He’s going to say it, she thought, and her stomach quivered. He’s going to tell me he loves me. Many years before, she had stood in front of another man who’d said the very same words, and she’d felt almost the same emotion, but the passage of time had colored her life and instead of feeling like the world was going to be delivered to her feet, she felt as though taking a step into a new world would be the bravest move of her life. She held her breath and fought hard not to swallow because she was sure there’d be an audible gulp.
He paused for what felt like five minutes, though she knew it was only seconds. “I don’t know how to say this . . .”
Now she could see his eyes and knew deep in the pit of her stomach that he wasn’t going to say what she expected. “Say whatever it is, Seth. I don’t do well with suspense.”
“Well, there’s something I know . . .” He dropped her hands and wiped his hair back, then peered up at her through his eyelashes, his face fully illuminated in a shaft of moonlight. “I know about the Lakeview School shootings. Natalie, I know everything.”
Her hands dropped to her sides like stones. She swayed a little and a thrumming filled her ears. He continued talking, though she only heard every other phrase or so.
“We have to . . . research team . . . necessary to your story . . . so sorry . . . overruled by the producer . . .”
She caught her breath and talked herself into listening. Focus, Natalie. Damn it. Don’t act like a freaking baby. Focus.
“You can’t tell the whole story,” she blurted. “This program that you’ve shot . . . it’s not about me. It’s about Sophie. About the sanctuary. Why the hell is what happened in my life even important?”
“I agree with you, believe me, but I also understand the producers’ plight. We fight an ongoing battle with hundreds of shows that viewers can choose to watch. Sometimes you have to dangle a carrot for them to choose yours.”
“A carrot? A school shooting where dozens of people died is now a carrot? You know, I left North Carolina to get away from people like you. And now you’re as inconsiderate of my feelings as they were. I thought you were different, but you’re all the same, aren’t you?” She pulled her shaking hands away from him. “The goddamn story is number one. You never consider the people who are in the middle of what could be the most devastating moments of their lives. You never think about what happens when you leave. You never think about grief and sadness and . . . and the tragedy that knocks you in the stomach like a baseball bat. You never think about the people left behind.”
“I don’t want to do this,” he said, reaching for her face. “Believe me. This is not my decision.” His eyes glistened.
“What do you want?” she asked. “It feels like I’m being ambushed. I’m the one who’s going to be in the limelight. My boys . . .”
“I think you’re in it anyway, Nat. But people will sympathize. You have to strengthen your backbone.”
She took a step back and shook her head from side to side. Her cheeks burned, but her thoughts had never been clearer. “That’s strange that you say that because that’s what I’ve been doing for more than a year. Almost two, as a matter of fact. Strengthening my backbone. Healing. Dealing with nightmares and paralyzing anxiety. PTSD. And it takes a helluva lot more than a couple of years to recover from losing a child. I’ll never recover. No parent who loses a child does. But you and your producers don’t care about that, do you?”
She swiped a hand over her mouth and avoided looking at him. “I’ve been trying to balance everything in my life, but reporters keep butting in and reminding me of what’s going to be repeated over and over and over. That’s why I came here. I didn’t want to hear it anymore.” Her hands tightened into fists, and she faced him squarely, as she’d faced so many other people from the media. Angrily. Fearlessly. “I want it to stop.”
“I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through, baby.” Seth stepped forward and reached out to hug her.
“Why is it that I hear a ‘but’ in your voice?” She dodged him. Her jaw hardened.
Without another word, he turned on his heel and started to leave.
“Wait, Seth. Wait.”
He stopped, but he didn’t turn around. She could see he was breathing heavily, obviously upset. He wasn’t the only one, but nothing in her life had ever seemed so clear. It was time to trust someone with her story.
She sat on the stump of a giant tree they came to, and in short, hesitant bursts, she told Seth about the hordes of journalists who drove her from home and to this remote part of Thailand. She shared the dreams she’d had of the boys since coming to the sanctuary, the visions of them when she least expected to see their faces. And when she finished, she sat with her face in her hands and felt him patting her shoulder like any friend would.
A touch, a hug, a shoulder. That’s all it took.
The machine-gun-like blasts of forbidden memories pummeled her, beating her relentlessly. She couldn’t breathe.
Stephen, the gurgling baby with a sharp fringe of impossibly long eyelashes, gazing up into her face with an impossible innocence.
Danny in third grade, a crooked tooth from a recent bike accident, a cowlick that simply would not stay down, proud as a rooster about his first science project.
Stephen asking to hold the baby when Danny was born, insisting it was his, she had told her it was his, wanting nothing more than to be part of his brother’s life.
When had it changed? When had Stephen become a stranger? When did I lose him?
She didn’t realize she was sobbing until Seth kneeled before her and held both of her hands in his sturdy fingers and coaxed her to answer his questions about her Stephen.
“He thought I hated him. I didn’t hate him,” she told Seth, emphasizing the words as if not only trying to convince him but to also convince herself. “I didn’t hate him.”
Seth simply nodded. He knew. He had told her he knew. No one ever knew what to say. That’s why she hadn’t told the story, but she’d started now. It was coming as surely as water does when you open the faucet.
