The Hour I First Believed

“About what?”

“My aunt’s funeral. They said they could keep the body refrigerated. Postpone the service until I could get back here and—”

He shook his head. “Better this way, Quirky. The last thing you need is stuff hanging over your head at this end. Not with what’s going on out there. Don’t worry. Me and the old ladies’ll give her a good send-off.”

“What if she’s dead?” I said.

He cocked his head, gave me a slight smile. “She is dead, man.”

“I mean Maureen.”

He opened his mouth to answer me, then closed it again. When he finally spoke, it was to ask me what time my plane arrived in Denver.

“Ten fifty-five,” I said. “Provided I get the hell out of Hartford.”

“Ten fifty-five our time?”

“Colorado time,” I said.

He nodded. “How about some nuts? What do you like? Cashews? Peanuts? You like those smoked almonds if they have them?”

I held out my hand. He handed me his phone. “I don’t care if you want them or not,” he mumbled, rising from his chair. “I’m getting you some nuts. Just shut up and put ’em in your pocket.”

I dialed our number. Got what I’d gotten for hours: the four rings, the click of our machine, my voice, the beep.

THE FLIGHT TO CHICAGO WAS uneventfully torturous. The seat next to mine was empty—that was a relief—but it was hell to just sit there, strapped in, waiting for time and distance to pass. I thought about that other night: the worst night of our marriage, when I’d confronted her about Paul Hay, and then hurt her wrist, and she’d gone out on those icy roads and totaled her car. She could have died that night…. Steer toward the skid. She knew that, but she’d panicked, jerked the wheel the other way, and gone skidding toward that tree. “Almost in slow motion,” she’d said later. That’s what flying back felt like: being in the middle of a slow-motion skid, waiting for the crash.

The captain came over the intercom to tell us we’d reached cruising altitude. The flight attendants wheeled down the aisle with the beverage cart. The little TV screens descended. I left the earphones in the seat pocket and sat there, staring at Kramer and Jerry’s moving lips, penguins hopping into and out of icy blue water, a Belgian chocolatier decorating petits fours. “Hey,” I said to a passing flight attendant. “Do these things work?”

“The in-flight phones? Yes, sir.” She pushed the button and the receiver popped free from its holder. “Just follow the instructions.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” someone said. “They gouge you on those calls.” I looked across the aisle. Nodded to the guy who was talking.

“Yeah, well…” I said. I punched in my credit card number, waited. One ring, two, three, four. “Hey, how’s it going? You’ve reached the Quirks. We’re not home right now, but you can leave a message after the beep.”

“Mo, where are you?” I said. “I’m in a plane. I’m coming home.”

I ate Al’s almonds. Looked out the window at nothing. Cross-hatched over the faces in the complimentary magazine. I thought about how fucked-up this was: the person on the plane is the one whose life is supposed to be at risk, not the person who stayed home. I wrote her name, over and over, in the margins: Maureen, Maureen, Maureen…I had never realized how much I loved her. Needed her. How over my own life was going to be, if she was dead.

O’HARE OVERWHELMED ME. I KNEW I had to get to Concourse G, but I couldn’t figure out how, and when people tried to direct me, I watched their mouths move but couldn’t make sense of what they were saying. Finally, on the verge of panic, I approached an airline employee—a black woman with copper-colored hair. “I’m lost…” I babbled. “My wife…a shooting at our school.”

“The one in Colorado that’s been on the news? Lemme see your boarding pass.” She took it from my shaking hand. “Okay, this is Terminal Two. You gots to get to Terminal Three. That’s where Concourse G’s at.”

I burst into tears.

She stared at me for a moment, then shouted over her shoulder.

“Hey, Reggie! I’m going on break now!” She took my hand; hers was rough and plump. “Come on, baby,” she said. “I’ll take you there.”

The waiting area for gate G–16 had a TV. Now CNN was saying the shootings may have been committed by students who belonged to a cult called the Trenchcoat Mafia. I shook my head. Those Trenchcoat Mafia kids had graduated the year before. And anyway, they were ironists, not killers. What the hell was going on? Eric Harris’s and Dylan Klebold’s yearbook photos filled the screen. “Once again, we want to emphasize that these are alleged suspects,” the anchorwoman said. “What we do know is that officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office have entered the boys’ homes with search warrants, and it is believed, although not yet verified by the authorities, that the bodies of Klebold and Harris were amongst those in the library. At the very least, they are persons of interest.”

