The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (28 page)

Bullshit. You said it yourself: kids get picked on all the time. But most of them don’t bring shotguns and propane bombs to school.

I don’t know. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe it all comes down to … what’d he call it? That guy on the plane? Sensitive dependence on initital conditions?

Oh, this ought to be good. Go on.

I don’t know. But maybe … if a butterfly’s wings can perturb the air and trigger a tornado half a world away, then maybe a spanking, or some small slight by a kindergarten teacher, or something a grandparent did could set something in motion. Travel through time and …

And what?

Trigger a massacre.

So they’re off the hook then? Harris and Klebold and their parents? It was all just inevitable? It was chaos’s fault? That’s total bullshit. And if I remember right, didn’t that jerk on the plane claim that chaos bred
life?
Tell that to the parents of those kids they killed. Tell it to Dave Sanders’s widow. Hey, tell it to
her
up there ! Because if she never gets over this, then they’ve taken her life, too. Haven’t they? So maybe, instead of making excuses for them, you should have grabbed a hammer and marched up Rebel Hill. Taken a few swings at those goddamned crosses yourself. It’s not like there isn’t precedent. Not like you haven’t swung a hammer before.

It was a pipe wrench.

So what? Same difference. Wouldn’t it have felt good to destroy those things? Wouldn’t it have felt like you were doing something?

I got up from the table. Brought the newspaper into the study and put it on the pile. Newspapers, magazine articles, computer printouts: I wasn’t sure why I was saving everything. Maybe some day down the line, I’d go through it all and it would make sense. Maybe not. Maybe I should take it all outside and put a match to it. Watch all those pictures and words go up in flame.

I went upstairs. She was taking a bath. Her Xanax was on her night-stand. I popped the lid, spilled the tablets onto my palm. Twenty-six. Don’t dog her, I reminded myself. Don’t mention the pills, or the Boost, or this Dr. Cid. Let her be in charge of it. Let her come around.

THE NIGHT BEFORE SCHOOL RESUMED,
I spent more hours awake than asleep. Although I’d been thousands of miles away on the morning of the murders, I could, during that long night, “see” the unfolding events as if, in my head, a camera had captured the morning like grainy surveillance video. Spliced together from articles and rumors, from TV reports and the things Maureen had said, it played soundlessly, over and over, and I tossed and turned and watched in dread….

Eric’s gray Honda pulls in, comes to a stop in the juniors’ parking lot. Dylan’s old black BMW follows, proceeds to the west-side senior lot. Their cars flank the front and side entrances to the cafeteria. Their long black trench coats hide the shoulder straps they’ve cinched to themselves, their ammunition belts and holstered firearms. Each hefts a duffel bag that holds one of the propane bombs they’ve timed to explode during “A” lunch. I can read the sense of purpose on their faces. The wait is almost over. They’re about to answer the hundreds of injustices they’ve suffered in silence. People are going to be sorry they fucked with them…. Inside, Maureen and Velvet leave the clinic, move down the corridor toward the commons, climb the stairs to the library…. Eric and Dylan wait at the top of the outside stairs. They’re ready. Psyched to shoot survivors as they flee the cafeteria explosions. But something’s wrong. Nothing explodes. No one’s fleeing. Eric stares at Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo, eating their lunch on the grassy bank near the stairs. He raises his rifle…. In the caf, Dave Sanders directs kids away from the windows, herds them up the stairs to the library hallway…. In the upper west hallway, Brian Anderson runs toward the double glass exit doors. Patti Nielson is there, frowning at the two boys outside at the top of the stairs. They’re wearing costumes of some kind—one’s in a long black trench coat, the other is dressed like a militiaman. Fed up with these silly senior pranks, she moves to the door to tell them to knock it off. Eric sees Patti, smiles, takes aim. Glass and metal fly around her and Brian…. Outside, near the west entrance, Eric
spots the patrol car, lights flashing, in the lot below. From inside the shattered doorway, he aims, fires. The officer fires back. Rachel Scott is dead, Richard Castaldo badly wounded. Danny Rohrbough lies facedown at the base of the stairs. Eric and Dylan enter the building….

My “tape” stopped there. Rewound.
Eric arrives in the parking lot. Dylan follows.
… My mind wouldn’t let me see them shoot Dave Sanders, or the kids in the library, or Maureen, on her hands and knees, crawling inside that cabinet.

