The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  “Well, look who’s here!” Arthur said, as if it was a big surprise that I’d shown up at my own house. He stood, walked toward me, pumped my hand like we were pals. “Long time no see.”

  Evelyn approached, too. Took my hands in hers and offered her cheek for kissing. “Maureen says you were at one of the children’s funerals.” She was whispering, like it was a secret. “How was it?”

  “Brutal,” I said. “They’ve all been brutal. What interview?”

  “Oh. Well, Todd Purvis, the new coanchor on Good Morning, Denver, is a client of mine. I was telling him about Maureen’s terrible ordeal, and he wanted me to ask her if she’d consider—”

  “No,” I said.

  She smiled patiently. “Well, Caelum, if you’d let me finish.”

  I turned to Mo. “You’re not interested in this, are you?” She looked down at the rug and shook her head.

  But we didn’t call Evelyn the Barracuda for nothing. “I just want to assure you both, before Maureen makes her decision, that Todd is a serious journalist. I never would have broached the subject otherwise. He’s worked at CNN, CBS News. He started out as a researcher for MacNeil/Lehrer while he was still a student at Columbia.”

  “His résumé’s not the point,” I said. “She’s not interested.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be this week. Would it, darling?” Arthur asked.

  “No, of course not. It could be next week, the week after. Whenever Maureen felt she was ready.” She took a seat beside Mo. Took her hand. “And Todd said they could come out and tape it here, rather than at the studio, if that was more comfortable for you. He’s really a wonderful man, Maureen. Very smart, very sensitive.”

  “And an exclusive like this would put him on the map in a new market, right?” I said. “So that’d be a feather in your cap.”

  We sat there, looking at each other. “Ouch,” she said.

  Mo turned to her father. “What do you think, Daddy?”

  Shit! Don’t weaken, Mo. Screw these jackals.

  Arthur smiled, stood up. “Well, sweetheart, I think you should listen to what this Purvis fellow has to say, and then do whatever you decide is best. And I also think I’d like a drink. Caelum, how are you fixed for scotch?” And with that, he walked past me and into the kitchen.

  I poured us each a drink from my special-occasion bottle of Glenlivet. Mumbled some thanks for that fancy basket they’d sent. “So,” he said. “Now that we’re out of earshot, how is she?”

  “Stricken,” I said.

  “Well, that’s to be expected. It only happened a week ago.”

  “Nine days ago,” I said.

  He nodded. “Hell of a thing that you were back East, burying your relative. Uncle, was it?”

  “Aunt.”

  “And then you have to rush back here to all this.”

  “Not knowing if she was alive or dead,” I said. “That was the hard part.” I took a sip of scotch. “In a way, she’s neither.”

  He cocked his head. We looked each other in the eye.

  “It’s like, what she went through…and hey, I can’t even fathom all she went through. I don’t even want to go there, you know? But it’s like…like that day stranded her on this…this small, lonely island.” What was I doing? Why was I trusting him? “And I can see her, you know? I can call to her. But I can’t reach her. Can’t rescue her because…because the water between us is thick with sharks. Thick with the blood of those kids.”

  For the next few seconds, we held each other’s gaze, and I thought, He gets it—Arthur, of all people. But when he opened his mouth, it was to suggest I was being, maybe, a little melodramatic. “I know my daughter, and she has an inner strength that will serve her,” he assured me. “Just as it has during other difficult times in her life.”

  “Such as?” I said. Go ahead, I thought. Admit what you did.

  “Well, when she and her sailor split up. And of course, they’d accrued all that debt on top of it. That complicated matters. But you know how difficult divorce is, right? Weren’t you divorced?”

  “Twice,” I said.

  He nodded. We sipped our scotches. On the other side of the door, the dogs were whimpering and scratching to be let back in.

  “She lost her way in high school for a while,” he said. “Made some bad choices, did some things she shouldn’t have. But she came to her senses. Entered that nursing program at the university and straightened herself out. When she graduated, she got one of the nursing school’s biggest awards.”

  “What about when you and her mother split up?” I said. “That was another tough time for her, wasn’t it?”

