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The Hour I First Believed
Wally Lamb
From the author of the international number one bestseller I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE comes a magnificent novel of a life turned upside-down by tragedy – and the search for a way to carry on in the aftermath.Caelum Quirkes a middle-aged schoolteacher. Students at Columbine High School generally respect him and turn to his wife Maureen, the school nurse, when in trouble. When he has to return to his home town for the funeral of his beloved aunt, Maureen promises to join him the next day - but she goes to work that morning, and that’s when the shootings happen. She hides in a cupboard, unable to see what’s happening, but listening to the students being taunted, then killed.Life can never be the same. But what can it be? In the face of Maureen’s trauma, Caelum searches for meaning, delving into his own family history and discovering that nothing was as he’s always been told. As the couple inch towards recovery and suffer setbacks, the stories of Caelum’s redoubtable ancestors illuminate how he came to be the man he is, and how he and Maureen might live in the future with freedom and dignity. With no easy answers, Caelum gradually comes to an understanding of who he really is and what he can believe in.
The Hour I First Believed
A Novel
Wally Lamb
Dedication
FOR ANNA
A series of debilitating strokes and the onset of dementia necessitated the agonizing conversation I had with my mother in the winter of 1997. When I told her she’d be moving to a nearby nursing home, she shook her head and, atypically, began to cry. Tears were a rarity for my stoic Sicilian-American mother. The next day, she offered me a deal. “Okay, I’ll go,” she said. “But my refrigerator comes with me.” I couldn’t meet her demand, but I understood it.
Ma’s refrigerator defined her. The freezer was stockpiled with half-gallons of ice cream for the grandkids, and I do mean stockpiled; you opened that freezer compartment at your peril, hoping those dozen or so rock-hard bricks, precariously stacked, wouldn’t tumble forth and give you a concussion. The bottom half of Ma’s “icebox” was a gleaming tribute to aluminum—enough foil-wrapped Italian food to feed, should we all show up unexpectedly at once, her own family and the extended families of her ten siblings. But it was the outside of Ma’s fridge that best spoke of who she was. The front and sides were papered with greeting cards, holy pictures, and photos, old and new, curling and faded, of all the people she knew and loved. Children were disproportionately represented in her refrigerator photo gallery. She adored kids—her own and everyone else’s. My mother was a woman of strong faith, quiet resolve, and easy and frequent laughter.
This story’s been a hard one to write, Ma, and it got harder after you left us. But I had the title from the very beginning, and when I reached the end, I realized I’d written it for you.
(P.S. Sorry about all those four-letter words, Ma. That’s the characters speaking. Not me.)
Epigraph
AND SO, THEY MOVED OVER THE DARK WAVES,
AND EVEN BEFORE THEY DISEMBARKED, NEW HORDES GATHERED THERE.
Dante’s Inferno, canto 3, lines 118–120
Contents
Cover (#u058e849f-1FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Title Page (#u058e849f-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Butterfly
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two: Mantis
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Afterword
Notes from the Author
Acknowledgments
A List of Sources Consulted
Charitable Donations
About the Author
Also by Wally Lamb
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Chapter One
THEY WERE BOTH WORKING THEIR final shift at Blackjack Pizza that night, although nobody but the two of them realized it was that. Give them this much: they were talented secret-keepers. Patient planners. They’d been planning it for a year, hiding their intentions in plain sight on paper, on videotape, over the Internet. In their junior year, one had written in the other’s yearbook, “God, I can’t wait till they die. I can taste the blood now.” And the other had answered, “Killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops! My wrath will be godlike!”
My wrath will be godlike: maybe that’s a clue. Maybe their ability to dupe everyone was their justification. If we could be fooled, then we were all fools; they were, therefore, superior, chaos theirs to inflict. But I don’t know. I’m just one more chaos theorist, as lost in the maze as everyone else.
It was Friday, April 16, 1999, four days before they opened fire. I’d stayed after school for a parent conference and a union meeting and, in between, had called Maureen to tell her I’d pick up takeout. Blackjack Pizza was between school and home.
It was early still. The Friday-night pizza rush hadn’t begun. He was at the register, elbows against the counter, talking to a girl in a hairdresser’s smock. Or not talking, pretty much. There was a cell phone on the counter, and he kept tapping it with his index finger to make it spin—kept looking at the revolving cell phone instead of at the girl. I remember wondering if I’d just walked in on a lover’s spat. “I better get back,” the girl said. “See you tomorrow.” Her smock said “Great Clips,” which meant she worked at the salon next door—the place where Maureen went.
“Prom date?” I asked him. The big event was the next night at the Design Center in Denver. From there, the kids would head back to school for the all-night post-prom party, which I’d been tagged to help chaperone.
“I wouldn’t go to that bogus prom,” he said. He called over his shoulder. “How’s his half-mushroom-half-meatball coming?” His cohort opened the oven door and peered in. Gave a thumbs-up.
“So tell me,” I said. “You guys been having any more of your famous Blackjack flour wars?”
He gave me a half-smile. “You remember that?”
“Sure. Best piece you wrote all term.”
