Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  What Matt and Tyler heard, we knew later, was Caroline Black’s scream as she left the women’s bathroom next door. As she entered the hallway. As she came upon Caleb. As she may or may not have had time to understand what was happening before three bullets from his handgun ripped through her right shoulder, her stomach, then through the frontal lobe of her brain.

  Matt would remember the slump of her body against the hallway carpet when the shots finally stopped, when he and Tyler lowered themselves from the toilet and emerged from the bathroom and saw Caroline’s body first, her blood washed across the carpet. Matt would remember her unblinking, her gaze aimed high to the hallway ceiling.

  He would remember it always but most acutely when he first heard, three days later, that everything and everyone in her house had burned to the ground.

  WE WERE ACCUSTOMED to uncertainty then. We lived in an era of ambiguity and the numbness of television and news, strange days we witnessed but barely understood. We’d watched our country step that year into the light of a Baghdad dawn, a morning in March when we woke to the news of air strikes booming across the city and marking the beginning of a war we knew nothing of, a war that felt faraway and distant and numb. We watched streaks of fire and blazed missiles make their way across the Iraq sky, a grand display of shock and awe. We watched night-vision images grained in green from the foreign ministry, fires burning near government buildings and the west bank of the Tigris River, two locations we were told housed Saddam Hussein’s palaces. What else we were told: that Iraq housed weapons of mass destruction, a violation of the United Nations and peace treaties and human rights. That Saddam harbored links to Al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center.

  We watched the news with our families, who tried to help us understand, who knew little more than we did, we could see, parents full of their own doubts and sorrows and strained distance from the world. The same sorrow we had intuited in their faces two years earlier, the lined tension in their jaws, when they tried to answer our questions about the twin towers, buildings so removed from us as freshmen. They’d tried to help us focus instead on starting high school, starting yearbook, our first football games and after-school meetings and Homecoming dances. They tried to make familiar a world we fell asleep in one September night that the next morning became another place, another realm entirely, a world no longer ours.

  But we had forgotten. We intuited an iceberg but only saw its tip. We forgot the twin towers and their billowed smoke through the tumult of two high school years, a roil of exams and team tryouts and pre-SATS and erupting acne. And then we watched raids and air strikes through the summer before our junior year, a noise on television that blared between meals and trips to the public pool and night drives zigzagging across back roads and cornfields with one another, Pavement and Jay-Z blasting through the car stereo. We heard in July of Saddam Hussein’s sons, their home invaded and both of them killed, a haze of information amid summer jobs at Applebee’s and upon the lifeguard stand at the neighborhood pool, among midnight movies and ice cream stands and the pages of Seventeen magazine. By the time we returned to school in the fall and the air began to cool, the death toll had already reached nearly four hundred soldiers and citizens.

  We paid attention in our social studies classes, a media awareness that rarely transcended the classroom. We lost ourselves to the new year, to being upperclassmen, to already putting stories together for the yearbook, to at last driving ourselves to school. And then just three days into October, across the news, everywhere we looked: that there were no weapons of mass destruction found anywhere in Iraq. That the search was ongoing, that nothing was conclusive. That at $300 million already, the search would require $600 million more.

  How many lives? Christina’s father screamed at the television. How much money, how many lives until this is over? Christina told us of his weekend outburst at our weekly junior staff meeting that Monday after school, the fall semester’s pre-planning stage before we met with the staff of other classes in the spring semester. We were in Christina’s bedroom, her father still at work, the late afternoon sun spilling through the curtains.

  But your dad’s always so quiet, Matt said. He sat on the floor of Christina’s room and thought of past meetings at her house, her father in the living room, the sound of the television traveling down the hallway sometimes the only noise in the house.

  He wasn’t quiet this weekend, Christina said. Maybe it’s still the divorce.

  He’ll get over it, Zola said from Christina’s bed, where she fiddled with the camera folded into her lap. My mom’s just fine without my dad.

  Hey, can I see what pictures you’ve taken? Nick asked from the bedroom floor, a notebook tucked behind his head, a notebook Zola saw was still blank of notes or ideas.

  Only if I develop them first, Zola said. It’s a manual. I don’t have much at all yet. I’m going to a few after-school events this week.

  Christina leaned against the wall beside her bed and sipped the can of Coke in her hands. These meetings often so unproductive, the bulk of their work saved for the crunch at the end of the school year, when they at last met with the other class staff and their faculty advisor, Mr. Jenkins. She and Matt: the yearbook’s junior staff writers. Nick: the junior staff researcher. Zola: the yearbook’s photographer. Mondays and Fridays the only afternoons of the week when Christina didn’t have swim practice and she wished regardless that she was at the pool, her arms cutting circles through the water. Her brother somewhere in the house, either in his room or out in the living room playing video games, what he’d turned on over the weekend after their father’s voice finally rose in anger toward the television, after he’d slammed the remote to the couch cushions.