  “Patricia and I saved our acrimony for the lawyers’ meetings,” he said. “We spared Maureen that.”

  “That’s not how she remembers it,” I said. “The separation. Those weekends at your place. She was what? Eleven? Sixth grade?”

  “Seventh,” he said.

  “No, sixth. According to her. She’s told me about those weekends.”

  He looked away, then looked back. Watched me over the rim of his glass as he sipped his drink. “Well, that’s ancient history,” he said. “But my point is, Maureen’s a strong person. A resilient person. She’ll land on her feet.” He touched the bottle. “May I?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He poured himself two or three fingers more—with a bit of a tremor in his hand, I noticed. I took some small, cheap satisfaction in that. That’s right, you son of a bitch. I know your dirty little secret, and it’s not necessarily safe with me. I smiled. He smiled, sipped. It seemed like a good time to negotiate.

  “Tell your wife to back off about that interview,” I said. “Because there’s no way in hell I’m going to let her get exploited like that.”

  “You think that’s the motivation, do you?”

  “I think profit’s the motivation, and Maureen’s the means to an end.”

  He was still smiling. “That’s pretty harsh, isn’t it? I didn’t realize you were such a cynic.” He reached inside his sports coat and pulled out a brochure. Handed it to me. I was staring at Mickey and Minnie Mouse in sailing garb.

  “Disney cruise?” I said.

  “It was Cheryl’s idea, actually. You’ve met our daughter Cheryl, haven’t you?” I shook my head. “Evelyn and I wanted to treat you and Maureen to a getaway of some kind—an escape from all this ugliness. But we were thinking more along the lines of plane tickets to London or Paris. Then Cheryl suggested this: after the terrible ordeal Maureen’s been through, a voyage back to innocence. She and Barry took their little one on this cruise, and they had a ball. Stage shows, snorkeling. And I want you to know, we’re covering everything, including your flights to and from port. Time-wise, it’s open-ended. You just call our travel agent when you’re ready. Misty, her name is. Her card’s stapled to the inside of the pocket. She’ll book everything, whenever you give her the word. And I’ve told her to get you an outside cabin. They cost a little more, but they have portholes. Reminds you you’re on a ship, not at a hotel.”

  “Arthur, how can you not understand?”

  “Understand what?”

  “What happened to your daughter is a lot worse than a divorce. Or a big MasterCard bill. It’s not something Mickey Mouse can fix.” And how the fuck can you be mourning her innocence, after what you did? I was a couple more sips of scotch away from saying it, instead of just thinking it. And once I said it—once it was out on the table—I might clock the son of a bitch. Pick up that scotch bottle and use it on him. I could feel my engines revving.

  So instead, I went to the door and opened it. The dogs bounded in, rushed past us and into the living room. Evelyn let out a satisfying little shriek. Five minutes later, they were in their Mercedes and on their way.

  I taped Amber’s pictures to the door of our refrigerator. Made us cheese omelets for supper.

  “Thanks, Cae,” Mo said.

  “Yeah, I’m a whiz with eggs, aren’t I?”

  “I mean, for no
t letting her push me into doing that interview.”

  “No problem,” I said. I showed her the Disney cruise brochure.

  She read through it, shaking her head. “They’d probably have to straitjacket me by the second day. Put me in a padded cabin.”

  “Yeah, and all the psych aides would be Disney characters.” I got up to clear the table. Stopped to look at her. “Hey,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You smiled.”

  Later, undressing for bed, I noticed glitter on the tops of my shoes. Bent down to brush it off, then stopped. Left it there. When I closed my eyes, I saw Velvet Hoon—that glittery eye shadow she’d wear sometimes, the sparkles in her blue crew cut. Velvet was long gone from Littleton by now, I figured. Maybe she was the smart one.

  chapter twelve

  THE YEAR MAUREEN AND I started at Columbine was also the year that an extensive remodeling of the school was completed. The sunlit commons area was new, and directly above it, the library and media center. To accommodate the expansion, construction workers had bulldozed the existing student parking lot, lowering it by eight feet. But rather than truck away the excavated earth, they’d mounded it behind the school, creating what the kids soon dubbed “Rebel Hill.” That first year, Andy Kirby and I made the mound part of the training course for our cross-country kids. It was steep enough to sled down in winter, and private enough on its far side for kids to toke up or make out. From the crest, you could see all the way to Boulder. In the aftermath of the killings, mourners trudged to the top of Rebel Hill to visit the crosses.

