The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (23 page)

A hand went up in the second circle. When Pete nodded, a young guy in his twenties—shaved head, earring in one ear—stood and addressed the crowd in a shaky voice. He said he’d been subbing at the school and was on his break when he got wind of what was happening.
He’d locked himself in a stall in the staffbathroom and had heard one of them laughing out in the hallway, banging on doors and shouting, “I know you’re in there !” The night before, he said, his girlfriend had told him she was pregnant, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it. But now he was glad about the baby, and he and his girlfriend had decided to get married. He was going to try and be the best husband and father he could be. I was unnerved by Maureen’s one-note chuckle. “Give me a break,” she mumbled, more to herself than me.

People spoke, others listened. There was no give and take, no response, beyond grateful nods from Pastor Pete. It was like that AA meeting I’d gone to that time, back in Three Rivers. I’d told Dr. Patel, the marriage counselor, about my father’s alcoholism, and about the way I’d get wasted on weekends sometimes, and drink when I couldn’t sleep. She’d urged me to go to a meeting—try it out—and so I had. Once. It creeped me out: all that handholding and surrendering to a Higher Power. All those heartfelt confessions and nobody saying anything in response. It just wasn’t for me, and anyway, those people were a lot more far gone than I was. More in my father’s league than mine. I just cut back a little. Less beer and liquor, more jogging. I was fine.

“I keep seeing them,” Sylvia Ritter was saying. “One of them, anyway.” She was the first person in the fishbowl up front to speak—the only person, as it played out. A biology teacher nearing retirement, Sylvia told the crowd she’d gone out in the hallway when she heard the second explosion, and that Dave Sanders had run past her, shouting for her to get back in her classroom, get the kids away from the door, and lock it. “And that’s when I looked down the hallway, and I saw one of them. Down near the library. I don’t know which one. I didn’t see a face, just a raised rifle, or a shotgun, or whatever it was; I don’t know about guns.” She stopped to compose herself, and when she spoke again, it was about how, the week before, she’d seen Dave Sanders in the office. She had asked him about his new granddaughter, and he’d taken out his wallet and shown her the baby’s
picture. “That’s when they must have shot him, I think. Right after he warned me to go back in my classroom and lock the door.”

Beside me, Maureen seemed to be gulping back tears. I reached over and started rubbing her back, but she shook her head no. She’d put her hair back in the ponytail.

A tall girl standing in back said she didn’t want to talk about her experience on Tuesday. She just wanted to say that Coach Sanders had been an awesome coach and she was never going to forget him.

Two freshmen girls asked if they could sing the Mariah Carey song “Hero” and dedicate it to the kids who’d died. “That would be fine,” Pastor Pete said, and they launched into their heartfelt, off-key a capella tribute. That was what got to me more than anything at the grief meeting, I think. Those poor, scrawny girls singing that shitty song, badly. Them, and the substitute—the father-to-be. Maureen rocked her head back and forth during the singing. She seemed both bored and nervous. She kept looking over at the wall clock.

Near the end of the program, Reverend Clukey introduced Dr. Bethany Cake, a University of Denver professor whose area of expertise was trauma. “Dr. Cake is here to share information that can help us understand what we’re going through, and how best to deal with the days and weeks to come. And may I add that she’s been good enough to come on very short notice. One of her colleagues was scheduled to speak to us, but he was called unexpectedly to the governor’s office this morning, to help plan the memorial service that’s being planned for Sunday. So we’re grateful Dr. Cake could make it. Bethany?”

A small, dark-haired woman in her early forties made her way to the center of the circle. She was gripping the neck of an overhead projector in one hand, a laptop computer in the other. An extension cord was lassoed around her shoulder. “I’ve brought a PowerPoint presentation,” she said, beginning the setup of her equipment. “Someone want to douse the lights?”

People mumbled, shifted uncomfortably. “Can we leave the lights on?” someone called. Dr. Cake didn’t seem to hear the request.

Reading the crowd’s discomfort, Pastor Pete stood. “Dr. Cake? I’m wondering, since this room doesn’t particularly lend itself to this kind of presentation, if you could maybe summarize your material and then open up the floor to questions?”

