Ellipsis

by Kristy McGinnis

  “Ms. Sanger, can I call you Nell?” At my affirmation, she continued. “Nell, just come meet us and hear us out. If you’re not interested after that, we will understand, but at least come listen.”

  Against my better judgment, I heard myself saying, “Okay, when and where?” as I wrote down an address. She wanted to meet up tomorrow and that meant it would be three days in a row I had to pull myself together. I felt exhausted at the prospect.

  After the call, I sat down and considered the day’s events. Between the text conversation and the intrusion of Ronda Jenkins, I felt like I was being forced to think about that day, the day I tried to never deliberately think about. Given the details the texting child had shared, and the fact I would be walking into a discussion about those events tomorrow, I felt dread at what I knew needed to be done. I needed to do a little research; I needed to know more about that morning, and the boy who had shattered my world.

  His name was Dill Hobert. He was a tall, skinny boy with a shock of red hair and vacant blue eyes. He wasn’t a boy I’d seen before, and with that red hair, if he’d passed through my school, I would have recognized him. He must have fed into Cooper from one of the other elementary schools, or perhaps was a recent transfer into the district. I studied his picture, searching for some hint of the malady that had poisoned him. He didn’t look like a monster, but there was something troubling about him. I was clearly a biased witness, but I didn’t think I was imagining it. He stared straight ahead in the released police photo. He didn’t seem to be hiding from the camera; he displayed no shame or fear, his face seemed to hold no expression at all.

  I poured through articles, learning he’d always been labeled a troubled kid. He had been diagnosed with learning disabilities; former teachers had commented he’d been a challenging student. I remembered the texting child’s comments; Dill had been a target for bullies and after reading about his learning and behavioral challenges, I wasn’t surprised. As a teacher, I tried to protect the vulnerable ones, but my protective wings could only spread so wide. Some children could be very cruel to those who were different.

  The gun had been his father’s. His parents were divorced, and he apparently spent time between both households. His father's criminal record included several domestic abuse charges later dropped, multiple DUI arrests, and a misdemeanor assault conviction. His mother was a stage 4 breast cancer patient, with a terminal prognosis. Not a lot was known about her, other than the fact she’d apparently been married to an abusive man and that as some speculated, she likely wouldn’t live to see the conclusion of Dill’s trial.

  On the morning of April 12, 2019, Dill Hobert had packed the 9 mm handgun he’d picked up off of the kitchen table the night before into his backpack and carried it into Cooper Middle School. The gun was loaded with a magazine carrying 15 bullets. At school, he would go to his first-period class and about ten minutes into class, as students were standing to find their lab partners, he would remove the gun and turn to the boy nearest him. That boy’s back was turned, Dill would aim at the black curls on the back of the boy’s head and without saying anything, fire the gun.

  Charlie, of course, died immediately. Dill would immediately aim again and hit 12-year-old Misty Framingham in her torso. She would die before paramedics could load her into the ambulance. He would fire next at 13-year-old Sam Keller, hitting him in the shoulder. Sam would survive. He’d fire one shot into the wall behind Sam, and the next 2 shots would hit DeShaun Jenkins, killing him, as he hovered over his twin sister Aliya. She was miraculously spared any injury. Number Four, Jessica Carter was struck in the head but initially survived. She would die later at the hospital. As Mr. Goldsby rushed into the room to tackle him, the gun would go off one final time and would graze Louisa Gonzales’s thigh, leaving her with a very minor injury and permanent scar. He fired eight shots, and seven of them hit human flesh. Four of his six victims were fatally injured. Dill Hobert, for all of his shortcomings, was an amazing shot.

