by Lamb, Wally
“Don’t make fun of me!”
“I’m not, babe. I’m sorry. I just … look, you have to give yourself a break here. You did the only thing you could do. You survived.” She began to cry. “Where is she?”
I sat down beside her. Took both her hands in mine. “Maureen, this is what Velvet does when her life gets crazy. She disappears. But sooner or later, she’s going to come out of hiding, and when she does, she’ll pick up the phone. Or ring our doorbell. Or come walking out of the woods and into the backyard like she did last Saturday. And until then—”
She withdrew her hands. “Okay. I’ll go to your stupid meeting.”
“It’s not my meeting, Mo.”
“Then whoever’s it is!”
She stood so abruptly, her chair fell backward and clattered against the floor. Then she, too, was on the floor, crawling beneath the table. She sat crouched, her hands on her head, her head between her knees.
At first, I just stood there, unsure of what to do. Then I knelt down next to her. Spoke with as much calm as I could manage. “The chair fell, Mo. It was just the chair.” When I reached out to touch her shoulder, she batted my hand away. Sophie and Chet stood like sentries on either side of her, low growls rumbling in their throats.
A minute or two later, Maureen was on her feet and heading for the stairs. When she came back down, she had put her hair in a ponytail and changed her blouse. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
THE PARKING LOT WAS FULL to overflowing. On our way inside, I overheard two older women. “I’m not even sure why I wanted to come to this,” one of them said. “Just to be sad with other people, I guess.”
At the steps leading down to the basement hall, we were approached by Lindsay Peek, a sophomore, one of my honors kids. One of Mo’s clinic regulars, too. Lindsay was painfully shy. Chewed the ends of her hair during tests. Her handwriting was so neat and regimented, it looked machine-generated. She spoke to Maureen, not me. “My mother made me come to this, but she had to go to work.” There was panic in her darting eyes.
Go away, I wanted to say; leave her alone.
“You want to sit with Mr. Quirk and me?” Maureen asked. Lindsay nodded. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.
“What is it, hon?” Maureen asked.
“I saw you. When you came in with that girl.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, but Maureen did. She touched her arm. “You were in the library, Lindsay?”
She squinted. Her eyebrows, bare in spots, were studded with scabs.
“Linds?”
“My mother said I have to work this summer? Because I turned sixteen and she doesn’t want me hanging around the house all day? And so, last week, she drove me around to all these places and made me go in and get applications. And then, Monday night, she came into my room and started screaming about how I was stalling on doing them because I was so lazy. And so, on Tuesday, at lunch, I went to the library…. And I was filling them out. And it was weird because you had to put down references? And I had just written ‘Maureen Quirk,’ and then I looked up and there you were. You and that weird girl…. They’re not going to make us talk at this thing, are they? Call on us or whatever? Because I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No, neither do I,” Maureen said.
They clasped hands, and I followed them inside.
* * *
REVEREND JUDY CLUKEY WAS A plump, reassuring Mrs. Santa Claus type. As pastor of the host church, she welcomed everyone who had come and introduced her fellow members of the faith community: Reverend Sands of South Fellowship, Rabbi Effron from B’nai Chaim, Pastor Benson of Faith Lutheran in Castle Rock, Reverend Kromie of the Unitarian Universalist Church. Father Duplice from Pax Christi had wanted to come, too, she said, but he’d had knee replacement surgery the week before and couldn’t yet handle stairs. Several of the clergy spoke briefly about services and programs planned at their houses of worship in the coming days.
“Now I’ve been asked to explain the seating for today’s session,” Reverend Clukey said. We probably noticed that the folding chairs had been arranged in three concentric circles. The innermost circle was reserved for witnesses to the killings, and for those who themselves had been fired upon. The next, larger circle was for students and staff members who’d been at school but had not personally witnessed the violence. The outer circle was for the rest of us. “Now our thinking in seating you this way,” she said, “is that what happened at Columbine two days ago was the emotional equivalent of a terrible earthquake. Nine-point-eight on the Richter scale of our hearts and minds. Am I right?”
Around the room, adults and kids nodded glumly.
“And it’s shaken us badly, this … upheaval. As individuals, as a community, as a nation. We’re frightened and confused. How can our children have been taken from us? How can the friends we’ve gone to grade school, and dance class, and football games with no longer be among us? The ground seems to have cracked open, and it feels as if we’re standing at the crumbling edge of some terrible abyss.”
Heads hung low; people dabbed at their eyes, looked out at nothing.
