The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  The Hour I First Believed

  A Novel

  Wally Lamb

  FOR ANNA

  A SERIES OF DEBILITATING STROKES and the onset of dementia necessitated the agonizing conversation I had with my mother in the winter of 1997. When I told her she’d be moving to a nearby nursing home, she shook her head and, atypically, began to cry. Tears were a rarity for my stoic Sicilian-American mother. The next day, she offered me a deal. “Okay, I’ll go,” she said. “But my refrigerator comes with me.” I couldn’t meet her demand, but I understood it.

  Ma’s refrigerator defined her. The freezer was stockpiled with half-gallons of ice cream for the grandkids, and I do mean stockpiled; you opened that freezer compartment at your peril, hoping those dozen or so rock-hard bricks, precariously stacked, wouldn’t tumble forth and give you a concussion. The bottom half of Ma’s “icebox” was a gleaming tribute to aluminum—enough foil-wrapped Italian food to feed, should we all show up unexpectedly at once, her own family and the extended families of her ten siblings. But it was the outside of Ma’s fridge that best spoke of who she was. The front and sides were papered with greeting cards, holy pictures, and photos, old and new, curling and faded, of all the people she knew and loved. Children were disproportionately represented in her refrigerator photo gallery. She adored kids—her own and everyone else’s. My mother was a woman of strong faith, quiet resolve, and easy and frequent laughter.

  This story’s been a hard one to write, Ma, and it got harder after you left us. But I had the title from the very beginning, and when I reached the end, I realized I’d written it for you.

  (P.S. Sorry about all those four-letter words, Ma. That’s the characters speaking. Not me.)

  AND SO, THEY MOVED OVER THE DARK WAVES,

  AND EVEN BEFORE THEY DISEMBARKED,

  NEW HORDES GATHERED THERE.

  Dante’s Inferno, canto 3, lines 118–120

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Butterfly

  Chapter one

  THEY WERE BOTH WORKING THEIR final shift at Blackjack Pizza…

  Chapter Two

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, I AWOKE to the sound of whimpering.

  Chapter Three

  FIGURING IT WAS BETTER IF they talked with someone who…

  Chapter Four

  MOTHER SAYS I’M NOT TO cross Bride Lake Road without…

  Chapter Five

  LOLLY’S CAT WAS CAUTIOUS AT first, watching me from doorways…

  Chapter Six

  I LIKED VICTOR GAMBOA, WHO was sympathetic without being smarmy.

  Chapter Seven

  I KEPT DIALING HOME, PACING, trying friends’ and other teachers…

  Chapter Eight

  EXCERPTS FROM DYLAN KLEBOLD’S JOURNAL, 1997:

  Chapter Nine

  BY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, MAUREEN SEEMED better. Shaken, still, but functioning.

  Chapter Ten

  ON THURSDAY, THE SNOW FELL. The coroner released the bodies…

  Chapter Eleven

  I WENT BY MYSELF TO the funerals.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE YEAR MAUREEN AND I started at Columbine was also…

  Chapter Thirteen

  I GOT HOME A LITTLE after six. Got the dogs…

  Part Two

  Mantis

  Chapter Fourteen

  BIOGRAPHY QUESTIONNAIRE—SECTION A

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE OTHER DAY, WHILE CLEANING out a bureau drawer, I…

  Chapter Sixteen

  WHEN MORGAN SEABERRY WAS IN utero, his mother had been…

  Chapter Seventeen

  DRIVING THROUGH THREE RIVERS’ DESERTED downtown, I passed the Savings…

  Chapter Eighteen

  MOSES AND JANIS MICK WERE a handsome couple, mismatched in…

  Chapter Nineteen

  Please excuse my hideous penmanship today. I am writing these…

  Chapter Twenty

  FATS DOMINO AND HIS WIFE had been rescued and were…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I am writing this from the Hartford station, where we…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I HAD TOURED HARTFORD’S MARK Twain House many times with…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “WHAT DID YOU CALL IT again?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  DEVIN, A DOMINO’S PIZZA DELIVERER, identified with Hermes, the Greek…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ON MONDAY, OUT AT THE apple house, Ulysses verified what…

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I GOT BACK TO THREE Rivers a little after midnight.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I STOPPED THERE. PUT IT away. I had to.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  JANIS WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN, looking the worse for wear.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Recapping the felt pen I’d used to scrawl the myth’s…

  Chapter Thirty

  PASSING THE GUARD STATION ON my way out of the…

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “DIG RIGHT ABOUT THERE,” HE said. “No, not that far.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  HE WAS PRETTY SHAKEN UP. Pretty scared. “You drunk?” Jerry…

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  In the years following the Civil War, many female abolitionists…

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  THE VISITING ROOM WAS LESS crowded that day, which was…

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Where would I go? I had asked Jerry Martineau the day…

  Afterword

  Notes from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  A List of Sources Consulted

  Charitable Donations

  About the Author

  Other Books by Wally Lamb

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  Butterfly

  chapter one

  THEY WERE BOTH WORKING THEIR final shift at Blackjack Pizza that night, although nobody but the two of them realized it was that. Give them this much: they were talented secret-keepers. Patient planners. They’d been planning it for a year, hiding their intentions in plain sight on paper, on videotape, over the Internet. In their junior year, one had written in the other’s yearbook, “God, I can’t wait till they die. I can taste the blood now.” And the other had answered, “Killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops! My wrath will be godlike!”

