We Need to Talk About Kevin

APRIL 5, 2001

Dear Franklin,

I know it’s bound to be a touchy subject for you. But I promise, if you hadn’t given him that crossbow for Christmas, it would have been the longbow or poison darts. For that matter, Kevin was sufficiently resourceful to have capitalized on the Second Amendment and would have laid hands on the more conventional arsenal of pistols and deer rifles that his more modern-minded colleagues prefer. Frankly, traditional School Shooting instruments would not only have improved his margin of error but would have heightened the likelihood that he could best the competition in fatalities—clearly one of his driving ambitions, since before those Columbine upstarts came along twelve days later, he topped the charts. And you can be sure that he considered this issue at great length. He said himself at fourteen, “Choice of weapons is half the fight.” So on the face of it, the archaic selection is peculiar. It handicapped him, or so it would seem.

He may have liked that. Maybe I passed on my own inclination to rise to a challenge, the very impulse that got me pregnant with the boy in the first place. And though he may have enjoyed sticking his mother, who fancied herself so “special,” with the insult of cliché—like it or not, little Ms. International Traveler would become one more assembly-line mother of a tacky American type, and he knew how much it pained me that my sassy VW Luna was now every fifth car in the Northeast—he still liked the idea of setting himself apart. Since after Columbine he grumbled in Claverack that “any idiot can fire a shotgun,” he must have recognized that being “the crossbow kid” would mark his little prank in the popular imagination. Indeed, by the spring of 1999 the field was crowded, and the once indelibly impressed names of Luke Woodham and Michael Carneal were already beginning to fade.

Moreover, he was certainly showing off. Maybe Jeff Reeves played a mean guitar riff, Soweto Washington could swish his free-throws, and Laura Woolford could get the whole football team to ogle her slim behind as it twitched down the hall, but Kevin Khatchadourian could put an arrow through an apple—or an ear—from fifty meters.

Nevertheless, I’m convinced that his leading motivation was ideological. Not that “I got plot” nonsense he fobbed off on Jack Marlin. Rather, I have in mind the “purity” he admired in the computer virus. Having registered the social compulsion to derive some broad, trenchant lesson from every asinine murder spree, he must have painstakingly parsed the prospective fallout from his own.

His father, at least, was forever dragging him off to some cluttered Native American museum or dreary Revolutionary War battlefield, so that anyone who tried to portray him as the neglected victim of the self-centered two-career marriage would have an uphill battle, and whatever he may have intuited, we were not divorced: no copy there. He wasn’t a member of a satanic cult; most of his friends didn’t go to church either, so godlessness was unlikely to emerge as a cautionary theme. He wasn’t picked on—he had his unsavory friends, and his contemporaries went out of their way to leave him be—so the poor-persecuted-misfit, we-must-do-something-to-stopbullying-in-schools number wouldn’t go very far. Unlike the mental incontinents he held in such contempt, who passed malignant notes in class and made extravagant promises to confidants, he’d kept his mouth shut; he hadn’t posted a homicidal web site or written essays about blowing up the school, and the most creative social commentator would be hard-pressed to deploy a satire about sports utility vehicles as one of those unmissable “warning signs” that are now meant to drive vigilant parents and teachers to call confidential hotlines. But best of all, if he accomplished his stunt entirely with a mere crossbow, his mother and all her mush-headed liberal friends wouldn’t be able to parade him before Congress as one more poster boy for gun control. In short, his choice of weapon was meant to ensure to the best of his ability that Thursday would mean absolutely nothing.

When I got up at the usual 6:30 A.M. on April 8, 1999, I wasn’t yet impelled to put that day of the week in italics. I picked out a blouse I rarely wore; you bent to me as I buttoned it in the mirror and said that I might not like to admit it, but I looked good in pink, and you kissed my temple. In those days your smallest kindness was writ large, and I blushed with pleasure. Once again I hoped you might be having second thoughts about separation, although I was reluctant to ask you outright and so risk spoiling the illusion. I made coffee, then roused Celia, helping her to clean and replace her prosthesis. She was still having trouble with discharge, and wiping the yellow crust off the glass and out of her eyelashes and tear duct could take a good ten minutes. Though it is amazing what you get used to, I still felt relieved once the glass eye was in, her watery blue gaze restored.

Aside from the fact that Kevin got up without having to be rousted three times, it began as a normal morning. As ever, I marveled at your appetite, recently revived; you may have been the last WASP in America who still regularly breakfasted on two eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. I could never manage more than coffee, but I loved the sizzle of smoked pork, the fragrance of browning bread, and the general atmosphere of relish for the day ahead that this ritual fostered. The sheer vigor with which you prepared this feast must have scrubbed your arteries of its consequences.

“Look at you!” I exclaimed when Kevin emerged. I was carefully frying Celia’s French toast completely dry, lest a little undercooked egg seem like slime. “What happened, were all your size-one clothes in the wash?”

“Some days you just wake up,” he said, tucking his billowing white fencing shirt into the same rippling black rayon slacks he had worn to Hudson House, “with a sense of occasion.”

In plain view, he packed the five Kryptonite locks and chains into his backpack. I assumed he’d found takers at school.

“Kevin looks really handsome,” said Celia shyly.

“Yup, your brother’s a heartbreaker,” I said. And wouldn’t he be.

I sifted a generous dusting of confectioner’s sugar over the toast, stooping by Celia’s soft blond hair to mumble, “Now don’t dawdle, you don’t want to be late for school again. You’re supposed to eat it, not make friends with it.”

I tucked her hair behind her ears and kissed the top of her head, and as I did so Kevin cut a glance toward me as he loaded the backpack with another chain. Though he’d entered the kitchen with a rare energy, now his eyes had gone dead.

“Hey, Kev!” you cried. “I ever show you how this camera works? Good knowledge of photography never hurt anybody; it’s sure paid off for me. Get over here, there’s time. I don’t know what’s got into you, but you have forty-five minutes to spare.” You pushed your greasy plate out of the way and opened the camera bag at your feet.

Unwillingly, Kevin floated over. He didn’t seem in the mood for Gee-Dadding this morning. As you went through the lighting and f-stop positions, I felt a pang of recognition. Your own father’s awkward version of intimacy was always to explain in far greater detail than anyone cared to hear exactly how some device worked. You didn’t share Herbert’s conviction that to take apart the clockwork of the universe was to unlock the extent of its mysteries, but you had inherited a resort to mechanics as an emotional crutch.

“This reminds me,” you said mid-instruction. “I want to shoot a roll of you at archery practice sometime soon. Capture that steely gaze and steady arm for posterity, how about it? We could do a whole photomontage for the foyer: Braveheart of the Palisades!”

Slapping his shoulder was probably a mistake; he flinched. And for the briefest of moments I appreciated what little access we ever had to what really went on in Kevin’s head, since for a second the mask fell, and his face curdled with—well, with revulsion, I’m afraid. To allow even so brief a glimpse of its workings, he must have had other things on his mind.

“Yeah. Dad,” he said effortfully. “That would be… great.”

