
Moments before the shooting started, Norah shifted in the worn seat pad of the universal machine, a seat set for a much larger person and one she didn’t know how to adjust. She couldn’t reach the floor, but it didn’t matter. She was at the back of the weight room, mostly hidden from Coach Mack. From the large mirror on the wall, she could see Coach heave circus dumbbells above his head. The boys on the wrestling team slapped and jabbed at each other, laughing about how much they could bench press, taking turns flexing in the mirror opposite from hers.
Norah took as much time as possible between sets so she wouldn’t break a sweat before the end of class. She kept her arms crossed to cover the stitches above her left wrist, where there had been, until that summer, a cherished birthmark that was almost heart-shaped until it started to change. The scar and its suspicious location on her wrist made her self-conscious, and she wanted nothing more than to blend in during weight training.
Early in the summer, she had noticed a shift in the small patterns that colored the quarter-size patch of skin, some vascular changes that turned out to be melanoma. They caught it early, but it was enough of a scare to convince her that life, at least her life, wasn't guided or influenced by any particularly benevolent force. It happened amid her parents' divorce, and she was still shaken from the bitter arguments over copays and insurance that reduced Norah's birthmark to some negotiating chip in a battle of broken egos.
So, she came to believe that grace wasn't in her DNA. This nihilistic truth about her life didn't bother her, but the scar did. As did the oversized equipment that kept her feet reaching for the ground.
The weight room, usually called the dungeon, was in the school basement, surrounded by a thick concrete foundation that effectively trapped all the odors of over-exerted, over-hormonal teenagers. It also kept out the sound of the shots fired outside the school cafeteria. So, Norah, unaware of the events unfolding above her, leaned uncomfortably against the weight cables and waited for class to end so she could quickly change back to a long-sleeve shirt.
When the fire alarm went off and the code silver was called over the intercom, it didn't phase her as much as the other girls—who were mostly freshmen—they always seemed startled anyway—or even the guys on the wrestling team who quickly jumped up from the benches.
They began grabbing water bottles and gathering their gym bags as alarms squealed. The announcement on the speaker was so brief and hard to hear over the alarms that they all looked back and forth at each other. Was this a fire drill or a shooting drill? It certainly couldn’t be both, so for a few minutes, it seemed like neither.
Coach Mack told the class to stay in the room, and he leapt up the stairs. The wrestling team gathered at the top of the staircase. Norah grabbed her bag and moved to the wall with the freshmen. She heard the wrestlers argue about whether to follow Coach or check out an escape route through the south hall. As the minutes stretched on, some of the kids began to breathe heavily and shake. Some pulled their phones out and texted friends and family.
A few minutes passed before the fire alarm ceased, replaced by the sounds of police sirens. Everyone took a hard look at everyone else, but nobody spoke. Finally, Coach reappeared, ghost-white and breathless.
“There’s a shooter,” he said, “It’s still active.”
There were gasps and stunned faces. Norah, originally startled, settled down quickly, as if whatever waited for her above that gym was simply the next step in her own private senior year tragedy.
“The police are here. Get your asses up now,” Coach said.
Officers clad in SWAT vests and helmets spit commands at Norah, the wrestling team, and the poor freshmen.
“Hands where we can see them,” they shouted.
Even after she hustled past the first two bodies in the south hallway, Norah didn't panic or scream. She felt a bit numb. The two obviously lifeless girls were both curled up on the floor under open lockers. It still seemed like a drill, like a routine. The worry of an active shooting was over, and Norah welcomed the numbing, hiding out in blind submission to the police. What was required of her was to march out with her hands up, to follow the wrestling team down a hallway filled with a blue haze and a metallic smell, to hold up her ugly, scarred wrist to the world.
Then, she saw Andy Lindy, his freckled white face frozen in horror, his mouth open with blood still dripping out of it and pooling on the floor. And she walked by another girl she recognized, the Jen that sat next to her in Biology. Norah shivered and became nauseous, and she decided not to look at any of the other bodies directly. But she couldn’t get them out of her periphery, and there were a number of them.
A police officer rounded the corner and halted their egress.
