Only Child(7)
I looked at all the benches and let my eyes do some searching left and right, like when you do a word-search puzzle and look for the first letter of a word, like when you look for the word PINEAPPLE, for example. You try to find all the Ps, and then when you find one, you look if there’s an I next to the P all around it, and that’s how you find the whole word. So my eyes went left and right like that to see if Andy wasn’t on one of the benches after all. Maybe we just didn’t see him earlier and then we could go get him and leave and go home. My eyes were searching, searching, back and forth, but Andy really wasn’t anywhere.
I started to feel tired, and I didn’t want to stand up anymore. After a long while, the big door opened, swish-squeak, and Daddy came in. His hair was wet and sticking to his forehead, and rain was dripping from his clothes. It took him a while to squeeze past all the people and get to us. When he did, he gave us wet hugs and Mommy started to cry again.
“It will be OK, babe,” Daddy said. “I’m sure they couldn’t fit all the kids in here. Let’s wait and see. They said they were getting ready to make an announcement when I walked in.” Right when he said that, the policeman Mommy talked to earlier walked in front of the altar table and said, “Hey, listen up, folks! Everyone, quiet down, please!” Then he had to shout, “Quiet down, please!” a few more times because of all the crying and calling and shouting, and no one was noticing he was talking.
Finally, everyone got quiet and he started to do a speech: “Parents, all children who were unharmed were brought to this church. If you have found your child, please leave the church quickly so we can restore some order in here and incoming parents will have an easier time finding their children. If you are unable to locate your child here in the church, please be advised that wounded children are being taken to West-Medical Hospital for treatment. I regret to inform you that there have been an unknown number of fatalities in this incident, and these will remain at the crime scene while the investigation is under way.”
When he said fatalities—I didn’t know what that meant—a loud sound went through the whole church, like all the people said “Ohhhh” at the same time. The policeman kept talking: “We don’t have a list of the wounded and fatalities yet, so if you cannot locate your child, please make your way over to West-Medical to check in with the staff there. They are currently in the process of compiling a list of patients who have been admitted. The shooter was killed in a confrontation with the Wake Gardens police force, and we believe he acted alone. There is no further threat to the Wake Gardens community. That is all for now. We are setting up a support hotline, and the information will be posted on the McKinley Elementary and Wake Gardens websites shortly.”
It stayed quiet for a second after he was done talking, and then it was like a noise explosion with everyone calling out and asking questions. I wasn’t sure what the policeman said, except that he said the shooter was killed, and I thought that was a good thing, so he couldn’t shoot other people anymore. But when I looked at Mommy and Daddy, it didn’t seem like a good thing, because their faces looked all wrinkled up, and Mommy was crying a lot. Daddy said, “All right, he must be at West-Medical then.”
I went to West-Medical before when I was four and I got allergic to peanuts. I don’t remember it, but Mommy said it was scary. I almost stopped breathing because my face and mouth and throat got swollen. At the hospital they had to give me medicine so I could breathe again. Now I can’t eat anything with peanuts ever again, and I have to sit at the no-nuts table for lunch.
Mommy also had to take Andy to West-Medical, last summer, because he was riding his bike with no helmet—that’s a big no-no—and he fell down on his head. His forehead was bleeding and he had to get stitches.
“Melissa, babe, we need to keep it together,” Daddy said to Mommy. “Take Zach and go find Andy at the hospital. Call me when you’re there. I’ll call my mom and yours to let them know, and I’ll stay here…in case…”
I waited to see in case what, but Mommy grabbed my hand tight and pulled me with her, and we walked out of the church. When we walked through the big door, there were people everywhere, on the sidewalk and on the street, and I saw vans that had big standing-up bowls on the roofs. Lights were flashing and blinking in my face.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mommy said, and we got out of there.
[ 5 ]
No-Rules Day
“WE’RE GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT, Zach, do you hear me? Everything will be OK. We’ll get to the hospital, and we will find Andy, and this whole nightmare will be over, OK, baby?”
Mommy kept saying the same things over and over again in the car, but I didn’t think she was talking to me, because when I said, “I really have to go to the bathroom when we get there, Mommy,” she didn’t say anything back. She was leaning forward and staring out the front window because it was still raining hard. The wipers were on the highest speed, the one where you get dizzy when you try to follow them with your eyes, and it can make you carsick, so you have to try to look out the front but try to ignore the wipers. Even with the wipers going at dizzy speed, it was hard to see anything. When we got to the road where the hospital is, there was traffic everywhere.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Mommy said.
Today was a bad-word day. Fuck, stupid, shit, Jesus. Jesus is not actually a bad word, it’s a name, but sometimes people use it as a bad word. There was loud honking. People had their windows down even though it was raining, and the inside of their car was probably getting wet. They were yelling at each other to get the hell out of the way.