I passed Wyatt’s room first. The door was closed and I wondered if my mom had been coming here and sitting in his room. I opened the door and heard the familiar creak that used to wake me up when he’d leave before dawn to run. His room was empty except for his bunk beds and desk. There were no pictures, no track trophies, no books, no clothes, no shoes, no Wyatt. It hurt too much to see it so I backed out of the room slowly and shut the door.
Through my open door, I could see my antique bed and dresser. The only color in the room, besides the light pink on the walls, was the pink and white striped cushion on the window seat. I’d spent so many hours on that window seat that I could see the impression I made on the cushion. I left my suitcase by the door, walked to the window, and pushed on the glass with my palms—sturdy, strong, unbending, just as it always was.
I opened the drawer under the window seat and saw things that the movers forgot to pack—old art projects, a few term papers, a couple of stuffed animals that I thought I couldn’t live without, and my journal. I forgot that I’d hidden it there. I shut the drawer quickly and tried to forget it was there. I stared out the thick glass of my window and remembered exactly what I’d written in that journal. My blood turned to ice and I fought the urge to open the drawer and grab it. I wanted to read it. I didn’t want to read it. It was the journal I started the night after Wyatt died. I’d been alone. There were thirty people swirling around in my house ready to help, ready to talk, but I felt alone. I’d hurt so bad that I couldn’t straighten my back. I remember taking a notebook out of my desk and pretending to be a famous writer, writing a tragic first-person account of a girl who’d suffered immeasurable loss.
To keep myself from taking it out and reading it, I unpacked my suitcase, took a shower, and put on my pajamas. With the heat off, it was freezing, so I turned the thermostat to seventy and prayed that the furnace worked well enough to heat the house without catching fire. Then I heated the stew Catherine gave me and settled in front of the fireplace on the old Mission couch that my mom loved so much. I ate while I wrestled with the temptation to get my journal. Finally, the part of me that said it would be cathartic for me to read it, to remember where I was so that I could see how far I’ve come, won. I sighed in defeat, knowing that ripping the scab off this sore could conceivably kill me, and trudged up the stairs to get it.
When I was back on the couch, wrapped in one of Catherine’s blankets, I opened it and began reading. The tears flowed easily, making pools of blue ink on the pages. I was there again. I heard for the first time that Wyatt had died. I came home to our house without him for the first time. I went to school without him and struggled to get more than one Ensure down a day. I patched myself together again every night, and then broke again every morning. I was frail, brittle, skin and bones, and lost. I was back in the place where nothing made sense. There was no absolute truth. There was no compassionate Higher Power. There was only the smell of gunpowder, the reek of panicked high schoolers, and the stain of blood that the custodians were never able to completely remove from the green tile.
I gently stroked the outside of the notebook. It must’ve been one I used in third or fourth grade. It had a picture of a little white puppy on the cover, but the innocence of the puppy belied the contents.
I saw Matthew in the parking lot before school. He was crying, again. Allie and I laughed, and I said he should get a life. I think I said that too loud. I didn’t mean to hurt him. What the heck was I thinking? I knew he was in pain. Why would I say something so mean? I’d do anything to take it back. I’d give up everything to go back in time and say something nice to Matthew right then. Maybe give him a hug. Maybe ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I have no doubt if I had, Wyatt would be alive.
Because twenty minutes after I laughed at Matthew, I heard the shots. I was almost to first period when the sound ripped through the hall. At first, I assumed it was seniors setting off black cats in the hall. Wyatt had warned me about this time-honored prank.
I kept walking, but the smell stopped me in my tracks. This was no firecracker. It was more. It burned my nose. A crowd silently ran out of the commons and down the hall brushing past me with warning blazing in their eyes. No one screamed. It was so quiet.
That still gets to me. Why weren’t we screaming? No one? Seriously? Was that a survival instinct honed after years of watching news reports of bloody massacres on campuses? Nothing about this felt like what I’d seen on the news. Columbine victims talked about the screaming, didn’t they?
