by Anne Valente
It was late. His entire family asleep. Slivers of moon fell through the slats of his closed blinds. Nick bent toward the screen of the computer, searching websites, finding nothing of substance. He looked up fire debris analysis. How investigators looked for accelerants in materials that were most flammable and absorbent. How they placed clothing, carpet, bits of cardboard in mason jars. How forensic chemists analyzed samples for evidence of ignition. How they distinguished accelerants from ignitable fluids, household substances that were combustible under normal circumstances. Forensic extraction. Mass spectrometry. A seeking of patterns, of ignitable liquid residues. A pattern Nick couldn’t find despite two hours of searching.
He pushed himself back from the desk. Closed his eyes, clenched the bridge of his nose. The moon pressed through the window, a ghost of light. He raised the blinds and looked to the sky, clear and remote. He rubbed a hand across his shirt and felt the tempest of the muscle beneath it, the same organ he’d tried to imagine as a living thing when he looked through the waiting room window at so many people seated in the cardiology ward. So many patients, so many strikes of the heart slackening out of tune. Nick wondered if a heart could physically break. He turned off the computer and let his palm rest against his chest. The same thumping of Sarah’s heart through her shirt, her body pressed against him on the couch. A muscle of ventricles and channels. The strongest organ in the body, none of them strong enough for this.
He looked to the moon. Wanted to ask it. What is happening here? He wanted to scream it. What the fuck is happening? He imagined a flame igniting the threads of a bed, licking across synthetic fiber, breaching the borders of a body. The permeability of skin, fingernails, and human hair and a line of teeth the first defenses before a flame bore down to bone, down to the faulted chambers of so many sorrowed hearts.
ZOLA STOOD ON the back porch, the house’s light spilling through the windows and across the wooden floorboards. She held Penelope clutched against her sweater, nose winking, fur soft against the brisk air. Zola watched points of stars emerge among the wash of dark, names of constellations she’d never learned. The backyard was quiet. Still. The hum of the television pushed through the closed windows behind her. Zola watched the sky and imagined a stretch of flames. She wondered what Christina had seen. How a house ignited. Christina in her bedroom less than two miles away, replaying again and again in her mind an explosion, an interrogation, a smashed window.
Zola heard the back door creak open, then footsteps. She felt a hand on her back.
The Great Square of Pegasus, her mother said, pointing. And up there, that small dot—that’s Andromeda.
How do you know all that?
I just do. Lots of years on this earth. Lots of gazing up and wondering.
Zola glanced at the telescope just beyond the porch, her mother’s favorite autumn tool. How it would stay in the yard until November’s first hard freeze.
But what made you want to learn it?
I don’t know. Curiosity. There’s so much about this world we don’t know.
And that’s a comfort to you?
Sometimes. Sometimes there’s peace in the mystery of it all.
Penelope fidgeted, nudged farther into her sweater. Zola wanted to stay hard, her body impermeable, skin tough as metal. She felt herself breaking regardless. Alisha’s house down the street just remains now of what a home had been. She wondered about peace. If Alisha’s parents had known it. If mystery was ever any comfort to them.
How’re you doing, baby?
I’m fine.
You say that, but I worry.
I’m as fine as I can be. I’m alive. What else do you want me to say?
You can talk to me, Zol.
I know.
I want to know you’re okay.
Zola looked to the sky. We learned in science class that the light we’re seeing up there is years old.
Look-back time, her mother said. The time it takes for light to travel that far. What we’re seeing right now is starlight from the past.
Zola felt her eyes spill over. Something sudden. Something silent, choking, breathless. She felt her mother’s arm enfold her shoulders, Penelope’s warmth against her chest. It’s okay, her mother said, it’s okay, just let it go. What Zola had told Christina. What she couldn’t tell herself. Let it go, her mother whispered and Zola closed her eyes against the stars and saw stained carpet and the rough texture of a book’s binding and the black thick of more blood than she’d ever seen.
I couldn’t help them, Zola said. I couldn’t do anything.
No one could. Zola. No one could. No one could do anything.
I was there. I could have.
You couldn’t. Zola. Her mother’s hand on her hair. You couldn’t.
There was a fist inside her chest. Squeezing. Squeezing so fucking hard and at last unfurling. Zola felt herself release into her mother’s arms. She felt herself small, nothing more than a seed beneath the sky’s swath of impenetrable dark. She curled her arms around Penelope and felt a pulse soft beneath her fur, the metronome of her rabbit heart.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE HUMAN HEART
THE HUMAN HEART: a muscular organ circuiting blood through the body, the approximate size of a closed hand. Pushes deoxygenated blood through the veins of the body to the lungs, then to the arteries bearing breath of the lung’s oxygen to tissues and cells. Rests in the thoracic cavity behind the sternum, its base apex just above the diaphragm, two-thirds of its mass tilted at an angle to the left side of the body. Surrounded by the pericardium, a fluid membrane: between the heart and everything else, a protective wall. Lubricates the beating organ, preventing friction. Maintains a margin of error, a hollow space for the heart to expand when too full.
