by Paul Griner
Interim 8
Number of school shootings since:
149
Number of school children killed:
258
May in May, Twelve Years Before
MAY 2003
I woke thinking about a hot day May and I took a trolley to the beach, a day that seemed like a gift. A cooler, backpacks with books and sunscreen, towels to stretch out on. Lazy waves and an intermittent wind, both of us drowsy in the sun.
She lifted the hair off her neck and I pressed a cold beer to it, kissed the damp skin, making her shiver. I said, The day will end with oysters and great sex.
A week later, when she went off to work, I tucked a note into the lunch I’d made her. Cold carrot soup, a curried chicken salad sandwich.
May
I stroked your lips. You began to hum. By the shore, bees and flowers, sand-speckled thighs, beers sweating in a cooler. Pressed into the sand, we slept and shared a silver dream. You and I, we are an airplane, wings and everything, hovering above the earth. I whisper your name like a psalm.
Social Media Updates
A text message from Silver.
FYI. Facebook post, supposedly from you, but I know you don’t have a page. Says: I’m working with Silver’s Bakery now. Me and a bunch of fallen women. Perfect! Never could stay away from the whores.
Don’t worry, she wrote. We get this a lot. Creeps come in and want to talk to the girls about what they used to do. Sometimes put money on counter and ask if they’ll do it again. Thought you’d want to know. Hope you’re well.
Ghosting
The bartender cut another twist from an orange peel and dropped it into the old-fashioned and rested the partially peeled orange on a shot glass. It looked like a miniature beach ball with its alternating orange and white wedges, and I pulled out a sketch pad to capture it, but before I could my phone buzzed and my heart sped up; I was hoping it was Palmer.
Not Palmer, but Lamont. I waited to read it until after the bartender rang up my drink, the reflection of the computer screen flashing white and blue on his glasses. Palmer hasn’t answered my barrage of texts or calls, and even my emails went unread; I wasn’t surprised, I’d sent her a drunken text during my bender. Well, dozens. And at least it worked, one way or another. This was the first I’d heard from Lamont in weeks.
Palmer says to stop.
She also says: I didn’t post anything about you NOT having children, and certainly didn’t tell anyone named Kate. I might have said something to one or two girlfriends about our date, and who they might have told, I couldn’t say. I don’t know anything about “Kate.”
I texted back my thanks and drank, the ice clinking in the heavy glass.
No problem, he replied. The hell’s this about? Whoever Kate is? Shut her ass up.
I didn’t reply, because doing so would only cause trouble. Besides, I’d been trying, but if Kate was back, she was keeping a low profile. Not a single new video out of dozens on the hoaxer websites I tracked; I knew, I’d watched them all. I rubbed the orange peel around the rim of the glass and drank again.
Interim 9
Number of school shootings since:
150
Number of school children killed:
260
Interim 10
Number of school shootings since:
151
Number of school children killed:
275
Letters
If real children died, why was every casket closed?
If real children died, why, for the first time in US history, did the final report on the “criminal investigation” not include the names, ages, or sex of the alleged victims?
If real children died, why were none actually identified?
If a policeman had made the call to the dispatcher saying he had multiple weapons—a shotgun and a rifle and four handguns, which is NOT the number of guns other police give—why didn’t he identify himself and why is there no record of those guns?
Stupid Things People Say in the Months after Funerals
Focus on the blessings in your life.
Now that he’s died, you shouldn’t get money from the survivors’ fund and the victims’ fund.
If you believe, why not belong?
But I don’t believe.
Then you’ll never belong, anywhere.
Pull yourself together. You need to be there for your kids.
We don’t have other kids.
Then it’s time you get over it. It’s been a while since he died.
Letters
Silence can be cruel, a type of violence, when it’s the silent treatment, and yet for most of us the experience of God is silence too. Do not mistake that silence for absence.
We used to sit in silent contemplation from after Night Prayer until noon the following day, every day, when I first became a nun. Vatican II changed that, and while I believe most of Vatican II’s changes were for the better, losing silence seems a real loss.
I still believe silence enables us to hear God, if only we can listen. To the wind in the trees, the gurgle of a flowing stream, the birds at dawn and dusk.
I imagine some silences in your life must be nearly unbearable, and for that I am truly sorrowful. But perhaps in some of those very silences, beyond the pain, lies some balm, a seed of understanding, of hope. I pray daily that this might be so.
Three Years After
MAY 21, 2019
Detective Sawyer testified about his visit to the shooter’s house, years before, occasioned by Venny Bosc’s phone call. Local news carried the trial; May didn’t watch. The prosecutor asked Sawyer why he’d never said anything about that visit to the families, who wondered if somewhere along the line someone had missed warning signs.
Sawyer’s clothes were put together—a peak-lapel corduroy jacket and a crisp white shirt—but his face looked pained. He smoothed his thin paisley tie every time he spoke. I wanted to say something about it, he said, for a long time. We couldn’t have known, really, but we were warned, however obliquely. We weren’t really guilty, but we weren’t innocent either.
