Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  DEDICATION

  For Josh

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Who We Were

  Terror in the Hallways A Brief History of Memory

  Love Is Patient, Love Is Kind

  House Fire Kills Two A Brief History of What Was Lost (or, Everything We Imagined)

  Where We Began

  Caroline Black A Brief History of Containment

  Paperweight, Apron, Bedside Lamp

  A Brief History of Fatal Fires

  What Trail of Light We Leave Behind

  Arson? A Brief History of Fire Investigation Terms

  The World as It Is

  A Brief History of Fire Scene Investigation

  To Be Alone

  A Brief History of Cremation (or, How the Body Burns)

  Jacob Jensen Memory, Record, Archive

  Pandemonium

  Benji Ndolo The Weather of Our Heart a Storm

  A Brief History of the Human Heart

  Lewis and Clark Resumes Amid Uncertainty Outline, Ghost

  A Brief History of Starlit Haunting

  Elise Nguyen The Color of Burning

  Fire Crisis A Brief History of Home Combustion

  Lamp, Carpet, Clock

  Alexis Thurber A Brief History of the Human Body

  As Much to Keep Us Safe

  A Brief History of Love

  It Is Time

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  WHO WE WERE

  THREE DAYS AFTER Caleb Raynor opened fire, the first house burned to the ground.

  Three days after he entered the school’s east doors during second period, after we heard screams and running and faint popping in the hallway, after our English and chemistry and mathematics and history teachers huddled us away from the doors and into storage closets and underneath laboratory tables, halfway to safety before doors burst open and shots ripped across blackboards and desks and overturned chairs, we awoke to the news that Caroline Black’s house and everything inside of it had disintegrated in flames.

  Caroline Black, who had once shared an elementary school with us.

  Caroline Black, who had been in the hallway, on her way back to social studies from the bathroom.

  Caroline Black, gone alongside twenty-seven of our peers within the walls of Lewis and Clark High School.

  When we first heard the noise we imagined bang snaps, the white-papered firecrackers we once threw to the pavement every Fourth of July. We imagined nothing more than powdered paper and a quiet spark until we saw our teachers’ faces and heard their strained voices, Get down, now, until we crouched beneath our desks and heard the firecrackers growing louder, until they became something other than fireworks entirely. And when we saw the news three days later about Caroline’s ravaged house, a fire beyond gunfire, we imagined other sounds: the sound of swirling sirens, the approach of fire trucks. We imagined Caroline’s neighbors standing in their yards wrapped in blankets against the fall Midwestern air, awoken by the blaze and by their own lack of being able to do anything as flames climbed the siding of the house and licked an expanse of overwhelming sky. We imagined their children padding down staircases and onto the lawn bleary-eyed, children clutched close against the growing heat, a glow alighting their faces and stinging their cheeks.

  And when we learned that Caroline’s parents had died in the fire, we felt a wash of relief and envy, and then guilt for even feeling it.

  That they were gone, that they would no longer live with this.

  And that we were still here, and that we would.

  WE: 1,193 STUDENTS at Lewis and Clark. One hundred eighteen teachers. Six administrators. Three counselors. Twelve support staff. Two librarians.

  We: The Lewis and Clark Trailblazers. State-champion dance squad. Members of the 2003 Chess Club, the Key Club, the National Honor Society, the Eco-Act Alliance.

  We: Nick Ito. Zola Walker. Matt Howell. Christina Delbanco.

  We: The junior staff members of the Lewis and Clark High School yearbook, waiting since freshman year to design the perfect book for our graduating seniors, our school’s one lasting tradition, a gift to bear them away to college and toward the future.

  Him: Caleb Raynor, another junior who once shared our playground. Who attended Des Peres Elementary with us so many years before we moved onward to Lewis and Clark High, who sat upon the magic carpet with us during story time, who never raised his hand in class, who only occupied his desk unseen and sketched shapes into its wood. Quiet. Reserved. A loner, but never picked on. A boy who some of us might have been friends with, who we might have dated if he’d ever moved to speak a word, if he’d thought to join the Art Club or Mock Trial, if he’d ever taken off the headphones that became his armor once we entered seventh grade.

  Caleb Raynor: a boy most of us knew nothing about. No one except Eric Greeley, his best friend, who was not at school when Caleb entered the east doors.

