“That’s it? It’s good.”
“I work in a bank, Caelum. What do you want me to say?”
As opposed to Francesca, who understood the nuances of my story better than I did. Who could finesse a sentence, change a verb, and make a whole paragraph sing. She was as brilliant an editor as Enid had promised. Helped me make a much better book. And Jesus, the fringe benefits….
It got so we could synchronize it. Get there together. She was the only one of the three of them that I could do that with. I told Alphonse Buzzi about it, and he said, “Oh, man, you gotta marry that.” And I had. Met her the first of September, married her the first of February.
“Married? Already?” Lolly shouted into the phone. “Good God almighty, you work quick! You moving to New York, or is she moving here?”
“Neither one for now,” I said.
Then Enid gets uterine cancer and joins the fucking Hemlock Society. Francesca gets a better offer at Random House. The new regime sweeps in, cancels my contract. “It’s a fine book in many ways, Mr. Quirk,” the new senior editor tells me. “It’s just not a home run.”
I’m sitting across from her, thinking I wish I could say it. Then I do say it. “You know, you got a pretty heavy mustache for a woman.”
Francesca tried selling The Absent Boy at Random House, although how hard she tried I never really knew. She kept telling me I needed an agent, so I got an agent. The first time we ate lunch together, Lon said my writing read like a hybrid of poetry and prose, and that the ending of the novel, jaded as he was, had made him cry. His plan was to get two houses interested, have them fight it out in an auction situation. “The whores out in Hollywood are going to give you blow jobs to get ahold of this story.” Then this Kevin Costner movie comes out, and it’s about the abduction of a little boy. Goes belly-up at the box office. By the end of the second year, Lon wasn’t even returning my phone calls.
“Take a leave of absence from teaching and start something new,” Francesca advised. “Move in with me.” Instead, I carried my galleys up to Lolly’s attic and took a second job, teaching a lit course over at Oceanside Community College. Going into New York every weekend got old. Too many student papers to get through, too little of Francesca’s attention when I did take the train down. And God forbid she should get on one. Get herself up to Connecticut on a Friday night and be with her husband…. Hey, it was a mismatch from the beginning. The foreign service diplomat’s daughter and the son of a drunk. The weekend marriage. Wasn’t going to work. She took her appetites elsewhere and claimed I was the problem…. Emotional castrato: she couldn’t just insult me. Had to give it that finishing-school twist. Had to take her house key and scratch it onto my fucking computer monitor…. But it was good before it got bad. Great at the beginning. Weed and waterbed sex, that floor-to-ceiling mirror propped in the corner of her bedroom wall so we could watch ourselves….
I took another sip of wine. Took matters into my own hand. Hey, why not? Expedient. Uncomplicated. Might even help me get some sleep. It wasn’t like I could go upstairs and ask her for it. Not then, and probably not for quite a while. It was like she was radioactive or something. Like she was that scared little eleven-year-old over at her father’s house….
So I jacked a little faster, conjuring Francesca’s breasts—the heft of them in my hands, those areolas dark as wine. I stroked to the rise and fall of her waterbed. Made my finger do that little flicking thing she’d do with her tongue. Thought about how she’d laugh as I came. Taste it. Welcome it. With my free hand, I groped for something, anything. Grabbed the Cheez-It box and let go in that….
I cleared my throat, tucked myself back inside my boxers. What was that old Joni Mitchell lyric? “After the rush, when you come back down….” Upstairs, the toilet flushed. Selfish prick, I thought. Absent Boy….
Gualtiero: that was that waiter’s name.
I sure as hell hoped she wasn’t up there taking more Tylenol. I had to get her to a doctor. Get her some real sleeping pills, rather than screwing around with over-the-counter shit. I’d call Monday morning, get her an appointment. Maybe if she could start sleeping through the night again, I could, too. Shit, man, half of Arapahoe County must be taking sleeping pills.
I killed the last of the wine. Reclined my chair the rest of the way. The Lakers-Celtics game went into double overtime….
I woke up at dawn. The dogs were sniffing my feet. The TV was still on: bass fishing now. I righted the recliner, got up. Stepped on the Cheez-It box. Collapsed and folded it as tight as it would go, then stuffed it into the garbage. With my entourage, I stumbled barefoot to the backdoor. The dogs rushed out, the cold air rushed in. If I wanted to find out who won that game, I’d have to do a freakin’ Internet search. I had a bitch of a headache.
“FORBID YOU?” I SAID. “MAUREEN, when have I ever forbidden you from doing anything? I’m just making the point that, when we went over to Clement Park Wednesday night, the crowd freaked you out. And the thing at the church. You said being in that packed room made you nervous. Made your heart race.”
“I was preoccupied about Velvet,” she said. “Now I’ll be able to focus.”
“This crowd’s going to be a hundred times bigger. That’s all I’m saying. But forbid you? Come on, Mo. Get real.”
She insisted she could handle it. She’d had a four-hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep, she said, and was feeling better. More in control. She’d take comfort in the anonymity of a big crowd. Nobody would know where she’d been during the shootings. What she’d seen and heard. This wouldn’t be anything like that church meeting, where she’d been afraid they were going to call on her and make her speak.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll give it a try.”
We left the house an hour before the program was scheduled to start, but they’d blocked off several of the streets and I had to park almost a mile away from Bowles Crossing, where the service was. The rain began when we were halfway there. I had Maureen get under the awning of a coffee shop. “Go inside and get a coffee if you get cold,” I said. I jogged back to the car, got my big umbrella, and made it back in under fifteen minutes.
She wasn’t out there. Wasn’t inside either. I ran down to the cross street. No sign of her. With my heart pounding, I went back inside the coffee shop. Approached the skinny, aproned guy behind the counter. “You see a woman come in here? Jean jacket and a turquoise skirt? Reddish-brown hair?”
“She’s in the back with Andrea. She came in here and she was like whimpering or something. And then she comes behind the counter, starts opening the cabinet doors like she’s looking for something. And we’re like, ‘What’s the matter, lady? What’s wrong with you?’”
She was seated at a tiny table in a room jam-packed with boxes. There was a steaming, oversized cup of coffee on the table. A punk-rock-looking woman, early twenties, was holding Mo’s hand, stroking it.
“Hey?” I said.
Mo looked up at me. Didn’t smile.
“We didn’t know whether to call nine-one-one or not,” the woman said.
“No, we’re good,” I said. “Thanks for your concern. What do we owe you for the coffee?”
She shook her head. Repositioned herself in the doorway. “Ma’am, do you want to go with this gentleman? Or would you rather stay here and have us call someone?”
“Hey, I’m her husband,” I said.
She looked me in the eye, nostrils flaring. “I volunteer at a women’s shelter. I know a lot about husbands.”
We stood there, glaring at each other. “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said. “But this isn’t about me. It’s about Columbine High School.”
“Oh,” she said. She dropped her defensive stance and stood aside.
We walked out front, ignoring the stares as best we could. Outside, I started her in the direction of our car. “No!” she said, pulling away. She’d panicked, but she was okay now. She was going to the memorial service. “Where were you?” she demanded.
?
??Maureen, you know where I was. I went to get the umbrella. I got back here as fast as I could.”
A few hundred silent steps later, she told me what had happened. Two teenage boys—one tall, the other short—had sauntered past the coffee shop, laughing and talking loudly. “I got confused,” she said. “I thought they were alive again. I thought I was back in the library.”
“Oh, Mo,” I said. “Oh, Jesus, Mo.”
HUDDLED UNDER UMBRELLAS AND JACKET hoods, the bereaved and the curious filled the three-acre parking lot. The overflow crowd was out in the street, on the rooftops of nearby stores and restaurants. Seventy thousand, the paper said the next day—twice what they’d expected. As Maureen and I approached the periphery, music was playing—guitars, undecipherable lyrics. Silver and blue balloons, hundreds of them, lifted into the drizzly sky.
We were way the hell away from the stage, but they’d set up big video screens. Denver’s archbishop assured us that love was stronger than death. The rabbi from Beth Shalom told us our grief should inspire us to greater awareness of the humanity in all. All? I wondered. Even those two?
As the governor read the names of the victims, a fluttering white dove was released for each. Eric’s and Dylan’s names were omitted. No doves for them. Watching one of those birds soar on the big screen sent me back to Three Rivers—to that stained glass window at St. Anthony’s. The Holy Trinity, the three-in-one: I’d stare at them every Sunday when I was a kid, trying to figure it out. God the Father and God the Son I could understand, no problem. But God the Holy Ghost? A white bird with a halo? My friend Jimmy Jacobson had a bird—a cockatiel—and it’d crap all over the bottom of its cage. Latch on to your finger with its toenail beak, and it would hurt. “Is it a bird or is it a ghost?” I’d ask my mother.
“God is a mystery,” she’d say. As if that was a satisfactory answer.
Amy Grant sang a Christian song. Billy Graham’s son said a prayer. Al Gore approached the podium, looking somber and stately. “What say we into the open muzzle of this tragedy, cocked and aimed at our hearts?” he asked. The answer to that question shaped the rest of his remarks, but I can’t remember what he said.
Jack Eams, a coach and assistant principal, was one of the last speakers to be introduced. He’d played pro football for a few seasons back in the sixties—the Vikings, if I remembered right. A silver-haired bulldog in a tan suit, he approached the podium, gripped it on either side, and leaned into the mic. “Raise your hand if you go to Columbine High,” he said. He scanned the crowd, nodding at the waving hands. “I want to talk to you kids specifically, okay? Remind you that what happened last Tuesday does not define who we are, okay?” His delivery seemed out of sync with the rest of the service—more half-time pep talk than tribute. “Because Columbine’s not about hatred, okay? Columbine’s about love. Columbine is love. And I want you to repeat those words after me, and I want everyone else here today to say them along with you. Okay? You ready? Columbine is love.”
“Columbine is love,” the crowd murmured.
“Louder! Columbine is love!”
“Columbine is love.” I couldn’t say it. Neither could Maureen.
“I can’t hear you! Columbine is love!”
“Columbine is love!”
“This is total bullshit,” someone near us said.
“Yeah,” another voice agreed. “When the white hats spit on me in the hallway, I can really feel the love.”
I turned around to see a quartet of Goth-looking kids—three skinny boys and a fat girl with eggplant-purple hair and fingernails. The kid with the goatee said, “How about when that Snapple bottle hit me in the face and Eams goes, ‘Wear different clothes and they won’t target you’? And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but how come the jocks get to target people?’”
“Because they’re the crown princes of Columbine!” the girl trilled, in mock adulation.
“Hey!” a beefy-faced guy near us said. “Would you kids mind shutting your mouths and showing a little respect?”
Maureen turned and faced him. “They’re right, though,” she said. “The APs look the other way at the bullying. You know what a ‘twister’ is? When they pinch your skin between their fingers and give it a twist. Makes a nasty little contusion. You know what ‘bowling’ is? They pour baby oil on the floor, then grab some poor freshman and send him flying down the corridor. They shoved one boy so hard, he fell and broke his wrist.”
“Yeah, and how do you know all this?” the guy said.
“Because I’m a school nurse.”
“Yeah? Well, my kid graduated from Columbine. Played football, wrestled, and he threw the shotput. And he never bullied anybody.”
“As far as you know,” Mo retorted. When I glanced over at the Goth kids, I saw their backs retreating into the crowd.
“Hey, Maureen?” I said. “This isn’t really the time to—”
Mo turned to the guy’s wife. “They bully the girls, too. Block their path when they’re trying to get to class. Slam them against the lockers if they have the nerve to talk back. And they get away with it.” She waved a hand at Eams’s face on the big screen. “I’ve been to him about the injuries. I’ve been to all of the APs, and I guess I should have kept going. Because maybe if they’d bothered to address the bullying, instead of—”
She was drowned out by the roar of the F–16 fighter jets—four of them, flying in formation above us to honor the dead. Frightened by the noise, Maureen positioned her body against mine. She was trembling badly. “I need to go now,” she said.
Neither of us said anything on the walk back to the car, and when we got near that coffee shop, we crossed the street and walked on the other side.
Back in our driveway, I cut the engine and turned to her. “Can I say something?” I asked. She looked at me. Waited.
“That ‘Columbine is love’ stuff? That’s a stretch, granted. But the equation’s a little more complicated than what you were saying back there. Lots of high school kids get bullied, but they don’t bring guns and bombs to school and start wasting everyone.”
“So we’re all exonerated, Caelum? Gee, that’s convenient.” She got out of the car. Slammed the door. I sat there, watching her jam her key at our front door lock until she got in. Sat there, thinking about that time Rhonda Baxter had had me read Klebold’s short story—the one where the mysterious assassin in the black coat murders “jocks and college preps” as they leave a bar. A lot of the boys write this stuff, I’d told Rhonda. Testosterone, too many video games. Nothing that getting a girlfriend wouldn’t cure.
THERE WERE FOUR FUNERALS ON Monday, three on Tuesday, one each on Wednesday and Thursday. The pastor at Grace Presbyterian told us it was typical that Danny Rohrbough had held the door open for others to escape when the shooting began. He might have lived if he’d been more selfish, but that was Danny for you. The youth minister at West Bowles Community told us there’d been a wedding in heaven; Christ was the groom, Cassie Bernal the bride. Corey DePooter’s tribute video ended with the words, “Gone fishing.”
At St. Frances Cabrini, Father Leone asked Matt Kechter’s teammates to stand, and when they did, he turned to the victim’s younger brother. “Adam, look at Matt’s football team over there. These guys are your big brothers. In the coming days and weeks, they will be there for you.” I spotted the red-haired boy—the one who’d caused the outburst at the grief counseling meeting. He looked over at Matt’s little brother. Nodded. Gave him a thumbs-up.
Dave Sanders’s funeral was both the hardest and the least hard to attend. I’d known Dave better than I’d known any of the kids, and differently. He was a colleague, a contemporary. But Dave had lived three times as long as those kids. He’d had forty-seven years to make his mark, learn from his mistakes. A dozen or more people approached that podium at Trinity Christian to speak about Dave: thank him for his teaching, his coaching, his having been like a second father, his bravery that day. At the end, we all passed by his open casket. I was glad the family’d decided t
o bury him in his orange basketball tie, his good luck “game day” tie—the one we used to tease him about.
Isaiah Shoels’s funeral was the last, and one of the biggest. They’d dressed Isaiah in the cap and gown he would have worn in May and laid him to rest with gospel music, blue-and-white balloons, and calls to end racism. “I was ten years old when my father was gunned down by senseless violence,” Martin Luther King III told the five hundred or more of us who had come. “There is still something gravely wrong with our nation when two young men who worshipped Adolf Hitler go on a killing spree on his birthday.”
When I got home from Isaiah’s service, there was a car parked in front of the house—a silvery blue Mercedes. Couldn’t be local detectives. Did FBI agents drive cars like this? Then, fuck, I realized who it was. I walked around back and came in through the garage, where Sophie and Chet had been exiled. The Barracuda was afraid of dogs.
There was a bouquet on the kitchen counter, a stack of drawings, a note in a kid’s deliberate cursive. “Dear Aunt Maureen, I heard you were sad. I hope these pictures make you happy! I LOVE You!!! Love, Amber.” When we’d first moved out there, Mo and her niece had hit it off, but Cheryl, the half sister, had withheld Amber—had decreed she’d be much too shy to stay overnight at our place, or for us to take her anywhere. She was four then, nine now. Big-time into glitter, from the looks of it. Everything in her drawings sparkled: the princesses’ crowns, the mermaids’ bras and fishtails, the dragonfly’s wings, the tips of the praying mantis’s antennae.
Their voices were in the living room. “Of course, it’s entirely up to you,” Evelyn was saying. “But I think it would be an important interview.”
I stood in the doorway, unnoticed. Maureen was slumped on the sofa, clutching a pillow. She looked close to tears. “What interview?” I asked.