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One
BREAKING: 1 DEAD, 4 INJURED IN RETAIL STORE SHOOTING
In the hospital, everything is clean, eggshell white, and the TV is stuck on local news. Onscreen, police in midnight-blue uniforms swarm the front of a fashion store. I Glam, the store’s sign reads. Yellow tape embraces the store’s broken front window display, where bald mannequins strike poses in the latest styles, innocent and oblivious to the shattered glass and emergency vehicles around them. Meanwhile, onlookers point and capture it all on phones. The news ticker reads: MAN DEAD AFTER MASS SHOOTING IN EMERYVILLE MALL.
Takes a moment for it to sink in: the gunman is the dead man, the injured are the women I heard him shoot, the retail store is the last place I visited.
I was there.
Holy shit, look at the news footage: I am there. I am standing next to my mother and sister, crying. It’s as if, for a moment, I’m the audience of my own life.
There’s no one in this room but me and my sister and a machine hooked up to her, emitting metronomic beeps. She’s in a gown and a pair of no-slip socks, dozed off and breathing heavy. Her name is written on a whiteboard, Joy Maple Lavelle. I don’t know what time it is, exactly, but the windows, curtainless, are pitch black. The whole gruesome scene floods back to me, and I sit for a moment in disbelief. This cannot be. 1 DEAD, 4 INJURED IN RETAIL STORE SHOOTING.
Yes, those are facts. But right now they seem like lies to me, because they are nothing close to the whole story.
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Two
The day is a backward eternity away. I worked my internship at Retrofit. My mother picked me up. Joy was already in the car. I climbed into the back seat of the battered Prius, shut the door, and asked Mom to turn down the music. It was Elvis. It was always Elvis. The CD’s been stuck in her car for months and her radio is broken.
“Appreciate the ride, but if I have to hear this album again, I will lose it,” I said.
In the rearview mirror, Mom gave me a long stare through her oversized sunglasses and turned up the volume.
“You are such a troll,” I told her.
She burst out laughing and turned the music off.
“Betty,” she said, “you’re too easy to torment.”
Without Elvis crooning about Kentucky rain, we could hear the tinny faraway sound of electronic drums and screaming wafting from Joy’s headphones. Joy sat shotgun, sunglasses on. Her face didn’t flicker in the side mirror. No signs of life.
“Hi, Joy,” I said.
Silence.
“Great to see you, too,” I said.
My sister is a badass. She rides a motorcycle. She plays bass guitar. She gave herself a poke-and-stick tattoo of a black heart on her wrist. She supersedes me by almost three years and an infinity of coolness.
Mom was pulled up in the loading zone of a bus stop with her hazards on, and at that moment, a car pulled next to us and honked.
“Excuse me, I don’t like to be hurried!” Mom yelled.
She peeled away from the curb in her usual way. Heads probably turned. I long ago had to stop caring if anyone stared when my mother was around, or I’d have been caring all the damn time. My mother is beautiful—and loud.
“Want to go to the mall?” Mom asked then. “I need new blouses. Apparently my business casual is too much casual, not enough business.”
“They told you that?”
“They sent out a memo about jeans today. I’m the only person on the floor who dares to wear jeans.”
After working for years in the office of my old middle school, Mom started a new job working as an executive assistant at a finance company this week. It pays better, so maybe her days of broken CD players and rent-controlled apartments are numbered.
“Does it have to be the mall?” I asked.
“Where else am I going to get clothes at 5:11 p.m. on a Thursday?” Mom said. After I responded with silence, she added, “I’ll buy you both dinner after.”
“Deal.”
At rush hour in the Bay Area, traffic was at its usual standstill. So much merging. So much honking. On one side, beyond, there were the lush green hills; on the other, the glimmering bay with its silver bridge, silhouettes of skyscrapers. We made it to Emeryville a little before six. We parked on the third floor in the garage at Bay Street, the outdoor mall that is a long, narrow lane composed of chain stores with apartments above. We took the elevator. Joy complained about the mall, and I joined in, and Mom threatened to not buy us dinner if we didn’t stop because she hates the mall too and she’d just “driven through vehicular Hades.”
