Finding Jake (13 page)

“Are you aware of what your son posted on the Internet?”

“Have any of the victims’ parents tried to contact you?
”

The questions meld into a shrill torture. My head throbs and I push into the mass of reporters, Laney in tow.

“Get the hell out of the way!” I shout.

More questions lash out at us as I plod toward the elevator.

“Any comment on the drawings they found at your house?
”

“How long have your son and Doug Martin-Klein been friends?
”

I pound the up arrow just as the city cops arrive. They begin what I expect will be a long process of ushering the reporters out of the lobby. Laney sobs; I hear it over the chaos. A reporter grabs my shoulder.

Events unfold as if someone else guides my actions; a gremlin usurps control of my nervous system. I swing at the guy. Luckily, he dodges back. There is no contact, but those green lights tell me I have been taped. Closing my eyes, I back up toward the elevator door. It opens and I nearly fall inside, Rachel right behind me. Laney’s crying grows louder as the doors close. I hold her. What else is there to do?

“It’ll be okay, peanut,” I whisper. “It’ll be okay.”

Rachel stands staring at the closed doors. My head tilts as I look at her. Laney bolts out of the carriage when the door opens, racing to our rooms. Rachel does not move. She looks lost.

“What?” I ask.

Once I say it, I know I should have remained quiet. No matter how I react, this pallor will hold tightly to my family, unable and unwilling to loosen its piercing grip. In this instant, I understand what I saw in Rachel’s eyes. Hopelessness. This is something I have never seen before, not in her.

Rachel is a rock. She has never faltered, not once. Over the years, our marriage may have, but she never did. It is one of those things that drives me crazy. When we fight, there is no reaction. I cannot get to her. Yet all this has.

I lead her back to the room she shares with Laney. The hallway is silent. I imagine eyes pressed against peepholes watching us toil down purgatory. When we reach the room, Rachel’s hand trembles as she attempts to insert the key card. I reach forward, but her shoulder shifts, blocking me. Laney cries softly beside her mother.

When the card finds the slot and she gets the door open, Rachel leads Laney into the room.

“Can I lie down?” My daughter’s voice is paper thin.

“Sure, sweetie,” I say.

Rachel darts a quick look at me and moves to settle Laney in one of the two queen beds.

“Will you sit here with me?” I hear Laney whisper.

Rachel responds too softly for me to hear. Once Laney is settled, my wife walks over to me. She passes and nods for me to follow her into the bathroom. My limbs remind me of a zombie as I shuffle toward her. Nothing makes sense anymore.

“We need a plan,” I say. “I need to do something.”

“In the morning, I think we should talk to Max. Maybe he knows something,” she says.

“I left a message.”

Or did I? I honestly cannot remember. The past hours have lost all clarity. Inexcusably, I think about the movies. Those parents, caught up in some awful tragedy paralleling our own, act the heroes, persevere against all odds, track down the clues and find the answers, gun in hand, nursing a nonfatal wound to the shoulder. For me, it is nothing of the sort. Instead the tsunami of reality pushes me, all of us, along, forcing us down this path of inactivity, bureaucracy, and flashbulbs. It is a wave of staggering weight that holds us captive to the nothingness.

“I’ll go over now,” I announce, unwilling or unable to stop fighting the storm.

“It’s almost midnight,” she says.

“It is? So what?”

Rachel stares at me for a time. “In the morning.”

I take a breath. “I went to the Martin-Kleins’ house.”

“What?”

“I didn’t get close. The police have it closed off.” I leave the doll part out of the story.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says. “We need to know what’s happening. I think Laney will feel better having you here. That shit downstairs got to her.”

I nod. I understand this. I need to stay close, protect my family. Although my family, in its entirety, is not here. I rub my eyes, walking into the other room and sitting down on the end of the bed. My wife returns to our daughter. As the door between the rooms slowly closes, I turn on the television. I feel like I have been here before. The moments revolve like I’m trapped on some hellish hamster wheel. Time is on a loop. Before I focus on the television screen, this thought troubles me. A loop implies there is no past and no future, there is only repetition.

