The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (26 page)

“Columbine is love,” the crowd murmured.

“Louder! Columbine is love!”

“Columbine is love.” I couldn’t say it. Neither could Maureen.

“I can’t hear you! Columbine is love!”

“Columbine is love!”

“This is total bullshit,” someone near us said.

“Yeah,” another voice agreed. “When the white hats spit on me in the hallway, I can really feel the love.”

I turned around to see a quartet of Goth-looking kids—three skinny boys and a fat girl with eggplant-purple hair and fingernails. The kid with the goatee said, “How about when that Snapple bottle hit me in the face and Eams goes, ‘Wear different clothes and they won’t target you’? And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but how come the jocks
get
to target people? ‘”

“Because they’re the crown princes of Columbine!” the girl trilled, in mock adulation.

“Hey!” a beefy-faced guy near us said. “Would you kids mind shutting your mouths and showing a little respect?”

Maureen turned and faced him. “They’re right, though,” she said. “The APs look the other way at the bullying. You know what a ‘twister’ is? When they pinch your skin between their fingers and give it a twist. Makes a nasty little contusion. You know what ‘bowling’ is? They pour baby oil on the floor, then grab some poor freshman and send him flying down the corridor. They shoved one boy so hard, he fell and broke his wrist.”

“Yeah, and how do you know all this?” the guy said.

“Because I’m a school nurse.”

“Yeah? Well, my kid graduated from Columbine. Played football, wrestled, and he threw the shotput. And he never bullied anybody.”

“As far as
you
know,” Mo retorted. When I glanced over at the Goth kids, I saw their backs retreating into the crowd.

“Hey, Maureen?” I said. “This isn’t really the time to—”

Mo turned to the guy’s wife. “They bully the girls, too. Block their path when they’re trying to get to class. Slam them against the lockers
if they have the nerve to talk back. And they get away with it.” She waved a hand at Eams’s face on the big screen. “I’ve been to him about the injuries. I’ve been to all of the APs, and I guess I should have kept going. Because maybe if they’d bothered to
address
the bullying, instead of—”

She was drowned out by the roar of the F–16 fighter jets—four of them, flying in formation above us to honor the dead. Frightened by the noise, Maureen positioned her body against mine. She was trembling badly. “I need to go now,” she said.

Neither of us said anything on the walk back to the car, and when we got near that coffee shop, we crossed the street and walked on the other side.

Back in our driveway, I cut the engine and turned to her. “Can I say something?” I asked. She looked at me. Waited.

“That ‘Columbine is love’ stuff? That’s a stretch, granted. But the equation’s a little more complicated than what you were saying back there. Lots of high school kids get bullied, but they don’t bring guns and bombs to school and start wasting everyone.”

“So we’re all exonerated, Caelum? Gee, that’s convenient.” She got out of the car. Slammed the door. I sat there, watching her jam her key at our front door lock until she got in. Sat there, thinking about that time Rhonda Baxter had had me read Klebold’s short story—the one where the mysterious assassin in the black coat murders “jocks and college preps” as they leave a bar. A lot of the boys write this stuff, I’d told Rhonda. Testosterone, too many video games. Nothing that getting a girlfriend wouldn’t cure.

THERE WERE FOUR FUNERALS ON
Monday, three on Tuesday, one each on Wednesday and Thursday. The pastor at Grace Presbyterian told us it was typical that Danny Rohrbough had held the door open for others to escape when the shooting began. He might have lived if he’d been more selfish, but that was Danny for
you. The youth minister at West Bowles Community told us there’d been a wedding in heaven; Christ was the groom, Cassie Bernall the bride. Corey DePooter’s tribute video ended with the words, “Gone fishing.”

At St. Frances Cabrini, Father Leone asked Matt Kechter’s teammates to stand, and when they did, he turned to the victim’s younger brother. “Adam, look at Matt’s football team over there. These guys are your big brothers. In the coming days and weeks, they will be there for you.” I spotted the red-haired boy—the one who’d caused the outburst at the grief counseling meeting. He looked over at Matt’s little brother. Nodded. Gave him a thumbs-up.

