There were no smiles that morning in the church parking lot, the sun beating down on the blacktop, heat rising up beneath our feet. I had tried to wipe away my tears before exiting the car, but when Mike and I embraced, I lost it again. He was crying too. To tell the truth, it looked like he had just been to hell and back. I found out later that Mike, a former firefighter, had been asked to identify Alison and Adam’s bodies. He later told me it was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do. I know it will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Mike lost a foster daughter to gun violence. He knew what we were going through. Because he knew our pain so well, he still has post-traumatic flashbacks to that miserable morning, episodes that contributed to the dissolution of his marriage. Despite all of the morbid images that had been flooding my mind, I hadn’t even thought about identifying Alison’s body. I don’t think I could have done it. I don’t ever want to know what Mike saw that day, and I’m grateful he was there to do it for me.
Mike told us that the third victim, the interviewee—a woman named Vicki Gardner, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce—had survived the shooting and was in emergency surgery. Then he dropped the bombshell.
“We think we know who the shooter was,” he said.
The suspected shooter was a former reporter at the station, he said, a man by the name of Bryce Williams who had been fired almost two years earlier. That didn’t make sense to me. A former employee of the station? Everyone loved Alison and Alison loved everyone. What brought this on? Why would he shoot his old coworkers? Why Alison?
Mike shrugged, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “We really don’t know,” he said.
“Mike,” I said, my arm wrapped around Barbara’s shoulder to support myself as much as her, “I just have to know if she suffered. Please tell me she didn’t suffer.”
He assured me she did not.
For a long moment none of us said anything; we just stood taking in the horror and the heartbreak in one another's faces. Cars went whizzing by on the road in front of the church, off to who knows where, the people inside minding their own business as usual. Couldn’t they feel it? Didn’t they know what had happened here, down by the water just over that rise? How could they carry on as if nothing had happened?
The chief deputy of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, a barrel-chested, no-nonsense sort of man, snapped me back to attention. I hadn’t even noticed his approach until he was right in front of me. He stood at least six-foot-four, and in a commanding voice, he confirmed that they had a suspect and were working on tracking him down. I asked what we needed to do next, and he said we should go home and wait for further information.
“When you catch this guy,” I said, struggling ineffectually to contain the rage in my voice, “I want a few minutes alone with him.”
“I understand, Mr. Parker,” the deputy said. “I wish I could.”
I have no doubt he meant it.
In that moment, all of my anger was directed toward the shooter, about whom I knew almost nothing. If the police take him alive, I thought to myself, I’ll kill him. I will find a way to get to him and then I’ll make him watch home movies of the lives he stole. I’ll make him live the moment when my little Scooter, all of six years old, wearing pigtails and overalls and missing a front tooth, got so scared by the special effects at Universal Studios’s brand-new Twister attraction that she jumped straight up into my arms and buried her head in my chest, eyes wide as saucers. It was always one of my favorite memories of her. It still is, actually, and even as I write these words, the page is swimming and I can feel the old familiar lump rising up in my throat. I used to tell that story over and over again and Alison would always put up a pro forma protest, but secretly she loved it. That was the moment I became her protector, and it was a lifetime appointment. If she ever needed me, she knew that all she had to do was say the word and I’d come running.
Except when I didn’t. I wasn’t there for her this morning. I didn’t know she needed me until it was too late. I didn’t know how I could possibly live with the shame, the incredible gut-wrenching guilt that wracked my insides, the barely contained rage bubbling just beneath it.
When I got my hands on the shooter, I decided, I would show him the pictures of that family vacation and then I would end him. An eye for an eye. At that moment, I didn’t care if the whole world ended up blind. There was nothing left I wanted to see. I was so focused on catching the shooter and bringing him to justice that I never imagined what we would ultimately learn about him, or the heartache it would bring.
I was the same sobbing mess on the way home. Somehow we made it back in one piece, and at home we found our friends Lynn and Noel Ward waiting for us (no relation to Adam). I don’t know if Lynn called Barbara or Barbara called Lynn. Maybe the Wards just heard the news and came right over, no questions asked. Barbara and Lynn had worked together for years at Piedmont Arts, the center of the social scene in small-town Martinsville, and they had been our best friends for most of the nearly twenty years we’d lived in town. Lynn looks like a made-to-order grandmother straight out of a holiday catalog. She’s almost always smiling a big warm smile, and she has a cute button nose in the middle of a round face framed by wavy gray hair. Noel, with his square jaw, asymmetrical nose, and short, wavy gray hair, may have looked like an aging prizefighter but was actually an accountant who had done well enough with a local manufactured-home company that he had already retired. Barbara and I had spent quite a few enjoyable weekends with the Wards at their beach house.
That day wasn’t a social visit—it was one of the first times I had ever seen Lynn without a smile—but I don’t know what we would have done without them. The house felt stale, sterile. The weight of our grief slowly filled each room like a water balloon, pressing harder and harder against us the more it inflated. Lynn had brought over a card table that she set up in the center of the tiled living room floor while Noel went out for coolers, ice, drinks, cups, paper plates, plastic utensils, a guest book, and all the other items that you inexplicably need when a life ends. He lined the items up on the kitchen island as soon as he returned, while Lynn started answering the phone and receiving the visitors who showed up at the front door unannounced. She directed traffic with quiet efficiency and organized meal deliveries for the coming days. According to the guest book, that first afternoon there was chicken salad and pimento cheese, followed in the next few days by barbeque and baked spaghetti and banana pudding, all manner of casseroles, and at some point, a whole tray of tacos and enchiladas donated by the local Mexican restaurant.
I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember eating anything that entire day—perhaps a spoonful here and there, but I certainly never sat down with a plate. I wasn’t hungry. For almost a week, the very idea of food made me ill. I lost five pounds before September 1 rolled around. The Lose-a-Daughter Diet Plan is damned effective, but the sales numbers are abysmal.
Lynn and Noel took care of many of the immediate practical concerns, which freed us up to do other things. Barbara, meanwhile, had totally bought into Barbara Kingsolver’s theory of grief, supporting the importance of staying busy: she moved fluidly from one task to the next without ever stopping long enough to let herself feel the pain I could see in her eyes. She sat down at the island—the same spot where we’d held vigil just hours earlier, to no avail—and called the funeral home to arrange a venue for Alison’s memorial service. I still don’t know how she made that call. The very idea of “Alison’s memorial service” would have been blasphemous if spoken aloud not even eight hours earlier. Barbara did it, though, and the moment she ended the call with the funeral home, she was back on the phone, this time with Alison’s alma mater, JMU, to set up a scholarship fund in her honor.
I look back now on everything Barbara did that afternoon and I can’t help but shake my head in amazement. She tells me that she did those things simply because they had to be done. Women are stronger, she says, and that was her job. Maybe she’s right. I once asked her if she resented me for not helping.