Yet I chose this of all mornings to gaze upon our domestic tableau in soft focus. All teenagers hate their parents, I thought, and there was something priceless about the antipathy if you could take it. As the sun caught the fine gold of Celia’s hair while she cut her French toast into ridiculously tiny pieces and you embarked on a riff about the dangers of backlighting while Kevin twitched with impatience, I was so heartened by this Norman Rockwell moment that I considered sticking around until the kids had to leave for school, maybe giving Celia a lift myself instead of leaving the run to you. Would that I had given in to the temptation! But children need routine, I decided, and if I didn’t get a jump on the morning rush hour, there would be hell to pay on the bridge.

“Shut up!” Kevin barked suddenly at your side. “That’s enough. Shut up!”

Warily, we all three peered at this unprompted impertinence.

“I don’t care how your camera works,” he continued levelly. “I don’t want to be a location scout for a bunch of crappy products. I’m not interested . I’m not interested in baseball or the founding fathers or decisive battles of the Civil War. I hate museums and national monuments and picnics. I don’t want to memorize the Declaration of Independence in my spare time, or read de Tocqueville. I can’t stand reruns of Tora, Tora, Tora! or documentaries about Dwight Eisenhower. I don’t want to play Frisbee in the backyard or one more game of Monopoly with a sniveling, candy-ass, one-eyed midget. I don’t give a fuck about stamp collecting or rare coins or pressing colorful autumn leaves in encyclopedias. And I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with heart-to-heart father-son talks about aspects of my life that are none of your business.”

You looked stunned. I met your eyes, then just perceptibly shook my head. It was unusual for me to counsel restraint. But the pressure cooker was very popular among my mother’s generation. After an incident now mythic in my family involving madagh scraped off the ceiling with a broom, I’d learned at an early age that when that chittering round whistle is blowing off steam, the worst thing you can do is open the pot.

“Okay,” you said tightly, fitting your lenses back in the case. “You’re on the record.”

As abruptly as he had exploded, Kevin folded right back up, once again the complacent, unimaginative tenth-grader preparing for another humdrum day of school. I could see him shutting out your hurt feelings, one more thing in which, I suppose, he was not interested. For about five minutes no one said anything, and then we gradually resumed the pretense of an ordinary morning, making no mention of Kevin’s outburst the way polite people are meant to pretend they didn’t notice the release of a very loud fart. Still the smell lingered, if less of gas than of cordite.

Although by now in a hurry, I had to say good-bye to Celia twice. I stooped and brushed her hair, picked a last bit of crust from her lower lash, reminded her which books she had to take today, and then gave her a big long hug, but after I’d turned to collect my things, I noticed her still standing there where I’d left her looking stricken, hands held stiffly out from her side as if contaminated with drydirt. So I hoisted her by the armpits into my arms, though she was nearly eight now and supporting her full weight was hard on my back. She wrapped her legs around my waist, buried her head in my neck, and said, “I’ll miss you!” I said I would miss her, too, though I had no idea how much.

Perhaps unnerved by Kevin’s unwarranted harangue and in need of safe harbor, your own kiss good-bye was for once not an absent peck on the cheek, but feverish, open-mouthed. (Thank you, Franklin. I have relived that moment so many times now that the memory cells must be pale and broken down, like the denim of much-loved jeans.) As for my earlier uncertainty over whether children enjoy watching their parents kiss, one look at Kevin’s face settled the matter. They didn’t.

“Kevin, you have that independent study archery for gym today, don’t you?” I reminded him, keen to consolidate our normality while bustling into my spring coat. “Don’t forget to bring your kit.”

“You can count on it.”

“Also, you should make up your mind what you want to do for your birthday,” I said. “It’s only three days away, and sixteen is something of a milestone, don’t you think?”

“In some ways,” he said noncommittally. “Ever notice how milestone turns into millstone by changing only one letter?”

“What about Sunday!”

“I might be tied up.”

I was frustrated that he always made it so difficult to be nice to him, but I had to go. I didn’t kiss Kevin lately—teenagers didn’t like it—so I brushed the back of my hand lightly against his forehead, which I was surprised to find damp and cold. “You’re a little clammy. Do you feel all right?”

“Never better,” said Kevin. I was on my way out the door when he called, “Sure you don’t want to say good-bye to Celie one more time?”

“Very funny,” I said behind me, and closed the door. I thought he was just riding me. In retrospect, he was giving me very sound advice that I really ought to have taken.

I have no idea what it must be like to wake up with such a terrible resolve. Whenever I picture it, I see myself roll over on the pillow muttering, On second thought, I can’t be bothered, or at the very least, Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow. Granted, the horrors we like to term “unthinkable” are altogether thinkable, and countless kids must fantasize about revenge for the thousand natural shocks that tenth-graders are heir to. It’s not the visions or even half-baked plans that set our son apart. It’s the staggering capacity to travel from plan to action.

Having racked my brains, the only analogy I’ve located in my own life is an awful stretch: all those trips to foreign countries that, up against it, I really didn’t want to take. I would ease myself through by breaking a seemingly monumental excursion into its smallest constituent parts. Rather than dare myself to spend two months in thief-riddled Morocco, I would dare myself to pick up the phone. That’s not so hard. And with a minion on its other end, I would have to say something, so I would order a ticket, taking refuge in the mercifully theoretical nature of airline schedules on dates at such marvelous remove that they could never possibly come to pass. Behold, a ticket arrives in the mail: Plan becomes action. I would dare myself to purchase histories of North Africa, and I would later dare myself to pack. The challenges, broken down, were surmountable. Until, after daring myself into a taxi and down a jetway, it would be too late to turn back. Big deeds are a lot of little deeds one after the other, and that’s what Kevin must have cottoned onto—ordering his Kryptonites, stealing his stationery, loading those chains into his backpack one by one. Take care of the components, and the sum of their parts unfolds as if by magic.

For my own part that Thursday—still plain old Thursday—I was busy; we were rushing to meet a due date at the printers. But in the odd unoccupied moment, I did reflect on Kevin’s peculiar outburst that morning. The diatribe had been signally absent the likes, I means, sort ofs, and I guesses that commonly peppered his passable imitation of a regulation teenager. Rather than slump at an angle, he had stood upright, speaking from the center of his mouth rather than out one corner. I was certainly distressed that he would hurt his father’s feelings with such abandon, but the young man who made these stark, unmediated declarations seemed a very different boy than the one I lived with every day. I found myself hoping we would meet again, especially at such a time that this stranger-son’s state of mind was more agreeable—an unlikely prospect that to this day I continue to look forward to.

Around 6:15 P.M., there was a commotion outside my office, a conspiratorial huddling by my staff, which I interpreted as a sociable gossip as they knocked off for the day. Just as I was resigning myself to working into the evening on my own, Rose, their elected representative I suppose, knocked tentatively on my door. “Eva,” she said gravely. “Your son’s at Gladstone High School, isn’t he?”

It was already on the Internet.

The details were incomplete: “Fatalities Feared in Gladstone High Shooting.” Who and how many students had been shot was unclear. The culprit was unknown. In fact, the news flash was exasperatingly brief. “Security staff” had come upon “a scene of carnage” in the school gym, to which police were now “trying to gain access.” I know I was flustered, but it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me.