He’d been in my junior English class the year before. A grade-conscious concrete sequential, he was the kind of kid who was more comfortable memorizing vocab definitions and lines from Shakespeare than doing the creative stuff. Still, his paper about the Blackjack Pizza staff’s flour fights, which he’d shaped as a spoof on war, was the liveliest thing he’d written all term. I remember scrawling across his paper, “You should think about taking creative writing next year.” And he had. He was in Rhonda Baxter’s class. Rhonda didn’t like him, though—said she found him condescending. She hated the way he rolled his eyes at other kids’ comments. Rhonda and I shared a free hour, and we often compared notes about the kids. I neither liked nor disliked him, particularly. He’d asked me to write him a letter of recommendation once. Can’t remember what for. What I do recall is sitting there, trying to think up something to say.
He rang up my sale. I handed him a twenty. “So what’s next year looking like?” I asked. “You heard back from any of the schools you applied to?”
“I’m joining the Marines,” he said.
“Yeah? Well, I heard they’re looking for a few good men.” He nodded, not smiling, and handed me my change.
His buddy ambled over to the counter, pizza box in hand. He’d lost the boyish look I remembered from his freshman year. Now he was a lanky, beak-nosed adult, his hair tied back in a sorry-looking ponytail, his chin as prominent as Jay Leno’s. “So what’s your game plan for next year?” I asked him.
“University of Arizona.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I gave a nod to the Red Sox cap he was wearing. “You follow the Sox?”
“Somewhat. I just traded for Garciaparra in my fantasy league.”
“Good move,” I said. “I used to go to Sox games all the time when I was in college. Boston University. Fenway was five minutes away.”
“Cool,” he said.
“Maybe this is their year, huh?”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound like he gave a shit either way.
He was in Rhonda’s creative writing class, too. She’d come into the staff room sputtering about him one day. “Read this,” she said. “Is this sick or what?” He’d written a two-page story about a mysterious avenger in a metal-studded black trench coat. As jocks and “college preps” leave a busy bar, he pulls pistols and explosives out of his duffel bag, wastes them, and walks away, smiling. “Do you think I should call his parents?” Rhonda had asked.
I’d shrugged. “A lot of the guys write this kind of crap. Too many video games, too much testosterone. I wouldn’t worry about it. He probably just needs a girlfriend.” She had worried, though, enough to make that call. She’d referred to the meeting, a week or so later, as “a waste of time.”
The door banged open; five or six rowdy kids entered Blackjack. “Hey, I’ll see you later,” I said.
“Later,” he said. And I remember thinking he’d make a good Marine. Clean-cut, conscientious, his ironed T-shirt tucked neatly into his wrinkle-free shorts. Give him a few years, I figured, and he’d probably be officer material.
AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, MAUREEN suggested we go out to a movie, but I begged off, citing end-of-the-week exhaustion. She cleaned up, I fed the dogs, and we adjourned to our separate TVs. By ten o’clock, I was parked on my recliner, watching Homicide with the closed-caption activated, my belly full of pizza. There was a Newsweek opened on my lap for commercial breaks, a Pete’s Wicked ale resting against my crotch, and a Van Morrison CD reverberating inside my skull: Astral Weeks, a record that had been released in 1968, the year I turned seventeen.
I was forty-seven that Friday night. A month earlier, a guy in a music chat room I’d begun visiting had posed the question, “What are the ten masterworks of the rock era?” Dozens of us had begun devising our lists, posting them as works in progress and busting each other’s chops about our selections. (I came to picture my cyber-rockin’ brethren as a single balding fat guy in a tie-dye T-shirt—size XL when XXL would have been a better fit.) My masterwork choices were as controversial as the next guy’s. I incurred the good-natured wrath of several of my cyberbuddies, for instance, when I named to my list Springsteen’s Nebraska while excluding Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. “Dude, as spokesman for the Boss’s TRUE fans,” a trash-to-energy engineer from Michigan messaged me, “I regret to inform you that you’re more f***ed up than a soup sandwich!” I dished it out, too, of course, not always successfully. I learned that I’d deeply offended a professor of medieval literature by stating that the bloodline of the Backstreet Boys could be traced to that other vapid and overrated boy band of an earlier era, the Beach Boys. The scholar asked if he could communicate with me privately, and I obliged him with my address. A week later, I received a FedEx envelope, postage paid by Princeton University, which contained an erudite (if unconvincing) eleven-page defense of the album Pet Sounds.
For weeks, listening and list-making had consumed me: Sgt. Pepper or Songs in the Key of Life? Aretha or Etta James? I’d saved my tenth and final berth for the unorthodox but always interesting Van Morrison but was having trouble deciding between Van the Man’s elegant Moondance and his more emotionally raw Astral Weeks. Thus, that Friday night, the earphones.
But it was armor, all of it, I see that now: the TV, the open magazine, the aural review of my life, the keyboard chatter. I’d safeguarded myself in multimedia chain mail to prevent emotional penetration from Maureen.
A shadow moved across the carpet, and I looked up from Homicide to her. “Caelum?” her lips said. She was holding our wicker tray, two glasses of red wine counterbalanced by a lit candle. I watched the wine rock in the glasses while she waited. The candle was scented—spice of some kind. She was into Enya and aromatherapy back then.
I lifted my left earphone. “Yeah, give me a few minutes,” I said. “I want to let the dogs out, catch a little of the news. I’ll be up.”
Maureen, her wines, and her defeated shoulders turned and started up the stairs. I could read Mo from the back, same as I could the other two. But reading and responding are two different things. “Look, don’t just stare at the pages,” I used to tell my students. “Become the characters. Live inside the book.” And they’d sit there, staring back politely at the alien from Planet Irrelevance.
