Quicksilver(24)

Instead of taking the boy with him, he forced him to stand at the center of the slaughter and said, “This happened because of you, Litton. When you chose her over me, you killed them all. Now live with it, boy.” We know this because Corbett left a video—an angry, rambling statement so chilling that the news media reached a new level of depravity in the exploitation of what they insisted on referring to as his “manifesto,” which wasn’t a manifesto by any definition, but only an insane rant.

Litton called the police.

Because Corbett remained a fugitive and inspired fear, Child Welfare found it impossible to place Litton in any foster family longer than a few weeks. For months he was cycled from home to home, until he came to the orphanage, hidden under a new name.

He told me his story just that one time. By mutual unspoken agreement, we never returned to the subject. I remember how he sounded in the telling: his voice colored neither by fear nor by grief, neither by anger nor bitterness, but hushed and reverent, much like the subdued and chastened tone the sisters took when speaking of the mysteries of the Passion or the rosary.

I often puzzled over why he trusted only me of all the kids at the orphanage. Considering where my life has taken me since then, I wonder if he intuited that I was destined to deal violently with those violent souls who would bear away all our peace and hope.

Some nights he cried in his sleep. When awake, he never wept over his losses or about what he had seen. However, his dreams wrung tears from him, as well as pitiable sounds of fear and grief.

Before he became my roommate, I had a night-light, for I used to think that something sought me as I slept, but that it could harm me only in the dark. By that dim glow, I often moved a chair beside Litton’s bed when he suffered his worst dreams and watched over him. I found that if I spoke to him in the softest of whispers, I could reach him without waking him, and gentle him out of a nightmare into peaceful sleep.

Meanwhile, Corbett Ormond had shaved his head and grown a beard and gone off the grid, living under another name, dealing drugs. He made a new life for himself but couldn’t make a new man of himself. He didn’t use the drugs he sold, for the only drugs that got him high were anger and resentment. The police never learned how Corbett discovered where his son had been given refuge.

Mater Misericordi? stood at one end of the block, Bellini’s Italian Specialties at the other end. We children received modest allowances and were permitted to buy candy, cookies, or other treats at Bellini’s, as long as one of the sisters accompanied us.

On the day that it happened, Sister Margaret took four kids to Bellini’s. I am grateful I wasn’t one of them, but Litton was among the four. Later we assumed Corbett had been running surveillance of the orphanage, because he followed them into the store.

As the kids were at the checkout counter with small bags of their favorite cookies, Corbett approached and asked, “Who did the bitch, your mother, sleep with behind my back?” As twelve-year-old Litton turned toward his father, Corbett said, “You don’t look anything like me,” and shot the boy dead.

Corbett turned the gun on Sister Margaret, a freckled redhead as sweet as she was shy, young and devout and quiet, as helpless in those circumstances as a lame kitten in the path of a high-speed train. Michael Bellini, son of the owner, was behind the counter, where they kept a gun to defend against robbery. He was quicker with his first shot than Corbett was with his second; he put an end to the murderer before Sister Margaret could become yet another victim.

A profound spiritual darkness settled on Mater Misericordi?, and everyone within its walls was traumatized. Hearts and minds heal with time, which is a grace of the human condition. Mine healed more slowly than others, and in fact for the first time I, the happiest of children, slipped into depression. I could not understand why such evil could befall a gentle boy like Litton, why the world was shapen to allow it. I was despondent, beyond the present exercise of hope, sad and distressed.

Sister Theresa, who’d earned a doctorate in psychology and who counseled many children and adults through times of crisis, was not able to reach me with the tools of psychology or the tenets of her theology. Although unfailingly patient, she was often frustrated with me. Her beautiful mahogany skin, so in contrast with her white habit, mostly hid a flush of annoyance, but I still saw it.

After a few weeks, when I came to her office at the appointed time, I found that she had acquired an ant colony: a two-foot-tall, four-foot-long box with glass walls through which we could watch the tiny residents conduct their affairs. She also had a DVD documentary about ants as well as several books about them.

“We’re going to study ants for the next week, nothing but ants, hours and hours every day. You and me together, but also you alone.”

“Why?” I asked.

“That is for you to figure out, Quinn. You’re a smart boy, more learned than most eleven-year-old boys. I’m confident that you’ll have an aha moment sooner than later.”

“They’re just ants,” I said with a note of indifference.

“And to an ant, you’re just a foot.”

I frowned. “A foot?”

“That’s all they see of you, if they see even that when you step on them. But there’s more to you than a foot, isn’t there?”

We studied several varieties of the family Formicidae: the architecture and organization of their colonies, the classes into which they are divided, the tasks each class is given. The winged queen. The wingless female workers. The male drones that exist only to breed and die. Those that cultivate food sources. The warriors.