by Sid Holt
After she had been shot, she told Bell, she was “basically mixed up—confused about life in general.” Only once she started reading the Bible in the years that followed had she found some peace. Scripture, she explained, “started effecting a lot of changes in my life.” She had found a group of Seventh-day Adventists who worked as medical missionaries around Loveland, where they tried “to help other young people physically, mentally, and spiritually,” she said. Her time there, immersed in nature and the gospel, had been restorative. “I’m so thankful,” she told Bell before she hung up. “I’m glad to be alive.”
Claire had spent five years living and working at the Eden Valley Institute, a spiritual retreat accessible only by unpaved roads and bounded by jaw-dropping panoramas of the snow-capped Rockies. Its clean-living, Adventist doctrine rejected not just smoking, drinking, and sex outside marriage but also the distractions of popular culture. In an era defined by the loosening of social mores, it was a monastic existence; Claire did not watch the evening news, listen to the radio, or go to the movie theater. While some women worked on the institute’s farm, which yielded much of their food, or helped with the cooking and childcare, her main occupation was teaching the residents’ school-age children. (Her father approvingly told her on his first visit that the self-sustaining community was “the closest thing to Red China” he had ever seen.) Though newspapers could be found at Eden Valley, Claire steered clear of them, preferring to spend her free time taking long walks through the backcountry. She was unaware of the Watergate hearings or the fall of Saigon. “It was very healing to be way out, deep in the mountains, apart from the rest of the world,” Claire told me.
She had tried at first to heal herself in more conventional ways, visiting UT’s Student Health Center as early as 1967 for the talk therapy she believed she urgently needed. But after her first session, during which she felt that the psychologist had made a pass at her, Claire abandoned the idea. At her father’s urging, she transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder that fall, leaving the near-constant reminders of the shooting behind, but she was homesick there, and she returned to UT the following year.
To her friends, she had seemed fine—“nice and sunny,” recalled one—but not long after her return, she landed at the Student Health Center again when she abruptly stopped eating. The psychiatrist who evaluated her, Claire thought, showed more interest in her admission that she had taken LSD before than in her obvious depression. He put her on Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic, and though her hair began falling out and she struggled to concentrate in class, her treatment was not adjusted. “Questioning doctors was just not done then, so I was an obedient patient,” she told me. “There never was any talk therapy. He only wanted to discuss my past drug experiences, which were so few.” In 1969, at the end of her spring semester, she dropped out and moved back to Colorado.
It was that same year that Claire began to feel the stirrings of belief. “After the shooting, I’d started wondering what forces were at work in the universe,” she said. “I felt strongly that there was a force I couldn’t see, and I was interested in finding out what it was.” She escaped to the mountains outside Boulder with a University of Colorado student named Ernie, with whom she lived in a rough-hewn house in the woods with no indoor heat or plumbing. They immersed themselves in nature and back-to-basics living, warming themselves by a coal stove and hauling water from a well.
Just down the road from them and the other hippies who had taken up residence in Lefthand Canyon was an eighty-two-year-old woman named Emma Spencer, whom her neighbors called “Ma.” A Seventh-day Adventist, she grew her own food, wove rugs by hand, and strictly observed the Sabbath. To Claire, the child of nonbelievers, she was a source of fascination. Ma gave her a Bible, which she began to read, and one afternoon, Claire found herself kneeling in prayer beside the older woman, searching for words as she tried to communicate with God. She had cried for Tom many times, but as she knelt on the knobby rag rug in Ma’s log cabin, she felt, as she would later recall, an “unbidden and unexpected” grief surface for the baby. For the first time, Claire began to weep for her lost son.
Her desire for “a sincere, authentic, Christian life,” as she called it, took her to Eden Valley in 1971. She would remain there until she was thirty, not striking out on her own until the winter of 1977. Her friends in Texas and Colorado, who heard from her infrequently during this time, if at all, were stunned that the girl they knew, who delighted in skinny-dipping and challenging the status quo, had suddenly gotten religion. “I don’t know what combination of PTSD, spiritual yearning—which was very much of the moment—depression, and epiphany led her to the strict regime of the Seventh-day Adventist utopia,” observed Tim Coursey, a childhood friend. “But I do remember thinking, ‘Well, how about that? She walked right through the looking glass.’ ”
• • •
The dream, which Claire first had in her twenties, always began the same way: she would look down and discover her baby, bright-eyed, in her arms. He was never as small as a newborn—he would be a few months old, perhaps, or a toddler, even, old enough to meet her gaze—and she would be flooded with relief as she stared back at him in wonder. Then she would glance away, or walk into another room, her attention wandering for no more than a second, and when she looked back, her son would be gone.
Claire did not have the dream frequently, but when she did, in the peripatetic years that followed her time at Eden Valley, she awakened with a start, a deep ache in her chest. As she moved from Colorado to other states in the West—New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming—she would occasionally stop in a public library to see if she could find the old Life magazine, anxious for something concrete upon which to anchor her longings. In those analog days, before it was possible to conjure up information about anything with a few keystrokes, her personal history was relegated to microfilm reels and hardbound magazine volumes, and there, alone among the stacks, she would scrutinize Tom’s photo again. People she met had sometimes heard she was the victim of gun violence—one rumor at Eden Valley placed her at the 1970 Kent State shootings—but she rarely shared her story.