Then in an instant, the noise started. Girls cried. Teachers yelled at us to get down, get in a classroom, lock the doors. People climbed over each other to get to safety. Weren’t we supposed to be moving in slow motion? Actually, we moved so fast that the edges of all of us seemed blurred. We were one giant tangle of humanity trying to save our souls. Some of us were selfish; others were natural heroes. I’ll never forget the faces of a few students who tried to help others. Their faces were calm; maybe they were angels.
My ears rang until there was no sound in my head but static. White noise. I heard white noise. I lay down on the cold floor of a classroom, under a desk. Voices whispered around me. Cell phone keys clicked as kids texted their parents. My brain started coming back online and I heard sirens slowly coming toward the school.
Someone knocked on the door and we all jumped. Principal Morgan’s strained voice filled the silence. “It’s me, kids. It’s over. Stay where you are until a police officer shows his badge through this window. Do NOT unlock this door until you see a badge.” I heard him repeat this message at the door of the next classroom.
The sirens were now in the parking lot. Under our windows. I tried to figure out what room we were in so I’d know how to get out of the school. I opened my eyes for the first time and saw that I was in my English classroom. Ms. Harrold, my favorite teacher, was under her desk looking at us with wild eyes. She was willing this away, I was sure. Counting us. Making eye contact with each of us, and mouthing calming words. “It’s over. It’s okay. I’m here. We’re here. We made it.”
Another knock on the door sent us all ducking for cover again. I heard fearful moans behind me. My heart stopped beating and then picked up again with the wrong rhythm. I barely heard Ms. Harrold say, “Show me your badge, please.” Her voice was small. It cracked with the effort of speaking. Metal hit glass as an officer pressed his badge to the window. “I’m Officer Brock, Pittsburgh PD, Badge #11908. It’s over. The shooter is down. We need to evacuate the kids now.”
Ms. Harrold attempted to stand but she fell immediately into a crumpled mess. Brian Heffington, one of the kindest guys I know, was at her side in an instant. He pulled her up and comforted her. He walked her to the door and flipped the lock open. Officer Brock entered the room slowly, calmly, which was so at odds with how he probably felt. The girls in the room cried quietly. Even the guys were fighting emotion.
Officer Brock checked each of us where we were crouched, and counted us. Then he lined us up, and we walked silently down a darkened hall. Had the electricity been turned off? We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were going to lunch. Or maybe having a fire drill. It all looked innocent enough except for the police officers with guns drawn running through the halls. I could still smell gun-powder.
Once we got near the school’s massive metal front doors, people started whispering. Someone said Wyatt’s name, but I didn’t really think anything of it.
“Matthew Wharton did it; he was trying to get to Bailey,” Angela Reynolds whispered. “I was in the commons when it started.”
“Who did he get?” whispered Chris Balfour.
“I only saw Wyatt, for sure,” she answered, completely unaware that I stood behind her. “Wyatt jumped in front of Bailey when Matthew came in. Matthew shot right through him. I heard he shot Bailey and then himself.”
So that was it. Lightning struck and my life ended. The ringing started in my ears again and I was
suddenly so dizzy that I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t see. I heard Officer Brock’s voice giving us directions, but it sounded like he was in a tunnel. I sank to my knees and then lay down in a fetal position, trying to stop the noise. My arms bent over my ears.
“Who is this girl?” Officer Brock asked the kids around me.
“Oh my God, that’s Meg Kavanagh,” Angela said. “Her brother was shot. We have to help her.”
“Meg, can you hear me?” Officer Brock spoke gently to me.
Yes, I could hear him, but I couldn’t speak.
Darkness floated through the front doors and down the hallway toward me. It billowed and waved like soft, warm water. I wanted to touch it. I wanted it to cover me. It came closer and touched my hair first. I put my fingers through it and it felt thick. It rippled against my cheek and down to my shoulders. It was warm and made me sleepy. I let it take my mind and I breathed it in like anesthesia. Strong arms picked me up just as I said yes to the waves and then I was gone.
