The Hour I First Believed

She flinched. Made fists. “The coroner was here earlier,” she said. “She passed out forms. She wanted names and addresses, descriptions of their clothing, distinguishing marks or features, whether or not they had drivers’ licenses. Because of the fingerprints, I guess.” Her crew cut, I thought. Her tattoo. “She said she might need dental records, too. Dental records: that’s when we knew.”

“Knew?”

“That they were dead. And I couldn’t even…I couldn’t…” She began to cry again. “She called me Mom, and I couldn’t even give them her address.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let me take you home.”

“I can’t go home!” she snapped. “I’m her mom!”

I opened my mouth to argue the point, then shut it again. I took her hands in mine and squeezed them. She didn’t squeeze back.

A short time later, a middle-aged man with a droopy mustache entered the gym. “That’s the district attorney,” Maureen said. “He was here before, when the coroner was here.” He mounted the stage, and the thirty or forty of us, scattered throughout the gym, approached.

He said he understood that waiting was pure hell—his heart went out to each and every one there because he had teenagers, too. But he wanted us to know that, for safety reasons, the building had been secured for the night and the exhausted investigation teams had been sent home to get a few hours’ sleep. “We’ve made the decision to resume at six thirty a.m.,” he said. “And at that point we’ll continue with the identification of—”

“The hell with that!” someone shouted. “Our kids are in there!”

“Sir, I know, but there are still live explosives inside the school. How many, and where, we just can’t say yet. A short while ago, a bomb detonated as the technicians were removing it from the building. Now, no one was hurt, but it’s been a very long, very difficult day for all of us. Nerves are frazzled, people are dog-tired. We just don’t want that fatigue to turn into more tragedy.”

“I need to get to my daughter,” a woman wailed. “Dead or alive, she needs to know she’s not alone in that place.”

“Ma’am, I understand what you’re saying, but the entire school is a crime scene,” the D.A. said. “Evidence has to be gathered and labeled, procedures have to be followed. Victims have to be identified, bodies removed and autopsied before they can be released to their families. Those of you who’ve followed the JonBenet Ramsey case can appreciate that when evidence is compromised—”

“We don’t care about evidence!” a man retorted. “We care about getting our kids the hell out of there! And don’t give me that ‘I’ve got kids, too’ bullshit, because your kids are safe at home tonight, and ours…” His reprimand broke down into sobs that echoed through the cavernous gym.

A woman announced fiercely that until she saw her son’s body, she refused to give up hope. We should prepare ourselves for miracles, she advised. No one responded. Someone asked when the names of the dead would be released.

“As soon as the coroner feels she’s gotten absolutely positive IDs for the twelve that are still in the library,” the D.A. said.

“Does that number include the two little bastards that did this?”

The D.A. nodded. “I’m guessing midday tomorrow we’ll have the final list. We’ll release it to you folks first, of course, and then to the press. And while I’m on the subject of the press, I want to advise you that talking to them at this point in time might not be in your own or the children’s best interests. Now you’re welcome to stay the night here, and if you do, I’m sure the volunteers will make you as comfortable as possible. But if I could, I’d like to suggest—since nothing more’s going to be released until late morning at the earliest—that you all go home, say some prayers if you’re so inclined, and try to get some sleep. Let’s meet back here at noon, and I think I can promise you by then that I’ll have the names for you. And I also want to promise you…” He faltered, struggled to regain his composure. “I want to promise…promise you that…we are going to treat your children like they are our own.”

Maureen slumped against me. “Take me home,” she said.

It was a brutal night. She wandered from room to room, cried, cursed the killers. She couldn’t tell me about it yet, she said, but she kept seeing it, over and over. Seeing what, I wondered, but I didn’t push her. In bed, she needed the light on. She kept bolting upright. “What was that?”

Somewhere after three in the morning, I convinced her to drink a glass of wine and swallow a couple of Tylenol PMs. They knocked her out, but her sleep was fitful. She kept clenching, whimpering. I finally dozed off myself, awakening from a leaden sleep at dawn. Maureen’s side of the bed was empty. I found her asleep on the floor, between the dogs. Her splayed hand, resting on Sophie’s side, rose and fell with each breath that dog drew.

She managed to get down a little breakfast—half a piece of toast, half a cup of coffee. I drew her a bath. She wanted me to stay in the bathroom with her, but when I soaped up a washcloth and tried to wash her back, she flinched. “Don’t touch me!” she snapped. Then she apologized.

“You want me to leave?”

“No, stay. I just don’t want you to touch me.”

And so I sat there, watching her wash herself. Watching her fall back into whatever it was she had lived through the day before. Watching the way her shivering shivered the bathwater.

The news was reporting that Dave Sanders had died. Shot in the science corridor while shepherding kids to safety, he’d staggered into one of the classrooms, collapsed face-first, and bled to death during the hours it took the SWAT team to take back the school and get to him. I needed to react, but she was watching me. She’d been through enough without my breaking down in front of her about Dave. “I’m taking the dogs out,” I said, nudging them from their naps with the toe of my shoe.

I walked around in the backyard, crying for Dave—thinking about the lunches we’d shared, the duties. He’d befriended me my first year at Columbine—one of the few who’d taken the time to welcome a newcomer. In return, I’d started going to some of the girls’ basketball games, running the clock for him during some of the home contests. He was a good coach—a teaching coach who used the kids’ mistakes as learning opportunities. I thought about that ugly orange tie he wore on game days to inspire his girls. It was typical that, when the shooting had started, he’d tried to get the kids to safety rather than running for cover himself…. Maureen was at the kitchen window, watching me, and so I bit my lip. Whistled for the dogs and roughhoused with them when they came running. I had no right to this playful romp, and no right to cry in front of Maureen.

