Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  “In the coming days, we’re going to need our community,” said Jeremiah Olson, a Lewis and Clark parent who at 7 p.m. last night was still waiting for news from his child. “We’re going to need every last shred of empathy and love and peace that still exists on this earth.”

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEMORY

  FLASHBULB MEMORY: A fixed location, a moment stilled in time.

  Where we were when x happened. Solve for x. Capture. Click.

  Synapse: the brain’s bridge where nerve cells touch.

  Neurotransmitter: an electric impulse, a firing of new data between cells.

  Dendrite: feathered tip. A waving of cilia at the ends of cells that connect, that jump synapses and transport fact. Sight and taste. Sound, touch. Sensory perception of how the light fell or how the television crackled or how the spine of a book curved firing between tendrils, catching data like an outstretched hand.

  Fear: the amygdala. Cortisone release. A stress response to threats, the animal brain. A quickening of heart rate and blood pressure. An intake of breath and air. A flooding of neural synapses to remember fear and to self-protect, to create connections that rewire the brain entirely.

  The mind a malleable thing, a mold of plasticity. A collection of 100 trillion synapses that rearrange and transpose. A critical mass of impulses that bury trenches, that germinate and take root in the cortex. Overturned chairs. A wall of desks. The sound of popping and screaming. An assembly of pale faces crouched to the floor.

  Flashbulb memory: the firing of so many synapses at once, a braid of cells.

  A strengthened cord. An imprinted image.

  A seed. A fractal. A road.

  LOVE IS PATIENT, LOVE IS KIND

  OUR PARENTS MONITORED what we knew, what we saw on the evening news. They closed our front doors to the swarming of police and the FBI and to the intrusion of reporters, local affiliates, and national news teams surrounding the school and its neighborhoods. Our parents placed signs on the porch pleading privacy, signs that told visitors to refrain from ringing the doorbell, a sound so unlike the ricochet of gunfire but still so startling, an earsplit. They presided over breakfasts and dinners without television, the phone off the hook. Homemade pot pies, chicken casseroles, trays of lasagna they accepted from neighbors. Some of our parents stayed home from work to be with us, school suspended until further notice, while others immersed themselves in their jobs, a means of coping and forgetting. All of them whispered behind their bedroom doors when they thought we had fallen asleep, some on the phone, some to one another, their voices low and terse. Despite their efforts we saw the newspaper anyway, a deluge of stories and sub-stories and so many photographs. Photographs of students pouring from the building, of response teams and ambulances, of parents gripping their children, of our peers and teachers fleeing the school marked by dark slashes of red. Photographs that were graphic but nothing of what we’d seen ourselves, images we tried to blink back and force away every time we closed our eyes. A black hooded sweatshirt walking past a window. A stain soaking through browned carpet. An exodus of faces from the doors of the school. And the sounds: gurgling. The warbling of a droned television. Shouts calling out to us, a chorus of strained voices we could not move ourselves to answer. The muffled pound of our own blood as we held our hands to our ears.

  We lay in our beds and combed through the times we’d ever spoken to Caleb Raynor, if there’d been any brief glimmer of menace or motive. Christina remembered square dancing with him in her seventh-grade gym class, his grip limp and weak. Nick thought of sharing a lab table with him in sophomore year biology and how he’d tuned out the classroom for the spiraled drawings of his notebook. Nick remembered no violence in the sketches, only a graphite menagerie of whales and skateboards and cartooned stick figures. Matt recalled standing beside him in the lunch line only once, how he’d bought a small carton of milk and nothing more, and Zola thought over and over about the one time she’d ever spoken to him during freshman year when they’d both been at the 7-Eleven near school and she was paying for a watermelon Slurpee. He walked in, head down, hair curtained across his eyes. She offered a small wave and said hello but he only moved toward the refrigerated cases of soda.

  We searched for grudges and found none, what the hell had made him do it.

  We thought of placement. Of timing. An obsession of reiterating where we were, where everyone else was, where Caleb had been. How one library table was not another table, the proximity of the stacks. How our bladders sometimes filled, how we might have caught ourselves passing between class and the bathroom when Caleb made his way through the hallway with a shotgun. How we might have been near the stairwell, how we might have been at the water fountain, how we sometimes forgot textbooks in our lockers and traveled back from class to retrieve them.