My mind ricocheted. Blackjack Pizza, the after-prom party, Sieg heil!…

I sensed the people around me were staring at me before I knew why. Then I heard moaning and realized it was coming from me.

I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT the flight from Chicago to Denver. We landed a little after eleven, and I ran through the airport, ran to my car. Floored it most of the way home.

The house was dark. When I pulled into the driveway, Sophie and Chet began barking frantically. I got the door open, and they jumped on me in lunatic greeting, then bounded past me to the outside. There was dog crap on the living room rug, a puddle of pee on the slate in the front hallway. They hadn’t been let out since morning.

“Maureen?” I called. “Mo?” I took the stairs two at a time. The bed was made. Her little suitcase was packed for the trip to Connecticut. I looked at her jeans, folded on the chair beside our bed, and a chill ran through me. Downstairs, Chet and Sophie were barking to be let back in.

There were eighteen phone messages, half of them from me. Her stepmother, Evelyn, had called, and later, her father. “We’re starting to worry about you, Maureen,” he said. “Give us a call.” As if, suddenly, her safety mattered to him. As if he had never put her at risk….

There was a message from Elise, the secretary at the school clinic. “I guess if you’re not answering, you’re probably still over at Leawood.”

Leawood Elementary School! The TV news had shown footage of evacuated students and staff reuniting with their families there. I threw some food into the dogs’ bowls and grabbed my keys. Elise’s message had come midway through the sequence, which meant she’d left it hours earlier. It was late. Most, if not all, of the kids would have been picked up by now. But maybe, for some reason, Maureen was still there. Or, if not, maybe someone knew where she was. I’d start at Leawood, then drive from hospital to hospital if I had to. Be there, I kept saying. Please be there, Mo. Please be all right.

The eight or nine cars leading up to the school were parked helter skelter, a few on the sidewalk, one abandoned in the middle of the street. Parents must have pulled up, thrown open their car doors, and run for their kids. A cop was posted at the entrance. “Yes, sir, can I help you?”

I blurted that I’d been away, that I was trying to find my wife.

“Are you a parent of one of the Columbine students, sir?”

“I teach there,” I said. “My wife’s one of the school nurses. Do you know if there were shots fired anywhere near the medical clinic?”

He said he’d heard all kinds of rumors about the boys’ movement inside the school, but that that was all they were: rumors. He took my driver’s license and wrote down my information on his clipboard. “It was bedlam here earlier,” he said. “It’s quiet now, though. Too quiet. Looks bad for the families still waiting. There’s eleven or twelve still unaccounted for, and there’s bodies inside the school, so it’s a matter of matching them up. ’Course, some of the kids may show up yet. If you’re sitting there waiting, you gotta hang onto some hope, I guess. You have kids?”

I shook my head.

“Me neither. The wife and I wanted kids, but it just never happened. You can go ahead in. They’re in the gym, all the way down past the showcase. There’s lists posted on the wall.”

“Lists?”

“Of the survivors.”

I walked warily down the hallway, my footsteps slowing as I neared the gym. Let her be here, let her be here. Let her be on that list….

She was seated by herself, cross-legged on a gym mat, a blanket around her shoulders, a pile of Styrofoam coffee cup spirals in front of her. “Hey,” I said. She looked up at me, emotionless for several seconds, as if she didn’t quite recognize me. Then her face contorted. I dropped to my knees and wrapped my arms around her. Rocked her back and forth, back and forth. She was here, not dead, not shot. Her hair smelled smoky, and faintly of gasoline. Her whole body sobbed. She cried herself limp.

“I wrote you a note,” she said. “On the wood inside the cabinet.”

“What cabinet, Mo? I don’t—”

“Velvet’s dead.”

At first, it didn’t register. “Velvet?” Then I remembered: she was going to meet Maureen at school that morning, to talk about reenrolling.

“I went to call you, to see how things were going, and then there was this explosion and the whole library—”

“Oh, Jesus! You were in the library?”

