by Jessica Pack
“I bet a big purple bird laid this egg.” Robbie’s bright blue eyes danced with excitement as the story behind his discovery grew in his mind. He’d cradled the egg in his hand as though it were the baby bird he was imagining. “And then the world froze and all the dinosaurs died. This egg was frozen for so long that when people were born they just thought it was a rock, so they didn’t even try to eat it. One day the rock-bird will hatch and fly into the sky with huuuuge wings that will blow over trees when he moves them up and down ’cause it will make tornados.” Tornados had fascinated Robbie when he was little—she’d forgotten that. They’d once taped two water bottles together at the openings with some doohickey Robbie had brought home from school. They had filled one of the bottles with water. When you tilted the water into one bottle and then turned it upside down, a whirlpool formed in the center as the water drained into the empty bottle. Robbie had loved watching that funnel over and over and over again. He said he wished they’d put a tiny plastic cow in the bottle before they taped it up so he could watch it spin. Not that they’d had a tiny cow . . .
Amanda now turned the rock over in her hand, uplifted by the memory she’d matched to it. She’d originally thought Robbie had left the rock at the campground. A few weeks after the trip, however, she’d found it in his drawer when she was putting away laundry. She’d left the rock-egg in the nest of socks Robbie had made for it. She hadn’t seen it—or even thought about it—since. The rock went into her keeper box. It was a good memory; intact and happy without any possible indications of what may have been always lurking in the darker corners of her child’s mind.
Yearbooks went alongside the rock in the keeper box after she skimmed through them. She liked being reminded that Robbie had run cross-country. He’d wanted to join the shooting club that went to a rifle range a few times a month, but Amanda had said no. She hadn’t been raised with guns and didn’t want him to be either. The irony of this was not lost upon her. It wasn’t until his trial that she learned Robbie had become fascinated with guns in the years before the shooting—had been intrigued by them since childhood. He’d hidden his interest because he knew she wouldn’t like it. Kind of like he’d hidden his drug use and dabbling into terrorist watch group websites; she wouldn’t have liked that either. He’d tried to buy an automatic rifle of some sort the summer before but had been turned down because of his mental health history. So, he’d stolen an assault rifle from his roommate’s father instead—ex-military with a broken lock on his gun safe who had showed off his collection when Robbie had been invited over for dinner with the other guys who shared the apartment. If she hadn’t been so phobic about guns, would Robbie have developed a healthier relationship with firearms? Maybe if she’d taken him shooting or somehow shown him what damage guns were capable of he’d have . . . what? Known that his delusion was a delusion? Told her his plans so that she could get him the help she didn’t know he’d needed?
Robbie’s choices in high school activities had assured Amanda that he would continue to achieve and progress as he grew up. He’d been a good student; 3.5 GPA; he’d scored a 23 on his ACT test. He’d helped decorate for the Halloween dance even though he hadn’t gotten up the courage to ask anyone. He’d liked that one girl . . . Kaitlyn, but she was a year older and “totally out of my league, Mom, like, far, far outta there.” Amanda looked up Kaitlyn’s picture in Robbie’s sophomore yearbook and wondered what she was doing now. College graduate? Married? A mother? Did she have a son of her own she was teaching to go pee-pee in the toilet and imagining what kind of man he would grow up to become?
Surrounding the black-and-white photographs forever recording this time in the lives of Robbie and his classmates were notes from fellow students hastily written on the last day of school. Things like, I will miss you so much, Robbie. Thanks for making Mrs. Larkin’s class bearable, and Rob, let’s get together for a Halo-fest this summer!
None of those kids had ended up in prison for killing nine people and forever changing the lives of countless others. Justin Farnsworth—Robbie’s best friend in junior high—had gone on to dental school and recently returned to work in his father’s practice; there’d been an article about it in the Tribune last spring. Jannie Mendon, Robbie’s date for the junior prom, had gone to NYU on a dance scholarship. A few months into Robbie’s trial, Jannie and her parents had sold the prom photos to a tabloid. Nicole Carlisle—the girl Robbie had dated for six months during his senior year—was now Nicole Allen. She’d had two little kids with her when Amanda had seen her at the grocery store a few months ago. Amanda and Nicole’s eyes had met when they both entered opposite ends of the cereal aisle, but Nicole had looked away quickly and then casually turned her cart around as though she didn’t actually eat boxed cereal. After Robbie had broken up with her all those years ago, Nicole had come to the house and cried on Amanda’s shoulder. “I just love him so much,” Nicole had said with all the fervor and sincerity of a teenage girl desperately in love. “I know he’s the one for me; I just know it.”
How Amanda wished Robbie had been the one for Nicole . . . or Jannie . . . or even Kaitlyn. It wasn’t hard to picture Robbie married to a sweet girl like one of them, kissing her and the kids goodbye before he went to work, having cookouts in the backyard on weekends while he complained about the office or the car in need of an oil change or the crabgrass he couldn’t get out of his lawn. He could have been a great husband, couldn’t he? He could have remained balanced on his meds, found behavioral controls for his anxiety like running or not eating gluten. He could have been whole and real and good. Was it better or worse for Amanda to fantasize about the possibilities? Was she missing some kind of peace by believing he’d had a chance? A chance he had discarded.
