Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (4 page)

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.

Matt stood near Christina between his parents, each holding a hand across his shoulders. He looked at Christina and couldn't imagine saying it: that their task was to write and that they'd both fail to acknowledge it. He knew Nick was home free, that there was no research for a vigil but that he and Christina, the junior staff writers, should be taking notes if nothing else. He hadn't brought a pen. No paper. He'd brought only the vast ocean of his own brain filled with Caroline Black and her vacant eyes and Tyler fleeing down the hallway and Tyler nowhere on the library lawn. He glanced around the crowd and saw Russ Hendricks, Alexis Thurber's boyfriend. Another junior. His face a steady wall of stoicism though Matt knew he must have been breathless. He looked for Zola, unable to find her. He wondered if she'd brought her camera, if there would ever be a right time to photograph grief.

Zola stood at the edge of the crowd, eyes closed, beside her mother, who held an arm around her, a grip palpable in the strain of her fingers. She'd left her Pentax manual at home, a gift her mother had bought for her when she joined the yearbook staff freshman year, a camera Zola knew was discarded somewhere on the carpet of her bedroom floor. There was nothing here. Nothing at all on this peopled lawn to commit to memory. Only faces illumined in light, tear-dried cheeks, so many parents and family members constellated together in the darkening night. Zola spied Eric Greeley, also standing at the perimeter of the gathering, wiping his nose not from crying but from the lingering remains of a cold, Zola knew from the newspaper. She couldn't remember any interaction she'd ever had with him to know whether he'd been lying to the police or not, another face in the dense crowd of Lewis and Clark's thronged
mass of teenagers, so many faces she'd never noticed until they became pixels in the paper, photographs of students fleeing school. Eric stood alone in a gray hooded sweatshirt, the profile of his face blank beneath the jersey-knit covering, a face he hid away from the crowd though he was deemed not guilty or responsible, a grieving he came to shed alongside everyone else.

We listened as people rose before the crowd, a gathering of hundreds standing around the row of white signs beneath a light-stolen sky disseminating prayers and hymns through the air, a cool that descended as stars slowly appeared. Alisha Trenway's father spoke. Elise Nguyen's mother. Then Josh Zimmerman's sister, a senior who'd hid in the girls' locker room, a choice we imagined she crucified herself for in hiding somewhere away from her brother, a sophomore, where she could not protect him. Mr. Bennington's partner, through rasping breath:
Above all, love one another
. Benji Ndolo's mother, midway through speaking, lost her composure and stepped away from the crowd. And the minister from the United Methodist Church on Bethel Road, who did not have children at Lewis and Clark but who knew some of the victims and their families from his congregation, spoke as if shedding great wisdom:
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with truth
. He looked out across the crowd, a gathering of faces tinged by candlelight.
Love is patient,
he whispered to all of us.
Love is kind
.

We considered love. What was kind in it. What love meant if it meant to kill. What would move a boy to enter the school's doors and take everything away, so many classmates and teachers and what love had meant for them, what love became for us when we saw them splayed across the floor soaked in blood and bullet and bone. We listened to the minister regardless upon the darkened lawn of a library where so many of us had once gone for summer reading and story hour. A library that had become a holding pen for fear, for parents not knowing if they'd ever see their children again. When the minister lifted his candle, we lifted ours. We raised our
candles to the Midwestern sky, a span of black with only the faint hint of stars. We watched the night fill with a million points of light, so much light that our vision flared in burned afterimage when we looked away.

We glanced across the crowd. Crisp air, the scent of flame and melting wax. We averted our eyes from the faces of so many parents of twenty-eight students, their cheeks streaked with candlelight and grief. We recognized parents who had volunteered, who had baked cupcakes, who had once led Girl Scouts and coached Little League, who had overseen field trips to the St. Louis Zoo. Alyssa Carver's mother. Missy Hoffman's parents, turned quietly into one other. Greg Alexander's father, who had chaperoned the Homecoming dance in the gymnasium our freshman year. And Caroline Black's parents, their eyes closed, their mouths moving softly in prayer.

Matt watched them across the crowd, their daughter engraved into the folds of his memory, an image that had kept him awake and staring out his bedroom window across the past three nights. He'd watched the moon to block out her body. He had not slept since Tuesday night. He looked at her parents standing in the crowd and felt the weight of his mother's hand upon his shoulders and felt his knees dissolve though he managed to stay standing. He scanned the crowd. He knew Tyler wasn't anywhere in the cluster of faces but he looked for the mohawked tuft of his hair poking up from the crowd and couldn't find him, hadn't spoken to him, hadn't heard from him at all since they'd stepped from the second-floor bathroom and fled.