  I had grown up with guns. Every kid I knew back in Michigan learned how to shoot a gun before they learned how to drive a car. Like Dill Hobert, I spent many days with my father firing at targets. His had been sheets of paper with human form on them, at an indoor shooting range. Mine had been tin cans and water filled milk jugs on saw horses, set up across the field on the back end of our property. Our family used guns to hunt, our freezer was always full of wild game. We also kept them for protection, people often think of the city as being where you need extra protection, but when you live in a semi-rural area, you’re vulnerable in a different way. Home robberies were not unheard of, and the police aren’t just a whistle away. No, guns had never scared me. People sometimes did.

  Dill hadn’t spoken publicly since the shooting. His attorney, a frazzled looking middle-aged man with wiry white hair and a permanent frown in every photograph and video clip, just repeated often that his client “will eventually tell his story.”

  I had my doubts about that, I’d seen kids like Dill before, kids with dazed lifeless eyes and mild cognitive challenges and they were not the tell your story kind of kids. Whatever secrets were locked up inside Dill’s head, would probably remain there. He was, in essence, a walking corpse. He’d never be fixed, because he hadn’t been whole before the shooting. He’d likely never leave prison. He’d stay locked up inside that head, with the monsters that inhabited it, and eventually fade away from public remembrance entirely.

  I was curious about his mother, but found little information to fill the gaps. There were a few photos, one was from Dill’s early childhood. She was standing behind him on a porch, staring straight ahead. She was fuller then, but not by much, her long thin arms dangled at her side with a three or four-year-old Dill mimicking her pose directly in front of her. Neither of them were smiling. Even then, in her presumably healthier days, they looked sickly. In a recent photo, she stood outside the police station, tall and skeletal, wearing a scarf and a dazed look. She, too, had made no statements, but what was there for her to say?

  The only photo released of the father was a police mugshot from an old arrest. He was the source of Dill’s red hair, but he didn’t share his son’s thin build or his vacant eyes. The senior Mr. Hobert’s eyes burned with anger and hatred toward the unseen cameraman. He was the image of a man I’d have avoided sitting next to on a crowded bus. Unsettled by his picture, I slammed my laptop shut and stepped away from my table.

  Between my uneasy stomach following my research on Dill, and my anxiety over what was happening with C, I couldn’t rest. I felt the heavy burden of impotency fill me as each minute ticked by. Pacing, I clung to my phone as if it were a talisman and willed it to do something. As it remained inanimate, I was reminded yet again that the universe didn’t particularly care what demands I made of it.

  I needed to distract myself from the anxiety threatening to seize control of me, and for the first time since Charlie’s death I dug into the hall closet that housed my treasure trove of photo albums. Randomly, I chose a fat, unlabeled, green album from the middle of the pile and brought it back to the living room.

  The cover stuck lightly to the first page, and there was a distinct stale smell that promised this wasn’t one of my recent albums. Good, my recent life hadn’t worked out so well. I smiled when I saw the first page of snapshots. Tucson 1995. It was an out-of-place vacation for us. We took a trip each summer, but typically they were much closer to home. We stuck to places like the Wisconsin Dells, Cleveland, Chicago. I’d flown just twice as a child, once to Disneyland and once to Tucson. I learned later that Tucson wasn’t a random destination, my father had actually scored a free plane ticket and a free hotel room as local union rep to a national convention. At the time, though, the trip had seemed so exotic, so different, I imagined it to be my parent’s dream vacation.

  In the first photo, six-year-old Sarah smiled wildly, her nose scrunched up, her eyes squinting, as a ten-year-old me pointed at a saguaro cactus next to her that was easily three times he
r size. It really hadn’t been that long ago, all things considered, yet the two innocent girls who had their entire lives before them were strangers. As I thumbed through the pages, I was struck by how happy we all seemed. Mom in her sundress, her hair still a deep, dark, auburn, holding up a dreamcatcher she’d purchased. Dad, in the hotel swimming pool, waving with his sunglasses on. A candid shot of me in a botanical garden at night, staring intently at a rare cactus flower that only bloomed at night.