“We’re holding. We’re holding. Until we’re secure,” he shouted.
As she crouched down and took a knee by the cafeteria, she heard a boy behind her in line say, “They just slipped, they’ll be okay,” and she wondered immediately if shock had overtaken him, or if he was making a terrible joke. Either way, she chuckled. She couldn’t help herself. She covered her mouth and ducked her head to make it look like she was crying instead of giggling.
Then, they moved outside, where more policemen shouted loud commands. Another body rested on the grass fields. The boy behind her in line said, "He could have just fallen. They could have all just slipped and fallen on their own."
SWAT waved the students across Lincoln Street, which looked like a parking lot full of dozens of police and fire trucks. The barricade stretched all the way down to Dry Creek, all flashing lights, the street swelling with newly arrived emergency vehicles.
As she joined a crowd in the church parking lot on the other side of the police barricade, where kids were wailing and sharing cell phones to call their parents, she turned and looked at the boy behind her.
Something made her jump back a split second, some automatic reflex, even before she became aware of what she saw. He was wearing a black hoodie. Underneath the hood, she could see drops of sweat on his face. Everyone was probably sweating. But she didn't recognize him, though that itself was unremarkable, as her circle of friends was small. She knew, though, every instinct she had screamed to her that he wasn't a student.
He was a man, a young man with wild dark eyes and a tattoo of a cross on his cheek, a man who appeared too old to pass as a high schooler. And, by the time this all registered to her, the man in the hoodie slipped out of her view.
For a long time after the shooting, she didn’t share her memories of that day with anyone. She didn’t join the support groups or see the counselors who took over the cafeteria. She only wanted to graduate as quickly as possible and disappear into the anonymity of lecture halls and dorm cafeterias.
But, after she graduated and left for college, she began to dream of it. In some dreams, she was alone in the hallway, with no SWAT team, no panic-stricken students. Just Norah and the quiet bodies in the hallway, and she would surrender to a force, a powerful whirlpool of blue gun smoke and blood, and she’d wake up, heart racing, just before being pulled through the door by the cafeteria.
Then, her dreams of the shooter began. She'd turn around in the fields outside the school and put her hands on his neck, and he would grip her neck too. They would choke each other. They would butt against each other, uninterrupted among the police cruisers and chaos. She would look into his dark eyes, waiting for a flicker of contrition, a signal to let go. And he'd keep his eyes locked on hers, searching for the same signs of a soul, his grip never relenting. She’d wake up thinking it was somehow her fault that he was never caught, somehow even to blame for the shooting itself.
Her college was along the foothills, and in her second year, she rented a studio apartment a few miles north of campus on a small but lively creek. Through her bedroom window, she studied the oaks along the rocky banks, the chipmunks scurrying down to the stream. She found peace in those natural aesthetics surrounding her, and the more beauty around her, the calmer she became. She bought fabrics, learned to sew, and made curtains and throw pill covers, then shawls and wraps. Her apartment became a vibrant assortment of tones and patterns and textures. Duvets and pillows didn’t have to match or make sense to delight her. A fabric only needed to be beautiful on its own terms. And behind a bold fabric, Norah could disappear.
She didn’t date much until her third year when she met a boy on the track team named Mike, who fell hard for her and wanted to know everything about Norah. He was tall, towering over her, and he didn’t have an ounce of fat despite eating endless pints of ice cream. Mike smiled like the world was waiting for him to arrive. She felt an unfamiliar source of pleasure by running her fingers across his abs and didn't mind that his breath was sour from a chronically dry mouth, or that the smell of his sweat still lingered on her pillowcase until she’d do the wash.
After track practice, he’d bring a bottle of cheap wine that he pretended was expensive, and they’d carefully reveal each story of their past. She opened up about her cancer one night, which drew more adoration than sympathy.
“What I love about you is that you’re a fighter,” he said. There was very little about Norah that didn’t feed Mike’s obsession with her.
On their first date to a real restaurant off-campus, Mike asked about her high school. Norah swallowed her noodles, and then slowly said the name, nodding.
“Were you there…during the shooting?” he asked.
