SELENE
Devastation has a scent.
A sound.
A taste.
A weight that presses down on your shoulders and curves your spine. That makes your knees weak, and forces you to the ground even when it’s the last place you want to be.
It’s happening to me now.
I’m sinking when I want to be standing. The heels I always reach for when I need to mix power with comfort disappearing into a ground softened by rain.
My ears are ringing when I need them clear, when I want to be listening to the officer on the other side of the caution tape. He just walked out of the building we haven’t been allowed to get near. He has all the information I need but don’t necessarily want.
Aubrey catches me by the elbows. His arms strong and sure. The reassurance he tries to offer me a song of broken and wrong words that barely register over the voices, sirens, and flashing lights. Bodies are pressing in on us from all sides. Family members of people who haven’t been escorted outside of thebuilding all clamoring to hear the update that’s taken hours to come.
“Senator Taylor,” Officer Langham begins, addressing Aubrey as if he’s the only one who matters here. The officer swallows hard, throat working to produce words I fear will obliterate me. Aubrey’s left hand slides down the length of my arm, and he closes his fingers around mine to stop me from flicking my thumb and forefinger together.
“Don’t,” he orders gently. “We don’t know anything yet.”
But don’t we? Can’t he, the man who always urges me to choose emotion over logic, feel it? The hollow ache that’s begun to weave its way through the huddled masses toeing the line of grief with us. The echoing throb of anticipated loss. And if, for some reason I can’t understand, he doesn’t feel it, he has to know that reason can only dictate one outcome in this situation.
AJ didn’t walk out of the doors of the high school he strolled into this morning. He wasn’t carried out on a stretcher and rushed to the triage area before being placed in the back of an ambulance. So there’s only one rational conclusion to draw: our son is still in there, and he won’t walk out. He’ll be carried. His lifeless form enclosed in a black bag that will be marched past us with a marked lack of urgency that rings with the hopelessness I’ll shoulder for the rest of my life.
Bile rises in my throat.
“Please,” I beg, forcing myself to meet the officer’s eyes. “Just say it.”
The faceless people on either side of us voice their agreement through sniffles and premature sobs while reporters and photographers shuffle around, trying to get the best angle. Several larger cameras pan the crowd, capturing the group in its entirety, but the others are trained on Aubrey and me.
He steps in closer, his chest pressed to my back, a rough exhale leaving him when Officer Langham starts to speak again.
“We’ve secured the scene,” he says, gray-blue eyes focused on Aubrey’s face. “All students, teachers, and staff have been accounted for. As you know, students who were not harmed were reunited with their families. Anyone who was hurt has been triaged on site and sent to the hospital for further treatment if necessary. There are thirty-two individuals left inside the building. Twenty-eight students, three teachers, and a janitor, but they were all….beyond help. We’ve been able to identify them all using their ID badges.”
A woman to my right wails loudly, crumbling to the ground, nearly knocking down the two young girls who have been clinging to her all day. They can’t be any older than nine years old, and yet, they have suppressed their own tears to wipe away their mothers. No one else moves to comfort her. We’re all too focused on the clipboard in Officer Langham’s hands now. His gaze flicks to the woman for just a second, a distant kind of sorrow on his face.
“Among those lost,” he continues grimly, calling out names one by one. I tune him out, more focused on the way each of them sends horror ripping through the crowd like a bullet with no discernment. Aimless and somehow still hitting its mark every time.
It strikes me last, and I’m shocked at the power still left in it.
How it sears my flesh and shreds my muscle.
How it tears ligaments and tendons.
How it shatters my bones.
But most of all, I’m shocked that when Officer Langham speaks our son’s name, confirming the greatest loss of our lives, I’m the only one who cries out for him.
1
SELENE
One hundred days.
Twenty-four hundred hours.
One hundred and forty-four thousand minutes.
