Nonfiction by Kirk Fjelstad
Michigan state police cars are beautiful shade of deep, azure blue, blocked every entrance to Meijer except the one on Tienken Road. We watched through the window glass but couldn’t hear the sirens. Mom said to take pictures.
The first 911 calls came in around 10 a.m. The shooter surrendered six minutes after that. SWAT went door-to-door instructing students and faculty to leave the building as quickly as possible and take Tienken down to Meijer. They were to leave their cars in the parking lot.
Dad made it out before Lou and waited for her on the edge of the parking lot. Close to 1800 students shuffled past him. He didn’t recognize Lou until she was five feet in front of him, shouting his name.
Police on Tienken were checking every car as they entered the parking lot to pick up their kids. We found Lou waiting by the barricaded doors. She said Dad would be a while.
We drove home and turned on the news.
Pat, a lanky kid in my grade, was braindead at the McLaren on M24. Three other students had died at the scene.
Mom sobbed quietly in a wicker chair.
Dad stayed with his students for another three hours before we picked him up outside the garden center. He was the last person to leave.
Mom offered to drive but he insisted.
Dad tried to talk when we got home, but he tripped over his words and stood and sobbed and clung to my mom.
He was a D2 offensive lineman. In his prime, he squatted 675 pounds. Mom was less than half his size; she anchored him to the earth.
—
There was a vigil the night Pat died. People asked if I knew him. Sort of.
For the first time, I recited my now tired, overtold-but-entirely-true story of how Pat and I once got into a fight over whale penises. It was the only story I had.
“Honestly, man! They’re 20 feet long,” he’d said. There was no way.
—
“Where were you?” was a common question in the following weeks. I had trouble admitting I was in bed.
“I bet you wish you were there.”
I said, “Yes,” because I supposed that was the correct answer.
“Well, we’re all in our own personal hell.”
I felt bad—not because of my own personal hell—but because I felt nothing at all, and I could not, for the life of me, remember who the woman talking to me was.
Looking back, I had her for pre-calc, and sleeping in that morning is the greatest regret of my life.
—
For a while, remembering was like watching muted aerial news footage:; grainy and withdrawn. Someone, somewhere in my head—maybe God, I don’t know—knew I couldn’t handle it.
Two years later, in a parking lot in Kensett, Arkansas, someone turned the sound on. The levee broke. I cried like a baby.
When the noise came on for a while it was all I could hear. Now, it drowns out everything I try to write. That’s most of the reason I’m writing this; it’s an obligation, really.
Before the sound came on I’d misconstrued that silence as forgiveness.
I heard Louise crying often in the following weeks. Once, when she was little, she cried because she was afraid of Heaven. This time, she couldn’t forgive.
We are Christian household. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. I think this was the first time any of us had an enemy to love, and it was hard. Lou didn’t understand how Mom could forgive so quickly. Mom couldn’t believe Lou had to think about it, but it’s easier when you didn’t hear the shots.
People think forgiveness is to say, “It’s alright. I forgive you. It’s okay.” That’s not it at all. It’s not okay and it never will be okay. To forgive is to drop your hate and move on through life. But that’s scary, because without hate, what’s left? Love? I don’t know—I’m not quite there yet. But I do know that often it’s harder to hate than to forgive.
I heard Pat’s dad’s testimony the other day. He’s a kind man with a kind voice trying so hard to say the most horrible, hateful things he can, because it was the correct response. It didn’t come easy to him.
—
Dad really was the last person to leave Meijer.
At the vigil the night Pat died, someone threw bang snaps into the crowd.
The largest blue whale phallus ever recorded measured 16 feet.