  We turned off the television, a swirling guesswork of determining Caleb’s motives. Though we ignored the local and national news as best as we could, we couldn’t shut out the list of names printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Friday.

  So many names. A wave we intuited, a tide that when it arrived washed in and overcame us. A list we had begun to piece together by what we knew of the school, who we saw fall, where we thought we heard gunfire. A list we checked off by elimination, by who we’d called to make sure they were okay, by who we’d made contact to speak only the briefest of thank Gods and the faint sound of tears before replacing the receiver, before exchanging nothing but confirmation. But when the list emerged Friday morning, in the newspaper and across national televised news, we felt the last of our once-lives ebb away.

  Matt saw it on TV and rose from the living room couch. He receded to his basement bedroom and closed the door. His father remained on the couch, a forensic specialist for the Midvale County Police Department, an official who’d been granted reprieve from the Lewis and Clark case due to the sensitivity of his son’s involvement. His mother glanced away and made her way down the stairs to Matt’s bedroom, where she knocked and no one answered. Matt sat on his bed. He regarded his hands in his lap. Hands that were still here. Hands that had leaned over and closed Caroline Black’s eyes. Hands that should have threaded the strips of 35mm film the night before, a Thursday shift at Midvale Cinemas that always lasted until midnight. A late shift to build films for Friday premieres, one he agreed to at least twice a month, his only time alone in the projection booth in the eerie blue of the movie screen, the theater dark, everyone gone home. Tyler sometimes met him there late after the manager had left for the night. Finding Nemo. Pirates of the Caribbean. Movies they’d watched together, the projection booth theirs alone and the movie theater empty below them. Tyler’s hands on his face. Tyler’s hands on his belt buckle in the bathroom stall. Caroline Black. Tyler leaving him behind in the school hallway. Matt heard his mother knocking on his bedroom door. He couldn’t open it. There was nothing in the world to say. His manager had called the night before. He wouldn’t work until the following week. He knew he’d sit at home, a list of names and his parents worrying over him in a waiting wide stretch, so many days of time with nothing but names and no words and the hard fact that Tyler had left him in the hallway.

  Christina, still in bed, watched the newscast on a small television in her room, curled into the womb of her covers. Her brother had been holed away in the storage room of his science classroom with his teacher and peers. She’d been right that he was safe. Her boyfriend, Ryan, was not on the list of names though she didn’t know it until late Wednesday evening, long after her father had fled his work as a parts specialist at Boeing and found her name on the signed registry at the public library and waited until police brought her and her brother to the library’s parking lot. The broken relief in her father’s face enough to make her crack at last. When he at last took them home, she called Ryan’s phone again and again, the deadpan sound of his voice on the outgoing greeting growing more maddening the longer she called and he never picked up. She learned past dark, when Ryan’s mother telephoned he
r house at last, that Ryan was okay but in the hospital, that he’d been shot in the right leg in the school’s gymnasium. Christina had stepped past her father and her brother and her mother, who’d come immediately to the house from her own new home in Edwardsville across the Mississippi River and stood in the front yard beneath the dome of darkened sky and took in the sharp knife of crisp October air, a welcome shard, something that let her know she was still alive.

  And now the list of names on the small television in her bedroom: the same bedroom where she and Zola and Matt and Nick had met only days before, as if a yearbook and the capacity to plan were still imaginable. Only one name on the list pierced her more than any other. Elise Nguyen. A junior who’d shared the swimming pool with Christina on the women’s swim team since freshman year. The girl who often shared lap lanes with her during practice at the Midvale County pool, their strides matched stroke for stroke as they glided through the water. The girl Christina drove with to swim meets, windows down, the speakers of Elise’s car blasting the Strokes and Sleater-Kinney and the humid Midwestern air blowing back through the front seat. The girl who’d played piano accompaniment in the school’s musicals, a production of Godspell she’d seen with Ryan her freshman year when they first began dating. And Ryan: still in the hospital, where she hadn’t yet visited and told herself it was because she wasn’t family. She watched the list populate the screen and felt her lungs shut down, the air of her bedroom currentless and stale and letting her forget for a moment what it was to still breathe.

