Gabby loved that her constituents were such a diverse crowd. Her district is home to an Air Force base and an Army post. Her constituents are ranchers, retirees, artists, college students, professors, astronomers, union members, public-sector workers, and a lot of hardworking, low-wage blue-collar types. Pia marveled at how adept Gabby seemed to be at relating to the “crunchy people in clogs” who thought she wasn’t liberal enough, and the grumpy old Republicans with guns on their belts who distrusted Washington. She called them her “bubbas.”
She could talk about military benefits with veterans, details of missile-production with Raytheon engineers, and Department of Defense policy specifics of the new Joint Strike Fighter with Air Force generals. She could nurse a beer with her bubbas at Trident Grill, a favorite Tucson watering hole owned by her friend Nelson Miller, or at the Shanty, owned by her friend Bill Nugent. She was just as comfortable sipping wine out in the foothills with retired investment bankers who’d moved to town from back East and wanted to discuss tax policy. And because Gabby spoke Spanish fluently and knew Hispanic culture well, she related easily to Latinos in her district.
She had a lot of warm feelings for the people she represented. It saddened her, though, to see the darker side of her district.
There was one highly charged Congress on Your Corner event in 2009 where people were arguing about the health-care bill. A man’s gun dropped out of its holster and slid across the floor of the Safeway supermarket. That was a scary moment for Gabby and her staffers; they realized people could be coming to COYC events armed.
On that particular day, there had been a group of people of Mexican descent waiting two hours to talk to Gabby. When they got to the front of the line, they hugged her and she spoke to them in Spanish. They related to her very warmly.
An angry Tea Party supporter watched Gabby interact with this group of people and shouted at her, “That’s why you’re going to lose in November—because the Mexicans love you!”
Gabby knew well that fringe elements were damaging Arizona’s reputation. She accepted that she’d have to live with sizable pockets of zealots. Some were vociferously anti-immigration, seeing no areas for compromise. Others were so pro-gun that they thought any laws requiring background checks or waiting periods were a threat to society. There were those who so hated Obama’s health-care bill that the veins in their necks bulged when they yelled at Gabby about it.
Gabby knew she represented these people, too. She often spoke about that to me. “I represent everyone who voted against me in the last election as equally as I represent my closest supporters,” she’d say. She hoped people’s anger could be tempered, that there was room for understanding. Publicly, she spoke of hope. Privately, she was sometimes less optimistic.
On Friday, January 7, 2011, the night before Gabby was shot at her Congress on Your Corner event, she received an e-mail from Kevin Bleyer, a writer we know who works for Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. The Comedy Central program had made fun of Arizona thirteen times in 2010 for its reactionary politics, its die-hard extremists, and the silly antics of some lawmakers. Kevin sent us a news link about an Arizona state representative we know who had said his goal for the upcoming session of the state legislature was “to try to keep Arizona off The Daily Show.”
From my observations of the state, I thought this was an impossible goal. I also thought it was all kind of funny.
But Gabby saw the note from Kevin in very personal terms. At 7:15 p.m., she replied to Kevin’s e-mail and cc’d me.
“My poor state!” she wrote. “The nut jobs have stolen it away from the good people of Arizona.”
That turned out to be the last e-mail I received from her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I Wonder What Happened”
In the days after Gabby first came out of her coma, she became aware, in the haziest of ways, that she was seriously injured. She recognized that she was hospitalized. She knew her loved ones had gathered around her. But she was not in a position to understand what had happened, and we offered no details. She wasn’t ready.
“I was a zombie,” Gabby would say, seven months later, when she tried to describe how she felt after waking up.
For our part, we didn’t know what she was thinking in those first weeks following the shooting. She may have assumed she was in a car accident or that she’d had a stroke. Perhaps she didn’t even consider how she was injured. Her brain wasn’t functioning yet at that level of awareness. And even if it was, a tracheotomy tube prevented her from speaking.
Jerome Caroselli, her neuropsychologist at TIRR, told us that when she was ready to absorb the news, it was important for her recovery that she know what happened to her. She didn’t need to be given the full story anytime soon, or any details about the fates of all the people around her. Almost certainly, that would be too difficult for her to process, especially because she wasn’t able to ask questions. But she deserved to be told how she had been hurt.
“She should know it wasn’t a stroke and it wasn’t a car accident,” Dr. Caroselli said. “You’ll need to tell her she was shot.”
I first attempted to have this discussion with Gabby in early February, less than a month after she was injured. Pretty quickly, I realized that she could not comprehend what I was saying. She looked at me blankly. I gave up.
Ten days later, I tried again. “Gabby, there’s something important that you need to know,” I said. “I’m going to tell you what happened to you.”
She looked at me and waited.
“You were at your first Congress on Your Corner event of the new term,” I said. “It was January eighth at the Safeway on Oracle. This man came up to you with a gun and he shot you. He shot you in the head. We don’t know why he did that. I’m sorry it happened. We all are. But he’s in jail. You’re safe.”
Gabby looked shocked and surprised, but only for a minute. Then it was as if the news wore off and escaped from her mind. She gave no further indication she had heard me.
