The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (18 page)

I bought a newspaper and sat down in the food court to read it. The front page had stories about Kosovo, the casino, the Love Bug virus. In the second section, there was an article about a project at the prison. That morning? When I’d walked past and seen the inmates out there, digging around for something? Apparently, they’d been unearthing graves. Baby graves, identifiable by flat stone markers, some with initials carved into them, some not. A surveyor had come upon what had been, in the early days of the prison, a cemetery for the inmates’ infants. Back then, it said, women had gone to prison for something called “being in manifest danger of falling into vice.” Translation: they’d gotten knocked up. Raped, some of them, no doubt. Talk about blaming the victim….

Two local ministers were leading the women in the recovery project, the article said, and the administration was cooperating. They weren’t sure yet what they were going to do once all the graves were recovered, but a couple of suggestions were on the table: a healing ceremony, a little meditation park where inmates with good behavior records might be allowed to go. One of the women interviewed, identified only as Lanisha, said she felt the infants’ souls knew they were there, looking for them. Another, Sandy, said it was hell being away from her own three kids while she served her sentence. “These babies were suffering back then, and my babies are suffering now. There’s no one in this world can take care of my kids as good as I can.” It got to me, that article. For a few seconds, I was on the verge of tears over
those long-buried babies. When it passed, I looked around to make sure nobody’d been watching me. Then I got up and threw the paper and my half-drunk coffee into the trash.

On my way back to the farm, I picked up a six-pack, a Whopper at BK, and cat food for Nancy Tucker. Passing the prison yard, I braked. Looked out at the field where I’d seen those women digging. There was no one out there now. I counted the ones I could see: eleven unearthed grave markers.

Maureen had left me a long, rambling phone message. The travel agency had had a hard time getting her a flight. She couldn’t get out of Denver until Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m., which meant she wouldn’t get into Hartford until 1:15 a.m. Wednesday morning. She’d probably just go in to school Tuesday, since her flight was so late. I could reach her there until two o’clock or so, but then she’d have to go back to the house, pick up the dogs, and bring them to the kennel. At least this way, she wouldn’t have to cancel out on Velvet; she hadn’t been able to get hold of her to say she was going to be away. She’d been thinking about me all day, she said; she hoped I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed. She was sorry she’d be getting in at such a hideous hour. She loved me. She’d see me soon.

That night, woozy from beer, I let myself fall asleep on the couch again rather than head upstairs. I got up in the middle of the night, peed, got up again, peed again. At dawn, I awoke from a dream. My grandfather and I were in a rowboat on a lake that may or may not have been Bride Lake. There were graves along the shore, and I was a boy again, sitting on the seat nearest the bow. Grandpa was in the middle of the boat, rowing in long, steady strokes. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Be brave. She’s all right.”

“Who?” I asked. “Mother?”

“Maureen,” he said. And I saw in the water’s reflection that I was not a boy but a grown man.

ULYSSES CAME BY THE HOUSE
the following morning. He looked scrawnier than I remembered. Grubbier, too. His eyes were bloodshot, his pupils jumpy. When I handed him a cup of coffee, he took it with trembling hands.

He already knew about Lolly, he said. He’d walked to the hospital the morning before and identified himself as the man who’d found her and called 911. “The woman at the visitors’ desk was full of herself. Wouldn’t give me the room number. Kept stalling, calling this one and that one. Then finally she just told me that Lolly had died. I was afraid I was going to break down in front of her. So I left. Walked down to the Indian Leap and tied one on.”

He was okay, though, he said. He’d just come from an AA meeting. It happened now and again, him falling off the wagon, but then he’d get himself to a meeting and climb back on. “Lolly was always good about it when I messed up,” he said. “She’d get mad at first–say that was it, she was done with me. But then she’d calm down again. She always took me back.”

I suddenly realized
why
she had, despite the fact that she’d nicknamed him “Useless” and was forever complaining about what a lousy worker he was. Ulysses was a drunk like my father and had been my father’s friend. Over the years, he had become her brother Alden’s surrogate.

He fished into his pocket and took out his key to the farmhouse. Placed it on the table. “Why don’t you keep it?” I said. “I’m just here for the next few days, and then I have to get back to Colorado. Probably won’t come back here until the start of summer. And until then, I’m going to need someone to look after the place, make sure everything’s okay. You interested in the job?”

He looked away and nodded.

“I’m seeing her lawyer while I’m here. She can help me figure out how to pay you. So I’ll have to get back to you about that. How did Lolly pay you?”

“By the hour,” he said. “Ten bucks per.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. Just keep track of your time.”

“What about Nancy Tucker?” he said.

“Well, I guess you’ll have to feed her, empty her litter box.”

He nodded. “I got catnip growin’ wild in back of my place. I could bring her some of that when I come over.”

I thanked him for helping Lolly. “She was good people,” he said. He swallowed the rest of his coffee, stood, rinsed his cup in the sink. Without another word, he started for the back door.

“One more thing,” I said. “Lolly planned out her funeral before she died. She wanted you to be one of her pallbearers.”

He turned and faced me. “She did?”

I nodded. “Do you think you could do that for her?”

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!”

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?”

“My aunt’s funeral. They said they could keep the body refrigerated. Postpone the service until I could get back here and—”

He shook his head. “Better this way, Quirky. The last thing you need is stuff hanging over your head at this end. Not with what’s going on out there. Don’t worry. Me and the old ladies’ll give her a good send-off.”

“What if she’s dead?” I said.

He cocked his head, gave me a slight smile. “She
is
dead, man.”

“I mean Maureen.”

He opened his mouth to answer me, then closed it again. When he finally spoke, it was to ask me what time my plane arrived in Denver.

“Ten fifty-five,” I said. “Provided I get the hell out of Hartford.”

“Ten fifty-five our time?”

“Colorado time,” I said.

He nodded. “How about some nuts? What do you like? Cashews? Peanuts? You like those smoked almonds if they have them?”

I held out my hand. He handed me his phone. “I don’t care if you want them or not,” he mumbled, rising from his chair. “I’m getting you some nuts. Just shut up and put ‘em in your pocket.”

I dialed our number. Got what I’d gotten for hours: the four rings, the click of our machine, my voice, the beep.

THE FLIGHT TO CHICAGO WAS
uneventfully torturous. The seat next to mine was empty—that was a relief—but it was hell to just sit there, strapped in, waiting for time and distance to pass. I thought about that
other
night: the worst night of our marriage, when I’d confronted her about Paul Hay, and then hurt her wrist, and she’d gone out on those icy roads and totaled her car. She could have died that night…. Steer
toward
the skid. She knew that, but she’d panicked, jerked the wheel the other way, and gone skidding toward that tree. “Almost in slow motion,” she’d said later. That’s what flying back felt like: being in the middle of a slow-motion skid, waiting for the crash.

The captain came over the intercom to tell us we’d reached cruising altitude. The flight attendants wheeled down the aisle with the beverage cart. The little TV screens descended. I left the earphones in the seat pocket and sat there, staring at Kramer and Jerry’s moving lips, penguins hopping into and out of icy blue water, a Belgian chocolatier
decorating petits fours. “Hey,” I said to a passing flight attendant. “Do these things work?”

“The in-flight phones? Yes, sir.” She pushed the button and the receiver popped free from its holder. “Just follow the instructions.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” someone said. “They gouge you on those calls.” I looked across the aisle. Nodded to the guy who was talking.

“Yeah, well …” I said. I punched in my credit card number, waited. One ring, two, three, four.
“Hey, how’s it going? You’ve reached the Quirks. We’re not home right now, but you can leave a message after the beep.”

“Mo, where are you?” I said. “I’m in a plane. I’m coming home.”

I ate Al’s almonds. Looked out the window at nothing. Cross-hatched over the faces in the complimentary magazine. I thought about how fucked-up this was: the person on the plane is the one whose life is supposed to be at risk, not the person who stayed home. I wrote her name, over and over, in the margins:
Maureen, Maureen, Maureen
… I had never realized how much I loved her. Needed her. How over my own life was going to be, if she was dead.

O’HARE OVERWHELMED ME. I KNEW
I had to get to Concourse G, but I couldn’t figure out how, and when people tried to direct me, I watched their mouths move but couldn’t make sense of what they were saying. Finally, on the verge of panic, I approached an airline employee—a black woman with copper-colored hair. “I’m lost …” I babbled. “My wife … a shooting at our school.”

“The one in Colorado that’s been on the news? Lemme see your boarding pass.” She took it from my shaking hand. “Okay, this is Terminal
Two.
You gots to get to Terminal
Three.
That’s where Concourse G’s at.”

I burst into tears.

She stared at me for a moment, then shouted over her shoulder.
“Hey, Reggie! I’m going on break now!” She took my hand; hers was rough and plump. “Come on, baby,” she said. “I’ll take you there.”

The waiting area for gate G–16 had a TV. Now CNN was saying the shootings may have been committed by students who belonged to a cult called the Trenchcoat Mafia. I shook my head. Those Trench-coat Mafia kids had graduated the year before. And anyway, they were ironists, not killers. What the hell was going on? Eric Harris’s and Dylan Klebold’s yearbook photos filled the screen. “Once again, we want to emphasize that these are
alleged
suspects,” the anchor-woman said. “What we do know is that officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office have entered the boys’ homes with search warrants, and it is believed, although not yet verified by the authorities, that the bodies of Klebold and Harris were amongst those in the library. At the very least, they are persons of interest.”

My mind ricocheted. Blackjack Pizza, the after-prom party,
Sieg heil!…

I sensed the people around me were staring at me before I knew why. Then I heard moaning and realized it was coming from me.

I
DON’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT
the flight from Chicago to Denver. We landed a little after eleven, and I ran through the airport, ran to my car. Floored it most of the way home.

The house was dark. When I pulled into the driveway, Sophie and Chet began barking frantically. I got the door open, and they jumped on me in lunatic greeting, then bounded past me to the outside. There was dog crap on the living room rug, a puddle of pee on the slate in the front hallway. They hadn’t been let out since morning.

“Maureen?” I called. “Mo?” I took the stairs two at a time. The bed was made. Her little suitcase was packed for the trip to Connecticut. I looked at her jeans, folded on the chair beside our bed, and a chill ran through me. Downstairs, Chet and Sophie were barking to be let back in.

There were eighteen phone messages, half of them from me. Her stepmother, Evelyn, had called, and later, her father. “We’re starting to worry about you, Maureen,” he said. “Give us a call.” As if, suddenly, her safety mattered to him. As if
he
had never put her at risk….

There was a message from Elise, the secretary at the school clinic. “I guess if you’re not answering, you’re probably still over at Leawood.”

Leawood Elementary School! The TV news had shown footage of evacuated students and staff reuniting with their families there. I threw some food into the dogs’ bowls and grabbed my keys. Elise’s message had come midway through the sequence, which meant she’d left it hours earlier. It was late. Most, if not all, of the kids would have been picked up by now. But maybe, for some reason, Maureen was still there. Or, if not, maybe someone knew where she was. I’d start at Leawood, then drive from hospital to hospital if I had to. Be there, I kept saying. Please be there, Mo. Please be all right.

The eight or nine cars leading up to the school were parked helter skelter, a few on the sidewalk, one abandoned in the middle of the street. Parents must have pulled up, thrown open their car doors, and run for their kids. A cop was posted at the entrance. “Yes, sir, can I help you?”

I blurted that I’d been away, that I was trying to find my wife.

“Are you a parent of one of the Columbine students, sir?”

“I teach there,” I said. “My wife’s one of the school nurses. Do you know if there were shots fired anywhere near the medical clinic?”

He said he’d heard all kinds of rumors about the boys’ movement inside the school, but that that was all they were : rumors. He took my driver’s license and wrote down my information on his clipboard. “It was bedlam here earlier,” he said. “It’s quiet now, though. Too quiet. Looks bad for the families still waiting. There’s eleven or twelve still unaccounted for, and there’s bodies inside the school, so it’s a matter
of matching them up. ‘Course, some of the kids may show up yet. If you’re sitting there waiting, you gotta hang onto some hope, I guess. You have kids?”

I shook my head.

“Me neither. The wife and I wanted kids, but it just never happened. You can go ahead in. They’re in the gym, all the way down past the showcase. There’s lists posted on the wall.”

“Lists?”

“Of the survivors.”

I walked warily down the hallway, my footsteps slowing as I neared the gym. Let her be here, let her be here. Let her be on that list….

She was seated by herself, cross-legged on a gym mat, a blanket around her shoulders, a pile of Styrofoam coffee cup spirals in front of her. “Hey,” I said. She looked up at me, emotionless for several seconds, as if she didn’t quite recognize me. Then her face contorted. I dropped to my knees and wrapped my arms around her. Rocked her back and forth, back and forth. She was here, not dead, not shot. Her hair smelled smoky, and faintly of gasoline. Her whole body sobbed. She cried herself limp.

“I wrote you a note,” she said. “On the wood inside the cabinet.”

“What cabinet, Mo? I don’t—”

“Velvet’s dead.”

At first, it didn’t register. “Velvet?” Then I remembered: she was going to meet Maureen at school that morning, to talk about re-enrolling.

“I went to call you, to see how things were going, and then there was this explosion and the whole library—”

“Oh, Jesus! You were in the library?”

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.”