The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (29 page)

“Father Brazicki,” I said. “Well, what the fuck. He and I bought our first Trojans together at Liggett’s Drugstore. The afternoon of Kitty Vinsonhaler’s skinny-dipping party.”

“The one her parents came home in the middle of?” Martineau said. “Don’t remind me.”

“Yeah, that’d make a great story down at the station,” I said. “You scaling that fence butt-naked with Mr. Vinsonhaler in hot pursuit.”

“Not to change the subject,” he said, “but I don’t think you ever gave me back my Grand Funk Railroad record, either.”

After I hung up, I thought about the three of them: Jerry’s dad, my dad, Ulysses. “Messed up” was right. Mr. Martineau had put a gun to his head and Daddy had put himself in front of a moving train. Ulysses was taking the slow boat, but he was killing himself, same as the other two. His liver was probably liverwurst at this point…. I’d asked Mother about my father’s Korean War experiences a couple of times. Lolly, too. Both had said they didn’t know much themselves—that Daddy had always kept it to himself…. Anyway, I was lucky nothing worse had happened in that dustup between Ulysses and those kids. I couldn’t have taken another shooting. Maybe I shouldn’t wait until I got back. I could hire someone to tear down the apple house. Someone who might haul it away in exchange for the scrap
lumber and the window casings. I could remove the floor myself. It’d feel good to swing a sledgehammer, take out my frustrations on a slab of concrete.

No, she was out. Must have been the woman who cleans our house. She’s self-conscious about her English.
Now why had I lied like that?
Because she’s becoming an embarrassment.

No, she’s not. I’m going to get her to that shrink. She’ll pull out of it.

Right. And Mrs. Buzzi’s novenas ought to be kicking in any minute, too. You two are going to live happily ever after, rise right up to heaven at the end of it all. Right?

The phone rang. Was it Martineau calling back? Velvet Hoon?

But it was Sergeant Cox, one of the investigators who’d interviewed Maureen a few weeks earlier in our living room. She said she was sorry to be calling back so late, but they were trying to firm up their schedule with the eyewitnesses. Had Mrs. Quirk and I had a chance to discuss their request?

“What request?” I said.

There was a pause. “She didn’t tell you about it?”

Cox said she and Detective Chin had stopped by the house that afternoon. They’d explained to Mo that they’d been assigned to a team that was reconstructing a minute-by-minute time line of the events at the school, from 11:10 a.m., when Harris and Klebold arrived on campus, until the last person was evacuated from the building. “So basically, what we’re doing is piecing together a jigsaw puzzle from the evidence and the eyewitnesses. Or, in your wife’s case and a few of the others, earwitnesses. What we’re asking people to do is return with us to the school, pinpoint their exact location, and share their memories with us, as specifically as possible.” Memory could be unreliable, she said; the more people they could gather information from, the more accurate a composite picture they could develop.

“And you’re saying she’d have to go back in there?”

“Yes, sir. In Mrs. Quirk’s case, what we’ll do, what
I’ll
do, probably—most women and girls seem to feel more at ease with another female—so what I’ll do is get down on the floor with her. Have her get inside the cabinet and close the door. And then, while we’re sitting there, I’ll interview her. Record her recollections. We find that on-site interviews are effective in—”

“Is it cleaned up?”

“The crime scene? No, sir. Everything has to be left as is while the investigation is ongoing. With the exception of the bodies. We’ve put cards down where the victims were.”

“But the blood, and the bullets and the glass …”

“Yes, sir. While the investigation’s under way.”

“How many takers have you gotten for these interviews?”

She said there were a few more people they still needed to reach, and a few that felt they had to decline, but that most of the eyewitnesses had agreed to assist them. “The kids have been super,” she said. “And we do appreciate that this is a lot to ask of people who’ve been through so much already. We’d spare folks if we could, but this is extremely important to our investigation. I can’t overemphasize how much.”

“What did she say? When you asked her?”

“Mrs. Quirk? Well, actually, sir, she seemed troubled.”

“As in distracted? Unfocused?”

“No, sir. Actually, she became quite agitated and told us to leave.” And then, I figured, she must have gone upstairs and popped two or three more Xanax. “Which is actually another reason why I’m calling this evening instead of waiting until morning,” Sergeant Cox said. “I wanted to find out how she’s doing. I’m a little surprised she didn’t tell you we’d stopped by.”

