No one tells you about this part. How desperate you become to believe you were justified.
As the officer walked me through the departments—electronics, toys, school supplies—I searched for the tall man as we passed the survivors. A woman on the floor, her body engulfing a child, his one blue sneaker poking out from beneath her right thigh. Ahealth-careworker comforting an old man in a wheelchair. A young employee speaking to a responder, trembling like a weed in a windstorm. Parents squeezed the life from their children, tears streaming, mouths gaping open with screams. Some of them loud like thunder, others silent, muted by the onslaught of emotions that strangled their voices.
Bodies were lying and sitting on the ground, paramedics tending to them. I could not tell which of them were physically injured and which were in shock, too afraid to move. I don’t remember seeing blood beyond what was on my hands and clothing. And, of course, an army of responders now searched the store for other possible shooters or accomplices, corralling shoppers into clusters who were then wrangled outside for questioning.
We passed the bathroom, and I asked to go inside. There were ten stalls, with the same number of sinks on the other side, each with a mirror. I counted them twice, my mind desperate for a calming task.
I was not alone. Women washed their hands and the faces of their children, then dried off with wads of toilet paper because there were just two air dryers mounted on the walls. One woman ripped open a package of paper towels from her cart and offered it to the others. Crying, nervous laughter, heavy sighs as I found a stall, fell to my knees, and vomited into the bowl. The woman with the paper towels slid three sheets under the door, and I sat on the cold tile, leaned against the wall, and wiped my mouth. Two officers entered then, ordering everyone into a line. The cop assigned to me moved us past them, through the remaining aisles to the exit.
All of this I recall, but what followed starts to blur. The chaos outside, the hospital, the interview. Itfast-forwardsto the moment I was finally alone with Rowan. No one would tell me what they’d found. How many dead. How many wounded. There had been many shots fired, and yet somehow the urgency of the medics at the scene had not felt commensurate with mass casualties. No one would tell me about the tall man. What he said. What he remembered.
God, how it crashes down now. I close my eyes and cover my face with my hands but I can’t stop it.
“How many?” I asked Rowan.
He took me by the arms, beaming. “None, Elise. No one was killed!”
I was confused, but only for a second. “But I heard the shots...”
Rowan told me that the shooter was firing as he marched through the store but didn’t hit a single person. No one was dead; no one was wounded. “It’s a fucking miracle,” he said.
I was relieved—of course I was—but there was no escaping what I had to ask next. “Did he come there to die?”
He rambled on then, as he had to, about how it was a justified kill. The gun was semiautomatic with live rounds. “He wasn’t shooting blanks. Even if he’d come there to draw fire upon himself, suicide by cop, he was still a danger. He was shooting that gun in a crowded store, Elise. And not at the ceiling.”
Thoughts began to spin. Wild and frenzied. It didn’t matter what the department would say. How they would cast me as a hero, redirect the narrative to the difficulty of handling that gun and the man’s lack of training and how we got lucky, as a community, that he didn’t hit a target. That’s how it would play. But it was just a story without proof to back it up.
I asked Rowan who he was, this man I’d killed. I was desperate to learn that he was a hardened criminal. That he was a sociopath. That he was destined to be violent, to hurt people. That he was beyond rehabilitation. That he had, in fact, come to Nichols to kill people.
None of that was true.
Rowan hesitated but then told me. “His name is Clay Lucas,” he began.
Reports came in all morning, on the news and internally. Each piece of information was more devastating than the one before it. The news carried anecdotes from friends of the family and former classmates of Clay and his siblings. Most of the facts came from the department’s investigation.
Clay Lucas wastwenty-twoyears old. He was five foot ten and weighed 172 pounds. Hazel eyes. Brown hair. His face was narrow and long withwell-definedcheekbones and thin eyebrows. He had big ears, which his parents said had drawn some teasing in grade school.
They thought that was the cause of his antisocial behavior. It started in fifth grade. Kids can be brutal. The other signs started to appear when he was thirteen. Delusions, depression, mania. They didn’t get an official diagnosis until he was sixteen. Schizoaffective disorder—the hardest of the four types of schizophrenia to diagnose. Clay presented with symptoms of a mood disorder, which made it even harder.
He had lived with his family until he ran away a few weeks ago. Their house is located on the other side of our small city, close to the downtown, which is really just a small cluster of office buildings and an indoor mall. From there, streets lined with businesses and apartment buildings fan out like the legs of a spider until they become hospitals and churches and community centers, then strip malls and side roads with modest houses like my own, and, finally, bigger houses with lawns between them and wooded areas behind. I couldn’t tell you where the neighborhood lines are drawn, whether it’s at the supermarket or the Dunkin’ Donuts. We are all part of the same community.
Nichols Depot is in one of the strip malls. The station we work at is farther downtown. Beyond that, on the side that ends at the river, is where they believe Clay found shelter when he ran away from home. There’s a bridge over the river, and beneath the bridge is a refuge for drug dealers, sex workers, the homeless. An older woman living there recognized Clay’s picture early this morning. She couldn’t recall how long ago she’d seen him. Recent enough to remember his face.
He was in and out of hospitals. On and off different meds. The hospital costs overwhelmed the family. The behavior was impossible to live with. The older brother moved out. The sister went away to college. His mother is a nurse. When they couldn’t afford help anymore, she worked nights. His father is an electrician. He works days. They did their best to watch him.
The morning he disappeared, he beat his mother with a shovel, calling her names for the devil—Gorgo, Loki, etc. She said he called out a different one with each strike. She was beaten unconscious, suffering broken ribs and internal bleeding, requiring nearly ten days in the hospital.
Rowan knew only some of this yesterday, but the picture was formed the second he told me the diagnosis. I cried, and Rowan held me as if he could wring the anguish from my bones.
“It gets easier,” he said.
Rowan had killed in combat. He’d fired thousands of rounds. Soldiers died, but also civilians, even children. But I’m not a soldier. I haven’t had to makelife-and-deathdecisions over and over until callouses formed around the consequences. I had no protection from the pain that was only just beginning.
Alone now with these memories of the day before, I pull my hands from my face and open my eyes. A gust of cool air rushes in through an open window. It’s the one with the ripped screen, and I think that I must have been the one to open it, but I never open that window because the bugs get in, and now I can’t remember doing it or how I ended up on the sofa.
This is just the confusion, I tell myself.The brain adjusting to what’s happened.I want it to stop. I don’t want this to be real. But what I want slips right through my fingers.
Fran is the first to wake. She carries her baby blanket in one hand and her iPad in the other—the big and little girl pieces of her struggling to coexist.