  Nick was in the kitchen with his parents when he heard the list of names on the morning broadcast, a list that forced a half gallon of orange juice from his hands to the floor. He’d spent the previous night researching, the only means of coping he knew: how to forget. What the brain retains. How it reiterates and maintains the detail of disaster. Research he knew would never make it into the yearbook, research he couldn’t stop himself from culling from his bedroom computer regardless as he sat awake beneath a moon pooling down through the window beyond his desk. Sarah was fine. She’d hid beneath a stand of risers with the other chorus members in the music wing, a section of Lewis and Clark that Caleb Raynor never entered. Since Wednesday, Nick had barely spoken to Sarah, hadn’t thought to call her as she hadn’t called him. He barely knew anyone on the list, their high school a small community yet still so large, and even still the list staggered him, a length of names and faces scrolled across the television as the orange juice carton tilted on its side and split open across the floor.

  At her own kitchen table, Zola fled to the bathroom and barely made it to the open toilet, her face against its porcelain. Her mother followed her in, held back her hair. Made sure Zola was okay, her hand on her daughter’s forehead. It was not the photographs printed in the paper, a skill Zola knew, how angles and light captured the contours of their faces. It was the names of so many peers and teachers she’d seen in the library before she fled to the stacks. Connor Distler. Jessica Wendling. Alexander Chen. Mrs. Diffenbaum, the librarian. Every one of them a memory she could recall before she heard the looming sound of gunfire. Connor across the wooden table, headphones on though he should have been studying, head bobbing softly to the sound of his own silent stereo. Jessica two chairs down, eyes trained on the small print of an enormous world history textbook. And beyond the library, in total: the names of twenty-eight students and three teachers plus the names of Principal Jeffries and her administrative assistant, Deborah Smalls, and of Mr. Rourke, the second-floor custodian.

  Twenty-eight students, three teachers, three staff members, one principal.

  The paper did not print Caleb Raynor’s name, a name we already knew, a name we did not need to know again.

  We’d known the number already. Thirty-five. A number printed the day before that did not include a killer. But we did not know the names. A list of faces. A list of lost handprints and first dances and ways of understanding a St. Louis summer. Thirty-five ways of watching lightning bugs, of eating soft-serve, of bracing against the first November winds and of watching rivulets of rain climb down a windowpane. Thirty-five styles of dress. Thirty-five mixtapes. Thirty-five baby books of first words, first steps, first songs sung in the bathtub among rubber toys. Thirty-five hearts that beat the center of a countless number of blinks, of twitches, of kicks and laughs and orgasms and flinches, all of them unknowable now, all of them lost indeterminably to the halls of a high school. Jacob Jensen: a Lewis and Clark soccer forward, a boy Matt had first seen kick a ball across the fields in sixth grade, a twist of the torso that sent a shock through Matt’s body, an electricity that first jolted inside of him an understanding of desire. Mr. Bennington: a teacher who had been in the library, an earth sciences instructor that Christina had as a freshman and whose lecture on echolocation she still remembered, how bats find one another through the dark. Kelly Washington: the first girl that ever flamed a crush for Nick, back in kindergarten when she sat beside him in class, though he’d never spoken to her once. Alisha Trenway: a girl who lived down the street from Zola, who sometimes waited with her at the corner for the bus.

  We sat with the names. We closed our eyes and saw only a fractured view. What small corner of terror we had seen within the school’s hallways, what shots we heard and what blood we saw burrowed into the fabric of our clothing and into the threading of the carpet but none of it ours, none of it lasting, not even what clothing we took home and held. Home: a guilt. That we were here, in our beds and at our tables. A folly of randomness, of chance. That there was nothing that separated our bodies from a list of names scrolled in the newspaper, a list of nothing but the whims of a gun’s attention, a gun aimed from an unimaginable place.

  We knew the police were working, that they sought a motive. We knew they had let Eric Greeley go. We knew from the newspaper that even though he’d been Caleb Raynor’s best friend, he claimed they’d grown apart in recent months and that Caleb had retreated into himself, a withdrawal that according to Eric was alarming and hurtful but came with no signs of violence.