I told Cox I’d talk it over with Maureen. Told myself there was no way in hell I was going to allow her to go back there. Fuck their investigation.

Cox said the on-site interviews would take a week or more. She
could put Maureen at the end of the schedule, and we could see how things went. I agreed to that, but made sure she knew that there was no commitment.

I poured myself a scotch—a generous one. Went up there. Leaned against the door frame and watched her sleep. I found the prescription bottle hidden in her beaded purse—the fancy one she carried for dress-up occasions. I spilled the tablets into my cupped palm. Nineteen. She’d taken seven that day.

CALL SERGEANT COX’S REQUEST A
double-edged sword. Maureen was terrified by the possibility of having to return to the library and crawl back inside that cabinet. But her terror was what finally motivated her to call Dr. Sandra Cid.

Her office was in a high-rise in downtown Denver. We had trouble finding it, and then, once we did, trouble finding parking. We had an argument at the elevators in the lobby. “But we’re
late,”
I reminded her, and
she
reminded
me
that she couldn’t handle enclosed spaces. “Come on then!” I said, and slammed open the door to the stairwell. I started up the seven flights, two stairs at a time, with her shoes click-clacking behind me. There were windows at the landings and, late or not, Mo stopped at each of them. To gather herself, I realized later. To assure herself that, outside this metal and cinder-block chimney she was climbing, there was a world of daylight and normalcy. By the time I reached the seventh floor, my heart was jackhammering. Maureen was a mess. This Dr. Cid had
better
be good, I thought.

She was soft-spoken and plump—one of those sixty-something women with the dyed black hair, the colorful suits and scarves. Mexican, maybe? Puerto Rican? She poured us each a paper cone of water from her water cooler and invited Mo into the inner sanctum.

The walls of her waiting room were decorated with framed color photographs—seascapes, most of them, pencil-signed by an Edgardo
Cid. Her husband, I figured. Ten minutes after they’d disappeared, Dr. Cid reappeared at the doorway. “Mr. Quirk?”

“Caelum,” I said.

“So noted. Maureen is feeling anxious. She’d like it if you could join us.”

“Sure,” I said, springing like a jack-in-the-box from my chair. “Whatever she needs.” My anger about the elevators had dissipated like fog.

Mo was trembling badly. I sat beside her on a sea-green couch and took her hand, stroked the back of it. “Sorry I was a jerk before,” I murmured.

“You were frustrated,” she said. “Hey, I’m frustrating.”

Dr. Cid waited for an opening. “Maureen was just sharing with me that, in addition to the fear that’s always with her, and the sadness about the children, she wrestles with constant anger, too.”

I nodded. Waited.

Mo turned to me. “I have to tell you something. Yesterday? When I let the dogs back in? Chet had been digging, and he tracked mud all over the house. And I got so mad, I grabbed the yardstick and … started beating him. I couldn’t stop. Then the yardstick broke, and I beat him some more with the broken piece. And he snapped at me. Bared his teeth.”

I told Dr. Cid it was completely out of character—that Maureen was the type who shooed flies out the window rather than use the fly swatter.

Dr. Cid asked Mo if she could identify the source of her anger.

Me, I thought. She’s always mad at me.

“Them.”

“The murderers?”

“They stole my life.” She glanced at me.
“Our
lives.” I said what I’d been saying for three weeks: that it was temporary. That it took time. That she was going to get her bearings.

“Will I, Caelum? And how do you know that? Did you gaze into your crystal ball?” The doctor looked back and forth between us.

“That’s new, too,” I said. “I used to be the smart-ass.”

Dr. Cid offered me a smile. “Sarcasm is a suit of armor,” she said. She asked Maureen if she would please describe a typical day.

“A ‘typical’ day?”

“Since the trauma, I mean. Walk me through it. You wake up in the morning and …?”

“And I lie there. Not wanting to get out of bed.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to face whatever’s going to clobber me. A flashback, or a memory, or some horrible new thing about it in the newspaper. And then … and then I tell myself, ‘Okay, maybe today’s the day you’re going to get up, get dressed, and not let it overwhelm you. Maybe today’s the day you start moving past it.’”

