Off the Deep End (78)
All the boys carried out similar plots with similar plans—homemade pipe bombs and guns. I’d been shocked to discover that Isaac hadn’t been spending as much time with Jules as I’d thought. Isaac had used his visits with her to cover up what he was doing with Allen. There was security footage of the two of them at Walmart buying bullets, and it made me sick every time I watched it. The whole reason they’d staged Isaac’s kidnapping was to ensure that in two weeks, all the police and law enforcement resources would be directed toward patrolling backcountry roads and combing ditches. Nobody would be patrolling in town. Isaac’s shooting was the signal for the others to begin, and that day had ended with more tragedy than anyone ever could have imagined. Allen and the other two boys had taken their lives at the end of their rampages. Two by police and the other by his own hand.
Once again, Isaac stood as the sole survivor.
Did he feel guilty?
Mark said he did now that the doctors were weaning him off the antipsychotic medication and he was becoming more coherent, but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure about anything with Isaac anymore. I understood his reasoning and logic behind wanting to take his own life. As much as I didn’t want to, I did. It all made sense—the survivor guilt, feeling like it was supposed to be you, the hopelessness, the loss of yourself and your old life. All of it. I did. Right up until the point where he hurt other people. That said something about him. Something different. Something horrible. Stuff no mother ever wanted to believe about their son.
He’d ignited a huge media storm over the effects of bullying on school shootings, and all the media outlets had been trying to get us on board with their platforms. To speak out against bullying and ask schools to take a stronger stance, but we hadn’t done it, and we weren’t going to. Kids were mean to Isaac, and unfortunately, for whatever reason, he’d always had a target on his back. Except it didn’t matter how awful those kids treated him: none of them deserved to die. Lots of kids got bullied. Many of them way worse than his experience, and they didn’t go to school and hurt innocent people. Even if people were mean to you, they didn’t deserve to die.
I’d spent weeks throwing massive amounts of blame and responsibility on my shoulders for what Isaac did. Guilt was just one piece of my emotional chaos. Nancy Grace and all the other forensic psychologists weighing in on the case didn’t help. All of them pointed to the accident with Jules as being the tipping point for Isaac. That was the hardest part for me because when all was said and done, I’d set the ball in motion by not being able to pick him up after the basketball game. But recently, I’d started remembering strange incidents with Isaac that had pricked at the corners of my consciousness. There was one in particular that I still couldn’t shake.
It had been a completely regular day. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening. I had just gotten Katie together and sent her off to school with Mark since she had to be there early for choir tryouts. It was just Isaac and me alone in the kitchen. I walked by the table, where he sat eating his oatmeal, and noticed it looked a bit mushy and thick. He hated it that way.
I pointed at his bowl. “Do you want me to put more milk in that?”
He lifted his head and gave me a look of utter disdain and contempt. “No,” he said, turning his nose up at me like I smelled bad.
It had stopped me in my tracks. For the first time since the accident and all Isaac’s subsequent behavior changes, I had found myself questioning my role in it.
Was it possible Isaac would’ve turned into an angry, disgruntled teenager no matter what? Was that going to be his path all along? Could the accident have just been the thing to push him there quicker? The thing that tipped the scale in that direction? Put him over the edge?
Adolescence was a turbulent experience, and teenagers lost their minds during it on a regular basis. You never knew which ones were going to make it through safely and which ones were going to derail. How did we know that wasn’t going to be the case with Isaac all along? Maybe he would’ve turned into a different person whether or not he’d been in the car on that fateful night.
I glanced at him in the front seat next to Mark, where he sat lifeless, and my breath caught in my throat like it did every time because I still couldn’t reconcile the little boy whose hand I used to hold when we crossed the street with the one who’d committed such a horrible act. His body sagged in his seat like he barely had enough energy to hold himself up, and his gaze never wavered from the road. His expression was blank, like all the lights inside him had been turned off. It’d been three nights since we’d brought him home from jail, and despite how much I’d missed him, I’d counted every single minute until we could get him to Bridges, where he would be safe. Where we would all be safe. He couldn’t be trusted, which was why he couldn’t come home, but jail was no place for him either. He needed help.
The car slowed, and Mark announced, “We’re almost here,” as he took a right onto the long gravel road. He said it the same way he used to say it when we showed up at Disneyland or any other vacation spot, but this wasn’t any kind of amusement park. Not even close.
Since I hadn’t been able to visit Isaac while he was in jail, I’d channeled all my energy into getting him out of jail and into a residential facility where he could get the help he desperately needed. It’d been an almost impossible task. First, because of all the legalities and upcoming court cases that he was in the center of, and second, because nobody wanted to touch someone like him. Even mental health professionals, who were supposed to be nonjudgmental no matter what, didn’t want to treat him after what he’d done, and I couldn’t be mad at them for it. Detective Hawkins had pulled some strings to get him into Bridges.