It’s the second siren that finally gets my attention. Two sirens in less than a minute. Must be an accident. Traffic or farm—and around here farm accidents tend to be the most horrific.
Helen says, “Humph,” and ambles over to a window overlooking the street. “Haley? Those were troopers.”
I join her at the window. “Not local cops?”
“State police. Must be serious. Escaped prisoners, maybe?”
The nearest prison is in the next county, fifty miles distant, but we Humble residents worry because four years ago Mildred Peavey was tied up and gagged and had her car stolen by one such escapee. The really tragic part is that Mildred lived alone and it was several days before anybody missed her. By then she’d died of a stroke, still bound and gagged. So the notion of an escaped prisoner is our local boogeyman.
Here comes another siren, a shrill wee-waw wail from a light-flashing ambulance. And this time we’re both able to see it take a left turn onto Academy Road.
“Oh my god,” says Helen, stealing a look at me. “The school.”
By the time I get there, half a dozen state cop cars have arrived, as well as the ambulance. A young trooper with a bright pink face is frantically trying to control the incoming traffic.
Hopeless.
Parents, mostly mothers, are converging from every direction. Most are not bothering to find a parking space, but are abandoning their vehicles and running toward the school, eyes wide with concern, or panic—both.
I’m one of them. Under normal circumstances I’m a pretty calm and rational person. But this is not normal. You can feel it in the air, pick it up from the way the young cops don’t want to look us in the eye. Something terrible has happened.
There’s talk among the moms about panicked phone messages from inside the building. From teachers and also from a few students who apparently ignored the ban on cell phones. Something terrible has happened but no one seems to know what, exactly.
All I know for sure is that Noah doesn’t have a cell phone. Since when do fourth graders need such things?
Since right this very minute.
What kind of mother am I, not foreseeing the need?
“Get them out!” someone shouts.
The crowd surges forward, and me with it.
Uniformed state troopers armed with shotguns are barricading the school entrance.
“Nobody gets in! Stay back!” one of them bellows, his voice cracking.
“What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
That’s me, pleading. Sounding like a frightened ten-year-old, and feeling that way.
The young trooper with the big voice and the baby-blue eyes shakes his head reluctantly, as if he’s under orders not to divulge information. “You’ll have to get back!” he repeats, pointing a finger at me.
Beside me, a furious, tubby little woman ignores the shotguns and the big shoulders barring her way, and attempts to burrow through the troopers, screaming, “They’ve got the kids! They’ve got the kids!”
It’s Becky Bedlow. She has a boy in Noah’s class, a shy little guy, small for his age. And when she says they’ve got the kids in that desperate tone of voice we all know what it means.
Mad bombers, terrorists, Columbine. Every fear we’ve ever had, every nightmare news story, has come careening into our little school. It’s like the entire town is having a panic attack. Mothers are shouting, demanding to be let into the school. The troopers look shocked and maybe a little frightened by the raw passions being expressed—some of it scatological—but refuse to back down.
“Establish a perimeter!” one of the older troopers bellows. From the way they react he’s the big boss, the man in charge.
“What’s happening! Somebody tell us what’s happening!”
The trooper in charge—he’s got a jaw as big as a clenched fist, eyes as pale as gray ice—wades into the crowd, holding up his hands, palms out like a traffic cop.
“Stop it!” he commands. “Stop right there!”
Amazingly enough, he’s rewarded with a cessation of shoving. As the volume lowers, I can hear women weeping. I’m one of them.
“We have a hostage situation!” the big trooper explains. “Man with a gun, barricaded inside the gymnasium with most of the children and teachers.”
“What about the children? What about the kids?”
“As far as we know, no children have been harmed. But if anybody tries to force their way inside, that may change, do you understand? You’ll only make it worse, maybe get somebody killed. So allow us to establish a perimeter. Allow us to do our jobs. Please!”
It takes more persuasion, but within a few minutes he has managed to get us all back behind a flimsy barricade of yellow crime scene tape that has been hastily erected at the far side of the parking lot.
Before I can get my breath I notice a nearly hysterical Meg Frolich waving around her iPhone. Evidently she’s just received an image from her daughter’s cell phone, somewhere inside the school. “Look at this!” she’s screaming, trying to get a beleaguered state trooper’s attention. “They shot Chief Gannett! He’s dead! They killed him! Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!”
I try to get a glimpse of the tiny image on the iPhone screen, but someone else wrestles it away. Can it be real? Does she have it right? Could the child have misunderstood whatever it is that’s happening inside? Maybe this is all a scary mistake, a group panic kind of deal. But it seems so real, this strange gravity of fear that thickens the air somehow, making it hard to breathe.
Not knowing is killing me. It feels as if icy fingers are clawing at my insides. The way it did when they told me Jed’s plane was down with no survivors. An end-of-the-world sensation, as though I’m falling and falling and it will never stop. The vertigo makes me so dizzy I have to sit down on the grass and cry until my eyes are blind with tears.
Noah, Noah, Noah. I know he’s in there with all the other children, with his teachers and maybe even the principal, but in my head he’s all alone.
9. An Angry Blur
Whatever the cops know, they’re not sharing it with us. Not beyond “man with a gun in the gym.”
Most of what I learn is secondhand at best. An uncertainty that somehow adds to the fear. For example, Megan Frolich had her iPhone seized by the state troopers, with vague promises of getting it back once the images have been downloaded. So we have to rely on what she recalls of the pictures and the accompanying text message from her eleven-year-old daughter.
“I know what she was trying to say,” she insists, her normally pretty eyes looking like overinflated pink balloons. “Bd, that’s ‘bad’ and m-n, that’s ‘man’—s-t has to be ‘shot’ and c-o-p is ‘cop,’ that’s obvious. ‘Bad man shot cop.’ Then c-a-n-t and then m-v, must be ‘can’t move,’ right? And A-f-r-d is ‘afraid.’ I know it is! She repeated it three times. Afraid, afraid, afraid. Bad man shot cop. Can’t move. Afraid, afraid, afraid.”
The accompanying image, as Meg remembers it, is a slightly blurred snapshot of the gymnasium floor, as seen from the stands. On the gym floor is what appears to be a blue plastic tarp. Not lying flat, but jumbled, covering something. And in proximity to the