  An anger Christina couldn’t comprehend. An anger none of us fully understood.

  An anger we would understand only two days later, when Caleb Raynor entered the east doors.

  How many lives? How many lives? We would remember the words of Christina’s father, what she’d told us nothing more than an anecdote. We would think of his question again and again as we put together a yearbook, something impossible, a task beyond what we’d imagined at the bright start of a new academic year. How many lives? How many lives could we possibly account for in the pages of a book? We would think it every time we imagined the shots in the hallway, across the library stacks, outside the second-floor bathrooms. And we would think of it beyond guns, beyond bloodshed, when like kindling the fires began to erupt.

  WHEN THE GUNFIRE stopped, when the sirens approached and swirled beyond the windows of Lewis and Clark, when the police surrounded the school and a bomb squad waited on standby and SWAT teams finally stormed the building nearly two hours after Caleb Raynor walked through the east doors, we emerged from classrooms, from storage closets, from beneath toppled desks and chairs and tables.

  SWAT members pushed open the doors of every closed classroom, an easy task for Christina’s French class but not for Nick’s English room. After pushing Mrs. Menda’s desk against the door, after watching through the door’s small window as Caleb walked down the hall, Nick helped John Sommers push a bookcase and a filing cabinet and a storage tower to the door to fortify the desk. The floor of the classroom was littered with books, with torn pages and broken spines they’d ripped from the shelves in their haste to build a barrier. Classroom videos and student files. Grades and tests fallen open across the floor. Textbooks and twenty-six copies of Crime and Punishment, the next book in the junior year curriculum. A SWAT member punched through the glass, a door he assumed was locked from the inside, only to find a tower of classroom furniture stacked against the door, a tower apart from another pile of desks and chairs on the opposite side of the room behind which twenty-four students crouched, Nick and Mrs. Menda included.

  Christina removed no furniture. A black-clad officer merely opened the door, a tall figure she first thought was the shooter until she saw the badge, the helmet, heard a female voice
shout all clear from behind the helmet’s visor. Is anyone hurt? the officer called to Mr. Broussard, hidden behind his desk. He looked up and shook his head and raised his hands above his head, a gesture Christina would commit to memory as though her French teacher had done something wrong, as though he were guilty and not simply reacting immediately to the officer’s drawn gun. The officer waved them out: Follow me. She told everyone to keep their eyes closed. Christina would remember the static white noise of the television, the vocabulary video long over, receding behind them as her class moved single-file into the hallway and she tried to keep her eyes closed but slid them open anyway and saw a custodian, Mr. Rourke, splayed across the carpet, his legs askew, a dark flood beneath him.

  Matt and Tyler had already vanished from the hallway. They had not received instructions, had not been in class, had not been waiting for an all-clear but had only waited silently in the bathroom stall until the gunfire at last ceased. They had waited ten minutes in the silence, a wait that felt longer than the four months they’d known one another. They had stepped down from the toilet’s edge, unlocked the stall, and slipped into the hallway. They had stood only moments above Caroline Black’s body before Tyler took off running down the hallway, away from Matt, either in shock or not wanting to be found and questioned with Matt, not even in crisis, leaving no chance that they would be asked what they’d been doing together away from class. Matt watched Tyler disappear down the stairs, then knelt down beside Caroline’s body, her eyes open behind her glasses, a ruby-stained radius behind her head widening across the carpet. He watched her for only a moment, long enough. He leaned forward and lifted her glasses. He let his hands close her eyes. Then he followed Tyler’s path, away and down Lewis and Clark’s central staircase but with an afterimage coiled forever in the fractals of memory, a reiterated image that burned back as a spiraling, that rewired his brain.

  Zola was the only one of us who did not exit Lewis and Clark through the hallways and then through the school’s entrances. When the SWAT teams arrived at the library they found the doors blockaded and impassible. Not by bookcases or by desks, not by storage units pushed against the door as barriers, but by a convergence of bodies collapsed behind the doorway where Caleb Raynor had entered firing. Zola stayed huddled within the stacks. She focused on the racks of titles and their blocks of lettering to drown away the sounds of crying, of sputtering blood, of rasping voices calling for assistance. She wanted to help them. She could not move. She waited immobile, her hands over her ears, until she felt a solid arm grab her around the waist, until she screamed and the arm spoke, It’s all right, until her body at last let go and her weight fell away and her jeans dampened with a wash of urine and the arm pulled her up and out of the stacks and toward the library’s high windows.

