Because of the shootings in Lewiston
Practice ends and my daughter streaks along the lacquered floor picking up basketballs. She is wearing the #7 Jaylen Brown Celtics jersey she got for Christmas, and two wristfuls of elastic band bracelets she wove herself.
Her eyebrows rise and fall in story as I hear about tonight’s layups, the code word for their new play (Arizona) and how no one would pick up the ball in the corner because (someone-not-naming-names-butSuzy) sneezed on it and there were … leftovers.
Her hand finds mine as we are briefly blinded stepping from the biodome of the gym into the complete blackness outside. We tip-toe because it’s icy but run because we’re cold and snap the car doors closed behind us. Warm air rises from her body and fogs the windows.
Her basketball is so much better
“Ma,” she says, drawing circles with her finger on the steamy glass, “my basketball is so much better this year.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask, idly. “Why do you think?”
She answers immediately. “Because of the shootings in Lewiston.”
I look back toward the elementary school we just left, where SWAT tank tracks groove the freezing ground in spite of our efforts to blot them out.
Her fingers speed up, repeating the same circle, which grows an erratic ellipse. “Ever since then I’m always thinking of where I stand, especially in front of windows. And where a shooter could get me. So I think about angles and corners all the time.” One palm wipe, the circle is gone.
I look back at her, reach back my hand. She seems to not notice, she is staring past me to headlights on the road. “Like they’re like math problems in my head that don’t stop. Calculations.”
I remember in second grade, toothless, how she whispered her secret to me that she didn’t even need paper and pencil to calculate nine times nine.
We are on the main road now, passing the parking lot where I used to leave my rusty Subaru and unpack my little boys’ two-wheelers for a pedal along the Androscoggin River.
Where, a decade later and a week before the shootings, my son parked his own car and walked along the same shore as we took his senior photos. Where I drive by a half-dozen times a day and still see the killer Robert Card’s white Subaru in my mind, because it was found in that same parking spot.
“But the good thing is I guess, I’m better at basketball, cause I know anyone who might try to get me and I know the best way to get away.”
A pit of darkness
On the right now is a pit of darkness which is where the killer’s body was found, behind Lisbon High School, Home of the Greyhounds! Where my children play baseball, field hockey, soccer, and track on the fields adjacent to Maine Recycling. We are almost home.
I say ...
What do I say?
Do I say what I said in November, when she complained of how her heart wouldn’t stop beating, all day every day, pummeling her nine-year-old ribcage til her lungs picked up the same pattern and she tucked her head into my armpit, shaggy-breathed?
When she would awake from sleep with hands protecting her face, shrieking her little sister’s name in the night, dreaming of her locked outside with a killer on the loose?
What I cannot say to her is you are ok, that will never happen. That is one thing I cannot ever say again.
“Your beautiful body,” I say. “Your adrenal system was there to keep you safe and protect you from danger. It’s taken such good care of you. But we can show it now it’s ok to calm down some, that you’re safe.”
Is it? Is she? Am I telling a lie?
Tragedy marks her
Tragedies don’t happen on the extreme stages we assume: crime-laden Gothams or napping whistle-stops. They happen on Wednesdays in unexceptional places to people wearing their favorite t-shirts, nuzzling beers, wondering when they’ll get life figured out.
They write themselves on the landscape and change the way everything ages. The radioactive deterioration of innocence from a mass shooting is a slow bleed. It won’t kill us but we will never be able to move without being reminded of our wound.
Time will harden and give wisdom, and maybe an appreciation of the flimsiness of life, to my daughter. But the framework of her mostly ordinary childhood has timbers that have been wrenched askew, and the house she buildson them will forever be marked.
I cannot erase this mark, I can’t even cover it. I have to watch her carry it through her fourth-grade life, another bag to carry on top of her backpack, snow gear, and gym shoes.
We pull in the driveway. Her hand is moving rapid-fire in the dark. I hear the small motions rather than see them. She is translating into American Sign Language.
Her best friend, whose father was killed on Oct. 25, is deaf. My daughter already spoke ASL with her, but since his death has desperately doubled down on signing; I do not know if she can even stop now if she wanted. Every word from her mouth crosses her palm in translation.
At nine, she is calmly biding her time until she can graduate high school and become an interpreter. I know and she knows — though neither of us say it — this is a desperate act of love to return to her friend some words that were carved from her the night her father died. I know and she knows — though neither ofus say it — that it won’t.
She knows
The next day, my daughters and I sit in my mother’s kitchen as she drops hot spaghetti into clean bowls. Eve, my daughter, is talking about a play she auditioned for.
“What’s the name of the play, sweetheart?”
“Esperanza Rising.”
“Oh, Esperanza! That’s the Spanish word for —”
I know, she says. I look at her hand under the counter as it signs each letter.
h –o –p –e