I don’t worry too much about Sterling, as he’s in heaven. Animals never left God – only people did. Lucky animals.
My father works in the mortgage division of Canada Trust, and my mother is a technician in a medical lab. They love their jobs. Chris is a generic little brother, yet not as snotty or pesky as my friends’ little brothers.
At Christmas everyone in our family exchanged bad sweaters and we all wore them as a kind of in-joke. So we were one of those bad-sweater families you see at the mall.
We got along with each other – or we did until recently. It’s like we decided to be superficially happy with each other, which is fine, and that we wouldn’t share intimacies with each other. I don’t know. I think that lack of sharing weakened us.
Dear Lord,
I pray for the souls of the three killers, but I don’t know if that is right or wrong.
It always seemed to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls. Looking a convert in the eyes was like trying to make eye contact with a horse. They’d be alive and breathing, but they wouldn’t be a hundred percent there anymore. They’d left the day-to-day world and joined the realm of eternal time. Pastor Fields or Dee or Lauren would have pounced on me if I’d ever spoken those words aloud. Dee would have said something like “Cheryl, you’ve just covered your halo with soot. Repent. Now.”
There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and of the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.
Jason’s father, Reg, always said, “Love what God loves and hate what God hates,” but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant “Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.” I don’t think he imparted this philosophy to Jason. Jason was too gentle, too forgiving, to adopt Reg’s self-serving credo. As my mother always told me, “Cheryl, trust me, you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”
Getting married in Nevada in 1988 was simple. At noon on the final Friday before school started, Jason and I cabbed out to the airport and scanned the list of outgoing flights. There was one to Las Vegas in ninety minutes, so we bought tickets – cash – walked through U.S. Immigration preclearance, went to the gate and were on our way. They didn’t even bother to check our ID. We each had only a gym bag for carry-on and we felt like bandits. It was my first time flying, and everything was new and charged with mystery…the laminated safety cards, the takeoff, which made my stomach cartwheel, the food, which was bad just like they always joke about on TV, and the cigarette smoke; something about Las Vegas attracts the smokers. But it was all like perfume to me, and I tried pretending that every moment of my life could be as full of newness as that flight. What a life that would be.
The two of us had dressed conservatively – shirt and tie for Jason, and me in a schoolmarm dress; our outfits must have made us look all of fifteen. The flight attendant asked us why we were going to Las Vegas and we told her. Ten minutes later there was a captain’s announcement telling everybody on the plane our news and our seat numbers. The other passengers clapped and I blushed like I had a fever, but suddenly it was as if we were blood kin with all these strangers. At the terminal, the men all slapped Jason’s back and har-har’ed, and this one woman whispered to me, “Honey, I don’t care what else you do, but the moment he hints that he wants it, you give it to him. Doesn’t matter if you’re fixing a diaper or cleaning out the gutters. You give it, pronto. Else you’ll lose him.”
It was over a hundred degrees outside, my first exposure to genuine heat, Jason’s too. My lungs had never felt so pure. In the taxi to Caesars Palace I looked out at the desert – real desert – and tried to imagine every parable I’d ever heard taking place in that exotic lifeless nothingness. I couldn’t have stood five minutes out there in that oven, and I wondered how the Bible ever managed to happen. They must have had different weather back then – or trees – or rivers and shade. Good Lord, the desert is harsh. I asked the taxi driver to stop for a second beside a vacant lot between the airport and the Strip. There were some rental units on the other side of a cinder-block fence, some litter and a shedded snakeskin. I got out and it felt as if I were floating over the sharp rocks and angry little plants. Instead of feeling brand new, Las Vegas felt thousands of years old. Jason got out and we both knelt and prayed. Time passed; I felt dizzy and the cabbie honked the horn. We drove to Caesars Palace.
I knew we were goners when Dee knocked over an apple juice can. Clank. The three boys had been across the room shouting pointless fragments of pointless manifestos or whatever moronic ideas they had, but then, yes, the clank. It was so primal to watch their heads swivel toward us, and their eyes focusing – zeroing in like crocodiles in TV documentaries. Dee squeaked.
I heard Duncan Boyle say, “Oh, if it isn’t the Out to Lunch Bunch slumming with us, the damned, here in purgatory, School District 44.” Listening to the inflections of his voice, for just a second I thought to myself that he could sing if he wanted to. I could always tell that about people – if they could sing or not.
Just then, for whatever reason, the overhead sprinklers spritzed on. The boys were distracted and looked up at the ceiling. The water rained down onto the tables, onto the milk cartons and half-empty paper bags; it sounded like rain on a roof. Then it began trickling off the laminated tabletops and dripping onto my jeans and forearms. It was cold and I shivered and Lauren was shivering, too. I put my arm around her and held her to me, her teeth chattering like maracas. Then there were more shots – at us, I assumed, but Mitchell Van Waters blew out some of the sprinkler nozzles, shattering a large pipe, and the water came down on us in buckets.
There was a noise from outside the building and Martin Boyle shouted, “Windows!” He and Mitchell blasted out four large panes opposite us. Then Duncan asked, “Was that a cop I saw out there?”
“What do you think?” Mitchell was mad as hornets. “Rearm!”
The guns made more metallic noises and Mitchell blew out the remaining windows. The school was now like a jewel case encrusted with snipers and cops. Their time with their victims was drawing to an end.
Lord,
I know that faith is not the natural condition of the human heart, but why do You make it so hard to have faith? Were we so far gone here in boring North Van that we needed a shock treatment? There are thousands of suburbs as average as us. Why us then? And why now? You raise the cost of faith and You dilute its plausibility. Is that smart?
Dear God,
I keep on imagining what those kids under the tables must have been feeling and it only makes me angrier and crazier at You. It just does.
Dear God,
I’m prayed out, and yet here I am, still knocking on Your door, but I think this could be the last time.
Dear Lord,
This is the first time I’ve ever prayed because I didn’t grow up with this stuff, but here I am, praying away, so maybe there’s something to it. Maybe I’m wasting my time. You tell me. Send me a sign. You must get a lot of that. Proof proof proof. Because to my mind, the school massacre could mean that You don’t exist just as much – if not more than – it could mean that You do. If I was trying to recruit followers, a school massacre isn’t the way I’d go about doing it. But then it got me here right now, praying, didn’t