Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (39 page)

WE AWOKE UNSURPRISED.
We awoke ravaged.

We awoke to the news that Mark Carter's house had disintegrated in the night.

His mother, his father: everyone gone. A sophomore we'd only known from the hallways, whose face we could place in a crowd but nothing more. We awoke to the persistence of school, an email. An announcement that Homecoming was still on. Friday night's dance, Saturday's game, everything and all of it, always, still on.

We awoke to a front-page spread, the same as the last. Mark Carter's home in charred debris, officials and firefighters circling its perimeter while bystanders looked on from behind yellow police tape. We awoke to printed funeral arrangements for Darren Beechwold's parents. We awoke to nothing changed.

We awoke to other news, the slimmest of back pages: that Iraq's interim head of state had warned the world to lower their expectations of the country's rebuilding. That the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence had finalized its report on pre-invasion data, its findings skeptical of the CIA and what they'd claimed to know. That it was true, in the end, that no weapons of mass destruction existed. That even beyond St. Louis not even our government knew anything but the feigning of certainty, an illusion.

Other news: that the Marlins were up 3–2 in the World Series, the next and potentially final game to be played Saturday night.
That an astral storm in outer space had caused satellite system disruptions. That despite the interference, a celestial outburst scientists were calling the Halloween solar storm, the solar flares would bring the most profound aurora borealis display the northern United States had seen in years. That here in the Midwest we saw nothing but faint stars that blinked back their forgetting.

And we awoke to what Matt told us: what the police believed, what his father had revealed to him outside the school. An accomplice. What lead of sequence the police were pursuing. What at long last, across the days and weeks that would follow, every one of us turned away from as more homes burned and the police failed to protect any of them.

We attended counseling sessions. Mandatory for everyone. No longer a means of opting out, the only policy the school changed.
How are you feeling?
the counselors asked us, an open question from a tall woman in a green dress, a thick man in round glasses. Natalie. Marcus. We watched the clock tick. We avoided their eyes. There were so many counselors that eventually we lost count.

I am burning, we wanted to say. We wanted to say out loud that we were combustible, that at night our chests felt like a heated hand had reached in and gripped our breastbone and that we were as vulnerable as any parent. That there was nothing of safety. That as the news mounted, we felt our bodies fissure and break down. But we said nothing. We'd lost nothing. We'd lost the companions of our classrooms and the frustrations of shared homework but we hadn't lost the nucleus of our homes, everything at the center that had kept them alive. We hadn't lost those beside us on the couch, watching television, reading books, quiet but there. We hadn't lost the sound of other voices echoing against the walls. We thought of Jacob Jensen's mother, returned from a funeral to the pressing hollow of an empty house. We thought of the Beechwolds coming home from the vigil, their candles extinguished and Darren's bedroom vacant. We thought of Caroline and we thought of Benji Ndolo and we
thought of Alisha Trenway and Alexis Thurber and we felt the storm of their absence, a tempest annihilating every single thing they left behind.

We looked up at our counselors. I am fine, we said.

We met their eyes. We said it over and over.

Then we went back to class, to the Crimean War and Raskolnikov's motives and the application of force and the speed of sound and we went home and we watched the news and we killed ourselves inside at waking each day to something new, to something no longer new, to a flood of fires that whispered nothing to the ash of our ravaged hearts.

IN THE END,
every family burned.

Every parent of our twenty-eight peers and classmates, a rash of fires that took only weeks to take everyone.

A month beyond the shooting, every parent was gone.

After Homecoming, that Friday night: Josh Zimmerman's house. His mother and his father and his sister Beth, who we'd just seen slow-dancing with her boyfriend beneath the heat of a strobe flash after the Homecoming Court was announced, her dress glittering against her skin and her face pressed to his chest and her eyes closed to the light.

