Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (5 page)

Parents of Slain Lewis and Clark Teen Found in Home

SUNDAY, OCTOBER
12, 2003

ST. LOUIS, MO—Early Sunday morning, just hours after a community-wide vigil was held at the Midvale County Public Library for the victims of Wednesday's shooting at Lewis and Clark High School, a house fire claimed two lives within the 1300 block of Westminster Court in Midvale County. Firefighters responded at 3:38 a.m. Sunday morning and observed flames engulfing the two-story residence. The blaze, which required at least 50 fire personnel, including police officials from nearby Hamilton County, was finally extinguished around 6 a.m.

According to police officials, the victims have been identified as Jean Black, 45, and Arthur Black, 47, the parents of Caroline Black, 16, who was killed in the Lewis and Clark shooting.

“We just can't believe it,” said Janet Wallace, a neighbor who stood on her porch with her two toddlers as officials doused the flames. “First the school and now this. It's inconceivable. They were all such good people, the two of them and their daughter. This week has been devastating for all of us.”

As of sunrise this morning, firefighters and police officials were combing through the debris in search of clues. Though foul play is not suspected, investigators hope to gather a clearer picture of what caused the fire. No other residents were found in the home, and neighbors heard no signs of struggle within the house.

“The streets were silent last night, especially in light of the vigil,”
said Jason Novitsky, a next-door neighbor, whose daughter is a freshman at Lewis and Clark. “We just came home and went to bed and heard nothing until the sirens came.”

Officials say that another neighbor, David Ramos, first saw the smoke and called 911.

“I couldn't sleep,” said Ramos. “You know, with these kids and the school. I happened to look out the window and saw smoke coming off the roof.”

Initial examination from fire officials indicates that the fire began on the second floor. The cause is under investigation.

PICTURE FRAMES. PHOTO
albums. Family portraits, snapshots, matte prints.

Knit blankets. Embroidery. Pillowcases and sheets.

Dishes. Wedding china. Flatware. Antique silver, ladles, cutting boards, spoons. Magnets collected from family travels: Nashville. Yellowstone. Bar Harbor, Maine. Sarasota, Myrtle Beach, the Wisconsin Dells, the Grand Canyon.

A pantry of boxed cereal, dried pasta. Canned tomatoes and beans and beets. A spice rack of cinnamon, curry powder, turmeric, paprika. A refrigerator impervious to burning, left standing and full of half-spoiled milk, plain yogurt, hardened cheese, a half-dozen mottled eggs. Wilting lettuce, jars of mayonnaise and mustard and pickles, apples and potatoes and pears still intact, untouched by flame. Furniture: coffee tables. Couches. The recliner where Caroline watched
Merry Melodies
after school in fourth grade. Inherited side tables and buffets passed down from grandparents, great-grandparents. Bookcases full of children's books, reference books, classics of literature, Caroline's baby book. A catalog of firsts: first smile, first steps, first words (
Mama? Mine?
), first day of preschool. Drapes, curtains, window blinds, doorknobs. Light fixtures and lightbulbs, a crackling hiss as their glass heated and exploded. Ironing board. So many
clothes. Stockings, leggings, wool socks, corduroy pants, jeans, sweatpants, collared shirts, a cacophony of tees gathered from sporting events, thrift stores, marathons, vacations. Sports sweatshirts: Cardinals baseball. Rams football, the team still so new. Knit hats and mittens and gloves, scarves and earmuffs and swimsuits and beach towels. Electronics: a television, a camcorder, family videos, old filmstrips. Caroline's parents on their wedding day: a brief Super 8 film, one minute and fifty-three seconds long, a film Caroline had seen twice in her life when her father draped a white sheet against a wall and her mother dragged the projector down from the attic. Videos of Caroline: violin recitals, school plays, freshman year Homecoming with her girlfriends, all of them giggling in the thin sunlight of the front yard. A stereo and receiver, two tall speakers, a record player and a six-disk CD changer. A stack of LPs that Caroline's parents collected through college: the Moody Blues, the Beatles, Elton John, Janis Joplin.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Are You Experienced?, Beggars Banquet, Surrealistic Pillow, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
what Caroline listened to over and over again the year she turned thirteen to find a way to play it backward, to hear the coded messages, to discover in the ridged grooves of spinning vinyl whether Paul McCartney's death had been wrongly foretold. CDs and cassettes, the first Caroline bought with her own allowance at the end of elementary school. Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton. Albums she hid in a box beneath her bed. Also in boxes: folded notes, movie ticket stubs, bottle caps, blown-out birthday candles, school photos. Diaries with tiny keys, journals of drawings, sketches of teachers and peers and turning maples beyond the classroom window. A miniature box of porcelain kittens, tiny owls, small books, a minuscule gumball machine. A jewelry box: emerald earrings. Collected necklaces. Small pins gathered on family vacations and from childhood, pins of
Cabbage Patch Kids and Michael Jackson's Captain EO. Textbooks wrapped in brown grocery bags. Tarot cards. A Ouija board slid beneath the bed. Posters of movies and Monet paintings and a vintage cover of
Catcher in the Rye
. Posters adhered to the wall that went up like kindling.

