flinging itself back at the shore in a towering wave of destruction.
Right then, I could feel the tide rolling away, exposing the dark, squirming creatures to the light of day.
Barbara gripped my hand. We said nothing, attempting to hide our worst fears, neither of us able to muster any bland pleasantries about how all was well and there was probably just some unusual incident, perhaps an exploded transformer or a solar flare or some other such nonsense that had brought down both the live truck and the cell towers around Smith Mountain Lake.
I sat down at the kitchen island and opened my laptop. Barbara moved behind me and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. The laptop spun to life slowly (why do these damn things start slowing down the second you take them out of the box?) before creaking to life. I googled “Alison Parker.” Plenty of old news clips popped up, but nothing new. Nothing that told me anything. I opened a tab and went to WDBJ’s website. Nothing. Back to Google. Nothing. I opened another tab and typed in “Smith Mountain Lake.” There were sketchy reports of shots fired, but nothing concrete, nothing useful, nothing that answered any questions. I navigated between the three tabs, compulsively clicking the reload button, the minutes ticking away.
My ringtone for Alison was Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Surely the phone would ring any minute now, Van the Man’s tinny voice echoing off the turquoise walls. I conjured an image in my mind of Alison picking up the phone, her eyes widening in mild surprise at the missed calls she had received, tapping the numbers to reply in order of importance. I knew I’d be the first one she called. I willed the phone to ring.
“I’m calling Lane,” I said.
Lane Perry is Henry County’s sheriff. I’d known him for years, back since I was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2003. He’s a good guy, a tall, plainspoken man with a crew cut so perpetually close-cropped that it probably requires daily maintenance. If Lane knew anything, I knew he would tell me.
Lane answered his cell immediately. He said he was sorry to report that he didn’t know much more than I did. He had also heard that something happened up at the marina, and he was reaching out to his colleagues in Franklin County to see what he could learn. He promised to call me back as soon as he heard anything.
As I got off the phone with Lane, I heard the tail end of Barbara’s phone conversation. She had been calling area hospitals, but no one named Alison Parker had been admitted, and they hadn’t heard anything about a shooting.
Within minutes, my phone rang; not “Brown-Eyed Girl,” but a generic ringtone. Lane Perry.
“They said there has been a shooting at the marina,” Lane said, “but they think the news crew is OK. I’ll let you know just as soon as I hear anything else.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said weakly, and ended the call.
I thought about grabbing my keys and driving to the marina, but Smith Mountain Lake was at least an hour’s drive away, better than half of it down a long, twisting two-lane road with intermittent cell service. What if Lane called back with news, or Alison called to tell me all was well, that she had just misplaced her phone about the same time a car had coincidentally backfired nearby? I was terrified to miss a phone call, so I stayed at the kitchen island with Barbara.
We sat there in silence for the most part, looking out the window at the hummingbird feeder, the bottle tree, the middle distance beyond. I’d occasionally refresh my tabs on the browser; there were no updates.
I couldn’t tell you the exact minute that we began to lose hope, but it happened sometime after that second phone call with Lane.
Years ago I read a story—I can’t remember where—about twin brothers in Kansas, or maybe Nebraska, one of those perfectly flat Midwestern states. They were both power company linemen, and one day one of the brothers touched the wrong wire and got zapped, dying instantly. Fifty miles away, his brother was in a work truck with a coworker. He pulled over and stopped the truck.
“Oh God,” he said, sobbing, “my brother is dead.”
As the story goes, they checked the times, and sure enough, he called it to the minute. He just knew.
Maybe that story is bullshit. It sure sounds like it. Or maybe there’s something to it. Maybe close family—twin brothers, or parents and their children—have some sort of deeper connection, some quantum physics thing that science doesn’t yet understand, an invisible umbilicus that connects us no matter how far apart we travel.
I don’t know. But I do know that as Barbara and I sat at our kitchen island, the morning sun pouring through the windows, filtering different hues by those wildly ineffective evil-capturing glass bottles outside, we began to realize that our daughter was dead. It wasn’t something we ever would have voiced. I don’t know that we even realized it on a rational level. But on some subconscious wavelength, we knew it to be true.
We waited for the call.
•
I always had a premonition that Alison would die young.
Some would probably chalk that statement up to confirmation bias; the death of a child is every parent’s greatest fear, after all.
Some might also blame it on intrusive thoughts. They say that a lot of new mothers end up going to psychologists for that, convinced they’re psychotic. They tell the doctor that they were sitting in the lovingly assembled nursery bedecked with stuffed animals, stencils of the ABCs on the walls, their infant nursing peacefully at their breast, when they suddenly had a mad thought: What if I took my tiny, fragile, defenseless child and threw it against the wall as hard as I could?
That is an intrusive thought, perhaps the worst one. But the psychologists assure the new mothers that they wouldn’t act on that impulse; it is simply human nature to imagine the worst things possible, the things that would utterly destroy us, and replay them in our minds like a looped filmstrip. The brain can be infinitely cruel.
For me, though, it never felt like an intrusive thought, and it never felt like confirmation bias. This was not standard-issue parental anxiety; it was disturbingly specific.
For one thing, Alison drove like a bat out of hell and it scared the living shit out of me. Barbara and I would white-knuckle our way through rides with Alison, instinctively pumping the imaginary passenger-side brake pedal as she streaked through curves.
I was afraid she would die in a car crash, but my imagination went far beyond that. I would imagine the scene of the crash, the twisted wreckage, the guttering flames on the asphalt from the spilled gasoline. I’d imagine having to identify her body. I’d imagine gruesome, unspeakable images of my child’s death, and I wouldn’t wish that on any other human being. To be clear, I wouldn’t wish death on anyone, but I wouldn’t even wish those mangled images my mind had conjured on another human being. For most of Alison’s life, my imagination was a taped-off crime scene.
A car crash was the reigning fear, just because it seemed so eminently possible, plausible even. But my imagination wasn’t limited to car crashes. I saw malevolent shadows at her periphery wherever she went.
I never imagined a shooting, though, not even in my wildest fears. Alison was in elementary school when the Columbine shooting occurred, in high school when the massacre at Virginia Tech took place, and then there had been Sandy Hook, Charleston, and all the others. So many others. For whatever reason, it had never even crossed my mind that Alison would die by someone’s hand. Even as I compulsively imagined fiery car