All the later writings in the journal, that revealed what was about to happen? That detailed it? Where he wrote about cutting down the stock of one of his shotguns and wrapping it in duct tape so it looked like the one Eric Harris used, and had named it Barb? Where he talked over and over about wanting to die, about suicide? None of that was there when I read it. He leaned forward. I swear to you.
Poor May, I thought, switching off the TV and going to the window to look at the evening sky. High pink clouds stood banked to the east and the wind moved through the bright green new leaves of the maples and carried the scent of freshly mown grass through the screen. She’d believed Sawyer all along. I had too, but I’d known it was stupid to do so. I hoped she had as well.
To Do List, Further Revised:
Find Kate
Fuck the Fenchwoods
Letters
You say you’re being followed.
You’re right.
Death is coming to you real soon and nothing you can do about it.
No sense looking back.
Have you made yourself ready? Death is behind you.
Tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow.
My face will be the last one you ever see, until you get to hell.
That one was persistent. When that didn’t get a response, she found my email and phone number posted online and contacted me that way, my phone dinging half the night. I can’t change either of them now because of my freelance work. She emailed me thirty-three times before she was arrested.
Interim 11
Number of school shootings in the three years since:
152
Number of school children killed:
275
Monday, or, America’s Longest War
Ninety-six Americans will be killed with guns today, seven will be children or teens. Forty other children will be shot.
African Americans a
re eight times more likely than whites to be among the dead and wounded. Most of them males, most of them young, many of them unarmed.
The radio detailed another murder. School shootings get the news, but day-to-day shootings are where the numbers pile up; Lamont taught me that. He was angry about that, about a lot of things. About abortion, about hoaxers, about me.
I stood barefoot in my kitchen, my wrinkled shirt untucked, turning a ripe peach over and over in my hand. Not wanting to listen more, I turned off the radio and thought, Scariest of all? I haven’t heard from Lamont in a while. He wasn’t responding to texts, he didn’t pick up my calls.
I tucked in my shirt and slipped on shoes and walked the three miles to Lamont’s house and rang the bell and then again when he didn’t answer. I pressed my face to the glass sidelight and cupped my hands around my eyes to see better; days of mail scattered on the floor, weeks of it, bills and circulars and glossy catalogs, some of my work among them. He’d need a shovel to sort through it.
I returned home down back alleys past a bakery and a print shop and a row of restaurants—Italian, Thai and Cajun—whose rear windows were always open, because I loved the smells of fresh bread and ink, of garlic sautéing in olive oil and lemongrass and paprika and cayenne pepper, but even those scents and the chalked bright yellow sun and green grass on one stretch of sidewalk didn’t lift my mood.
Liam, Me and My Grandfather, All of Us at Eight
MAY 2015
Liam sat on a stool at the kitchen counter and swung his feet in their blue LeBron 17s and ate a chunk of Boar’s Head liverwurst from a napkin on which he’d drawn a sinuous cat. I liked that, liked each sign that he was like me. As a child, I’d drawn on every surface I could, including two crows once on my grandfather’s pale legs while he slept in a hammock with his faded red baseball cap pulled low over his closed eyes. Just the once; he hadn’t liked it. I was eight.
He’d told me a story about shooting crows in the Indiana cornfields as a boy my age in the ’40s, earning twenty cents for each pair of crow legs he brought to the county agricultural board, and shown me the wooden crow call he still carried with him. It looked like a small clarinet and I’d worked it from his pocket as he slept, desperate to try it but afraid to wake him, and so contented myself with the drawing.
Liam could draw anywhere, as far as I was concerned. The more he was like May or me, the more I liked it. Like her, he pinned rulers to the page with his fist.
The kitchen smelled of liverwurst and of the limes I’d cut for the key lime pie. You know what I miss from Vermont, Otto? he said. Butcheroni. I must have looked puzzled because he swung his feet faster and said, You know. Our butcher? Mr. Steigerwald? That stuff he used to make and give some to us when we went in?
Oh. Bologna.
Yes. That’s what I said. He looked right at me, daring me to correct him.
Sometimes in my memory I do, sometimes in my memory I don’t. Both can’t be true, but I don’t know which one is. Time, swallowing us all.
Colonel Mustard Did It
MAY 22, 2019
Nash! May said, and pushed the door open to the scent of blooming lilacs, which made her drowsy. We have target shooting scheduled?
He shook his head. She was always glad to see him, especially when she was upset, like now. His calm presence throughout, she thought, her fingers on the cool doorknob. Not the flare of lust she’d had upon first meeting him in those terrible early hours, which had recently been rekindled, but his compassion, his fidelity to their sorrow. As if he was pledged to it.
And there was more, of course. Movies, dates, dinners. She’d gone with him to a fundraiser for a wounded colleague, met his sons. They’d made love once and it had been much better than she’d expected, his face pressed to her neck, his baritone voice in her ear, its pitch rising and falling with her desire. The thought of it now made her spine tingle.
