Oh

There isn’t enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance, prevails.
—Raymond Carver

I did not know this feeling existed.

I am standing in a lane of hastily parked cars. The street is full of them, total gridlock up to a police barricade at the end of the block. I have my phone in my hand and it’s ringing.

It won’t stop ringing. It’s up to my ear. I keep hitting the same number.

She doesn’t answer. She’s not answering. Why isn’t she answering?

I think of holding her for the first time in the hospital, the little pink blanket they swaddled her in, my wife all but passed out in the room down the hall.

They take her out of the incubator, place her in my arms. She is warm and tiny and so fragile I feel like any sudden moves will make her fall apart like dandelion fluff. My heart floods with a love so full it can’t be described.

I stop calling, get down off my car’s roof. I look down the packed street. I don’t see anyone I know, no other parents I recognize. There are kids running towards me, past me, but I don’t see the one I’m looking for.

Harriet texts. She has Kevin. He wasn’t in the same area of the building.

I look up google news and get more updates. I can’t not. I need information and this is the only place providing it. The cops at the barricade won’t say anything, won’t let me through, don’t care that I’m a parent. Everyone here is a parent.

There are news crews talking to escaped students. Everyone is surprisingly calm about everything, if not visibly shaken. Their voices are fraught, tense; their hands move a lot while they talk.

I find a link, look at the news stories, consume, consume, consume. Nothing new. No information since I last checked it two minutes ago.

I already know the shooting occurred in an area of the building where Nellie has science class. But maybe she wasn’t there. I know she is usually there because I’ve picked her up right outside it at the end of the school day. But maybe she wasn’t today.

I click on another link.

There‘s a video that starts to play.

It’s taken by a kid that was inside the school.

I recognize the classroom as one of the science rooms. I’ve never seen the one Nellie has class in, not even for conferences which are held in the cafeteria, but it could very well not be Nellie’s.

It’s a Snapchat video, and there’s a little tag of text towards the bottom. It shows a bunch of kids huddled on the floor of a classroom. The lights are on and they’re all hunched over. I can’t see any faces but I don’t see Nellie, don’t recognize any of the clothes as hers.

Our fucking school is getting shot up, says the caption.

Then, the gunshots. To the right of the phone-holder. The shooter is firing through the door at another group of students across the room.

The gunshots aren’t gunshots. They’re a rapid series of bombs going off. They don’t fill the room so much as replace the room. The sound seems to shatter the air.

Smoke lingers at the ceiling. All the students freeze, paralyzed shapes. The desks stand stupidy.

With every blast, there are screams. Male and female.

The screams are not screams as we’ve been conditioned to hear screams. We hear screams that we’re used to, movie screams. Acting screams. These aren’t screams so much as involuntarily expulsions of air tearing through the larynx, the only way to express the mental anguish and stress that these particular bodies are experiencing. They are high, bright-sounding, sharp-sounding. They pierce you.

It is the sound of cornered prey. This is what humans sound like when they’re being hunted. And when they’ve been caught by hunters.

I don’t recognize any of the voices as Nellie’s, but they might as well be.

I click out of the video and hit my phone app in the lower left hand corner of the main screen. It doesn’t open. I click it. Still won’t open, my thumb isn’t hitting the screen right because my hand is shaking. I click it again.

“Come on, you motherfucker,” I snarl at it. I’m sweating and my face is wet and red. I can feel my temples pounding, twin jets of blood forced under my skin and around my skull. My heart is going a million miles an hour. I came here right from work when I heard, didn’t even tell them I was leaving. They’ll understand.

Harriet calls me again and I’m not answering. I have to talk to Nellie. I have to hear her voice.

Her phone doesn’t even ring this time, just her voicemail message, “Hi, this is Nellie, leave a message.”

We named her Eleanor, called her Nellie. Eleanor means light.

She had originally recorded an irresponsible- sounding voicemail message when she got her phone. I can’t even remember was it was now, but I’d told her she needs to record a more straightforward one if she’s going to be looking for a job, and she argued with me about it but it looks like she took the advice. I should’ve just let her be herself. What harm could it really have done?

