The Hour I First Believed

Tears came to his eyes. “I’d like to,” he said. “But I don’t have no good clothes.” I reached for my wallet, then stopped myself. It wasn’t going to do either of us any good if he drank up his clothing allowance.

“Come on,” I said.

At Wal-Mart, I bought him a pair of navy blue pants, a boxed shirt and tie set, socks, underwear, and a cheap pair of black tie shoes. A chili dog, too, and a large Dr Pepper. “Now I’m good to go,” he said.

MY MOTHER’S BEDROOM WAS AS I remembered it: pale yellow walls, lace curtains. Her dust-covered Sunday missal still sat on her nightstand.

I walked up to the crucifix on the wall opposite her bed. Mother’s crucifix had been blessed by Pope Paul and given to her by her father, Grampy Sullivan, when, on his deathbed, he had at last made amends with the only one of his six daughters who had married a Protestant, and the only one who’d ever gotten a divorce. A chain smoker, Mother had died of lung cancer a few years later—the year she was fifty-five and I was thirty. On the morning of her final day, she’d asked me in a whispery voice to lift the crucifix off the wall and bring it to her. I’d done it and she’d cradled the cross in her arms, as tenderly as if it were an infant, while I stood and watched in envy.

I had never quite loved my mother the way other sons—the Buzzi brothers, for example—seemed to love theirs. Growing up, whenever Mother had held out her arms for one of those hugs, it was almost as if there was something parked between us. Something intangible but nevertheless real, I didn’t know what…. I’d stayed with her at the end, though, from early morning until late that night. People had come in and out all day, whispering: Lolly, Hennie, some of the nuns Mother had befriended, the priest who mumbled her last rites and, with his thumb, anointed her by drawing an oily cross on her forehead. Back in catechism class when I was a kid, they’d made us memorize the sacraments, and those seven “visible forms of invisible grace” had remained stuck in my brain: baptism, confirmation, penance, Holy Eucharist, Holy Orders, Holy Matrimony, and, at every good Catholic’s final curtain, extreme unction. “Thanks a lot, Father,” I’d said when that priest had finished and started for the door. Slipping him a twenty, I’d added, “Here’s a little something for your trouble.” For your holy hocus-pocus, I’d thought but not said. It was weird, though. Even with the lights dimmed and the window shades half-drawn, that cross on Mother’s forehead, for the next several hours, had glistened eerily…. It was just the two of us at the end, and I witnessed, clearly and unmistakably, when life left my mother. One moment, she’d been a living, suffering woman; the next moment, her body was nothing more than an empty vessel. Later, after the McKennas had retrieved the corpse and Hennie had stripped the bed, I’d returned to Mother’s room. Her crucifix lay against the bare uncovered mattress. I picked it up, kissed Jesus’ feet, and hung it back on the wall. I made the gesture for her, not for her god or for myself. I was a twice-divorced thirty-year-old, teaching Twain and Thoreau to indifferent high school students by day and, by night, going home to my life of quiet desperation and one or two too many Michelobs. I’d long since become skeptical about an allegedly merciful God who doled out cosmic justice according to some mysterious game plan that none of us could fathom.

THE DOORBELL RANG. I LEFT my mother’s room, went downstairs, and opened the door. The woman on the other side looked vaguely familiar. “Millie Monk,” she said. “Here’s the lemon squares.”

I thanked her. Took the box she held out and stood there waiting for her to go. She reminded me that she’d come to do some vacuuming and tidying up. “No, really, I can do it,” I insisted. Millie was insistent, too.

“You put these on top the Frigidaire and then go relax,” she told me. “Put your feet up and watch some TV so I can get busy.”

I did as I was told, channel-surfing in the den while she vacuumed the rest of the downstairs. I’d just switched to CNN when the vacuum cleaner’s whirr turned the corner and entered the room. I got up, went into the kitchen. Figured maybe she’d like some tea.

The vacuum stopped. She called out to me over the sound of tap water rattling the bottom of the teakettle. “What’d you say?” I called back.

“Something bad’s happening,” she said. “Out in Colorado. Do you live anywhere near Littleton?”

“Littleton?” I said. “That’s right…that’s where…” By then I had made it back to the den.

I stood there, stupefied. Why was Columbine High on TV? Why was Pat Ireland crawling out onto the library’s window ledge? Shot? What did they mean, he’d been shot?

