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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
A parent in the path of a spree killer has little to offer beyond slim protection and lessons in real life.
Oct 10, 2002 | By Friday of last week, six people had been randomly and fatally shot by a seemingly invisible spree killer. One of the victims was a woman vacuuming her car less than a mile from where I live. That day, I was pushing two carts of groceries through a supermarket when my cellphone rang. It was a close friend, a woman supposedly en route from New York to our home outside Washington.
She, her husband and their two young children were coming to visit for a tourist weekend, and I brightened at the sound of her voice. "Hey, we're in Philly," she said, "and we're sort of freaked out."
I stopped moving the baskets. "Why? What's wrong?"
There was a long pause, and then she spoke slowly, the way you address small children when you want to Make. Sure. They. Are. Listening.
"The shootings," she said, with a touch of incredulity. "It looks like your house is right in the middle of them."
Oh. That.
Our home was indeed in the midst of the tragedy that began officially the night of Oct. 2 when a 55-year-old man was shot and killed in a parking lot and became full-fledged bedlam on Thursday, Oct. 3 when five more people were killed. (That was before the killer had widened the circle of his bloody sport south to Fredericksburg, Va., and east to Bowie, Md.)
I had been riveted -- and shaken -- like everyone else I knew. The mere sight of my two sons after school on Thursday had released in me a sense of relief so profound that my boys smelled my fear. "What's wrong, Mommy?" they demanded in a tone that telegraphed they'd rather not know.
Yet a day later, I was telling my New York friend that everything was peachy, thanks. The kids were back in school (albeit under "Code Blue" restrictions to keep them locked indoors all day). Washington was humming along unremarkably when I rode the subway downtown for an appointment that morning. "We're just going about our normal business!" I chirped.
I must have resembled some turn-of-the-century British explorer stomping around the Arctic and shouting "Brilliant!" as the ice closed around my ship. My denial was as soothing and strong as Percocet after a C-section.
But that was before a 13-year-old boy was shot at his Bowie middle school Monday morning. Before his aunt, a surgical nurse, heard a gunshot seconds after dropping him off, before she rushed back, half-carried him into her car and raced him to a nearby medical center. (When does she get a presidential citation, by the way?) Before parents streamed back to Benjamin Tasker Middle School looking stunned but guiltily grateful that it wasn't their son or daughter.
As I drove to work, my husband had reached me by cellphone, his voice grim. Minutes later, inside the office, my stomach knotted as we watched live television reports of parents hustling their children away from Benjamin Tasker. The tableau was sickeningly familiar: We had seen the events of Sept. 11 unfold in front of this same TV a year ago.
Once again, those of us who live here watched in dread, working to stifle the anxiety rising in our throats. We were trying mightily to be good citizens and obey school administrators who asked that we leave our children in area schools, because they were safer there. We tried to believe that -- until the latest victim was shot at school.
Since the shootings began, my phone had rung repeatedly at work -- all women friends who are mothers. "I'm trying really hard not to swoop," said one, describing her clutching need to shut down her computer and collect her two daughters from school.
"Can you believe this?" asked another, who only recently moved here from Atlanta. Three days earlier, we had scoffed at the thought of changing our routines. But Monday morning, her voice trembled with anger and disbelief. The gunman had hurt a child, and as Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose had said, "now we're stepping over the line."
E-mails popped up on my screen from the Montgomery County Public Schools listserv, advising of one cancellation after another. No outside recess. No extracurricular activities. No field trips. No foreign language instruction after school. "Given these uncertain times" began one.
Talk about understatement.
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