Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (40 page)

We knew Caleb Raynor met Caroline Black in the hallway outside the second-floor bathroom, just past the central stairwell. We like to imagine she hadn't heard gunshots. That she was only refilling her water bottle at the drinking fountain before returning to social studies class. That she had no idea what was happening. In the gymnasium Matt closed his eyes, blinked away the hallway carpet, took Tyler's hand. The dance floor. Strobe lights. Flashbulb memory. Shoes gripping a toilet seat. Matt's hand on Tyler's mouth pleading him to stay silent. Tyler let himself be led to the dance floor beneath lights that were too harsh and bright.

We knew Caleb moved from the second-floor hallway toward classrooms, a left turn. The first classroom Caleb could find. A
freshman writing course that held Alisha Trenway and Benji Ndolo. What Alisha might have thought about when she saw Caleb kick open the classroom door with a gun: first learning to ride a bicycle without training wheels. How thin so many years were that brought her to high school, to this moment. And Benji: his younger brother. Playing badminton with him in the front yard.

In the gymnasium, Matt's hand fell against Tyler's rib cage, his starched shirt. Tyler's body a breathing thing, something alive. Tyler trembling beside him, skin sweating beneath fluorescent light, but he didn't let himself drop Matt's hand.

We knew Caleb raged from the writing classroom to the math wing on the second floor. A trigonometry classroom that held Jacob Jensen, Alexis Thurber. Russ Hendricks elsewhere in the school, not knowing yet that his life would split apart. We imagined Caleb paused. That he took a breath, only seconds, a space long enough to reload. Not long enough to realize what he was doing or whether so many parents already felt something miles away in their work offices or desks or at home at their kitchen tables, a bullet piercing skin and their chests flashing, mistaken for heartburn.

We knew Caleb moved from trigonometry to the science wing, the hallway he must have passed down when Nick saw him through the small window of Mrs. Menda's classroom door. Flashbulb:
click.
Synapse, memory. Nick held Sarah on the dance floor, her arms resting on his shoulders, her tea rose corsage pricking the skin of his neck. We knew Caleb walked into Mr. Duggar's sophomore biology class, where he shot Mark Carter and Josh Zimmerman. Josh's mother and sister: patrons at the Local Beanery, their timeline sealed as Caleb drew his gun. Mr. Duggar: the third teacher killed, pulled out from beneath the lab table where he'd draped his body across Mark and Josh crouched and shuddering beneath him, all three of them shot point blank.

Nick felt Sarah lean her weight into him beneath the gym lights. He felt her heartbeat. Seventy beats per minute. The length of a
song: three minutes, more than two hundred heartbeats to claim as his. Heartbeat as memory, what he could take with him. Memory stored as matter, the brain's core. Nick focused on Sarah's dress, the apple scent of her hair. Memory as aroma, a firing of transmitters. Memory as sound, speakers through the hollow rafters of a gymnasium. Memory as skin. Sarah pressed close. Memory as her body pushing into him on a living room couch, in the cramped backseat of a car parked beneath so many knots of swaying trees. Memory as forgetting a door's window and overturned desks and the faraway sound of a gun moving down a hallway.

We knew Caleb stayed in the science wing, that he walked from Mr. Duggar's biology class to a physics lab of juniors. Alyssa Carver. Kelly Washington. Missy Hoffman. Elise Nguyen. Alyssa on Lewis and Clark's dance squad. Kelly allergic to almonds, a petition circulated their freshman year for greater nut allergy awareness in the cafeteria. Elise: girl in the water. Girl joyriding through the streets, girl rolling down the windows to let out the stereo's sound. All of them gone in seconds. Eight other students injured. Everyone else in the school hidden inside their classrooms. Everyone huddling beneath desks or inside storage closets but for a few who'd been elsewhere like Matt and Tyler had been, in bathrooms or at lockers or on their way to the library during study periods. James Sharma, a near-graduating senior: shotgunned in the corridor as Caleb left the math wing and moved toward the library. Then Mr. Rourke, the second-floor custodian, a location we know by how Christina saw him when she first exited the school. A pooling circle, a darkened carpet. Then Justin Banks, a senior, shot in the hallway just outside the library only days after he'd asked Sejal Chaudry to Homecoming.

Then the library.

