Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (7 page)

Christina met his eyes. Saw them hollowed out. Something empty beyond the shock she'd seen in his face at the vigil. Nick nodded hello but said nothing and Christina closed the yearbooks on the carpet and slid them in the drawer of her nightstand and Matt stepped forward only when she flipped the television station away from the news.

Christina sat beside Nick on the carpet and said nothing of the newscast. Said nothing of Simon asleep on the couch, safe because of a storage closet within the high school's science labs. Said nothing of Ryan heading home from the hospital, how he had no idea who Caroline Black was. She glanced at the red digits of her bedside clock: 4:46
P.M.
She knew Ryan should be home by now and that he hadn't called. She knew Matt's father's job. She wanted to know if he was there. She wanted to know what he knew, whether the fire was deliberate or an accident, whether Zola had been right to guess suicide. She wanted to know what police had found in the debris littered across the lawn, the ashes of photos and report cards and elementary school artwork, the remains of what had once been a home. She wanted to know if there was an answer yet, a reason why Caleb had done what he'd done. A reason for hiding beneath her desk, Henry Park crouched across from her as the French video blared. A reason for Ryan's leg torn in half, his classmates gasping last breaths in the locker room stalls. A reason for Mr. Rourke pooled
on the hallway carpet, what she'd seen when the officer ushered her French class away from the building. A reason for Elise, what room or closet of Lewis and Clark had claimed her away from the water, a swimming pool that would never buoy her weight again. But Christina didn't ask. She didn't know what Matt knew, if he knew anything at all. She only flipped the television away from the news and toward a mindless Sunday marathon of afternoon movies, a double feature of
The Break fast Club
and
Sixteen Candles.
She lay on her bedroom floor and watched so many high schoolers on-screen and tried not to think of an elsewhere of teenhood, some confusion of hormones and angst and a relationship that had seemed so much more important only days before, sex in a fogged car or the adrenaline of fighting, the only remnant the sting of Ryan not calling as an afternoon wore on.

My dad's there, Matt said at last from Christina's bed, where he sat beside Zola. At the station, for forensics and fire analysis.

Christina glanced at Zola, who looked blankly back. The television mumbled behind them, a movie no one was watching. Christina seized her chance to ask.

Will he be able to tell you anything? she asked.

I don't know, Matt said. He usually doesn't tell me anything.

He might tell you something about this, she said. This is different.

What time did your dad leave the house this morning? Nick asked.

I don't know. Early.

Has he been there all day? Zola asked.

Christina recognized the opportunity and took it, grabbed the remote control and switched the channel from the afternoon movies to the ongoing newsreel, CNN and local stations alternating between the Blacks' home and continued coverage of Lewis and Clark. Matt didn't stop her. Neither Zola nor Nick moved to protest. Christina knew each of them wanted to know: stories about each family, each shot student. Speculation as to when school would
resume. Roundtable pundits discussing gun legislation and mental health reform, an indefinite break from the war in Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Just talking heads. Christina wanted information. Christina turned up the volume and threw the remote control to her nightstand.

We can't pretend this isn't happening, she said. She looked at her bedside clock: 5:54
P.M.
Ryan was home, she knew, had probably been home for some time. She felt her eyes smart and she bit her lower lip to keep her frustration at bay.

I saved the article from this morning's paper, Nick said. I couldn't help it.

I clipped the list of names, too, Christina said. God. So many fucking names.

I saw Caroline Black, Matt said. I saw her on the carpet.

On the carpet? Christina asked. What do you mean you saw her on the carpet?

Christina glanced at Nick, who didn't meet her gaze, who kept watching the news.

You were there, Christina whispered to Matt. In the school. You saw her.

Matt nodded and Zola's face fell and she moved closer to him on Christina's bed, put her hand on his hand, and Christina tried to contain the mess of herself, the guilt welling up from her gut to her throat. She'd seen Mr. Rourke. An image she could barely remember. Blocked from her brain in the haste of exiting. She'd seen nothing, heard nothing but a French video droning over a classroom of empty desks, everyone tucked beneath them. She hadn't heard the last wheezing breaths of peers who'd no longer walk the length of the hallways when everyone returned to school, a point in the future that felt as far-off and inconceivable as growing old. No images burned to her brain, no sense of where Elise was or how she had died. Only imagination, not the same as what Zola had seen in the library that she wouldn't say or what Matt had witnessed on
the carpet, not the same as grief transforming the wiring of her brain. Only Henry Park's face across the aisle, only a classroom that Caleb never entered. Only a boyfriend shot in the leg, one who hadn't called all afternoon. Christina had no right to feel the way Matt or Zola did but couldn't quiet the lack of stillness rattling her body, the need at once to shake every muscle off inside the resistant waves of a swimming pool, her arms gliding through the water, or else the need to set her pen to paper and start writing, the start of an archive.