  9:04 A.M. Wednesday. Early October. The air beginning to tinge with the crisp of autumn. Homecoming two weeks away, the marching band practicing beyond the football field each day after school. The sun already high in an eggshell sky when Caleb burst through the doors carrying a sawed-off shotgun and a handgun and sixteen magazines of ammunition, when he kicked open the door to the principal’s office and gunned down the administrative assistant, Deborah Smalls, a woman who handed us hall passes on mornings we showed up late, and then moved on to Principal Jeffries, shot dead as she reached for the PA system that would have alerted us, an alarm, an emergency.

  We heard nothing in our classrooms, our pencils to paper, our ears trained upon our teachers. Not until Caleb moved down the hallway, reloaded, rattled his guns against the railings. Not until he charged into the art studio and shot Mr. Nolan, alone in the room, on planning period between classes and drawing up a lesson and snapping the sugar-free gum we knew he always chewed, listening to KSHE 95’s classic rock on a transistor radio. Manfred Mann. Styx. Blue Oyster Cult. Gone in only seconds.

  We heard it then. The popping. The faraway screams. Of administrators, counselors, cafeteria workers entering the hallways. Of librarians and custodians coming to realizations, of testing exit doors and finding them barred.

  We have tried to gather and transpose. We have tried to rearrange this.

  We have tried to catalog the details.

  We have tried to set this right.

  This: a record. What it means to archive, to set down disaster. What it means to commit it to memory, to create a book, to catalog what we were to one another and what the school’s halls were to us. A single book: as if we shared the same memory, as if every student at Lewis and Clark bore the same witness. As if we all beat the same heart within the hallways that morning and in the following days and weeks, as if we all understood what was happening, as if we all split apart the same way. As if a book could contain this in photographs and in words, a book meant to capture the best, to bear us away toward the future with a comfortable wistfulness.

  This: an attempt to archive. An attempt at futility. An attempt to gather and collect and piece together and put away, an assemblage of articles and documents and reports and profiles. An archive of record, that this happened. An archive of moving on. An archive of prisms, of refraction, of looking at the same light from an endless stretch of angles. An archive that evaded us, that still evades us, an archive of pressing on regardless of evasion to put everything back together, to reassemble parts, to create a perfect whole from a scattering of fragments. To create a history. A laying down of testimony. An archive of a year. And an archive of the four of us, classmates since elementary school and sinc
e freshman year colleagues as well, a word we used with irony to describe our collaboration as the junior yearbook staff and a word that would hurt only later when tossed around in distant workplaces, a word that would return us always to an autumn morning and the breaking in of gunfire, to a single October day.

  October 8. 2003. 9:04 A.M. A single minute, a split second, an ending.

  Nick sat in English class, bent over the pages of Moby-Dick and listening to Alicia Hughes read a passage out loud. Alicia Hughes, who’d worn the same pair of green sneakers since freshman year, who’d once told Nick at a seventh-grade dance that she thought he was cute. Alicia Hughes intoning That unsounded ocean you gasp in is life and Nick imagining nothing of a windswept sea but only the curve of his girlfriend Sarah Reynolds’s neck, how his breath caught and sputtered when he pressed his mouth into the bend of her throat. Sometimes in her bedroom before her parents came home from work, sometimes in the back of his Honda Civic when he took her home from school and they detoured to Midvale County Park. His girlfriend for more than a year now and both of them still virgins, Sarah pressing always for more beneath the breath-damp sheets of her room’s twin bed and Nick pulling away because he was older, because he didn’t want to take advantage of her, his mouth seeking air instead of the sea salt of her skin. Sarah a girl he’d first noticed at a basement party when she was a freshman and he a sophomore, how her laugh carried across the Solo cups and the bass of the stereo’s speakers. Sarah downstairs in the school’s music wing practicing choir when the popping in the hallway crescendoed above Alicia Hughes’s voice and everyone in the room looked up and Mrs. Menda glanced toward the closed classroom door.