Zola stood to the side of the dance floor, her Pentax camera in her hands. Christina beside her, neither of them speaking. Zola taking photographs intermittently, an archive of what celebration should
have meant. Photographs she would review that Sunday night, her mother on the back porch watching constellations. Samuel Winters sock-hopping with Dolores Fremont. Lindsey Cho and Adam Hunter standing in line for professional photographs. The Homecoming Court. Beth Zimmerman smiling faintly when her name wasn't announced, a relief at last to stay beyond a spotlight. Lauren Kirkland and Daniel Brown, first dance as Homecoming king and queen.

Zola didn't step onto the dance floor once.

She'd offered nothing in Nick's kitchen but the names of those who'd shared her academic lab. Connor Distler. Jessica Wendling. Alexander Chen. All of them beside her at the library's long oak table. We knew Caleb entered the library's double doors and shot at them first, the table so close to the hallway entrance, all of them crouching beneath it and Zola hidden in the stacks only yards away.
A Graphic History of Oceanic Biology
. Green vellum. Amygdala. Cortex. Memory. Peers who had shared pop-quiz tips with her across so many hours of academic lab, who had shared mnemonic devices for math equations and earbuds for Billboard Top 40 listening and snacks of dried apricots. We knew Caleb aimed at a group of seniors gathered around Mr. Eckstein to learn capstone-project research: Ilya Litvin. Georgia Tarkington. Greg Alexander. Carolina Olson. Constance Bellamy. Jake Berger. Jackson Pavey. Their names a cascade of flames, homes Zola knew from inside Timber Creek's gymnasium would burn within days.

Christina stood beside her drinking fruit punch, the taste too sweet on her tongue.

We knew Lewis and Clark's gymnasium downstairs was where Caleb moved last, where Ryan hid in the boys' bathroom while Christina curled beneath the desk of her French class upstairs. A seniors-only gym class, boys pressing themselves into the wet humidity of a locker room's shower stalls. Dan Zeller. Sebastian Holmes. Will Isholt. Sam Scott. All of them gone, a mental image
Christina closed her eyes to kill as we mapped the last of Caleb's path that Friday afternoon at Nick's kitchen table.

She scanned the dance floor. Ryan at home. The picture frame and his window splintered to pieces. He would leave for college. He would never speak to her again. She would leave the movement of his body above hers and the tangled sheets of his bed to nothing but the faded scar of memory, to photographs in a drawer, to a life she couldn't imagine she had once lived. Memory as swim partner. The blue of a pool. Memory as girl scalpeling through the water. Memory as orgasm, a tendriled wave billowing through the steam of a bath. Memory as losing the rough texture of a boy's tongue skating across her skin, the sound of her own shoes running far and fast from his car.

We knew the last name: Caleb Raynor. The last home to burn. We knew no motive, a self-inflicted wound inside the gymnasium of Lewis and Clark High, a separate gym we blinked away from the dance floor of Timber Creek.

We knew a path. Nothing else. We knew nothing more than Matt's father in the end. We knew a trail of gunfire. We knew the human body, as best as we could. We knew a path of grief but nothing of its mechanics. Of how it knew when to ignite.

We know how we held one another inside the heat of a gymnasium.

We know how even as we wished to move as far away from ourselves as we could we wanted to keep this, even still, all of us in the same walls and the same town and the same blaze of our youth and our grief before we germinated upward and out, before we left the shells of who we were and became something else entirely. We looked at one another across the gym, beyond the punch bowl, from the sidelines of a dance floor. We felt our chests torch us from the inside. We knew it was not the swelter of a gym.

We know we loved one another.

We knew only that the body knows when to burn.

WE MADE A
book, by year's end. We archived what we could.

We assembled our photographs, our profiles. We submitted work that made up the 289 pages of the 2003–2004 Lewis and Clark High School yearbook, a record of action shots and smiles and sanitized silhouettes of those we lost, a witness to nothing at all that could tell us what we were.

We grew up. We grew away from ourselves. We fanned out across the country to distant colleges then to internships and big cities and to office jobs we hated, jobs we could disappear into and forget.

We come home infrequently.

Our parents visit, or we speak to them by phone. We hold the receiver to our ears and imagine them in our childhood homes, our former porches and closed-in kitchens and bay windows looking out on front yards that once held the scent of smoke and the air-blown remnants of ash and before we hang up we can still hear the soft rattle of their breath on the line, a faint beating back that remains only to hear ours.

We keep an archive, a dusted book. A record of our making that we still open, not for memory but for a question without reply. At night, when we can't sleep, we retrace our history over every newspaper we kept. We feel a palpitation. A roil we know as dormant, latent always inside us. We scour the headlines and the fine print, all of it yellowing and tattered. We search for answers in photographs of our school, of the homes, of the guns and ammunition used. We run our hands across the glossed pages of our once-selves, across pictures and profiles. We keep searching. We understand now how Matt's father shut himself off, a valve closed. We know there is nothing, no answer, but even still we can't stop ourselves from seeking. We search for confirmation. Something.

