Silent Alarm

by Jennifer Banash

  Suddenly, I felt the molecules of air surrounding my body rearrange themselves in a cool rush, the shadow falling abruptly away. Even before I opened my eyes, I knew he was gone. I watched his back as he walked away, striding purposefully toward the table I’d hidden under just minutes before. I could hear Miranda’s cries intensify as he came closer, advancing. He walked briskly, almost passing her before he turned around, bending at the waist and peering under the table. Miranda began to scream helplessly then. I was aware that my hands were shaking, that I was cold, so cold it felt as if I might never be warm again.

  “What’s up?” I heard him say in the seconds before the gun went off, his voice taunting and menacing, belying those innocent words. The screaming abruptly stopped, the wail of an animal cut short. If you had asked me to sit still, or even to get up and run, I couldn’t have done it. At some point soon after, he must’ve left the library, the double doors clanging noisily behind him. I stayed where I was, rocking back and forth as if to put myself to sleep, my hands clutching my head. A lullaby my mother had once sung to me before bed repeated itself over and over in my brain. Safe and sound. Safe and sound. Go to sleep, you little baby . . . There was peace in the repetition of words, the sameness of the syllables. Then there were hands on my body lifting me up, voices cooing into my deafened ears, smoothing my clothes. I pulled away with a violent jerk, the sound finally released from my throat in a long howl that rose steadily up and into the hollowness of the room. The light blue hoodie and jeans I wore that day were drenched, the blood beginning to dry, stiffening the fabric against my skin. That night when I sat down to brush my hair, I would find tiny pieces of bone matted in the long strands.

  After leaving the library, my brother walked calmly through the quad, stopping in a deserted science lab, shutting the door behind him. I imagine him waiting for a long moment, the clock ticking on the wall, before resting the long barrel of the gun against his forehead and pulling the trigger. I can almost picture the explosion, the force that propelled him backward so that he fell into a desk, then hit the floor, his blood discoloring the pale yellow linoleum in a dirty smear. By the time the SWAT team busted through the doors of the school (he had secured them with bicycle locks), my brother had killed fifteen people. His face would be plastered across the front page of every newspaper in the country, that half smile I knew so well grinning out from the stark pages, my fingers smeared with ink as I sifted through the wreckage.

  High school senior kills 15 in Plainewood shooting

  Plainewood, Wisconsin— A student killed 15 people and injured 4 in a deadly shooting yesterday at Plainewood High School. Police have confirmed that the shooter, Lucas David Aronson, 18, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  A student who witnessed the attack said he heard gunshots coming from the parking lot before seeing Aronson entering the library, where he proceeded to open fire.

  FBI officials would not comment on a motive. And Plainewood Police said authorities “have much work to do yet” in their investigation of the shooting, which sent students running for their lives during their lunch hour at 1,200-student Plainewood High.

  “Everybody just took off,” said 17-year-old Melanie Walker, who was studying in a classroom when she heard shots fired. “We were all running and screaming down the hallway.”

  Heather Adams, 17, said she was in the library when she saw Aronson enter and begin shooting. She said she and several other students immediately ran outside, while others locked themselves in a teachers’ lounge.

  Classmates and residents described Aronson as a normal boy who excelled in school and enjoyed skateboarding.

  Bill Dunne, a next-door neighbor, said he was “stunned,” to hear of Aronson’s involvement in the Wednesday shooting, describing Aronson as “an average boy, pretty quiet.”

  “The boy was a senior, had gotten into a good college. He had everything going for him,” Dunne said. Reportedly, some months prior to the shooting, Aronson had been accepted to MIT, where he planned to study biochemistry.

  Equally stunned are Aronson’s classmates.

  Eighteen-year-old Christa Conners, a senior at Plaineville High School, said that Aronson was known for his willingness to counsel others. “He always had time to listen,” Conners stated. When asked about bullying as a possible motive, Conners stated that as far as she knew, “Luke was never made fun of or bullied. He didn’t talk a lot in class, but nobody picked on him.”