“He loved his brother. I know he did. That’s why . . . that’s why . . ..” A wrenching breath caved in her chest. Seth kept holding her hands in his and didn’t say a word. “That’s why I didn’t understand. I don’t . . . I don’t understand why.”
“Go ahead, love.”
“How could he have done it?”
“Done what?”
She stared straight ahead, no longer in Thailand. She was home. North Carolina. It was two years ago, once again, on that devastating day at Danny’s school.
She had felt the tension in the group of parents who surrounded her, all of them kept in place by a piece of flimsy yellow police tape. She heard the crackled vibration of silenced cell phones that rippled from one end of the crowd to another. Then those shots. Those horrible shots. And the pandemonium that took over after that. Each parent, each family member in that crowd cried out for their own child, the child trapped in the Lakeview Middle School with shooters who’d kept the whole school captive. So many shots. Then the long silence. The loudest, longest silence. And, suddenly, the pounding boots of the SWAT team as they found their way to the cafeteria door entrance. Shouts from inside the school. Bright flashes of light. More shouts. Then another silence. Never-ending. Moments later, ambulances and fire engines. Sirens. Screaming. Panicked voices. Often, she awoke screaming when she dreamt of that sound in the middle of the night. In fact, Sophie had heard Natalie scream so often that she came to the bars and threw her trunk over Natalie until the screaming stopped.
God.
Stephen.
Danny.
Her sons, her babies. Her heart.
A fresh wave of emotion. She shook so hard it felt as if her body would split apart.
“Are you alright, love?”
“I’ll never be alright. E
ver.”
“Talk to me. Keep telling me the story. Cry, if you need to. I’m here. Sometimes giving a voice to the pain is the only way to get past it.”
“There’s no getting past it.” She didn’t want to talk about that day, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d been forced to. There had been so many interviews, then the month-long court proceedings. And no one could comfort her. No one could explain why it happened. No one could give her back her boys. Even her own family couldn’t offer any answers. She had long ago given up on God.
“I know, love, but you have to talk about it.” Seth held her upper arm and had one palm to her cheek. His eyes were moist.
“You know already, don’t you?” She stepped back and her hands flew to her throat. “You know.”
“I always have.”
His simple answer floored her. Yet, as she wrapped her mind around it, it made sense. Of course he knew. The story had been in all the newspapers: Teenager Shoots His Own Brother in School Shooting.
What no one seemed to understand, though, was that Stephen would never have shot Danny. He couldn’t have. She always knew that, but no one listened.
“The newspapers had it all wrong, Seth. I was sure of it. But then I talked to Stephen’s friends.”
She paused, picked at an insect bite on the back of her hand. Kept scratching the bite because it kept her focused, reminded her where she was. The present. Now. Thailand. Almost two years later. Two years after. She pulled her nail over the bite one more time and drew blood.
“It was an accident, they said. No one even realized it was Danny until it was too late. I knew Stephen wouldn’t have done it on purpose.”
Stephen had gone to school that morning with his friends. Kyle had driven, as he usually did because he was two years older. He had an old beat-up Ford. The perfect car for tailgating and riding Main Street looking for girls on weekend nights. Unfortunately, it had broken down that day, and the guys who’d driven with him—Stephen included—had to walk almost two miles to make it to school. Stephen was supposed to give a speech to the Student Farmer’s club during first period, but he was late. The teacher sent him to the principal’s office, but he never made it there. Instead he joined his friends and groused about the school principal and their teachers, and the kids created a plan for getting out of their classes. Permanently.
They all sneaked out into the parking lot, went back to Kyle’s car, and smoked a joint. Then Kyle showed them what he’d taken from his father’s closet: two revolvers and three shotguns.
“Let’s scare the shit out of them,” Kyle said to his friends. “There’s one for each of us. Here.” He handed them out and the boys stood there, the weight of the guns heavy in their hands, a ripple of forbidden excitement bubbling in each of their chests. “They’ll never fuck with us again when today is over.”
Kyle was right. The principal and teachers would never fuck with him again. He lived in jail now. Natalie had watched him sob on the witness stand, the only one of the four boys to survive. And in front of her, his parents held tight to each other, watching their only child as he was sentenced for the murder, the cold-blooded murder, of children and teachers. The courtroom filled with the moans and cries of those family members, but Natalie couldn’t cry that day. She sat on that courtroom pew as still as stone, her heart barely beating.
Kyle had been Stephen’s best friend, had been to Natalie’s house more times than she could count. She’d known him since his fifth birthday. Seeing him walk out of that courtroom in shackles was like losing a third son.
She forced herself to visit him a month later when the nightmares wouldn’t stop, and Dr. Littlefield had told her the only way she would find out the truth was to ask Kyle himself. She went to the prison alone, jumped every time a lock clicked, squeezed her fists so tightly that her fingernails scored her palms.