  Nick saw his teacher’s face change, a recognition. Get under your desks, she whispered harshly, get under your desks right now. She motioned everyone toward the back of the room and began pushing her bulked desk against the classroom door and John Sommers, a Trailblazers basketball guard, broke from the group to help. He grabbed one end, Mrs. Menda the other. Nick heard the gunfire approach. He felt himself iced and immobile, the same as when Sarah unbuckled his jeans sometimes and he whispered don’t, but he pulled himself away from the wall where his peers were gathering their desks into a collective barrier and grabbed an end of Mrs. Menda’s desk. He hoisted its weighted wood toward the door, a screech against the floor. He heard Mrs. Menda’s shallow breath, rapid intakes rising toward hyperventilation, and thought of Sarah terrified in the school’s choral room practicing vocal scales cut to a gunfired halt. He heard the sounds of his classmates: some of them crying, his own breath silent and still. He heard the groan of John Sommers’s voice as he lifted the heft and together they pushed the desk flush against the classroom door. John on one end, Nick and Mrs. Menda on the other. As they slid the desk into position, a heavy blockade, Nick peered through the door’s narrow rectangle of window and saw Caleb Raynor pass by in a hooded sweatshirt carrying two guns.

  Christina crouched beneath her desk in French class when she and her classmates heard the shots, a rapid banging above the pronunciation videos they had been watching all week. French in Action, a PBS series, today an episode on ordering lunch: the difference between des and les, whether to order some escargots or every escargot in the world. Vous avez choisi? Je vais prendre du jus d’orange. The check: L’addition, s’il vous plaît! On-screen the glow of an outdoor café flickered across the faces of everyone in the room, the lights dimmed, the classroom door closed. When they heard the shots Mr. Broussard stood from his desk. He motioned everyone beneath theirs, Christina shocked by his lack of emotion, his quick economy of action. She huddled beneath her desk and Mr. Broussard let the videotape continue playing through the dark and through faraway gunfire. Combien coute? À la carte. Christina closed her eyes and felt shame only later to not have thought of her boyfriend, Ryan Hansen, or her brother, Simon, both elsewhere in building, but instead of swimming practice after school and that it would surely be canceled. The team’s major fall meet coming up in three weeks, practice she needed to keep her arms and legs muscling through chlorinated water. The popping of ammunition sounded down the hallway and Christina opened her eyes and let them fall on Henry Park, her speaking partner, crouched across the row beneath his own desk. Du fromage. The video droned. Henry a boy she knew from class but more acutely from the Midvale County Community Center’s pool, where they sometimes shared swimming lanes, Henry on the men’s water polo team, Christina on the women’s swim team. Christina took her brother home every afternoon on her way to practice at the community center, Simon a freshman, so new at Lewis and Clark that she barely knew his schedule. Christina imagined him in one of the physical science classrooms huddled beneath a table with whoever his lab partner was, some other freshman who would shield him. Keep him safe. Christina stared at Henry Park across the thin aisle between their desks and a woman’s voice accentuated syllables. Je n’ai pas faim. It was only then that she imagined Ryan in the gymnasium downstairs, a senior and state tennis champion, gym an easy elective while applying for the many college scholarships that had shortened his temper since the beginning of the school year, so many sent SAT scores and applications and not once had he double-checked their location or proximity to St. Louis, where she’d still be at Lewis and Clark for another year. Je n’ai pas faim. A pronunciation of words she would associate always with Henry’s drained face and the sound of guilt and gunfire, of how easy it was to think only on swim practice and the feel of water sliding against her skin.

  Zola was in the library, a study period every Lewis and Clark student had throughout the day, an academic lab planned once into the seven periods of the day. She sat at a long wooden table alongside a scattering of other juniors randomized into her study lab. Derek Wilson, the Trailblazers punter. Alissa Jankowski, vice president of the National Honor Society. Alexander Chen, a quiet kid known for his variety of food allergies: wheat, dairy, nuts, mangoes. Soma Chatterjee, the founder of the first Lewis and Clark High community garden. Zola sat beside her peers reviewing last-minute trigonometric functions before her third-period test. Slope definitions. Rise over run. Mnemonic devices: sine is first, rise is first. The same kind of mathematics needed for understanding apertures and scales and ratios, the photography work she did for Lewis and Clark’s high school yearbook. A photo shoot scheduled that afternoon at the Math Club’s weekly meeting, another shoot later in the week with the school’s marching band in the end zone of the football field. Zola had closed her trigonometry textbook and pulled out graph paper and begun to sketch sample lines for her test when the first shots sounded from the hallway, an echo through the library that stopped her pencil short, a streak of graphite halted midway across the paper’s boxes and lines.