  “Even though he was kind of quiet, he still had friends,” said Tyler Rosen, 16.

  Plainewood High School principal David Clarke, who was injured in the attack, released a statement expressing the administration’s “deep grief for the victims and survivors of this horrific event,” and vowed to “bring the community back together swiftly and securely.”

  On Friday, teachers and administration will return to the school for the first time since yesterday’s fatal shooting, with grief counselors on hand. Students and parents are urged to return to the school on Monday, March 16th for counseling, with classes set to resume after the spring break holiday on April 6th.

  Aronson is survived by his parents and a sister, 17.

  ONE

  “It’s the human’s nature to survive,

  Welcome to the living.”

  —ALICE ANDERSON, “HUMAN NATURE”

  ONE

  There’s blood under my nails.

  No matter how many showers I take, how much I scrub with a coarse brush, the bristles scouring the damp pads of my fingers, I can’t get them clean. I hold my hands up to the light and scrutinize them, squinting my eyes, bringing them to my nose, my stomach recoiling at the coppery stink I imagine still permeates my chapped flesh. In spite of all of my efforts there remains a faint line embedded beneath each nail. A shadow.

  I hear muffled noises from outside the house, and I walk to my window, pull the curtains back. Reporters stand there patiently, lying in wait, their hulking white news vans parked at the curb. I can feel their eyes sweeping the perimeter of the house, searching for signs of life, movement, a story. One woman lights a cigarette, and as she draws the smoke into her lungs, a look of relief falls across her face, her hair shellacked into a dark helmet. I close the curtains and look around. My room is the same: pale blue walls the washed-out hue of skim milk, a mirrored vanity table with spindly wooden legs that used to belong to my grandmother, a pair of long windows that look over the sloping front yard. My violin case propped at the foot of my bed like a discarded doll. But everything is different. I open the case, still imagining that it is streaked with blood and other bodily fluids I don’t want to think about, and pull my violin from the velvet interior, my fingers skidding over the well-oiled mahogany. I run my hands over the satiny wood, the tips of my fingers hardened and rough, before tucking it back in the case where it will be safe, where it can sleep and forget.

  I should be practicing now, warming up with scales in the music room at school, light falling weakly through the dusty blinds, the bow moving effortlessly in my hands. Afterward, gulping down a carton of orange juice in the cafeteria before first track, the shreds of sweet pulp tickling the inside of my cheeks, the halls, redolent of floor wax, strong, musky perfume, and the chemical stench of Dry-Erase markers. My face staring back at me in the girls’ bathroom mirror, hurriedly brushing my hair before class—eyes the color of hot cocoa, a pointed chin, two dark slashes for eyebrows, the brush caught in my straight sandy hair.

  I walk downstairs, pulling my hoodie around me in the morning chill. My feet are bare and cold on the polished wood floors. What do people do in the morning? I wonder as I descend, my legs moving mechanically. Without school, time seems slowed down, heavy and thick as a snowdrift. Just yesterday I was rummaging through the kitchen in the early morning light, grabbing a banana from a bowl on the kitchen counter, Luke waiting impatiently in the driveway, car keys jangling against his leg—but it already seems
lost in the distance. Some people won’t be walking downstairs today, I think, or eating anything at all. Some people won’t ever walk again, and you know whose fault that is, don’t you? Miranda’s face flashes in front of my eyes. I stop at the bottom, my hand on the banister, the scent of freshly brewed coffee drifting through the air. Even though I’m not particularly hungry, I want the normalcy of routine, an illusion of order. Breakfast, I tell myself firmly, putting one foot in front of the other. You should eat breakfast.

