The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (20 page)

“What should I put?” Velvet wanted to know. Maureen told her to just be honest. “Okay then, I’ll say, ‘This school still blows dead moose cocks, but
Springer
and
Sally Jessy
are all reruns.’” Mo looked at her, not smiling. “Jesus Christ, Mom. I was only
kidding.”

Maureen asked Louise if she could use the library phone to make a credit card call. “Sure thing,” Louise said. “You want to use the one in the break room? Less noise, more privacy.”

“Great,” Mo said. She looked back to see if Velvet had gotten to work, but her view was blocked by the bookshelves.

Unused to credit card calling, Mo kept screwing up and having to start over. And when the phone finally did ring, an unfamiliar voice picked up. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I must have dialed the wrong number.” She hung up and called the operator so she wouldn’t have to pay for her mistake.

It was a wall phone, Mo told the investigators. She was standing beside it, shoulders against the cinderblock wall, so she both heard and felt the vibration of the first blast. What was
that?
she wondered. Construction? The operator came on. “What number were you trying to call, ma’am?” she asked.

There was a second blast. Maureen faltered. Then, refocusing, she recalled Lolly’s phone number and recited it. The science labs were just down the hall; maybe there’d been a chemical explosion. If so, someone might be hurt. Another, louder explosion shook the floor.
Louise and an elderly library aide threw open the break room door and rushed past her toward the television studio. “Someone’s got a gun!” Louise screamed. “He’s shooting out in the hallway! Hide!”

No, it’s a chemical explosion, Maureen thought. She’d better get down there, see if anyone needed medical assistance. “Would you like me to dial that number for you, ma’am?” the operator asked. Mo hung up.

She opened the door to the library. There was an acrid smell, smoke pouring in from the hallway. The fire alarm began to blare. Strobe lights started winking on and off. One of the art teachers—the pretty blond one, Mo couldn’t remember her name—was at the circulation desk, seven or eight feet away. She was breathless, speaking rapid-fire into the phone. “Yes, I am a teacher at Columbine High School! There is a student here with a gun! He has shot out a window. And the school is in a panic, and I’m in the library. I’ve got students down. UNDER THE TABLES, KIDS! HEADS UNDER THE TABLES!”

At the break room doorway, Maureen stood, stunned. A boy was crouched behind the photocopier, hiding in plain sight. Another boy sat at a computer station, dazed. Most did what they were told, sliding from their chairs to the floor, huddling together beneath the tables. Like faces in a dream, Maureen recognized, among the strewn backpacks and spilled note cards, kids she knew: Josh, Valeen, Kristin, Kyle. She had to get to Velvet—grab her and pull her to safety. But, as if in a dream, she couldn’t make her feet move. Velvet was all the way across the room, and Mo was too afraid. Make this be a horrible dream, she thought. Make this not be happening.

The art teacher, still on the phone, dropped out of sight behind the desk. “Okay, I’m in the library,” Maureen heard her say. “He’s upstairs. He’s right out here…. He’s outside this hall. Okay…. Oh, God. Oh, God. Kids, just stay down!” In the hallway, there were several more blasts.
“Woo-hoo!”
someone shouted. “I’m on the floor.… In the library, and I have every student in the library on the floor and YOU GUYS STAY ON THE FLOOR!”

Maureen said she saw them enter, carrying duffel bags, the tall one in a long black coat, the shorter one in a white T-shirt and cargo pants tucked inside his boots. He was gripping a shotgun. He looked at her, grinning. Eric, his name was. Luvox, 75 milligrams at lunchtime. “Get up!” he shouted. “All the jocks stand up! We’re going to kill every single one of you!”

“Anyone with a white hat, stand up!” the other one shouted. “Are you guys scared? Well, don’t be, because you’re all going to die anyway!”

Maureen backed into the break room, pulling the door closed behind her. She was afraid to shut it tight—afraid the click of the lock might draw their attention. Draw their gunfire.

She heard screaming, pleas, the crack of gunfire, shattering glass. “How about you, big boy? You want to get shot today? … Hey, you? Peekaboo!”

Bam!
A flash.
Bam!
Another flash.

