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Noah is not even slightly confused by what has happened. He gets it. He understands that none of this is pretend. The bad man is not a funny clown; he’s a killer. It’s all very real. The bad man really shot the white-gloved policeman and then quickly covered the body with a blue tarp. The bad man made Mrs. K lock the exit doors, weaving bright new chains through the push bars. The bad man keeps waving his ugly black gun, alternating between making threats and singing along with his stupid iPod.
One other thing Noah understands. The crazy bad man is getting worse, more crazy. He’s shouting things about Satan being inside his brain. He’s raging about cell phones, and the importance of letting the whole world know what’s going on, and some of the other kids are madly texting, as if the act of communicating what the bad man says will save them. Noah isn’t so sure about that. He thinks the bad man might really do it. He might press the button and turn them all into sticky red jelly beans. Then all of them would go to heaven—or not—Noah hasn’t decided yet about heaven, whether it really exists or whether it’s like Santa Claus, to make people feel better. He likes to think of his father as being in heaven, but if his dad was really in a place like that, wouldn’t he find some way to let his son know? Unless there are rules, and Noah supposes there might be, rules about not talking to those left behind. Rules as complicated and hard as calculus. He knows calculus exists because Mrs. Delancey has a book about it in her desk and Noah sneaked a look, and to his surprise could not immediately understand the contents. Whatever it is, calculus is more than arithmetic, more than algebra, more than geometry—it’s all of them mashed together, making something completely different, but at the same time tantalizingly familiar. Differentials? What are those? The formulas and symbols looked intriguing, as if they might contain all the answers about everything there is to know, including whether heaven really exists.
More than anything else, Noah wants to live long enough to understand calculus, and have his mom read him a bedtime story, and get up and have breakfast, and go to school as if nothing bad had ever happened. So he’s thinking really hard about what to do. How to get away without being turned into jelly beans, or doing something that will turn Mrs. Delancey into jelly beans.
Meanwhile the bad man rages at them.
“I see a black moon rising and it’s calling out my name!” he shouts, bobbing his head and pretending to strum an air guitar like on Guitar Hero. Then the bad man seems to correct himself, like a funny skip on a DVD. “Text the world, I want to get off! They’ll be coming round the mountain, boys and girls!” Then, shouting so loud he spits: “Don’t move! I swear to the prophet, I WILL BLOW THIS BITCH!”
Now he’s waving around the detonator button, pointing at it with his gun as he grins, showing all of his small yellow teeth. He holds the pose for a few beats, as if he knows that his picture is being captured on cells.
“Noah?”
Somehow Mrs. Delancey has slipped along the bench and is beside him, a comforting presence, a still point in the chaos of fear and confusion that radiates from everybody in the gym, including the bad man. She pitches her voice for him alone, her mouth a mere inch from his ear. “I want you to go and hide,” she whispers. “Hide in the air duct, Noah, like you did before. Can you do that for me?”
“I’m scared to move.”
She hugs him. At this moment, in this place, she smells like home. Like flowers and bread and home. And so he doesn’t want to leave her side. Doesn’t want to risk doing something wrong. Something that will make the bad man press his crazy button and send them all to heaven.
“Listen to me, Noah,” Mrs. Delancey says in her beautiful, lilting voice. “He’s not focused on anything but himself. All you have to do, slip down through the space between the benches, like you did before. He won’t be able to see you. Hide, Noah, please? For me? Hide in the air ducts, okay? I’ll come to find you when all this is over.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. Now go.”
As the bad man raises his fist, shaking the detonator and screaming something about children of the grave, Noah slips under the bench, through the narrow gap, into the stands. Into the familiar geometry of the supports and trusses that hold up the benches. The last time he did this, slipped away into the space under the stands during an assembly, he got in a lot of trouble. Mrs. K was really upset with him then, told him he might have been injured and nobody would have known where to look for him. Noah thought it was pretty funny, the way he’d run along under the benches, tugging at dangling feet to make the girls giggle and shriek. Mrs. K didn’t think it was funny at all and his mom had to come to the school and take him home. But that was last year. Things were different last year. He was younger then and he didn’t have Mrs. Delancey. Mrs. Delancey who understands him, and wants to save him.
Hiding in the air ducts sounds like a really good idea. It will be snug and cozy in there. Noah discovered the attractions of the ducts last year, when he brought an adjustable screwdriver to school, removed a metal grate, and then shinnied around on his tummy, just as he’d seen in the movies, where air ducts were often a means of secret escape. The big difference was that the ducts at school were way too small for anybody even slightly larger than he was—Matt Damon wouldn’t ever fit, no way!—and they didn’t really go much of anywhere useful. Retreat a few feet and you ran into a fan, baffle, or filter system. So basically they were good for hiding in the classroom and making spooky echo noises to amuse your classmates. This is the booger monster and I’m comingto get you ooh ooh ooh! Even Mrs. K couldn’t keep a straight face when she marched him to the office. Booger monster? she had said, breaking up. Where do you get this stuff?
