Sam was at a loss for words. She finally managed, “It’s a common name.”
“It is?” Laurens was always eager to learn more about his adopted city.
“Yes. From before the Civil War.” Sam shook her head, because she could have come up with a better lie. All that she could do now was move on. “So, I heard from UXH’s in-house people that Nippon is about to have a shake-up in their corner suites.”
Laurens hesitated slightly before changing the conversation to work. Sam listened to him run down the rumors he had heard, but her attention strayed to her computer.
She opened the New York Times website. Lucy Alexander. The shooting had taken place at Pikeville Middle School.
Sam’s middle school.
She studied the child’s face, looking for a familiar shape of the eye, a curve of the lip, that might remind her of Peter Alexander, but she found nothing. Still, Pikeville was a very small town. The odds were strong that the girl was somehow related to Sam’s former beau.
She scanned down the article for details about the shooting. An eighteen-year-old girl had brought a weapon to school. She had started shooting right before the first bell. The gun was wrested away by an unnamed teacher, a highly decorated former Marine who now taught history to teenagers.
Sam scrolled down to another photo, this one of the second victim.
Douglas Pinkman.
The phone slipped from Sam’s hand. She had to retrieve it from the floor. “I’m sorry,” she told Laurens, her voice somewhat unsteady. “Could we follow up on this tomorrow?”
Sam barely registered his consent. She could only stare at the photograph.
During her tenure at the school, Douglas Pinkman had coached both the football and track team. He had been Sam’s earliest champion, a man who believed that if she trained hard enough, pushed herself enough, she could win a scholarship to the college of her choice. Sam had known that her intellect could get her that and more, but she had been intrigued by the prospect of her body working at the same efficient levels as her mind. Running, too, was something that she really enjoyed. The open air. The sweat. The release of endorphins. The solitude.
And now, Sam was forced to use a cane on her bad days and Mr. Pinkman had been murdered outside his school office.
She scrolled down, searching for more details. Shot twice in the chest with hollow-point bullets. Pinkman’s death, anonymous sources reported, was instantaneous.
Sam clicked open the Huffington Post, knowing they would give more attention to the story than the Times. The entire front page was dedicated to the shooting. The banner read TRAGEDY IN NORTH GEORGIA. Photos of Lucy Alexander and Douglas Pinkman were placed side by side.
Sam skimmed the hyperlinks:
HERO MARINE PREFERS TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS
ATTORNEY FOR SUSPECT RELEASES STATEMENT
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN: A TIMELINE OF THE SHOOTING
PINKMAN WIFE WATCHED HUSBAND DIE
Sam did not want to see the attorney for the suspect. She clicked on the last link.
Her lips parted in surprise.
Mr. Pinkman had married Judith Heller.
What a strange world.
Sam had never met Miss Heller in person, but of course she knew the woman’s name. After Daniel Culpepper had shot Sam, after Zachariah had tried and failed to rape Charlie, Charlie had run to the Heller farm for help. While Miss Heller took care of her, the woman’s elderly father had sat on the front porch, armed to the teeth, in case one of the Culpeppers showed up before the police did.
For obvious reasons, Sam had only learned these details much later. Even during the first month of her recovery, she could not retain the sequence of events. She had vague memories of Charlie sitting on her hospital bed repeating the story of their survival over and over again because Sam’s short-term memory was a sieve. Her eyes were still bandaged. She was blind, helpless. She would reach out for Charlie’s hand, slowly identify her voice, and continually ask the same questions.
Where am I? What happened? Why isn’t Gamma here?
Each time, dozens, perhaps over one hundred times, Charlie had answered.
You are in the hospital. You were shot in the head. Gamma was murdered.
Then Sam would fall asleep, or a certain number of minutes would pass, and she would reach out for Charlie, asking her again—
Where am I? What happened? Why isn’t Gamma here?
Gamma is dead. You are alive. Everything is going to be okay.
Sam had not considered for many years the emotional consequences of her thirteen-year-old sister having to tell and retell their story. She did know that after a while, Charlie’s tears had stopped. The emotion had abated, or at least managed to conceal itself. While Charlie exhibited no reluctance to talk about the events, she had begun to relay them at a remove. Not exactly as if everything had happened to someone else, but as if she wanted to make it clear that the tragedy had lost its grip on her.
The affect came across most clearly in the trial transcripts. At various times in Sam’s life, she had read the twelve hundred fifty-eight page document as an exercise in memory. This happened to me, then this happened to me, then this is how I managed to live.
Charlie’s testimony during the prosecutor’s examination was dry, more like a reporter narrating a story. This happened to Gamma. This happened to Sam. This is what Zachariah Culpepper tried to do. This is what Miss Heller said when she opened her back door.
Fortunately, Judith Heller’s testimony served to color between some of Charlie’s stark lines. On the stand, the woman had described her shock when she’d found a blood-covered, terrified little girl standing on her porch. Charlie had been shaking so hard that at first she could not speak. When she was finally inside, finally able to form words with her mouth, inexplicably, she had asked for a bowl of ice cream.
Miss Heller had not known what to do but comply while her father called the police. Nor did she know that the ice cream would make Charlie sick. She had served two bowls before Charlie ran to the toilet. It was only through the closed bathroom door that Charlie had told Miss Heller that she thought that her mother and sister were dead.
A loud squawking distracted Sam from her thoughts.
Laurens had hung up minutes ago, but Sam was still holding the phone. She put down the receiver. Her hand lingered.
Consider the etymology of the phrase “hang up the phone.”
The Huffington Post page automatically reloaded. The Alexander family was giving a live news conference.
Sam turned the sound down low. She watched the video. A man named Rick Fahey spoke on behalf of the family. She listened to his pleas for privacy, knowing they would fall on deaf ears. Sam supposed the one silver lining of being in a coma was that after being shot, she did not have to listen to endless speculation about her case on the news.