Dave Sanders’s funeral was both the hardest and the least hard to attend. I’d known Dave better than I’d known any of the kids, and differently. He was a colleague, a contemporary. But Dave had lived three times as long as those kids. He’d had forty-seven years to make his mark, learn from his mistakes. A dozen or more people approached that podium at Trinity Christian to speak about Dave: thank him for his teaching, his coaching, his having been like a second father, his bravery that day. At the end, we all passed by his open casket. I was glad the family’d decided to bury him in his orange basketball tie, his good luck “game day” tie—the one we used to tease him about.

Isaiah Shoels’s funeral was the last, and one of the biggest. They’d dressed Isaiah in the cap and gown he would have worn in May and laid him to rest with gospel music, blue-and-white balloons, and calls to end racism. “I was ten years old when my father was gunned down by senseless violence,” Martin Luther King III told the five hundred or more of us who had come. “There is still something gravely wrong with our nation when two young men who worshipped Adolf Hitler go on a killing spree on his birthday.”

When I got home from Isaiah’s service, there was a car parked in front of the house—a silvery blue Mercedes. Couldn’t be local detectives. Did FBI agents drive cars like this? Then, fuck, I realized who
it was. I walked around back and came in through the garage, where Sophie and Chet had been exiled. The Barracuda was afraid of dogs.

There was a bouquet on the kitchen counter, a stack of drawings, a note in a kid’s deliberate cursive. “Dear Aunt Maureen, I heard you were sad. I hope these pictures make you happy! I LOVE You!! ! Love, Amber.” When we’d first moved out there, Mo and her niece had hit it off, but Cheryl, the half sister, had withheld Amber—had decreed she’d be much too shy to stay overnight at our place, or for us to take her anywhere. She was four then, nine now. Big-time into glitter, from the looks of it. Everything in her drawings sparkled: the princesses’ crowns, the mermaids’ bras and fishtails, the dragonfly’s wings, the tips of the praying mantis’s antennae.

Their voices were in the living room. “Of course, it’s entirely up to you,” Evelyn was saying. “But I think it would be an
important
interview.”

I stood in the doorway, unnoticed. Maureen was slumped on the sofa, clutching a pillow. She looked close to tears. “What interview?” I asked.

“Well, look who’s here !” Arthur said, as if it was a big surprise that I’d shown up at my own house. He stood, walked toward me, pumped my hand like we were pals. “Long time no see.”

Evelyn approached, too. Took my hands in hers and offered her cheek for kissing. “Maureen says you were at one of the children’s funerals.” She was whispering, like it was a secret. “How was it?”

“Brutal,” I said. “They’ve all been brutal. What interview?”

“Oh. Well, Todd Purvis, the new coanchor on
Good Morning, Denver,
is a client of mine. I was telling him about Maureen’s terrible ordeal, and he wanted me to ask her if she’d consider—”

“No,” I said.

She smiled patiently. “Well, Caelum, if you’d let me finish.”

I turned to Mo. “You’re not interested in this, are you?” She looked down at the rug and shook her head.

But we didn’t call Evelyn the Barracuda for nothing. “I just want
to assure you both, before Maureen makes her decision, that Todd is a serious journalist. I never would have broached the subject otherwise. He’s worked at CNN, CBS News. He started out as a researcher for MacNeil/Lehrer while he was still a student at Columbia.”

“His résumé’S not the point,” I said. “She’s not interested.”

“It wouldn’t have to be this week. Would it, darling?” Arthur asked.

“No, of course not. It could be next week, the week after. Whenever Maureen felt she was ready.” She took a seat beside Mo. Took her hand. “And Todd said they could come out and tape it here, rather than at the studio, if that was more comfortable for you. He’s really a wonderful man, Maureen. Very smart, very sensitive.”

“And an exclusive like this would put him on the map in a new market, right?” I said. “So that’d be a feather in
your
cap.”

We sat there, looking at each other. “Ouch,” she said.

Mo turned to her father. “What do you think, Daddy?”

Shit! Don’t weaken, Mo. Screw these jackals.

Arthur smiled, stood up. “Well, sweetheart, I think you should listen to what this Purvis fellow has to say, and then do whatever you decide is best. And I also think I’d like a drink. Caelum, how are you fixed for scotch?” And with that, he walked past me and into the kitchen.

I poured us each a drink from my special-occasion bottle of Glen-livet. Mumbled some thanks for that fancy basket they’d sent. “So,” he said. “Now that we’re out of earshot, how is she?”

“Stricken,” I said.

“Well, that’s to be expected. It only happened a week ago.”