Would you like to come in? she said. She offered her cheek for a kiss.
Nash glanced over his shoulder, as if someone was waiting for him in his empty car, parked askew on the street. He must have come in a hurry, she thought, after she’d called the station. He turned back and gave her a fleeting smile. Can’t, he said. Just had to tell you in person.
Tell me? she said. You didn’t come because of the hoaxer?
What hoaxer?
It was a man, she said, and he heard the fear in her voice. He’d heard it before, linked to this case. Venny Bosc, when she made her call about the neighbor boy all those years ago. And from May, that first morning. Then he decided that was wrong. May had felt terror that morning, that her son might die, not fear; this was different. He had something to tell her, but it would have to wait until this was sorted out.
She leaned forward and looked over his shoulder, both ways, but no one was on the street, walking or sitting in a car, watching. I’m sorry, I thought you knew. It’s the first time I’ve been this scared in a long time. I was glad I had that gun.
Nash said, Did this hoaxer try to force his way in?
Oh no, he was respectful enough. It’s just that he came here. To Liam’s house. That’s a first. And he said he’d be back. To answer any questions I might have.
Why would you have questions?
Because I’m an actress who’s been stealing money from gullible people for years. Questions about how I might put things right with God. She shivered again when she said that, and he wanted to touch her arm, to calm her, but he couldn’t.
Nash’s face changed. It looked miserable. He always called before he came over, so that he hadn’t this time when it wasn’t because of her call was surprise. Another in this day of them. His tie was disorderly and his corduroy jacket crumpled and her heart misgave her. Something had gone wrong. She forgot all about the cruel hoaxer and began to worry that Otto had done something stupid with Lamont.
News is going to come out soon, Nash said. He looked down and scuffed his cap-toed shoe over the brick step, the same beautiful shoes she’d first noticed years before. More scuffed now, but still that beautiful buttery leather. Today, he said. Maybe it already has. He took a step back, as if she might hit him, and blinked twice.
News about what?
He cupped his right elbow with the palm of his left hand, a familiar gesture, and said, That there was a report. About the shooter.
There have been a lot of reports about him, Nash. She felt herself getting smaller, like an animal anticipating a blow.
No, he said, and shook his head, and his shoe rasped over the brick as he scraped it harder. As if he was trying to dig a hole he could drop into. Not like this one. At last he looked up. This one was from before. Two years before.
She felt interior supports collapsing. Ribs, hips. The cathedral was imploding, the delicate architecture that seemed so gaudily sturdy—groins and vaulted ceilings—failing. She wanted to sit down. People knew about him? They knew ahead of time?
Not everything, no. Nash shook his head again. He realized he was doing that a lot. But a warning, he said. A visit to his house because he’d been overheard talking about shooting up his school.
Oh, Nash, she said. She willed steel to form in her legs, to keep her standing, even as her spine turned to Jell-O. That’s what her life had been these last months and years, after all, a sustained effort of will. You always told me there wasn’t a visit, she said. No warnings.
I know, he said. He made himself hold her gaze. Made himself go on, since she deserved that. I was ordered to. And I’m sorry I listened to those orders.
He was going to tell her about all of it. Even the journal. The same journal he’d seen years before. True, there’d been nothing in it at the time, but the boy’s hatred had begun to spill onto the pages in the months after Nash’s visit. It had more drawings as well. Of the school, of his planned places of attack, of dead kids in pools of blood. The high school, it turned out, since that had been his initial plan, but still a school. He would tell her about that too, because if he didn’t and
it came out later—the way this had—he would look even worse. He said, It gets worse, May.
How could it get worse? May asked. Her voice quavered and tears were already rolling down her cheeks. He wondered if she already knew somehow, on some level. Had always known, but never admitted it to herself.
It was me who wrote up the report. Who visited the kid. Who missed the signs. It’ll be out soon under my name. Nash Sawyer. Everyone will read about it in black and white. I wanted you to hear it from me first, ahead of time.
Oh, Nash, no. I asked you again and again.
She started to tremble and he wanted to reach out and touch her but he didn’t think he should. Thought he’d probably lost that right forever.
I’ve been trying to right my initial mistake all these years, he said, but now I see I only compounded it.
That can’t be true, May said. Now I know you’re lying. When she shut the door on him, he couldn’t see inside through the glass, only his own startled reflection, and he had the odd thought that it would stay there forever and be the first thing she saw each morning, or the last each night when she came home.
Interim 12
Number of school shootings in the three years since:
153
Number of school children killed:
281
Ghostbusted
MAY 25, 2019
I glimpsed Kate when I pulled into the parking space, pushing a cart through the grocery store sliding doors. It couldn’t be, I thought, but it was, which made perfect sense. After all this time, Kate had grown impatient, had come for me so I didn’t have to come for her; she too must have ached for a final confrontation. For three years she’d listened to me lie, and now my time was up.