In the morning, I filled the sink bowl with cold water. Stuck my face in. Came up for air. Bags under my bloodshot eyes, a twitch in my left eyelid: my face was wearing what a tough night it had been. Later, I shaved. Gelled my hair a little. My hands shook when I tried to get the Visine in. Visine tears dribbled down my cheeks instead of landing where they were supposed to. Maureen walked in, her hair askew. It was past noon, and she was still in her pajamas. She’d spent the morning watching some old black-and-white Bette Davis movie on TV. Staring at it, anyway. When I’d asked her what it was about, she couldn’t tell me.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Thanks. You sure you’re going to be okay here by yourself? Because you could always call—” “I’ll be okay,” she said.

“I made you a sandwich. It’s in the fridge. Try to remember to call that shrink, okay?” I waited for a response that didn’t come. “Well,” I said. “At least while I’m at school, I won’t be hovering. Right?”

She gave me a look:
I have no idea what you mean.

I FELT A LITTLE NAUSEOUS
driving there. Lack of sleep didn’t help. And the fact that, at the red lights, that “tape” was still playing in my brain. The schedule felt way out of whack: hang around the house all morning, then get to work for one p.m. And parking was a pain. The Chatfield teachers were done at noon, but a lot of them
had hung around. Several of us had to jump the berm and park on the lawn. And checking in with the security cop: that felt strange. Having him check through my briefcase, look back and forth between my ID badge and me. I couldn’t see why the faculty had to be treated like prospective bombers.

My first class was my American lit sophomores—the honors kids. We were all feeling like strangers in a strange land, I think, but I couldn’t really address it while Mrs. Boyle was still in the room. Mrs. Boyle was the teacher whose classroom I was borrowing, and she was taking her sweet time getting her stuff together and leaving us alone. She was nice enough—had cleaned out one of her desk drawers for me and put up a bulletin board: “Welcome, Columbine. Chatfield stands with you.” Thirteen silver balloons thumbtacked to a blue background. But as far as blackboard space? She’d hogged over half of it and taken colored chalk and written, “Please SAVE! Please SAVE!” around the edges. So, you know, it didn’t leave a whole lot of space for me. And I like to sprawl a little when I’m using the board. When the kids get going during a discussion. You write down a little something of what each of them says. Legitimizes their comments, you know? Gets more kids participating. Now that I think of it, Mrs. Boyle
looked
like she’d been boiled: pink complexion, kind of sweaty.
“Adios,”
I said when she finally headed out the door. Her hand appeared over her shoulder and waved bye-bye. The sound of that door catch was music to my ears.

I looked out at the kids. Smiled. Said it was good to see everybody. They were wearing their security badges, too—hung like pendants around their necks, per order of the superintendent’s office. Poor Lindsay Peek looked miserable—more gaunt than Maureen. She probably should have stayed home for the rest of the year, too. Had her work sent to her.

“So,” I said. “Day one of our last eighteen. What do you guys want to do today?” No one responded. “You want to talk about it?
Not
talk about it?”

“Not talk about it,” one of the boys in back said. It dawned on me that they’d taken seats in approximately the same places where they’d sat in my classroom.

“Then shall we just get back to the book we were reading?” I asked.

“I don’t know. What book were we reading?” Katrina said. A few kids laughed, several smiled. All year, she’d been the class smart-ass—never as funny as she thought she was. But I decided to play along.

“What book?” I groaned. “Only Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck’s masterwork. How many of you have finished it?” About half the kids raised their hands. Several of the others reminded me that the police hadn’t let them retrieve their backpacks from the crime scene. Luzanne Bowers, a cop’s kid, said her dad had told her nobody was going to get their stuff back until July.

“I finished it,” Travis said. “What was up with that ending? Her baby dies, so they put it in a box and send it down the river?”

“Like Moses. Right, Mr. Quirk?” Luzanne asked. “One of those biblical illusions we were talking about before?”

I nodded. “Allusions,” I said. I wrote the word on the board.

“Yeah, but why did she breast-feed that starving dude?”

“Duh-uh,” Katrina said. “Because he was
starving”

“Yeah, but come on. That was gross.”

“Not as gross as going to school at Chatfield,” Charissa said. Several kids mumbled in agreement.

“Hey, it’s not all bad,” Malcolm said. “We get to sleep in in the morning. And has anyone checked out their vending machines? They got Yoo-Hoo!”

Lynette said she hated that the media was there. “Can’t they just leave us alone on our first day back?” I suggested that their first day back
was
the story. Catalina Quinones said she saw Katie Couric out front—off-camera, eating a yogurt like a normal person. When she waved, Katie had waved back.

“Big hairy deal,” Alex said.

