Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (6 page)

Christina answered the front door before Zola could knock and led her past the living room where her brother, Simon, was on the couch reading a book and down the hallway to her bedroom, her small television glowing through the darkness, her bed unmade. Her father out running errands, Christina said, and Zola noticed their freshman and sophomore yearbooks open on her bedroom
carpet, books they'd assembled together, meetings that seemed like a separate lifetime.

Why do you have these out? Zola asked.

I don't really know. Just passing time.

We don't have to do anything yet. Don't even think about it.

I know. I wasn't looking for ideas.

Zola kneeled to the carpet, the sophomore yearbook open to a photograph of the women's swim team. Through the haze of the library and the dark stain of her jeans, Zola had forgotten other rooms in the high school, other gunshots. Other pinpoints of loss.

Elise, Zola whispered. Ran a hand across her classmate's face and Christina's teammate, so small in a group photograph beside the community pool.

Her mother was so sad, Christina said. At the vigil. She was so sad.

Zola didn't want to ask. Do you know where she was in the school?

I have no idea. I don't know where anyone was. I clipped the list of names from the paper. It's in my nightstand. I didn't know what else to do until you arrived.

Are you doing okay?

Same as everyone else. I'm doing fine.

Zola thought of the week's photo shoots that never happened: the Math Club meeting, the marching band practicing on the football field. She turned to the yearbook's section of celebrations and events, photographs of last year's Homecoming dance she'd taken. Students spilling across the dance floor. Strobe lights and crepe paper streaming down. A picture of Caroline Black smiling in a pale blue dress, one Zola had snapped just before Caroline helped crown the winners of Homecoming Court.

I can't even believe it, Zola said. Caroline Black's house. Her entire family.

On the small television upon Christina's nightstand, a reporter stood in front of the Blacks' home. Zola hadn't turned on her own
television that morning, hadn't seen the home's ruin. She couldn't pull her eyes away from the blackened dust and the broken foundation and the stream of firefighters behind the reporter, the legs of their suits darkened with ash. She remembered Caroline's white bedroom furniture, a set that had probably long since been replaced. A trundle bed pulled from beneath Caroline's bed when Zola slept over, two twin mattresses side by side. A koala teddy bear placed always on her pillow. A Sega Genesis console in the cool damp of the Blacks' basement, video games they played while drinking Juicy Juice boxes and eating Nilla wafers. Zola watched the coverage and tried to imagine what it was that Caroline's parents had last seen. If this was suicide. The horrible possibility that it was. The sad tragedy if it wasn't. What dark ceiling they watched from the insomnia of their beds as some outlet sparked, as a stove knob neglected in the ocean of their grief ignited a flame that jumped the counter, that climbed the stairs to their bedroom and up the mattress and across the sheets.

I wonder if Matt's dad is there, Christina said. I wonder if he knows anything beyond what they're telling us.

Have you talked to Matt? Zola asked.

I haven't talked to anyone. Have you?

Just my supervisor.

You're actually going to work?

She's giving me time, Zola said. I can go back when I feel like it.

Christina looked back at the television. The coverage terrible and even still, Zola felt a flame of irritation bubble up beneath her skin. She had so few frustrations with Christina but if one was her asshole boyfriend, the other was work. Christina didn't have a job, worked as a lifeguard only in summers, her father's work at Boeing and her mother's career at a small university in Edwardsville enough to pay for her college outright. She didn't need to save for the possibility of tuition, nor did Nick, whose father was a doctor, his mother a lawyer. Nick had summer jobs, same as Christina. Matt was the
only other one of them who'd had a worker's permit since fifteen, a single-income household like hers that made him start shifts as soon as he could at Midvale Cinemas. At fifteen, Zola chose the Local Beanery, a coffee shop within easy biking distance from home and school where she learned quickly how to make lattes and cappuccinos and flat whites, where she learned how to make money. Her father gone since she was three, a man she remembered only in the soft focus of bedtime stories, a disembodied masculine voice lulling her to sleep. Her mother's salary high in pharmaceutical management but challenged by the rising cost of college. Christina understood Zola's job only to the point of balking when it interfered with their weekend plans and of coming in sometimes for free hot chocolate when Zola worked after school, shifts full of bused dishes and slanting sun and the scent of burned coffee.