  My mother sits at the kitchen table, engulfed in a sea of newsprint, her eyes staring straight ahead. The phone, I notice, is placed on the countertop, off the hook. She’s wearing the blue terry-cloth robe my dad gave her for Christmas years ago, the fabric now worn into softness. Her golden hair is matted in the back, one piece sticking up crazily on top. She doesn’t hear me come in, and when I touch her, she jumps, grabbing my arm. When she tilts her face up to look at me, there are shadows beneath her eyes, deep craters. In her heart-shaped face, I see my own wide-set eyes, though Luke got her dimple, the slight indentation on her left cheek that only appears when she smiles.

  “Alys! You startled me.” She looks away before noticing the newspapers cluttering the table, the mess of them. Words swim before my eyes in a tangle of black and white. Shooter. Casualties. Unstable. Tragedy. Rifle. I take a deep breath in and hold it, a sharp pain filling my lungs. She pulls the newspapers toward herself, crumpling them, and the sound it makes is like fire, my nerves standing on end. She gathers up the papers in her arms and walks over to the kitchen counter, stowing them there, out of reach.

  “Let me make you something to eat.” She turns around, her eyes unnaturally bright, glittering from lack of sleep. There is a cadence to her voice I haven’t heard before, a kind of superficial cheerfulness. For the record, my mother is a lot of things, but cheerful isn’t generally one of them. She works at an art gallery and makes pots and small sculptures in her studio in the basement in her spare time, glazing them in metallic bronzes and cloudy grays. She devours thrillers with hammers and sickles on the covers and is partial to boring experimental foreign films with endless subtitles. “Cheerful” is not generally on her radar. When my parents met, they were college students at the University of Chicago, spending all their time at weird-ass pseudo-hippie gatherings where people sat around in parks doing lots of drugs and making out with each other, even though the sixties were long over. They should’ve been listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, hanging out in coffeehouses dressed in plaid, ogling pictures of Kate Moss modeling the latest in heroin chic. Instead they organized protests against major corporations until they were chased from the sidewalks like bits of paper blown by the wind. It sounds stupid now, but when I look at the old pictures of them my mother keeps tucked away in her underwear drawer, patched and faded jeans sliding down her skinny hips, my father wrapped in some kind of crazy wool poncho, his dark hair longer than my own, I almost believe that they’re going to end up on a farm somewhere, growing vegetables and baking their own bread, a merry band of weirdos sharing their ramshackle Victorian, the paint peeling in a shower of flakes like so much dead skin. Pots of vegetable chili cooking on the stove, and the sweet clucking of chickens in the yard.

  But my dad gave all of that up for the dream of a white picket fence and the financial security of a corporate job—something my mother never quite forgave him for. Moving to Plainewood from Chicago was just about the worst thing that has ever happened to her, and she never gets tired of telling us so. “We live in a town where I sell paintings of kittens, for God’s sake,” she’ll grumble after a particularly bad day at work. My dad works as an insurance adjuster, the guy people call when their roofs cave in or their houses burn to white-hot cinders. Most of the time, he sits in his office, hunched over a calculator, spreadsheets and cost analysis reports littered across his desk. Rows of suits line the walls of his closet, his threadbare jeans and poncho thrown in the trash long ago. In spite of the bleakness of his job, the floods, the fires, the acts of God that can tear a house down to its very foundation, my father is unremittingly cheerful—something that irritates my mother to no end. “How can you do what you do and be happy?” she’ll mutter as she stalks around the kitchen, banging cabinets and pulling a dense block of cheese from the fridge for a makeshift dinner. “Who the hell did I marry?” is another one she’s fond of lobbing out as she exits a room, the smell of turpentine trailing her like vapor. I watch as she pulls open the cupboard now, her hand hovering over a box of cereal.

  I think of the myriad possibilities waiting patiently to be consumed: the bagels on the counter, the cartons of peach and strawberry yogurt in the fridge, the cereal my mother is about to pull from its shelf, and bile rises in my throat. How can I go through the mindless act of chewing and swallowing like it’s just a normal day when everything’s been burned to ashes? I sit down, one hand over my mouth.