I tried a third time a week or so later, and it didn’t go well. After I spoke, Gabby began crying uncontrollably, and she kept crying for about a half hour.
I told her neuropsychologist what happened, and he was pleased. “Great,” he said. “That’s an appropriate response. She understood what you said and she cried about it. I’m happy to hear that.” But again, her sadness passed and within hours Gabby seemed to have forgotten what I told her.
Then on March 12, a Saturday, I was sitting with Gabby, and as usual, I was encouraging her to try to ask a question. She looked at me for a while in silence before she spoke. “I wonder,” she said. “I wonder what happened to me.”
It wasn’t really a question, but I gave her credit for it.
I decided to take a different approach to help her understand what she was wondering about. This time, instead of telling her what happened to her, I’d tell her what happened to me. I’d share the story of the shooting from my perspective.
So I didn’t start by mentioning the Congress on Your Corner event. Instead I said, “A couple months ago, I was home on a Saturday morning and the phone rang.” I explained that Pia, her chief of staff, was on the line. “She told me you’d been shot, and that I needed to get to Tucson.” Gabby seemed to be following the story more closely this time.
“Do you remember being shot?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. It was hard to know if she really remembered, but she was insistent. “I remember.”
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“Shot. Shocked. Scary,” she said, very clearly, pausing between each word.
I still didn’t tell her that others had been injured and killed. Her doctors had warned us that she might hold herself responsible for their deaths, having hosted the event. How would she handle feelings of guilt and sadness, given her inability to say much or ask questions? We were told we had to proceed very carefully.
A little later that morning, however, Gabby took charge of the flow of in
formation into her life.
For a few weeks, I had been reading articles to her from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Arizona Republic, and Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star. Every day, she seemed to be getting a clearer sense of the stories. She even looked at the front-page headlines and photos on her own, and read the words to herself. It was hard to know just how much she comprehended, but she was definitely engaged in the newspapers.
On this Saturday, there happened to be a teaser at the bottom of the front page of The New York Times: “Doctors Detail Giffords’s Progress.” It pointed to a story on page A-13.
Gabby saw that and started frantically leafing through the paper to find the page. Just then, Angie, her speech therapist, came into the room to bring her to a session. Sitting in her wheelchair, Gabby latched her good left hand onto the railing of her bed, giving all of us the firm message “I’m not going anywhere!” To me, it seemed as if she was thinking, “Everyone has been lying to me about my condition. But now I’m going to get the real story!”
“OK, Gabby,” I said. “Let’s find the story and I’ll read it to you.”
I turned to page A-13 and Gabby watched as I read the story aloud, paragraph by paragraph. Her eyes remained focused on the newspaper. The story was mostly about a news conference held by her doctors at TIRR the previous day. Saying Gabby was “making leaps and bounds,” they explained that her cognitive level and long-term memory seemed good, that she was walking with assistance, and that her personality had reemerged. They called her progress “quite remarkable.”
Gabby listened as I read. When I got to the second column, I knew what was ahead. I was going to come to a paragraph about the people who were killed and wounded in Tucson. I thought I’d smoothly and seamlessly skip over those sentences, but Gabby had been following along. She watched me bypass that paragraph. That’s when she grabbed the paper, ruffled it, and glared at me. Using her middle finger and forefinger, she forcefully and abruptly tapped the paragraph in question.
I had made a decision after she was injured that I wouldn’t mislead her. If she asked me a question, I’d give her an answer. Now here she was, nonverbally, asking me for the truth. And so I read to her, slowly: “Ms. Giffords was one of nineteen people shot in January while she was meeting with constituents in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson; six died.”
I looked up from the page and took Gabby’s hand. She didn’t ask, “Who died? Did I know them? Were they strangers?” She couldn’t formulate a question or express herself at that level. But now she knew that she wasn’t the only one shot that day.
She sat for a moment, digesting the news, and then Angie asked, “Gabby, are you ready to go to speech therapy now?”
“Yes,” Gabby answered, but I could tell her thoughts were elsewhere.
As Angie wheeled her to therapy, Gabby began crying. I sat in on her session, and she was very emotional. She had trouble getting through her verbal exercises.
That night, I was lying in bed with Gabby and I asked her how she felt about what we’d read in the newspaper. “Awful, awful,” she said. “So many people hurt.”
“Yes,” I told her. “It was a very terrible day.”
“Die,” she said. “So many people.” She cried and I held her.
On the morning of the shooting I was home in Houston. It was my weekend to have the kids. Claire was sleeping and Claudia was sitting with me, talking about a boyfriend I didn’t approve of. (It wasn’t totally the boy’s fault. I don’t approve of any of them.)
That’s when my cell phone rang. It was Pia. “I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll just say it,” she said. “Apparently, Gabby has been shot at the Congress on Your Corner.”
She was in Washington and had no other information. She said she had just received a call from Mark Kimble, Gabby’s senior press advisor, who was at the Safeway but uninjured. Mark said he was standing behind a pole with bodies all around him. It was about four minutes after the shooting. The police hadn’t even arrived there yet.
Pia recalls that I was calm while hearing the news. She told me she had no other information. The call was over in fewer than thirty seconds.