Mostly, she was truthful and forthcoming. She revealed every detail as if she needed to hear an accurate history of the shooting herself, but she lied twice. She told Mike that therapy had helped get her over the trauma (she never went to therapy). And she never mentioned that she had seen the shooter.
“They never caught the guy, right?” Mike asked. “Unbelievable. How could that happen with all the cell phone cameras? And the security cameras. The body cameras too. Do you think someday they’ll catch him? They’ll eventually, with modern forensics and DNA.”
With everything else, she was honest, and each revelation to her new boyfriend, a Catholic most of the time, felt like a sort of confession. Her chest tightened, and her spirits lifted, as she admitted to Mike that she didn’t believe in any benevolent force in the universe.
“Virtue is an invention, like language or property ownership,” she said. “The universe doesn’t care.”
“Come to Sunday Mass with me," Mike suggested. Norah laughed. But he would keep asking. And, she eventually capitulated, sauntered through campus on a fall Sunday, passed through the grand archways of the old Gregorian chapel along the creek, hand in hand with her student-athlete who looked on point in an Oxford and tie. She went with an open mind—not of converting to Mike’s religion—but a willingness to enjoy the respite of Mass, the aesthetics of it. Perhaps if she and Mike were to have a future, she could benefit from the hour of peace and music and silent judgment of other women’s Sunday outfits.
She smiled at cheerful parishioners gathered in the perfume-filled foyer, and she giddily clung to Mike’s arm as he introduced her to the ushers. But as they took their seats in the back pews, she caught a glimpse of the crucifix behind the altar and immediately looked down, clutching her nose as if she needed to sneeze. She avoided looking at it. Every time the congregation made the sign of the cross, she shuttered. When she kneeled, she drew her thumb across the scar on her wrist, remembered her birthmark, and felt those first pains of her surgery. She pressed into the scar to draw her attention away from the looming cross.
“Are you okay?” Mike whispered during the first reading.
“Just a dry throat,” she said.
By the time the priest gave the sermon, her fear had numbed into exhaustion, and her breathing slowed. So, she looked back up at the crucifix, the brown, polished wood. She hesitantly studied the face of Jesus and thought about her freckled schoolmate Andy Lindy…how his mouth, too, had hung open in a frozen expression of despair.
“I don’t think I can do that again,” she said after Mass. Mike was surprised and then hurt, and the spell was broken. It seemed to Norah that, after Mike finally discovered something about her that deeply disappointed him, he began to note all of her imperfections. He mentioned that she could use more cardio. He suggested she consume less sugar, without a hint of irony despite the empty pints of ice cream in his garbage can.
When she forgot about a coffee date, he stood on her patio and said, “I’m not mad at you. I just want to understand what you were thinking.” He wouldn’t leave.
They broke up that weekend. Norah heard rumors that he lost his scholarship in the spring and had moved back home.
When she was single in her late twenties, working at a credit card call center, she had an affable supervisor named Tracy who built a dedicated hobby of happy hours with whiskeys on ice. Tracy had grown up in the foster system and, as she told Norah, had seen some shit.
Norah and Tracy stayed late at strip mall bars and sometimes sang karaoke to empty tables and drunks slumped on barstools. Norah’s scar came up during a marathon session of Seagram’s Seven. Tracy asked, “Do you miss your birthmark?”
Norah almost cried and decided Tracy was her best friend. Norah made a garish shawl for Tracy, with gold-embordered angel wings. From then on, Tracy refused to sing karaoke without it.
When Norah told Tracy the story of the shooting, revealing, and almost reveling in, every small detail of her deceased classmates in the hallway, Tracy didn’t blink.
Tracy said, “Oh, I’ve seen worse, honey. Ever had a gun pointed at you? By an adult who you trusted more than anyone in the entire world?”
Because her friend Tracy had, in fact, seen some shit, Norah felt safe enough to say, “I saw the shooter. I saw his face. He walked out of the school with me.”
“Oh, now that’s screwed up. That’s really screwed up. Oh, honey.”
“And I’ve never told anybody before,” Norah said, raising her whiskey tumbler and taking a swig.
