The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  She said she’d called Cyndi Pixley after Sergeant Cox and Detective Chin’s latest drop-by. Even after that letter from Dr. Cid, they were still putting pressure on her about that interview. Maybe if we moved away, she’d feel safer, less assaulted by it, day after day after day. She was pretty sure she would. The farmhouse was just sitting there, right? What was keeping us here?

  “Our jobs,” I said. “Our house. Our friends.”

  “What friends?”

  I ignored the whack. “How about your family, then?” I said. “We moved back here so you could be nearer to your family.”

  “My father” she said. “And he doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  She played Velvet Hoon’s message over and over. “Why Louisiana?” she said. “And who’s Keith? She sounds afraid of him.”

  “Velvet’s not your responsibility,” I reminded her. “You’re your responsibility.”

  “You know what I wish? That they had spared one of those kids’ lives and killed me instead.”

  I grabbed my car keys. “I can’t listen to this,” I said.

  “Why not? Because that’s what you wish, too?”

  A better man would have stayed and comforted her. Instead, I slammed the door. Revved the engine to drown out the sound of her sobbing in there. If I didn’t get the fuck away, my head was going to explode.

  I drove around for a couple of hours, burning up half a tank of gas and thinking about the irony of it: me arguing in favor of staying put, and her arguing that we should move back to Connecticut. But that farm without Lolly was … what? A bunch of bad memories and a house full of junk. One headache after another, starting with that goddamned apple house.

  Filling up at the Mobil station, I watched a cabbage butterfly flutter above a pot of yellow marigolds, then light on one of the flowers and flap its wings. Looked innocent enough, but maybe it was starting a domino effect—triggering a disaster in some other part of the world…. Maybe I’d sell the farm. Be rid of the burden of it.

  A big-ass Jeep pulled up to the pump next to mine, blasting rap. Guy cut the engine, climbed out. One of those twenty-something guys with the requisite shaved head and earring, the tattooed forearms. I was trying to remember where I knew him from when he caught me looking. “What’s up?” he said.

  “What’s up?” I said. Then I remembered. He’d stood and spoken at Pastor Pete’s grief counseling session. The substitute—the guy whose girlfriend had gotten pregnant. When the shooting started, he’d hidden in a stall in the staff bathroom. They’d banged open the door, rapped on the stall. “Yoo hoo! We know you’re in there!” At the grief meeting, he said he’d been unhappy about the baby at first, but then glad about it. Said he was going to be the best father he could be.

  When I asked him how the pregnancy was going, he looked a little taken aback. “The grief counseling session at the church,” I explained.

  “Oh. Right. She’s starting to show.” My pump clicked off. I hung up the nozzle, screwed my gas cap back on. “You have kids?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing you usually confessed to someone at the gas station, but what happened at Columbine had changed all of the rules. Turned everything upside down. I mean, look at me, telling Maureen we should stay in Colorado.

  “Scared of what?” I said.

  “Being a dad.”

  “Not that I’m an expert,” I said. “But I think most prospective parents—”

  He cut me off. “From what I read, they came from good homes. Had decent parents, enough money. Paper said the Klebolds had a swimming pool, a tennis court, a basketball court.” I nodded. Watched that cabbage butterfly float above his head, then land on his shoulder. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s cool to think about having a son. Taking him fishing, taking him to his first Nuggets game. But what if it’s born with all its fingers and toes, and her and I give him a good life, and, in spite of all that, he turns out to be …”

  “A monster?”

  He nodded. Noticed the butterfly and shooed it away.

  “I guess you just do your best,” I said. “And realize that the rest is a crap shoot. But for what it’s worth, I’ve been teaching high school for a long time. Worked with a lot of untroubled kids and a lot of troubled ones. Those two were the only two monsters I ever came across. So the odds are with you.”

  He nodded pensively.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “When you went in that day? Who were you subbing for?”

  He shrugged. “Some English teacher. He had a death in the family. Name began with a Q, I think.”