Three layers of the heart: first, epicardium. The visceral layer of the pericardium sac. Then myocardium: a middle layer of muscle, cardiac tissue responsible for pumping blood. At last endocardium: the innermost layer, the most sensitive and most protected.
Keeps blood from clotting. Lines the inside of the heart.
Keeps a guarded hand, every tight-clutched secret.
Four chambers: right and left ventricle. Right and left atrium. A four-leaf clover.
The atria smaller, receptacles for veins pumping blood to the heart. Less work than the duties of ventricles sending blood from the heart to the body’s extremities, the ends of its own earth. The chambers of the right side smaller, a nearby circuit while the left pushes blood through the whole body. The reason for the left’s greater size. The reason for the heart mistaken always as a left-sided organ. The reason to hold a hand to the left breast when placing a palm above the heart.
Valves: prevent blood from backtracking, from getting lost in itself.
Atrioventricular valves: in the middle of the heart. Keep blood flowing solely from atria to ventricles, a one-way route.
Semilunar valves: between ventricles and the arteries that carry blood from the heart. Named for the moon, the crescent cusps that form their passage. Controls blood flow through the body, the same as a moon, manipulating the tide of our veins.
The heart: never at rest. Constantly in flux between systole and diastole, either pushing out or taking in. Cardiac cycle: the life span of a single heartbeat. A heartbeat in three phases the eternity of a second, the movement of blood from the ventricles then to the aorta and then to each chamber. Atrial systole, ventricular systole, relaxation. All four chambers filled. The heart sated.
A fraction of second, an infinity. The only moment the heart is alone.
What we know as a heartbeat: the cycle in sound, the first long lubb the closing of the atrioventricular valve, the staccatoed dubb the subsequent sealing of the semilunar valve. Heart rate: the number of heartbeats a body produces per minute, the average human heart pushing five liters every sixty seconds through a body at rest.
The heart sets its own rhythm. The heart beats a system of orchestration and conduction. The heart holds the wand above a philharmonic of o
rgans, a coordination of gesture and signals and synapses. The heart is electric, its own current, a system of impulses and conductive fire. The sinoatrial node: a cluster of cells, the metronome for an entire body’s circuitry. A node located in the wall of the right atrium that sets the pace, the rhythm of every blood cell. A node that screams its own ticking, I’m here, I’m here, or else a more piercing rhythm, You were, You were. A node partnered to the atrioventricular node, a cluster sharing the same right atrial wall. A receiver. A transmitted signal. Carried to cardiac muscles that contract in symphonic rhythm.
What blood bears: the mark of parents. The same code of cousins, sisters, brothers. The mark of children. The trail of their lives coiled inside the shell of our veins.
What blood bears: oxygen, glucose. Proteins and minerals and carbon.
What the heart bears: a system of pulleys. A complicated language of levers. An orchestration, a sonata singing inside a chamber. A fortress surrounded by a pericardial moat that if flooded will release, a hollow space.
LEWIS AND CLARK RESUMES AMID UNCERTAINTY
Students Return to Class; Fires Remain a Looming Question
MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2003
ST. LOUIS, MO—Despite concern over a rash of house fires that occurred throughout last week, killing three families of students who perished in the October 8 shooting at Lewis and Clark High School, school resumes today at Timber Creek Recreational Center, a district facility located two miles from Lewis and Clark. In order to maintain 1,120 hours of class time, the allotted amount required by the state of Missouri to complete an academic school year, the Midvale School District made the executive decision to return Lewis and Clark’s near-1,200 students to classrooms today. Security will be on hand to ensure that students make it safely to class and will remain on campus throughout the day in the form of Midvale County sheriff’s deputies and parent volunteers.
Police are still investigating the most recent fire, which occurred late Thursday night in the 2300 block of Conway Terrace in Midvale County. The home belonged to the family of Benji Ndolo, a freshman at Lewis and Clark whose life was claimed in the October 8 shooting. Benji’s parents, Andricia and Henrico Ndolo, 41 and 47, perished in the fire alongside their second son, Daniel Ndolo, 11. Midvale County police are working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine a cause for this incident as well as two other house fires that occurred last week, all afflicting the homes of student victims of the Lewis and Clark shooting. The Midvale County Police Department instated a mandatory curfew late last week due to the fires occurring after dark. Midvale County Sheriff Albert Corcoran issued a brief statement late Friday night that police are still investigating the possibility of an arsonist, though he declined to comment further on the cause of the fires. No additional fires occurred through the weekend.
Lewis and Clark students will return today to classes that resume the curriculum interrupted by last week’s shooting. Counselors will be on hand for students who need additional support. David Sykes, vice principal of Lewis and Clark High School, will assume the duties of principal in the wake of losing Principal Regina Jeffries in the shooting. Students who left backpacks and personal items in Lewis and Clark High School, which is still under police investigation, will receive new school supplies upon arrival at Timber Creek.