Then, I see and hear the outside world, those not stuck on our awful little wheel. My soul breaks in the minutes that follow. At first, it is an instant collage on the screen, people I know, facts I know,
and places I know all folded into an enormous nightmare. Snippets stand out, punctuating the horror:

Karen appears on the television. She stands outside our house. Her face swoops, a somber and premeditated curve of the mouth and eyebrow in unison. I’ve seen this look before, as if she’s prepared the ultimate backhanded compliment. I can’t remember what she said in the past; I will never forget what she says now.

“He was a quiet kid,” she says, peering into the camera. “A loner. He never really joined in when my son, Bo, had all his friends over. I tried to reach out to his father, but he was sort of standoffish, I guess. His wife, Rachel, was always more friendly. Although they kept to themselves a lot.”

A girl I have never seen before speaks to a reporter just outside the cordoned-off area surrounding the school. Her blond hair hangs just above her eyes in perfectly coiffed bangs. The rest bounces behind in a jaunty ponytail. She speaks with an accent reminiscent of the Valley girls of my youth.

“Doug and Jake hung out all the time. The two of them always had their heads together. It was, like, really weird, you know? They kept to themselves all the time. No one really talked to them that much. I remember this one time, like, forever ago, Doug invited me to this birthday party. My parents wouldn’t let me go. They must have seen something, even then. I guess, you know, I’m just not all that surprised.”

A local anchor looks seriously into the camera. Even they are now reporting the story throughout the night.

“It is thought that two seniors at the school, Douglas Martin-Klein and Jake Connolly, planned and executed a horrible massacre this morning, killing thirteen. The body of Martin-Klein has been positively identified after he took his own life, apparently after running out of ammunition for the assault-style rifle he used in the shooting. The whereabouts of Connolly are currently unknown. Let’s go to Lisa Ann, at the scene.”

The camera cuts to a woman standing outside the school, surprisingly close to the same angle of the girl a minute before. She wears a windbreaker with the logo of the local station. Her appearance hints at the beauty she must have been ten years before, yet the makeup cannot entirely hide the passage of time. Beside her stands another woman, most likely in her seventies, who stares at the camera with unabashed anger.

“Hi, Kevin. I’m here outside the school where police are still searching for Jake Connolly, a high school senior thought to be one of the shooters. With me I have Donna Jackson, the owner of property adjacent to the school. She claims to have seen someone fleeing through her property at the time of the shooting.”

“I saw that kid running through my field,” Donna Jackson spits out. “Right as rain, I did. He ran into the woods toward the neighborhood back there.”

“Was this before or after the shooting?”

Donna Jackson’s eyes look strangely vacant. “Sure was.”

Lisa Ann narrows her eyes. “Okay. Well, are you sure it was Jake Connolly?”

“The police showed me a picture. This kid had the same dark hair, if you know what I mean.”

Lisa Ann’s eyes widen, as if that was not part of the script. She pulls the microphone away from Donna Jackson. “Back to you, Kevin.”

Tairyn appears next on another local station. Her gaunt face and lined neck clash with her $200 haircut and her diamond earrings. She wears expensive running clothes. I realize my thoughts are cruel, but all I can do now is protect and in protecting lash out.

“Jake was raised by his father, really. His mom wasn’t around all that much. My daughter played with his daughter, so I’m one of the few people around here who have been in the house. I always tried to be nice to Simon, to include him in neighborhood activities, but I think he sort of looked down on all of us, the ‘stay-at-home moms’
here. I know he let Jake do things that I always wondered about. Even at a young age, I would see him playing with swords . . . and probably guns, you know, violent stuff like that. I guess . . .” She swallows her apparent emotions. “I guess I should have seen this coming. Those poor kids.”

Tairyn can no longer talk. She is choked up, waving at the camera, but the shot lingers. She tries to brush it away, her eyes brimming with tears.

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

The camera pans to their front door. There stands her daughter, Laney’s old friend Becca. She happens to be wearing a high school hoodie. Although I expect Tairyn to react poorly, to cut the scene and tell them not to film her daughter, she motions Becca over. Becca wraps around Tairyn, who hugs her daughter close. It reminds me of how I held Laney in the lobby, but something is different. The two cock their heads in the exact same manner and I am reminded of a women’s glamour magazine.