  * * *

  CYNDI PIXLEY LISTED OUR HOUSE at one eighty-nine, nine, but warned us we’d most likely have to come down. People with kids weren’t exactly champing at the bit to buy property in Littleton. She advertised it as “a charming cottage with warmth and flair–ideal for empty-nesters!”

  The Paisleys—empty-nesters, sure enough—offered us one eighty-five, with two stipulations: that we leave behind our “window treatments” and postpone the closing until they could sell their home in Arkansas. We agreed. And they agreed to our only stipulation—Maureen’s, actually. For a year after they took occupancy, they were to post at both the front and back doors our new address and phone number. In the unlikely event Velvet returned to Littleton and came looking for us, Maureen wanted her to know where we could be found.

  We quit our jobs, gave our plants to the Kirbys, and brought three carloads over to Goodwill. Dr. Cid called some East Coast colleagues, who called colleagues of theirs. At their fourth and final session, Maureen was given the names and numbers of doctors in Connecticut who could help her with her recovery. “Moving away won’t be enough,” Dr. Cid warned Mo. “The fear and the anger will travel right along with you. You have to keep working hard.” Maureen had been taking Zoloft for about a month by then—with little to no effect, she claimed. The Xanax had made her feel much better.

  Three nights before we departed, Maureen’s father insisted on hosting a farewell dinner for his “little girl” at his and Evelyn’s favorite steak house in Denver. Cheryl, her husband Barry, and their daughter Amber were to have joined us, but they begged off at the last minute. Arthur was put out that Maureen ordered only salad and a cup of tea. “Every party needs a pooper, that’s why we invited you,” he sang, somewhere between his second and third Macallan. The Barracuda said it was “just plain silly” of us not to have consulted her before listing our house; she did business with Denver-area realtors all the time and, as a professional courtesy, could have most likely saved us the realtor’s commission. “Which would be a bigger deal for you than it is for us,” I told her, more to knock her off her high horse than anything else. She whacked me right back, though—said she didn’t realize schoolteachers had so much money to burn. Arthur reminded us three different times that his travel agent, Misty, was standing by to hear from us about the Disney cruise. When we got up to leave, he took Mo’s hand in his and kissed it, as if he were some genteel country gentleman instead of the scumbag he really was.

  “Well, that’s over with,” I said, in the car on the way home.

  “Thank God,” she said, her voice full of tears. “I wish we’d never moved back here.”

  Our vet gave Sophie and Chet treats, good-bye kisses, and dog-chew tranquilizers for the long ride home. We put the Rockies to our backs and left Littleton in the predawn darkness on a Monday morning during the third week of July. Drove across the flat green belly of Kansas and into Missouri, listening to country music, books on tape, evangelists’ warnings of coming doom. We stayed that first night in St. Louis, at a motel that allowed dogs. (If you’re ever at a restaurant there and see crab cakes on the menu? Take my advice: order something else, unless you want to get up close and personal with your Holiday Inn toilet bowl.) We got off to a later-than-expected start on the second day—made it as far as Cleveland. Mo and the dogs flopped back on the
motel beds, and I hightailed it over to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. Got in an hour or so before they closed for the day. Next day, we drove horizonally across Pennsylvania and into upstate New York. We hit Springfield, Massachusetts, during the five o’clock rush hour. Stopped for supper at a Friendly’s in Hartford. It was a little before nine p.m. by the time I drove through downtown Three Rivers, crossed the viaduct, passed the casino, and took the right onto Ice House, the left onto Bride Lake. Great-Grandma’s prison was in silhouette, a blood orange sunset behind it. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning, I heard Aunt Lolly say. Heard my mother, singing in church. Praise the Holy Trinity, undivided unity … Heard my father, in love or in ridicule : Rosemary Kathleen Sullivan, my wild Irish rose. I heard the smash of Great-Grandma’s soup tureen out in the kitchen and saw, again, from my post at the parlor window, my father storming away from us, Grandpa’s liquor bottle in hand. Why was it that I had loved him, the parent who’d cut me loose, more than her, the parent who’d stayed? It was a question I’d carried into middle age. Maybe now that I was back home again, I’d finally figure that one out. Or maybe I’d finally just let it go and get on with it.

