The Hour I First Believed

I tell you one thing, though: Mo’s moving back to Colorado didn’t get her what she wanted, father-wise. She went over to their house three or four times at the beginning. She’d get all dressed up, buy them gifts. I chose not to go with her. The thing was, I didn’t trust myself. Figured seeing Daddy Dearest might trigger something, and I’d go off on the guy. Coldcock him or something. It’s not like I didn’t have a history. Maureen would always come back from those visits saying she’d had a good time, or that their house was beautiful, or that their granddaughter, Amber, was so adorable. She’d be down, though—in a slump for the next few days. Sometimes, I’d eavesdrop when she called them. Maureen would small-talk with Evelyn for a while and then ask to speak to her father. He’d oblige her—come to the phone maybe half the time. And when he did, it made me sad to hear Mo doing most of the talking. He never called her. Neither did Evelyn. Or Cheryl, the half-sister. Somewhere during our second year out there, Maureen stopped calling, too. It was hard for her, as it had been hard for me. I knew a thing or two about abdicating fathers.

BUT ANYWAY, THAT FRIDAY NIGHT? In our Colorado living room? Homicide ended on its usual note of moral ambiguity, Van Morrison’s “Slim Slow Slider” faded to silence, and the news came on. There was relative calm in the world that night. Nothing you’d stay glued to your recliner over. No sign of the trouble those two rage-filled little motherfuckers were planning. Channel Nine had a convenience-store stickup in Lakewood, an environmental protest in Fort Collins. There was the usual numbing news from Kosovo. Get up, I kept telling myself. Go to her. Instead, I’d stuck around for the Sox and Celtics scores, checked in with the Weather Channel for the national temperatures. We’d been out there for four years by then, and I was still keeping tabs on Connecticut weather.

Still, I meant to go up to her. I was going to. But the news led into Letterman, and since James Brown was the musical guest, I decided to open a beer and catch that soulful old reprobate, too. Should I add the Godfather of Soul to my masterworks list, I wondered. And if so, who should I bump?…

My eyes cracked open some time after three. I looked around until I recognized the room. Got up, got the dogs taken care of and the downstairs locked up. Went up there.

Our bedroom was lit by dying candlelight and aromatic with ginger. Wax had dribbled down the front of the bureau and cooled. Carapaced the carpet. Maureen was scowling in her sleep. She’d drunk both of the wines.

I dropped my clothes beside our bed and got in next to her. She rolled onto her side, away. Moondance, I thought. No, Astral Weeks. And in the midst of my indecision, I suddenly saw the long view of my inconsequential life: Mouseketeer, farm kid, failed husband, mediocre teacher. Forty-fucking-eight years old, and what had I accomplished? What had I come to know?

IN THE AFTERMATH, I’D LEARN that he lied to me on two counts that afternoon at Blackjack Pizza. First, he hadn’t been as anti-prom as he let on; he’d asked a couple of girls and been refused. As was his habit when one of his peers displeased or slighted him, he’d gone home, grabbed a marking pen, and X-ed out their faces in his yearbook. Second, he was not headed for the Marines. The Rocky Mountain News would report that the antidepressant he was taking for obsessive-compulsive disorder had disqualified him. The recruiter had dropped by his home and delivered the news on Thursday, the night before I’d bought that pizza. His buddy had made plans to go to the University of Arizona, though; he and his dad had driven there a few weeks earlier and chosen his dorm room. Had that been part of the deceit? Had he been playing both fantasy baseball and fantasy future? Playing his parents along with everyone else? His computer offered no clues; they confiscated it within the first few hours, but he’d erased the hard drive the night before.

Over and over, for years now, I have returned to that Friday night: when I can’t sleep, when I can, when the steel door slides open and I walk toward her, Maureen looking sad-eyed and straggly-haired, in her maroon T-shirt and pocketless jeans. Mo’s one of the victims you’ve never read about in the Columbine coverage, or seen interviewed on the Today show or Good Morning America. One of the collaterally damaged.

I just wish to Christ I’d gotten up the stairs that night. Made love to her. Held her in my arms and made her feel safe. Because time was almost up. They’d bought their guns, taped their farewell videos, finalized their plans. They’d worked their last shift together at Blackjack—had made and sold me that pizza that, piece by piece, Mo and I had lifted out of the box and eaten. Chaos was coming, and it would drive us both so deeply into the maze that we’d wander among the corpses, lost to each other for years. Yet there Maureen was on that long-ago night, up in our bed, waiting for me.

Get up those stairs! I want to scream to my clueless April-seventeenth-of-nineteen-ninety-nine self. Hold her! Make her feel safe! Because time was running out. Their first shots were eighty hours away.

Chapter Two

ON SATURDAY MORNING, I AWOKE to the sound of whimpering. Eyes closed, I groped. Felt, on my left, Maureen’s hipbone. On my right, fur. I’d swum up from sleep on my back, the sheet knotted around my ankles, a hard-on tent-poling the front of my boxers. I cracked open my eyes and looked into the eyes of the perp. The whimperer: Sophie. Her muzzle rested against the mattress. Her face was a foot from mine. I blinked; she blinked. I sighed; she sighed. The plea in her eyes was readable: Get up. Feed me. Love me the most.