After Eden Valley, Claire made a brief sojourn to another religious community in upstate New York and then headed to New Mexico, where her sister, Lucy, was working as a psychologist at a residential facility for developmentally disabled adults. It was there that Claire met her first husband—an easygoing teacher who ran the facility’s art-therapy program—and they wed in 1979. She never discussed the shooting with him, and he never showed any interest in discussing it. “I really just wanted to be married and have a baby, and that was more important to me than whether we were a good match,” Claire said. They were not, and within two years they had divorced.
Claire packed her belongings and headed to Stephenville, Texas, where she moved in with her grandmother and enrolled in Tarleton State University, determined to finally finish college. She did so two years later, in 1983, with honors, when she was thirty-five years old. Armed with a degree in education, she then made her way to Wyoming, where she taught at a private Seventh-day Adventist school in the town of Buffalo, in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains. Like many rural Adventist schools, it was modeled on a one-room schoolhouse, and she was its only teacher. Her life in Wyoming suited her well—the school was out in the country, and she had fewer than a dozen students, ranging in grades from first to eighth—but even as she devoted herself to the children, Claire found she could not shake her recurring thoughts about her baby. She wanted to have a child of her own, before she ran out of time, and her dreams about holding her son took on a new intensity.
Claire had sought psychological help at Tarleton with little success, and two years after moving to Wyoming, she tried again. Soon she met a bright, empathetic local therapist who listened without judgment as she described the anger that sometimes felt as if it might consume her. She began to see him in twice-weekly sessions in his comfortable office just off Main Street, where she fi
nally spoke freely—nearly two decades after the fact—about having lost Tom and the baby. “It was the first time I’d been given permission to talk about what had happened and to mourn in any sort of meaningful, sustained way,” said Claire.
Her therapist told her about post–traumatic stress disorder, a then-new medical diagnosis that he said described the array of symptoms some trauma victims, many of them veterans of war, experienced in the wake of catastrophic violence. PTSD, he explained, was characterized by nightmares, emotional detachment, rage, and a strong desire to avoid people and places that might trigger memories of the trauma. It was a diagnosis Claire reflexively resisted because to accept it “felt cheap, since I hadn’t earned it,” she said. “I had never seen the horrors of Vietnam.”
The incremental progress she was making was cut short when, six months into counseling, her therapist transferred her into group therapy, and Claire found herself surrounded by people with substance-abuse problems—many of whom had been mandated, by court order, to attend—who had little insight into her state of mind. At loose ends, she abandoned the group and took up with a nineteen-year-old ranch hand and Wyoming native named Brian James. Then thirty-eight, she had little in common with the soft-spoken high school graduate, but in him she saw a kindred spirit with a curious and unconventional mind. Each afternoon, after she had dismissed her students, they talked for hours, hiking through the canyons and dry creeks that he had grown up exploring. Eight months after they met, they decided to get married.
When they wed, in August 1986—a full twenty years after the UT tragedy—Brian was just two years older than Claire had been when she was shot. “I think she was still trying to recover all that she had lost at eighteen,” her sister, Lucy, told me. They moved to Arizona, where Lucy had already put down roots, and rented a house in Patagonia, near the border town of Nogales. Claire taught elementary school and Brian worked construction jobs, and their marriage was a happy one at first, though they would never delve into the defining event of her life. “I knew Claire had been shot, and that she had lost her boyfriend and her baby, but we never had a deep conversation about it,” Brian told me. “It wasn’t something I asked her about, and it wasn’t something she seemed eager to discuss.”
Instead, Claire tried to get pregnant, but she was met with disappointment. Though her doctors in 1966 had assured her that she would still be able to have children despite being left with one ovary and a uterus that had been stitched back together, she often wondered if Whitman, who had already robbed her of so much, had also stolen her ability to conceive.
She had all but given up by 1989, when she was forty-one, and her mother called with an improbable offer. Mary Wilson was by then on her third marriage and had reinvented herself as a successful New York City real estate agent. She was animated on the phone as she laid out her proposal for Claire: a realtor who worked for her, who had emigrated from Ethiopia, had introduced her to a good friend of his from Addis Ababa. The friend had been allowed into the United States a year earlier so that his young son could undergo emergency surgery for a congenital heart defect that had left him near death. The boy had remained in the States so he could receive follow-up medical care, but he and his father had overstayed their visas, and if they returned to Ethiopia, he would not have access to the pediatric cardiologists he needed.
The father had already embarked on the long and complex process of seeking asylum, her mother continued, but his and his son’s legal status was precarious. Would Claire and Brian consider adopting the boy, she asked, so he could remain in the country? The first step would be to take legal guardianship of him, an effort that his father supported. The boy was four years old, added her mother, and his name was Sirak.
That June, after Claire had studied every book she could find at the library on the subject of adoption, she and Brian packed up their hatchback and embarked on a cross-country road trip to New York to meet the little boy who would become their son. “He was an incredible gift,” Claire said. “A gift I didn’t expect.”