“The boys went back into that school, and Kyle started looking for the principal,” she told Seth, breathing carefully and choosing her words. “They meant to scare him. A stupid prank. But someone saw the guns. The other kids heard the screams. Someone called the cops. They got scared. He and Mark and Jeremy started shooting. Just shooting. Shooting and shooting and shooting. None of them had held a gun before but they’d played video games like Slasher III and they knew how to aim for the head. The heart. They called to each other as they shot, claiming twenty points, a hundred points. A bonus. Kyle said they heard someone yelling, Danny yelling at Stephen, he said, and Kyle said he told Stephen to point his gun at a group of kids, and Danny . . . Danny stepped out in front of them. He tried to protect them. I think he thought . . . I think he thought Stephen would stop. He wouldn’t shoot.”
She wound her fingers together in her lap. A drop of wetness fell on the back of her right hand. She wiped it away with her thumb.
“I should’ve seen it,” Natalie said. “Stephen was miserable after his father left. He blamed himself. And when Parker never called again, Stephen sunk deeper and deeper into a depression. I should’ve taken him to a therapist, but I thought he’d get past it like Danny had. Danny was fine, so I thought Stephen would be, too. And I was so busy trying to keep myself together and trying to put food on the table that I fooled myself into thinking everything was . . . everything was going to be okay. It’s a mother’s instinct to protect, and as long as I fed the boys and put clothes on their backs, they would be fine. At least that’s what I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t protect them. I couldn’t protect either of them. I failed. That shooting . . . all those deaths . . . I could have done something. I should’ve known. I’m as guilty as those boys were.”
Seth reached for her again and hugged her, whispering in her ear, “No, no, no, my sweet Natalie. Horrible tragedies like that are never someone else’s fault. Life is a series of heartbreaks and joys. You know that. We all struggle. We all fail. Sometimes we find the light of happiness, but most days we simply move on through life’s moments. Through the pain. The suffering of being alive.”
He kissed her forehead. Above them, several monkeys played tag in the tree’s branches. From a distance, one of the elephants trumpeted. He gazed toward the sound, softly chuckled. “You know, I think sometimes that humans are conscious of the causes of our emotions. But animals . . . well, animals simply react to them. They feel pain and sadness and grief like we do, but they also know that life goes on, and they do not feel guilty for living. All you have to do is live with elephants for a while to see that. They feel the importance of family and of bonds, of supporting each other and working together. But they don’t make that a difficulty. They don’t make it dramatic or anxiety ridden. They don’t feel guilt.” He took her face in his hands. “You shouldn’t either, dear one. You shouldn’t either.”
Forty
He who gains a victory over other men is strong; but he who gains a victory over himself
is all powerful.
-Lao Tzu
Telling Seth about the boys had set off an anxiety episode that made Natalie want to find an old empty tree, crawl inside, and turn into moss. Her chest squeezed tightly, her lungs struggled for breath, her sight swam as if she had drunk way too much.
She retreated to Sophie’s enclosure, slept very little that night, imagining the Pandora’s Box that had been opened and all the ills in the world being visited upon her like an upset bees nest. She dreamt of flying things that hit her body like icy projectiles, bringing up boils on her skin, blinding an eye, crippling a finger. More than once, she woke herself screaming from that time right between fully awake and deeply asleep.
Reality hit her the next morning that the truth was that the story released another type of evil upon her world. As soon as Seth’s show aired, her family would be on the receiving end of the media’s desperate need to make more of her story. They’d speculate about her life, follow the blog she’d started to write about Sophie, steal away what little privacy and normalcy she
’d built. Everyone wanted to figure out what the mother of a mass shooter was like, especially a shooter who killed his own brother, her other son.
There. She said it.
She spent the day with Sophie and was grateful when no one tried to find her. She suspected Seth might have kept them away.
Now, the sunset created colors they might not yet have named, and she was exhausted. She wanted nothing more than a few hours of sleep in her own bed, but the argument with Seth marched back and forth through her mind like the foreign legion had marched through the Sahara.
Yes, she’d escaped any human interaction by spending the night in the enclosure, it was not a good place to sleep. Now, she rolled onto her right knee, enjoying the safe cave Sophie’s body made.
She thought about her conversation with Seth and it took on a different light. Had he thought she would be fine about sharing such a painful story with the world? On the other hand, why would she understand his need to add the drama of a school shooting to a story about elephants? Wasn’t the story of Sophie’s transformation enough? He was producing a TV show about animals for chrissakes, not people. No need to learn anything else. Especially about her boys. And now that he knew her story and cared about her, wouldn’t it be all the more reason to leave her personal life out of the production?
She leaned against Sophie’s leg and looked up. The elephant’s trunk and head created a dark, cool shadow against the orange-and-yellow sky.
Closing her eyes, she imagined Seth’s face as they made love. “Do you know how good you feel to me?” he’d said. “How long it has been since I’ve felt this way about a woman?” His black eyes softened as he lowered his head to take her mouth, the warm moistness of his lips on hers. And she remembered the surprising hardness of his shoulders and back beneath her hands as the magic built up in her lower stomach and exploded throughout her body.
She forced herself to inhale to the count of eight, exhale to the count of ten. Painfully. Slowly. Opened her belly with the breath. Exhaled every last wisp. Three times. Four. Her body started to relax. She concentrated on the breath, the way her yoga instructor had taught her. Tried to empty her mind.
The Mourning Parade Page 29
