‘We just ran. We saw people starting to run, so we just ran.’
Frantically reading about Sunday’s mass shooting on the Danforth, I was too engrossed, too sickened, to realize one of my daughters was standing behind me.
This is what happens when horror casts a shadow in your backyard: you lose your bearings, your sense of time and place. You get lost in a labyrinth of what-ifs.
How unnerving it is to see your neighbourhood in the news behind crime tape.
But before I turned around on Monday morning, before I could fold down my laptop screen and shield her from the real world, Charlotte had skimmed enough to know something terrible had unfolded in the middle of her little world of souvlaki restaurants and toy boutiques and ice cream parlours and rock stores.
“Someone was shooting people on the Danforth?” she asked, her face contorting with primal fear. “Someone killed people on the Danforth?”
Her twin sister, Ava, was now present for a sombre conversation no parent wants to have and every parent is having far too frequently this summer in a city besieged by inexplicable violence. How do I explain why a man might climb into a van and start mowing down pedestrians on Yonge St.? How do I field queries from my kids about serial killers or brazen executions in the Entertainment District or the unsolved murders of a billionaire couple who lived not far from where their grandparents live?
Earlier this summer, there was a knock on my front door. It was two detectives who asked if they could search my side yard. There had been reports of gunshots in the area near Pape and, following eyewitness leads, it seems the shooter may have tossed his weapon somewhere along the path my girls ride their scooters.
“Shouldn’t we move?” Ava asked me on Monday morning, in a tone so matter-of-fact it made me wince.
“Move?” I repeated, slowly and loudly, offering comfort by pretending her question was ridiculous. “No, no, no. Toronto is a very safe place to live! Don’t worry!”
They looked at me with as much skepticism as two 11year-olds can muster.
As they got ready for summer school, practicing ballet twirls and swapping plans for an upcoming field trip to a farmers’ market — “I’m going to buy honey sticks” — I couldn’t stop thinking about that girl, one year younger than my daughters, who was shot and killed on Sunday night while out with her loved ones on a street in which the threat of random crime used to be set at zero.
My heart breaks for that innocent child. My heart breaks for her anguished family.
And my heart breaks for what is now happening to this city, a disorienting array of deadly incidents that seem to be unfolding across the GTA in slowmo, freezing block after block with the same creeping sense of dread.
The Danforth was a place where the only smoke came from cast iron trays of extinguished Saganaki on patios filled with boisterous diners shouting, “Opa!” The Danforth was where the only presence of law enforcement came by way of the parking patrol. The Danforth is where the biggest intrusion on any given night was a panhandler outside the LCBO or a sweet guy selling roses to any tables of two occupied by apparent romantic couples.
From early morning coffee runs to long after the moon danced off the shoulders of half-soused revelers who had spilled out of bars, the Danforth felt cloistered, benign and immune to human savagery at its most depraved.
The Danforth is where a mass shooting could never happen.
But here we are. It has happened.
As I type this dispatch, the news choppers are rumbling in the skies above me and the nearby streets remain closed as detectives try to piece together Sunday night’s horrifying sequence of events that left two of our fellow citizens dead and sent 13 others to hospital, some with critical injuries. When that gunman opened fire so coldly and methodically, when chaos descended and 911 lit up with desperate calls, another stretch of this rambling town felt violated in a way that’s becoming so common it’s terrifying.
This was Toronto the Good, once again, reimagined as Toronto the Bad.
This was Toronto cast into a previously unknown role.
As an adult, it never hurts to keep perspective, even when the viewpoint bends toward the horrifying. But as a Torontonian — and as a parent — I’m increasingly struggling to see this city as anything but a metropolis at the edge of an abyss.
Where are these guns coming from? How do we make them go away again?
When I see my kids later today, I will repeat my mantra: Toronto is a very safe city. Do not worry. Everything will be fine. I will hug them and tell them comforting lies.
But the truth is, we should all be worried.
Something terrible is happening to our city.