Then Alyssa Carver's house. Her mother inside. Kelly Washington's home. Missy Hoffman. Elise Nguyen, Christina retreating to her bed for two days. James Sharma. So many homes that we lost count, homes in Midvale County but also elsewhere. Alexander Chen's family cabin out in Innsbrook, where they'd gone to take time away. Constance Bellamy's father alone in a hotel room, a weekend business trip to Chicago. A trip to get away, we knew, to abandon the walled-in pressure of our city that followed him elsewhere. A pattern we'd anticipated from a list of names, a trail the police knew but couldn't prevent from igniting. At home, our parents let the television blare behind dinner. On low, a quieter volume,
a volume all the same for them to hear. That the evidence was still inconclusive, the investigation ongoing. That a pattern had been determined and that police were drawing nearer. That they'd staked out every home, that each time one flared they were ever closer to their culprit. Our parents glanced at us across the table and muted the volume. Zola's mother watched the stars, a solar storm her telescope couldn't detect. Matt's father worked late and his mother kept her eyes on him always above her book or across the kitchen table. Nick's dad kept watch out the front window while his brother read on the living room floor and his mother worked. Christina's father awaited the mail at the end of the driveway so he could speak to Mr. Wilcox and to the mailwoman, to any other voice with an answer while her mother called from Edwardsville every day to check in. Our parents walked the tenuous line of asking us and not asking us. Of being attentive and leaving us alone. Of wanting to know whether we were okay. Their hands lingered on our backs as we helped clear dishes from the table and upon our heads as we stood at the kitchen sink.

At night, we knew, they watched us.

In our own lack of sleep, we heard our doors creak open and felt a sliver of light from the hallway redden the underside of our closed eyes. We waited in silence as our parents stood in the doorway, sometimes minutes, sometimes longer. We heard their feet approaching our beds and the rhythm of their breath beside us. We felt their hands soft upon our covers to know we were still here. And when they left, we kept our eyes closed.

We imagined a world without them.

We imagined our homes in flames.

CALEB RAYNOR'S FAMILY:
the last.

The last of the homes to flame out.

His mother, his father, his brother: gone in the debris of a small rental home out in Spanish Lake where they'd sought privacy and
their own healing. Nothing left but the blackened logs of an allwood cabin the
Post-Dispatch
printed on the front page. A house looking out on the lake. Lewis and Clark Memorial Park not a mile away, our city's namesake and the name of a high school their son eradicated. The last fire to burn, early November, a blaze that drew more media attention than any of the others. And then when no more cases occurred, when a day and then two passed and the winter winds blew in for good and the sky lowered itself toward the earth, the reporters receded and the headlines changed and the police continued investigating a radius of fires that even from Spanish Lake, even from the far reaches of a Chicago hotel, was still small enough for the possibility of arson. They searched for weeks. They found nothing. St. Louis vanished from the national news, a slow wash away from a twenty-four-hour news cycle to hourly updates and then to a daily checking in. And then only brief mentions on the scroll that ticked constantly across the bottom of the screen and then nothing. Within a month, we disappeared from the eye of the national storm completely.

The only survivors: the families of our administrators and teachers.

As if their bodies had known the nearness of loved ones long enough beyond the brief spark of teenhood to come to terms, to make bargains. To comprehend the pierced ache of an ending they knew would eventually find us all in some distant bedroom or basement, a loss that even in youth we knew our cells could never accept.

Midvale County police investigated. Our city buried it. Lasting questions that eventually died away, that we knew had no answers beyond a series of reports done by fire chiefs and arson analysts, beyond a news swell that lingered and then died down and then forgot us entirely.

We remember when Matt's father and a full team of local and national investigators closed the case nearly a year to the day of the shooting. We remember their ruling in the face of a maddening
lack of evidence: that given the sequence and seemingly deliberate nature of the fires, our city had seen the work of a highly skilled arsonist. An arsonist we couldn't trace or uncover. One who had range, who knew the streets, who tracked each family like a hunter. An arsonist with resources and mobility: the capacity to follow families beyond the bounds of the city, to throw off an entire trail of police. Someone who knew Caleb's path. An accomplice. Someone in one of our classrooms or else a mole within the police force, though Matt's father never spoke of it. Matt's father never spoke of anything, a case he shut tight inside of himself, a box sealed and buried in the backyard of his heart. But Matt knew, he told us, that his father still searched. Matt knew by the light spilling down the hallway well past midnight some nights, leaking from beneath an office door that blocked his father's work from view, leaving only the sound of shuffled papers and intermittent silence.