A few weeks after Wyatt died, his friends told me more about what happened that morning. Matthew had come into the commons looking for Bailey Freeman. They had dated off and on for about a year but she had finally broken up with him. For some reason I’ll never understand, Bailey had been stupid enough to put up with Matthew’s abuse. He was out of his mind over her, and so possessive that he’d let her have it if he saw her talking to another guy. I heard she hid bruises for months before she broke up with him. Matthew turned into a walking, crying corpse, just waiting for an opportunity.
The morning that opportunity presented itself, Wyatt was talking to Bailey and her friends when Matthew came in. I guess Wyatt could tell by looking at Matthew that things weren’t going to end well so he grabbed Bailey around her waist and spun her behind his back. He tried to protect her with his body. Even his gut reactions were noble. He held his hand out to Matthew and spoke to him calmly. “Morning, Matthew. How about you and I take a walk? Looks like you need someone to talk to.”
But Matthew never took his eyes off Bailey as he pulled a gun from his coat and shot through Wyatt’s chest. When Wyatt fell, he shot Bailey, too, and then did the world a favor and turned the gun on himself.
Although I blamed Matthew, I hated Bailey, and I couldn’t help being angry with Wyatt, too. Why did he feel like he had to save Bailey? He hardly knew her! He inherited these quixotic tendencies of his from my mom, the starry-eyed idealist. He always went out of his way to help people—friends or strangers. He died for that.
I had my first panic attack a few days after we buried Wyatt. I felt like I couldn’t cry anymore and as I lay in my bed, this unbearable tightness started in my lungs. My life felt very unreal, like even my flesh was transparent, like I was disintegrating, bit by bit, into pieces, with nothing firm to hold me tethered to this world. I sat up quickly and got so nauseated I had to run to the bathroom to vomit. Then the shaking started, like my muscles had a mind of their own. I felt so pathetic because I couldn’t control my own body. I couldn’t sleep—I paced the floor all night. These attacks happened every night for days until Mom and Dad sent me to Robin, my grief counselor. Slowly, she helped me figure out how to breathe through an attack. She taught me that panic attacks would not kill me.
At Wyatt’s funeral, the minister had droned on and on about how there’s a time for everything, even a time to die. “Wyatt’s with Jesus and he’s happy,” he’d said. I wanted to slap him because he didn’t realize that his God had let my innocent brother die. I couldn’t make sense of the world anymore; I just knew that it was evil. We had to somehow survive in a world full of depraved idiots who might or might not bump up against you and ruin your life. A crap shoot with deadly implications.
Once I’d starting reading my journal, I couldn’t put it down. I read entry after entry of bitter ranting against Matthew, Bailey, God, my parents, and Wyatt. I thought of Wyatt’s last moments. I imagined his face; I thought his thoughts. I cried until I had nothing left and then I wrapped the blanket tightly around me and curled up on the couch. The room had slowly darkened and I faded into a catatonic sleep, lost to reality.
Some time later I thought I felt a cool breeze on my cheek. It pulled at my mind and I tried to open my eyes and focus, but I couldn’t fight through the grogginess.
I stirred again because I felt like I wasn’t alone. I could swear I heard someone breathing and I felt pressure on my back. But nothing could pull me out of this sleep. I told my brain to tell my eyes to open. Nothing. I waited.
“Meg. Meg, sweetheart, wake up.”
I heard Henry whispering to me in my dream. I saw him above me in the red barn and he smiled and motioned for me to climb the ladder to him. I tried to walk but couldn’t because my feet were so heavy. I called to him but my voice was silent.
“Meg, honey. Can you open your eyes?”
I checked and my eyes were open. Couldn’t he see me down here? I was stuck. I reached for him and found that he was closer than I thought. He was right here. A huge sense of relief rushed through me and stirred my consciousness. Henry was here. He found me.