You're lucky, Christina said. I could use a distraction.

You can take care of Ryan. Zola's smile thin. Make sure he's okay.

Christina glanced at her bedside clock. I wonder if Matt and Nick are at home.

Zola hadn't thought to check in with either of them beyond knowing they'd made it out safe. They were alive. That was all. Everything she needed to know.

Call them, Zola said. They're home. Where else would they be?

WHEN CHRISTINA CALLED,
Nick lay in the soft down of his bed. He'd clipped the newspaper and heard his parents and brother return from church sometime late morning, but he'd left his bedroom door closed. Though he'd called Sarah and tried to coax her to venture out of her house, he'd barely moved beyond his own room. He hadn't seen blood. He hadn't looked on as his classmates and teachers expired. But he'd seen a face through the glass, the passing of an armed figure, a face that haunted him into stasis if he imagined where it went and who it shot after moving beyond his English class.

Nick didn't want to leave his bedroom. But he was happy to hear Christina's voice on the other end of the line. She asked first about Sarah. Only the particulars Nick had let her know about their relationship. Christina knew only that Sarah was shy, a year younger, that she sang soprano in the Lewis and Clark choir. That Nick was still a virgin, that he was afraid of getting Sarah pregnant, that her choral scholarships would be risked if they made mistakes. Not much but more than Nick knew of Christina's boyfriend, Ryan, someone who ran in other circles, who Christina seemed to only talk about with Zola. Nick said Sarah was fine and when Christina asked if he would come over, that Zola was already there, Nick felt the exhaustion of the entire week encasing his limbs. He didn't want to move. But he didn't want to stay in his bedroom and watch the news or be tempted to scroll through refreshed articles on his computer. He sat up. He said he'd pick up Matt on the way and pulled a pair of jeans from the floor, jeans he'd thrown off after the vigil that still smelled of smoke.

In the car, a 2000 Honda Civic hatchback he'd paid for across four summers of mowing lawns, Nick rolled down the driver's side window and let in the sunlight and moved along the grid of Midvale County's streets. The days were still sun-warmed and bright blue but the nights were cool, the humidity and sweltering heat evaporated. Summer seemed far gone now, a span of months spent sweating in backyards and visiting Sarah at the custard stand where she worked and lighting off M-90s toward a hazy sky, a stockpile of firecrackers he'd kept long after the Fourth of July had come and gone.

Nick let the October air dishevel his hair through the breeze of the open window. Fall banners swayed from flag holders fastened to the porches he passed. Homes that seemed boarded up, yards bereft of children or people walking to their own mailboxes, houses closed off to the police patrols and FBI vans that filled so many once-sleepy streets. Nick watched the wind litter maple leaves across the
panorama of his windshield. He'd once loved autumn in St. Louis. Born and raised in the outer stretches of the city, a landscape he'd known his entire life, he waited every August for the oppressive humidity to burn away to the clarity of September. He anticipated the turn beyond Labor Day, the pools finally closed and the summer thunderstorms gone for the promise of new teachers and new weather, an opportunity each year to begin again. He waited for the tangled foliage of poplars to strip away their green for crimson and orange, colors he watched beyond the windshield and wondered whether he'd ever see them the same way again.

He knew Matt would be home. He didn't think to call. He knew Matt rarely did anything but play video games and smoke pot in his basement bedroom when his parents weren't home, the window cracked for the smoke to escape. His mother probably home. Everyone home, shielded inside from the heavy scrutiny of reporters, hiding out in their living rooms or basements or backyards. He hadn't spoken to Matt but knew Tyler hadn't come to the vigil. He didn't know what had happened. He knew only that Tyler was safe. Nick pulled into Matt's driveway and saw his Ford Fiesta parked alone, his parents' Chevy Impala gone, an absence he knew meant his father had been called into work.