  I put my blinker on. Drove up the gravel driveway to the house and all its ghosts. The Rocky Mountains were far, far away now, and Columbine High School was part of our past. For better or worse, I had come back home, with my barking dogs in the backseat and my sleeping, stricken wife beside me.

  PART TWO

  Mantis

  chapter fourteen

  BIOGRAPHY QUESTIONNAIRE—SECTION A

  Instructions: The following questions concern background information prior to your traumatic event. Please read each question carefully and answer as accurately as you can remember. Do not skip any questions.

  Name: Maureen Quirk

  Present age: 41

  Date of birth: March 26, 1959

  Place of birth: Syracuse, N.Y.

  City and State or Country

  When did the traumatic event occur?

  _____ Less than two weeks ago

  _____ Two weeks to one month ago

  _____ One to three months ago

  _____ Three to six months ago

  _____ Six months to one year ago

  X One year to eighteen months ago

  _____ Eighteen months to two years ago

  _____ Longer than two years ago

  Race or ethnicity

  _____ American Indian or Alaskan Native

  _____ Asian or Pacific-Island American

  _____ Mexican-American

  _____ Black

  X White

  How many brothers and sisters do you have?

  _____ Brothers

  1 Sisters (half sister)

  _____ None

  Were you the oldest child, youngest child, or in between?

  X Oldest (Never lived with my half sister—pretty much an only child)

  The_____ oldest of_____

  _____ Youngest

  What was the size of the city or town in which you lived?

  _____ Under 5,000

  _____ 5,000–25,000

  X 25,000–100,000 We lived in several places while I was growing up,

  mostly suburbs of larger cities (father in business)

  ____249,999–One Million+

  How much schooling have you had?

  _____ Completed grade school or less

  _____ Some high school

  _____ Completed high school

  _____ Some college

  _____ Completed college

  _____ Some post-graduate work

  X Completed postgraduate work (Nursing administration)

  _____ Completed Ph.D.

  Through high school, how many different towns or cities did you live in? 6 or 7

  What is your present employment status?

  _____ Employed full-time

  _____ Employed part-time (and want it this way)

  _____ Employed part-time (but don’t like it this way)

  _____ Unemployed (but actively looking for a job)

  X Unemployed (and not looking for a job) Not yet—want to work

  when I feel more in control and I’m not in so much physical pain

  _____ Laid off

  What is your approximate annual income before taxes?

  _____ $0–$10,000

  X $10,000–$25,000 (was)

  _____ $25,000–$50,000

  _____ $50,000–$100,000

  _____ More than $100,000

  Were you married at the time of the traumatic event?

  X Yes

  _____ No

  If yes to the above, how long had you been married? 12 years

  Did you have any children at the time the traumatic event occurred?

  _____ Yes

  X No

  What is your present marital status?

  _____ Single

  _____ Married (never divorced)

  X Married (previously divorced)

  _____ Married (previously widowed)

  _____ Separated

  _____ Divorced and still single

  _____ Divorced, living with partner

  _____ Living with partner

  _____ Common law marriage

  Present number of children: o

  BIOGRAPHY QUESTIONNAIRE—SECTION B

  Instructions: Check those problems (if any) which happened to you prior to your having experienced the traumatic event.

  _____ Sexual abuse

  X Physical abuse (first husband—only twice)

  X Verbal abuse first husband—when he was drinking

  X Truancy (“cut” school more than 5 days a year)

  Ran away with boyfriend

  _____ Expulsion or suspension from school

  (senior yr. h.s. gone for l week)

  _____ Delinquency (arrested or appeared in Juvenile Court)

  _____ Running away from home on more than one occasion (just that one time)

  _____ Persistent lying

  X Frequent sexual intercourse in casual relationships (In high school, college)

  X Getting drunk or using drugs regularly in h.s.—much less in college

  X Thefts (stealing for fun) freshman year of h.s. (shoplifting)

  _____ Vandalism (for fun)

  _____ Poor grades in school

  _____ Frequent violation of rules at home, school, or work

  _____ Initiation of fights

  _____ Walking off jobs because you got angry

  _____ Being negligent as a parent

  _____ Engaging in illegal occupations

  X Being reckless and getting into trouble because of it (somewhat in h.s.)