  “Alys?” My mother hurries over and places one hand on my forehead as if to check for fever. She tries to pull me to her, but I am stone. Immovable. My mother does not fuss, as a rule, but now she is all over me. “You didn’t eat last night, did you?”

  “Nobody did,” I mumble as her face falls slightly, tears welling up in her eyes. “I told you. I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ll feel better if you eat something.” My mother is always happiest whenever she has a project, and she moves purposefully over to the refrigerator and pulls out a loaf of bread. The last time she made me breakfast, I was probably six. I notice her hands are trembling slightly, a low-grade tremor. You’ll feel better. As if something as small as eating could fix anything at all. I watch, hypnotized by the banality of toast as she places two slices of bread in the oven and shuts the door, pulls the butter from the fridge so it can soften on the counter. My mother doesn’t believe in toasters—she thinks they’re a waste of money.

  “Can I have some coffee?” I want to feel the cup in my hand, the heat burning my palms, the solid heft of the porcelain.

  “You know how I feel about you drinking coffee. It stunts your growth.”

  I’m five eleven. Without coffee, I would be the Jolly Green Giant. I already tower over most of the guys in my class, which is slightly humiliating. I look out the kitchen window at the bare branches of trees, a light rain trickling down from the sky. I wish things could go back to the way they were yesterday, Luke telling me to hurry up, Mom yelling from her studio for us to have a good day, Dad talking on the phone to some agitated client before he left for work, his voice calming as a tranquilizer. Not my mother bustling around as if she knows what she’s doing when everything has so obviously fallen apart. Not this awful silence we have to fill with toast and morning conversation. Not this.

  “We’ll need to get you a dress,” she says casually, as if we’re talking about shopping for the prom. “The service is tomorrow. We can go to the mall later. In Madison.”

  I notice that she doesn’t say the word funeral, though she and I both know this is exactly what she means. A dress. A stupid black dress I will wear once, and then stuff in the garbage cans out back when no one is looking. A dress I would rather douse in gasoline and light on fire than ever see again. I should be shopping for bikinis for the trip to Maui we were supposed to be taking next week, staring at my body in the full-length mirrors of the dressing room with a combination of fascination and dismay, my legs long and too skinny, my chest annoyingly flat. Perusing the aisles of Ray’s Drugs in search of the one self-tanner that smelled like coconuts and somehow magically enabled my dead-white skin to develop a burnished glow that whispered of exotic locales. Bali. Antigua. Bora Bora brown.

  “Is that . . . necessary?” I say slowly.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” She stops and stares at me, holding a knife in one hand like a talisman, her face impassive but her eyes flashing a warning. Danger.

  Because there is a group of rabid reporters camped out on our doorstep, waiting for us to so much as
stick a toe out the front door? Because Luke killed fifteen people? Because leaving the house right now to go anywhere makes me feel like I’m going to die?

  “Your entire wardrobe consists of sweats and jeans with holes in them, so yes, Alys, I think it’s necessary.” She puts a yellow plate with toast cut into precise triangles down on the table in a sharp clatter—I get it: You will eat this toast—and sits down in a chair next to me. The smell turns my stomach, but I force myself to pick up a slice, to consider the tiny bubbles of air in the dough before bringing it to my mouth and taking a bite. The bread has no taste whatsoever, despite being liberally spread with butter, and I chew mechanically, then swallow, a lump sticking in my throat.

  “Where’s Dad?” I ask, taking another bite.

  My mother looks away, her expression distant.

  “He got up early—to go down to the hospital, to see your brother’s . . .”

  The hospital is for sick people. Dead.

  She doesn’t finish the sentence. Can’t.

  “Anyway. He’s resting upstairs now.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  She looks at me wearily, and for the first time I notice the sharp lines around her mouth and eyes. My mother has always been one of those moms who can pass for ten years younger than she really is. People are forever commenting on it, which gets kind of annoying, if you want to know the truth. Now, for the first time I can remember, she looks old, worn-out, her face crumpling in on itself.