Amanda moved on from the yearbooks to another stack of papers—college brochures, a manual for his Xbox, his acceptance letter to the University of Sioux Falls. He’d wanted to go out of state, but he didn’t get the hoped-for scholarships to any of those schools. Amanda had been secretly glad to have him closer to home. His freshman year at USF had been fun—parties and friends, a job at a burger joint; he’d even had a girlfriend for a few weeks, though Amanda had never met her because “we aren’t serious, Mom. It’s just a thing.” He didn’t do as well in his classes as he’d thought he would, and he wasn’t sleeping well. Toward the end of his second semester he told her that he was having really vivid dreams that sometimes felt so real it took him a while to really wake up from them in the mornings. Amanda ascribed it to stress. College wasn’t high school after all. Lots of kids struggled, and it was through adversity that we grow—Amanda’s dad had always said that, and she found herself repeating it to her adult children on a regular basis. Robbie moved home for the summer after his freshman year and worked on the landscape crew where he’d been employed since he was fifteen—he was good with his hands and after four years of grunt work was now helping to put in sprinkler systems.
His sophomore year at USF was when everything fell apart. He’d chosen a rigorous schedule and exhibited a new tension that surrounded him like a bubble. He was snappy with Amanda but would always apologize and admitted after a rough weekend that he wasn’t sleeping well again. Sometimes when he came home for an evening or the weekend to do laundry, she’d catch him staring into a corner of the room as though looking really hard at something. When she asked about it, he shook his head, returned to what he was doing, and said he was just thinking.
It had been easy to chalk up his behavior to the continued stress of hard classes and then the stress of not doing very well that first semester. He’d come home for Christmas sulky and irritable—staying in his room most of the time and playing video games. When he’d been living at home she hadn’t let him have a TV in his room, but he’d brought the TV and console from his dorm home with him at Christmas. Amanda didn’t want an argument when their relationship had already become so strained. A stressed-out son coming home for visits and playing video games in his room was better than him
not coming home at all.
Amanda had suggested that he talk to the therapist she’d seen after the divorce, but he’d shrugged off her suggestions. He was just tired, he said. College was hard. She suggested seeing a doctor; maybe he could take sleeping pills for a few weeks to get his circadian rhythms back to normal. He said he’d think about it. He didn’t always return her texts; he said he’d come to Sunday dinner, but then forget. Amanda tried not to take things personally, telling herself that Melissa had gone through the same sort of transition in college. He was an adult and gaining independence—it was fine.
Two months into the second semester of his sophomore year, Robbie called the school’s administration building to warn them about a bomb. He said he’d had a dream about it and if they didn’t listen, hundreds of students would be killed. The administration had taken the call as a terroristic threat and had him arrested. When Amanda was called out of class so she could go down to the police station, she’d had a weird vortex-like moment of believing they were talking about some other kid with the same name. Another Robert Mallorie at USF. Or perhaps someone had used Robbie’s name—that weird roommate who was obsessed with Call of Duty maybe. Her kid didn’t make terroristic threats. Robbie was in college, working hard and learning life lessons.
She’d left the vice principal in charge of her class and arrived at the police station to find Robbie pacing back and forth in one of the interview rooms, his hands in his hair as he mumbled about a conspiracy no one knew about except him. Didn’t they know how many people were going to die? Didn’t they see that their detaining him was exactly what Al-Qaeda wanted? She had watched him from behind the glass with shock and fear and wondered, Who is that guy? It was Robbie, but it . . . wasn’t.
What had happened?
What had she missed?
What did she need to do to fix it?
Robbie was admitted to the Avera Behavioral Health Unit instead of being taken to jail, and the charges were dropped, although he was put on probation with the university. Amanda hadn’t seen him again until he’d been stabilized with medication—the longest three days of her life up to that point. Little did she know how truly long a day could become. When she was finally able to visit, Robbie was so upset by what he’d done. He remembered it all happening but said it felt like it had been someone else. Like a movie he’d watched. The school dropped the charges, but he was put on academic suspension and moved back home so that he could get his feet underneath him, find the right medication, and deal with his embarrassment and depression. He’d gone to a therapist and a psychiatrist, who confirmed Avera’s initial diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Amanda knew what schizophrenia was, but the reality of its delusions—auditory and visual—and the paranoia they inspired was far different from anything she’d imagined. She’d never imagined that someone she loved—someone not only in her sphere of life, but her own child—could become one of those people who saw things that weren’t there, heard things no one else did, and felt watched and monitored by everyone from the next-door neighbor to the CIA. In the year that followed that first hospitalization, she became an expert thanks to the library and Google. She clung to the understanding that with medication and awareness, Robbie could still live a normal life. As it turned out, Dwight had a cousin, and probably an uncle, with the same diagnosis. Did it make her terrible to be glad it was on his side of the family? Dwight wouldn’t get into it with her; he just gave the history and then didn’t return her calls when she asked for more information. She remembered telling Robbie once when he was particularly down about everything that “This isn’t a death sentence, Robbie; it’s just something we need to deal with.” Not a death sentence. The memory made her shiver.
