For Alison. Andy Parker
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tell the doctor that they were sitting in the lovingly assembled nursery bedecked with stuffed animals, stencils of the ABCs on the walls, their infant nursing peacefully at their breast, when they suddenly had a mad thought: What if I took my tiny, fragile, defenseless child and threw it against the wall as hard as I could?
That is an intrusive thought, perhaps the worst one. But the psychologists assure the new mothers that they wouldn’t act on that impulse; it is simply human nature to imagine the worst things possible, the things that would utterly destroy us, and replay them in our minds like a looped filmstrip. The brain can be infinitely cruel.
For me, though, it never felt like an intrusive thought, and it never felt like confirmation bias. This was not standard-issue parental anxiety; it was disturbingly specific.
For one thing, Alison drove like a bat out of hell and it scared the living shit out of me. Barbara and I would white-knuckle our way through rides with Alison, instinctively pumping the imaginary passenger-side brake pedal as she streaked through curves.
I was afraid she would die in a car crash, but my imagination went far beyond that. I would imagine the scene of the crash, the twisted wreckage, the guttering flames on the asphalt from the spilled gasoline. I’d imagine having to identify her body. I’d imagine gruesome, unspeakable images of my child’s death, and I wouldn’t wish that on any other human being. To be clear, I wouldn’t wish death on anyone, but I wouldn’t even wish those mangled images my mind had conjured on another human being. For most of Alison’s life, my imagination was a taped-off crime scene.
A car crash was the reigning fear, just because it seemed so eminently possible, plausible even. But my imagination wasn’t limited to car crashes. I saw malevolent shadows at her periphery wherever she went.
I never imagined a shooting, though, not even in my wildest fears. Alison was in elementary school when the Columbine shooting occurred, in high school when the massacre at Virginia Tech took place, and then there had been Sandy Hook, Charleston, and all the others. So many others. For whatever reason, it had never even crossed my mind that Alison would die by someone’s hand. Even as I compulsively imagined fiery car wrecks, maybe a shooting was just too terrible to even consider.
•
My phone rang a little before 8 a.m. It was Greg Baldwin, WDBJ’s assistant news producer. I answered.
“Mr. Parker, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t even imagine . . .”
I don’t remember what else he said, or what I said, or even if I said anything at all. The last thing I remember is my vision narrowing to a point, blackness swallowing me up on all sides.
Barbara says that I gasped and crumpled to the floor, one hand stupidly clutching the handle on the oven door. I believe her, but I don’t recall it.
I do remember sitting on the floor, Barbara holding me and me holding her, because of course she knew without a word passing between us. I remember blackness, the absence of light, the absence of everything. Whatever essence I had, whatever life force or soul, drained out of my body, from the crown of my head down the chest, gut, and limbs, down into some yawning abyss beneath me. Gone, never to be refilled.
I couldn’t breathe. I looked at Barbara, my throat closed up, both our eyes pinched, mouths drawn as if to cry. But we couldn’t, not then. That would come later. But in that moment, the shock was too great, like some horror so frightening that you can’t even scream, you can only stand there mutely, waiting for the end.
I pinched myself at some point, because maybe this was a dream. Yes, there was something to latch onto, a dream, the worst I’d ever had to be sure, but a dream nonetheless, and now it was time to wake up, and when I finally did wake up I would tell everyone about it, what a hideous nightmare, the worst I’d ever had or ever hope to have. Maybe in time I would laugh about it, Alison would laugh about it too; we would laugh about it together because it was just so crazy and she would suggest that I probably shouldn’t eat leftover pizza right before bed and I would say, You’ve got that right, lesson learned, Scooter; I’m just glad that wasn’t real, thank Christ that wasn’t real.
I would call Alison, that’s what I would do, I would call her up and she would answer, just like always, because she’s so good about that, and she’d tell us a wild story about that car backfiring or that transformer blowing up, and Barbara and I would hop in the car to drive to Roanoke, and there she would be, just like always, and Barbara and I would hug her. We would squeeze her so tight that she would joke that she was the one who couldn’t breathe, and we would press our faces into her waves of shoulder-length blonde hair, and we’d smell that hairspray she loved that smelled like roses, and we would never let her go, never, and she would understand completely, she was always understanding, and everything would be normal again because nothing had happened at all, really, it was all just a bad dream.
I sucked in a ragged breath and held my wife, and she held me, and we sat there on the kitchen floor.
It didn’t feel real then. It wouldn’t feel real for days, weeks, months. Some mornings, when I first wake up and my brain is still winding itself up to full consciousness, it still doesn’t feel real.
My daughter, my Scooter, was dead. My treasure was stolen. My world was obliterated; its carefully assembled parts, pieced together across a lifetime, picked up by the hand of a cruel, capricious God and dashed to the floor.
I was numb then, but that numbness would fade throughout the day, replaced by new emotions that made me yearn for the numbness to return.
I don’t know how long Barbara and I held each other in the kitchen. I don’t know how long we stared out at that hummingbird feeder. I don’t know who spoke first or what was said. There’s a lot about that day—The Day, as I’ve taken to calling it—that I’ll probably never know. Some of it I don’t want to know. Eventually, though, we decided we needed to tell our families. Part of me didn’t want to. Part of me, I think, felt that it if we kept it to ourselves, it would be like it had never happened.
I knew we didn’t have a choice, though. I’d gotten the call and I was fairly certain I wasn’t asleep; I’d pinched myself, just to be sure. Barbara knew about it now, too, and I didn’t think she was asleep. What were the odds that we’d both had the same dream at the same time and emerged into that state somewhere between dreaming and waking where you’re not sure which is which and you don’t know how much of what you remember has actually happened and how much of it was all in your head? I don’t know if that even makes sense. Nothing made sense. It couldn’t be real.
If it was real, we knew the shooting would soon hit the news and we wanted our families to hear it from us first. While Barbara called her sister in Sherman, an hour north of Dallas, I called Drew. As I mentioned, Drew has Asperger’s, and he doesn’t register emotion in the same way that you or I would. That call elicited as much shock and sorrow as I’ve ever heard from him.
I called my sister Jane Ann back in Austin, and I asked her to tell our mother, still living on her own at ninety-one. It felt strange to speak the words, to say something I knew was true—that Alison was dead—but still couldn’t bring myself to believe. It was like I had found myself in the Twilight Zone, some parallel dimension where the sun didn’t shine and water flowed uphill. I hadn’t moved more than three feet from the kitchen island all morning.
As we were spreading the news, I got a call from someone telling me to meet at a staging area near the marina at 10:00 a.m. The words barely registered, but I made a mental note. Then the phone rang again. I didn’t know the number, but I picked it up anyway. I would have answered it on any other day without a second thought. Maybe, I thought, if I answered like I usually would, things would finally return to normal.
“Hey, man,” a voice said. It was Trey Weir, a client of mine from a bank in Charlotte. Nothing felt different yet, I thought, but give it time. “I need you to find me a new portfolio manager.”
I said nothing. Still waiting. For what, I honestly didn’t know.
“Andy?”
“Trey,” I said, “I don’t