by Anne Valente
Matt stood near Christina between his parents, each holding a hand across his shoulders. He looked at Christina and couldn’t imagine saying it: that their task was to write and that they’d both fail to acknowledge it. He knew Nick was home free, that there was no research for a vigil but that he and Christina, the junior staff writers, should be taking notes if nothing else. He hadn’t brought a pen. No paper. He’d brought only the vast ocean of his own brain filled with Caroline Black and her vacant eyes and Tyler fleeing down the hallway and Tyler nowhere on the library lawn. He glanced around the crowd and saw Russ Hendricks, Alexis Thurber’s boyfriend. Another junior. His face a steady wall of stoicism though Matt knew he must have been breathless. He looked for Zola, unable to find her. He wondered if she’d brought her camera, if there would ever be a right time to photograph grief.
Zola stood at the edge of the crowd, eyes closed, beside her mother, who held an arm around her, a grip palpable in the strain of her fingers. She’d left her Pentax manual at home, a gift her mother had bought for her when she joined the yearbook staff freshman year, a camera Zola knew was discarded somewhere on the carpet of her bedroom floor. There was nothing here. Nothing at all on this peopled lawn to commit to memory. Only faces illumined in light, tear-dried cheeks, so many parents and family members constellated together in the darkening night. Zola spied Eric Greeley, also standing at the perimeter of the gathering, wiping his nose not from crying but from the lingering remains of a cold, Zola knew from the newspaper. She couldn’t remember any interaction she’d ever had with him to know whether he’d been lying to the police or not, another face in the dense crowd of Lewis and Clark’s thronged mass of teenagers, so many faces she’d never noticed until they became pixels in the paper, photographs of students fleeing school. Eric stood alone in a gray hooded sweatshirt, the profile of his face blank beneath the jersey-knit covering, a face he hid away from the crowd though he was deemed not guilty or responsible, a grieving he came to shed alongside everyone else.
We listened as people rose before the crowd, a gathering of hundreds standing around the row of white signs beneath a light-stolen sky disseminating prayers and hymns through the air, a cool that descended as stars slowly appeared. Alisha Trenway’s father spoke. Elise Nguyen’s mother. Then Josh Zimmerman’s sister, a senior who’d hid in the girls’ locker room, a choice we imagined she crucified herself for in hiding somewhere away from her brother, a sophomore, where she could not protect him. Mr. Bennington’s partner, through rasping breath: Above all, love one another. Benji Ndolo’s mother, midway through speaking, lost her composure and stepped away from the crowd. And the minister from the United Methodist Church on Bethel Road, who did not have children at Lewis and Clark but who knew some of the victims and their families from his congregation, spoke as if shedding great wisdom: Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with truth. He looked out across the crowd, a gathering of faces tinged by candlelight. Love is patient, he whispered to all of us. Love is kind.
We considered love. What was kind in it. What love meant if it meant to kill. What would move a boy to enter the school’s doors and take everything away, so many classmates and teachers and what love had meant for them, what love became for us when we saw them splayed across the floor soaked in blood and bullet and bone. We listened to the minister regardless upon the darkened lawn of a library where so many of us had once gone for summer reading and story hour. A library that had become a holding pen for fear, for parents not knowing if they’d ever see their children again. When the minister lifted his candle, we lifted ours. We raised our candles to the Midwestern sky, a span of black with only the faint hint of stars. We watched the night fill with a million points of light, so much light that our vision flared in burned afterimage when we looked away.
We glanced across the crowd. Crisp air, the scent of flame and melting wax. We averted our eyes from the faces of so many parents of twenty-eight students, their cheeks streaked with candlelight and grief. We recognized parents who had volunteered, who had baked cupcakes, who had once led Girl Scouts and coached Little League, who had overseen field trips to the St. Louis Zoo. Alyssa Carver’s mother. Missy Hoffman’s parents, turned quietly into one other. Greg Alexander’s father, who had chaperoned the Homecoming dance in the gymnasium our freshman year. And Caroline Black’s parents, their eyes closed, their mouths moving softly in prayer.