  When Zola looked up, everyone else in the library had also stopped. Every student in her academic lab, and in other labs scattered across so many wooden tables. Groups of freshmen, sophomores. A class of seniors gathered around Mr. Eckstein, one of two librarians, listening to proper methods of capstone-paper research. Everyone in the library fell silent and stared blankly at one another as the sound of gunshots approached and grew louder, the only sound ricocheting off the library’s high ceilings and through its book-filled stacks. The librarians and teachers did what so many others did. They told everyone to get down, to climb under the tables. To hide, to tuck themselves back into the stacks. Zola dropped her pencil and ran for the stacks and hunkered down behind the science books while her peers ducked beneath the wood table. She heard the gunfire approach from the hallway, as loud as explosives, growing louder and stronger until it was in the library, until it was upon them. She heard people screaming: the voices of her peers, the voice of a lone male ordering everyone to get the fuck down then the hoarse rasp of Mrs. Diffenbaum, the other librarian, shouting no, no, no, please, no. Zola didn’t think of siblings. Of boyfriends or girlfriends. She had none within the school. Though she never admitted it later, not out loud to herself or to Nick or Matt, she didn’t think of Christina, either, in her F
rench class, didn’t think of meeting as they always did in the hallway between second and third period to determine where they’d congregate in the cafeteria for lunch and whether they’d brought sandwiches from home or needed to buy salads or sodas. Zola thought only of her mother. How Zola had left the house first that morning, her mother still standing in the kitchen. From her hiding place in the stacks Zola heard the sear of bullets shattering glass, cracking wood, splitting the surface of human skin. She kept her eyes trained on the one book before her with the largest font, A Graphic History of Oceanic Biology, its title typefaced in bold down the book’s breaking spine, a book she had never read and would never read though its Garamond font and its name would billow through her brain for weeks that would become months and then years. She kept her head down, her hands clasped over the coil of her ears, and watched the book until her eyes glazed and she closed her eyes and thought of her mother by the stovetop griddling pancakes. Blueberries and banana. Maple syrup. A kiss to the forehead before Zola walked out the door.

  Matt was the only junior yearbook staff member not in class. He was in the men’s bathroom instead on the second floor, just past the main stairwell from the ground floor, his mouth pressed to his boyfriend Tyler’s mouth in the farthest and most hidden stall from the door. Tyler Cavanaugh, a sophomore: a boy only some of us knew Matt was dating. A new relationship of four months, one Matt held as close as he could to the chest, as close as he guarded the particulars of his own sexuality within a high school that housed the LGBTQ Spectrum Alliance but also manifested unexpected slurs scrawled occasionally and artlessly across lockers. Matt’s family knew he was gay. Tyler’s family did not. In waiting for Tyler to grow comfortable and come out, Matt had allowed alternatives to fooling around in the absence of Tyler’s house or his. Matt’s hatchback Ford Fiesta. Nights in the surrounding cornfields, the sky washed above them like a dome, like starlight, like nothing they’d ever seen. And sometimes the second-floor bathroom, skipping class to meet in the farthest stall but always in the morning, low traffic before lunch, first or second period. Just the week before, the last stall, Tyler’s mouth tracing the curve of Matt’s ear and Matt had felt breathless, had almost whispered three words teetering dangerously on the edge of his tongue before his eyes shuttered open and he pulled them back, their relationship far too new. And here, the same stall, the same words pushing hard against his teeth, Matt held them down safe inside the lockbox of his throat. He had just pressed Tyler to the tiled wall, his hands traveling from his face down toward his belt buckle, when they both heard gunshots and opened their eyes. The shots traveled closer. They held each other’s gaze, so close Matt could see the perspiration on Tyler’s forehead. Matt forgot the words. He quieted the breath quickening in his lungs and pushed Tyler up onto the toilet seat to make his feet invisible below the stall and followed him up onto the other edge of the lid. They stood across from one another, the door of the stall locked. They watched each other. Matt held a finger to his lips: stay silent, Tyler, stay silent. Tyler focused on Matt’s face until the shots grew louder and a female voice screamed beyond the door and Tyler looked down and began to weep and Matt pressed his hand across Tyler’s mouth, the same mouth that had skirted his ear.