I immediately called your mobile, cursing when it was turned off; you did that all too often, treasuring the uninterrupted solitude of your 4x4 as you tooled around New Jersey searching for the right-colored cows. I appreciated that you didn’t want to hear from a rep from Kraft or your Madison Avenue minders, but you might have thought to turn it on for me. What’s the point of having the damned thing? I fretted. I called home but got our machine; it was a lovely spring evening, and doubtless Robert had taken Celia out in the backyard to play. The fact that Kevin didn’t pick up made my stomach churn, but I reasoned feverishly that of course he could have slunk off with Lenny Pugh, with whom he had inexplicably patched things up since the Pagorski hearing. Perhaps the trade in slavish disciples was not so brisk that a self-abasing sidekick could be easily replaced.

So I grabbed my coat and resolved to go straight to the school. As I left, my staff was already regarding me with the awe that attends those who have even the most tangential association with the cameo news flash on the America On-Line home page.

As we follow me running down to the garage to my VW, gunning out of midtown only to get stuck on the West Side Highway, let’s get one thing straight. I did think Kevin screamed in his crib out of free-floating rage, and not because he needed feeding. I fiercely believed that when he poked fun at our waitress’s “poopy face” he knew he would hurt her feelings, and that he defaced the maps on my study walls out of calculated malice, not misguided creativity. I was still convinced that he systematically seduced Violetta into clawing a layer of skin from the better part of her body and that he continued to require diapers until he was six years old not because he was traumatized or confused or slow to develop, but because he was on a full-time war-footing with his mother. I thought he destroyed the toys and storybooks I painstakingly fashioned because they were worth more to him as emblems of his own up-yours ingratitude than as sentimental playthings, and I was sure that he learned to count and read in secret deliberately to deprive me of any sense of usefulness as a parent. My certainty that he was the one who flipped the quick-release on the front wheel of Trent Corley’s bicycle was unwavering. I was under no illusion that a nest of bagworms had dropped into Celia’s backpack by itself or that she had climbed twenty feet up our white oak only to get stranded on an upper branch all by her lonesome; I believed it was no more her idea to stir together a lunch of petroleum jelly and Thai curry paste than it was to play “kidnapping” and “William Tell.” I was pretty damned sure that whatever Kevin whispered in the ear of let-us-call-her-Alice at that eighth-grade school dance, it wasn’t admiration of her dress; and however Liquid-Plumr got in Celia’s left eye, I was dead positive that her brother had something to do with it beyond his role as her noble savior. I regarded his jerking off at home with the door wide open as wanton sexual abuse—of his mother—and not the normal uncontrolled bubbling of adolescent hormones. Although I may have told Mary that Laura should suck it up, I found it entirely credible that our son had told her frail, underfed daughter that she was fat. It was no mystery to me how a hit list turned up in Miguel Espinoza’s locker, and though I took full responsibility for spreading one to my own company, I couldn’t see the hobby of collecting computer viruses as anything but disturbed and degenerate. I remained firmly of the view that Vicki Pagorski had been persecuted in a show trial of Kevin Khatchadourian’s personal contrivance. Granted, I’d been mistaken about our son’s responsibility for chucking chunks of bricks at oncoming cars on 9W, and until ten days ago I had chalked up the disappearance of a treasured photograph from Amsterdam as yet another victim of my son’s unparalleled spite. So I have, as I said, always believed the worst. But even my unnatural maternal cynicism had its limits. When Rose told me there’d been a vicious assault at Kevin’s high school and some students were feared dead, I worried for his well-being. Not for an instant did I imagine that our son was the perpetrator.

The testimony of witnesses to an event is notoriously shambolic, especially on its immediate heels. On-scene, misinformation rules. Only after the fact is order imposed on chaos. Hence, with a few keystrokes on-line I can now access numerous versions of our son’s actions that day that make crude chronological sense. Few pieces of this tale were available to me when I careened into the school parking lot with the radio on, but years of contemplative reflection spread before me for the leisurely assembly of this hobbyistic jigsaw, much as Kevin himself has years more access to underequipped wood shops in which to file, sand, and polish his excuse.

Schools do not necessarily regard their letterhead stationery as the keys to the kingdom, and I doubt it’s all locked up. However he acquired it, Kevin had paid enough attention in Dana Rocco’s English class to digest that form dictates tone. As you do not use popular slang in an article for the school paper, neither do you indulge nihilistic little games involving three-letter words when printing on letterhead stationery. Hence, the official missive sent to Greer Ulanov, for example—in sufficient advance to allow for Nyack’s lackluster postal service—exhibits the same keen ear for authenticity that Kevin displayed in playing Ron Howard to you and the shy, flustered victim to Alan Strickland:

Identical notices were sent to eight other students, with the blanks filled in accordingly. Denny Corbitt was commended for acting, Jeff Reeves for classical guitar, Laura Woolford for “personal grooming,” Brian “Mouse” Ferguson for computing skills, Ziggy Randolph not only for ballet but for “encouraging tolerance of difference,” Miguel Espinoza for academic achievement and “vocabulary skills,” Soweto Washington for sports, Joshua Lukronsky for “cinematic studies” and—I fault Kevin here for not being able to control himself—“memorizing whole Quentin Tarantino scripts,” though most people are disinclined to regard flattery with suspicion. Dana Rocco was sent a somewhat different letter that requested she chair this Thursday meeting but also advising that she herself had been selected for the Most Beloved Teacher Award and likewise requesting, since all the other teachers are also beloved, that she keep her MBTA on the q.t.

If the trap was well set, it was not immune to glitches. Dana Rocco might have mentioned the meeting to Bevons, who would have protested ignorance, and the whole business might have come unraveled. Can we really call Kevin lucky? She didn’t.

On the evening of April 7, Kevin set his alarm for half an hour earlier than usual and laid out clothing for the morning roomy enough to allow for ease of mobility, choosing that dashing white shirt with billowing fencing-style sleeves in which he might photograph well. Personally, I would have tossed through such a night in anguish, but then I personally would never have contrived this grotesque project in the first place, so I can only assume that if Kevin lost any sleep it was from excitement.

Riding the school bus the following morning he would have been encumbered—those bike locks weighed 6.2 pounds apiece—but Kevin had arranged for this independent-study archery course at the beginning of the semester, interest in the unpopular pastime being too slight for a proper class. Other students had been trained to regard his lugging archery equipment to school as ordinary. No one was sufficiently attuned to the niceties of this dorky sport to be disturbed that Kevin wasn’t lugging his standard bow or his longbow but his crossbow, which the administration later bent over backward to deny would ever have been allowed on school grounds. Though the number of arrows in his possession was considerable—he was obliged to cart them in his duffel—no one remarked on the bag; the wide berth that his classmates allowed Kevin in eighth grade had by his sophomore year only broadened.

After stashing his archery materiel, as usual, in the equipment room of the gym, he attended all of his classes. In English, he asked Dana Rocco what maleficence means, and she beamed.

His independent-study archery practice was scheduled for the last period of the day, and—his enthusiasm firmly established—PE teachers no longer checked up on him as he fired arrows into a sawdust target. Hence, Kevin had ample time to clear the gym of any apparatuses such as punching bags, horses, or heavy tumbling mats. Conveniently, the bleachers were already up, and to make sure they stayed up, he clipped small combination padlocks around the intersection of two iron supports on both banks, ensuring that they could not fold out. When he was finished there was absolutely nothing in that gym except six blue mats—the thin kind, for sit-ups—arranged in a convivial circle in the middle.