We search for some shred of evidence to explain this.

We imagine all of those parents and their silent homes before the flames burst and left nothing but ash. We sit in our basements
alone knowing what inimitable dark overcame them. We light our own candles, votives too late, a scent of fire that burns back a vigil, a Midwestern sky. We huddle in the quiet of our basements after our partners and children have fallen asleep and we think of them curled into the bedrooms above us, their beating blood, the cadence of their lungs. How their breath rises. How it falls. How we pray that it never stops. How we're cloaked inside new lives that have taken us to coasts and mountains and so far away from Missouri plains we once knew but how sometimes even still we can't keep ourselves from a familiar ache, from the soft knife of home.

How there are pockets of memory within our bodies that light up when we pass back through our former streets. Upon the routes we took to school. Past the empty lot where Lewis and Clark was eventually demolished. How the maps of our brains blaze upon the swing set of our first kiss. Upon the abandoned pool where we climbed the fence and swam beneath a star-speckled St. Louis sky and smoked our first cigarette. Upon a full moon. A waving poplar. The sound of soft wind through corn husks. How we know the backs of our knuckles, their creases of skin, but can't begin to understand our own cells and what they contain. How we know memory bears weight, every image an ounce. How we've learned to move away, to move on. How when we return home memory erases us, tells us time and distance mean nothing at all.

How we carry this with us, a schematic. Not a school but an entire town. How sometimes when we're home we drive the back roads, streets we still know like a diagram of our own veins. How the back roads have become highways, every cornfield bisected and diminished, but the land long and flat and tasting still of whiskey and the salt of someone else's skin.

How our brains deceive us because they must.

How they tell us the past is something we've discarded. How we drive the length of roads we once thought stretched for miles to the edge of the Midwest and we think of our parents, our
once-classmates, our lovers and children up through the floorboards, so close, above the piled boxes of our basements. How we know the earth as unsound. Vulnerable. Always on the edge of bonfiring. How our homes are exposed, no safer than the houses that once lined the tree-drenched streets of our neighborhoods.

How we would burn them down if the world made us.

How we would feel a flame tell us it is time.

How a spark would climb the ladder of our throats and jump the tip of our tongues. How it would catch the curtains. The bedspread. The nightstand lampshade. The wires of the walls. How we know only enough of our own cells to know they speak a language we can't hear. How our atoms slacken and slide out of tune. How they slip past one another, the slightest of friction. How they whisper insurrection. How they articulate in flame what we leave behind.

THANK YOU TO
this novel's earliest readers, Michael Griffith and Matt Bell, for your encouragement, feedback, and unwavering support. Thank you also to Chris Bachelder and Jim Schiff for invaluable feedback, and for so much kindness and guidance.

Thank you to Kerry D'Agostino, a wonderful person and tireless champion of this book—thank you for believing in this novel and in me. Thank you to Margaux Weisman for so carefully reading, editing, and supporting this book, and for so keenly understanding my vision for it. I am beyond lucky to work with both of you. Thank you to the entire team at William Morrow and HarperCollins for your dedicated work on this book.

Thank you to Lindsey Kurz, Julia Koets, Rochelle Hurt, and Steven Stanley (Go Orangers)—you couldn't have known it, but through the dark of writing this book you were four points of the brightest kind of light.

Thank you to the generous support of the University of Cincinnati, the Sewanee Writers' Conference where the first chapter of this novel was workshopped, and to Emily Nemens for excerpting the first chapter in
The Southern Review
. Thank you to Leslie Jill Patterson for publishing the short story in
Iron Horse Literary Review
that eventually became this novel. Thank you to the
Denver Post
for their archive of the Columbine shooting, which shaped my understanding of mass tragedy and its scale within a community.
Thank you to the Public Library of Cincinnati for providing a multiplicity of textbooks on crime scene and fire investigation. Thank you to the inspiration of my colleagues and students at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Thank you to St. Louis, my home and my heart.

Thank you always and forever to my parents, Michael and Maureen Valente, to my sister, Michelle, and to Jeff, Noa, and Salem. If there is understanding of family and what it means to love in these pages, it is because of you.

And to Josh Finnell, the very earliest reader, for seeing me through every step of the journey this book had to take—thank you for following me through the dark.