Almost a year later, Tracy told Norah that their happy hours would need to stop for a while. There was a lump in Tracy’s left breast, and she was taking a leave of absence.
“Cancer is nothing compared to us, right?” Tracy said, during what would be their last round of whiskey together. “If you can beat it, why can’t I?”
But cancers are different, and Tracy’s was quick.
Norah’s quiet nihilism persisted until she found herself in her thirties and single, and for the first time unhappy to be invisible. She began talking to her coworkers more, and at a Super Bowl party, Norah shared nachos and napkins with a soft-spoken policeman. His name was Brian Carlson and he had big muscles across his shoulders and arms—enough mass to stretch out his jersey—and he wore a thick beard which matched his fatherly manner. He was too shy to ask for her number, so she asked for his.
They eloped after a year of dating, during a weekend in Las Vegas. Soon, they had a son, an adorable little chunky guy with perfect skin, no moles on any inch of his tiny body, hardly a freckle. And with just a weightless tuft of hair, it was clear he would have Norah’s curls, which she mentioned to anyone who missed mentioning it to her first.
Brian began complaining more, usually about living in the same city that he patrolled, or a feeling of being trapped, which Norah feared stemmed from their baby. It was clear to Norah that having a child weighed more on Brian than he anticipated. Brian convinced Norah to stay home past her maternity leave, and he argued with her about the safety of raising little Lucas in the city. Brian, chronically exhausted, became temperamental.
When Lucas woke in the middle of the night, Brian would toss the blankets, sit up, and curse, but would always wait for Norah to leave the room and rock Lucas back to sleep.
“I need to be up at four,” Brian would remind Norah when she slid back into bed.
On the phone, Norah’s father would calm her down.
“The first year is always the toughest. Everyone is exhausted, and no one is at their best.”
Of little surprise to Norah, her mother was less comforting.
“Maybe they aren’t red flags, but they don’t sound like green flags either.”
Though Norah had settled into their townhouse, Brian begged her to ride with a realtor down through the Black Forest area, to a small suburb south of the city, Pine Castle, where they looked at a house at the bottom of a hill. Norah could not hide her near-instant love of it. She fawned over the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the pine trees and a small pond. Brian liked the three-car garage and basement. Both agreed that being nestled against the hill out back afforded a sense of security.
In Pine Castle, with her now two-year-old sleeping through the night, she could walk outside and see the stars, and she could catch up on her sleep. Her nightmares disappeared, and she spent her days playing with Lucas on the floor in front of her cherished windows, dancing around his blocks and puzzles, washing and folding. The chores gave her a certain rhythm and purpose, and for the first time in her life, Norah felt blessed.
She even conceded that Lucas had given her some meaning, some belief that perhaps a benevolent force was finally showing up for her—there was nothing like becoming a parent to instill a sense of wonder in the world. Brian even began sleeping better and lost some weight, begrudgingly aided by a much loathed and equally loved CPAP machine.
She discovered a fabric store twenty minutes down the highway, and she began decorating their new home. She had a little more budget and more time, so she created heavy velour blackout drapes in Lucas’s room, and white chiffon shades to let all the light in through her beloved living room windows.
For their third anniversary, Brian arranged for a sitter, rented out the back room of the favorite Italian place in Pine Castle, and bought Norah a dress she didn’t care for, but it didn’t matter. She was happy to wear it for him.
The two of them sat at a small table with a burgundy and ivory scalloped tablecloth. Candles in brass candlesticks flickered between them, as they ate too much pasta and drank the perfect amount of expensive wine. They spent most of the time talking and laughing about Lucas, and neither of them minded that they couldn’t manage to talk about anything else.
After feeding Lucas some lunch and then cleaning most of Lucas’s lunch off the floor, she would take him to Pine Castle’s quaint shopping center, which comprised a few blocks of brick storefronts, boutique clothing stores, a couple of coffee shops, a toy store—all the little delightful retail windows that allowed her to ignore the biker bars and rough edges on the east side of the highway.
Norah would push Lucas’ stroller up Main Street and around by the library, where the view opened up across the Front Range. Sometimes, if Lucas wasn’t getting fussy, she’d stop by the toy store, and occasionally she could even manage to browse the narrow aisles of the bookstore if her little toddler had fallen asleep.