Trembling violently, she was barely able to control her hands, she said, but she managed somehow to open the door of an under-the-counter cabinet and dump its contents to the floor. Bulletin board decorations, she remembered now; cardboard Pilgrims and turkeys, shamrocks, Valentine’s cupids. She removed the cabinet’s adjustable shelf. She meant to place it quietly on the counter, but one end dropped with a bang. Oh, God! she thought. Oh, God! Let them not have heard!

On her hands and knees, she crawled into the open space. Her skull was pressed against the ceiling of the tight enclosure, her knees jammed against the wall. With her fingernails, she clawed at the door from inside. It wouldn’t close all the way, and she was terrified that half-inch opening would lead them to her.

Over the alarm, she could hear their taunts, the ridiculing of their victims before the shotgun blasts. It was as if each of the shots passed through her, she said. She knew they’d find her. She was sure she was going to die—that this cabinet would be her coffin.

The air carried the stink of gunpowder and gasoline. Crying would cleanse her burning eyes, but she was too afraid to give in to tears—afraid it might attract their attention. Then the break room door banged open, and she thought,
This is it.
There was a spray of gunfire, the sound of things shattering and splintering on the other side of the room, and then on her side, above her. “Let’s go down to the commons!” one of them called, and the other, the one closest to her, said he had one more thing to do. Kill
me,
she thought: he’s going to kill me, and then they’ll leave. There was a loud crash that sounded like furniture being smashed. After that, for a long time, she heard only the fire alarm’s drone.

Had they killed all of the students? Should she take a chance—crawl out of the cabinet and see? Go to Velvet? Try to save herself? But if she ran for it, which way would she go when she didn’t know where they were?”Let’s go down to the commons” : it could be a trick to lure her out of hiding.

Her back ached. The blood pounded in her head. Her legs and feet were numb. Would they work if she climbed out and tried to run? She felt the smooth face of her wristwatch but couldn’t read it in the dark. She couldn’t tell how much time had passed.

She heard helicopters above. Life Flight for the injured? A news crew? Later, she heard voices in the outer room. Had the police gotten there? Had the boys come back? She heard someone count, “One, two, three!” Then gunfire, a single shot. Maybe two. She waited. Recited the Hail Mary, over and over, counting the decades on her fingers. She wrote me her note.

“What did the note to your husband say, Mrs. Quirk?” Sergeant Cox asked softly. “What was the gist of it?”

Mo’s answer was barely audible, and she did not look at me when she said it. “The gist of it? Good-bye.”

Much later, she said, she heard more glass smashing out in the library.

“That might have been when Pat Ireland knocked out the window and crawled out onto the ledge,” I suggested.

“That would have been about two thirty,” Officer Chin said.

I nodded. “Four thirty in Connecticut, where I was,” I said. “That’s when I first knew something was wrong. I turned on CNN and they were showing it live: Pat dangling out there on the ledge, then falling into the arms of the rescue workers.”

“Then what, Mrs. Quirk?” Sergeant Cox said. “After you heard the breaking glass?”

“I heard Louise’s voice.”

“The librarian?”

Maureen nodded. “She was speaking to someone. A man. I heard her telling him that I’d been in the break room when she and her aide went to hide. And the man called out to me. He said the building had been secured and that if I was able, I should come into view. ‘It’s all right, Mrs. Quirk,’ I heard Louise say. And so I opened the cabinet door a little more and saw the man—a member of the SWAT team, I guess he was. He was wearing a helmet and big, thick glasses—safety glasses, I guess. And then I saw Louise, and the art teacher who had called 911. And so I swung the door open and got out. And the man had each of us, one by one, place our hands on his shoulders and follow him out of the library. He told us not to look at anything around us—to look just at the back of his helmet—and so that was pretty much what I did. I saw a little. There was glass all over the floor, and it crunched underneath my shoes, and I saw that the carpet had gotten scorched. And, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the students, sitting at a computer. He must be dead, I figured. Why else would he be just sitting there? His computer was still on. I didn’t look at anything else. A part of me wanted to ask the SWAT man if we could go to Velvet’s table, but I was too afraid. I didn’t want to see her dead, and I didn’t want to make the man mad.