She flinched. Made fists. “The coroner was here earlier,” she said. “She passed out forms. She wanted names and addresses, descriptions of their clothing, distinguishing marks or features, whether or not they had drivers’ licenses. Because of the fingerprints, I guess.” Her crew cut, I thought. Her tattoo. “She said she might need dental records, too. Dental records: that’s when we knew.”

“Knew?”

“That they were dead. And I couldn’t even…I couldn’t…” She began to cry again. “She called me Mom, and I couldn’t even give them her address.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let me take you home.”

“I can’t go home!” she snapped. “I’m her mom!”

I opened my mouth to argue the point, then shut it again. I took her hands in mine and squeezed them. She didn’t squeeze back.

A short time later, a middle-aged man with a droopy mustache entered the gym. “That’s the district attorney,” Maureen said. “He was here before, when the coroner was here.” He mounted the stage, and the thirty or forty of us, scattered throughout the gym, approached.

He said he understood that waiting was pure hell—his heart went out to each and every one there because he had teenagers, too. But he wanted us to know that, for safety reasons, the building had been secured for the night and the exhausted investigation teams had been sent home to get a few hours’ sleep. “We’ve made the decision to resume at six thirty a.m.,” he said. “And at that point we’ll continue with the identification of—”

“The hell with that!” someone shouted. “Our kids are in there!”

“Sir, I know, but there are still live explosives inside the school. How many, and where, we just can’t say yet. A short while ago, a bomb detonated as the technicians were removing it from the building. Now, no one was hurt, but it’s been a very long, very difficult day for all of us. Nerves are frazzled, people are dog-tired. We just don’t want that fatigue to turn into more tragedy.”

“I need to get to my daughter,” a woman wailed. “Dead or alive, she needs to know she’s not alone in that place.”

“Ma’am, I understand what you’re saying, but the entire school is a crime scene,” the D.A. said. “Evidence has to be gathered and labeled, procedures have to be followed. Victims have to be identified, bodies removed and autopsied before they can be released to their families. Those of you who’ve followed the JonBenet Ramsey case can appreciate that when evidence is compromised—”

“We don’t care about evidence!” a man retorted. “We care about getting our kids the hell out of there! And don’t give me that ‘I’ve got kids, too’ bullshit, because your kids are safe at home tonight, and ours…” His reprimand broke down into sobs that echoed through the cavernous gym.

A woman announced fiercely that until she saw her son’s body, she refused to give up hope. We should prepare ourselves for miracles, she advised. No one responded. Someone asked when the names of the dead would be released.

“As soon as the coroner feels she’s gotten absolutely positive IDs for the twelve that are still in the library,” the D.A. said.

“Does that number include the two little bastards that did this?”

The D.A. nodded. “I’m guessing midday tomorrow we’ll have the final list. We’ll release it to you folks first, of course, and then to the press. And while I’m on the subject of the press, I want to advise you that talking to them at this point in time might not be in your own or the children’s best interests. Now you’re welcome to stay the night here, and if you do, I’m sure the volunteers will make you as comfortable as possible. But if I could, I’d like to suggest—since nothing more’s going to be released until late morning at the earliest—that you all go home, say some prayers if you’re so inclined, and try to get some sleep. Let’s meet back here at noon, and I think I can promise you by then that I’ll have the names for you. And I also want to promise you…” He faltered, struggled to regain his composure. “I want to promise…promise you that…we are going to treat your children like they are our own.”

Maureen slumped against me. “Take me home,” she said.

It was a brutal night. She wandered from room to room, cried, cursed the killers. She couldn’t tell me about it yet, she said, but she kept seeing it, over and over. Seeing what, I wondered, but I didn’t push her. In bed, she needed the light on. She kept bolting upright. “What was that?”

Somewhere after three in the morning, I convinced her to drink a glass of wine and swallow a couple of Tylenol PMs. They knocked her out, but her sleep was fitful. She kept clenching, whimpering. I finally dozed off myself, awakening from a leaden sleep at dawn. Maureen’s side of the bed was empty. I found her asleep on the floor, between the dogs. Her splayed hand, resting on Sophie’s side, rose and fell with each breath that dog drew.