IV.
Sirak had not seen his mother since he had left Addis Ababa as a toddler, and from the moment he caught sight of Claire in her mother’s house in Riverdale, he brightened. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know her,” Sirak told me. On their first day together, his father and Brian set out to go sightseeing around the city, leaving Sirak and Claire to become acquainted with each other. For the next three days, she fed him, bathed him, sang to him, read to him, and tucked him in at night. He was cheerful and playful in return, and from the first day, he called her Mommy in his accented English.
When it was finally time to load his meager belongings—two shirts, two pairs of shorts, and a toy school bus—into the hatchback and head home to Arizona, his father walked him to the car and buckled him in. “His dad was very loving, but he didn’t make a big deal out of saying goodbye,” Claire said. “He made it seem like Sirak was going on a long trip, on a big adventure.” Sirak’s father could travel inside the United States while his application for asylum was under review, and he promised the boy that he would come see him soon.
As Brian drove, Claire and Sirak sat together in the back seat, watching as the Manhattan skyline faded from view. The boy cried quietly to himself for a few minutes, but he became more animated as they moved farther from the city, and he was insistent on Claire’s undivided attention. If she pulled her book out and started to read—she was in the middle of James Michener’s Alaska—he would stick his head between her and the page, grinning. If she lay down and stretched out across the back seat, he would sprawl on top of her until his face hovered just above hers. They remained that way for hours, talking and laughing and staring up at the flat, blue summer sky.
Though they could not have looked any more different, they each bore a similar scar: a long, vertical line along the torso where a surgeon’s scalpel had once traced a path. Hers began below the sternum, while his was located higher up, closer to his heart. Years later, when he was old enough to understand, Claire would tell him what had happened to her in 1966 and he would listen, carefully considering her story, before adding that he would always think of the baby she had lost as his brother.
Despite the fact that Sirak had been born with a ventricular septal defect, or a hole in his heart, he thrived. He was a healthy if slight little boy, and when Claire took him to see his pediatric cardiologist every three months for his checkups, he was usually given a clean bill of health. As the only dark-skinned person in their community, he was a source of fascination to the kids who reached out to touch his hair. But Sirak embraced the very thing that set him apart, beaming when his father—who made biannual visits to Arizona—stood before his classmates and spoke about their African heritage. From the start, Sirak was quick to make friends and an exuberant presence. “Teach me!” he exhorted one teacher the summer before he started kindergarten.
Claire and Brian formally adopted him when he was six years old, shortly after they moved west to the unincorporated community of Arivaca. Sirak’s father continued to make the trek out to see them, and each time he left, the boy would take the snap-brim cap his dad had worn during his visit and bring it to bed with him, resting it on the pillow. On nights when the stars shone so brightly above their desert outpost that they illuminated the canyons below, Claire, Brian, and Sirak would roll out their sleeping bags on the flat portion of their roof and lie side by side, staring up at the constellations.
Still, the area between the two lower chambers of Sirak’s heart remained fragile, and at the age of seven, he was rushed into surgery after an echocardiogram suggested that his aorta had narrowed and was impeding blood flow to his brain. (The operation was called off after another round of tests.) Afterward, Claire found herself preoccupied with the possibility that something cataclysmic might happen. Even a nick in the mouth—sustained during a dental exam, say, or while playing with other kids—could allow bacteria into his bloodstream and have fatal consequences. Claire girde
d herself, carrying supplies of antibiotics in her purse at all times, but she could not shake her fear that, at any moment, she could lose Sirak. Once, she dreamed that she watched him board a bus that then abruptly pulled away, and she chased after it, calling out for the boy and waving her arms wildly, before losing sight of him.
Claire did her best to keep her worry to herself. Harder to hide was the anguish she had carried since the shooting, which would surface unpredictably despite how fortunate she felt about finally having a family. “I still had so much anger,” Claire told me. She was moody and short-tempered, often lashing out at Brian, who grew distant, spending more and more time away from home. In 1996, when Sirak was eleven, Claire accepted a teaching position at a Seventh-day Adventist school in Virginia and took their son with her. Three years later, she and Brian divorced.
And then, just like that, Claire was a single mother, scratching out a living, ashamed by her cardinal failure, as she saw it, to keep her family intact. Her restlessness ensured that she and Sirak did not stay in Virginia long; they moved to Nebraska in 1999, when he started high school, and then to Kansas two years later. Though her pay as a teacher was barely enough to get by on, she and Sirak were resourceful, baking their own bread and gathering windfall apples. In Virginia, where they lived next to a public housing project, Claire sometimes treated herself to a twenty-five-cent copy of the Washington Post, and she and Sirak took turns reading the restaurant reviews aloud at the kitchen table, imagining that they, too, were dining in a white-tablecloth establishment.
What little Claire scraped together she put into piano lessons for her son, who was captivated by classical music. Once, when she reached to turn down the volume of a Beethoven symphony they were listening to in the car, Sirak had signaled for her to stop. “No,” he said, smiling, as if transported. “We were just getting to the exciting part.” He spent hours at the piano each day practicing Chopin’s Études, and he played wherever he could find an audience, from their church to local nursing homes.