“Henry? What are you doing here? How did you get here?” The tears started flowing immediately.
He kissed my cheeks and eyes, and held me tenderly.
“Happy Birthday, sweetie. Remember I promised you that I’d celebrate your birthday with you? I went to your aunt’s house to surprise you and she gave me directions here. I knocked and no one answered so I tried the knob and the door was open.” His voice turned hard, “Why in the world are you in here at night with the door unlocked? Are you alone?”
“Yeah. I guess I forgot. I couldn’t think once I walked into this house. It was too much, Henry. I didn’t mean to fall apart. I don’t know what happened.”
“I know what happened, Meg,” he said, so softly I wasn’t sure I heard him right.
“No, Henry, you don’t know what happened. If you knew, you’d turn around and leave,” I sobbed, bitterly.
“Meg, I know. When I came in, you were sleeping and I saw your notebook on the floor. I read it, honey. I read it all. And I’m not going to apologize for that. I need to know why you didn’t tell me. What were you thinking?”
“The other shoe is dropping,” I mumbled pathetically.
“What? What do you mean, Meg?”
“It’s okay, Henry. It’s ‘boy gets girl, boy finds out girl’s brother was murdered and her mom is crazy, boy leaves girl.’”
“I’m not leaving you, Meg.”
I rushed on, ignoring his insistence, “And no one would blame you. I wouldn’t blame you. You’ve made me happier than I’ve ever been, happier than I ever deserved to be. You gave me that time to just ‘be’ which is part of the whole grieving process.”
“I’m not leaving you, Meg. Do you hear me? I’m not leaving you. Not now. Not ever.”
“You will, Henry. This is more than you bargained for. I should’ve told you everything that first night when you asked me to tell you who I was. Well, this is who I am. Wyatt called me his glass girl because I’m always a heartache away from shattering. And I’m the daughter of a woman who has lost her mind.”
Henry’s eyes flashed with anger. “No! You’re not those things, Meg. You never were. You think you’re delicate. I’m here to tell you, you may look delicate, but it’s only the surface, underneath you’re strong as nails. Maybe I know you better than you do. I’m not leaving you, Meg. I love you. I want you.”
He pulled me onto his lap and I felt a shudder go through him.
“Henry.” I touched his face in the dark and realized that he was in pain. “This is why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want you to have to think about it, worry about it. He wasn’t yours to grieve.”
His voice sounded thick with emotion when he finally responded. “Is that what you think? You have no idea how much a part of me you are. If he was yours, he’s mine to grieve.”
“I’m sorry. I thought I could keep handling it on my own…that it was b
est for everyone that way. I’ve had to just ignore the pain so long now because my mom is losing it. I never liked the way I felt when people looked at me like they felt sorry for me. I was going to tell you, one day. I didn’t want you to be afraid of me, or think it was too much to handle.”
Fresh tears flowed from my eyes. Henry wiped them away and pulled me to his chest. He was so warm and strong and he whispered to me so gently. “It’s okay, Meg, everything’s going to be all right. What happened was horrible, but it doesn’t affect the way I feel about you.”
He spoke so sincerely, and he didn’t make a move to leave. I wanted to believe him.
“I’m here, Meg. I understand now. You are going to let me in, and I’m going to make sure you get what you need for once. Do you hear me? You’re going to take me into this mess you’ve built up in your heart, and we’re going to clean it up. For God’s sake, Meg, I’ve been right next to you all these months and you haven’t talked to me. All these things that have happened in your life—they’re part of you. And I love you exactly the way you are. You have to know that by now.”
His voice sounded choked as he forced it through his tight throat. “You have to see that you’re not alone in this world! You have people who love you and want to help you. You don’t have to carry all of us on your shoulders, and you don’t get to decide who knows and who doesn’t anymore.”
I realized that I’d hurt him. He thought that I’d hidden this because I didn’t trust him.
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