Matt watched them across the crowd, their daughter engraved into the folds of his memory, an image that had kept him awake and staring out his bedroom window across the past three nights. He’d watched the moon to block out her body. He had not slept since Tuesday night. He looked at her parents standing in the crowd and felt the weight of his mother’s hand upon his shoulders and felt his knees dissolve though he managed to stay standing. He scanned the crowd. He knew Tyler wasn’t anywhere in the cluster of faces but he looked for the mohawked tuft of his hair poking up from the crowd and couldn’t find him, hadn’t spoken to him, hadn’t heard from him at all since they’d stepped from the second-floor bathroom and fled.
The vigil lingered after the minister spoke, then thinned, then gradually began to disperse entirely. Christina stood beside the white signs with her father and brother, signs illumined by the faint glow of the distant moon. She closed her eyes and prayed to believe in prayer for the list of names and bore silent gratitude to no God in particular that Ryan Hansen’s name was not among them, even if she hadn’t seen him since he entered the hospital. Nick found Sarah’s mother in the diluted crowd and let her gather him in an embrace, her hands gripping his sleeve, a mother who had come in her daughter’s stead while Sarah’s father stayed home. Zola watched Eric Greeley at the periphery, how he gazed at the white signs and how in profile his eyes glistened wet. She watched him turn away alone, heading down the dark sidewalk until he disappeared.
Candles: extinguished and kept, tucked away into purses and backpacks. Cheeks kissed. Chests crossed. Carnations and lilies and small teddy bears left beside still-glowing tea lights. Parents holding one another. Parents holding their teenagers. Parents gathering their children all around them, constellations of families moving down the sidewalk toward the haven of their cars.
In the backseat on the way home, Nick leaned his forehead against the glass of the car window and watched the ink-spill of the Midwestern sky. He thought of Sarah at home, surely curled up in the twin bed where she’d tried so many times to make him give in at last, a roll of condoms tucked into her bedside drawer. He thought of Kelly Washington, his first crush. How he’d never once spoken to her despite admiring her from afar. How he thought her face was beautiful in kindergarten beneath a shock of dark hair and small barrettes and how he knew she’d joined the cheerleading squad at Lewis and Clark and how her older brother had been at the vigil alongside a woman who must have been Kelly’s mother. How both of them looked too stunned to weep.
In the passenger seat of her father’s Ford Taurus, Christina reclined the chair and leaned her forearm across her eyes, her brother in the backseat. Her father stayed quiet and in the silence she thought of Elise Nguyen, her mother and father and sister at the vigil, how they’d come so often to swim meets and cheered from the sidelines, how they were surely driving home to the echoed walls of an empty house. She thought of Mr. Bennington, how she’d been only fourteen when he taught her about echolocation, how bats and dolphins find one another across spans of dark too wide to imagine and how this had comforted her somehow, her parents just divorced, making one’s way home without light. How Mr. Bennington would not, his name etched into the starkness of a white sign, his partner alone at the vigil and straining to speak. How Mr. Bennington had disappeared from the earth only yards away from where she’d crouched in French class immobile beneath a desk, as useless to him sputtering on the library floor down the hall as she was to Ryan hidden in the stalls of the boys’ locker room.
Zola moved down the street on foot with her mother, their house close enough to walk. Zola’s mo
ther ran her hand down Zola’s back, a comforting weight, and pointed her other hand to the sky, the jagged line of Cassiopeia. Her mother knew the stars, a backyard astronomer, her telescope standing firmly in the grass every autumn until the first snowfall of the year. Her mother whispered Andromeda and Cepheus, two stars that flanked the constellation above them. She said Cassiopeia would be brightest in November. Zola watched the stars above her so she would not have to look at Alisha Trenway’s house as they passed it on the way back to their own, a house of darkened windows and drawn shades that had not been raised since Wednesday.