Matt's mother answered the door when he knocked. She set a hand on his shoulder and asked
how are you
and drew him into the house and shut the door. Nick tried to smile and she nodded toward the basement door, said
he's downstairs.
Nick made his way down the stairwell off the kitchen to the basement, where Matt was sitting in the alcove of his bedroom window and Nick knew right away by his face that he'd seen something terrible. He knew that somewhere in the halls Matt had witnessed what Nick had not: a scattering of blood, a gunning down, something lost to the walls of a high school. Nick said only what he could,
it's okay,
though he knew it was not.

My father's there, Matt said. Not at the house, but he's out there. For the fire.

Nick knew immediately in the tenderness of his voice what Matt had witnessed.

Caroline Black, Nick whispered. You saw her inside the school.

Matt nodded and Nick imagined Caroline's glasses and sheen of long dark hair, hair he once recognized by the back of her head from sitting behind her in their shared third-grade classroom wondering what it was like to brush something so long. He tried to imagine her bleeding, her glasses shattered, and found that he could not.

I'm fine, Matt said.

Are you?

Really. I'm fine.

How's Tyler? Nick asked.

I don't know. I haven't talked to him.

Nick moved from the doorway and sat beside Matt in the window.

We were both there, Matt finally said. The second-floor bathroom. That's where Tyler and I found her. He just took off. He didn't even stay to see if she was okay.

Nick put a hand on Matt's shoulder. I'm sure he didn't know what else to do.

Matt shrugged off his hand. I'm fine. I'm just so fucking angry. He left me there with her. So he wouldn't be caught with me.

Are you doing okay? Nick asked.

I said I was fine.

Christina wants us to come over. Zola's there, too.

Matt looked up at him, something tired in his face.

I don't want to talk about it, he said. Not yet.

Nick knew then that he meant the yearbook and not Caroline Black.

We don't have to talk about it, Nick said. He didn't know what else to say, what wouldn't be a lie: that he hadn't thought about the yearbook yet, which he had, during the hours he'd spent in his
room watching the patterns of paint on his ceiling. That he hadn't researched how memory fires as synapse, how trauma tunnels into the human brain. That he hadn't started clipping newsprint to configure somehow into a record. That he hadn't already wondered how they could possibly put a book together, anything of significance to archive a year already fractured apart.

I have no idea how we're going to put this together, Matt said.

None of us do, Nick said. Let's just forget it for now. We have time.

Do we?

Nick looked at Matt. Are you sure you're okay?

I haven't slept in three days. I'm sure I'm not alone.

What you saw, Nick said. I looked it up. It changes the structure of the brain.

Researching already?

Not really. Not anything we could use.

I keep seeing her, Matt said softly. Every time I close my eyes.

That's how memory works, Nick couldn't help saying. It latches on to anything that bears a resemblance to what you saw.

Matt said nothing and Nick wondered if he'd disclosed too much. If research was his comfort alone, a means of knowing in the face of so many unknowns.

You don't have to ask your dad what he saw today, Nick said.

Matt looked at him. You're a good friend, he said. His eyes shone in the window's weak light. Nick wondered what made him say it but only nodded and looked away.

I'll go, Matt said. But only if we don't talk about it. It's too soon to plan.

We don't have to go, Nick said. We can just stay here if you want.

No, I'm fine. Let's just go. Please. Let's go.

CHRISTINA HEARD MATT
and Nick walk in from her bedroom floor, where she lay sprawled with Zola, the front door unlocked, a habit
of past meetings after school. Simon asleep on the couch in the living room. Her father returned from errands, she knew, by his knock on her closed bedroom door and his voice asking if they needed anything, far calmer and quieter than his yelling at the living room television just days before. Christina's bedroom carpet littered with past yearbooks. Matt walked in and saw them open-faced and told her immediately that now wasn't the time. That there was nothing to plan. Not yet. That their lone task was to sit with the names. That he would stay only if Christina packed up the yearbooks and put them away.