The vigil lingered after the minister spoke, then thinned, then gradually began to disperse entirely. Christina stood beside the white signs with her father and brother, signs illumined by the faint glow of the distant moon. She closed her eyes and prayed to believe in prayer for the list of names and bore silent gratitude to no God in particular that Ryan Hansen's name was not among them, even if she hadn't seen him since he entered the hospital. Nick found
Sarah's mother in the diluted crowd and let her gather him in an embrace, her hands gripping his sleeve, a mother who had come in her daughter's stead while Sarah's father stayed home. Zola watched Eric Greeley at the periphery, how he gazed at the white signs and how in profile his eyes glistened wet. She watched him turn away alone, heading down the dark sidewalk until he disappeared.

Candles: extinguished and kept, tucked away into purses and backpacks. Cheeks kissed. Chests crossed. Carnations and lilies and small teddy bears left beside still-glowing tea lights. Parents holding one another. Parents holding their teenagers. Parents gathering their children all around them, constellations of families moving down the sidewalk toward the haven of their cars.

In the backseat on the way home, Nick leaned his forehead against the glass of the car window and watched the ink-spill of the Midwestern sky. He thought of Sarah at home, surely curled up in the twin bed where she'd tried so many times to make him give in at last, a roll of condoms tucked into her bedside drawer. He thought of Kelly Washington, his first crush. How he'd never once spoken to her despite admiring her from afar. How he thought her face was beautiful in kindergarten beneath a shock of dark hair and small barrettes and how he knew she'd joined the cheerleading squad at Lewis and Clark and how her older brother had been at the vigil alongside a woman who must have been Kelly's mother. How both of them looked too stunned to weep.

In the passenger seat of her father's Ford Taurus, Christina reclined the chair and leaned her forearm across her eyes, her brother in the backseat. Her father stayed quiet and in the silence she thought of Elise Nguyen, her mother and father and sister at the vigil, how they'd come so often to swim meets and cheered from the sidelines, how they were surely driving home to the echoed walls of an empty house. She thought of Mr. Bennington, how she'd been only fourteen when he taught her about echolocation, how bats and dolphins find one another across spans of dark too wide to imagine and how
this had comforted her somehow, her parents just divorced, making one's way home without light. How Mr. Bennington would not, his name etched into the starkness of a white sign, his partner alone at the vigil and straining to speak. How Mr. Bennington had disappeared from the earth only yards away from where she'd crouched in French class immobile beneath a desk, as useless to him sputtering on the library floor down the hall as she was to Ryan hidden in the stalls of the boys' locker room.

Zola moved down the street on foot with her mother, their house close enough to walk. Zola's mother ran her hand down Zola's back, a comforting weight, and pointed her other hand to the sky, the jagged line of Cassiopeia. Her mother knew the stars, a backyard astronomer, her telescope standing firmly in the grass every autumn until the first snowfall of the year. Her mother whispered Andromeda and Cepheus, two stars that flanked the constellation above them. She said Cassiopeia would be brightest in November. Zola watched the stars above her so she would not have to look at Alisha Trenway's house as they passed it on the way back to their own, a house of darkened windows and drawn shades that had not been raised since Wednesday.

Matt rode in the front seat of his parents' Chevy Impala, buckled on the upholstered bench between them though the backseat was empty and full of room. His mother drove and his father sat with his arm tucked around him, a relief Matt leaned into as he watched the October landscape pass through the panorama of the windshield. He tried to latch his brain on to the view but saw the athletic calves of Jacob Jensen instead. Calves that held no sexual charge, no allure but only a symbol of lack. Of energy, of force, what could no longer move them. Matt closed his eyes to erase them and imagined Tyler instead. Nights that had been theirs alone across the summer, the headlights of his Fiesta hatchback cutting lines through the dark and low fog. The sun gone, the heat still heavy. Beyond the movie theater's projection booth, a summer of late-night drives,
the radio droning, their speed whipping hot air through the car's open windows. The heat had been a blanket. Thick and warm. As hot as the hood of his car once they'd parked, the engine calming down, a ghost of heat pooling beneath its surface as Matt pushed Tyler back against the metal and ran a hand beneath his shirt and held the other against his face. He opened his eyes. The warmth of the engine. How quickly it became the heat of Caroline's blood still warm on the carpet. And Caroline's parents. He didn't want to think it but couldn't stop himself: what blankness they must have returned home to as he rode through the streets safe between his parents, a home where the walls rang silent and still and where a bedroom's emptiness pushed into them like a dagger.

And though his eyelids sagged with the deprivation of sleep, he lay awake that night in his basement bedroom and watched a water stain at the edge of the ceiling. Caroline's blood soaking the carpet, his clothes. Her gaze fixed. Her body slumped, a position he'd seen that her parents had been spared, a mercy. One that flamed guilt through him, spreading across his limbs like a growing fever. A strange intimacy. Something awful. Something he never should have seen. Matt watched the stain, his eyes open so they wouldn't see her body when he closed them. He fell asleep anyway sometime after 4
A.M.
when the shade of his ceiling began to grow lighter by degree, only several hours of reprieve from a world that had pulled away what grounding he knew, a world that shifted again in the morning when he awoke to the news that Caroline Black's home had disintegrated in the night, that her parents standing bowed into one another at the vigil had gone home and closed their doors and turned off the lights and burned.