Matt rode in the front seat of his parents’ Chevy Impala, buckled on the upholstered bench between them though the backseat was empty and full of room. His mother drove and his father sat with his arm tucked around him, a relief Matt leaned into as he watched the October landscape pass through the panorama of the windshield. He tried to latch his brain on to the view but saw the athletic calves of Jacob Jensen instead. Calves that held no sexual charge, no allure but only a symbol of lack. Of energy, of force, what could no longer move them. Matt closed his eyes to erase them and imagined Tyler instead. Nights that had been theirs alone across the summer, the headlights of his Fiesta hatchback cutting lines through the dark and low fog. The sun gone, the heat still heavy. Beyond the movie theater’s projection booth, a summer of late-night drives, the radio droning, their speed whipping hot air through the car’s open windows. The heat had been a blanket. Thick and warm. As hot as the hood of his car once they’d parked, the engine calming down, a ghost of heat pooling beneath its surface as Matt pushed Tyler back against the metal and ran a hand beneath his shirt and held the other against his face. He opened his eyes. The warmth of the engine. How quickly it became the heat of Caroline’s blood still warm on the carpet. And Caroline’s parents. He didn’t want to think it but couldn’t stop himself: what blankness they must have returned home to as he rode through the streets safe between his parents, a home where the walls rang silent and still and where a bedroom’s emptiness pushed into them like a dagger.
And though his eyelids sagged with the deprivation of sleep, he lay awake that night in his basement bedroom and watched a water stain at the edge of the ceiling. Caroline’s blood soaking the carpet, his clothes. Her gaze fixed. Her body slumped, a position he’d seen that her parents had been spared, a mercy. One that flamed guilt through him, spreading across his limbs like a growing fever. A strange intimacy. Something awful. Something he never should have seen. Matt watched the stain, his eyes open so they wouldn’t see her body when he closed them. He fell asleep anyway sometime after 4 A.M. when the shade of his ceiling began to grow lighter by degree, only several hours of reprieve from a world that had pulled away what grounding he knew, a world that shifted again in the morning when he awoke to the news that Caroline Black’s home had disintegrated in the night, that her parents standing bowed into one another at the vigil had gone home and closed their doors and turned off the lights and burned.
HOUSE FIRE KILLS TWO
Parents of Slain Lewis and Clark Teen Found in Home
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2003
ST. LOUIS, MO—Early Sunday morning, just hours after a community-wide vigil was held at the Midvale County Public Library for the victims of Wednesday’s shooting at Lewis and Clark High School, a house fire claimed two lives within the 1300 block of Westminster Court in Midvale County. Firefighters responded at 3:38 a.m. Sunday morning and observed flames engulfing the two-story residence. The blaze, which required at least 50 fire personnel, including police officials from nearby Hamilton County, was finally extinguished around 6 a.m.
According to police officials, the victims have been identified as Jean Black, 45, and Arthur Black, 47, the parents of Caroline Black, 16, who was killed in the Lewis and Clark shooting.
“We just can’t believe it,” said Janet Wallace, a neighbor who stood on her porch with her two toddlers as officials doused the flames. “First the school and now this. It’s inconceivable. They were all such good people, the two of them and their daughter. This week has been devastating for all of us.”
As of sunrise this morning, firefighters and police officials were combing through the debris in search of clues. Though foul play is not suspected, investigators hope to gather a clearer picture of what caused the fire. No other residents were found in the home, and neighbors heard no signs of struggle within the house.
“The streets were silent last night, especially in light of the vigil,” said Jason Novitsky, a next-door neighbor, whose daughter is a freshman at Lewis and Clark. “We just came home and went to bed and heard nothing until the sirens came.”
Officials say that another neighbor, David Ramos, first saw the smoke and called 911.
“I couldn’t sleep,” said Ramos. “You know, with these kids and the school. I happened to look out the window and saw smoke coming off the roof.”
Initial examination from fire officials indicates that the fire began on the second floor. The cause is under investigation.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF WHAT WAS LOST (OR, EVERYTHING WE IMAGINED)
PICTURE FRAMES. PHOTO albums. Family portraits, snapshots, matte prints.