The logistics, for those impressed by such things, were impeccably worked out. The physical education building is a freestanding structure, a good three-minute walk from the main campus. There are five entrances to the central gym itself—from the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms and the equipment room, as well as from the lobby; a door on the second floor opens onto an alcove, used for the aerobic conditioning machines, that overlooks the gym. Yet not one of these entrances lies on the outside of the building. The gym is unusually high, a full two stories, and there are windows only at the top; you can’t see inside from ground level. There were no sporting events scheduled for that afternoon.

The bell rang at 3:00, and by 3:15 the distant clamor of departing students was dying down. The gym itself was deserted, though Kevin must have still padded with trepidation as he glided into the boys’ locker room and unlooped his first Kryptonite bike lock from around his shoulder. He’s a methodical person in the most ordinary of circumstances, so we can be sure that he had twist-tied the correct key to each bright yellow, plasticcoated padlock. Looping the heavy chain around each handle of the double doors, he pulled the chain taut. After hiking up the chain’s protective black nylon sheath, he hooked the sunny yellow padlock into a middle link, clicked the lock shut, twisted the round key from its socket, and slipped it in his pocket. I dare say he tested the doors, which would now only open with a crack between them before they seized. He repeated this exercise in the girls’ locker room, then at the gym entrance from the equipment room, exiting from its back door into the weights room.

I now know that these locks were state-of-the-art in bicycle security. The U-shaped portion of the tiny, sturdy padlock is only about two inches high, denying prospective thieves the leverage for a crowbar. The chain itself is forged interlinking at the factory; each link is half an inch thick. Kryptonite chains are famously resistant to heat, since professional cycle thieves have been known to use torches, and the company is sufficiently confident of its technology that if your bicycle is stolen, it guarantees a full refund for the purchase value of the bike. Unlike many competitors’ models, the guarantee is even good in New York.

Despite his avowed disinterest in your work, Franklin, Kevin was about to launch Kryptonite’s most successful advertising campaign to date.

By 3:20, giggling with self-congratulatory glee, the first BSPA winners were starting to arrive through the main entrance from the lobby, which remained unlocked.

“Personal hygiene, my momma!” Soweto declared.

“Hey, we’re bright and shining,” said Laura, tossing her silken brown hair. “Don’t we get any chairs?”

Mouse crossed to the equipment room to scrounge some fold-ups, but when he came back reporting the room already locked for the day Greer said, “I don’t know, it’s kind of neat this way. We can sit cross-legged, like around a campfire.”

“Puh-lease,” said Laura, whose outfit was—scant. “Cross-legged, in this skirt? And it’s Versace, for Chrissake. I don’t want to stink it up with sit-up sweat.”

“Yo, girl,” Soweto nodded at her spindly figure, “that close as you gonna come to sit-up sweat.”

Kevin was able to listen in on his prizewinners from the alcove, an inset shelf on the upper level; so long as he remained against the back wall, he couldn’t be seen from below. The three stationary bicycles, treadmill, and rowing machine had already been dragged away from the alcove’s protective railing. Transferred from the duffel, his stash of some hundred arrows bristled from two fire buckets.

Enticed by the marvelous echo, Denny emoted a few lines from Don’t Drink the Water at the top of his lungs, while Ziggy, who made a habit of flouncing around school in a leotard and tights to show off his calves, couldn’t resist making what Kevin later called “a big queeny entrance,” dancing a series of turns in pointe position across the length of the gym and finishing with a grand jeté. But Laura, who doubtless thought it uncool to ogle fags, only had eyes for Jeff Reeves—though quiet and terminally earnest, a handsome blue-eyed boy with a long blond ponytail with whom a dozen girls were known to be smitten. One of Jeff’s salivating fans, according to an interview with a friend recorded by NBC, was Laura Woolford, which more than his mastery of the twelve-string guitar may have explained why he, too, was christened Bright and Shining.

Miguel, who must have told himself he was unpopular for being smart or Latino—anything but for being a little pudgy—promptly plunked himself on one of the blue mats, to burrow with knit-browed seriousness into a battered copy of Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Beside him, Greer, who made the mistake common to rejects everywhere of assuming that outcasts like each other, was busy trying to engage him in a discussion of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo.

Dana Rocco arrived at 3:35. “Come on troops!” she rallied them. “Ziggy, that’s all very dramatic, but this isn’t ballet practice. Can we get down to business here? This is a happy occasion, but it’s still after-hours for me, and I’d like to get home before Letterman.”

At this point, the cafeteria worker arrived, carting a tray of cellophaned sandwiches. “Where you want these, ma’am?” he asked Rocco. “We got a order from Mr. Bevons to provide refreshments.”

“Wasn’t that thoughtful of Don!” she exclaimed.

Well. It was thoughtful of someone. And I have to say, the sandwiches were a nice touch, that little garnish of an authentic school occasion. But Kevin may have been over-egging the pudding a bit, and the gesture would cost him collateral damage.

“Ma’am, my shift’s over now, you mind if I shoot a few? I just be over at the far end there, won’t be no trouble. Don’t got no hoop in my neighborhood. I’d be much obliged.”

Rocco would have hesitated—the noise would be a distraction—but the cafeteria worker was black.

Kevin must have been kicking himself for having left that basketball off in the corner, but by this time—3:40—he’d have been more distracted by the no-show. Only nine of his ten party guests had reported for duty, along with one gate-crasher. This operation was not organized for latecomers, and as the meeting got underway he must have been frantically concocting a contingency plan to allow for the dilatory performance of Joshua Lukronsky.

“Oh, gr-ooss!” said Laura, passing the platter. “Turkey roll. Total waste of calories.”

“First off, you guys,” Rocco began, “I want to congratulate you all on having been picked for this special award—”

“O-kay!” The lobby doors burst wide. “Let’s get in character!”

Kevin would never have been quite so happy to see the consummately irritating Joshua Lukronsky. As the circle enlarged to make a place for Josh, Kevin crept out of the alcove and slipped downstairs with another Kryptonite. Although he was as quiet as he could be, the chain did rattle a little, and he may have been grateful for the banging of the cafeteria worker’s basketball at that. Back up in the alcove, he slipped his last padlock and chain around the inside bars of the alcove’s double doors.

Voilà. Fish in a barrel.

Was he having second thoughts, or simply enjoying himself? Their meeting had proceeded another five minutes by the time Kevin advanced stealthily toward the rail with his loaded crossbow. Though he drew into sight from below, the group was too engrossed in planning their own accolades to look up.

“I could give a speech,” Greer proposed. “Like on how the office of special prosecutor should be abolished? Because I think Kenneth Starr is evil incarnate!”

“What about something a little less divisive?” Rocco proposed. “You don’t want to alienate Republicans—”

“Wanna bet?”

A soft, rushing sound. Just as there is a tiny pause between lightning and thunderclap, there was a single, dense instant of silence between the arrow’s shsh-thunk through Laura Woolford’s Versace blouse and the point at which the other students began to scream.

“Oh, my God!”

“Where’d it come from!”

“She’s bleeding all OVER!”

Shsh-thunk. Not yet struggled to his feet, Miguel took one in the gut. Shsh-thunk. Jeff was nailed between the shoulder blades as he bent over Laura Woolford. I can only conclude that for those many hours Kevin spent in our backyard, the little black bull’s-eye in the middle of all those concentric circles was in his mind’s eye a perfect circle of Versace viscose. Struck perfectly through the heart, she was dead.