  I’d been lucky, I knew it. I’d grown up in a home where there was laughter and love. I yearned to feel as safe and confident as the young girl in the photos again. How had these years of promise ended so badly? I’d had everything a child needs to develop into adulthood unscathed and unscarred. Even that hadn’t been enough to protect me from the pain always watching and waiting. Dill’s photos were of a family that knew only anger, pain, suffering and I didn’t envy that, but I realized perhaps had I suffered just a little back then, it would be more bearable now. Maybe I’d been too blessed.

  23

  Ronda Jenkins was a force of nature, a microburst that carved a path in the solid terrain of the status quo. I’d approached the huge, brick, colonial home and knocked softly on the bright red door only to have it swing open with force. Although of similar, average height as myself, the four-inch-tall heels she wore gave her a towering impression. She wore a royal blue dress that looked both chic and expensive. Her hair was short and expertly styled, her face was made up with precise eyeliner, mascara and a deep ruby lipstick. She commanded attention. I instantly felt shabby in my faded blue jeans and Old Navy t-shirt and fought the urge to reach back and pull the ponytail out of my hair. With barely a word, she’d grabbed my arm and swooped me up in the house announcing loudly, “She’s here!”

  We walked quickly through the entryway, down a long hallway. More accurately, Ronda clipped along at a rapid pace in her heels while I tried not to run to keep up. I barely had time to take in the details, but the large bowl of fresh flowers, the oil paintings lining the walls, the marble-topped table displaying a white sculpture, made it clear Ronda and I were in completely different socioeconomic classes. I’d felt awkward enough about this meetup before arriving. By the time we stepped into her kitchen, my anxiety was almost out of control.

  The kitchen was a chef’s dream kitchen. I felt as if I was walking into a showroom bathed in a heavenly sunray as I walked toward the huge marble-topped island that four other people already sat around. I eyed them nervously and realized with some relief they looked decidedly normal, almost as schleppy as me.

  “Welcome, Nell, that’s Calvin and Sherry Framingham, Lulu Deters, and that’s my husband, Jeremiah.”

  They all waved. Sometimes when people were married a long time, I’d noticed they looked more like siblings than spouses. The Framinghams had that look, with matching grey-streaked light brown hair and gold wire-framed glasses. Both had deep bags under their eyes and I sensed that they, like me, had slept little in the previous six weeks. Lulu was a large, casual looking woman who wore her long black hair in a braid down her back. I didn’t recognize her name and wasn’t quite sure who she actually was. My face must have given my confusion away because she explained her son Sam was one of the injured students who had recovered. Mr. Jenkins stood to shake my hand and I could only gawk at his height. I guessed he was almost seven feet tall, and I suddenly understood Ronda Jenkin’s apparent affinity for high-heeled shoes.

  Jeremiah Jenkins, the name sounded familiar. I coaxed the memory forward, and then I knew who he was.

  “You’re the basketball player,” I said.

  He nodded. “I was, although these days I’m the marketing man. You’re a basketball fan?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s just that Charlie mentioned you just before that day…” It felt strange to say his name out loud to these strangers and I immediately regretted it.

  As if sensing my discomfort, Ronda said, “Have a seat, Nell, what would you like to drink? Coffee? Iced tea? A glass of chardonnay? We don’t judge.”

  Eyeing the wineglass in front of Lulu Deters, I pointed and said, “I’ll have one of those.” This day would need a little liquid ambition.

  I sipped on my wine slowly as Ronda filled me in on what the group had planned and achieved so far. They had initially met to discuss school security measures and gun reform, but in truth, things had morphed into something else. They were pushing for a short list of specific gun reform items, focusing mostly on accused domestic abusers. The current state laws, they explained, prohibited anyone under a domestic abuse-related protective order from owning a gun. What it didn’t do was prevent anyone with a previous conviction (or future one) from owning a weapon if they were not under an active restraining or protective order. It didn’t stop anyone who was under any other type of protective order from owning a gun. There also wasn’t a strict impetus in place for officers to remove weapons from a household where they were responding to a domestic abuse accusation. With Dill Hobert, such a law might have kept his father’s guns out of the house.

