by Wally Lamb
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 textbo
oks. 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.
Mo asked Velvet where she wanted to sit, and she pointed to a remote table behind the rows of bookshelves on the far side of the room. Maureen told Velvet she needed to call me to see how things were going, but that she’d be right back. “Why don’t you get started on your statement?” she said.
“What should I put?” Velvet wanted to know. Maureen told her to just be honest. “Okay then, I’ll say, ‘This school still blows dead moose cocks, but Springer and Sally Jessy are all reruns.’” Mo looked at her, not smiling. “Jesus Christ, Mom. I was only kidding.”
Maureen asked Louise if she could use the library phone to make a credit card call. “Sure thing,” Louise said. “You want to use the one in the break room? Less noise, more privacy.”
“Great,” Mo said. She looked back to see if Velvet had gotten to work, but her view was blocked by the bookshelves.
Unused to credit card calling, Mo kept screwing up and having to start over. And when the phone finally did ring, an unfamiliar voice picked up. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I must have dialed the wrong number.” She hung up and called the operator so she wouldn’t have to pay for her mistake.
It was a wall phone, Mo told the investigators. She was standing beside it, shoulders against the cinderblock wall, so she both heard and felt the vibration of the first blast. What was that? she wondered. Construction? The operator came on. “What number were you trying to call, ma’am?” she asked.
There was a second blast. Maureen faltered. Then, refocusing, she recalled Lolly’s phone number and recited it. The science labs were just down the hall; maybe there’d been a chemical explosion. If so, someone might be hurt. Another, louder explosion shook the floor.
Louise and an elderly library aide threw open the break room door and rushed past her toward the television studio. “Someone’s got a gun!” Louise screamed. “He’s shooting out in the hallway! Hide!”
No, it’s a chemical explosion, Maureen thought. She’d better get down there, see if anyone needed medical assistance. “Would you like me to dial that number for you, ma’am?” the operator asked. Mo hung up.
She opened the door to the library. There was an acrid smell, smoke pouring in from the hallway. The fire alarm began to blare. Strobe lights started winking on and off. One of the art teachers—the pretty blond one, Mo couldn’t remember her name—was at the circulation desk, seven or eight feet away. She was breathless, speaking rapid-fire into the phone. “Yes, I am a teacher at Columbine High School! There is a student here with a gun! He has shot out a window. And the school is in a panic, and I’m in the library. I’ve got students down. UNDER THE TABLES, KIDS! HEADS UNDER THE TABLES!”
At the break room doorway, Maureen stood, stunned. A boy was crouched behind the photocopier, hiding in plain sight. Another boy sat at a computer station, dazed. Most did what they were told, sliding from their chairs to the floor, huddling together beneath the tables. Like faces in a dream, Maureen recognized, among the strewn backpacks and spilled note cards, kids she knew: Josh, Valeen, Kristin, Kyle. She had to get to Velvet—grab her and pull her to safety. But, as if in a dream, she couldn’t make her feet move. Velvet was all the way across the room, and Mo was too afraid. Make this be a horrible dream, she thought. Make this not be happening.
The art teacher, still on the phone, dropped out of sight behind the desk. “Okay, I’m in the library,” Maureen heard her say. “He’s upstairs. He’s right out here…. He’s outside this hall. Okay…. Oh, God. Oh, God. Kids, just stay down!” In the hallway, there were several more blasts. “Woo-hoo!” someone shouted. “I’m on the floor…. In the library, and I have every student in the library on the floor and…. YOU GUYS STAY ON THE FLOOR!”
Maureen said she saw them enter, carrying duffel bags, the tall one in a long black coat, the shorter one in a white T-shirt and cargo pants tucked inside his boots. He was gripping a shotgun. He looked at her, grinning. Eric, his name was. Luvox, 75 milligrams at lunchtime. “Get up!” he shouted. “All the jocks stand up! We’re going to kill every single one of you!”
“Anyone with a white hat, stand up!” the other one shouted. “Are you guys scared? Well, don’t be, because you’re all going to die anyway!”
Maureen backed into the break room, pulling the door closed behind her. She was afraid to shut it tight—afraid the click of the lock might draw their attention. Draw their gunfire.
She heard screaming, pleas, the crack of gunfire, shattering glass. “How about you, big boy? You want to get shot today?…Hey, you? Peekaboo!”
Bam! A flash. Bam! Another flash.
Trembling violently, she was barely able to control her hands, she said, but she managed somehow to open the door of an under-the-counter cabinet and dump its contents to the floor. Bulletin board decorations, she remembered now; cardboard Pilgrims and turkeys, shamrocks, Valentine’s cupids. She removed the cabinet’s adjustable shelf. She meant to place it quietly on the counter, but one end dropped with a bang. Oh, God! she thought. Oh, God! Let them not have heard!
On her hands and knees, she crawled into the open space. Her skull was pressed against the ceiling of the tight enclosure, her knees jammed against the wall. With her fingernails, she clawed at the door from inside. It wouldn’t close all the way, and she was terrified that half-inch opening would lead them to her.
Over the alarm, she could hear their taunts, the ridiculing of their victims before the shotgun blasts. It was as if each of the shots passed through her, she said. She knew they’d find her. She was sure she was going to die—that this cabinet would be her coffin.
The air carried the stink of gunpowder and gasoline. Crying would cleanse her burning eyes, but she was too afraid to give in to tears—afraid it might attract their attention. Then the break room door banged open, and she thought, This is it. There was a spray of gunfire, the sound of things shattering and splintering on the other side of the room, and then on her side, above her. “Let’s go down to the commons!” one of them called, and the other, the one closest to her, said he had one more thing to do. Kill me, she thought: he’s going to kill me, and then they’ll leave. There was a loud crash that sounded like furniture being smashed. After that, for a long time, she heard only the fi
re alarm’s drone.
Had they killed all of the students? Should she take a chance—crawl out of the cabinet and see? Go to Velvet? Try to save herself? But if she ran for it, which way would she go when she didn’t know where they were? “Let’s go down to the commons”: it could be a trick to lure her out of hiding.
Her back ached. The blood pounded in her head. Her legs and feet were numb. Would they work if she climbed out and tried to run? She felt the smooth face of her wristwatch but couldn’t read it in the dark. She couldn’t tell how much time had passed.
She heard helicopters above. Life Flight for the injured? A news crew? Later, she heard voices in the outer room. Had the police gotten there? Had the boys come back? She heard someone count, “One, two, three!” Then gunfire, a single shot. Maybe two. She waited. Recited the Hail Mary, over and over, counting the decades on her fingers. She wrote me her note.
“What did the note to your husband say, Mrs. Quirk?” Sergeant Cox asked softly. “What was the gist of it?”
Mo’s answer was barely audible, and she did not look at me when she said it. “The gist of it? Good-bye.”
Much later, she said, she heard more glass smashing out in the library.
“That might have been when Pat Ireland knocked out the window and crawled out onto the ledge,” I suggested.
“That would have been about two thirty,” Officer Chin said.
I nodded. “Four thirty in Connecticut, where I was,” I said. “That’s when I first knew something was wrong. I turned on CNN and they were showing it live: Pat dangling out there on the ledge, then falling into the arms of the rescue workers.”
“Then what, Mrs. Quirk?” Sergeant Cox said. “After you heard the breaking glass?”