Small details I remember now that everything is different:
We went into I Glam first. Mom walked around squinting at labels on pants with her reading glasses on, murmuring words like bootcut like she was learning a new language. Joy went riffling through black lace underwear. Nothing seemed off. Teenagers trying on bras over their clothes and giggling; a woman talking on her phone on speaker; some zombie-eyed employees folding leggings. I told Joy and Mom that I was going next door to the cupcake shop. I took my time. I sat and unwrapped a vanilla cupcake with salted caramel frosting and scrolled on my phone at a confetti-patterned plastic table. I took a bite and closed my eyes, the salt and sugar together a drug. I could hear the music from I Glam next door, an earworm about living in the moment, and the sound of the girl behind the register humming along.
And then popping. Snapping. Like fireworks—two, three, four. I opened my eyes. The girl behind the counter had stopped humming.
“Shit, that sound like a gun to you?” she asked.
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Three
Mom joins me in the hospital room after her exam. She’s fine, in a way, and in another way, she’ll probably never be fine again. She’s pale from shock, mascara smudged. She gets angry that the news is on, and when I tell her, gently, there is no remote, she rips the cord out of the wall. Then she collapses in my arms and cries, and I cry too, even though I don’t feel I have the same right to cry as she does. I wasn’t in the store when it happened. I didn’t see anyone get shot in front of me. I didn’t hide in the middle of a clothes rack and whisper prayers into my hands for five minutes that stretched into a nightmarish eternity.
When Mom and I pull apart, both our shoulders are wet and stained black from each other’s makeup and tears.
“I can’t believe this happened,” she keeps saying.
I nod.
“We were just shopping,” she goes on. “I was buying pants for work.”
I nod.
“And then he just—he just—came in and started shooting. He kept doing it and he didn’t stop. How did we not get shot?”
“Did I get shot?” Joy asks from the bed.
Mom and I gasp, because Joy’s awake. We rush to her side. Joy’s gaze is glassy and thick, her eyes smaller than usual. She pulls her blankets off her legs, looking for wounds.
“No, no, no,” Mom tells her. “You whacked your head trying to hide under a counter.”
Joy touches her head.
“You fell down,” Mom says. “You played dead.”
“But I didn’t get shot?” she asks.
“You don’t even have a concussion,” Mom says. “They sedated you because you were hysterical when the paramedics arrived.”
Joy knits her dark brows. “Right.”
We give her a moment of silence, leaving her with her thoughts. Her eyes flash. She starts breathing quickly. I put my hand on her arm, but she shakes it off.
“Joy,” Mom says.
“He killed himself, I remember that part,” Joy says, her voice climbing. “He was only about ten feet away from me. I tried to keep my eyes shut. I lay on the floor and I heard it happen. I opened my eyes for just a second and there was so much blood and . . . and . . . other stuff . . . and I was so happy. So happy when I saw him lying there. Because it was over.”
She puts her face in her hands, and Mom wraps her arms around her and they cry, one being, one traumatized being, and I am inept, watching them. I can’t understand what they went through because I was steps—just steps—outside of it. I dig my fingers in my palms to feel anything other than this useless ache.
“How’s your head feel?” Mom asks, pulling back and running her fingers through Joy’s black bangs.
“Who died, Mom?” Joy asks, ignoring her question, wiping her eyes. “Other than the shooter? Did everyone in there but us die?”
“I’m not sure,” Mom says. “They shuttled everyone to the hospital. I remember stretchers . . . so many stretchers . . . I don’t know.”
“On the news it said one dead and four injured,” I tell them. “Just the gunman. The gunman is the one.”
Both Joy and my mother look back at me, amazed.
“No one else died?” Mom asks. “Are you serious?”
“As far as I know,” I say.
“We’re fucking lucky,” Joy says. “There were so many bullets. We should have died.”
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Mom says, holding Joy’s head to her chest. Joy closes her eyes and her lips turn downward as she fights tears. It’s not a fight she wins.
“I’m so glad you’re both okay,” I say.
I feel dumb crying, but I guess I always feel dumb crying. I grab a box of tissues and little cups of water for them...