On this day, she cut through the church lot to the coffee shop. She wanted to pick up a coffee for her and Brian and didn’t want to break too much of a sweat ascending the hill. So, she skipped the toy store and as she passed by the Ace Hardware, she saw a shadow back out of the alley, whirling around in front of her.
She immediately swerved the stroller off the curb, and Lucas let out a panicked cry. Then, she twisted back without stopping, expecting a teenager screwing around, waiting for friends, but instead, she saw a figure in an army-green tattered jacket, an old face of a bald man—a wrinkled, reddish face with dark eyes and a cross tattooed on his cheek. He yelled curse words and indistinguishable syllables and waved his arms.
She picked up the stroller by the handles and rushed to the other side of the street. In her periphery, she saw the shadow still vibrating by the alley entrance, a backpack slung around his shoulder, shouting at nothing, throwing punches at the air.
She rushed to the lot across from the bookstore where her car was parked. It must have taken ten minutes, at least it seemed, to wrestle with the straps of the car seat, with Lucas crying the whole time and Norah’s hands shaking wildly. It took even longer for her to pack the stroller in her trunk, settle into her car seat, and mash the gas pedal down on Paseo Street.
After Norah called Brian and barely could talk, Brian left work early and paced in the kitchen in his uniform, his gun belt still on, which she didn’t like out around Lucas. She watched his belt as he rubbed the back of his head and tried to make sense of Norah’s story.
“All these years. Why didn’t you ever tell the police?” Brian said, upset by Norah’s tears.
“I was in high school. I was afraid. Then I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Are you sure it was him?”
Brian kept asking questions that Norah couldn’t answer, and he kept getting more frustrated that Norah didn’t have the answers, that he couldn’t help.
At Brian’s insistence, Norah gave three interviews at the Pine Castle police district, and even drove up for an interview with the Arapahoe County sheriff, the department that let the shooter slip through and disappear.
The security cameras had captured images of the man, a transient, loitering in the alley, but there was no sign of where he’d come from or disappeared to. She became exhausted with what she felt was a futile effort to catch him, with all the questions on why she had never come forward when she was a depressed teen.
“Please, make it stop,” she pleaded with Brian.
“You’re helping bring justice,” he said. “Think of the victims’ families.”
How could she think of the families when all she could picture were the victims themselves, and that long walk along the hallway to the back of the school.
“ What if it wasn’t him?” she asked, knowing that question made Brian angry, fearful of losing face.
“Then it is what it is.”
She didn’t want to care as much as everyone else whether it was the shooter she saw freaking out by the hardware store in downtown Pine Castle, some twenty miles from the high school he may have terrorized some fifteen years before.
She wasn’t sure herself, but it didn’t matter. Her nightmares returned. Brian suggested counseling, a way of passively blaming Norah for what had turned their home into a cold case investigation.
“I don’t know how to help you,” he’d say. “I don’t want to move. I’d like to just move on.”
Meanwhile, the fear festered. Usually, it was fear. Other times, it was a sort of thrill, as if finding the shooter was in fact that missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that defined her life, that gave her the meaning that she was looking for. But that was fantasy, and the reality was that going to town terrified her.
“I think we should move,” she said. “We can move back up to the city, or down south if you want.”
“They didn’t find him. He’s not hanging around Pine Castle,” Brian said, lecturing with half a case of beer in him.
Her marriage would not last another two months. It came to an end on a Sunday. After a grocery trip, Brian stopped the car outside the Ace Hardware store.
“Come with me,” he said.
“What? No, Brian…”
He opened her car door.
“You wouldn’t go to therapy. Just come with me. Please. Look, no one is around. It’s not going to kill you.”
“Brian, I’m not getting out of the car.”
She considered it for a moment, though. She looked up and down the block. She looked back at Lucas, sleeping in his car seat, and then she grasped her seat buckle and hunkered down in her seat.
“No choice, honey. Come on. Out of the car.”
“No, Brian. Lucas’s sleeping. And there are groceries in the back. Let’s go home.”