  I listened intently, still grappling with the question of inevitability. “So, here’s my question, if Dill was bent on doing this thing, and his father didn’t have a gun, could he have gotten it someplace else anyway?”

  “Possibly,” Ronda conceded, but then clarified, “But we’re talking about a thirteen-year-old kid here. We know that his brain was still developing; every year, he’s developing more, his frontal lobe is going to be fully developed around the time he’s 25. For every day that his exposure to a gun is delayed, the better the chance is he doesn’t do this thing.”

  For the first time, I saw the dignified strength in her show a crack, as her chin trembled a bit and her voice became slightly shaky. “If this boy doesn’t find a gun at home, he has to go look for one and that’s not that easy at thirteen. This boy isn’t running with a gang, he doesn’t even have friends, it seems, like most of these school shooters, he gets his gun at home. It’s almost always the parent who introduces them to it.”

  Everything she said made sense, but something else had occurred to me. Feeling timid, I finally said what was on my mind. “The boy, it’s true he didn’t have friends. I hear he was, in fact, bullied. I appreciate your efforts and everything you just said makes sense. I think, though, it’s falling short.”

  Lulu Deters laughed suddenly, and I glanced at her. “Sorry! I just love when someone tells Miss Ronda she’s wrong about something.”

  Ronda gave her a pointed look and said, “You shush. Go on, Nell.”

  “Sorry, I just think if a kid is intent on causing harm, he or she will. And maybe it won’t be something as catastrophic as this, but they hurt themselves and other kids in other ways. I think it’s really important as a teacher that I help identify these kids very early on and I feel there must be a better way we can handle them when we do. Any child who reaches eighth grade and doesn’t have a single friend has been failed along the way by a lot of people.”

  I saw the Framinghams look at each other and then Sherry Framingham interrupted, “I don’t feel sorry for him and I don’t know how you can. I don’t care what his background was; he had free choice. Plenty of kids come from bad homes and don’t act out like this. My daughter is dead, while he will live for years and years off taxpayer dollars.”

  I rubbed my forehead; I knew this meeting had been a mistake. “No, I don’t feel sorry for him. I’ve tried in recent days to be honest, because intellectually, I know I should, but that hasn’t gone well. I’m thinking of the future Dills out there who can still be saved, though, and how important that is; because that means saving future Charlies and Mistys and DeShauns.”

  Ronda walked over to me and put a hand on my arm, and as I looked into her deep brown eyes, I realized all of that strength, all of that dignity, I’d seen her display, was a powerful shield against the raw grief she was still fighting. I was a person who’d needed to hide, cocooned in my son’s bed, from the agony I thou
ght might literally break my heart. Ronda Jenkins put on heels and lipstick and stared defiantly at the pain that threatened to encompass her. It was window dressing though, inside her soul, she was as much a broken human being as me.

  I smiled sadly at her, now that I could finally recognize her as a kindred soul, and she smiled back. We understood each other. She broke the silence and said, “I like that actually. If we are talking about gun laws and metal detectors as preventative measures, it makes sense we would also talk about identifying at-risk kids and trying to meet their needs better. That, too, is preventative. Okay, so last time, we discussed forming an actual NFP organization and I think we should get the paperwork rolling on that. I’ll have my paralegal write up a mission statement and send it to everyone. We’ll have chairs for various parts of the program, and obviously, you’ll be head of the at-risk youth identification part, Nell.”

  My jaw dropped; force of nature Ronda was back. Lulu laughed again, this time even louder. “Gotcha sucker!” she said.

  “Next order of business is getting the Carters involved. I’m passing that one off to the Framinghams. I think I scared them last time I called; Sherry might be able to reach them better.”

  The mention of the currently missing Carters made me suddenly realize there was another family not represented here.