  Maureen saw three doctors that first month. Dr. Strickland, a pretty, young M.D. at the open-on-weekends clinic, was sympathetic when Mo discussed her anxiety about going back to work. But the waiting room was full, and the clinic was “down a doc,” as Dr. Strickland put it.

  “How are you sleeping?” she asked.

  Mo told her she couldn’t get more than two or three hours at a time.

  “Do you have to finish the school year? Is it a contractual thing?”

  Mo gave me the look: you answer her. “We both feel it’s better if she tries to confront her fears instead of giving in to them,” I said. The doctor’s eyes jumped back and forth between us.

  There was a soft knock, a nurse in the doorway. “I’ve got a broken nose in room D,” she said. “Hemorrhaging pretty badly.”

  Dr. Strickland said she’d be right there. She scrawled two prescriptions for Maureen: Restoril for sleep—one at bedtime, a second if she woke up in the middle of the night—and Xanax to “take the edge off” during the day. Ten tablets of each. “To tide you over until you see your regular doctor,” she said.

  It was Brian Anderson, a junior at Columbine, who’d contacted Greg Zanis about the crosses. Zanis, a carpenter from Illinois, had made it his mission to build and plant crucifixes to commemorate the lives of murder victims. Whether by fate or accident or the hand of God, Brian Anderson had been spared twice on the morning of the murders—first at the west entryway when Eric Harris fired at him and Patti Nielson, the teacher on hall duty, and minutes later in the library, where Brian and Patti, both wounded by shrapnel, had run for safety. Zanis promised Brian he’d come. A few days later, he and his son drove the sixteen hours to Littleton. Brian was waiting for them on Rebel Hill. Without fanfare or media attention, they erected the crosses—fifteen of them, not thirteen. Then Zanis and his boy got back in their truck and headed home.

  Maureen’s Xanax ran out on day three of her five-day supply, but luckily, Dr. Quinones had a cancellation. “At your checkup last February, you weighed a hundred and ten,” he noted. “That’s an ideal weight for you, Maureen. I’m concerned that you’re down to ninety-six.”

  “She won’t eat,” I said.

  “I can’t eat, okay?” Mo snapped. “I’m nauseous all the time. And it doesn’t help that you’re always nagging me about eating.”

  Dr. Quinones asked her if she’d gotten her period that month.

  “I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you mean,” she scoffed.

  He shuffled through the papers in Mo’s folder. “Oh, yes, yes. Tubal ligation. I’d forgotten. So what do you feel is making you nauseous?”

  “I don’t know. Living?”

  Quinones’s gaze turned from Mo to me, then back again. He sat down beside her, lowered his voice. “Are you having thoughts about suicide?”

  She shook her head.

  “Feeling depressed?”

  “Afraid,” she said. “I’m always afraid.”

  I told Quinones she was nervous about returning to school. “I keep trying to tell her it’ll be good for her, you know? See the kids. Focus on the day-to-day stuff.”

  “Sixteen days left to go, is it?” the doctor asked. The Quinoneses had twins at Columbine—sophomores, a boy and a girl. They were both in my honors class.

  “Eighteen,” I said. “But Chatfield’s going to be a whole different environment. It’s not like she’s going to have to walk back into—”

  “Yesterday?” she blurted. “We were just driving past Chatfield, and I had a flashback.”

  “A short one, though,” I said. “Less than a minute, and she was back.”

  “Right, Caelum, and for the rest of the day, I was scared to death that I was going to get another one.” She turned to the doctor. “He doesn’t realize how they wipe me out.”

  “Yes I do, Mo. Sure I do.”

  “We had to go to the superintendent’s office?” she said. “To get our pictures taken for the security badges they’re making us wear. And first of all, I was a nervous wreck because it was so crowded. Then everyone kept coming up to me, asking about it. And I got so flustered. I couldn’t remember anyone’s name—people I’ve worked with for years now—and I kept saying, ‘I’m sorry. I just can’t talk about it.’ And they kept talking anyway. And I wanted to scream, ‘Shut up! Just shut up!’”

  “I tried to run interference for her,” I said. “But, you know. Word’s gotten out about where she was. People mean well, but—”

  “And then in line? For the ID pictures? That flash kept going off, and it was making me nervous. I can’t explain it, but I was afraid to have my picture taken—have that thing flash in my face. And I had to keep leaving the line and rushing to the rest room because I thought I was going to vomit.”

  “Did you?” Quinones asked.

  “No. I got a splitting headache, though. It lasted for the rest of the day.”

  “But, Doc,” I said. “Don’t you think if she confronts it—gets through those first couple of days at Chatfield—she’ll be better off in the long run? Not have it hanging over her all summer?”

  Instead of answering me, Quinones asked if I wouldn’t mind stepping out to the waiting room so that he could chat one-to-one with Maureen. It took me back a little. What did he have to tell her that he couldn’t say in front of me? “What do you think, Mo?” I said. “Would you prefer I stay?”

  She shook her head.

  So I left. Sat out with the stale Newsweeks and Entertainment Weeklys for a good fifteen minutes, and when finally I was called in from exile, Quinones told me that Maureen had decided to take a leave of absence for the remainder of the school year. He endorsed that decision, he said, and would write the school board a letter that it was medically advisable. He said Maureen also needed me to know that, although she certainly appreciated all I was doing to help her recover, she sometimes found my efforts and my advice overwhelming.

  When I looked over at her, she looked down. Spoke to her fidgeting hands. “You hover,” she said.

  “Hover?”

  “You don’t need to follow me around from room to room, okay? Ask me twenty times an hour if there’s anything you can get for me. Because there’s nothing you could go and get me that’s going to make it go away.”

  “I know that, Mo. All I’m trying to do is—”

  “And I don’t need you to keep telling me that going back to work will be good for me.” Here, she
finally did look at me. “Because you don’t know what’s good for me any more than I do, Caelum. So stop acting like you’ve read the instructional manual on what I need.” I suddenly noticed the box of tissues on her lap. She must have been crying before, but now she was dry-eyed and pissed off. Her chest was heaving like she was short of breath.

  Apropos of nothing, I told the doctor I’d been in Connecticut during the shootings. It came out like a confession. Bless me, Doctor, for I have sinned.

  He said something about crises always coming at inconvenient times.

  “And in my own defense?” I said. “Yesterday? When we were grocery shopping? We couldn’t find the bread crumbs, okay? Thought maybe we’d already passed them. So I backtracked. Left her alone for maybe three or four minutes at the most. And when I got back to her, she was freaking out.”

  “Freaking out how?” Quinones asked.

  “Crying, muttering. This kid stocking shelves is just standing there, staring at her. So I get her calmed down, right? And when I do, she starts reaming me out for leaving her alone. And now I hear she doesn’t want me to hover?” When I looked over at her, I realized, suddenly, how hollow-cheeked she’d gotten. How gray she looked. “She’s right, though,” I said. “There is no step-by-step to follow with something like this. Because what happened to her was so…” Defeat overtook my defensiveness. I was suddenly so tired. “Maureen,” I said. “What you went through overwhelms me. And I’m so, so sorry it happened to you. And that I wasn’t there to…and all I want…all I’m trying to do—and hey, I guess I’m doing a lousy job of it—but Mo, I’m just trying to be part of the solution, you know? Not part of the problem.”

  She nodded. Didn’t look at me. Didn’t smile.

  Quinones reached over and cupped my shoulder. “You are part of the solution, Caelum. An important part. She just needs a little more breathing room. And a little more time to heal before she tries going back to work.”

  He handed her a slip of paper on which he’d written the name and number of a psychiatrist he recommended, Dr. Sandra Cid. “She and I were in med school together,” he said. “I think she can help you. Will you call her?”