“Nine days ago,” I said.

He nodded. “Hell of a thing that you were back East, burying your relative. Uncle, was it?”

“Aunt.”

“And then you have to rush back here to all this.”

“Not knowing if she was alive or dead,” I said. “That was the hard part.” I took a sip of scotch. “In a way, she’s neither.”

He cocked his head. We looked each other in the eye.

“It’s like, what she went through … and hey, I can’t even
fathom
all she went through. I don’t even
want
to go there, you know? But it’s like … like that day stranded her on this … this small, lonely island.” What was I doing? Why was I trusting him?”And I can see her, you know? I can call to her. But I can’t reach her. Can’t rescue her because … because the water between us is thick with sharks. Thick with the blood of those kids.”

For the next few seconds, we held each other’s gaze, and I thought, He
gets
it—Arthur, of all people. But when he opened his mouth, it was to suggest I was being, maybe, a little melodramatic. “I know my daughter, and she has an inner strength that will serve her,” he assured me. “Just as it has during other difficult times in her life.”

“Such as?” I said. Go ahead, I thought. Admit what you did.

“Well, when she and her sailor split up. And of course, they’d accrued all that debt on top of it. That complicated matters. But you know how difficult divorce is, right? Weren’t you divorced?”

“Twice,” I said.

He nodded. We sipped our scotches. On the other side of the door, the dogs were whimpering and scratching to be let back in.

“She lost her way in high school for a while,” he said. “Made some bad choices, did some things she shouldn’t have. But she came to her senses. Entered that nursing program at the university and straightened herself out. When she graduated, she got one of the nursing school’s biggest awards.”

“What about when you and her mother split up?” I said. “That was another tough time for her, wasn’t it?”

“Patricia and I saved our acrimony for the lawyers’ meetings,” he said. “We spared Maureen that.”

“That’s not how she remembers it,” I said. “The separation. Those weekends at your place. She was what? Eleven? Sixth grade?”

“Seventh,” he said.

“No, sixth. According to her. She’s told me about those weekends.”

He looked away, then looked back. Watched me over the rim of his glass as he sipped his drink. “Well, that’s ancient history,” he said. “But my point is, Maureen’s a strong person. A
resilient
person. She’ll land on her feet.” He touched the bottle. “May I?”

“Be my guest.”

He poured himself two or three fingers more—with a bit of a tremor in his hand, I noticed. I took some small, cheap satisfaction in that. That’s right, you son of a bitch. I know your dirty little secret, and it’s not necessarily safe with me. I smiled. He smiled, sipped. It seemed like a good time to negotiate.

“Tell your wife to back off about that interview,” I said. “Because there’s no way in hell I’m going to let her get exploited like that.”

“You think that’s the motivation, do you?”

“I think profit’s the motivation, and Maureen’s the means to an end.”

He was still smiling. “That’s pretty harsh, isn’t it? I didn’t realize you were such a cynic.” He reached inside his sports coat and pulled out a brochure. Handed it to me. I was staring at Mickey and Minnie Mouse in sailing garb.

“Disney cruise?” I said.

“It was Cheryl’s idea, actually. You’ve met our daughter Cheryl, haven’t you?” I shook my head. “Evelyn and I wanted to treat you and Maureen to a getaway of some kind—an escape from all this ugliness. But we were thinking more along the lines of plane tickets to London or Paris. Then Cheryl suggested this: after the terrible ordeal Maureen’s been through, a voyage back to innocence. She and Barry took their little one on this cruise, and they had a ball. Stage shows, snorkeling. And I want you to know, we’re covering everything, including your flights to and from port. Time-wise, it’s open-ended. You just call our travel agent when you’re ready. Misty, her name is. Her card’s stapled to the inside of the pocket. She’ll book everything,
whenever you give her the word. And I’ve told her to get you an outside cabin. They cost a little more, but they have portholes. Reminds you you’re on a ship, not at a hotel.”

“Arthur, how can you not understand?”

“Understand what?”

“What happened to your daughter is a lot worse than a divorce. Or a big MasterCard bill. It’s not something Mickey Mouse can fix.”
And how the fuck can you be mourning her innocence, after what you did?
I was a couple more sips of scotch away from saying it, instead of just thinking it. And once I said it—once it was out on the table—I might clock the son of a bitch. Pick up that scotch bottle and use it on him. I could feel my engines revving.