She stared back at him for a few uneasy seconds. “I can project it onto that wall there,” she said. “And sure, I can
do
a q & a, as long as everyone realizes that I’m a researcher, not a clinician.” And so there was an awkward shifting of chairs and a compromise : a dimming of
some
of the lights.

Dr. Cake began by laser-pointing to a list of responses to what she termed “the traumatic event.” I pulled out the small notepad and pen I’d shoved in my pocket before we left and jotted down “hypervigi-lance, flashbacks, survivor guilt, psychic numbness, palpitations, hy-persensitivity to noise, hypersensitivity to injustice.”

“Now these are all normal
initial
responses,” Dr. Cake said. “So if you’re experiencing some of them at this point, all it means is that you’re processing. Working through your anxiety. You’ve all heard of the mind-body connection, right?”

There was a collective nodding of heads.

“Each of us has a kind of thermostat that coordinates environmental stimuli with encephalic activities and endogenous activities.”

From the sidelines, Pastor Pete said, “In other words, what our brain does and what our body does with the stimuli we take in.”

Trauma could throw our thermostats out of kilter, Dr. Cake explained. So maybe we were feeling extremely jumpy, or uncharacteristically angry, or emotionally numb. Maybe there were blank spots when we tried to remember what we’d been through. The good news was that most people’s thermostats would self-adjust, and these responses would subside over the next few weeks. “It’s only when they persist, or evolve, that there’s clinical concern.”

“Persist for how long?” someone asked.

“Rule of thumb? Beyond four to six weeks,” she said. “But I’d appreciate it if you hold your questions until the end.”

“Miss Warmth,” I wrote on my pad. When I showed Mo, she looked at me, confused, as if I’d written something cryptic. Lindsay was chewing on her hair.

Posttraumatic stress disorder would result if the individual’s central nervous system was impacted significantly at the time of the event, Dr. Cake said. And that impact would only reveal itself over time through “the three Es.”

The words
environmental, encephalic,
and
endogenous
appeared on the wall, in a diagram with arrows going this way and that. I copied it onto my pad without knowing what the hell it meant. Too technical, I thought; she’s talking to sufferers, not psych majors.

She spoke about triggers—sights, sounds, smells, tactile sensations that might induce a flashback. Or a panic episode. Or psychic numbness. “How many of you heard gunshots on Tuesday?”

Hands went up around the room.

“Okay. So let’s say there’s a loud clap during a thunderstorm. Or you’re at a party and a balloon pops. Bang! Not out of the ordinary, right? But sensory cues that wouldn’t ordinarily disturb anyone may now become triggers. Cause a flashback, say. Which is stressful, sure, but not really a clinical problem at this stage of the game. But if you’re
still
getting hijacked by sensory stimuli six months from now, then you’ve probably gotten stuck. And each time a flashback occurs, it retraumatizes you. We see it in the research on rape victims. In their flashbacks, they get re-raped. Veterans, too, especially Vietnam vets. They go back, again and again, to the war zone.”

Maureen reached over and took my pad and pencil.
This woman is making me nervous,
she wrote.

Want to go?
I wrote back.

She shook her head.

Hands shot up, and to her credit, Dr. Cake relaxed her noquestions-until-the-end rule.
“Yes?” she said, calling on a woman in the second circle.

“So why do some people get stuck, and others don’t?”

Our central nervous systems were all different, she said. And there was
some
evidence that some people were more genetically predisposed to PTSD than other people. “And it can depend, too, on whether or not you experienced trauma during childhood.”

A girl raised her hand. “So can this PSTD or whatever be cured?”

“PTS
D,” Dr. Cake said. “Yes. Particularly if it’s treated successfully during the acute, rather than the chronic, stage. And what can’t be cured can often be managed, the way diabetics monitor and manage
their
disease.” She rambled on, oblivious to the fact that she seemed to have put the first circle in a trance. I zoned out for a while myself, suddenly aware of how exhausted I was. Worried about Mo, I hadn’t slept for shit the night before. With my pen, I made cross-hatchings over the notes I’d taken. Whatever it was that we needed, it wasn’t a bunch of clinical information about what might happen to people’s heads four to six weeks down the line…. Were they going to make the kids finish the school year, given the circumstances? If not, maybe Maureen and I could get back to Connecticut a little earlier. Get away. Start figuring out what to do about Lolly’s house and the farm property. It was going to be a lot of work, clearing out that place, whether we decided to sell it or rent it out. There was going to be a lot of emotional baggage, too. But it’d be nothing compared to this. And the distraction might be good for Mo. Maybe we could put the dogs in the backseat and drive back there instead of flying. Meander a little. Take the scenic route…. When I tuned back in, Dr. Cake was talking about physical ailments: ringing in the ears, tingling sensations, lack of bladder control, sexual dysfunction.