Sophie was the needier of our two mutts—mother and son golden retrievers we’d brought with us from Connecticut. Soph had gotten neurotic as she aged—whiny, fixated on food, and, out of nowhere, possessive of me. I’d grab Maureen by the kitchen sink or in the bathroom, give her a smooch, and Sophie would appear at our feet, head-butting her away. It was funny but creepy, too, like living with a canine version of what’s-her-name in Fatal Attraction. Not Meryl Streep. The other one. Cruella De Vil.

Maureen’s arm swung back. “Mmph,” she said. Her hand found me, her fingertips skidding across my throat. I rolled toward her and hitched my chin over her shoulder. Placed my stiffness against her. “Hey, toots,” I whispered.

“Bad breath,” she mumbled back, stuffing her pillow between us. Sophie’s whimper became a guttural grunt. Yoo hoo. Remember me?

The clock radio said 7:06. The wineglasses on the wicker tray by the window said I’d failed Maureen the night before. Sophie’s wet nose poked my wrist. “Yeah, yeah, wait a minute,” I muttered. Swung my feet to the floor and padded toward the bathroom, Sophie following. Chet groaned and stretched, wagged his tail, and joined the pissing party. You almost never saw that dog without a grin on his face.

Mid-leak, Maureen came in, a wineglass stem in each fist. She dumped the dregs with so much determination that wine spattered on the wall.

“Hey,” I said. “What do you say I give the dogs a quick run, then we go someplace for breakfast?”

She rinsed the glasses, kept me waiting. “Can’t,” she finally said.

“You can’t, or you’d rather not eat eggs with a shithead like me?”

No forgiving smile. No look in my direction. She grabbed a washcloth, wiped the glasses so hard they squeaked. “I’m taking Velvet to breakfast.”

I stood there, nodding. Touché.

In that system of signals Mo and I had worked out with Dr. Patel, there was no shorthand for “I’m sorry.” You were obliged to speak those two words. But the mention of Maureen’s breakfast buddy short-circuited any contrition I’d been generating.

Mo’s field was gerontology, but after we moved out West and she took the school nurse’s job, she found she enjoyed working with the high school kids. She liked the needy ones, particularly. “Just give them an aspirin and send them back to class,” I kept advising her. Instead, she’d help them with their math, counsel them on their love lives, give them rides and lunch money. I’d warned Mo to observe boundaries with Velvet, especially. Velvet Hoon was like a Cape Cod undertow: if you weren’t careful, she’d pull you in deeper than you meant to go. I spoke from experience.

I pulled on my sweats, laced up my running shoes. If she wanted to spend her weekend morning with a dysfunctional sixteen-year-old instead of with her husband, then fine. Fuck it. Maybe I’d leave the dogs home, do a long run—the eight-miler out to Bear Creek Lake and back. I was halfway out the door when she said something about a rain check.

I stopped. Our eyes met for a nanosecond. “Yeah, whatever,” I said. Bounding past me down the stairs, the dogs almost sent me tumbling.

Outside, it was see-your-breath cold. Flurries possible tomorrow, they said. Goddamn thin Colorado air. It was different back in Connecticut. By mid-April, the sea breezes began to cut you some slack. Aunt Lolly had probably gotten her garden rototilled by now, I figured. She may have even put her peas in the ground. When she called on Sunday, I’d be sure to get the weekly farm and weather reports, along with a complaint or two about her hired man, Ulysses—“Useless,” she called him—and an update on the latest shenanigans being pulled by “those goddamned toy soldiers down the road.” Lolly had it in for the paramilitary regime that now ran the maximum-security version of what she still stubbornly referred to as “Grandma’s prison.” Like her paternal grandmother, who had served as superintendent of the Bride Lake State Farm for Women from 1913 to 1953, Aunt Lolly, too, had been a Bride Lake long-timer, albeit a rank-and-filer. For forty of her sixty-seven years, she’d been a second-shift custody officer—a CO. “Of course, that was back when they let us treat the gals like human beings instead of cockroaches,” she’d say. “Nowadays they’ve got all those captains and majors and lieutenants strutting around like it’s May Day in Moscow, and they don’t know shit from Shinola about how to run a ladies’ jail.”

Out in the backyard, I was doing my stretches and deliberating about whether or not to go back in for a cap and gloves when I heard leaves crackling in the woods behind our place. The dogs heard it, too. They stood rigid, staring at the clearing, Chet emitting a low, throaty growl. Deer, I figured. Too heavy-footed for squirrels. “Easy, boy,” I told Chet, and the three of us stood there, listening to the silence. A few seconds later, the crackling recommenced and she emerged from the woods in all her chaotic glory: Velvet Hoon.