“He’s up there!” Denny pointed.

“Kids, get out! Run!” Rocco ordered, though she needn’t have; the uninjured remainder had already stampeded toward the main exit, where they were giving new meaning to the term panic bars. Yet given the position of the alcove, there wasn’t one square foot in that gym that couldn’t be penetrated from over its railing, as they were all soon to discover.

“Oh, shit, I should have known!” screamed Joshua with an upward glance, rattling the equipment room door that Mouse had already tried. “It’s Khatchadourian!”

Shsh-thunk. As he pounded on the main doors calling for help while the arrow stuck in his back quivered, a shaft sank into the nape of Jeff Reeves’s neck. As Mouse streaked to the boys’ locker room exit and the doors gave just a little and held fast, he took an arrow in the ass; it wouldn’t kill him, but as he hobbled to the one last exit on the girls’ side, he was surely beginning to realize that there was plenty of time for one that did.

Dana Rocco got to the girls’ exit at about the same time, weighed down by Laura’s body in her arms—a fruitless but valiant effort that would feature prominently in the memorial service. Mouse met Rocco’s eyes and shook his head. As his shrieking classmates began to circle from door to door in a churning motion like dough in a mixing bowl, Mouse shouted over the uproar, “The doors are locked! All the doors are locked! Take cover!”

Behind what?

The cafeteria worker—less attuned to the School Shooting format than the students, who had been through whole preparatory assemblies and got into character right away—had been easing along the walls as if feeling for one of those secret passageways in murder mysteries, moving slowly, attracting minimum attention. The cinder block unavailing, he now crouched into a fetal ball, holding the basketball between the archer and his head. Kevin was doubtless annoyed at having allowed any obstacle to remain in the gym however small, and the ineffectual protection just drew fire. Shsh-phoot. The ball was skewered.

“Kevin!” cried his English teacher, triangulating Mouse behind her body into the corner farthest from the alcove. “Please stop! Please, please stop!”

“Maleficence,” Kevin hissed distinctly from overhead; Joshua said later that it was weird how you could hear this relatively quiet word above the din. For the duration, it was all that Kevin said. Thereafter, Kevin fixed his staunchest ally on the Gladstone faculty steadily in his sight and put an arrow straight between her eyes.

As she fell, Mouse was exposed in the corner, and though he began to crouch in the shelter of her body, he took another shaft that pierced a lung. That would teach him to share the secrets of computer viruses with mere cyber-dilettantes who were really much more interested in archery.

But Mouse, in Joshua’s view, had the right idea; so far, Lukronsky’s scrabbling up all the thin blue sit-up mats and trying to fashion some kind of shield wasn’t working nearly as well as it would have in the movies, and already two arrows had whizzed within inches of his head. Scooting over to Mouse’s corner while Kevin was occupied with reaming Soweto Washington’s powerful thighs, Joshua built himself an impromptu lean-to in the corner constructed of the blue foam rubber, Dana Rocco, Laura Woolford, and the groaning, half-conscious body of Mouse Ferguson. It was from this stuffy tent that he observed the denouement, peering from under Laura’s armpit as Mouse’s breath bubbled. It was hot, suffused with the rank fumes of fearful sweat and another, more disturbing smell that was nauseously cloying.

Giving up on safe haven, Greer Ulanov had marched right up to the wall that dropped from the alcove’s railing, standing twenty feet immediately below their malevolent Cupid. She had finally found a bête noir more odious than Kenneth Starr.

“I hate you, you stupid creep!” she screeched. “I hope you fry! I hope they shoot you full of poison and I get to watch you die!” It was a rapid conversion. Only the month before, she’d written an impassioned essay denouncing capital punishment.

Leaning over the railing, Kevin shot straight down, striking Greer through the foot. The arrow went through to the wooden floor, and pinned her where she stood. As she blanched and struggled to pull the arrow from the floor, he pinned her second foot as well. He could afford the fun; he must still have had fifty, sixty arrows in reserve.

By this time, the other injured had all crawled to the far wall, where they flopped like voodoo dolls stuck with pins. Most bunched on the floor, trying to present the smallest targets possible. But Ziggy Randolph, yet unscathed, now strode to the very middle of the gym, where he presented himself with chest blown out, heels together, toes pronated. Dark and finefeatured, he was a striking boy with a commanding presence, though tritely effeminate in manner; I have never been sure if homosexuals’ limp-wristed gestures are innate, or studied.

“Khatchadourian!” Ziggy’s voice resonated over the sound of sobbing. “Listen to me! You don’t have to do this! Just put the bow on the floor, and let’s talk. A lot of these guys’ll be all right, if we just get some medics right away!”

It’s worth inserting a reminder here that after Michael Carneal shot up that prayer group in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, a devout Heath High School senior, a preacher’s son with the novelistic name Ben Strong was feted from coast to coast for having advanced soothingly on the shooter, urging the boy to put down his weapon and putting himself in mortal danger in the process. In response, according to legend, Carneal dropped the pistol and collapsed. Due to nationwide hunger for heroes in events that were otherwise becoming irredeemable international embarrassments, the story was widely known. Strong was featured in Time magazine and interviewed on Larry King Live. Ziggy’s own familiarity with this parable may have bolstered his courage to confront their assailant, and the unprecedented admiration that had met Ziggy’s “coming out” to an assembly earlier that semester would have further enhanced his faith in his persuasive powers of oratory.

“I know you must be really upset about something, okay?” Ziggy continued; most of Kevin’s victims were not yet dead, and someone was already feeling sorry for him. “I’m sure you’re hurting inside! But this is no way out—”

Unfortunately for Ziggy, the apocryphal nature of Ben Strong’s stern, mesmerizing Michael? Put down the gun! would not come out until the spring of 2000, when a suit filed by the victims’ parents against more than fifty other parties—including parents, teachers, school officials, other teenagers, neighbors, the makers of “Doom” and “Quake” video games, and the film producers of The Basketball Diaries—came to trial in circuit court. Under oath, Strong confessed that an initially sloppy rendition of events to his principal had been further embellished by the media and taken on a life of its own. Trapped in a lie, he’d been miserable ever since. Apparently by the time our hero approached, Michael Carneal had already stopped shooting and had collapsed, his surrender unrelated to any eloquent, death-defying appeal. “He just got done,” Strong testified, “and he dropped it.”

Shsh-thunk. Ziggy staggered backward.

I hope I haven’t related this chronology in so dispassionate a fashion that I seem callous. It’s just that the facts remain bigger, bolder, and more glistening than any one small grief. I’m simply reiterating a sequence of events strung together by Newsweek.

In parroting its copy, however, I do not pretend any remarkable insight into Kevin’s state of mind, the one foreign country into which I have been most reluctant to set foot. Descriptions from Joshua and Soweto of our son’s expression from overhead depart from the reportage of similar events. Those Columbine children, for example, were manic, eyes glazed, grinning crazily. Kevin, by contrast, was described as “concentrated” and “deadpan.” But then, he always looked that way on the archery range, if only on the archery range, come to think of it—as if he became the arrow, and thus discovered in this embodiment the sense of purpose that his phlegmatic daily persona so extravagantly lacked.