When I came back in, she asked me if Dave Sanders had children.

“Daughters,” I said. “And grandkids, I think. Babies.”

She nodded. “I should have died,” she said. “Not him.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? I’m nobody’s parent. I’m expendable.”

“You know something?” I said. “Until yesterday, I don’t think I ever fully appreciated what crap my life would be without you. I was so scared, Mo. You’re not expendable. I need you.”

I opened my arms to her, but instead of coming to me, she sat down on the kitchen stool and stared at nothing, her face unreadable. “The summer I was eleven?” she said. “After my father moved out? I had this friend, Francine Peccini, and she invited me to go with her to the convent where her church was. The Church of the Divine Savior, it was called. Her mother was the church secretary, and Francine used to go over there mornings and help at the convent. Dust, do dishes, fold laundry. And one day she asked me to go with her. My mother never had much use for Catholics, but she was so distracted by the separation that she said okay, I could go…. And I liked the nuns. They were nice, and sort of mysterious. At lunchtime, we’d stop our work and eat with them. And after lunch, we’d say the rosary. At first I didn’t know the words to the Hail Mary, but then, they got repeated so much that I did…. And in the afternoon, we went back to Francine’s house, and she and I went up to her room and pretended we were nuns. Sisters of Mercy. We put bath towels on our heads for veils, and stapled them to these oaktag things we cut out. What are they called? Those stiff things around their faces?”

“Wimples,” I said. Why was she telling me all this?

She nodded. “Wimples. And on weekends? When I used to have to go over to my father’s? In his car on the way over, I used to say it to myself: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…’ And at night, when he’d come into my room and…and…I’d say it then, too, over and over, until he was finished and got up and left…. And yesterday? When I thought those boys were going to find me and kill me? I said the Hail Mary, over and over and over. The words came back to me from that summer when I was eleven. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’…Okay, here it is, I kept thinking: the hour of my death, because they’re going to find me and kill me. And that was when I got the idea to write you a note, Caelum. On the wall of the cabinet I was hiding in. I managed to inch the pen out of my pocket without hitting the door, and I wrote, in the dark, with my hand squeezed between my knees…and I kept thinking, they’re going to find me in here, and shoot me, and later on, someone will find my body and…and Caelum will suffer, grieve for me, and then he’ll move on. Find someone else, marry her. And Sophie and Chet will get old and die. And then Caelum will get old, too, and maybe he’ll die without ever knowing I had written him the note.”

Should I go to her? Hold her? Keep my distance? I didn’t know what she needed. “What did it say, Mo?” I asked.

She looked at me, as if she’d forgotten I was in the room. “What?”

“What did your note say? What did you write to me?”

“That I loved you more than I ever loved anyone else in my life, and I hoped you could forgive me for the mistakes I made…. And that, if Velvet survived and I didn’t, I hoped you could forgive her for the things she did, and look after her. Make sure she was okay.”

Before I could respond, the phone rang. “Don’t answer it!” Maureen said. But I told her I’d better—that it might be the investigators.

It was her father. “No, no, she’s pretty shaken up, but she’s all right.” I pointed to the receiver and lip-synched the words: your father.

Mo shook her head vehemently and hurried out of the room.

“Well, actually, she’s sleeping right now,” I said. “She had a bad night.”

LATER THAT MORNING, TWO DETECTIVES came to the house—Sergeant Cox, a small blonde in her early forties, and an earnest younger guy, Asian-American, Detective Chin. They didn’t want coffee, but Detective Chin took a glass of water. The four of us sat in the living room. Sergeant Cox did most of the questioning. She was gentle, coaxing. She seemed to have a calming effect on Mo. That was how I learned what had happened to her the day before.

Expecting Velvet to stop by the clinic later that morning, Maureen had gone to the guidance office and spoken to Ivy Shapiro, her counselor, about the possibility of Velvet’s coming back to school. Ivy had said she was all for it, but that Velvet would have to petition for readmittance. That meant filling out some paperwork and writing a one-paragraph statement about her intent. Columbine wanted to encourage returnees, Ivy explained, but also to send them the message that school was not a revolving door. She typed Velvet’s name into her computer. “Looks like she never handed in her textbooks from last year,” she told Mo. “She’ll have to return them before we can issue her a schedule. And it says here that she owes library fines, too. She’ll need to take care of those.”

It was hectic at the clinic, as it always is during fifth hour, Mo said: kids coming in to take their medications, pick up forms, drop off doctors’ notes. A freshman boy was icing the ankle he’d sprained in gym. A junior girl with chills and a temp sat wrapped in a blanket, waiting for her father to pick her up. Velvet arrived in the midst of the hubbub. Her clothes were subdued—jeans and a sweater. She had rinsed the blue dye out of her crew cut. Kids stared nonetheless. Snickered. Mo said she was afraid Velvet might lose her temper, or worse, lose her nerve and abort her plan to reenroll.

“I brought ’em,” Velvet said, when Mo relayed Ivy’s message about returning her textbooks. She overturned her backpack and several heavy books clunked out onto Mo’s desk. “Oh, yeah, I found this, too,” she mumbled. Eyes averted, she slid my signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird toward Maureen.

Mo said she took a breath, tried not to show too much of a reaction. “Great,” she said. “Mr. Quirk will be glad to get it back. He had to fly home to Connecticut because of a death in his family, but when I talk to him, I’ll tell him you found it.”

“Whatever,” Velvet said.

A girl laughed out loud. “Her?”