  Zola saw only broken chairs and splintered tables, only people slumped into the ground as if they were sleeping before the officer pushed her through the window and down a makeshift pulley to a cluster of officers waiting on the ground, officers who wrapped her in blankets along with thirty-three other students and teachers, thirty-three shuttled outside on a system of levers though they left twelve behind in the library, what would be the location of heaviest casualties in the entire school.

  We stood in the parking lot, a chaos of students and police, of parents who had been alerted in the two hours that had passed since Caleb first walked through the east doors, parents who pushed through the lot searching each face for the certainty of their children. Parents who did find their kids: a shocked freshman, a quiet senior sitting on the curb holding his head in his hands. Parents who did not, who shoved through the parking lot, who searched and screamed and looked toward the school, who watched a stream of faces continuing to emerge, none belonging to them. A chaos of teachers, of more and more students flooding from the doors and the library windows, of wounds and weeping and the splattering of blood, some of it ours, most of it from others stained across our clothes, an answer their parents would never find.

  We carried them with us upon our jeans, upon our sweaters and T-shirts and sneakers. We carried this answer, what remained. We gave them to police officers, to investigators, what evidence was left of them upon our clothes. As if spatters could speak. As if clothing bore a voice. We left them in the parking lot with police, and we also carried them home. On socks, on the tips of shoes. On the edges of belt buckles and earrings and upon the knees of our jeans. We wanted to wash them away, a swirling of pink down the drain, a stream we would watch until it ran clear as if the flow of water could circle us back. And we wanted to keep them, this stain. A mark that they were here, that all of us were. That what we were had been permanent, that this fraction had been whole, what we needed in those first hours after we returned home and then again in the coming days, when Caroline Black’s home incinerated, when the first of the fires began.

  TERROR IN THE HALLWAYS

  Lone Gunman Kills 35 and Self at Local School, Devastates City

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2003

  ST. LOUIS, MO—A student opened fire yesterday at Lewis and Clark High School in Midvale County, killing 28 students, three teachers, three staff members and one administrator. The student, identified as Caleb Raynor, 16, entered the school’s east doors at 9:04 a.m. on Wednesday armed with a sawed-off shotgun, a 9mm handgun, and 16 rounds of ammunition. Though Raynor’s path through the school is not yet known, police have confirmed that he first entered the principal’s office and the art room on the first floor before proceeding to the second floor.

  “We heard shots down the hallway,” said Ben Bacaro, 17, a senior who was in a physics classroom on the second floor. “I looked out the class window and saw someone in black walk by and our teacher told us to get under our desks.”

  Raynor killed 35 people and wounded 22 in a rampage that lasted less than one hour. The death toll was announced this morning, though investigators are still in the process of identifying the victims and notifying their families. Police are retracing Raynor’s movements through the school, a shootout that ended in his suicide. Raynor’s body was discovered late yesterday in the school’s gymnasium.

  “He walked into our classroom and there was just nothing,” said Kavita Thaman, 15, who was in a biology class on the second floor. “No anger, no laughter, just nothing. He stared at us blankly. Then he shot a boy next to me in the chest.”

  One hundred fifty law enforcement officials arrived on the scene at 9:22 a.m., along with five SWAT teams that later entered the school at approximately 10:09 a.m. after cell phone calls from inside the school reported that gunfire had stopped. FBI officials are also investigating the shooting and its cause. No motive has yet been determined though police are questioning Eric Greeley, 17, a close friend of Raynor’s who was not at school during the shooting.

  “So far he’s not a suspect but we have some questions,” said Midvale County Sheriff Albert Corcoran. “Right now we’re just trying to deal with the magnitude of what has occurred.”

  The scene outside of Lewis and Clark High School was one of pandemonium when students were finally evacuated late morning. Parents waited for news of their children while students and teachers streamed from the building, some stained with blood. Law enforcement officials later corralled parents to the local public library to wait for news of their children, and to make room at the high school for ongoing investigation. Each high school student signed a register as they left the building to account for their presence. Medical helicopters and ambulances arrived on the scene to take the wounded to nearby hospitals.

  Meanwhile, a search warrant has been authorized to investigate the suspect’s home.

  “It’s just unbelievable,” said Betsy Carraway, an employee in the school’s cafeteria who hid with coworkers in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer when she heard shots fired. “These are just kids. This is a school. This is meant to be a safe place.”

  Amid widespread news this week regarding the war in Iraq, President Bush held a press conference sendin
g prayers to the community of Lewis and Clark High School and the city of St. Louis. The rampage occurred just after the state of Missouri passed a concealed-carry bill this year, legislation that Governor Bob Holden vetoed before it was overridden by the Missouri General Assembly and Senate. Governor Holden held a press conference last night that called for prayer, care and healing in addition to continued consideration of gun responsibility, mentioning specifically the recent bill.