Yet I have reflected on the fact that for most of us, there is a hard, impassable barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-life execution. It’s the same solid steel wall that inserts itself between a knife and my wrist even when I’m at my most disconsolate. So how was Kevin able to raise that crossbow, point it at Laura’s breastbone, and then really, actually, in time and space, squeeze the release? I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier. That like my trips abroad or this ludicrous scheme of bike locks and invitations on school stationery, the very squeezing of that release can be broken down into a series of simple constituent parts. It may be no more miraculous to pull the trigger of a bow or a gun than it is to reach for a glass of water. I fear that crossing into the “unthinkable” turns out to be no more athletic than stepping across the threshold of an ordinary room; and that, if you will, is the trick. The secret. As ever, the secret is that there is no secret. He must almost have wanted to giggle, though that is not his style; those Columbine kids did giggle. And once you have found out that there is nothing to stop you—that the barrier, so seemingly uncrossable, is all in your head—it must be possible to step back and forth across that threshold again and again, shot after shot, as if an unintimidating pipsqueak has drawn a line across the carpet that you must not pass and you launch tauntingly over it, back and over it, in a mocking little dance.

That said, it is the last bit that harrows me most. I have no metaphors to help us.

If it seems extraordinary that no one responded to the cries for help, the gym is isolated, and the stragglers at the school who later admitted to hearing screams and shouts understandably assumed that an exciting or fractious sporting event was underway. There was no telltale crack of gunfire. And the most obvious explanation for this absence of alarm is that, while it may take a while to tell, the melee couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. But if Kevin had entered into some sort of altered mental state, it was far more sustained than ten minutes.

Soweto passed out, which probably saved him. As Joshua remained motionless, his fleshy fortress shook from a systematic rain of arrows, some combination of which would finish Mouse Ferguson. Shouts for help or wails of pain further down the wall were silenced with additional shots. He took his time, Franklin—emptying both buckets, until that line of limp casualties bristled like a family of porcupines. But more appalling than this cheap archery practice—his victims could no longer be regarded as moving targets—was its cessation. It’s surprisingly difficult to kill people with a crossbow. Kevin knew that. And so he waited. When at last at 5:40 a security guard jingled by to lock up, was dismayed by the Kryptonite, and peeked through the crack of the door to see red, Kevin waited. When the police arrived with those massive but useless cutters (which the chain merely dented) and at length were driven to secure an electric metal saw that shrieked and spit sparks—all of which took time—Kevin put his feet up on the alcove rail and waited. Indeed, the protracted interlude between his last arrow and the SWAT team’s final burst through the lobby door at 6:55 was one of those untenanted periods for which I’d advised him at age six that he’d be grateful for a book.

Laura Woolford and Dana Rocco were killed by the trauma of the arrows themselves. Ziggy, Mouse, Denny, Greer, Jeff, Miguel, and the cafeteria worker all bled to death, trickle by drop.

(April 6, 2001—Continued)

When I wheeled out of the car, the lot was already jammed with ambulances and police cars. A bunting of yellow tape marked its perimeter. It was just getting dark, and careworn paramedics were lit in ghoulish admixtures of red and blue. Stretcher after stretcher paraded into the lot—I was aghast; there seemed no end to them. Yet even amid pandemonium, a familiar face will flash brighter than emergency vehicles, and my eyes seized on Kevin in a matter of seconds. It was a classic double take. Although I may have had my problems with our son, I was still relieved that he was alive. But I was denied the luxury of wallowing in my healthy maternal instincts. At a glance, it was obvious that he was not marching but being marched down the path from the gym by a brace of policemen, and the only reason he could possibly be holding his hands behind his back rather than swinging them in his conventionally insolent saunter is that he hadn’t any choice.

I felt dizzy. For a moment, the lights of the parking lot scattered into meaningless splotches, like the patterns behind the lids when you rub your eyes.

“Ma’am, I’m afraid you’ll have to clear the area—.” It was one of the officers who appeared at our door after the overpass incident, the heavier, more cynical of the pair. They must meet a plethora of wide-eyed parents whose darling little reprobates issued “from a good family,” because he didn’t seem to recognize my face.

“You don’t understand,” I said, adding the most difficult claim of fealty I’d ever made, “That’s my son.”

His face hardened. This was an expression I would get used to; that, and the melting you-poor-dear-I-don’t-know-what-to-say one, which was worse. But I was not inured to it yet, and when I asked him what had happened, I could already tell from the flinty look in his eye that whatever I was now indirectly responsible for, it was bad.

“We’ve had some casualties, ma’am,” was all he was inclined to explain. “Best you came down to the station. Just take 59 to 303, and exit at Orangeberg Road. Entrance on Town Hall Road. That’s assuming you’ve never been there before.”

“Can I—talk to him?”

“You’ll have to see that officer there, ma’am. With the cap?” He hastened away.

Making my way toward the police car into whose back seat I’d seen a policeman shove our son with a hand on the top of his head, I was forced to run a gamut, explaining with increasing fatigue who I was to a sequence of officers. I finally understood the New Testament story about St. Peter, and why he might have been driven to thrice deny association with some social pariah who’d been set upon by a lynch mob. Repudiation may have been even more tempting for me than for Peter, since, whatever he might have styled himself, that boy was no messiah.

I finally battled to the Orangetown black-and-white, whose enveloping inscription on the side, “In partnership with the community,” no longer seemed to include me. Staring at the back window, I couldn’t see through the glass for the blinking reflections. So I cupped my hand over the window. He wasn’t crying or hanging his head. He turned to the window. He had no trouble looking me in the eye.

I had thought to scream, What have you done? But the hackneyed exclamation would have been self-servingly rhetorical, a flouting of parental disavowal. I would know the details soon enough. And I could not imagine a conversation that would be anything but ridiculous.

So we stared at each other in silence. Kevin’s expression was placid. It still displayed remnants of resolution, but determination was already sliding to the quiet, self-satisfied complacency of a job well done. His eyes were strangely clear—unperturbed, almost peaceful—and I recognized their pellucidity from that morning, though breakfast already seemed ten years past. This was the stranger-son, the boy who dropped his corny, shuffling disguise of I mean and I guess for the plumb carriage and lucidity of a man with a mission.

He was pleased with himself, I could see that. And that’s all I needed to know.

Yet when I picture his face through that back window now, I remember something else as well. He was searching. He was looking for something in my face. He looked for it very carefully and very hard, and then he leaned back a little in his seat. Whatever he’d been searching for, he hadn’t found it, and this, too, seemed to satisfy him in some way. He didn’t smile. But he might as well have.

Driving to the Orangetown police station, I’m afraid I got enraged with you, Franklin. It wasn’t fair, but your mobile was still switched off, and you know how one fixates on these small, logistical matters as a distraction. I wasn’t able, yet, to get angry at Kevin, and it seemed safer to vent my frustrations on you, since you hadn’t done anything wrong. Hitting that redial button over and over, I railed aloud at the wheel. “Where are you? It’s almost 7:30! Turn on the fucking phone! For God’s sake, of all the nights, why did you have to work late tonight? And haven’t you listened to the news?” But you didn’t play the radio, in your truck; you preferred CDs of Springsteen, or Charlie Parker. “Franklin, you son of a bitch!” I shouted, my tears still the hot, leaking, stingy ones of fury. “How could make me go through this all by myself?”