“Just step out of the car,” he said.
He didn’t look like her husband then. The cop took over, and Brian Carlson faded away somewhere. He leaned into the car and unclicked her seatbelt. She kept a grip on the belt and shook her head. He grabbed her wrist, and she could feel his fingers dig into her scar. It felt as tender as it used to be back in high school.
“Don’t,” she cried. She shouted a little louder, “Don’t!”
And suddenly Brian broke. Blinking and red, he looked down the block.
“Okay, okay, calm down,” he said.
They didn’t speak all the way home. Norah leaned against the car window and quietly cried, feeling her marriage had shattered beyond repair, but that not all the cracking had ended.
At home, away from the public eye, Brian exploded in anger. Norah stared out the windows, her trembling hands buried in her pockets, with Lucas curled up underneath her feet. She hid from her husband’s glance, hoping to wait out the storm. She heard him get closer, and she braced her shoulders, thinking she’d feel his hand on her.
Instead, she heard a sickening thump. Lucas cried out, and she spun around and looked down to see Lucas's face covered in blood, his body twisted on the floor. A pool of red crawled out from Lucas's head. Brian stood shocked above him.
“I kicked him. I didn’t mean to,” Brian said. Norah scooped up her baby and screamed.
“I didn’t mean it,” Brian said. “I think he must have gotten in the way.”
“Get away from us,” Norah said. She rushed towards the kitchen and grabbed a washcloth for Lucas’s nose.
“I didn’t do that on purpose. Give me a break.”
“Get away from us. Get out of the house, or I’ll call the police.”
Brian said, “I am the police.” He pulled a gun from under his shirt. He held it by the barrel, but he waved it at her. She took it as a threat, to remind her to behave. He waved it and put it on the kitchen counter, the barrel pointed away from Norah.
“I’m sorry. Now let me see Lucas’s nose. He’s okay, just let me see him.”
Brian muscled his way around Norah. He sat the bleeding toddler on the tile floor near the sink.
“Mamma,” Lucas was screaming. “My nose, mamma.”
She approached the counter and picked up Brian’s gun. Brian looked up at her, then looked down at the gun in her hand. Like a startled teenager, almost, his hands recoiled from Lucas, terror in both their eyes. But Norah’s panic disappeared.
Norah ejected the clip, turned the gun over, and slid the catch out. She put the magazine in her back pocket.
“I’m taking Lucas. We’re going to the ER.”
Brian would stand stupefied in the driveway while Norah pulled out. Norah would shout at Brian not to be home when she got back. And, after Lucas was stitched up, the house would, to Norah’s relief, be empty. The gun would be gone, and Brian’s CPAP would be gone, too.
Boxes would be packed, and the curtains would come down shortly thereafter, and new curtains put in their place. Her realtor would choose a tan cotton for the curtain, a neutral look for a quicker sale.
Some months after the sale, when she and Lucas were settling into a fifth-floor apartment overlooking a park in north Denver, she received a call from the Pine Castle police department.
The detective referred to her as Mrs. Carlson, and reflexively she started to pace.
“We brought him in on menacing,” the detective told her, “I’ll send you a picture if you’d like, but the description matches. The face tattoo and everything. We ran a background check.”
Norah looked at the scar on her wrist. As she listened, she drew her wrist to her lips and closed her eyes.
“It appears there’s no connection to your shooting. He’s not the guy. There’s no evidence of any connection.”
“No connection?” she asked, her eyes still closed. The words filtered through her skin, into her body, as quickly as a painkiller injected into the spine.
“No ma’am, no connection at all.”
When she hung up, she stared out the window, down to the park. She watched the people walking dogs and jogging. She grabbed the stroller and her coat, and she took Lucas out, for some fresh air, for some exercise.
Peter Galligan is a freelance writer from Denver, Colorado. His creative writing has been published in Grist Journal, Mud Season Review, From Whisper to Roars, and other literary journals. He also writes about investing and asset management research and is a regular contributor to the financial journal Practical Applications. He holds an interdisciplinary MA in writing and business administration, summa cum laude, from Western New Mexico University.
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