Knit blankets. Embroidery. Pillowcases and sheets.
Dishes. Wedding china. Flatware. Antique silver, ladles, cutting boards, spoons. Magnets collected from family travels: Nashville. Yellowstone. Bar Harbor, Maine. Sarasota, Myrtle Beach, the Wisconsin Dells, the Grand Canyon.
A pantry of boxed cereal, dried pasta. Canned tomatoes and beans and beets. A spice rack of cinnamon, curry powder, turmeric, paprika. A refrigerator impervious to burning, left standing and full of half-spoiled milk, plain yogurt, hardened cheese, a half-dozen mottled eggs. Wilting lettuce, jars of mayonnaise and mustard and pickles, apples and potatoes and pears still intact, untouched by flame. Furniture: coffee tables. Couches. The recliner where Caroline watched Merry Melodies after school in fourth grade. Inherited side tables and buffets passed down from grandparents, great-grandparents. Bookcases full of children’s books, reference books, classics of literature, Caroline’s baby book. A catalog of firsts: first smile, first steps, first words (Mama? Mine?), first day of preschool. Drapes, curtains, window blinds, doorknobs. Light fixtures and lightbulbs, a crackling hiss as their glass heated and exploded. Ironing board. So many clothes. Stockings, leggings, wool socks, corduroy pants, jeans, sweatpants, collared shirts, a cacophony of tees gathered from sporting events, thrift stores, marathons, vacations. Sports sweatshirts: Cardinals baseball. Rams football, the team still so new. Knit hats and mittens and gloves, scarves and earmuffs and swimsuits and beach towels. Electronics: a television, a camcorder, family videos, old filmstrips. Caroline’s parents on their wedding day: a brief Super 8 film, one minute and fifty-three seconds long, a film Caroline had seen twice in her life when her father draped a white sheet against a wall and her mother dragged the projector down from the attic. Videos of Caroline: violin recitals, school plays, freshman year Homecoming with her girlfriends, all of them giggling in the thin sunlight of the front yard. A stereo and receiver, two tall speakers, a record player and a six-disk CD changer. A stack of LPs that Caroline’s parents collected through college: the Moody Blues, the Beatles, Elton John, Janis Joplin. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Are You Experienced?, Beggars Banquet, Surrealistic Pillow, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, what Caroline listened to over and over again the year she turned thirteen to find a way to play it backward, to hear the coded messages, to discover in the ridged grooves of spinning vinyl whether Paul McCartney’s death had been wrongly foretold. CDs and cassettes, the first Caroline bought with her own allowance at the end of elementary school. Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton. Albums she hid in a box beneath her bed. Also in boxes: folded notes, movie ticket stubs, bottle caps, blown-out birthday candles, school photos. Diaries with tiny keys, journals of drawings, sketches of teachers and peers and turning maples beyond the classroom window. A miniature box of porcelain kittens, tiny owls, small
books, a minuscule gumball machine. A jewelry box: emerald earrings. Collected necklaces. Small pins gathered on family vacations and from childhood, pins of Cabbage Patch Kids and Michael Jackson’s Captain EO. Textbooks wrapped in brown grocery bags. Tarot cards. A Ouija board slid beneath the bed. Posters of movies and Monet paintings and a vintage cover of Catcher in the Rye. Posters adhered to the wall that went up like kindling.
WHERE WE BEGAN
WE HAVE ARCHIVED so many articles: these, the first. The first printed that week and the first we saved, now tattered and browning in the boxed corners of our basements. We have gathered newspaper articles and reports and photographs, an assemblage of texts meant to reconstruct a whole. Meant to guide us, what task of journalism we took on as our own beyond the static linearity of a yearbook, a year that lost us in the end to some understood register of shared history. We began to collect after the first fire. After the disaster of an entire high school. We knew only to act, to do something, to do what we knew how to do by saving articles and timelines, clippings hoarded in jagged newsprint.