WE HAVE ARCHIVED
so many articles: these, the first. The first printed that week and the first we saved, now tattered and browning in the boxed corners of our basements. We have gathered newspaper articles and reports and photographs, an assemblage of texts meant to reconstruct a whole. Meant to guide us, what task of journalism we took on as our own beyond the static linearity of a yearbook, a year that lost us in the end to some understood register of shared history. We began to collect after the first fire. After the disaster of an entire high school. We knew only to act, to do something, to do what we knew how to do by saving articles and timelines, clippings hoarded in jagged newsprint.

We'd sat in our homes through a week that became a weekend, the days indistinguishable. We sat taking in the news: local news. National news. Radio broadcasts.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
special sections on memorials and weapons, on gun control, on cancellations and chronologies and school plans and where we could possibly go from here. The newspaper tried to reconstruct where Caleb had been and when, what hallways he moved through before traveling to other hallways and classrooms, a trail we hadn't thought to replay. Matt asked his father why it mattered and
you can't imagine the destruction
was all he said, an indication that it would take time. We awaited news of funerals. We triaged our options. We considered whose we would attend, whose we would not, who among
thirty-five we'd release in our own way from the quiet privacy of our homes. We hadn't thought to contact one another until we saw the broadcast of the Blacks' home.

Matt was the first of us to see the news, after only three hours of broken sleep. He drifted off past 4
A.M.
in a bedroom that had already begun to lighten, a dawn that spread through slatted blinds when he got out of bed and crawled from the basement to the living room, where his father watched the morning broadcast, already in his police uniform on a Sunday. His father stood from the couch and moved toward him, a gesture meant either to embrace him or to shield him from the news. Behind him, Matt saw the grained faces on-screen of Arthur Black and Jean Black: faces Matt recalled from school-wide assemblies and holiday parties at Des Peres Elementary, faces turned away from the crowd at the vigil. Matt listened to the newscaster speak it, not local news but already a national affiliate,
both died in a house fire late last night.
Matt didn't have to ask. He knew his father would be called upon for forensics. He knew his father had been granted a reprieve from the investigation at Lewis and Clark High but that he would be needed for this.

Are you going to the house? Matt asked.

The only thing he could think to say.

They have fire scene investigators for that, his father said. I've been called to the station. Chemical analysis of the debris.

Debris
. A word that pulled the breath from Matt's body, that allowed him the indignity of a single thought: that nothing remained. That a fire had razed not just the walls or a roof but the entirety of a house.

Zola awoke to find her mother seated at the kitchen table, her elbows bent in a triangle, her hands folded. The newspaper spread across the table beneath her arms, a front-page headline screaming house fire. A half-page photo of the house's collapsed frame, a home Zola recognized immediately by the barn-shaped mailbox included in the photo's vantage point to illustrate the only thing left
standing. Caroline Black's house: a home Zola had visited countless times for playgroup in kindergarten. A group of four children that included herself and Caroline and two twins, Amy and Althea Robinson, a group formed by their parents when they began school at Des Peres Elementary. Zola remembered the rooms of Caroline's house. Her kitchen. Her small bedroom. Her living room carpeted in green shag. Her basement where the four of them once played with Barbies and board games and My Little Ponies, a basement with a Ping-Pong table and a pullout couch and so many lamps and side tables, all gone. Zola's first thought: suicide. A burden too vast for a parent to live with, fire its only reprieve.