“Well, maybe it is for me, since I want to be a TV journalist,” Catalina retorted. Delbert said he’d seen “that CNN dude. One of the main ones. I forget his name.” Charissa complained that she couldn’t ever turn on TV anymore without seeing Mr. DeAngelis being interviewed by somebody. If we asked her, she said, he should remember he was a high school principal, not some big TV star. Plus, he had a big, fat pumpkin head. She just wanted to say that, too.

“Can I say something?” Jenny Henderson asked. She looked upset. Looked over at the silver balloons on Mrs. Boyle’s bulletin board. “Lauren Townsend lived on my street? And I always … she was like a role model for me? Because she was so smart? But she was like really, really nice, too.” The rest of us looked at her. Waited. “That’s all I wanted to say. Just that Lauren was an awesome person.”

“Thanks, Jen,” I said.

Kyle Velasquez had rocked, too, Charlie told us. He and Kyle had bet ten dollars on the Super Bowl in January and Kyle had won. They’d gone to DQ and Charlie had paid off his bet in Blizzards. “Dude, trust me,” Charlie told us. “That dude could eat ice cream!”

Melanie said she’d been in the lunch line once and didn’t have enough money. “And the cafeteria lady had already rung me up and she was all like, ‘Well, what did you
take
that for if you can’t pay for it? ’ And then this kid behind me? He tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a dollar. He didn’t even know me or anything. I didn’t know his name. And then? After everything happened? … It was that kid, Danny Mauser.”

I nodded. Smiled. “Anyone else?”

Delbert’s hand went up. “How’s Mrs. Quirk?”

The question rattled me. I felt my face redden.

“How is she? She’s fine. Why?”

“She was in the library. Right?”

Involuntarily, I looked over at Lindsay. She was staring straight
ahead. Chewing on her hair. I looked back at Delbert. “She was, yes,” I said. “She’s okay, though. She’ll be back next year.”

“My friend Eli was in the library,” Annie said. “He’s changing schools.” I saw four or five kids sneak peeks at Lindsay. From the looks of it, some of them knew where she’d been, some didn’t.

Clemente Quinones’s hand shot into the air. It surprised me; unlike his sister, he rarely spoke in class. “In the book?” he said. “When Rose of Sharon bares her breast? Isn’t that from the Bible, too?”

“No, it’s from
Playboy”
Katrina quipped.

I gave her a look, but Clemente ignored her. “Isn’t it like ‘the milk of human kindness’ or whatever?” he said.

“Well, that phrase is from Shakespeare,” I said.
“Macbeth.
You guys will read it next year. But you’re right, Clemente. That’s exactly what Rose of Sharon is offering the starving man. Think about it. Her husband’s ditched her, her baby’s just died. But she unbuttons her dress and offers a stranger the milk of human kindness. The gift of hope.”

On the other side of the room, Lindsay Peek burst into tears.

It was Jesse who went to her. Put her arm around her. Lindsay clung to her like she was drowning. She was shaking violently. Making a gurgling sound.

“Linds?” I said. “Do you need a pass to the nurse?” She didn’t answer.

My mind raced.
Panic attack,
I thought.
She can’t go to the nurse. She can’t move.
“Could someone please go and get the nurse?”

Delbert stood and started toward the door. “Where’s her office at?” I searched from face to frightened face. None of us knew.

I GOT HOME A LITTLE
after six. Got the dogs exercised and fed. Broiled some chicken, made a salad. I had to call her three different times before she got herself downstairs and to the table. Her eyes were puffy, her hair uncombed. “Well,” I said. “One day down, seventeen to go.” She looked at me, puzzled. “School,” I said.

“Oh. Right.”

I waited for her to ask me about it—about the kids—but she just sat there, looking sad and stoned. “You should eat,” I said.

She took a bite.

“Lindsay Peek had a tough time today.”

“Did she? That’s too bad.” End of subject.

“So how’d it go here? What did you do all afternoon?” I waited. “Mo?”

“What?”

“What did you do this afternoon?”

She shrugged.

“No panic or anything?”

She shook her head. “Someone came here,” she said.

“Who?”

The fork shook in her hand, the tines clinking against her plate. “Would you please stop doing that?” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Making that tapping noise. It’s driving me crazy.” I pointed to her plate. Showed her that she was making the noise. “Oh,” she said. Put down her fork.

“Who came here?” I said.

She looked up. Looked away. “What? Oh. No one.”

I took a bite, watched her. “So which is it? Someone came, or nobody came?” She remembered now, she said: she’d taken a nap and
dreamed
someone was at the door. She picked up her napkin and started shredding it.

I told her I’d tried calling a couple of times but kept getting a busy signal. Who was she talking to? No one, she said; she’d taken the phone off the hook. “And then later? After my nap? As soon as I hung it back up, it started ringing. For some reason, I thought it was going to be Velvet, so I answered it. But it was what’s-his-name.”