“And these would be psychosomatic rather than real?” someone asked.

“Well, they’re
very
real to the sufferer. People with PTSD will sometimes go from doctor to doctor to doctor to get to the bottom of
their physical ailments. But the origin of their pain is in their mind, not their body.”

“But we don’t want to put the cart before the horse,” Pete said. “As Bethany said earlier, many of you—the
majority
—will wrestle with some symptoms in the short term, but they’ll subside.”

“That’s right,” Cake said. “But there could be a high price to pay for ignoring treatment. That’s all I’m saying.” God, this woman is terrible, I thought. They should unplug her projector and get her the hell out of there.

A boy in the second circle raised his hand. “You said something before about ‘psychic numbness’? Is that like when the person acts like a space cadet?”

This drew a smile from Cake—the first she’d displayed. “Well, that’s one way of putting it,” she said.

“Because I was in trig when it started? And I got out okay? But my little brother was in the cafeteria. And after they left the library and came downstairs to the caf—”

“After
who
left the library?” Dr. Cake asked.

“You know.”

“The killers?”

He looked nervously at the people around him, then nodded. “Do you know their names?”

He nodded again.

“Then why don’t you say their names?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

Hey, lady, I thought. You’re a researcher, not a shrink. Remember?

“Because I just don’t
want
to,” the boy said.

“Okay. Go on, then. There were explosions. There was gunfire. And then they came down to the cafeteria where your brother was.”

The boy nodded. “And he and these two other kids he was hiding
under a table with decided to make a run for it? But they saw them and started chasing them down the hallway. Firing at them. Ethan said he could hear bullets flying past him, and over his head. Making this whistling noise and, like, skidding along the walls. He thought he was going to get hit, you know? But he just kept going, and then he cut through the auditorium and got outside…. And after? When my parents picked us both up at Leawood? All’s
I
wanted to do was go home. But Ethan wanted to go to McDonald’s and get a Quarter Pounder with cheese. He had this craving, like.”

“Probably more for normalcy than hamburgers,” Dr. Cake noted. Inexplicably, Maureen let out a laugh.

“So that’s what we did,” the boy said. “It was kind of weird, you know? After everything that happened, we go to Mickey D’s? … But anyways, he seemed okay that night. Watching the news, talking on the phone to our grandparents and our cousins. He was kind of getting into being an eyewitness or whatever. But then yesterday? And today? He just keeps staring out at nothing, and it’s like ‘Yoo-hoo? Earth to Ethan? ’ And he wouldn’t come to this thing today. My parents wanted him to, and I wanted him to, but he was all like, ‘What? Nah, I’m too tired. I don’t need to. I don’t even remember a lot of it.’ And I was just wondering: is that that psychic numbness stuff?”

Dr. Cake said it wasn’t appropriate for her to comment on his brother’s responses specifically. What she could say was that, in the wake of trauma, the brain sometimes acts protectively by blanking out the terrible memory. “Which is okay in the short run. But if psychic numbing—‘emotional amnesia,’ it’s also called—if this persists, then the patient can’t confront the feelings and the fears. And, over time, that avoidance can do damage.”

“Think of it in terms of the hard drive on your computer,” Pastor Pete added. “The memories are
in
there. Stored. But they’re not being accessed.”

“Actually, let me take that metaphor a step further,” Dr. Cake said.
“Psychic numbing can act like a computer
virus.
Because those unac-cessed memories are in there, doing their damage, undetected. And then, one day, nothing works.”

On my pad, I wrote “Love Bug.” Had it only been a couple of days ago when I’d read about that computer virus sweeping the country? Jesus, it seemed more like two or three
months
ago. Back when we were naïve about what a couple of high school kids could do—when we thought an erased hard drive was a tragedy. An elderly aunt’s stroke. Was this how Maureen and I were going to organize our lives from now on: before and after they opened fire?