Remembering that our dogs freaked her out, I grabbed them by their collars. “Got ’em!” I called. The phrase “all bark, no bite” could have been coined for our mutts; couple of wimps, those two. But to tell you the truth, it was a relief to see Velvet afraid of something. Eyeing my hold, she entered the yard in full freak regalia: halter top, exposed flab, hacked-off tuxedo pants, and those Bozo-sized men’s workboots of hers, spray-painted silver. Her shaved head had grown out in the months I hadn’t seen her. Now she was sporting a butch cut, dyed bread-mold blue. Watching her make a beeline for the picnic table, I couldn’t help but crack a smile. Short and squat, she moved like R2-D2. She climbed from the bench to the tabletop and fumbled for a cigarette. Having secured higher ground and sucked in a little nicotine, her cocky stance returned.

“Maureen home?” she called.

“Mrs. Quirk, you mean?” I nodded. Watched a shiver pass through her. What did she expect, exposing that much belly in weather where you could see your breath? “I’ll tell her you’re out here.” I’d be damned if I was going to let her back in the house. “You need a jacket?”

Instead of answering me, she screamed at the barking dogs. “Peace out! Shut the fuck up!” Her shouting made them nuts.

Back inside, I called up the stairs. “Cinderella’s here!”

“Already? I told her nine o’clock.”

“Must have been a hell of a shortcut. She arrived through the woods.”

No response.

“I’m heading out now. Gonna run out to Bear Creek and back.”

Nothing.

“Don’t let her in here unsupervised, okay?” One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand…“Maureen!”

“Okay! Okay!”

In the mud room, I grabbed my wool-lined jacket and headed back out. Velvet was still on the picnic table, but sitting now, smoking. “Here’s a loaner,” I called. I balled up the jacket and tossed it underhand. It fell short by a foot or two, landing on the frosty grass. She looked down at it but didn’t move. “Make sure you stub out that cigarette when you’re done,” I said. She took a drag, blew smoke toward the sky.

“You find my book yet?” I said.

“I didn’t take your freakin’ book.”

She looked away before I did. I turned and jogged down the driveway. If she wanted to freeze out there rather than pick up the jacket, then let her. It wasn’t like she was doing me any favors.

It was a tough run. My lungs burned, my throat felt fiery from what was probably a cold coming on. Even at the top of my game, I’d never fully acclimated to running at those altitudes. “Your red blood cells adjust in a few days, Caelum,” Andy Kirby had told me once. “It’s your head that’s the problem.” Andy’s a marathoner and a math teacher. Andy, Dave Sanders, and I used to eat lunch together during my first year on the faculty. Dave was the girls’ basketball coach, and he followed the UConn women pretty closely—closer than I did. Good guys, Dave and Andy were, but during my second year at Columbine, I started bringing my lunch and eating in my room. I don’t know why, really; I just did. For a while, the kids—the needy ones—would squint through the window in my classroom door and want to visit me during my duty-free lunch. After a while, though, I got smart. Cut a piece of black construction paper and taped it over the glass. With the lights off, the door locked, and the view blocked, I was able to eat in peace.

See, that’s what Maureen didn’t get: that sometimes you had to play defense against that wall of adolescent neediness. Her job in the nurse’s office was half-time, which meant she could leave at noon. But more often than not, she was still there at the end of the school day. “Accept your limitations,” I’d warn her. “A lot of these kids are damaged beyond repair.” And you know what her response was? That I was cynical. Which hit a nerve, I have to admit. I wasn’t a cynic; I was a banged-up realist. You live to middle age, you begin to reckon with life’s limits, you know? You lace up your sneakers and run it out.

From West Belleview, I took a left onto South Kipling. My destination, the park entrance at Bear Creek Lake, was a haul, and eight miles there meant eight miles back. I’d forgotten to grab my gloves, and my hands felt cold and raw. I was raw on the subject of Velvet Hoon, too.

Velvet had been my project before she was Maureen’s. The year before, she’d clomped into my second-hour creative writing class in those silver boots, waving an add-to-class slip like a taunt. Hoo boy, I remember thinking, my eyes bouncing from the nose stud to the neck tattoo to the horizontal scar peeking through her stubbled scalp. The kids were seated in a circle, freewriting in their journals. Twenty-two, twenty-three kids in that class, and I don’t think there was a single pen that didn’t stop dead on the page.

“We’re finishing up a writing exercise,” I whispered. “Have a seat.” She ignored the empty one in the circle I indicated and, instead, exiled herself to a desk in back. Someone made a crack about Star Trek: Voyager, but because the put-down was borderline inaudible and the reaction from the others minimal, I decided to let it lie. Velvet didn’t. Her arm shot into the air and gave an unspecified middle-finger salute. Most of the kids didn’t notice, but the few who did—Becca, Jason, Nate—looked from Velvet to me. I stared them down, one by one. “Five more minutes,” I announced. “Keep those pens moving.”

When the bell rang and the others exited, Velvet stayed seated. She took an inhaler out of her pocket and gave herself a couple of puffs. She kept looking from her schedule to her photocopied floor plan of the building. “Big school,” I said. “It’s like a maze when you’re new, isn’t it? Can I help?”