She pulled the yearbooks from her nightstand. Laid them on the floor.

We said we wouldn't talk about it. There's no way we can't.

I can't do this right now, Matt said. Really, I can't.

No one's saying you need to write, Nick stepped in. Not yet. What would there even be to document at this point? But we need to talk about it. We're all here.

What do you want us to do? Zola said. There's nothing we can do.

Nick opened their sophomore yearbook to the block of photos that gridded the entire class. We at least need names, he said. The names of every junior, every person in our class that we lost. We're going to have to profile them eventually.

Where will we put these profiles? Zola asked. The front of the yearbook? The back? Somewhere in the middle? How do we even decide something like that?

I don't know, Nick said. Do you? Do any of us know how to do this?

Christina pulled the list of names from her nightstand, a folded piece of newsprint clipped and saved from the morning paper. Ryan at home, surely worrying about tennis scholarships and not her. She knew he wouldn't call all night. Matt looked away as she grabbed a pen and began circling faces in the block of sophomore year photographs.

Zola stood from the bed. Don't draw on that—

I don't care, Christina interrupted. We need to know what we have to handle.

She circled the faces. Every junior. Caroline Black. Alyssa Carver. Alexander Chen. Connor Distler. Jacob Jensen. Elise Nguyen, a drawn ring that made her hand shake. Alexis Thurber. Kelly Washington. Jessica Wendling.

Nine names, Christina said. Nine profiles. Matt, can you help me handle these?

Matt stayed soundless on Christina's bed, his eyes fixed on the front lawn through her bedroom window.

You can't put Jessica's and Alyssa's profiles next to each other in the yearbook, Zola blurted. Jared Hirsch cheated on Jessica with Alyssa last year. Remember?

Zola's objection, one that would have felt natural only days before. Christina looked from Zola to Nick and back to Matt as the room fell silent.

You can't put Kelly next to Connor, either, Matt finally said. They were both in the top ten. It will look like a list of National Merit scholars instead of a memorial.

We'll put them in alphabetical order then, Christina said loudly, her voice harsher than she intended. Does that work? Does that work for everyone?

The television buzzed. No one spoke. On the TV screen an entire community, a radius of grief.

Where do we go from here? Nick said at last.

He didn't mean the yearbook. The beginnings of an archive we would have to plan by duty, a yearbook wholly different than the one we'd envisioned just days before. A book none of us knew how to make. A testimony to what, we couldn't imagine. Of wanting to forget. Of wanting to go back. Of knowing only a counting of days, the growing distance from Wednesday to so many more Wednesdays that meant the past would only recede and become incrementally lost.

We'll do what we can, Christina said. When we're ready. It's an impossible task. We can only do our best and nothing more.

We were imperfect, she meant. We were faulted in willful forgetting. Our best: the careful placement of photographs and articles in the glossed pages of a book to square away, to close off, to place in the past and forget. We were human, she meant. We would leave behind who we had to, in order to break ourselves. In order to move on.

Lewis and Clark High School Class of 2005

November 7, 1986—October 8, 2003

Caroline Black, a junior at Lewis and Clark, was a magnetic force in the hallways of our school. Known for her humor and liveliness, she was a straight A student, her favorite subjects English and Art. She excelled at drawing and painting and had two recent pieces in the 2002–2003 Lewis and Clark High Art Show. Her favorite book was Joyce Carol Oates's
Foxfire
, and her favorite book as a child was
Charlotte's Web
.

She loved animals and often visited the St. Louis Zoo, an institution she said was the best in the world because it was free to anyone in the city. She also loved St. Louis winters and thought it was good luck to catch snowflakes on her tongue during the first snowfall of the year. She was a fan of folksingers, especially Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Bob Dylan. She was on the Lewis and Clark varsity soccer team, having played since freshman year on the JV team, and she was also a member of the National Honor Society and Key Club. She loved trying new foods—sushi, kimchee, papaya—and her favorite place in the world was the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where her family traveled every summer.

She wanted to attend the University of Missouri and study veterinary science. She was a firecracker. We will miss her energy and light.

ERASE YOUR FAMILIARITY.
Erase what you knew. Erase this as where you first learned the particulars of locker combinations, glances of flirtation, seven minutes of passing time between classes. Erase your heart. Shut down its valves. Think of this only as crime scene, as investigation. As a site of evidence, nothing more.

Survey the scene. Make sketches. Take photographs. Map and measure everything. Record and document where physical evidence was discarded. Search for fingerprints, for left-behind weapons. Analyze ballistics, evidence of range. Identify the residue of gunshots, trace evidence of hair, of fibers and dust. Allow first responders to take notes, allow a coroner to take over, allow crime scene investigators to arrive. Record the time. Leave everything as found. Barricade the perimeter with yellow tape.

Note the weather conditions. A wash of blue sky.

Restrain the arrival of reporters.

Place identification cards beside everyone found. Make note of eyeglasses. Earrings. Torn clothing. Skewed shoes. Place belongings in a bag. Mass disaster: contain everything. Steel yourself. Erase what you were.

MONDAY MORNING: WE
awoke to a mass-emailed notification sent to every student and parent at Lewis and Clark that we would take the week off for mourning, that we would resume school the following week. School as abstract. A learning how, the education of moving on. School as collective, school as process. Not the bricks and mortar of a building.

We would resume school, the email told us, but not at Lewis and Clark.

We were told that the school was a crime scene, a term our administration avoided for
still under investigation
. That the district had arranged for us to return to the Timber Creek center, an administrative building for the Midvale County School District that we knew only through D.A.R.E. programming and special events, a building available for use by every school in the district but more often empty, a building sizable enough to contain our classrooms for the duration of the academic year. That our bus routes and driving routes would change only slightly, the building just two miles from Lewis and Clark. That Homecoming would still be held at Timber Creek, a dance we'd forgotten across the length of a long weekend. That it would be held the Friday after classes resumed, almost two weeks away, to reclaim a sense of normalcy and what our lives had been.

We didn't know what to do with ourselves, the first day of a gaping, cracked-open week. A first day that would span to five,
sprawling and unscheduled and impossible to fill. We walked through the rooms of our homes and felt a weight pressed to our chests as if the air we took in was nothing but water, our lungs drowning on land. We sat on the swings of our porches and listened to the wind whistle through the dry leaves. We pulled our sweatshirts tighter around us, the air still warm but harboring an edge. We tucked our knees to our breastbones, our palms folded against our hearts. We leaned back and watched a wheel of turning sky, blue and endless and aching.

We couldn't imagine a new building, a new high school, a forked route from the life we'd pictured: a junior year of dances and finally being upperclassmen and Halloween parties and SAT preparation, a year funneled down to the strange hallways of a new building that would remind us, every day, what had run off course. We couldn't imagine driving past Lewis and Clark, its hallways empty and vacant, hallways we couldn't envision walking through again as readily as we couldn't stand to not know them the way we once did. And a Homecoming dance, a celebration we'd just days before anticipated: swaying beneath streamers and balloon arches and a darkness that would no longer conceal our trembling, a trembling of harsh light and loss instead of the trembling of nearness, of standing so close on the dance floor to someone else's human skin.

Before the dance, a week off for quiet and mourning.

We knew what mourning meant: that funerals would begin.

We also knew what administrators wouldn't name in the sterile typeface of an email, that alongside the clear absence of our teachers' and our peers' detailed names there was the void of Caroline Black's parents, a fire, what no one had words to address.

Matt hadn't slept. Nick had driven him home from Christina's house past dark, cicadas all around them singing the night into being. A sound so strange in his ears, what he'd always known of a Missouri fall but had forgotten across the past days. He heard it as
Nick pulled into his driveway and they sat in the car watching the squares of his house's front windows pool light on the yard. The sound of late Little League games, a chill descending with dusk as his teammates left the diamond and the field lights flooded on. The sound of summer dying off. The sound of driving Tyler home late across the past weeks, night falling in waves of droned sound all around them. The sound of a terrible nostalgia inside Nick's car, his house waiting just past the windshield. He'd walked inside and found his parents reading on the couch. His father thumbing through a
Sports Illustrated
article on the American League Championship Series between the Yankees and the Red Sox. His mother, a new biography on President Bush and the War on Terror to know what was happening in the world, Matt knew, and with what dose of skepticism she should approach the news. She set down her book and asked how everyone was, Nick and Zola and Christina, and he'd said they were fine and turned immediately to his father and asked what he'd found out at work. His father kept his eyes lowered.
So far nothing's conclusive,
he said. Matt knew he was lying but didn't push. He'd turned from the living room toward the basement stairs and felt his parents' eyes following him, a tightness piercing his chest to walk away from them.

In his bedroom, he kept the lights off and lay down on his bed fully clothed. He listened to the silence of the house: the pings, the cracks of a house settling. Sounds he once thought were ghosts until his mother told him houses breathed and shifted. In the dark he tried not to think of Tyler, the rough texture of his face where stubble grew in. He lay there until he heard the television's volume through the floorboards above him, the muted shows switched to the ten o'clock news. He lay until he heard his parents finally turn off the television and move down the hall to their bedroom, the weight of their footsteps echoing overhead. He waited another ten minutes. Twenty. He thought of a house without sounds, what it must have been for Caroline's parents to hear no footsteps. No
television, no humming radio, no creaks or doors opening that told them their daughter was there, what sounds they'd grown accustomed to across sixteen years that had vanished in the quick second of a high school hallway. Matt waited in the pitch dark of his bedroom, illuminated only by a single streetlamp beyond his basement window. When he knew at last that his parents were asleep he crept from his room, up the stairs, into the study beside his parents' bedroom. He sat at his father's desk and ran his hands across the mahogany surface then over the keyhole of the drawer just below the chair, the only one his father locked.

Matt knew this was where his father kept anything confidential. Anything of police proceedings that couldn't be left at the department, anything he had to work on overnight that was sensitive or unsuitable for adolescent eyes. Matt remembered certain nights from his childhood when his father holed himself away in this office all night. He remembered lying in his bed imagining photos of dead bodies, of blood spatters and used knives and the hollows of bullet holes. He knew how to pick a lock. He'd long ago confiscated his mother's bobby pins, had once jimmied the desk lock in sixth grade to know what his father knew but had found nothing, just the black text of indecipherable incident reports.

But as he sat at his father's desk, the urge leaked from him and his hands fell away from the keyhole. He didn't want to feel dirty. He didn't want his father to look at him in the morning and know by his face, impossible to conceal, that he'd read the reports and knew what his father wished he would never know. He sat back in the chair. He tilted his head to the ceiling. In the patterns of paint he saw only whorls of blood upon high school carpet. He wouldn't sleep. He would do nothing but watch the darkness and yearn for dawn. He thought of Caroline Black. A girl who'd once stood next to him on the risers during their second-grade class play at Des Peres Elementary, both of them chorus members without speaking lines. How his parents had asked their music teacher, Mrs. Mayhew,
that he not have an acting part, that he was too shy, too filled with stage fright to be anything but a nonspeaking evergreen. How the girl standing next to him knew, a quiet peony. How his voice wavered the chorus notes and how she grabbed his hand to help him sing, her palm damp and warm.

What did you love?
He wished he could ask.
What was it when you were small that made you so fucking brave?
He pulled a pad of paper and a pencil from the desk's unlocked drawers. He knew he'd told Christina it would take time. He gripped the pencil in his left hand regardless and began to write. He took breaks to close his eyes and force the air into his lungs. He did not stop writing until the streetlamp beyond the window flickered off and the walls of the study began to lighten with dawn. He traveled back downstairs from the study before his parents awoke, the profile in his hands. He set it on his dresser and lay in his bed and watched the sun crawl up the dark shades of his window. He thought of what he'd written, everything he knew and remembered of Caroline Black, so much of it inadequate, only anecdotes, words he was sure revealed nothing but how little he knew of her. His mother opened his bedroom door past sunrise and padded across the carpeted floor, his father already gone for work, footsteps Matt had heard tracking overhead from the kitchen to the front door.

Honey, Matt's mother said. She sat at the edge of his bed. He could smell coffee on her breath. Sweetheart, are you awake?

He could see the faint lines of her face, ridges that had become more pronounced as the week's news had settled into her skin.

School's canceled this week, she said. You'll go back next Monday.

To Lewis and Clark?

She looked away. No. That other facility. The one you went to for D.A.R.E.

Matt recalled Timber Creek: a cavernous building where he'd gone to a one-day retreat, where he should have learned about pills and marijuana and Missouri's growing meth problem but in the
end all he remembered was fluorescent lighting and more Little Debbie's snack cakes than he should have comfortably eaten.

That shithole? He found himself angry.

Matt, his mother said.

This is fucked, he said.

I know, his mother whispered. You're just tired. You need to sleep.

He knew this. They both knew this. But he also knew what she wouldn't say, that what was between them and around them was not insomnia but a ripped-open universe, one tilted far beyond kilter by a surge of bullets and fire.

Come upstairs, she said. I'll make you eggs.

He watched the light filter through the curtains and could not look at his mother. This woman who'd taken care of him. Who had listened. Who for so long he'd considered soft, just a housewife who packed his lunches while his father charged into Midvale County and solved cases. This woman who in the end had enveloped him in her arms when he let the words gut him, when they spilled from his mouth and pooled at his parents' feet and his father only watched him without expression before walking away to their bedroom, to a door closing. He was young. He was fourteen. He was old enough to know what did and did not move him. He'd spent junior high shoving his tongue into the mouths of so many girls to push back a needling spark and freshman year losing his virginity at a basement party to a girl named Misty, a girl from another high school whose last name he never learned and whose face he never saw again, all of it to feel nothing but some pulse of normalcy, a deadening his mother absorbed at the start of high school when he at last made himself tell them by pulling him to her chest.

He'd heard her heartbeat, his father down the hall. A drumming that drowned out the television, the hum of the refrigerator. An anthem he still heard. She was here again, at his bedside. She was here. She would always be here. He pulled the covers back and
stepped to the floor and followed her upstairs, his mother who said nothing of the jeans he still wore from the night before.

At the table, he scanned the headlines of the front page while she cracked eggs into a glass and whisked them with milk. Continued coverage of Lewis and Clark, of the victims and families, of who had really known Caleb Raynor. A follow-up story on the Blacks' home, a subheading blaring that information was still sparse. An article on Iraqi sovereignty, a UN-enforced timeline for establishing a governing council by mid-December. Matt looked away. The sound of sizzling eggs filled the kitchen.

What did Dad find? Matt asked.

Your father doesn't like to discuss his cases, his mother said. She tilted her head to the ceiling. God, I'm sorry, she said. I know this isn't just a case.

Did you ever lose anyone in your high school class? Matt asked. He thought to ask but stopped himself:
did anyone die.

Janet Tillman, she said. She was in my algebra class. She died in a car accident my junior year.

Matt tried to imagine his mother at sixteen: her golden hair, a short bob he'd only seen in photos. He tried to imagine what it meant for her to sit in a mathematics class with the seat beside her empty, someone missing. He tried to imagine the classrooms of Timber Creek and how cavernous they would feel, how many absences he would sense despite how deliberately the administration would change the atmosphere and seating.

He would still know. They would all know.

There was nothing an administration could do.

His mother set a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him. She didn't open the
Post-Dispatch
like she always did, first thing every morning. She sat beside him at the table with her hands resting on top of the folded newspaper.

She was a friend, his mother said. Janet Tillman. She was on the cheerleading squad with me. She had the loudest laugh. Infectious.
She wanted to work for Amnesty International. This was the early seventies. She hated the war.

Matt ate his eggs. His mother reached across the table. It's okay, she said. It's okay to admit this hurts. She hesitated a moment. I saw what you wrote, she finally said. What you left on the dresser. Caroline Black. Is that for the yearbook?

I'll need to revise it. I barely knew her.

But we all knew her. We knew her parents. We watched you grow up together in Suzuki concerts and homeroom parties at Des Peres.

Matt looked up and saw in his mother's face that she knew. What he couldn't bring himself to say when she and his father located him at last in the library parking lot though his jeans were stained, what they could have known by the blood on his clothes.