  My wrath will be godlike: maybe that’s a clue. Maybe their ability to dupe everyone was their justification. If we could be fooled, then we were all fools; they were, therefore, superior, chaos theirs to inflict. But I don’t know. I’m just one more chaos theorist, as lost in the maze as everyone else.

  It was Friday, April 16, 1999, four days before they opened fire. I’d stayed after school for a parent conference and a union meeting and, in between, had called Maureen to tell her I’d pick up takeout. Blackjack Pizza was between school and home.

  It was early still. The Friday-night pizza rush hadn’t begun. He was at the register, elbows against the counter, talking to a girl in a hairdresser’s smock. Or not talking, pretty much. There was a cell phone on the counter, and he kept tapping it with his index finger to make it spin—kept looking at the revolving cell phone instead of at the girl. I remember wondering if I’d just walked in on a lover’s spat. “I better get back,” the girl said. “See you tomorrow.” Her smock said “Great Clips,” which meant she worked at the salon next door—the place where Maureen went.

  “Prom date?” I asked him. The big event was the next night at the Design Center in Denver. From there, the kids would head back to school for the all-night post-prom p
arty, which I’d been tagged to help chaperone.

  “I wouldn’t go to that bogus prom,” he said. He called over his shoulder. “How’s his half-mushroom-half-meatball coming?” His cohort opened the oven door and peered in. Gave a thumbs-up.

  “So tell me,” I said. “You guys been having any more of your famous Blackjack flour wars?”

  He gave me a half-smile. “You remember that?”

  “Sure. Best piece you wrote all term.”

  He’d been in my junior English class the year before. A grade-conscious concrete sequential, he was the kind of kid who was more comfortable memorizing vocab definitions and lines from Shakespeare than doing the creative stuff. Still, his paper about the Blackjack Pizza staff’s flour fights, which he’d shaped as a spoof on war, was the liveliest thing he’d written all term. I remember scrawling across his paper, “You should think about taking creative writing next year.” And he had. He was in Rhonda Baxter’s class. Rhonda didn’t like him, though—said she found him condescending. She hated the way he rolled his eyes at other kids’ comments. Rhonda and I shared a free hour, and we often compared notes about the kids. I neither liked nor disliked him, particularly. He’d asked me to write him a letter of recommendation once. Can’t remember what for. What I do recall is sitting there, trying to think up something to say.

  He rang up my sale. I handed him a twenty. “So what’s next year looking like?” I asked. “You heard back from any of the schools you applied to?”

  “I’m joining the Marines,” he said.

  “Yeah? Well, I heard they’re looking for a few good men.” He nodded, not smiling, and handed me my change.

  His buddy ambled over to the counter, pizza box in hand. He’d lost the boyish look I remembered from his freshman year. Now he was a lanky, beak-nosed adult, his hair tied back in a sorry-looking ponytail, his chin as prominent as Jay Leno’s. “So what’s your game plan for next year?” I asked him.

  “University of Arizona.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. I gave a nod to the Red Sox cap he was wearing. “You follow the Sox?”

  “Somewhat. I just traded for Garciaparra in my fantasy league.”

  “Good move,” I said. “I used to go to Sox games all the time when I was in college. Boston University. Fenway was five minutes away.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  “Maybe this is their year, huh?”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t sound like he gave a shit either way.

  He was in Rhonda’s creative writing class, too. She’d come into the staff room sputtering about him one day. “Read this,” she said. “Is this sick or what?” He’d written a two-page story about a mysterious avenger in a metal-studded black trench coat. As jocks and “college preps” leave a busy bar, he pulls pistols and explosives out of his duffel bag, wastes them, and walks away, smiling. “Do you think I should call his parents?” Rhonda had asked.

  I’d shrugged. “A lot of the guys write this kind of crap. Too many video games, too much testosterone. I wouldn’t worry about it. He probably just needs a girlfriend.” She had worried, though, enough to make that call. She’d referred to the meeting, a week or so later, as “a waste of time.”

  The door banged open; five or six rowdy kids entered Blackjack. “Hey, I’ll see you later,” I said.

  “Later,” he said. And I remember thinking he’d make a good Marine. Clean-cut, conscientious, his ironed T-shirt tucked neatly into his wrinkle-free shorts. Give him a few years, I figured, and he’d probably be officer material.

  AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, MAUREEN suggested we go out to a movie, but I begged off, citing end-of-the-week exhaustion. She cleaned up, I fed the dogs, and we adjourned to our separate TVs. By ten o’clock, I was parked on my recliner, watching Homicide with the closed-caption activated, my belly full of pizza. There was a Newsweek opened on my lap for commercial breaks, a Pete’s Wicked ale resting against my crotch, and a Van Morrison CD reverberating inside my skull: Astral Weeks, a record that had been released in 1968, the year I turned seventeen.

  I was forty-seven that Friday night. A month earlier, a guy in a music chat room I’d begun visiting had posed the question, “What are the ten masterworks of the rock era?” Dozens of us had begun devising our lists, posting them as works in progress and busting each other’s chops about our selections. (I came to picture my cyberrockin’ brethren as a single balding fat guy in a tie-dye T-shirt—size XL when XXL would have been a better fit.) My masterwork choices were as controversial as the next guy’s. I incurred the good-natured wrath of several of my cyberbuddies, for instance, when I named to my list Springsteen’s Nebraska while excluding Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. “Dude, as spokesman for the Boss’s TRUE fans,” a trash-to-energy engineer from Michigan messaged me, “I regret to inform you that you’re more f***ed up than a soup sandwich!” I dished it out, too, of course, not always successfully. I learned that I’d deeply offended a professor of medieval literature by stating that the bloodline of the Backstreet Boys could be traced to that other vapid and overrated boy band of an earlier era, the Beach Boys. The scholar asked if he could communicate with me privately, and I obliged him with my address. A week later, I received a FedEx envelope, postage paid by Princeton University, which contained an erudite (if unconvincing) eleven-page defense of the album Pet Sounds.

  For weeks, listening and list-making had consumed me: Sgt. Pepper or Songs in the Key of Life? Aretha or Etta James? I’d saved my tenth and final berth for the unorthodox but always interesting Van Morrison but was having trouble deciding between Van the Man’s elegant Moondance and his more emotionally raw Astral Weeks. Thus, that Friday night, the earphones.

  But it was armor, all of it, I see that now: the TV, the open magazine, the aural review of my life, the keyboard chatter. I’d safeguarded myself in multimedia chain mail to prevent emotional penetration from Maureen.

  A shadow moved across the carpet, and I looked up from Homicide to her. “Caelum?” her lips said. She was holding our wicker tray, two glasses of red wine counterbalanced by a lit candle. I watched the wine rock in the glasses while she waited. The candle was scented—spice of some kind. She was into Enya and aromatherapy back then.

  I lifted my left earphone. “Yeah, give me a few minutes,” I said. “I want to let the dogs out, catch a little of the news. I’ll be up.”

  Maureen, her wines, and her defeated shoulders turned and started up the stairs. I could read Mo from the back, same as I could the other two. But reading and responding are two different things. “Look, don’t just stare at the pages,” I used to tell my students. “Become the characters. Live inside the book.” And they’d sit there, staring back politely at the alien from Planet Irrelevance.

  Maureen’s my three-strikes-and-you’re-out spouse and, as far as I know, the only one of the trinity who ever cheated on me. That lit candle on the tray? It’s one of the signals she and I came up with back in Connecticut, back in 1994, during the sensitizing humiliation of couples counseling—those seven sessions we attended in the aftermath of her Courtyard Marriott fuck-fests with Paul Hay.

  Whom I’d met a few times at her staff parties. Who was in our Rolodex. Come to think of it, we must have been in the Hays’ Rolodex, too.

  HELLO?” I SAID. ORDINARILY, WHEN the phone rang while I was grading papers, I’d let the machine get it. But the rain that March night had started making clicking sounds against the floorboards of the deck and the dogs had come back inside wearing ice crystals on their backs. Nervous about Mo’s driving home from tai chi on treacherous roads, I was half waiting for a call.

  “May I speak to Maureen Quirk?” the woman asked.

  “She’s out,” I said.

  “Are you Mr. Quirk?”

  “Yeah, but look. No telemarketing at this number. Take us off your—”

  “Do you know who Maureen’s out with?”

  I uncapped my pen. Tore off a piece of some kid’s blue book to jot down her number. “Excuse me,” I said. “W
ho’d you say this is?”

  She identified herself not by name but by association: she was Trina Hay’s best friend. Trina was sitting right there next to her, she said, but too upset to talk on the phone. “We just wanted you to know, in case you don’t know, that your wife’s having an affair with Paul.”

  I said nothing for several seconds, but when I finally did speak, all I could come up with was, “Paul who?”

  “Paul Hay,” she said. “Trina’s husband. Did you know they have a little boy named Casey? Or that Trina has lupus? Or that they’re building a house?” Jesus, she was giving me the whole A&E Biography, and I was still on Paul Hay? Paul Hay? Where do I know that name from? Maureen’s betrayal hadn’t broken the surface yet. Or maybe it had, because my instinct was to kill the messenger.