Nick's parents had already left for church when he woke, leaving behind a scrawled note on the kitchen counter,
Wanted you to rest.
They'd taken his brother with them, he knew, Jeff's bed empty and already made. Nick noticed the newspaper missing, usually folded on the dining room table once both of his parents finished reading it. He searched the kitchen and the recycling bin and found it folded and placed near the trash can, its contents hidden away and, Nick later understood, purposefully misplaced by his parents so he wouldn't see the headline:
House Fire Kills Two
. So he wouldn't sit in the silence of a house. So he wouldn't pull the scissors from the kitchen's utility drawer and clip the article and place it in his nightstand drawer, the beginning of an archive, so he wouldn't spend the morning until his family returned sitting in front of his computer researching fire and smoke and grief.

Nick read of the neighbors and the emergency and the two hours it took firefighters to douse the flames, a blaze that left only the faint blueprint of a home. He glanced at other news: the findings of the Iraq Survey Group, a multinational team organized to determine whether Iraq housed weapons of mass destruction, that after six months of searching Iraq there was no evidence of any kind. That although the team would keep looking, no nuclear or chemical or biological agents had been found but only remnants of long-dormant
activity from the First Gulf War, a war Nick barely remembered, a war that began when he was only three years old. He flipped back to the front page and let the scissors glide through the thin film of newsprint. He placed the clipped article in his bedroom's nightstand and lay on his back, his computer off. He heard the whirring of sirens beyond the window, a sound that had become constant across the past days. Reporters filled the streets. Local teams. CNN. FBI officials who hadn't left Midvale County since Wednesday morning. He focused on the stilled blades of the overhead fan and thought of how only neighborhoods away the Blacks had entered their home after the vigil and disintegrated.

Christina sat curled into the armchair beside Ryan's hospital bed at St. Mary's Medical Center. After waiting several days beyond visiting hours for immediate family only, Christina had gotten up early and left her father and brother in the house and driven to the hospital to be in Ryan's room when he woke. He was already awake and barely acknowledged her when she walked in, the first time he'd seen her since Wednesday, but she told herself it was distraction from determining how to still complete college applications for tennis scholarships. She held his hand as he drank water from a plastic cup and clicked the remote toward the small television mounted in the room's corner. MSNBC. Christina grimaced at the coverage, a constant stream of news replaying over and over across the weekend, national affiliates buzzing through Midvale County to interview students, eyewitnesses, teachers.
Turn it off,
she whispered but Ryan kept the television on, his leg cast in plaster and elevated. Milking the injury for its worth, she thought, though she said nothing and let the television drone on until an anchor interrupted with breaking news. Christina sat forward in her chair. Squinted at the television, so small in the corner. Despite its distance and Ryan's calling to a nurse for more water that drowned out the sound of the speakers Christina recognized immediately whose house had caught fire and burned.

That's Caroline Black's house, Christina said.

Who? Ryan leaned back in his hospital bed.

Caroline Black, Christina said again, her voice carrying above the television.

Who the fuck is Caroline Black? Ryan said and Christina got up immediately from her armchair.
Hey, where are you going?
she heard him shout as she made her way down the hospital corridor. Her legs moving. Brain hazed. She located the nurses' station and laid her hands on the counter and one of the nurses looked up with concern, a young woman who'd brought Ryan a tray of scrambled eggs an hour before.

Your boyfriend okay? the nurse asked.

I need to use your phone, Christina said.

The nurse smiled. It's only for emergencies.

I need to use your phone, Christina said again and watched the nurse lose her smile and hand her the receiver.

CHRISTINA HAD BARELY
spoken to Zola since Wednesday, had only acknowledged her and her mother across the crowd at the vigil. Zola answered on the first ring and said nothing of the Blacks' house and Christina wondered which of them would break first.

How is he? Zola asked when Christina told her where she was.

He'll be released from the hospital this afternoon, Christina said. Her voice even, as calm as she could keep it, the nurse listening behind the counter. Zola asked how bad it was and Christina told her the shot to his leg had just missed a major artery and that they'd discussed nothing else, not his college applications or how the injury would affect his chance of scholarships. Christina watched a man shuffle past her down the hallway, wearing a cloth gown and pulling a wheeled metal stand holding an IV bag. Her anger softened. Ryan's reaction was forgivable given the circumstances. He'd been a state champion his junior year, readying this fall for a final spring season in both singles and doubles. His record of excellence was
exactly what had attracted her to him two years ago, both of them athletes, her JV teammates encouraging their relationship as a given. He'd attracted college recruiters as well, a full ride he'd planned on taking before a bullet ripped through his leg.