“What’s-his-name?”

“From Connecticut. The baker.”

“Alphonse?” Jesus, she couldn’t remember my best friend’s name?

“He said to tell you the police were out at Lolly’s. They caught some kids fooling around down at the apple house.”

“Oh, great,” I said. “Just what I needed. The rest of that roof could come down any time. Hurt someone, and the next thing you know, their parents would be suing us. What else did he say?”

“Who?”

“Alphonse.”

“I couldn’t find a pen,” she said. “We never have enough pens in this house.” She stood up and, teetering, carried her meal to the sink. With her hand, she pushed it into the drain. Hit the garbage disposal switch. “Put the faucet on,” I reminded her. Waited. “Hey, wake up! Put the faucet on!”

She pivoted. Screamed, “Don’t yell at me!”

“I’m not. I … you run it without the water on, the motor burns out.”

“I know that! I forgot!”

Well, it was as good a time as any, I figured. “How many of those tranquilizers you take today?”

Two, she said. Why?

“Because ever since I got home, you’ve been acting so tranquil, I’m wondering if you have a pulse. And by the way, it’s you who’s yelling, not me. How many’d you really take?”

She reminded me that she was a nurse with pharmacological training. Only trouble was, she had a little trouble pronouncing “pharmacological.”

“You call that shrink yet?”

She stared at me for several seconds. “He’s going to e-mail you.”

“He? I thought Dr. Cid was a she.”

“Alphonse.” She said she was going to bed.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” I called after her. “So you can go up there, take another couple of those goofballs?”

I hadn’t checked my e-mail since before the killings. Hadn’t even turned the computer on. There were thirty-something unopened messages, most of them spam. The
“I Love You”
message was there: that computer virus I’d read about and I remembered, luckily, not to open it. There were three or four missives from my cyberbuddies—postings about our greatest-records-of-the-rock-era lists. I’d missed the deadline. Well, so what? It all seemed so stupid to me now: bunch of bored baby boomers trying to recapture their rock’n’roll youth. I block-deleted everything but Alphonse’s message.

I had to smile, thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi driving each other crazy down there in retirement heaven, same as they had at the Mama Mia all those years. Mrs. B must be approaching her one millionth novena by now—ought to get some kind of citation from the Vatican. I was working at the bakery when they voted in the Polish pope. She wasn’t too happy at first because they hadn’t picked an Italian, but within a month, she was gaga over the guy. Had his picture up all over the place at the bakery. And when he got shot? Man, the only time I ever saw Mrs. B in worse shape was when Rocco was dying…. So Ulysses was drinking again? I pictured him sitting forlornly at Lolly’s kitchen table a few weeks before, making his bullshit promises that he’d stay sober in exchange for the faith I was putting in him. Well, so much for the word of a lush…. And Maureen. Jesus Christ. Martineau calls on police business and she hangs up on him? I had to get her to that shrink—pick her up and carry her there if I had to. Had to count those pills before I went to sleep. Those things were just supposed to chill her out a little, help her get to sleep. Not turn her into something out of
Night of the Living Dead.

The dispatcher told me Captain Martineau was gone for the day. Would I like to speak to an officer on duty?

“Captain?” I said. “When did Jerry make captain?”

“First of the year, sir.” She said she wasn’t authorized to give out Captain Martineau’s home number. Did I wish to speak to an officer, or would I like the captain’s voice mail? Neither, I told her. Hung up and found his home number in the Internet white pages.

“I’ll see if he can come to the phone,” his wife said. “Who should I say is calling?”

“Tell him it’s one of the Four Horsemen.”

“Excuse me?” His first wife, Connie, would’ve gotten it; she and Jerry had been together since high school. But this was wife number two, the assistant city planner he’d had the affair with.

“One of the Four Horsemen,” I repeated. “He’ll know what I mean.” As in: he had a history before you came along, darlin’. I’d run into Connie in the dairy section of Big Y once. Her bitterness could have curdled the milk.

Back in high school, Martineau and I had had two things in common: we both ran cross-country and track, and we both had fathers who’d committed suicide. (Not that either of us ever spoke about it.) Senior year, at the state meet, Jerry, Ralph Brazicki, Dominick Birdsey, and I broke the record in the four by eight hundred. The sports writer for the
Daily Record
dubbed us “the Four Horsemen,” and then everyone started calling us that. Last I knew, we still held the state record: 7:55. But “last I knew” was before we moved to Littleton.

“Hello?”