What Noah knew from his previous experience, and what Mrs. Delancey obviously knew, as well—there were a couple of fairly large duct openings under the stands. Part of the circulation system for the sock-smelling gym. He hadn’t attempted to access the ducts at the time—it was too much fun tugging on dangling feet—but once he climbs down to the floor beneath the stands—there’s pee dripping down from the benches, ick!—he makes a beeline for the wall, locates one of the ducts.
The duct is, like all the others, covered by a metal grate. The problem is, he no longer carries the adjustable screwdriver. Because of his previous ‘behavioral problems,’ the screwdriver set has been forbidden. Too much like a weapon, they said. He might poke out somebody’s eye. To which his mom had said all he needs for that is a pencil. Wrong answer. For a whole week they didn’t let him have pencils and he had to fill in the answers with a crayon, like a baby! And his mom was so mad she cried.
Noah has some change in his pockets, but none of the coins fits the special slots on the screws that hold the metal grate in place. He’s hurrying because the crazy bad man is shouting again. Scary shouting that doesn’t make sense.
“Don’t mess with success! Heed the prophet! I bite the heads off bats! Leave the earth to Satan and his slaves! Into the void, boys and girls! Into the void!”
A moment later there are gunshots, and children screaming. Teachers, too. Is that Mrs. Delancey? Has something happened to Mrs. Delancey? Has she been punished for helping him escape?
Fighting his fear, Noah creeps to the front edge of the gymnasium seating on his hands and knees and looks out through a slot between the benches.
The crazy man is running around in circles, firing his gun straight up in the air. He looks as frightened as the screaming children. Smoke is pouring out of his little janitor cart. Huge amounts of thick black smoke, billowing over the floor and into the stands.
The crazy man kicks at the cart as if he wants the smoke to stop, as if he doesn’t understand what’s going on. That’s the really weird thing. He looks genuinely puzzled. He looks scared.
When the smoke begins to filter under the stands, enough to make him cough and make his eyes sting, Noah retreats back to the air duct.
Stupid people taking away his screwdriver! He hooks his fingers into the metal grate and yanks with all his might.
To his surprise the grate swings open on its hinges. He climbs inside just as the whole building begins to shake and the air goes black with smoke.
12. Out Of The Smoke
When Jed proposed, he sealed the deal with his grandmother’s wedding ring. A thin band of gold set with a diamond about as big as a grain of sand. But if I’d ever had any doubts—and who doesn’t have a few?—that little old ring blew them away. A man you love more than anything, more than you can possibly describe, he drops to one knee with tears of joy in his gorgeous eyes, and he offers you not only a place in his heart, but a place in his most precious memories.
A girl just has to say yes. Actually I didn’t stop saying yes for about half an hour, and by then we were in bed, and, come to think of it, I was still saying yes. But that’s private. You don’t need to know.
What really matters was that Jed trusted me without reservation, holding nothing back. The proposal of marriage came with an escape clause. He was going to tell me a secret, a terrible secret, and if I wanted to back out, forget the whole thing, he’d understand.
And that’s the thing about Jedediah; he really would have understood. Because it wasn’t just the secret, it was what it meant about our future together. Marriage would mean leaving everything behind—friends, family—and making a new life.
First thing I asked him, joking: you mean like the witness protection program?
He’d nodded gravely and said yes, a little bit like that, except we’ll be totally on our own. No U.S. Marshals to protect us. Nobody to give us new identities or settle us into a new life. It will all be up to us alone.
So who did you kill? I asked.
He’d rolled his eyes at that—he got a kick out of what he called my ‘smart-mouth jokes’—and said, it’s nothing I did, it’s who I am. Who my father is.
So who’s your daddy? Tony Soprano?
And that’s when he told me who his father was, and what that meant, and after he was done, as he waited gravely for my answer, I kissed his eyes and said, didn’t you hear me the first ten thousand times? The answer is yes.
Saint Francis of Hoboken, patron saint of New Jersey, he said, regrets, I’ve had a few. Not me. Even after all we went through, I have no regrets. Not about saying yes. Not about loving Jed. Not about the life we lived, the baby we made, the time we had together. What would I be if I’d never met Jedediah? Another person, surely. Not Noah’s mother, that’s for sure.