“It could have been her,” Tairyn says, dabbing at an eye with a tissue. “My daughter was there when the shooting happened.”

Although it looks as if Tairyn beckons her daughter to speak, Becca does not. She stares vacantly into the camera for a few seconds. She looks like she might be in shock.

“He was a quiet guy,” another man says, one of the Martin-Kleins’ neighbors. “Kept to himself mostly. Never came to any of the neighborhood parties. I’m sure he was invited, though.”

The reporter nods. The conversation continues, rehashing much of the same judgment every “eyewitness” has shared since I turned the TV back on at six this morning. Finally, the reporter finishes up with this neighbor and looks thoughtfully into the camera.

“We may never know what caused Douglas Martin-Klein to turn on his own classmates. Violent video games, bullying, or mental illness, time will tell. Back to you, Jake.”

Jake
. Adrenaline pumps through my system, a jolt of draining
energy that disappears as quickly as it came. Simply coincidence, but the sound of someone speaking to
Jake
is both hopeful and devastating.

The anchor introduces another field reporter. This one, somehow, has gotten himself into the library at the school.

“. . . as first reported by Gawker.com, Douglas Martin-Klein’s Instagram page paints a sad, grisly story of a boy crying out for help. This troubling image, a picture of a red fist bound by a gray cord, was used as his profile picture on the widely popular Web site.”

There is something familiar about the image, but I don’t remember before the reporter continues.

“Many may recognize the image from an album cover nearly a decade ago by the band Metallica. I went back and listened to the songs. What I heard will shock you. Here are just some of the lyrics:

“It makes we wonder how we failed this sad young man.”

Never a huge heavy metal fan, I did recall that album,
St. Anger
. Strangely, I didn’t remember it being one of their most popular, or best. I did not, however, know the song the reporter quoted.
World down the drain
. Sad, but not exactly Sylvia Plath. For that matter, it did not sound all that angry or violent.

The screen catches my eye, cutting off the thought. High school yearbook pictures pan like a police lineup. I see Leigh and James. Amanda’s smiling face brings back memories of her being at our house, playing with Laney. A couple of unfamiliar kids are shown, and then one of the pictures hits me like a fist to the face—Alex Raines.

On one particular afternoon, around two months ago, Jake came home and I could tell immediately something was wrong. Anger flared on his face, reddening his cheeks and darkening his eyes. He went up to his room and closed the door. I stood in the kitchen, listening to see if he came back out, but the house was quiet. I tried to give him some time but my own curiosity kept those better intentions from being realized.

I knocked and waited. When Jake finally opened the door, he looked calm, normal.

“What’s up, buddy?” I asked.

“Nothing, Dad.”

“You looked upset.”

He gave me a look I knew all too well. He couldn’t lie to me if I asked a direct question but he didn’t want to talk about it. I pushed, so he told me about Alex Raines. I knew the name from baseball. Alex had been big at an early age, a good hitter who never wore anything that did not sport an Under Armour logo. He was the first kid to rock a Mohawk, albeit a coiffed one, in the second grade. I’d never really heard Jake talk about him, positively or negatively, before that day.

“I was talking to someone and accidentally backed into him. He pushed me. I guess I hit a locker. It sounded bad but it was really no big deal. Just hallway stuff.”

“You look awful mad for just hallway stuff,” I said.

He lifted an eyebrow. “Amnesty moment, remember?”

I let it go and by dinner, Jake was his normal self.

That evening, the guidance counselor called.

“Hi, this is Phil Hartman, school guidance counselor. May I please speak to Mr. or Mrs. Connolly?”

“This is he.”

“Mr. Connolly, there was an incident at the school today. I thought we should discuss it.”

“Yes, Jake and I talked about that.”

I felt proud of Jake for telling me, and maybe I wanted to show it just a little.

“I’m not sure what details you received from your son, but I wanted to let you know that neither student will be receiving any punishment. We feel they both acted out but were remorseful about it.”