The cops from the barricade are moving forward now through the rows of parked cars, telling us the school has been evacuated and that if we haven’t found or heard from our children yet then we should go home and they will contact us.

I don’t want to leave, but I turn and it takes me an hour to wait for the traffic to dissipate.

I continue to call Nellie and listen to her voicemail greeting multiple times. I finally talk to Harriet, who is as calmer now that she has Kevin with her. We both hold our cool for each other. Beneath the surface, we’re roiling. I talk to Kevin who tells me he didn’t see anything but heard gunshots coming from the science wing. He’s taking this extremely well, too, and I’m proud of him.

I think about Nellie when she was like ten, screaming at me because I didn’t get her the right Hunger Games book. She’d been angry because I got her the one she’d already read and she’d asked for the next one in the series. She really let me have it. Something must’ve been bothering her and that just happened to be what set her off. But she came into my room later that night and apologized tearfully and sincerely and I’d never been happier to have a daughter.

The next thing I know I’m back at home and it’s unseasonably warm, the sun’s starting to go down, and I don’t know what to do.

Harriet comes home and neither of us are freaking out but neither of us sound like ourselves either. We’re silent after we say hello and hold each other for a minute. We gather our bearings on what to do next. We have to wait. I keep calling Nellie. We take turns. I pace a lot.

“She’s going to come home any minute,” I say, calling again. Any second now, and she’ll answer her phone and tell me she lost her charger and it died. Or an unfamiliar number will come up and it’ll be her, calling from a friend’s and telling me where to come pick her up. Or the door will open and there she’ll be.

Kevin goes up to his room and then comes back downstairs, then goes back up to his room again, then comes back downstairs.

Everything is so agonizingly calm. It is a tenuous calm. A calm like the thinnest ice on a puddle after a spring morning frost, waiting for the ascending sun to evaporate it away one molecule at a time until it breaks so quietly and softly that no one ever notices.

“We would’ve heard from her, Norm,” Harriet is saying to me now. “We would’ve heard from her.”

“I know, I know,” I’m saying. “Maybe her phone died. Maybe she lost it.”

Harriet says the one thing I can’t hear right now and my calm breaks and I’m hissing at her so hard I’m slobbering.

“Don’t you say that, don’t you say that!”

I’ve never acted like this before in front of either of them. Harriet actually manages to get even quieter.

Kevin leaves the room again.

I finally admit to myself that I know something is terribly wrong. I have this horrible feeling and I can’t explain it. I’ve had it since this morning when Gary from the office next to mine rolled his chair into my office and showed me his phone and said, “I don’t mean to freak you out, man, but don’t your kids go to this school?”

I won’t admit this to myself until later, but I know it’s coming before the phone call buzzes in.

For a second, I see the unfamiliar number and I answer and I think I hear Eleanor’s voice. But it’s not her.

The voice is tired, male, middle-aged.

“Is this Norman Bernice?”

“Yes.”

“Your daughter is Eleanor Bernice?”

I think of Nellie on her bike when she was six, yelling at me because I wouldn’t let go of the seat, the training wheels lying in the driveway. I’ve got my hand on the seat and she’s got a little blue helmet on. Her brown hair is in braids.

I think of her a few weeks ago, arguing with her mother about her prom dress, shrieking in a teenage rage that she’s shaped like a grasshopper and that no one will ever love her.

I think of her this morning, taking a GoGurt on her way out, arguing with Kevin because it’s the last cherry one and he wants it and I tell them both to knock it off, you’re acting like children.

“We are children,” Nellie says. Then she’s out the door.

I can’t remember saying, “I love you.” I might have. I usually do. But I can’t remember if I did right now.

I don’t remember answering the voice, but I must have said yes, because the guy is speaking again and I’m hearing him but I’m not hearing him. I am otherwordly, somehow outside myself and shrunk deep within simultaneously. The world is very large right now and very empty. I am on a ride I do not want to be on.

Harriet is next to me and she already knows what’s going on and Kevin is in the doorway and he’s losing it, too, finally, and Harriet is making these clicking noises in her throat and I can only say one word into the phone.

“Oh.”