She managed to get down a little breakfast—half a piece of toast, half a cup of coffee. I drew her a bath. She wanted me to stay in the bathroom with her, but when I soaped up a washcloth and tried to wash her back, she flinched. “Don’t touch me!” she snapped. Then she apologized.

“You want me to leave?”

“No, stay. I just don’t want you to touch me.”

And so I sat there, watching her wash herself. Watching her fall back into whatever it was she had lived through the day before. Watching the way her shivering shivered the bathwater.

The news was reporting that Dave Sanders had died. Shot in the science corridor while shepherding kids to safety, he’d staggered into one of the classrooms, collapsed face-first, and bled to death during the hours it took the SWAT team to take back the school and get to him. I needed to react, but she was watching me. She’d been through enough without my breaking down in front of her about Dave. “I’m taking the dogs out,” I said, nudging them from their naps with the toe of my shoe.

I walked around in the backyard, crying for Dave—thinking about the lunches we’d shared, the duties. He’d befriended me my first year at Columbine—one of the few who’d taken the time to welcome a newcomer. In return, I’d started going to some of the girls’ basketball games, running the clock for him during some of the home contests. He was a good coach—a teaching coach who used the kids’ mistakes as learning opportunities. I thought about that ugly orange tie he wore on game days to inspire his girls. It was typical that, when the shooting had started, he’d tried to get the kids to safety rather than running for cover himself…. Maureen was at the kitchen window, watching me, and so I bit my lip. Whistled for the dogs and roughhoused with them when they came running. I had no right to this playful romp, and no right to cry in front of Maureen.

When I came back in, she asked me if Dave Sanders had children.

“Daughters,” I said. “And grandkids, I think. Babies.”

She nodded. “I should have died,” she said. “Not him.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? I’m nobody’s parent. I’m expendable.”

“You know something?” I said. “Until yesterday, I don’t think I ever fully appreciated what crap my life would be without you. I was so scared, Mo. You’re not expendable. I need you.”

I opened my arms to her, but instead of coming to me, she sat down on the kitchen stool and stared at nothing, her face unreadable. “The summer I was eleven?” she said. “After my father moved out? I had this friend, Francine Peccini, and she invited me to go with her to the convent where her church was. The Church of the Divine Savior, it was called. Her mother was the church secretary, and Francine used to go over there mornings and help at the convent. Dust, do dishes, fold laundry. And one day she asked me to go with her. My mother never had much use for Catholics, but she was so distracted by the separation that she said okay, I could go…. And I liked the nuns. They were nice, and sort of mysterious. At lunchtime, we’d stop our work and eat with them. And after lunch, we’d say the rosary. At first I didn’t know the words to the Hail Mary, but then, they got repeated so much that I did…. And in the afternoon, we went back to Francine’s house, and she and I went up to her room and pretended we were nuns. Sisters of Mercy. We put bath towels on our heads for veils, and stapled them to these oaktag things we cut out. What are they called? Those stiff things around their faces?”

“Wimples,” I said. Why was she telling me all this?

She nodded. “Wimples. And on weekends? When I used to have to go over to my father’s? In his car on the way over, I used to say it to myself: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…’ And at night, when he’d come into my room and…and…I’d say it then, too, over and over, until he was finished and got up and left…. And yesterday? When I thought those boys were going to find me and kill me? I said the Hail Mary, over and over and over. The words came back to me from that summer when I was eleven. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’…Okay, here it is, I kept thinking: the hour of my death, because they’re going to find me and kill me. And that was when I got the idea to write you a note, Caelum. On the wall of the cabinet I was hiding in. I managed to inch the pen out of my pocket without hitting the door, and I wrote, in the dark, with my hand squeezed between my knees…and I kept thinking, they’re going to find me in here, and shoot me, and later on, someone will find my body and…and Caelum will suffer, grieve for me, and then he’ll move on. Find someone else, marry her. And Sophie and Chet will get old and die. And then Caelum will get old, too, and maybe he’ll die without ever knowing I had written him the note.”

Should I go to her? Hold her? Keep my distance? I didn’t know what she needed. “What did it say, Mo?” I asked.