I drove past Town Hall Road at first, since that slick, rather garish green-and-white building looks like a chain steakhouse or subscription fitness center from the outside. Aside from its clumsily wrought bronze frieze memorializing four Orangetown officers fallen in the line of duty, the foyer, too, was an expanse of white walls and characterless linoleum where you would expect to find directions to the pool. But the reception room itself was horrifyingly intimate, even more claustrophobically tiny than the emergency room at Nyack Hospital.

I was accorded anything but priority status, though the receptionist did inform me coldly through the window that I could accompany my “minor”—a word that seemed inappropriately reductive—while he was booked. Panicked, I pleaded, “Do I have to?” and she said, “Suit yourself.” She directed me to the single black vinyl sofa, to which I was abandoned untended as police officers raced back and forth. I felt both implicated and irrelevant. I didn’t want to be there. In case that sounds like a grievous understatement, I mean that I had the novel experience of not wanting to be anywhere else, either. Flat out, I wished I were dead.

For a short time, on the opposite side of my sticky black vinyl couch sat a boy whom I now know to be Joshua Lukronsky. Even had I been familiar with this student, I doubt I’d have recognized him at that moment. A small boy, he no longer resembled an adolescent, but a child closer to Celia’s age, for he lacked any of the wisecracking swagger for which he was apparently known at school. His shoulders were drawn in, his cropped black hair disheveled. Hands shoved inward in his lap, he kept his wrists bent at the unnaturally severe angle of children in the advanced stages of muscular dystrophy. He sat perfectly still. He never seemed to blink. Awarded a police minder that my own role didn’t merit—I already had that feeling of being infected, contagious, quarantined—he didn’t respond as the uniformed man standing next to him tried to interest him in a glassed-in case of model police vehicles. It was quite a charming collection, all metal, some very old—vans, horse trailers, motorcycles, ’49 Fords from Florida, Philadelphia, L.A. With fatherly tenderness, the officer explained that one car was very rare, from the days that New York City police cars were green-and-white—before NYPD blue. Joshua stared blankly straight ahead. If he knew I was there at all, he did not appear to know who I was, and I was hardly going to introduce myself. I wondered why this boy had not been taken to the hospital like the others. There was no way of telling that none of the blood drenching his clothes belonged to him.

After a few minutes, a large, plump woman flew through the reception room door, swooping down on Joshua and lifting him in a single motion into her arms. “Joshua!” she cried. At first limp in her clasp, gradually those muscular-dystrophy wrists curled around her shoulders. His shirtsleeves left red smears on her ivory raincoat. The small face buried in her ample neck. I was simultaneously moved, and jealous. This was the reunion that I’d been denied. I love you so much! I’m so, so relieved you’re all right! Me, I was no longer entirely relieved that our own son was all right. From my glance in that car window, it was his very seeming all rightness that had begun to torment me.

The trio shuffled through the inside door. The officer behind the reception window ignored me. If at wit’s end, I was probably grateful for my little task with the mobile, which I worried like a rosary; dialing gave me something to do. If only for variety, I switched to trying our home phone for a while, but I kept getting the machine, and I’d hang up in the middle of that stilted recording, hating the sound of my own voice. I’d already left three, four messages, the first controlled, the last weeping—what a tape to come home to. Realizing that we were both running late, Robert had obviously taken Celia to McDonald’s; she loved their hot apple pies. Why didn’t he call me? He had my mobile number! Hadn’t Robert listened to the news? Oh, I know, McDonald’s broadcasts Muzak, and he wouldn’t necessarily switch on his car radio for such a short trip. But wouldn’t someone mention it while standing on line? How could anyone in Rockland County be talking about anything else?

By the time two officers fetched me into that plain little room to take my statement, I was so distraught that I was less than polite. I probably sounded thick, too; I couldn’t see the purpose of contacting our family’s lawyer when there didn’t appear to be any question that Kevin did it. And this was the first time that anyone had seen fit to give his mother even the sketchiest lowdown on did what. The casualty estimates that one officer rattled off matter-of-factly would later prove exaggerated, but back then I’d had no reason to have researched the fact that atrocity figures are almost always inflated when first released. Besides, what is the difference, really, between bearing a son who murders only nine people instead of thirteen? And I found their questions obscenely immaterial: how Kevin did in school, what had he been like that morning.

“He was a little testy with my husband! Otherwise, nothing special! What was I supposed to do, my son was rude to his father, so I call the police?”

“Now, calm down Mrs. Kachourian—”

“Khatchadourian!” I insisted. “Can you please get my name right?”

Oh, they would.

“Mrs. Khadourian, then. Where might your son have gotten that crossbow?”

“It was a Christmas present! Oh, I told Franklin it was a mistake, I told him. Can I please call my husband again?”

They allowed the call, and after another fruitless redial, I wilted. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be unkind to you, I don’t care about my name, I hate my name. I never want to hear my name again. I’m so sorry—”

“Mrs. Khadarian—” One officer patted my shoulder gingerly. “Maybe we should take a full statement another time.”

“It’s just, I have a daughter, a little girl, Celia, at home, could you—”

“I understand. Now, I’m afraid Kevin’s going to have to stay in custody. Would you like to speak to your son?”

Picturing that smarmy, implacable expression of serenity I met through the police car window, I shuddered, covering my face with my hands. “No. Please, no,” I begged, feeling an awful coward. I must have sounded like Celia, imploring weakly not to be forced to bathe when there was still all that dark, sticky horror lurking in the bathtub trap. “Please don’t make me. Please don’t. I couldn’t face him.”

“Then maybe it would be best for now if you just went on home.”

I stared at him stupidly. I was so ashamed, I honestly believed they were going to keep me in jail.

If only to fill the awkward silence as I just looked at him, he added gently, “Once we get a warrant, we will have to search your house. That’ll probably be tomorrow, but don’t you worry. Our officers are very respectful. We won’t turn the place upside down.”

“You can burn that house for all I care,” I said. “I hate it. I’ve always hated it—”

The two looked at each other: hysterical. And they ushered me out the door.

Freed—I couldn’t believe it—out in the parking lot, I wandered desolately past my car, failing to recognize it the first time down the row; everything in what was already my old life had grown alien. And I was dumbfounded. How could they just let me go? Even at this early juncture I must have begun to feel a deep need to be brought to book, to be called to account. I had to stop myself from pounding on the station door and importuning reception to please let me spend the night in a cell. Surely I belonged there. I was convinced that the only pallet on which I would be able to lie peacefully that night would be a cheap, lumpy mattress with a scratchy institutional sheet, and the only lullaby that could possibly sing me to sleep would be the grit of cordovans on concrete and the distant clink of keys.

Yet once I found the car I became strangely calm. Sedate. Methodical. Like Kevin. Keys. Lights. Seat belt. Windshield wipers on interval, for there was a thin mist. My mind went blank. I ceased talking to myself. I drove home very slowly, braking on yellow, coming to a legally complete halt at the four-way stop, though there was no other traffic. And when I curved up our long drive and noticed that none of the lights were on, I thought nothing of it. I preferred not to.

I parked. Your truck was in the garage. I moved very slowly. I turned off the wipers, and the lights. I locked the car. I put the keys in my Egyptian bag. I paused to think of some other small everyday thing I needed to take care of before walking in the house; I picked a leaf off the windscreen, scooped your jump rope off the garage floor and hung it on its hook.