“Now some of us here today found ourselves, two days ago, at the epicenter of this emotional earthquake.” I glanced at Maureen, standing a few feet away. She was listening intently, hungrily. Beside her, Lindsay Peek looked dazed. “And these are the people we most want to reach out to today with our love and our support. Because loving one another may be the key to stepping back from the edge of this abyss, no matter where fate, or the Good Lord, or happenstance placed us on Tuesday at 11:19 a.m. when those two lost souls opened fire. We need to stare back, without blinking, at the depravity of those boys’ actions and realize that our love is more powerful than their hatred.”
Sobs broke out around the room. “Amen,” someone said.
“And so we invite those of you who were in the line of fire on Tuesday to please come forward and take seats at the center of this room. Because we love you. And because we want to listen to you—to bear witness. You’re the ones who’ve been given the heaviest crosses to bear, and we want to help you carry them. So please, everyone. Come. Sit.”
The crowd shifted. A dozen kids and half as many adults moved toward the center seats, some without hesitation, others more tentatively. Maureen dug her nails into my arm. “I’m not going up there,” she whispered. I looked from the fear in her eyes to the fear in Lindsay’s. Nodded. Led them, against the flow of bodies, to the back wall. Up front, five or six chairs remained unclaimed.
Reverend Benson, the Lutheran minister, took the floor. Back during World War I, he said, there’d been a saying: “In the foxholes, there are no atheists.” “And so, let’s begin today’s meeting by clasping hands, closing our eyes, and reciting, together, the Lord’s Prayer. And if you’re a nonbeliever, or if right now you’re too angry at God to pray to Him, we respect your silence. But do close your eyes and hold the hand of the person next to you, so that you might feel, if not the Lord’s mercy, then the solidarity of our community.”
Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. … There were a couple hundred people in that room. Most of us, myself included, held hands as he requested. Moved our lips. But very few of us—not Maureen or Lindsay, no one in the first circle, that I could see—felt inclined to close our eyes. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…. Eyes open, I saw my mother, kneeling next to me at St. Anthony’s, her mantilla covering her head, her eyes closed in fervent faith. What had Mother been praying for all those Sundays? Her father’s forgiveness? Her husband’s soul? … I saw Eric Harris, leaning against the counter at Blackjack Pizza, staring at his spinning cell phone. Saw them both, in their aprons, their T-shirts and cargo shorts, traveling incognito as kids with part-time jobs and plans beyond high school…. The minister’s voice boomed toward the end—the line about our deliverance from evil. Had they been evil monsters? Lost souls? Psychop
aths? All or none of the above? And what about their parents? Their older brothers? How, for the rest of their lives, were they supposed to walk in the world? What kind of black hole had they been sucked into?
In my peripheral vision, I noticed Maureen’s fidgeting hands. Looked to my left and watched her. With the thumb and index finger of her right hand, she was twisting the wedding ring on her left. Around, around, around, around. She probably didn’t even realize she was doing it. By the time I refocused, Ivy Shapiro was addressing the group. Although classes for Columbine students would not resume for another week and a half, she said, she and the other counselors would be on call immediately. She gave telephone numbers, e-mail addresses. They’d be happy to talk to whoever wanted to talk, happy to schedule appointments and accommodate walk-ins. “So let’s all talk about it, kids,” Ivy said. “As much as possible. You don’t need to suffer in silence.”
Three women from St. Frances Cabrini spoke next. The grief committee, they called themselves. They draped hand-crocheted prayer shawls onto the shoulders of the folks in the first circle. “Wear them whenever it’s starting to overwhelm you,” their spokeswoman advised. “Put them on and feel God’s loving arms around you.” Beside me, Maureen let out an unnerving chuckle.
When Reverend Clukey introduced Megan’s father, he stepped to the center of the first circle. He was wearing jeans and hiking boots; his clerical collar peeked above his Columbine Rebels sweatshirt. He said some people knew him as Pastor Kromie, others as Dr. Kromie, but he invited us to think of him, if we liked, as just plain Pete. He said he had a confession to make: that although, as both therapist and minister, he had counseled many grieving families, he had never before dealt with a grief this widespread and profound. And so he felt inadequate. At a loss. He needed our help. “A lot of you have had the impulse to come here today—there are more people than there are chairs. And I think this says that we need something from one another. But what? In the coming days, I suspect, our needs may be different than they are today, forty-eight hours after this terrible tragedy. Grief is a process—an evolution. But what do we need at this moment?” His eyes circled the room, scanning faces in the front, the middle, the back. “To vent? Is that what we need today? To cry and hold each other? To ask the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘Why us?’ and ‘How could a hatred so deep and disconnected from everything we value have taken root here in Littleton?’ Maybe we can figure out, together, what we need this meeting to be.”