It was the first I’d heard of these pep talks. “That’s good, Mo,” I said. “See? You’re beginning to fight it.”

Dr. Cid asked if she could interject. “It sounds to me, Maureen, that even before your feet touch the floor, you’re putting enormous pressure on yourself. Setting yourself up for failure, I think, because trauma is not really something you can wish away with ‘maybes.’ You have to learn how to manage it. Develop coping strategies you can use when these difficult moments present themselves.
That’s
how you’re going to heal, Maureen. But please, go on. What happens when you get out of bed?”

Maureen sighed. “I get up. Go into the bathroom. And I’ll be washing my face, or brushing my teeth and … I’ll start remembering things.”

“Such as?”

“Gunfire. Breaking glass.”

“So it’s mostly sounds you remember?”

“Smells, too,” I said. “The other day? The bottom of one of our garbage barrels had rotted out? So I said, ‘Come on. Let’s drive over
to Home Depot, get another barrel.’ And she didn’t want to go, but I was like, ‘Just take a ride with me. You can’t stay cooped up in here.’ And so we went. And while we were looking for the garbage barrels, we passed the lumber section. And the smell of the lumber, the raw wood …”

“It smelled like the inside of the cabinet,” she said.

“She got nauseous. Dizzy.”

“And for the rest of the day, I had a bad headache. And I felt so …”

“Anxious?”

Mo shook her head. “Defeated. I mean, Home Depot has nothing to do with what I went through, but it’s like … everything’s a landmine field. Which is
why
I don’t want to leave the house.”

“But there are trip wires there, too,” I said.

Dr. Cid asked Mo to describe some of the other auditory memories that made her feel defeated.

She closed her eyes. I watched her hands dance and fidget in her lap. “Their laughing and whooping while they were shooting them…. The way the kids were wailing. Begging for their lives.” She was struggling. Being so brave. “And the fire alarm. It just kept screaming, you know? All the time I was hiding inside the … I remember thinking at one point, well, if they find me and kill me, I won’t have to hear that alarm anymore.”

We sat there in silence, the three of us.

It was Dr. Cid who finally spoke. “Maureen, when you remember these terrible sounds, what effect does it have on you?”

“It’s like … there’s this wave coming toward me, but there’s nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and … and I’m done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave?”

“You don’t,” Dr. Cid said. “And you’re wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you
can
do is learn how to
negotiate
this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability.” When she was a little girl living in Cuba, she said, her older brothers taught her
how to manage the surf. She learned that, as a wave approached, she needed, first of all, to calculate whether it was going to break over her, or pass by her and
then
crest. If the latter was the case, she could spring upward and bob above the swell. Or, she could make her body rigid and lean into the curl. Ride the wave in to the shore, and then stand, adjust her swimsuit, and return again to deeper water. But if the wave was about to break against her, she said, the best plan was to face it head-on. Take a gulp of air and stick her head right into it. Better that than to be battered by it, lifted off her feet and sent tumbling and choking on sea water.

Maureen rolled her eyes. “Well, if I ever go swimming in Cuba, I guess I’ll know what to do.”

“Mo, stop it,” I said. “She means—”

But Dr. Cid put her hand up like a traffic cop. “Maureen’s an intelligent woman,” she said. “I think she understands the metaphor. And if she needs to resist it, that’s okay, too.”

We had been booked for a double session, and near the end of those hundred minutes, Dr. Cid shared her conclusions with us. Maureen’s symptoms indicated that she was certainly suffering from acute-phase posttraumatic stress disorder. If they were to continue working together, her goal would be to help Maureen manage her stressors so that she could avoid advancing to chronic PTSD. “This needn’t be a life sentence,” she said. “For either of you.”

I asked her to describe what Mo’s treatment would be like.

“A mix,” she said. “Talk therapy, instruction in relaxation techniques, medication. And perhaps, down the line, a session or two with an Ericksonian hypnotherapist.”

Maureen shook her head emphatically. “I am
not
having anyone hypnotize me.”

“So noted,” Dr. Cid said. “But that’s a common misconception about hypnosis: that someone else does it
to
you. In actuality, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Now let’s talk about medication.”