  _____ Moving frequently without prior planning

  _____ Persistent conning, manipulating, or exploiting others for personal gain

  _____ Experiencing conflicts with authority figures (e.g., boss, teacher, police)

  _____ Expectation of trickery or harm from others

  _____ Continually being on the lookout for signs of threat

  X A need to be guarded or secretive in your affairs (somewhat)

  _____ Tendency to avoid accepting blame when warranted

  X Tendency to question the loyalty of others

  _____ Tendency to be overly concerned with people’s hidden

  _____ motives and the special meanings of their words

  _____ Tendency to be overly jealous

  _____ Tendency to be easily slighted and quick to take offense

  _____ Tendency to exaggerate problems (“making mountains out of molehills”)

  _____ Tendency to be ready to counterattack when threat was perceived

  X Often found yourself unable to relax

  _____ Tendency to give the appearance to others of being “cold” (unemotional)

  _____ Tendency to take pride in being objective, rational, unemotional

  _____ Tendency to lack a sense of humor (so I’ve been told)

  _____ Found it hard to experience passive, soft, tende
r and sentimental feelings

  _____ Feeling you were a person of unusual importance or uniqueness and capable of doing truly great things in life

  _____ Feeling or thinking that you could achieve unlimited success, power, accomplishment, beauty, and wealth

  X Tendency to feel that your “looks” were especially important to your success with others But never really satisfied with my appearance

  _____ Tendency to find it “hard” or “stupid” to sympathize with others when they were in periods of distress

  X Tendency to feel it was okay to take advantage of others if it was in your interest in terms of personal gain —To some extent in h.s. (with boys)

  SYMPTOM INVENTORY CHECKLIST

  In the following list, please mark an X to show the degree to which you have experienced each item listed following the accident or traumatic incident. Also, please mark an O to show the degree to which you experienced that item before the accident or traumatic event.

  Is there anything else you wish to add to this inventory?

  I have pain (severe sometimes) in my back, knees, and on the top of my head. Have had MRIs done but doctors say there’S nothing physically wrong. I strongly disagree!

  chapter fifteen

  THE OTHER DAY, WHILE CLEANING out a bureau drawer, I found the pocket calendar I had kept and carried back in 1999. I’ve learned to do that now, in the aftermath of everything that’s happened: assign myself small tasks that I’m likely to finish before the feeling of futility overtakes me. These days, I’ll tackle a drawer, not a whole bureau. Call back a creditor, and let the rest of them take a number. When that little calendar presented itself, I sat back on the bed and leafed through it to the April pages. Saturday the seventeenth: the day Ulysses Pappanikou had found Lolly wandering in the yard, talking gibberish. But what I’d written was “Change oil and filter” and “post-prom party—be there @ 11:00 p.m.” Tuesday, April twentieth—the day that changed our lives—is blank. So are most of the pages after it. One exception is July the twenty-first.

  She and I were on the road that day, heading back to Connecticut with the dogs. We’d gotten an early start, then stopped midmorning for breakfast at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in upstate New York. I’d parked at the edge of the lot so the dogs could do their business. Thrown a tennis ball a dozen or so times, so they could chase after it, get a little exercise. (Watching Sophie run in that parking lot—that was the first time I noticed the weakness in her back legs.) Inside, I’d ordered eggs and grits. “This wallpaper paste’s not half bad,” I’d told Mo, shoveling in a forkful of grits. “Of course, you could ladle gravy over boiled sneakers and they’d taste good.”