And if I’d known Jed would be gone in twelve years, snatched away in one terrible instant? If instead of an unforeseeable fatal accident he’d had, say, a disease that would shorten his lifespan. Something we knew about from the start. Would I have said no and saved myself the loss, the pain? No, no, no. No matter how you make the calculation—and all of this has raced through my mind a million times, in every possible variation—I would never choose to erase those years. Would never, ever wish I had taken another path. You can’t truly love someone and make a choice based on how long he might live. Love isn’t something that can be rated by ConsumerReports—go with the Maytag or whatever, because it will last the longest with fewest repairs. That’s not how it works. We like to think we’re rational creatures but we’re not. And besides, when you’re twenty, twelve years seems like an eternity. It seems, indeed, like a lifetime well worth having.
And it was, it was. I swear on my wedding ring. So forgive me if I admit that when the smoke starts pouring from the building, my first reaction is that I’d rather die than endure this again. I simply can’t do it. If Noah doesn’t come out of that gym alive, I want my heart to stop beating. I want to go wherever he’s gone.
It starts amid the swarm of uniforms. The county SWAT team, the state police tactical units. Deputies, firefighters, all positioned around the gym like bees desperate to return to a hive. I’m on my feet by then, with my friend Helen providing moral support, gathered with the other parents just beyond the bounds of the police barricade.
Until that moment I thought ‘gnawing on your knuckles’ was just an expression. It’s Helen who gently draws my fist away before I draw blood.
“That’s Tommy crouching by the exit doors,” Helen says with obvious pride. “He’s the unit expert on surveillance devices. He’s threading a fiber-optic device through the door frame, so they can see what’s going on inside.”
“You can tell all that from here?” I ask, my eyes still blurry and swollen.
She squeezes my hand. “Just my assumption, dear. That’s what Tommy does, so I assume he’s doing it now. Plus I saw him with an electric drill in his hand.”
I’m not reassured. “Remember what happened at Columbine? They waited and waited and waited. Kids bled to death while they waited.”
“They’ve learned a lot since then,” she says soothingly. “Tommy’s unit studies Columbine. They won’t make the same mistake.”
“Or they’ll break in too soon and he’ll set off his bomb.”
“Your little boy will be okay.” She gives me a quick hug. “You’ll see.”
I can’t blame her for believing that her nephew can work miracles, and I’ve no doubt he’ll try, like all of the others swarming the building. They have one thing in mind, to save the lives of our precious children. But I can’t help fearing the worst.
God help me, what I fear most is that Noah will make himself the center of attention. Which is what he tends to do when he’s unhappy or under stress. He tries to relieve the tension by doing something silly. Which would be exactly the wrong thing to do around a violent, insane individual.
Please, Noah, don’t make a joke. Don’t hang erasers on your ears, or scratch under your arms like a monkey. For once in your life blend into the background. Be invisible. Your mother is begging you.
That’s just about when the smoke starts coming out from under the doors. At first just a whiff, barely there. But smoke, definitely. Was anybody else seeing it? Are my exhausted eyes playing tricks?
Beside me, Helen mutters, “Oh, no,” and then covers her mouth with her hand, her eyes bright with fear.
“Oh my god, there’s a fire!” someone shrieks. “He’s lit the school on fire!”
The crowd begins to keen. Even Helen, my rock, is crying. And me, I’m running through the barricade, spinning away from outstretched hands, with a single purpose in mind. I’m going to smash open an exit door with my own body and get inside.
As it happens, Helen’s nephew Tommy and his fellow state troopers are way ahead of me. They know what smoke means, too. Before I get anywhere near an exit door a couple of big guys smash through with a battering ram and a moment later about a dozen tactical officers run into the smoke wearing headgear and full-face masks.
Then I’m down, tackled and held by the ankles; all I can do is watch as great billows of black smoke pour from the opening. Behind me the whole crowd is screaming and shouting, but it sounds like background noise because all of my attention is focused on the exit door. On wanting Noah to come racing out of the smoke.
There are a few popping noises. Gunshots. Just a few. Maybe they got the guy and it’s over. Or maybe it wasn’t a gunshot. Maybe something exploded in the fire.
They breach another pair of doors and firefighters race into the smoke dragging hoses. Shouting orders, directing the rescue efforts—Over here! Pressure up! Full maskSCBAs! Bring in the air caddys!
The smoking doorways are thick with emergency responders. All of them diving into the dark, no hesitation. Doing all that can be done, that’s obvious even to a desperate, overwrought mom like me.
Please, God, please. Let Noah be safe. Let all of them be safe.