“So what do you say, Captain Martineau?” I began. “You want to get ahold of Birdsey and Brazicki, see if we can still pass off the baton without dropping it?” He laughed. Said these days he’d have to run with a wheelbarrow in front of him to carry his gut. I congratulated him on his promotion; he said he wasn’t sure if congrats or condolences were in order. “No, really,” I said. “You’ve given that town a lot of good years. You deserve it.”

Martineau said my “buddy over at the bakery” had filled him in about my connection to Columbine. “You work in law enforcement for as long as I have, and you think you’ve seen it all,” he said. “Then something like this happens. I tell you one thing: I don’t envy that sheriff’s department out there. Investigation’s gotta be brutal, and then, on top of that, you got the press and the FBI and the politicians breathing down your neck. Not to mention a bunch of heartbroken parents. How’s the wife doing?”

I clenched. “My wife? She’s hanging in there. Thanks for asking.”

“That her I spoke to briefly when I called today?”

“Uh, no,” I said. “No, she was out all day. Must have been the woman who cleans our house. She’s a little self-conscious about her English.”

“Is she?”

“Yeah. She is. Mexican. Lot of Mexicans out here.”

“Here, too,” he said. “More and more. Come up to work at the casino. Mexicans, Haitians, Malaysians. It’s like the UN around here now. So I guess you heard you had some drop-in visitors out at your aunt’s place.”

“And that my caretaker took matters into his own hands and ended up in the hospital.”

Could have been worse, Jerry said.

“You catch the little shitheads?”

Not yet, he said. But his guys were making some inquiries, keeping their eyes open. Meanwhile, he wanted to avoid another confrontation. “We’ve had dealings with Mr. Pappanikou from time to time. He’s fine when he’s sober, but when he’s not, that’s a different story. And my philosophy is: Let’s prevent something from happening if we can, rather than cleaning up the mess
after
it’s happened. Last thing we want is for him to catch those kids out there again when he’s three sheets to the wind. Grab a shotgun, do something stupid.”

My mind flew to those CNN pictures of Rachel and Danny, lying dead outside the school. “Jesus, no,” I said. “Look, I’m planning to get back this summer. Tear down their little clubhouse.”

“He have a key to the farmhouse?”

I said he did—that he went over and checked on things for me.

“But that’s it? You didn’t give him permission to stay there? Because, according to my guys, that seems to be what he’s doing. And if he’s stumbling around drunk in there, he could start a fire, fall down the cellar stairs. I don’t mean to mind your business for you, Caelum, but I think you better get someone else to keep an eye on things for you.”

I told him I’d get ahold of Alphonse, have him go out to Ulysses’s place and get the keys from him.

“Well, you better tell him to wait till the weekend,” Jerry said. “I called in a favor from Bev Archibald over at Social Services, and she got Ulysses into Broadbrook on a five-day. Dry him out a little.”

“That’s above and beyond the call,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Well, there’s a connection there. He and my dad went to high school together. Went down and enlisted right after high school. Fought in the Korean War.”

“My father, too,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? Who knows? Maybe Korea’s what messed all three of them up.” And there it was : the first mention either of us had ever made about our fathers’ having killed themselves.

“Yeah, well …” I said.

Jerry said I should give him a call when I got into town. “Maybe you and me and the wives can get together, go out to dinner or something.”

Doubtful, I thought, unless she begins to pull out of it. “Sounds good,” I said. “Or maybe you and I could do some laps around the track. How’s our state record holding up?”

“It’s not. Team from Storrs finally beat our time by one second. But we were on the books for what? Twenty-six years? Not too shabby.”

I asked him if he ever heard from Brazicki or Birdsey.

“Birdsey I see from time to time. Not too often. Probably too busy counting his casino millions. He’s a good guy, though. Writes us a nice check every year for the Policemen’s Benevolent fund. You know his brother died?”

I told him my aunt had sent me the clipping. “Drowned, right?”

“Yeah, that was a tough one…. I tell you one thing about that casino, though. They get some damn good entertainment down there. The wife and I have seen Travis Tritt, Dolly Parton, the Oakridge Boys.”

“So I take it your heavy metal days are over?”

“Yeah, and come to think of it, you never did give me back that Iron Butterfly album you borrowed.”

I laughed. Told him I was pretty sure the statute of limitations was up on that one.

“You know Brazicki became a priest?”

“Ralphie? You’re shitting me. I thought he was one of the evil capitalists at Aetna.”

“He was. Got the calling after Betsy died. Resigned, sold the house, the boat, their place at the Cape. His kids weren’t too happy about it, but what the hell. They’re both grown and married. He’s a prison chaplain. Says the inmates are a piece of cake compared to the sharks he used to have to deal with in business.”