“Claudia!” I said. “Wake up, Claire.” And then, strangely, I thought to myself that maybe I had just imagined my short conversation with Pia. For a few seconds, I wondered whether I’d been hallucinating. I got out my cell phone and looked at it to make sure Pia’s phone number was my most recent call.
I hit redial. “Tell me this again,” I said to Pia, and she repeated what she had said.
This time, she added that she’d heard Gabby may have been shot in the head. I’m an optimist. Maybe that information was wrong. Maybe the injury wasn’t life-threatening, and the bullet had just grazed her. Pia could only tell me what she’d heard from Mark Kimble.
I hung up and immediately called Gabby’s parents in Tucson. When something terrible happens to your child, I believe you have a right to know immediately. Spencer answered the phone and took the news hard. He began sobbing. He said Gloria was at a dry cleaner in Tucson, so I called her on her cell. She was shocked, but she’s like me. She was thinking, “What do I do next?”
For me, the first question was “How do I get to Tucson?”
The next commercial flight wouldn’t get me there for six hours. If it had been a weekday, I could have flown myself in one of NASA’s T-38s. I always needed more training hours on the jet; I had to log forty-five hours per quarter. In my emotional state, however, I’m not sure how that flight would have gone that day. In any case, because it was a Saturday, the T-38s were in the hangar and unavailable.
That’s when my friend Tilman Fertitta came into my head.
Given his restaurant and casino businesses all over the country, he had his own plane. When I told him about the shooting, he jumped into action. “The plane is about to be taken apart for maintenance,” he told me. “Let me call them right this minute.”
He stopped the mechanics in time and had the plane fueled while I packed two suitcases. I didn’t know how long I’d be in Tucson, so I figured I’d better be prepared. The girls begged to come with me, and I finally relented. After my mom offered to join us and look after them, the four of us jumped into my car and headed for Houston’s Hobby Airport.
At first, there was nothing on the news about the shooting. We were listening to CNN on the car’s satellite radio. But then, shortly before we arrived at the airport, the first “breaking news” from Tucson was reported. It was about forty-five minutes after the shooting began.
Once the news was out, my cell phone started vibrating as friends and colleagues learned what had happened and tried to reach me. I didn’t answer any of their calls. We were too frantic rushing to get onto the plane. Once it was in the air, I tried to figure out if the TV system on board would work. It turned right on, and we were able to get CNN and Fox News.
In hindsight, however, watching the television was a great mistake.
We had the TV set to Fox, which at first had limited information, but then reported news that had just aired on National Public Radio: “Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona has been shot and killed during a public event in Tucson, Arizona.”
It was the most shocking moment of my life.
My mother screamed and the girls began crying. I was so distraught I didn’t know what to do except to stand up and go into the plane’s tiny restroom.
I sat in there on the lid of the toilet with my head in my hands. I cried. Gabby was the most amazing person I had ever met, full of life and optimism. Now she was gone. What would the coming days look like? I didn’t know what to do or what I could say to my kids and my mom. Through the bathroom door they could hear the muffled sounds of my grief, and I could hear theirs.
After a few minutes, I wiped away the tears, splashed some water on my face, and pulled myself together the best I could. I came out of the bathroom and hugged the girls. Claudia later said it seemed as if my whole body was crying.
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br /> We switched on CNN, which also was reporting that Gabby was dead. “I should tell you,” said the CNN anchor, Martin Savidge, “that NPR is now reporting that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has, in fact, died, as have six other people.” A few minutes later, he said: “For those of you tuning in, CNN has confirmed that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was killed at a shooting that took place at a grocery store.”
“Confirmed.” That was the word CNN was using.
Minutes later, one of the pilots, Dave Dinapoli, yelled back to us in the cabin, “Tilman is on the phone.”
I picked up the phone and Tilman said, “I’m watching the news and they’re saying Gabby died. I don’t believe it. Something is screwed up here.” Other news outlets had been reporting that Gabby was taken to the hospital. Dead people aren’t usually taken to hospitals. Tilman told me how to use the phone on the plane so I could try to call Pia.
Pia answered right away. “I’ve spoken to Gloria,” she told me. “She’s at the hospital now. Gabby is there and she’s alive. They’ve taken her into surgery.”
I repeated what Pia had told me to Claudia, Claire, my mom, and the pilots. We were numb but relieved. Hearing that Gabby was dead had been rock bottom for us. After we learned that she was still breathing, at least for my family, there was reason for hope.
From the plane, I was able to send an e-mail to Scott Simon, my friend at NPR. His show, Weekend Edition, airs on Saturdays, so he was at work when the news broke. “Where is NPR getting that info?” I wrote. By that point, several major news outlets, including The New York Times website, were also pronouncing Gabby dead, crediting NPR for breaking the news. It was one of the worst possible examples of pack journalism. We had to get NPR to disclaim its false report.
Scott called the NPR newsroom and asked how they had received information Gabby was dead. “It’s solid, Scott,” he was told. “We have two sources.” Scott later told me that he got the impression they were humoring him on that call. They were almost dismissive. As a top NPR personality, they thought he was trying to “bigfoot” them—poking around on the news side, where he didn’t belong.
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