An eternity passes and then suddenly, miraculously, children begin to pour out of the building. They come through the smoke like little football players ripping apart a dark, billowing banner, eager for a game. Or eager to find their mothers, their fathers.
Child after child emerges from the smoke.
Whoever has me by the ankles finally relents and I’m up, staggering to the gym with all the other parents—there’s no holding us back now—and child after child is swept up into loving arms. Most of the kids are crying and some of them are coughing, but the smoke, for all its ropy thickness, doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Worse on the eyes than the throat. And it doesn’t smell of fire, which is strange.
I’m calling out for Noah. At the top of my lungs, I don’t doubt. But I might as well be shouting into a raging hurricane because my voice can’t rise above the din. Noah! Noah! Noah!
Watching as the kids, by some amazing instinct, seem to gravitate like little iron filings to the magnet of their mothers’ arms. Like all the others, I have my arms out, waiting for them to be filled with my little boy.
I wait and wait and wait and still he does not come. The only people still coming out of the gym are firefighters and cops. Have I somehow missed him? Is he back there in the parking lot, absorbed into the joyous crowd?
“My son!” I scream at a startled firefighter. “Where is my son?”
He rips off his mask, tells me the gym is clear. “We got them all,” he assures me. “There isn’t any fire, just a smoke device of some kind. Not even toxic,” he adds. “So he’s got to be out here somewhere. Come on, let’s find him, you and me. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
A young, earnest fireman with a farm-boy face, anxious to help and pumped because the rescue went off like clockwork. All that training paid off. He seems so assured, so certain that all the children were rescued, that I let him steer me away from the exit doors, heading back to the crowd.
We’re thirty yards or so from the gym when it explodes in a ball of fire, blasting me into darkness.
Part II
Mad Mom
1. Six Weeks Later
The bank teller thinks I’m nuts. It’s there in her eyes. Which means she’s heard about me. The crazy mom from Humble, the one whose son got blown up in the school. The one who won’t accept reality, who keeps handing out pictures to strangers. The one folks will cross the street to avoid, if at all possible.
“How would you like this, Mrs. Corbin?”
“A bank check would be fine,” I tell her.
She doesn’t want to make eye contact. As if looking me in the eye might somehow be dangerous. As if crazy is catching. “Who should I make it out to?” she asks warily.
“Make it out to ‘cash.’”
“Cash? That, uh, that means anyone can endorse it.”
“I know what it means.”
She’s troubled by the transaction and goes off to confer with her supervisor. Who glances over at me and shrugs. I’m no lip reader, but it’s pretty obvious what she says to the nervous teller: It’s her money.
Two minutes later I’m out of there, check in my purse. Which leaves me plenty of time for the twenty-three-mile drive back home. Plenty of time for me to think about what I’m going to say to the man after giving him the check.
Wondering how much time ten thousand dollars will buy me.
He’s expected, having called not ten minutes ago, looking for directions. But still the doorbell makes me jump. Everything makes me jump these days—cars backfiring, thunderclaps, loud whistles, whatever.
A glance in the peephole confirms my visitor’s identity. Randall Shane, retired Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, now working as a civilian consultant, if you can get him. Type missing child hopeless case into Google and up pops Mr. Shane. Legendary in law enforcement circles, supposedly. Gets results when no one else can. A blurry head shot on a Web site gave me a vague idea of what he looks like, but nothing has prepared me for the man on my front porch pressing the bell.
He’s huge. Lean but large.
When I crack open the door he introduces himself and then says, “You must be Haley Corbin. If I’ve got the right place.”
“You’ve got the right place…. Come in.”
He ducks his head as he comes through the doorway. The farmhouse ceilings are low and he doesn’t clear the old fir beams by all that much.
“Good thing you’ve got a crew cut,” I tell him. “Another inch you’d be bumping your head.”
Startled, he looks up and touches a big hand to a beam. “Nah,” he says gently, “plenty of room. You’ve got seven feet at least. That leaves me five or six inches. All the room in the world.”
“It might be better if you sit down,” I suggest, indicating a pumpkin-pine leaf table in the kitchen. “Coffee?”
“Coffee would be great.”
I get busy with the coffeemaker. “Was it a long drive?”
“Not so bad,” he says, carefully settling onto a spindle-back chair as if he’s afraid it might collapse under him.
“Must have been six hours, if you came up through Binghamton.”
“Seven,” he says, touching a hand to a neatly trimmed Vandyke that’s delicately streaked with gray. “I stopped for lunch. More like a late breakfast, actually. They have a nice diner there, in Binghamton. Danny’s Diner, on Main Street. It’s an old Sterling.”
“Excuse me?”
