Nineteen Minutes Read online

  The producer from The Oprah Winfrey Show handed back the stack of photographs that Yvette had given her. She hadn't known, before today, that there were levels of tragedy, that even if the Oprah show called you to ask you to tell your sad story, they would want to make sure it was sad enough before they let you speak on camera. Yvette hadn't planned to show her pain on television--in fact, her husband was so dead set against it he refused to be here when the producer came to call--but she was determined. She had been listening to the news. And now, she had something to say.

  "Kaitlyn had a beautiful smile," the producer said gently.

  "She does," Yvette replied, then shook her head. "Did."

  "Did she know Peter Houghton?"

  "No. They weren't in the same grade; they wouldn't have had classes together. Kaitlyn's were in the learning center." She pushed her thumb into the edge of the silver portrait frame until it hurt. "All of these people who are going around saying that Peter Houghton had no friends--that Peter Houghton was teased . . . that's not true," she said. "My daughter had no friends. My daughter was teased every single day. My daughter was the one who felt like she was on the fringe, because she was. Peter Houghton wasn't a misfit, like everyone wants to make him out to be. Peter Houghton was just evil."

  Yvette looked down at the glass covering Kaitlyn's portrait. "The grief counselor from the police department told me Kaitlyn died first," she said. "She wanted me to know that Kaitie didn't know what was going on--that she didn't suffer."

  "That must have been some consolation," the producer offered.

  "It was. Until we all started talking to each other and realized that the grief counselor had told the same thing to every one of us with a dead child." Yvette glanced up, tears in her eyes. "The thing is, they couldn't all have been first."

  In the days after the shooting, the families of the victims were showered with donations: money, casseroles, babysitting services, sympathy. Kaitlyn Harvey's father woke up one morning after a light, last springtime snow to find that his driveway had already been shoveled by a Samaritan. Courtney Ignatio's family became the beneficiaries of their local church, whose members signed up to provide food or cleaning services on a different day of the week, a rotating schedule that would take them through June. John Eberhard's mother was presented with a handicapped-accessible van, courtesy of Sterling Ford, to help her son adapt to life as a paraplegic. Everyone wounded at Sterling High received a letter from the president of the United States, crisp White House stationery commending them on their bravery.

  The media--at first a wave as unwelcome as a tsunami--became something ordinary on the streets of Sterling. After days of watching their high-heeled black boots sink into the soft mud of a New England March, they visited the local Farm-Way and bought Merrell clogs and muck boots. They stopped asking the front desk at the Sterling Inn why their cell phones didn't work and instead congregated in the parking lot of the Mobil station, the point of highest elevation in town, where they could get a minimal signal. They hovered in front of the police station and the courthouse and the local coffee shop, waiting for any crumb of information they could call their own.

  Every day in Sterling, there was a different funeral.

  *

  Matthew Royston's memorial service was held in a church that wasn't large enough to hold the grief of its mourners. Classmates and parents and family friends packed into the pews, stood along the walls, spilled out the doors. A contingent of kids from Sterling High had come dressed in green T-shirts with the number 19 on the front--the same one that had graced Matt's hockey jersey.

  Josie and her mother were sitting somewhere in the back, but that didn't keep Josie from feeling that everyone was staring at her. She wasn't sure if that was because they all knew she was Matt's girlfriend or because they could see right through her.

  "Blessed are those who mourn," the pastor read, "for they will be comforted."

  Josie shivered. Was she mourning? Did mourning feel like a hole in the middle of you that got wider and wider every time you tried to plug it up? Or was she incapable of mourning, because that meant remembering, which she couldn't do?

  Her mother leaned closer. "We can leave. You just say the word."

  It was hard enough not having a clue who she was, but here in the Afterward, she couldn't seem to recognize anyone else, either. People who had ignored her for her whole life suddenly knew her by name. Everyone's eyes got soft at the edges when they looked at her. And her mother was the most foreign of all--like one of those corporate addicts who has a near-death experience and becomes a tree-hugger. Josie had expected to have to fight her mother in order to attend Matt's funeral, but to Josie's surprise, her mother had suggested it. The stupid shrink Josie had to see now--probably for the rest of her life--kept talking about closure. Closure, apparently, meant that she was supposed to realize that losing normal was something you got over, like losing a soccer game or a favorite T-shirt. Closure also meant that her mother had morphed into a crazy, overcompensating emotive machine, one who kept asking her if she needed anything (how many cups of herbal tea could a person drink without liquefying?) and trying to act like an ordinary mother, or at least what she imagined an ordinary mother to be. If you really want me to feel better, Josie felt like saying, go back to work. Then they could pretend it was business as usual, and after all, her mother was the one who'd taught Josie how to pretend in the first place.

  In the front of the church was a coffin. Josie knew it wasn't open; rumors had flown about that. It was hard to imagine that Matt was inside that lacquered black box. That he wasn't breathing; that his blood had been drained out and his veins were pumped full of chemicals instead.

  "Friends, as we gather here to remember Matthew Carlton Royston, we are beneath the protective shelter of God's healing love," the pastor said. "We are free to pour out our grief, release our anger, face our emptiness, and know that God cares."

  Last year, in ancient world history, they had learned about how the Egyptians prepared their dead. Matt--who studied only when Josie forced him to do it--had been truly fascinated. The way the brain was sucked out through the nose. The possessions that went into a tomb with a pharaoh. The pets that were buried beside him. Josie had been reading the chapter in the textbook out loud, her head cradled on Matt's lap. He'd stopped her by putting his hand on her forehead. "When I go," he said, "I'm going to take you with me."

  The pastor looked out over the congregation. "The death of a loved one can shake us to our very foundations. When the person is so young and so full of potential and skill, the feelings of grief and loss can be even more overwhelming. At times such as this we turn to our friends and family for support, for a shoulder to cry on and for someone to walk that road of pain and anguish with us. We cannot have Matt back, but we can rest easy knowing that he's found the peace in death he was denied here on earth."

  Matt didn't go to church. His parents did, and they tried to make him go, but Josie knew he hated it. He thought it was a waste of a Sunday, and that if God was at all worthy of hanging around with, he'd probably be out riding around with the top down on his Jeep or playing pickup pond hockey instead of sitting in a stuffy building doing responsive reading.

  The pastor moved aside, and Matt's father stood up. Josie knew him, of course--he cracked the worst jokes, silly puns that were never funny. He'd played hockey at UVM until he blew out his knee, and he'd had high hopes for Matt. But overnight, he'd turned hunch-shouldered and sullen, like a husk that used to contain the whole of him. He stood up and talked about the first time he'd taken Matt out to skate, how he'd started out pulling him along on the end of a hockey stick and realized, not much later, that Matt wasn't holding on. In the front row, Matt's mother began crying. Loud, noisy sobs--the kind that splattered against the walls of the church like paint.

  Before Josie realized what she was doing, she'd gotten to her feet. "Josie!" her mother whispered, fierce, beside her--in that instant a flicker of the mother she was accusto