He seemed to be looking at me when he said it. I nodded back. Looked over at Mo. She was twisting her ring again.
Pastor Pete invited audience members to talk about what they were feeling, or what they had experienced. Few did—no one in the shell-shocked first circle. A girl in the second circle said she’d been trapped in her art class for two hours before she got out of the building. “I prayed the whole time,” she said. “And My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ saved my life.”
“Jesus saved me, too,” a tall, skinny boy in the back agreed. “I woke up with a sore throat, and my mother called me in sick.”
A girl in the middle circle popped out of her seat. “So if Jesus is so great, why didn’t he save my friend Kyle then? Or Cassie? Or Rachel Scott, who would never even hurt a mosquito?” She glared accusingly at the sore-throat kid, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“None of us does,” Pete told him. “We’re all struggling with that one.”
A girl who’d been trapped in her science class said she called her mother on her cell phone, and that her mother had stayed on the line with her through the whole ordeal. “If she hadn’t,” she said, “I probably would have gone crazy. I just wanted to say that I love my mom so much.”
Maureen let go an impatient sigh. Her shoulder-l ength hair was down now, her fingers fidgeting with the purple elastic that had held her ponytail in place. She’d put it around her fingers and kept stretching it and letting go, letting it snap against her knuckles.
A hand went up in the second circle. When Pete nodded, a young guy in his twenties—shaved head, earring in one ear—stood and addressed the crowd in a shaky voice. He said he’d been subbing at the school and was on his break when he got wind of what was happening. He’d locked himself in a stall in the staffbathroom and had heard one of them laughing out in the hallway, banging on doors and shouting, “I know you’re in there !” The night before, he said, his girlfriend had told him she was pregnant, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it. But now he was glad about the baby, and he and his girlfriend had decided to get married. He was going to try and be the best husband and father he could be. I was unnerved by Maureen’s one-note chuckle. “Give me a break,” she mumbled, more to herself than me.
People spoke, others listened. There was no give and take, no response, beyond grateful nods from Pastor Pete. It was like that AA meeting I’d gone to that time, back in Three Rivers. I’d told Dr. Patel, the marriage counselor, about my father’s alcoholism, and about the way I’d get wasted on weekends sometimes, and drink when I couldn’t sleep. She’d urged me to go to a meeting—try it out—and so I had. Once. It creeped me out: all that handholding and surrendering to a Higher Power. All those heartfelt confessions and nobody saying anything in response. It just wasn’t for me, and anyway, those people were a lot more far gone than I was. More in my father’s league than mine. I just cut back a little. Less beer and liquor, more jogging. I was fine.
“I keep seeing them,” Sylvia Ritter was saying. “One of them, anyway.” She was the first person in the fishbowl up front to speak—the only person, as it played out. A biology teacher nearing retirement, Sylvia told the crowd she’d gone out in the hallway when she heard the second explosion, and that Dave Sanders had run past her, shouting for her to get back in her classroom, get the kids away from the door, and lock it. “And that’s when I looked down the hallway, and I saw one of them. Down near the library. I don’t know which one. I didn’t see a face, just a raised rifle, or a shotgun, or whatever it was; I don’t know about guns.” She stopped to compose herself, and when she spoke again, it was about how, the week before, she’d seen Dave Sanders in the office. She had asked him about his new granddaughter, and he’d taken out his wallet and shown her the baby’s picture. “That’s when they must have shot him, I think. Right after he warned me to go back in my classroom and lock the door.”
Beside me, Maureen seemed to be gulping back tears. I reached over and started rubbing her back, but she shook her head no. She’d put her hair back in the ponytail.
A tall girl standing in back said she didn’t want to talk about her experience on Tuesday. She just wanted to say that Coach Sanders had been an awesome coach and she was never going to forget him.
Two freshmen girls asked if they could sing the Mariah Carey song “Hero” and dedicate it to the kids who’d died. “That would be fine,” Pastor Pete said, and they launched into their heartfelt, off-key a capella tribute. That was what got to me more than anything at the grief meeting, I think. Those poor, scrawny girls singing that shitty song, badly. Them, and the substitute—the father-to-be. Maureen rocked her head back and forth during the singing. She seemed both bored and nervous. She kept looking over at the wall clock.
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 extensi
on 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 “hypervigi-lance, flashbacks, survivor guilt, psychic numbness, palpitations, hy-persensitivity 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.”