She looked at me, as if she’d forgotten I was in the room. “What?”

“What did your note say? What did you write to me?”

“That I loved you more than I ever loved anyone else in my life, and I hoped you could forgive me for the mistakes I made…. And that, if Velvet survived and I didn’t, I hoped you could forgive her for the things she did, and look after her. Make sure she was okay.”

Before I could respond, the phone rang. “Don’t answer it!” Maureen said. But I told her I’d better—that it might be the investigators.

It was her father. “No, no, she’s pretty shaken up, but she’s all right.” I pointed to the receiver and lip-synched the words: your father.

Mo shook her head vehemently and hurried out of the room.

“Well, actually, she’s sleeping right now,” I said. “She had a bad night.”

LATER THAT MORNING, TWO DETECTIVES came to the house—Sergeant Cox, a small blonde in her early forties, and an earnest younger guy, Asian-American, Detective Chin. They didn’t want coffee, but Detective Chin took a glass of water. The four of us sat in the living room. Sergeant Cox did most of the questioning. She was gentle, coaxing. She seemed to have a calming effect on Mo. That was how I learned what had happened to her the day before.

Expecting Velvet to stop by the clinic later that morning, Maureen had gone to the guidance office and spoken to Ivy Shapiro, her counselor, about the possibility of Velvet’s coming back to school. Ivy had said she was all for it, but that Velvet would have to petition for readmittance. That meant filling out some paperwork and writing a one-paragraph statement about her intent. Columbine wanted to encourage returnees, Ivy explained, but also to send them the message that school was not a revolving door. She typed Velvet’s name into her computer. “Looks like she never handed in her textbooks from last year,” she told Mo. “She’ll have to return them before we can issue her a schedule. And it says here that she owes library fines, too. She’ll need to take care of those.”

It was hectic at the clinic, as it always is during fifth hour, Mo said: kids coming in to take their medications, pick up forms, drop off doctors’ notes. A freshman boy was icing the ankle he’d sprained in gym. A junior girl with chills and a temp sat wrapped in a blanket, waiting for her father to pick her up. Velvet arrived in the midst of the hubbub. Her clothes were subdued—jeans and a sweater. She had rinsed the blue dye out of her crew cut. Kids stared nonetheless. Snickered. Mo said she was afraid Velvet might lose her temper, or worse, lose her nerve and abort her plan to reenroll.

“I brought ’em,” Velvet said, when Mo relayed Ivy’s message about returning her textbooks. She overturned her backpack and several heavy books clunked out onto Mo’s desk. “Oh, yeah, I found this, too,” she mumbled. Eyes averted, she slid my signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird toward Maureen.

Mo said she took a breath, tried not to show too much of a reaction. “Great,” she said. “Mr. Quirk will be glad to get it back. He had to fly home to Connecticut because of a death in his family, but when I talk to him, I’ll tell him you found it.”

“Whatever,” Velvet said.

A girl laughed out loud. “Her?”

Mo said her colleague, Sandy Hailey, saw what was happening and tried to short-circuit the ridiculing without drawing attention to it. “Why don’t you take your break now, Mrs. Quirk?” she said. “I can hold down the fort here, and then later on, you can spell me.” Ordinarily, Maureen didn’t take a break during fifth hour, but she mouthed a silent thank-you to Sandy and grabbed her purse. She suggested to Velvet that they head upstairs to the library, where they could fill out the readmission materials and pay the book fines.

Louise Rogers was working the circulation desk. She typed Velvet’s name into the computer. “Wow,” she said. “Says here you owe us twenty-nine dollars and sixty cents. I believe that makes you this year’s grand champion.” Maureen said she smiled at the joke; Velvet scowled. “Tell you what,” Louise said. “Why don’t we just round this off to twenty dollars and call it even?” Maureen thanked her and took out her wallet. Velvet fished into her pocket and slammed a fistful of loose change onto the desk. “She comes off so hostile,” Mo told the investigators. She promised herself she’d address the subject with Velvet—maybe sit out in the sun with her for a little while after they’d finished the forms. She’d treat her to lunch. Get yogurts or sandwiches in the cafeteria and take them outside.

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