Robbie was diligent with his medications, which kept the delusions and his moods subdued but slowed him down in a lot of ways. Everything was harder than it had once been. He worked with the landscape crew again that summer, but Robbie wasn’t “easy” with the work. He got frustrated and was clumsy. He made mistakes, which made him even more frustrated. He got angry one day and smashed a sprinkler timer on a customer’s driveway while screaming obscenities. His boss called Amanda once they’d gotten Robbie to calm down to tell her that they would have to take the cost of it out of Robbie’s check. “You know I love Robbie, Amanda, but maybe this is a little too much pressure for him right now. I think it would be better if he took off these last few weeks before school starts. We can look at things again next summer.” Amanda had been humiliated on her son’s behalf, but downplayed it to Robbie. She worked it out with his boss to pay for the timer herself so that Robbie would still get his paycheck. They agreed to tell him that work was slow and they didn’t need him those last two weeks.
Robbie went back to school under probationary status that fall—determined to make up for the time he’d lost—but ended up with more failing grades than passing ones in the first semester. He had one more semester to get things right, but dropped out halfway through and moved to Omaha one weekend—one of the guys from the landscape crew had invited him to share an apartment. Amanda had been furious at such an irresponsible decision and refused to talk to him for three full weeks. Even when they made up—agreeing to disagree that this move was a good idea—he’d been defensive when she asked if he was taking his medication or experiencing any of his delusional manifestations. She learned later, during his trial, that he started drinking during that time and smoking various substances that were then not classified as illicit drugs—spice, black mamba, and other “herbal” blends that lots of kids were experimenting with. There were stories about these drugs causing psychosis in people without mental health issues.
Amanda had helped Robbie with his portion of the rent three different times because he wasn’t working regularly—just picking up short-term jobs through a temp agency. She talked to him about being responsible, and he would tell her about the interviews he had lined up. “I just need one more month, Mom. Then it’s all gonna fall into place.” She talked to him about being an advocate for his health and he said he would. She sent him articles about people with schizophrenia who lived normal lives so long as they stayed under the care of a good psychiatrist. He finally told her in an e-mail that he didn’t really have schizophrenia; whatever was going on with him was something else, and he was figuring things out. She’d called him as soon as she got the e-mail, but he didn’t answer. She left him messages, reminding him to take his meds and offering to come to Omaha and help him find a new doctor. He finally texted her back in all caps:
IM TAKIGN MY MEDS. BACK OFF!!!
It had been such a frustrating and frightening time for Amanda. Robbie was so different from the boy he’d been in high school. She read articles on parenting adult children and then more articles about parenting adult children with mental illness. She read about schizophrenics who had learned how to live without their meds and she hoped that maybe Robbie was like them. She talked to her pastor, who told her that Robbie had to make his own way in the world and maybe this was a case of her not cutting the apron strings. Amanda had never thought of herself as smothering, but maybe she was. It was a strange kind of relief to take the blame. If it was her fault, she could fix it. She watched A Beautiful Mind and cried, but also found hope. Robbie wasn’t bad; he was just sick. She prayed that he would find his way sooner rather than later.
Six months into this new phase of independence Amanda tried to convince herself was normal and nothing to freak out about, Robbie stole that assault rifle from his roommate’s father’s house. Three weeks later he drove past the Westroads Mall in Omaha on his way to Sioux Falls. He thought of the Cotton Mall as his mall and he believed it was the meeting place of a secret cell of Al-Qaeda. He had to get them before they could organize another attack like 9/11. His roommates later testified that he’d become obsessed with 9/11 and the first Westroads massacre—talking about the events incessantly and saying things like, “What if they’re connected?” and “Robert Hawkins wasn’t all tha
t different from me, ya know.” His roommates dealt with his odd moods by offering him another drink or smoke, which, they said, he never turned down. None of them were aware that he’d been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia or that he was supposed to take medication every day to keep his delusions in check. They thought his obsession was . . . funny. One of his roommates admitted to putting notes on Robbie’s car a few times saying that Al-Qaeda was strengthening in his area. He later told Robbie that he’d made it up, but Robbie hadn’t believed him. He was convinced there was a growing threat in Sioux Falls. It was a perfect cover—quiet Midwest town where nothing extreme ever happened—and even though he knew innocent people might die, someone had to take a stand, and God had somehow decided that Robbie was that someone.
Amanda had been filling his prescriptions every month and mailing them to him with little motivational quotes about determination and perseverance. The police found all the packages in his closet, unopened, after his arrest. Were all those notes now in an evidence locker somewhere?