We offer Matt's father credit, even still. That even if arson was nothing but an easy answer, an understanding we sometimes believe he intuited, he got one thing right. What Matt was never able to say to him, not even nights when he knew his father stayed awake searching: that he gave us one answer. A path of destruction.

A gasoline trail, one that took nothing more than a match.

The Monday morning past Homecoming weekend, after Josh Zimmerman's home burned, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
published wide across the front page a sketched diagram of the entire school and Caleb's path through it. A map of Lewis and Clark's first and second floors, its wings and classrooms. A map printed next to images of Josh Zimmerman's burned house and grained photographs of his mother and father and sister. A schematic linking the fires at last to Lewis and Clark.

A dotted line indicating the route Caleb Raynor took through school.

The newspaper told us what we already knew, what we'd pieced together three days before on that Friday afternoon before
the Homecoming dance, just after Matt told us what his father revealed to him: Caleb's path and its link to the fires, how the way he'd killed mirrored the rash of homes exactly. How police and an entire community could anticipate next moves, how an arsonist could be caught.

No matter a published diagram. We made one ourselves. We made one seventy-two hours before the
Post-Dispatch
ever printed anything. We re-created Caleb's path by what Matt said his father had told him, by a list of names and by the way the homes had already burned. We pieced it together through our own archives, through the news clippings and the Web articles Nick had bookmarked. Through the profiles Matt wrote, through the eyewitness accounts of what Christina saw at Benji's house and on Jacob's street. We stitched it together from Zola's photographs, the ones she'd taken of Alisha Trenway's house after dark and finally showed to us. From what we knew of our peers, some better than others, some to whom we'd never spoken. From where we'd seen them in the hallways during passing time between classes. We placed everything together in Nick's kitchen, his father still at work, his brother in the other room finishing his spelling homework on the carpet. We put together an archive on the kitchen table and made our own map, so far from a yearbook, less than two hours before the Homecoming dance.

We thought of what we assembled hours later as we held one another beneath the gym's lights. Taffeta dresses. Suit and tie. We knew Caleb Raynor entered the east doors of Lewis and Clark High School on the morning of October 8, a Wednesday.

A sky without clouds. 9:04
A.M.

Boutonnieres, baby's breath corsages already wilting.

We knew he'd sat in his car through first period watching the school. Hands agitated against the steering wheel. Red Bull. Three cups of coffee. Adrenaline. The same rattling of every weapon against the railings of a high school. We knew he'd waited in his car
through the entirety of first period before crossing the parking lot at the start of second period. Black sweatshirt, hood raised. Pouch hiding extra rounds of bullets. Weapons slung across his back and hidden in his back pocket, three two-by-fours bent beneath his arm. Thin wooden beams he slid through the exit doors of the north and south and west entrances, circling the perimeter of the school before pushing through the east doors. We knew he carried a sawed-off shotgun and a handgun and sixteen rounds of ammunition into Principal Jeffries's office, where he pushed open the glass door and she stood and tried to block him from coming any farther into the school and he shot her and her administrative assistant, Deborah Smalls, before making his way back to the first-floor art studio, where he shot Mr. Nolan. Sugar-free gum. A radio still ringing KSHE 95's classic rock. Half-finished drawings. A still-life display of two apples and a vase set up for third period. We knew he moved from the art room up the central stairs.

Balloon arches. A hired DJ. A transformed gymnasium, Timber Creek not even ours a week. Matt stood with Tyler to the side of the dance floor, his collared shirt sticking to his neck in the gym's heat. Couples dancing all around them. Tyler beside him, his hand inches away but just beyond touching.