The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
of coffee. I drew her a bath. She wanted me to stay in the bathroom with her, but when I soaped up a washcloth and tried to wash her back, she flinched. “Don’t touch me!” she snapped. Then she apologized.
“You want me to leave?”
“No, stay. I just don’t want you to touch me.”
And so I sat there, watching her wash herself. Watching her fall back into whatever it was she had lived through the day before. Watching the way her shivering shivered the bathwater.
The news was reporting that Dave Sanders had died. Shot in the science corridor while shepherding kids to safety, he’d staggered into one of the classrooms, collapsed face-first, and bled to death during the hours it took the SWAT team to take back the school and get to him. I needed to react, but she was watching me. She’d been through enough without my breaking down in front of her about Dave. “I’m taking the dogs out,” I said, nudging them from their naps with the toe of my shoe.
I walked around in the backyard, crying for Dave—thinking about the lunches we’d shared, the duties. He’d befriended me my first year at Columbine—one of the few who’d taken the time to welcome a newcomer. In return, I’d started going to some of the girls’ basketball games, running the clock for him during some of the home contests. He was a good coach—a teaching coach who used the kids’ mistakes as learning opportunities. I thought about that ugly orange tie he wore on game days to inspire his girls. It was typical that, when the shooting had started, he’d tried to get the kids to safety rather than running for cover himself…. Maureen was at the kitchen window, watching me, and so I bit my lip. Whistled for the dogs and roughhoused with them when they came running. I had no right to this playful romp, and no right to cry in front of Maureen.
When I came back in, she asked me if Dave Sanders had children.
“Daughters,” I said. “And grandkids, I think. Babies.”
She nodded. “I should have died,” she said. “Not him.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? I’m nobody’s parent. I’m expendable.”
“You know something?” I said. “Until yesterday, I don’t think I ever fully appreciated what crap my life would be without you. I was so scared, Mo. You’re not expendable. I need you.”
I opened my arms to her, but instead of coming to me, she sat down on the kitchen stool and stared at nothing, her face unreadable. “The summer I was eleven?” she said. “After my father moved out? I had this friend, Francine Peccini, and she invited me to go with her to the convent where her church was. The Church of the Divine Savior, it was called. Her mother was the church secretary, and Francine used to go over there mornings and help at the convent. Dust, do dishes, fold laundry. And one day she asked me to go with her. My mother never had much use for Catholics, but she was so distracted by the separation that she said okay, I could go…. And I liked the nuns. They were nice, and sort of mysterious. At lunchtime, we’d stop our work and eat with them. And after lunch, we’d say the rosary. At first I didn’t know the words to the Hail Mary, but then, they got repeated so much that I did…. And in the afternoon, we went back to Francine’s house, and she and I went up to her room and pretended we were nuns. Sisters of Mercy. We put bath towels on our heads for veils, and stapled them to these oaktag things we cut out. What are they called? Those stiff things around their faces?”
“Wimples,” I said. Why was she telling me all this?
She nodded. “Wimples. And on weekends? When I used to have to go over to my father’s? In his car on the way over, I used to say it to myself: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…’ And at night, when he’d come into my room and…and…I’d say it then, too, over and over, until he was finished and got up and left…. And yesterday? When I thought those boys were going to find me and kill me? I said the Hail Mary, over and over and over. The words came back to me from that summer when I was eleven. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’…Okay, here it is, I kept thinking: the hour of my death, because they’re going to find me and kill me. And that was when I got the idea to write you a note, Caelum. On the wall of the cabinet I was hiding in. I managed to inch the pen out of my pocket without hitting the door, and I wrote, in the dark, with my hand squeezed between my knees…and I kept thinking, they’re going to find me in here, and shoot me, and later on, someone will find my body and…and Caelum will suffer, grieve for me, and then he’ll move on. Find someone else, marry her. And Sophie and Chet will get old and die. And then Caelum will get old, too, and maybe he’ll die without ever knowing I had written him the note.”
Should I go to her? Hold her? Keep my distance? I didn’t know what she needed. “What did it say, Mo?” I asked.
She looked at me, as if she’d forgotten I was in the room. “What?”
“What did your note say? What did you write to me?”
“That I loved you more than I ever loved anyone else in my life, and I hoped you could forgive me for the mistakes I made…. And that, if Velvet survived and I didn’t, I hoped you could forgive her for the things she did, and look after her. Make sure she was okay.”
Before I could respond, the phone rang. “Don’t answer it!” Maureen said. But I told her I’d better—that it might be the investigators.
It was her father. “No, no, she’s pretty shaken up, but she’s all right.” I pointed to the receiver and lip-synched the words: your father.
Mo shook her head vehemently and hurried out of the room.
“Well, actually, she’s sleeping right now,” I said. “She had a bad night.”
LATER THAT MORNING, TWO DETECTIVES came to the house—Sergeant Cox, a small blonde in her early forties, and an earnest younger guy, Asian-American, Detective Chin. They didn’t want coffee, but Detective Chin took a glass of water. The four of us sat in the living room. Sergeant Cox did most of the questioning. She was gentle, coaxing. She seemed to have a calming effect on Mo. That was how I learned what had happened to her the day before.
Expecting Velvet to stop by the clinic later that morning, Maureen had gone to the guidance office and spoken to Ivy Shapiro, her counselor, about the possibility of Velvet’s coming back to school. Ivy had said she was all for it, but that Velvet would have to petition for readmittance. That meant filling out some paperwork and writing a one-paragraph statement about her intent. Columbine wanted to encourage returnees, Ivy explained, but also to send them the message that school was not a revolving door. She typed Velvet’s name into her computer. “Looks like she never handed in her textbooks from last year,” she told Mo. “She’ll have to return them before we can issue her a schedule. And it says here that she owes library fines, too. She’ll need to take care of those.”
It was hectic at the clinic, as it always is during fifth hour, Mo said: kids coming in to take their medications, pick up forms, drop off doctors’ notes. A freshman boy was icing the ankle he’d sprained in gym. A junior girl with chills and a temp sat wrapped in a blanket, waiting for her father to pick her up. Velvet arrived in the midst of the hubbub. Her clothes were subdued—jeans and a sweater. She had rinsed the blue dye out of her crew cut. Kids stared nonetheless. Snickered. Mo said she was afraid Velvet might lose her temper, or worse, lose her nerve and abort her plan to reenroll.
“I brought ’em,” Velvet said, when Mo relayed Ivy’s message about returning her textbooks. She overturned her backpack and several heavy books clunked out onto Mo’s desk. “Oh, yeah, I found this, too,” she mumbled. Eyes averted, she slid my signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird toward Maureen.
Mo said she took a breath, tried not to show too much of a reaction. “Great,” she said. “Mr. Quirk will be glad to get it back. He had to fly home to Connecticut because of a death in his family, but when I talk to him, I’ll tell him you found it.”
“Whatever,”