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 reenrolling.
“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.”
“Knew?”
“That they were dead. And I couldn’t even…I couldn’t…” She began to cry again. “She called me Mom, and I couldn’t even give them her address.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let me take you home.”
“I can’t go home!” she snapped. “I’m her mom!”
I opened my mouth to argue the point, then shut it again. I took her hands in mine and squeezed them. She didn’t squeeze back.
A short time later, a middle-aged man with a droopy mustache entered the gym. “That’s the district attorney,” Maureen said. “He was here before, when the coroner was here.” He mounted the stage, and the thirty or forty of us, scattered throughout the gym, approached.
He said he understood that waiting was pure hell—his heart went out to each and every one there because he had teenagers, too. But he wanted us to know that, for safety reasons, the building had been secured for the night and the exhausted investigation teams had been sent home to get a few hours’ sleep. “We’ve made the decision to resume at six thirty a.m.,” he said. “And at that point we’ll continue with the identification of—”
“The hell with that!” someone shouted. “Our kids are in there!”
“Sir, I know, but there are still live explosives inside the school. How many, and where, we just can’t say yet. A short while ago, a bomb detonated as the technicians were removing it from the building. Now, no one was hurt, but it’s been a very long, very difficult day for all of us. Nerves are frazzled, people are dog-tired. We just don’t want that fatigue to turn into more tragedy.”
“I need to get to my daughter,” a woman wailed. “Dead or alive, she needs to know she’s not alone in that place.”
“Ma’am, I understand what you’re saying, but the entire school is a crime scene,” the D.A. said. “Evidence has to be gathered and labeled, procedures have to be followed. Victims have to be identified, bodies removed and autopsied before they can be released to their families. Those of you who’ve followed the JonBenet Ramsey case can appreciate that when evidence is compromised—”
“We don’t care about evidence!” a man retorted.