Has he talked about it? Zola asked.

Not really. Christina glanced at the nurse and lowered her voice. There were other guys there. He says that's where Will Isholt and Sam Scott were. I can't even imagine what he saw or heard.

Will Isholt and Sam Scott: two names on the list of thirty-five. Christina said it before remembering that Zola had been in the library, where the news reported the most gunfire. That her best friend could easily imagine what Ryan had seen and heard.

Zola was quiet for only a moment. Is he acting okay?

He's been distant, Christina said carefully. He didn't even call me after it happened. His mother had to call me late Wednesday night.

He was probably just in shock, Zola said, and Christina heard in her voice the subtle catch, what she knew Zola felt but never said: Zola didn't like him. Hadn't liked him since Christina started dating him as soon as they entered Lewis and Clark. Back when she was a freshman on the junior varsity swim team, Ryan a sophomore and already playing varsity tennis. Back when she and Zola had thrown Tootsie Rolls and Double Bubble from the freshman float in the Homecoming parade, candy Ryan caught as he rode ahead of them on the sophomore flatbed. Christina had called Zola late at night sometimes when they fought, Zola listening without judgment. When Ryan said something terrible. When he stonewalled her for two, sometimes three full days. She'd told Zola about losing her virginity that summer, a July night after they'd gone mini-golfing and it started to rain and they stayed parked in Ryan's car. She'd told Zola sex had become habitual, that after nearly three months in Ryan's backseat or at his house when his parents were at work she still felt nothing close to orgasm. She'd stopped
herself sometimes from saying too much, a widening gulf between the initiated and uninitiated, Zola who'd never been in a relationship beyond a three-day stretch in seventh grade that involved Carter Johnson and her first kiss and the only time a boy had slid a hand beneath her shirt. Christina sensed in her listening what at times felt like silent judgment, that Zola didn't want drama, every phone call and complaint Christina made about Ryan pushing her further toward her resolve to be alone.

Zola alone. Christina watched the man with the IV bag disappear down the hallway and wondered if anyone had been beside her in the stacks of the library.

I'm sorry I didn't call sooner, Christina said.

It was nothing. I'm fine. I wasn't hurt.

Did you see the news? Christina finally asked.

Caroline Black's family, Zola said. I can't believe it.

I know. I can't even imagine.

I wouldn't blame them. I wouldn't blame them at all if they chose this.

Christina let her eyes lose focus down the hospital corridor. Suicide: what Zola meant. What she herself hadn't considered. She'd never been in the Blacks' home but had known Caroline since their first days together in kindergarten. Christina hadn't joined Zola's playgroup with Caroline and the Robinson twins, hadn't lived near enough to really know them, but her budding friendship with Zola in their first-grade classroom had pushed a permanent distance between Zola and the group. Christina remembered Caroline's feistiness. How when a group of parents suggested Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale
be banned from their sophomore year English curriculum last year, she'd circulated a petition around the school to make sure it stayed included. How she'd always been the first girl at their annual Des Peres Elementary roller skating party to grab a boy during slow songs as the lights dimmed and the mirror ball glittered above the rink.

Come over this afternoon, she said to Zola. A statement more than a question, one she hoped would not sound like a demand.

Don't you want to be around for Ryan when he goes home?

Christina glanced down the hallway toward his hospital room.
Who the fuck is Caroline Black?
Her anger flickering again toward ignition.

I'm sure he'll be busy with his family, she said. Please, just come over.

ZOLA TOOK HER
bike to Christina's, a habitual two-mile ride. Her mother out with the car buying groceries for the week, the only window Zola had alone across the days since Wednesday. Her mother watching over her like a night nurse on call. Her mother knowing she'd been in the library. Despite her mother's vigilance and care, Zola had been unable to speak a word of it. The day shone bright and crisp, the sun a high disk in a cloudless sky, the leaves a shock of yellow and copper. The sun's light hurt her eyes: a light she'd waited for, fall her favorite season, every color alive. A light that broke over her as she pedaled fast past Alisha Trenway's house on the corner, her legs spinning to outpace the choked lump of her throat. Christina had asked about the library. The first thing Zola had thought: not screams or the rasped gasping for air or the metal of gunfire but the urine stain that had darkened her jeans, and whether any of her classmates had seen what control she'd lost. At times across the past days she could think of nothing else at all, an awful vanity, what she couldn't tell Christina or her mother or anyone else who asked.