“And then, out in the hallway, another of the SWAT guys had to
frisk us. He was apologetic, but we were saying, ‘That’s okay! That’s okay! We understand!’ He frisked me first, and while he was frisking the others, I noticed bullet holes in the wall and dents in the lockers, from where the bullets had hit. And there were black scorch marks on the wall and the ceiling, from the bombs, I guess. And bullet casings all over the floor. The officer had us write down our names, addresses, and phone numbers in a little notebook. He told us the police would question us later, but that right now we needed to go down the stairs and walk directly out of the building. He said there’d be officers just outside who would escort us safely off the school property. And then I remembered my purse. It was still inside the break room. I didn’t want to go back in there, but I needed my purse, so I asked the man if he could get it for me. He said no, no, my purse was evidence—that the library was a crime scene and everything in it was evidence. And I said, ‘Well, but my car keys are in my purse.’ And he said all the cars in the parking lots were part of a crime scene, too, and that no one was going to be able to claim their cars for a while. ‘Just go down the stairs and out the building,’ he said. He sounded a little mad, a little impatient, and it scared me. So that was what we did, the four of us—Louise, her aide, the art teacher, and me. And when we got to the bottom of the stairs, I stopped to look around the cafeteria. The ceiling sprinklers were on, and the kids’ backpacks were all over the floor, floating in water. And there was a kind of burnt chemical smell in the air. And then the fire alarm shut off. It had been going for hours, and suddenly it was quiet. You know when people say, ‘The silence was deafening’? That’s what it was like. All you could hear was the sound of the sprinklers. It was like a light rain, like it was raining inside the cafeteria. The sprinklers. And … and what sounded like birds chirping.”

“Birds?” Sergeant Cox asked.

“I know it
wasn’t
birds,” Maureen said. “But that’s what it sounded like.”

“Cell phones,” Detective Chin said.

The three of us looked over at him. His water glass was empty. He’d hardly said a word. “Cell phones,” he said again. “Ringing in the students’ backpacks. Parents trying to reach their kids.”

Sergeant Cox asked Maureen if she and the others were escorted off the school grounds once she was outside. Mo nodded. “The four of us got into a cruiser, and they drove us to Clement Park. There were people everywhere—parents, kids. Everyone was crying, hugging each other. Two or three of the kids were hysterical. I didn’t speak to anyone. I just kept walking, through the park. And then, at the other end, I saw the library and said to myself that I’d go in there.”

“The public library?”

“Yes. So I went in, and went to the women’s room. And I started seeing and hearing everything I’d seen and heard that morning, when those boys … walked in and started laughing and yelling…. And I thought I was going to have to throw up, but I was too afraid to close the stall. I didn’t want to be closed in, even if I was going to vomit. And then I did vomit, with the door open. And later, I heard that people were meeting their kids at Leawood, so I walked to Leawood, and I thought, I’ll walk in and Velvet will be there, or
I’ll
be there and she’ll walk in and see me. But …”

A LITTLE BEFORE NOON, MAUREEN
and I drove over to Leawood Elementary School. Most of the family members who’d been there the night before had made it back. The D.A. arrived at about twelve fifteen. True to his word, he had a list. He said he would read the names of
all
the deceased—those who had died outside and inside the school. As he read from his list, fathers and mothers clamped their eyes shut, nodding in anguished resignation, but no one screamed out. No one wailed.

“Lauren Townsend, Rachel Scott, Kyle Velasquez, John Tomlin,
Cassie Bernall, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbaugh, Corey DePooter, Isaiah Shoels, Steven Curnow, Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, William ‘Dave’ Sanders, Dylan Klebold, and Eric Harris.”

Maureen and I looked at each other. We approached the D.A. Waited while several of the others asked him questions about the removal and reclaiming of their sons’ and daughters’ bodies. At last, he turned to us.

“What about Velvet Hoon?” Maureen asked.

He looked again at his list. Shook his head. “Is she your daughter?”

I told him she was an emancipated minor, a former student.

“She was there,” Maureen said. “In the library.”

He consulted his list again, twisted the hairs of his mustache. “Ma’am, at this point in time, we’ve examined every square inch of that school,” he said. “If her name’s not on this list, then she got out.”

EXCERPTS FROM DYLAN KLEBOLD’S JOURNAL,
1997:

Excerpts from Eric Harris’s Journal, 1998:

Posting on Eric Harris’s AOL Web site, 1998: