by Wally Lamb
He hung up before I could get to my questions about Columbine. And so, in the waning minutes of the twentieth century, I finished my drink and poured another. Shut down the computer, rested my cheek against the keyboard, and started sobbing like a baby. I cried so loudly that it woke her up. She came down the stairs. Sat down next to me and touched my cheek. Stroked it, over and over.
“Everything’s all right,” she lied.
The overhead light shone on her bald patches. The pajamas she wore night and day were stained with food, missing a button. “No, it’s not,” I said.
“I’m going to get better, Caelum,” she said. “I am. I promise.” And by the time I stopped crying, it was January. A new year, a new century. Outside, the snow was filling up our fallow fields.
I DON’T KNOW. MAYBE WE’RE all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we’re scared shitless of explosive change. But we’re fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium—the devils let loose from their cages. “There but for the grace of God,” the faithful say. “It’s not for us to know His plan.”
Which, I’ve concluded, is bullshit. Big G, little g: doesn’t matter. There is no mysterious Master Planner, no one up there who can see the big picture—the order in the disorder. Religion’s just a well-oiled, profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all. That’s what I’ve come to believe. Because if some merciful Lord and Master Puppeteer were up there pulling the strings, then why did my wife have to crouch in the dark inside a cabinet that day, listen to all that murder, and survive, only to become her frail, bitter, self-absorbed unself? O come all ye faithful and tell me why, in the heat of the moment back in 1980, your all-seeing, all-knowing, Intelligent Designer would not have spared us those two collisions of sperm and egg, those divisions and multiplications of cells that became Eric and Dylan. Tell me why, if a benign god’s at the control panel, those two kids had to exist, hook up, and stoke each other’s mind-poisoned rage.
Not available for downloading are Eric and Dylan’s “basement tapes”—the smug, ridiculing rants they recorded late at night, mostly in the Harrises’ basement, and left behind for the cops to find and confiscate. Too disturbing for public consumption, a judge ruled. Too much danger of copycat crimes. I’ve seen them, though—the basement tapes. Some of them. It happened more or less by accident.
“Good news!” Cyndi Pixley told me over the phone that December day. “The Paisleys sold their house, so we can go ahead and schedule the closing on your place. How soon do you think you could make it back?”
I hired one of Alphonse’s counter girls to stay at the farmhouse with Maureen and flew back to Littleton. And after the Paisleys and I had signed all the paperwork and shaken hands, Cyndi Pixley, whose husband was a cop, casually mentioned that the sheriff’s office was showing the basement tapes to the media that afternoon. “Where?” I said.
“The Dakota building, I think Ron said.”
“When?”
“One o’clock?”
I looked at my watch. It was twelve forty-three. I ran.
At the door to the screening room, a woman cop stopped me and asked to see my press credentials. “I don’t have any,” I said.
“Then I’m afraid I can’t let you in, sir.”
“Oh, I’m going in,” I said. “I was one of their teachers at Columbine.”
“Well, sir, this viewing is only for—”
“My wife was one of their victims,” I said.
“Sir, there were thirteen victims: twelve students and a male teacher.”
I nodded. “Dave and I used to eat lunch together in the faculty room. My wife is one of their collateral victims.”
“But like I’ve told you, this screening is strictly for—”
“She can’t sleep. Can’t concentrate. Can’t work.”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but I have my orders.”
“The investigation you guys did? Where you had everyone go back in the library and get into their same positions? Man, that request did her in. The thought of having to see the bloodstains, the dead kids’ names on cards.”
“She was in the vicinity of the library then?”
I nodded.
“Sir, these tapes are very disturbing.”
“She’s lost,” I said. “I’m lost.”
We stared at each other for the next several seconds, neither of us looking away. Then she took a step back and swung the door open wide. There was one seat left, at the end of the second to last row, against the wall. “Morgan McKinley, Chicago Sun-Times,” the guy next to me said. I looked at the hand he was extending, then shook it. “Yup,” I said. “Good. Great.”
“Where you here from?” he asked. To my relief, the officer up front stopped talking, and the room went dark before I could answer him.
The tapes resurrect them. In the first one, they talk about what they’ll do “next month,” so it’s March. Lolly’s alive, the blood still flowing to her brain. Maureen’s mentally healthy—in charge of herself and the kids in her care. It’s late at night, long after Eric’s parents have gone to sleep upstairs. Looking into the lens of a camera they’ve borrowed from school, they address the cops, their parents, the classmates they hate, the rest of us. Their shotguns are in their laps. They swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and reveal their plans and preparations, their philosophies. They’re “evolved,” they tell us. “Above human.” Theirs is a two-man war against everyone. They sound so fucked-up full of themselves, so pathetically juvenile, that it’s hard to believe they’ll cause this much pain. “We need to kick-start the revolution here,” Eric says. “We need to get a chain reaction going.” He stands and opens his trench coat, the better to display his gear. “What you will find on my body in April,” he says.
“You’re fucking going to pay for this shit,” Dylan warns us. “We don’t give a shit because we’re going to die doing it.”
They knew we’d be watching these tapes after they’d killed the others, then themselves. Their suicides had been a part of the plan. They laugh, imagining themselves as “ghosts” who will trigger flashbacks in the survivors’ brains. Make them go insane.
That was when it hit me, with the full-force pain of a kick to the groin. They had foreseen Maureen’s struggle. Orchestrated it. I’d gone looking for the monster and found it in the darkened room of a municipal building, on a television monitor hooked to a videocassette player inside which tape spooled from left to right. My heart pumped wildly, and the fight-or-flight adrenaline surge I’d felt that morning out at Paul Hay’s house was with me again. But there was no pipe wrench in my hand this time, and it was futile to fight videotaped ghosts. I did the only other thing I could do. I fled. Jumped from my chair, pushed past the people standing in back, banged open the door, and ran, stumbling, down the well-lit hallway. And when a men’s room door presented itself, I shoved it open, whacked open a stall door, and emptied my gut into a toilet.
On the direct flight back to Connecticut, the seat next to me was empty. I decided I wouldn’t tell her—could never tell her—that I’d seen those tapes.
ON THAT MILLENNIAL NIGHT WHEN Maureen came downstairs to stroke my face and quiet my sobs, she had promised me she would get better. And she had, too. Little by little, small gain by small gain. At least it seemed so.
She started getting dressed in the morning. Started walking the dogs after breakfast. And because the exercise energized her, she began eating more. “Caelum, come here,” she said one morning, and I followed her voice into the bathroom. She was standing on the scale, smiling shyly. “Ninety-seven? That’s great, Mo!” I put my arms around her and pulled her close.
“Ow, ow,” she said. “You’re hurting
my back.”
She began taking vitamins, taking the car for short runs to the grocery store. She went to the little IGA on Orchard Street, not the Super Big Y, where, she said, the lights were too bright, the array too overwhelming. When her bald patches grew in, the stylist talked her into having the rest of her hair cut off to match that inch or so of new growth. “Looks cute,” I told her. And it did, too, in a boyish, Peter Pan kind of way. Despite her weight gain, she still wasn’t menstruating, far as I knew. Sex? We didn’t go there. I was pretty sure she didn’t want to be touched, and my desire to touch her had waned, anyway. I got that need taken care of in another lost corridor of the Internet.
It took us a year, year and a half, to work our way down the list of psych referrals Dr. Cid had given us before we left Colorado. Dr. Burrage just plain didn’t get it, she said. Dr. Darrow’s flat affect unnerved her. The drive down I–95 to Dr. Kersh’s office was too nerve-racking. “But you’re not driving,” I said. “I’m driving.”
“Zigzagging in and out of lanes, passing every single truck you see. By the time I get to his office, I’m a nervous wreck, and then I’ve got to sit there for fifty minutes and look at that lazy eye of his. Therapy’s supposed to make you feel better, not worse.”
Dr. Bain gave her homework: a ten-page form that she kept sighing and crying over as she filled it out. I saw the form poking out of her purse the morning of her appointment. She was upstairs; the shower was running. I guess I shouldn’t have, not without asking her, but I pulled it out and read it. The symptom checklist got to me: her suffering, spelled out in all those X’s and O’s. Her answers on the bio contained some surprises. She’d told me her first husband had sometimes been “a bully,” but I didn’t know he’d hit her. And the high school stuff: she’d run away with a boyfriend? Shoplifted? I noted that she’d left “sexual abuse” unchecked—had given her father another free pass.
But Bain must have been on to something regarding “Daddy,” because after their fourth session, Mo said she wasn’t going back. “Because he’s fixated on my parents,” she said, when I asked her why not. “My mother’s dead and Daddy’s basically out of my life. What’s the point?”
“Well, I think—”
“I was there that day. I heard those kids being murdered. That’s the point. Not what my parents did or didn’t do.”
“But maybe there’s some connection between your reactions to what happened that day and your reaction to what your father did when—”
“Shut up!” she screamed. “My father never touched me!”
Dr. Bromley’s office had an odor that made her feel nauseous. Dr. Adamcewicz was condescending. And if stupid, frog-eyed Dr. Mancuso thought he was going to put her in a trance and guide her back to that library, he could go to hell.
I pointed out that we’d reached the end of Dr. Cid’s referral list.
“Good!” she said. “Great! Then I’m done with shrinks!” Her brain wasn’t the problem, anyway, she told me; her body was. If she could just be free of the pain in her back and knees, the pressure she felt at the top of her head, she could sleep through the night. Have a life again. Go back to work.
Her bringing in a paycheck would have helped, I had to admit. The month we moved back, JFK, my old high school, had been advertising for an English teacher. I’d applied for the position but hadn’t even gotten an interview. Nineteen years of service? Yeah, so what? A few months later, Kristen Murphy—my former student teacher, for Christ’s sake—was getting ready to go on maternity leave. I asked to be considered for the long-term sub’s job but wasn’t. That’s when the lightbulb finally came on. I’d done my penance and gotten that assault charge expunged from my record, but it had never been expunged from the superintendent’s memory. They were done with me.
What I did was stitch together an income. I took an adjunct teaching job at Oceanside Community College: two back-to-back evening courses. Basic English, thirty-five hundred bucks per, no health insurance. Steve Grabarek gave me ten or twelve hours a week at his sawmill. I pinch-hit weekends for Alphonse’s nighttime baker. So I was doing a little of everything, but what I wasn’t doing was making enough to meet our monthly expenses and pay her doctor bills. Once the probate stuff was settled, we’d be able to get at the money in Lolly’s bank account and pay down our Visa bill. Until then, I had to keep dipping into our house sale money. It was hard not to pressure her, you know? She was an RN, and places needed nurses. But she couldn’t handle a job yet. We both knew that.
She saw an osteopath, two neurologists, a chiropractor, and three GPs about her chronic pain. Well, five GPs, but at the time I only knew about three. Dr. MacKinnon suspected it might be Lyme disease, but the test came back negative. Dr. Mosher ordered a bunch of tests, reviewed the results, and concluded that Mo’s pain was psychosomatic. She dismissed him as a quack. Dr. Russo ordered retests of some of the ones she’d already had, plus a CAT scan and an MRI. When all the data was in, the three of us sat down for a powwow. “Mrs. Quirk, I imagine it must have been a terribly tight squeeze inside that cabinet,” Russo said. “How long did you say you were hiding in there? Four hours? In the fetal position, right?”
Mo nodded glumly.
“So what I’m thinking is, there had to have been enormous pressure at just the points where you’re feeling this persistent pain.”
“Are you saying it did nerve damage or something?” I asked.
“No evidence of that.” He turned back to Mo. “Your pain is real, Mrs. Quirk. I understand that. But I’m ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent sure the cause is psychological. Now there’s a Dr. Mario Mancuso down in New Haven who’s done some wonderful work with Ericksonian hypnosis and…” His eyes followed her out of the room.
Mo felt more simpatico with Dr. Pelletier, a general practitioner in his seventies whom she knew from her days as nurse supervisor at Rivercrest Nursing Home, and who, without ordering tests, prescribed the “muscle relaxer” Valium to address both her pain and the insomnia it caused.
I kept my mouth shut for a while. Kept watch. Kept counting her remaining tablets each morning when she walked the dogs. More and more, I didn’t like the math. She seemed dazed sometimes. Was it psychic numbness or was she overdoing the Valium?
“Look, they help me, okay?” she insisted. “Why is that a problem?”
“Because the bottle says three a day tops, and they’re disappearing faster than that.” If I wanted to act like a prison guard, she said, then I should go next door where the real drug addicts were. Because she wasn’t one, and she resented being treated as if she were. She was a nurse, remember? She knew a hell of a lot more about medications than I did.
The next day, while she was out, I called Pelletier’s office. No, I told the receptionist, I didn’t want a call-back; I’d hold. I stood there, waiting, shaking her pill vial like a castanet. “Mister Quirk,” he finally said, like I was one more pain in the ass he had to tolerate in the middle of his busy day.
I blurted it out. “Valium’s addictive, right?”
He said all minor tranquilizers had the potential to become habit-forming; the risks had to be weighed against the benefits. “Valium got a bad rap after that Hollywood book came out back in the seventies. I forget the title—something about dancing. But I’ve been prescribing it without a problem for years now. To hundreds of patients. Your wife says her pain has lessened, her sleep patterns have regulated. And she understands this is a short-term, not a long-term, solution. Now is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Guess not,” I said.
“Good. Stop worrying. She’ll be fine.”
But Dr. Pelletier didn’t know that Dr. Yarnall up in Plainfield was also writing her scripts for Valium, or that Dr. Drake down in New London was supplying her with Ativan. I didn’t know this either, until that afternoon down at the bakery. I was helping Alphonse with a big special order: fifteen dozen pastries for some ballroom lecture event up at UConn. “Hey, Quirky! It’s for you!”
Al called, and I put down the frosting knife and walked over to the wall phone. Jerry Martineau was on the other end. One of his detectives had brought Maureen in, he said. I’d better get down to the station ASAP.
“She’s been doctor-shopping,” Jerry said. We were seated side by side on a long wooden bench in the hallway of the station house, speaking in hushed voices. “And this afternoon the computer system caught up with her.”
I nodded. “So I take it you’re arresting her. I better get her a lawyer, right?” Jerry shook his head. He said he understood she’d been to hell and back because of what happened “out there.” So when Detective Meehan brought her in, he told him he’d handle this one personally. He’d made some calls, pulled in a favor from the controlled substance guys—not that that was for publication. Maureen and he had had a long talk, he said, and she’d made him two promises: she was going to get back into counseling and she was going to start going to meetings.
“What kind of meetings?” I asked.
“Narcotics Anonymous. And I need you to make sure she keeps her promises. Okay?” I nodded. “Okay. Good. Now what do you think? You want to take her home or get her into a treatment place? Because, depending on how much of that shit she’s gotten hooked on, the next couple days might not be too pretty.”
I told him I’d take her home.
“Okay then. Your call, Caelum. I’ll go get her.”
While I waited on that scarred old wooden bench, I wondered if it was the same one I’d sat on all those years ago, on that snowy day when my father and I had gone downtown to buy me a Davy Crockett coonskin cap and we’d ended up, side by side, in this same friggin’ station house hallway. I closed my eyes and saw him again: his front tooth dangling, his shirt stained with blood and egg yolk. Don’t you ever be like me, buddy, I heard him say. Because my name is mud. Alden George Quirk the Third MUD!
Maureen and Jerry approached from the opposite end of the corridor. It hit me: she looked like an addict—scrawny and scared, with those jumpy eyes. She walked up to me and, without a word, rested her forehead against my chest. My hand hovered an inch or so away from the small of her back, but I couldn’t bring myself to place it there. Not with Jerry standing there, watching us. I felt grateful to him, but resentful, too. “Let’s go home,” I said.