“You’re looking at live pictures from Littleton, Colorado, where the local high school is under attack by as few as two or as many as six shooters,” the news anchor said.

Patrick dangled, then fell from the ledge, landing in the arms of helmeted men on the roof of a truck.

What the—? In the kitchen, the teakettle screamed.

I’ll probably just go in to school tomorrow, since my flight’s so late.

“Oh, no! Oh, please, God. No!”

Chapter Seven

I KEPT DIALING HOME, PACING, trying friends’ and other teachers’ numbers, trying home again. I cursed myself for telling her a while back that we didn’t need cell phones. When the phone rang, I lunged. “Maureen?”

But it was Alphonse. He’d just heard about it on the radio. “I can’t get ahold of her!” I shouted. “I’ve been calling for over an hour! I get halfway through the number and the busy signal cuts in!”

“Okay, take it easy, Quirks. What do you need?”

“To hear her voice. To see her.”

He was at the farmhouse ten minutes later. He drove me to Bradley Airport, got me an emergency ticket to Denver with a connecting flight in Chicago, delivered me to the right gate, and waited with me. It was seven p.m.—five o’clock in Colorado. Six hours since they’d opened fire.

This was what I knew: there were dead bodies outside and inside the school; some of the injured were undergoing emergency surgery; bombs had gone off; the shooters—thought to be students—had fired back at the police from inside the library. I kept seeing what I’d seen on the news before we left for the airport: Columbine kids, a lot of them recognizable, streaming out of the building with their hands on their heads like captured criminals. Students had done this? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

“Still no answer?” Alphonse asked. I shook my head and handed him back his cell phone. “The library’s upstairs,” I said. “And the clinic where she works is downstairs, in another part of the building. So she was probably nowhere near the gunfire. Right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Did I already say that?”

“Yeah. Hey, you know what, Caelum? How about I go get you a sandwich or something? Because at this hour, all’s they’re probably going to give you on the plane is a soda and one of those little things of peanuts.”

“Pretzels,” I said.

“What?”

“They don’t give you peanuts anymore. They give you pretzels.” I unfolded the paper where I’d jotted down the numbers for the hospitals: Littleton Adventist, Denver Health, St. Anthony’s, Lutheran Medical. Held out my hand for his cell phone again.

“Probably all that peanut allergy stuff that everyone’s so hopped up about now. Down at the bakery? We got about sixty different regulations from the state about product that has peanuts in it. Man, I make a batch of peanut butter cookies and I gotta fuckin’ sequester ’em.”

Most of the hospital lines were still busy, but when I dialed the number for Swedish Medical Center, it was silent for a few seconds and then, miraculously, I got a ring.

“It’s like a status thing, you know? ‘My kid’s special because he’s got a peanut allergy.’ I’m surprised they don’t have a bumper sticker for it.”

“Al, stop!” I said.

The operator passed me on to the crisis spokeswoman, who was polite at first, then less so. “Okay, look,” I said. “I can appreciate you’re not releasing any names yet. I understand that. But I’m giving you her name. All you have to do is look at your list, or your computer screen or whatever, and tell me she’s not there.” She gave me some line about following her protocols, and we went at it for a few more rounds, but she wasn’t going to budge. With my fingernail, I pushed the little end call button and handed the phone back to Alphonse.

He kept steepling his fingers, cracking his knuckles. “You sure you don’t want to eat something, Quirky? What about a hot dog?”

“What about the car I rented?” I said.

“What about it?”

“I didn’t return it.”

He stared at me in disbelief, then reached into his jacket pocket and produced the paperwork and the key I’d given him. “We worked that out. Remember? I’m going to drive it back up here midday tomorrow. Have one of my workers follow me up and give me a lift back.”

I nodded. “I already knew that, right?”

He nodded. “How about a couple of candy bars?”

“Alphonse, I can’t eat, okay?” I snapped. “My stomach’s in fucking knots.” As we sat there, across from each other, I suddenly realized he was still in his baker’s clothes: black-and-white checked pants, Mama Mia T-shirt, stained apron. He had flour in his eyebrows, bags under his eyes. “Thanks, man,” I said.

“For what?”

“Getting me here. Keeping me glued together.”

“What? You didn’t do the same thing for me, when my brother was down at Yale–New Haven?” I nodded. Flashed on Rocco in his hospital bed. In his coffin, Red Sox button pinned to his suit jacket lapel, rosary beads twisted around his hand. “Do you think I did the right thing?” I said.

“About what?”