The Hour I First Believed

  Mo burst into sobs. I think she may have been waiting a lifetime to hear those words. But look what it had cost her.

  The second caller was speaking so softly that I missed the first few words of her message. “It’s Velvet!” Maureen said. I hit replay.

  “Hi, Mom…. It was pretty bad, huh? Those fuckers…. I looked for you after I got outside. I wasn’t sure where you were, and I was scared that maybe…but I know you got out okay, because I seen the list and you weren’t on it…. I’m okay, I guess. I’m gonna split. I just wanted to say good-bye to my mom. And thanks for, you know, hanging with me. I’m not sure where I’m going. Just away from this fuckin’ place. This guy I met’s giving me a ride. He may be going to Vegas, or California, or maybe even down to Mexico. It depends. Maybe I’ll call you when I get someplace. Just to see how you’re doing. How my mom’s making out…. Oh, and tell Mr. Quirk—”

  Beep. End of message.

  chapter eleven

  I WENT BY MYSELF TO the funerals.

  John Tomlin’s, on Friday, was the first. His girlfriend spoke of his infectious grin. His minister warned of the devil. “Satan loves this,” he said. “He wants us to be overwhelmed by the evil and the fear. He wants us to return evil for evil.”

  On Saturday, Rachel Scott’s mourners, myself among them, queued up to sign her off-white casket with marker pens. Two people from the front, I could read the messages. “Honey, you are everything a mother could ask the Lord for in a daughter.” “Sweet Rachel, we love you.” “I promise to finish the dreams we had together.” My hands began to shake. How could I hold a pen? What could I write? I had no words for Rachel—nothing to counteract the senseless shame of that sweet kid’s being inside that polished box. And so I left the line, left the church, and drove home. I must have, because one minute I was sitting behind the wheel in the church parking lot, and the next I was walking through our backdoor, moving toward the ringing kitchen phone.

  It was my father-in-law. “Apparently, half of Colorado is going to that memorial service tomorrow. Evelyn has to show a house at nine. She’d reschedule, but it’s a VIP client—the new cohost for Good Morning, Denver. The soonest we could get on the road would be ten, ten thirty, and by then, traffic’s going to be a nightmare.”

  Right, I felt like saying. Your daughter’s falling apart at the seams, but we’d hate to see you and the Barracuda inconvenienced by a little bumper-to-bumper. And besides: letting her down? It’s not like you haven’t established plenty of precedent. “No, I understand,” I said. “Maureen will, too.”

  I hung up feeling pissed but relieved. I’d come face to face with Daddy Dearest twice since Mo and I had been together, both times in neutral places—high-end restaurants he and Evelyn had suggested. Both times, I’d sat there, chewing and swallowing food I wasn’t going to pay for, answering patronizing questions about my teaching, and itching to confront him about it: Masturbate in front of your eleven-year-old-daughter? Mess with her head like that?…Arthur Ekhardt and his charity golf tournaments, his Italian silk suits. Hey, my father may have been a drunken failure, but at least he’d never…I mean, why would she even want him in her life? That’s what I didn’t get.

  In lieu of themselves, my in-laws sent, later that afternoon, a huge cellophane-wrapped basket filled with gourmet cookies, candies, coffees, and teas. There was a pricey bottle of pinot in there, too, and a copy of Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul or some such crap. The card’s inscription—“Thinking of you both. Love, Evelyn and Dad”—was written in someone else’s handwriting.

  “That was really nice of them,” Maureen said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Couple of sweethearts.”

  “Caelum, don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  By way of an answer, she walked out of the room.

  Insomnia-wise, she and I had been taking shifts all week. Neither of us could concentrate enough to read. That night, she lay in bed, staring at nothing while, lying next to her, I catnapped my way through the last innings of a Rockies game and Walker, Texas Ranger. She tapped me awake a little before eleven. “Hmmph? What?”

  “Did you lock the doors before you came up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The second time, I mean? After you let Sophie out?”

  “Yeah…. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Could you check?”

  I sighed. Swung my feet to the floor and sat there. Got up, headed down. I tried not to think about it: her hiding inside that cabinet, listening to the gunfire, the kids wailing and pleading. Well, I was awake now, goddamnit. Up for my two-to-three-hour vigil.

  I checked the front and backdoors, the door leading in from the garage. I thought about that note she’d left me. In the dark, on the inside of the cabinet. She’d worried no one would find it—that I’d never know she’d written me a good-bye. Maybe after all the investigators left and we could take back the school, I’d go up there, into the break room. Crawl inside that cabinet and sandpaper over it. Because she’d survived, right? She was upstairs. She was safe.

  I went to the bottom of the stairs and called up. “All set!”

  No response.

  “Maureen?”

  “I just took two more Tylenol PMs.”

  “Yeah? Okay then. Give ’em time to work. Be up in a few minutes.”

  Silence.

  I stood at our front window for a while, rocking on the balls of my feet and staring out at the stillness. Asked myself: What are you afraid of?

  That she won’t come back. Be Maureen anymore.

  But they said the symptoms would subside.

  For most people. What if she’s not one of them?

  Relax. One day at a time.

  Fuck you, one day at a time. Every day I’m walking on eggs, waiting for her to freak out. Going to kids’ funerals, seeing the horror of it in their parents’ faces. And every night, I’m up for the count, trying not think of what they would’ve done to her if they’d found her in there.

  Satan wants you to be overwhelmed by the evil and the fear.

  Yeah, and Santa wants me to leave milk and cookies by the fireplace. Shut up. Get fucked. I’m going to go watch TV.

  The news was on: the investigation, their yearbook photos, workers assembling the stage for the next day’s memorial. The big guys would be there: the governor, the Gores, Colin Powell. Thirty to forty thousand people in that movie theater parking lot? I couldn’t even picture it. A pretty blond reporter at a highway rest stop was asking out-of-staters why they were making the pilgrimage. “We just want to be there for the families,” a big guy in a fishing hat said. “Because we’re all Columbine.”

  Yeah? That right, buddy? Any of your kids in a coffin? Is your wife flinching every time you move to touch her?

  I’d exiled the unopened gift basket to the mudroom. Now I carried it to the kitchen, slit the cellophane with a steak knife, and reached in for the wine. Uncorked it, poured a juice glass full. Stood there in the moonlight, in my skivvies, and raised a toast to my father-in-law. Cheers, you sick fuck. CEO child molester. I downed the glass, poured a second. Carried it, and the bottle, and an almost-empty box of Cheez-Its back into the living room.

  Drank, ate. Surfed past Saturday Night Live, the Bowflex guy, Steve McQueen in Bullitt. I licked my fingers and stuck them into the cheese dust at the bottom of the box. Sucked my fingertips, drank some more…. Maybe I’d go over there tomorrow, join the throng. Or stay home. Be with her. She sure as hell couldn’t go—not with that size crowd. Over at Clement Park, she’d imagined snipers in the trees.

  On MTV, black girls in thongs were shaking their booties behind a gold-toothed rapper. VH–1 was playing a video by that group Dylan’s son was in. Handsome kid—must take after his mother. Bobby’d never been too pretty to begin with, and middle age hadn’t improved the situation any…. Maybe I’d call Andy and Jen Kirby in the morning, see if they were going. Hitch a ride with them. Or not. Stay home. Watch it on TV if she wanted to.

&nb
sp; I felt the memory of that marker pen in my hand. Sweet Rachel, forgive us. We hadn’t realized they were monsters….

  I found an old Celtics-Lakers game on ESPN Classic. Okay, now we were talking. I turned the volume down to zero. Pushed the recliner back. Nineteen eighty-four or eighty-five, it looked like. Bird and Magic in their prime, all motion, no sound. I reached for the wine.

  Scoreboard says 99 to 99, twenty-seven seconds left. Worthy gets it to Magic, who pump-fakes once, twice, then drives to the basket. Takes a gravity-defying leap and stuffs it, one-handed.

  Balletic, I hear Francesca say. Close my eyes and see her, sitting next to me at Madison Square Garden. She’s wearing that red sweater, the one that hugs her tits and bares her shoulders….

  Someone at the publishing house hadn’t been able to use their Knicks tickets, and she’d bought them to surprise me. Knicks-Bulls. She’d never been to an NBA game before, or even a high school game. Not much hoop action at Miss Porter’s School for Girls. “I thought I’d be bored, but I’m fascinated. Their movements are…balletic.” And I’d rolled my eyes and laughed. Leaned over and kissed her.

  Near the beginning, this was. Winter of ’84, when she was editing my novel and I was taking the 5:07 train down to Manhattan every Friday afternoon. Rushing from Grand Central over to her little apartment on Ninth Avenue. The first one. The one with the cockroaches and the waterbed….

  Four seconds left, 101 to 99. Parish passes to Bird, who trips, stumbles forward, shoots anyway. Swish. You forget how fucking unbelievable Bird was. Game goes into overtime.

  Weird the way all that happened: Francesca and me. I’d started writing my novel the year Patti and I got married, and finished it eight years later—the year she left me to go to business school. “Move back here with Hennie and me,” Lolly had said. “We can always use another hand and set another supper plate.” It was like that kids’ game, Red Light, where, if they see you moving forward, they send you back to the starting line. So I’d boxed up my stuff and moved back to my windowless bedroom with the cowboys-and-Indians bedspread. I didn’t have a wife anymore, or an apartment. Didn’t have a title for my novel, or a clue about why I’d written it, or how to get it published. So it just sat there in a box on the top of my bureau—the one I’d used as a kid. A nameless 457-page story that I didn’t know what to do with. Was it any good? Could someone whose wife had left him because he was “too aloof” and “just not that interesting” write something anyone would want to read? I asked the dusty Magic Eight-Ball that still sat on the bookshelf in that second-floor bedroom I thought I had escaped forever. Shook it and tipped it over. The answer floated into view. It is highly doubtful.

  And then? At school? In one of my C-level classes? This sullen, seedy kid, Michael Mull—a druggie, everyone said. His attendance had been spotty from the start, but then he’d stopped coming altogether. Days in a row, then weeks. One day, one of my talkers, Missy Gingras, rushes through her test as usual, comes up to my desk, and hands me her paper and a note: “Can I switch seats with the absent boy?” Now, I know why she wants to switch: because Michael Mull’s desk is next to her girlfriend Joline’s, and Joline’s another yapper. So I shake my head, and Missy goes back to her seat and pouts.

  But that note: I keep looking at it. “Can I switch seats with the absent boy?” There’s a pad of late passes on my desk, and I rip one off and turn it over. Write: “The Absent Boy.” Write it again, upper-case. “THE ABSENT BOY.” Put the paper in my pocket. And that night, while I’m correcting those tests at the dining room table, Hennie sticks her head in the doorway. “Doing a load of laundry, Caelum. You got any darks?”

  “Yeah. I’ll go up and get them.”

  Upstairs, I bundle my clothes, check the pants pockets. In the khakis I’ve worn that day, I find the paper. I’d already forgotten about it. I flatten it out, place it on top of my manuscript. The Absent Boy. My novel’s got a name.

  The next week, on a field trip to New York, while my students are wandering the great halls of the Metropolitan Museum and sneaking out to the front steps to smoke, I get an idea. I find a phone booth just outside the rest rooms on the bottom floor, look up “publishers” in the phone book, and tear out the pages. I didn’t know anything about publishing protocol or literary agents, but now I had three or four tissue-paper pages of addresses.

  That weekend, I had the photocopy place make me six copies of The Absent Boy. Stuffed them into oversized envelopes and sent them off to the six publishers whose names I’d circled. No cover letters, no editors’ names or return postage enclosed. Just my novel and an index card with my return address paper-clipped to page 1.

  For the next few weeks, every time Lolly’s phone rang, I suspected it might be a publisher. A month went by. Two months.

  Turns out, Michael Mull was dead. Murdered. His body was discovered behind a shed out near Pachaug Pond, his skull smashed in with a rock. The morning it was in the paper, the vice principal came on the PA and led us in a ten-second “moment of silence” for Michael. The month before, a pretty senior girl—National Merit Scholar, Thanksgiving food drive coordinator, homecoming princess—had been killed in a car accident. There’d been a special assembly, a tree planting, a scholarship fund set up in her memory. The day of her funeral, the kids had been allowed to come in late without a note. But no one mourned for Michael Mull. “Who?” my homeroom kids buzzed. “What did he look like?”

  I went to the wake, a sorry little gathering—ten or eleven people, counting the Ozarks-looking aunt and uncle he lived with, and me. “He loved this goddamned snake,” the uncle told me, handing me a creepy Polaroid of Michael, shirtless, his torso emaciated, his boa constrictor draped around his neck like a winter scarf. “We gotta get rid of it, though. Her and me can’t be running and buying mice all the time. You like snakes?”

  At the six-month mark, three of the six copies I’d sent out had drifted back, one with a snotty Xeroxed note about how much money unsolicited manuscripts without SASEs cost publishers. SASEs? It took me a week and a magazine, Writer’s Digest, to crack the code.

  The police arrested the killer, a forty-year-old speed freak who claimed Michael had cheated him on a drug deal. The Absent Boy was about the abduction of a four-year-old boy, not the murder of a teenage druggie. My story and Michael Mull’s story weren’t alike at all. But with each passing month, each returned manuscript, the title took on deeper resonance for me. At the one year mark, I admitted to myself that the book was stillborn—as dead as Michael—and that I’d been an asshole to fantasize about ever being a published writer.

  Then it was August 26, 1983. I’d spent the morning haying with Lolly, and had planned to spend the afternoon over at school, getting my classroom ready for opening day. But while Lolly, Hennie, and I were eating lunch, the doorbell rang. The divorce papers had arrived from Patti’s lawyer. I never made it over to school. By mid-afternoon, I was still lying upstairs on my bed with that unopened package of legal papers sitting on my stomach. Thinking: Well, she was right. We’d gotten married too early and grown in different directions. I was aloof. I was boring. And in the middle of my pity party, Lolly called up the stairwell. “Caelum? Phone!”

  It was Enid Markey, a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Said she usually only read books that were represented by agents, but that one of their summer interns had been assigned the slush pile and had discovered The Absent Boy. The manuscript had made its way from office to office and had, the day before, landed on her desk.

  “What’s the slush pile?” I said. It was pretty much what I thought.

  Enid said she’d read through the night, intrigued by the first chapter, enthralled by what came after. That was the word she used: enthralled. Introducing readers to a talented new writer was the part of her job she most enjoyed, she said. The book’s flaws were entirely fixable. Simon & Schuster would be delighted to publish The Absent Boy. “I’m assigning you to a wonderful young associate editor, Francesca LaBarre. Arrived last year, s
umma cum laude from Bryn Mawr. She’s brilliant!”

  And she was. Beautiful, too. Not fat, but fleshy. Different from Patti in every other way, too: self-assured, temperamental, sexy. She signaled me that very first meeting, up there in her cramped little office on the twelfth floor. Pulled my chair next to hers so that we could go through the text together, and while she was making her points, asking her questions, our shoulders kept colliding. I’d go to turn a page, and she’d stop me. Put her hand on top of mine, her fingertips resting in the spaces between my knuckles. I mean, in terms of pheromones, they were going off like the Fourth of July. After our second meeting, she took me to lunch at a place just down the street from her apartment. “You want to come up?” she asked…. You always hear how, what men want is release and what women want is intimacy. Not Francesca. She preferred coming to cuddling. Made love the way she tackled text and the way she ate: with an urgent and ravenous appetite.

  God, that one time? I get off the train at Grand Central, get over to her place. She buzzes me up, and I’m barely in the door before we’re going at it. Her, with her skirt hiked up and her shoulder blades banging against the wall and me, with my pants down at my ankles and my sports jacket still on—the one I wore teaching that day—thrusting into her, and into her, and into her….

  I popped a boner thinking about it.

  And God, New York, man: that was part of it, too. Those art house movies she liked, the galleries and used bookstores. That little Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street with the big olive jars in the windows, and that same waiter we always had. What was his name?…Manhattan was like the antidote for Three Rivers, Francesca the antidote to Patti, my high school sweetheart, my prim, inhibited Irish-Catholic wife who used to have to undress in the dark. Who’d had her first orgasm maybe two, three years into our marriage. When I was writing my novel, I’d hand Patti a new chapter to read, and she’d read it and hand it back to me, nervously. “It’s good,” she’d say.