When I turned on the light in the kitchen, I thought how unlike you it was to have left all those greasy breakfast dishes. The skillet for your sausage was upright in the drainer, but not the one for the French toast, and most of the plates and juice glasses were still on the counter. Sections of the Times splayed on the table, though taking the paper out to the stack in the garage every morning was one of your neatnik obsessions. Flicking the next light switch, I could see at a glance that no one was in the dining room, living room, or den; that was the advantage of a house with no doors. Still I walked through every room. Slowly.

“Franklin?” I called. “Celia?” The sound of my own voice unnerved me. It was so small and tinny, and nothing came back.

As I advanced down the hall, I paused at Celia’s bedroom and had to force myself to walk in. It was dark. Her bed was empty. The same, in the master bedroom, the bathrooms, out on the deck. Nothing. Nobody. Where were you? Had you gone looking for me? I had a mobile. You knew the number. And why wouldn’t you have taken the truck? Was this a game? You were hiding, giggling in a closet with Celia. This of all nights you chose to play a game?

The house was empty. I felt a surging, regressive urge to call my mother.

I walked through it twice. Though I had checked the rooms before, the second time through I felt only deeper trepidation. It was as if there were someone in the house, a stranger, a burglar, and he was just out of view, stalking behind me, ducking under cabinets, clutching a cleaver. Finally, shaking, I returned to the kitchen.

The previous owners must have installed those floodlights in the back in expectation of lavish garden parties. We didn’t incline toward garden parties and rarely used the floods, but I was familiar with the switch: just to the left of the pantry, beside the sliding glass doors that opened to our banked backyard. This was where I used to stand and watch you throw a baseball with Kevin, feeling wistful, left out. I felt a little that way at that moment—left out. As if you’d held some family celebration of great sentimental significance, and of all people I hadn’t been invited. I must have kept my hand on that switch a good thirty seconds before I flipped it. If I had it to do over again, I’d have waited a few moments more. I would pay good money for every instant in my life without that image in it.

On the crest of the hill, the archery range lit up. Soon I would understand the drollery behind Kevin’s lunchtime phone call to Lamont, when he’d apparently told Robert not to bother to pick up Celia from school, since she was “unwell.” Backed against the target was Celia—standing at attention, still and trusting, as if eager to play “William Tell.”

As I wrenched the door open and flailed up the rise, my haste was irrational. Celia would wait. Her body was affixed to the target by five arrows, which held her torso like stick-pins tacking one of her crimped self-portraits to a class bulletin board. As I stumbled nearer calling her name, she winked at me, grotesquely, with her head knocked back. Though I remembered putting in her prosthesis that morning, it was missing now.

There are things we know with our whole being without ever having to actively think them, at least with that verbal self-conscious prattle that chatters on the surface of our minds. It was like that; I knew what else I would find without having to specify it to myself outright. So when, scrambling up to the archery range, I tripped over something sticking from bushes, I may have sickened, but I wasn’t surprised. I recognized the obstacle in an instant. I had bought pairs of chocolate-brown Stove brogans from Banana Republic often enough.

Oh, my beloved. I may need too badly to tell myself a story, but I’ve felt compelled to weave some thread of connection between the otherwise meaningless dishevelment of that backyard and the finest in the man I married.

With a good twenty minutes remaining before they had to leave for school, you’d let the kids go out to play. In fact, it would have encouraged you that for once the two of them were horsing around together—bonding. You dawdled through the Times, though it was the Home C-section on a Thursday, which wouldn’t entice you. So you started on the breakfast dishes. You heard a scream. I don’t doubt that you were out the sliding doors in a flash. From the bottom of the hill, you went for him. You were a robust man, even in your fifties, still skipping rope forty-five minutes a day. It would have taken a lot to stop a man like you in his tracks. And you almost made it, too—a few yards from the crest, with the arrows raining.

So here is my theory: I believe you paused. Outside on the deck, with our daughter pinioned to an archery target with an arrow through her chest, while our firstborn pivoted on his mound and sighted his own father down the shaft of his Christmas crossbow, you simply didn’t believe it. There was such a thing as a good life. It was possible to be a good dad, to put in the weekends and the picnics and the bedtime stories, and so to raise a decent, stalwart son. This was America. And you had done everything right. Ergo, this could not be happening.

So for a single, deadly moment this overweening conviction—what you wanted to see—fatally interposed itself. It is possible that your cerebrum even managed to reconfigure the image, to remix the sound track: Celia, pretty make-the-best-of-it Celia, darling look-on-the-bright-side Celia, is once more inured to her disability and tossing her fine gold hair cheerfully into the spring breeze. She isn’t screaming, she’s laughing. She’s shrieking with laughter. The only reason Kevin’s helpful girl Friday could conceivably be standing right in front of the target is to faithfully collect her brother’s spent arrows—ah, Franklin, and wouldn’t she. As for your handsome young son, he has been practicing archery for six years. He has been scrupulously instructed by well-compensated professionals, and he is nothing if not safety conscious. He would never point a loaded crossbow at another person’s head, least of all at his own father’s.

Clearly, the sunlight had played some visual trick. He is merely waving an upraised arm. He must be hoping, without saying as much—he is a teenager, after all—to apologize for lashing out at breakfast with those harsh, ugly repudiations of everything his father has tried to do for him. He is interested in how the Canon works, and he hopes you’ll explain what “f-stop” means another time. In truth he deeply admires his father’s enterprise in having seized upon such a quirky profession, one that allows such creative latitude and independence. It’s just awkward for an adolescent boy. They get competitive at this age. They want to take you on. Still the boy feels awful now, for having let fly. The fit of pique was all a lie. He treasures all those trips to Civil War battlefields, if only because war is something that only men can understand with other men, and he’s learned one heck of a lot from museums. Back in his room some nights, he takes out those autumn leaves you two collected on the grounds of Theodore Roosevelt’s ancestral home and pressed inside the Encyclopedia Britannica last year. Seeing that the colors are beginning to fade reminds him of the mortality of all things, but especially of his own father, and he cries. Cries. You will never see it; he will never tell you. But he doesn’t have to. See? The waving? He’s waving for you to bring the camera. He’s changed his mind, and with another five minutes left before he has to catch the bus, he wants you to take some photographs after all—to start the montage, Braveheart of the Palisades, for the foyer.

This masterful remake may not have lasted more than a second or two before it corrupted, as a frozen frame will blister and crenellate before a hot projection lamp. But it would have lasted just long enough for Kevin to sink his first crippling shaft—perhaps the one I found angled through your throat and protruding from the back of your neck. It must have severed an artery; around your head, under the flood lamps, the grass was black. The three other arrows—stuck in the hollow between your pectorals where I loved to rest my head, fixed fast into the fibrous muscle of your broad rope-skipping calf, and extending from the groin whose pleasures we had so recently rediscovered together—were just-to-be-on-thesafe-side touches, like a few extra stakes around the edges of a well-pitched tent.

All the same, I do wonder just how hard you struggled up that hill, really—wheezing, beginning to choke on your own blood. It wasn’t that you didn’t care for her, but you may have grasped with a glance that it was too late to save Celia. The fact she was no longer screaming was a bad sign. As for saving yourself, maybe it just wasn’t in you. Stark in the glare of the floods, sharpened by the shadow cast by the shaft in your neck, the expression on your face—it was so disappointed.