The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  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 “hypervigilance, flashbacks, survivor guilt, psychic numbness, palpitations, hypersensitivity 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 no-questions-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 pre-disposed 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?”

  “PTSD,” 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 crosshatchings 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?”<
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  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 unaccessed 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?

  “I’m not trying to put you on the spot,” Dr. Cake said. She was back at the boy whose brother had gone into emotional retreat. Back to trying to get the poor kid to speak their names. “I just want to make the point that it’s important for us to—”

  “Dylan Klebold!” the kid blurted. “Eric Harris!” He began to cry.

  “Cock-sucking motherfuckers!” someone else shouted. A collective flinch traveled around the room. There was nervous laughter, grumbling, whimpering. My eyes lit on a big, red-faced kid in the middle circle. Steve something, a halfback on the football team. The kids seated around him in the second circle—teammates in matching Rebels jerseys—tried to pull him back down in his seat, but he shook them off, bolting for the exit. The slam of the door made Maureen gasp and grab my arm. Like gunfire, I realized. Oh God, Mo.

  From another part of the room, a gray-haired couple stood and made for the door, too. “I want to apologize for my son,” the man said. “They killed his buddy. His best friend since second grade. They were going to go camping together this coming weekend. And that’s not his usual vocabulary, either.”

  After they left, Pastor Pete turned to his teammates. “What’s his name?”

  “Steve,” one of them said.

  “Well, when you see him, you tell Steve not to be embarrassed about what just happened. Tell him his outburst was a healthy reaction. Okay? One of you want to tell me why?”

  We all waited, but Steve’s friends volunteered nothing more. Ivy Shapiro stood up. “Because he got it out,” she said.

  “Got what out?” Pete asked.

  “His anger.”

  “Right. And not only did he get it out, but he directed it at the appropriate parties. Not his parents, or his teachers, or himself. He directed it at the two people who murdered his best friend. How many of you feel angry at Harris and Klebold?”

  The majority of people, kids and adults, raised their hands. I did. Maureen did. Lindsay’s hands stayed in her lap.

  “Then you need to express that anger. Get it out on the table, rather than letting it fester. Direct it where it belongs.”

  One of the football kids stood. “I think it sucks that they killed themselves,” he said. “They should have gone to trial, gotten convicted, and fried in the chair.”

  “Faced a firing squad,” someone muttered.

  “Hung from a fuckin’ tree.”

  A girl in the first circle stood and gathered her things. “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t take this.” She followed Steve out the door.

  A squat, muscular boy—a wrestling team standout whose name I’ve forgotten—rose from his chair. “Know what I would have done to them?” he said. “I was thinking about this last night. I would have skipped all that trial stuff and gotten two pieces of rope, okay? Tied one end to their ankles and the other end to the bumper of my truck. Then I would’ve gotten in and put the pedal to the metal, okay? Cranked that sucker to ninety, a hundred miles an hour and enjoyed the screaming. Worn their backs down to the spinal cord, then ripped ’em out and stuffed them down their throats. That’s what I would have done.”

  His comment drew revulsion and applause. He looked around the room, pleased with himself. Pastor Pete looked glum but said nothing. Dr. Cake looked confused. She hurried through the rest of her presentation, laser-pointing to PTSD Web sites we could visit, articles and books we could read, clinic numbers we could call.

  Passing Pete on the way out, I said, “Well, you said they could vent. They vented.”

  He nodded sadly. Apologized for the way things had gone, and for Cake’s insensitivity. He said the guy who was supposed to have come was terrific. “How’s your wife doing?” he asked. His eyes followed mine to Maureen, walking five or ten steps ahead with Lindsay Peek. I looked back at him and shrugged.

  We gave Lindsay a ride home. The driveway was empty, the house was dark. Her mother got out of work at six, she said. Reluctant to leave her alone, Maureen suggested the three of us go someplace and get an ice cream. Lindsay said she’d be okay. Oprah was on. She’d go in and watch Oprah.

  “Lindsay?” I said. “The girl Mrs. Quirk was with when she came into the library? Velvet? Did you see what happened to her in there?”

  She nodded. “I could see her from where I was. Most of us were under the tables with other people, but there was no one else under hers. Just her.”

  “Did they say anything to her?” I asked.

  “The tall one did. He called her a name. I don’t want to repeat it. It wasn’t very nice…. He asked her if she believed in God. They were both asking kids that. Then they’d laugh at their answers and shoot them.”

  Maureen put her fist to her mouth. She looked away from Lindsay.

  “What did Velvet say when he asked her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear that good, because of the alarm, and kids crying and everything. And then, I think it was right after that, the short one jumped up onto a bookcase.”<
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  “Eric?”

  She nodded. “He was screaming and swearing. Shaking books off the shelves. And then they left…. That’s when kids started getting out from under the tables and going down that little hallway and out the side door. I was scared to get up at first. Scared to look at everything. But then these kids near me got up and I just followed them.”

  “Did you see her later on? Outside?”

  “That girl?” She shook her head. “No, wait. I did. She was walking toward the park.”

  “Was she with anyone else?” Maureen asked.

  Lindsay shook her head. “By herself. She was crying.”

  On the way home, the car radio said Janet Reno’s tour of the school had been canceled when another live bomb was discovered among the debris and floating book bags in the cafeteria. The Education Commissioner’s prerecorded voice announced that Columbine High would remain closed indefinitely. We would complete the last eighteen days of the school year at nearby Chatfield High. Double sessions: the Chatfield kids in the morning, our kids in the afternoon, from one to five. “Well,” I said. “I guess we can limp through anything for eighteen days.”

  Maureen said the Chatfield nurses would probably work both sessions, or maybe split the schedule with Sandy Hailey, Columbine’s full-time nurse. “They won’t need me,” she said.

  “Mo, they’re not going to cut your position with eighteen days left. You’ll still be half-time. Go in for a couple of hours.”

  She shook her head. “No, they won’t want both Sandy and me.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Do you want to go back to work?”

  She stared ahead.

  The dogs bolted past us to the outside. The message machine was blinking. We both stood there, staring at it. I pressed the button.

  “Maureen? Sweetheart? It’s your father. We’ve been thinking about you. Wondering how you’re doing after your ordeal. Worrying about you. Evelyn and I are planning to drive down to visit you in a few days. On Sunday, unless you call and tell us otherwise. Until then, if there’s anything you need—” The message seemed to have ended, but there were four or five seconds of silence, no beep. Then, belatedly, “I love you, Maureen. Very, very much.”