  Eric knew nothing of the guns. Knew nothing of the ammunition or the hooded sweatshirt hiding rounds of bullets or the two additional assault rifles found in Caleb’s bedroom when the police searched his home. And he knew nothing of Caleb’s plans but had merely been absent due to a bad cold, a virus he was still battling that Friday.

  We knew nothing of Caleb’s family, either: only that, according to the newspaper, they were grieving. That his younger brother was in eighth grade, not yet a student at Lewis and Clark High, that his mother was a social worker and his father an insurance salesman. That their home had been searched, that they’d cooperated fully with the police. That they’d issued a statement of grief and prayer for the community, that they asked only for the respect of privacy.

  We tried not to think of it. We wanted anger. Anger that would rip through the fog of our numbness. But when we looked across the table at our mothers and fathers over lasagnas and casseroles we could barely eat that neighbors had brought by, what trace of rage we could summon dissipated in the worry lines that creased our parents’ faces, faces that so easily could have been those of Elise Nguyen’s parents or Mr. Rourke’s family, faces trenched by an unconscionable weight that blanketed our entire community.

  At night, we huddled into our sheets and watched the empty ceiling above us. Spackled ceilings, ceilings with stilled fans, ceilings with glow-in-the-dark constellations, ceilings burdened by shadows. We watched the darkness pervading our bedrooms and thought of nothing but the palpable hole sunk deep into our chests, a lack as dark as space, an emptiness that had swallowed all light.

  SATURDAY NIGHT, THE night after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed the full list of names, our township of Midvale held a vigil. A community-wide ceremony open to anyone: to those who had been there, to those who had known someone, to those in St. Louis who knew no one but felt sorrow all the same, who wanted to excise a welled grief that if locked tight would overwhelm them. We
stood upon the lawn of the public library, four blocks east of Lewis and Clark, the same library where police had gathered students and parents just three days before, the school a crime scene and an open investigation and roped off entirely. A vigil largely left to privacy by the media, local and national news outlets that had filled our streets for three days, though some of us saw a lone news van parked at the edge of the library’s parking lot, lights extinguished, a reporter standing beside it. A vigil for the students, our peers. For their families and their friends. For the teachers and staff lost inside the building, for their fathers and sisters and daughters. A vigil of names spelled across thirty-five white signs planted in the dewed grass, names lit by the glow of staked candles, names we held silent inside our mouths. Principal Regina Jeffries. Caroline Black. Alexis Thurber. Nafisa Fields. They were a flame each of us spoke nothing of, their names caught beneath our tongues. We stood close to one another, apart, the light of our candles a heat against our cheeks in the autumn air.

  Nick stood beside his father, his mother at home with his younger brother Jeff, nine years old but too young to understand fully what had happened. Sarah at home in her bedroom, still too shocked to leave the house though the chorus room where she hid never saw gunfire. Nick hadn’t seen her since Wednesday. Christina stood with her father, her mother working a rare weekend shift across the river though she’d called six times through the afternoon. Her brother, Simon, a freshman, stood next to her and watched his candle blankly. Her boyfriend, Ryan, in the hospital after hiding in the shower stalls of the boys’ locker room, where he and his classmates fled when they heard gunshots in the gymnasium. Stalls that could not hide him, in the end, each of which Caleb opened with his shotgun raised and took aim and fired. Ryan told her on the phone from the hospital that he heard one last gunshot beyond the locker room before he passed out in the stall bleeding, a gunshot we would later learn was Caleb’s final aim to his own mouth in the center of the gymnasium. Christina looked across the crowd of parents, community members, friends. She noticed Callie Rhodes, another member of the varsity women’s swim team, and knew they’d postpone practice for another several weeks despite Christina’s muscles itching to move beyond the confines of her bedroom, one of their teammates lost. Her bedroom. She wondered if she and Zola and Nick and Matt would meet again at all, what could possibly be committed to paper about a vigil like this, what glint of candle Matt could document and what shade of sky she could write down as night descended around all of them, what anyone would want to remember in a yearbook.