OUTLINE, GHOST
MONDAY MORNING CAME. We knew it would. A leaving of our homes for the doorstep of school past a weekend we thought might never end. A weekend of too-hot showers, blistered water to melt the week from our skin. Of tweezing eyebrows, shaving stubble, clipping nails, everything that didn’t belong. Of raking backyard piles, of standing beside dewed clumps of leaves. A weekend of the final funeral, Alyssa Carver, the last of our lost classmates to be buried. A service none of us gathered any last gasp of fortitude to attend late Sunday afternoon, one that followed a memorial that morning for the entire Ndolo family. Ceremonies we evaded to sit on our couches, to watch the start of the World Series, to see the light beyond the windows shift as dusk crept slowly down the sky. A weekend of inertia, a curfew imposed. A weekend of stealing apart from one another, a lack of phone calls, of burrowing in.
We awoke before dawn on Monday to our parents already seated at our kitchen tables, a night longer for them than our own insomnia, the giving away of their children back to the world. We sat beside them. We read the paper. We chewed the burnt crust of toast. We saw the name of our school written across the front page of the Post-Dispatch, a glaring limelight we never asked for or wanted. That we would return to school. News outlets squeezing what they could from a story that lacked sensation, no fires across the weekend, no reporters rushing to the scene. We learned from the paper that certain parents of our lost peers had formed an association regardless, a barrier against the possibility: Parents for Home Protection. Their homes a target. That some had joined, others choosing to be left to their own private sorrow, those who came together promising one another the certainty of a neighborhood watch, a promise taken into their own hands if everything else was beyond their control. We skimmed other headlines: new Al Jazeera tapes, allegedly from Osama bin Laden. A nuclear stand-down with North Korea, the potential withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from South Korea. Two games of the World Series, the score tied. Marlins: 1. Yankees: 1. And Iraq: Spain pledging $300 million toward the government’s reconstruction while a roadside attack in Fallujah left a convoy burning.
We pulled on sweaters. Hoodies. Jackets. Sneakers. We grabbed our textbooks, those of us who still had them, who hadn’t dropped them in hallways or beneath desks, who hadn’t left our belongings behind in lockers. We climbed into cars. We stepped onto buses. We trekked down the sidewalks of our neighborhoods, the trees almost bare above us, cold morning light winking down through the spindles of branches. We made our way to Timber Creek. Streets we knew, but to the parking lot of a new building. A building we only knew in other contexts, classrooms unimaginable apart from the D.A.R.E. workshops and peer counseling we once attended. We couldn’t fathom walking in, finding our new lockers, sitting down in classrooms that were never ours. We couldn’t envision listening to teachers talk of algebra formulas and the tilt of planets as if we never stepped away from Lewis and Clark, as if we could gather ourselves back together from empty halls, as if we could forget the sound of a sawed-off shotgun.
But we did. We closed our car doors. We let our shoes find the pavement beneath our cars, our bikes, the school bus steps. We found Timber Creek’s entrance guarded by sheriffs and volunteer parents. We were handed tote bags of complimentary supplies. Nylon sacks of pencils, erasers, lined notebooks, ballpoint pens. We passed beneath hand-painted banners: WELCOME BACK, LEWIS AND CLARK. Signs made by parents, friends of families, a community of volunteers. We stepped into the building. We found our lockers, assignments that had been emailed from the district. We hooked our jackets, thumbed through supplies, shed the weight of our bags. We took only what we needed. A literature book. A biology textbook lined in grocery paper. We passed down the hallways, the light harsh, the walls blank except for a United States map here and a bulletin board lined with autumn trim there, hangings placed in haste to make us feel at home.
Christina slipped through the hallways quickly, though she knew Ryan was still at home, knew he wouldn’t return to school for weeks and that a tutor would bring him assignments until he was healed. She wondered what her peers knew, what they’d heard of a broken window, whether everyone knew they’d broken up. She found her seat in a corner classroom where her advanced-algebra teacher, Mrs. Gornick, stood at the front blackboard writing out the quadratic formula. Minus B. The square root of B-squared minus 4ac, divided by 2a. Devon Leary entered the room and sat beside her, a football player who’d burned their crescent rolls in eighth-grade home economics and earned them a B-minus. He glanced at her across the aisle of desks. Hey, he said. His demeanor usually cocky but this morning his manner was somber, his eyes cast down. Christina acknowledged him and he turned away, loo
ked toward the front of the classroom in silence. Jen Chandra filed in. Charles Pool. No one spoke to anyone else.
Matt saw Tyler stooped above a drinking fountain, his mouth meeting a stream of water. Matt walked past with his English textbook clutched to his chest, hating himself for noticing the curve of Tyler’s throat and the way his eyelashes lilted above the fountain. He pressed himself into his English classroom, sterile and hollow, its walls fluorescent white. Mrs. Brooks sat at the front of the room, glancing at each student who passed through the door. Susan Waterson. Jeremy Lechaux. So many people, so many peers who had separate memories of fleeing a school, different images they worried in their brains like a bead. Matt thought of the profile he’d written of Jacob Jensen. He hadn’t spoken to Jacob in years despite still knowing the schedule of his high school classes, a far-flung supergiant, knew it in the way that amateur astronomers knew constellations and phases of the moon. He knew Jacob had been in trigonometry class, second period, though he knew nothing else of Caleb’s path.
