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Part One 1988: Cheryl

I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world – spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley – is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well. What happened that morning only confirms this.

It was a glorious fall morning. The sun burned a girly pink over the mountain ranges to the west, and the city had yet to generate its daily smog blanket. Before driving to school in my little white Chevette, I went into the living room and used my father’s telescope to look down at the harbor, as smooth as mercury, and on its surface I could see the moon dimming over East Vancouver. And then I looked up into the real sky and saw the moon on the cusp of being overpowered by the sun.

My parents had already gone to work, and my brother, Chris, had left for swim team hours before. The house was quiet – not even a clock ticking – and as I opened the front door, I looked back and saw some gloves and unopened letters on the front hallway desk. Beyond them, on the living room’s gold carpet, were some discount warehouse sofas and a lamp on a side table that we never used because the light bulb always popped when we switched it on. It was lovely, all that silence and all that calm order, and I thought how lucky I was to have had a good home. And then I turned and walked outside. I was already a bit late, but I was in no hurry.

Normally I used the garage door, but today I wanted a touch of formality. I had thought that this morning would be my last truly innocent glance at my childhood home – not because of what really ended up happening, but because of another, smaller drama that was supposed to have unfolded.

I’m glad that the day was as quiet and as average as it was. The air was see-your-breath chilly, and the front lawn was crunchy with frost, as though each blade had been batter fried. The brilliant blue and black Steller’s jays were raucous and clearly up to no good on the eaves trough, and because of the frost, the leaves on the Japanese maples had been converted into stained-glass shards. The world was unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered if this is how artists go through life, with all of its sensations tickling their craniums like a peacock feather.

I was the last to park in the school’s lot. That’s always such an uneasy feeling no matter how together you think you are – being the last person there, wherever there may be.

I was carrying four large binders and some textbooks, and when I tried shutting the Chevette’s door, it wouldn’t close properly. I tried slamming it with my hip, but that didn’t work; it only made the books spray all over the pavement. But I didn’t get upset.

Inside the school, classes were already in session and the hallways were as silent as the inside of my house, and I thought to myself, What a day for silence.

I needed to go to my locker before class, and as I was working my combination lock, Jason came up from behind.

“Boo.”

“Jason – don’t do that. Why aren’t you in class?”

“I saw you parking, so I left.”

“You just walked out?”

“Forget about that, Miss Priss. Why were you being so weird on the phone last night?”

“I was being weird?”

“Jesus, Cheryl – don’t act like your airhead friends.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. You’re my wife, so act like it.”

“How should I be acting, then?”

“Cheryl, look: in God’s eyes we’re not two individuals, okay? We’re one unit now. So if you dick around with me, then you’re only dicking around with yourself.”

And Jason was right. We were married – had been for about six weeks at that point – but we were the only ones who knew it.

I was late for school because I’d wanted everyone out of the house before I used a home pregnancy test. I was quite calm about it – I was a married woman, and shame wasn’t a factor. My period was three weeks late, and facts were facts.

Instead of the downstairs bathroom I shared with my brother, I used the guest bathroom upstairs. The guest bathroom felt one notch more medical, one notch less tinged by personal history – less accusatory, to be honest. And the olive fixtures and foil wallpaper patterned with brown bamboo looked swampy and dank when compared to the test’s scientific white-and-blue box. And there’s not much more to say, except that fifteen minutes later I was officially pregnant and I was late for math class.

“Jesus, Cheryl…”

“Jason, don’t curse. You can swear, but don’t curse.”

“Pregnant?”

I was quiet.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m late for math class. Aren’t you even happy?”

A student walked by, maybe en route to see the principal.

Jason squinted like he had dust in his eyes. “Yeah – well, of course – sure I am.”

I said, “Let’s talk about it at homeroom break.”

“I can’t. I’m helping Coach do setup for the Junior A team. I promised him ages ago. Lunchtime then. In the cafeteria.”

I kissed him on his forehead. It was soft, like antlers I’d once touched on a petting zoo buck. “Okay. I’ll see you there.”

He kissed me in return and I went to math class.

I was on the yearbook staff, so I can be precise here. Delbrook Senior Secondary is a school of 1,106 students located about a five-minute walk north of the Trans-Canada Highway, up the algae-green slope of Vancouver’s North Shore. It opened in the fall of 1962, and by 1988, my senior year, its graduates numbered about thirty-four thousand. During high school, most of them were nice enough kids who’d mow lawns and baby-sit and get drunk on Friday nights and maybe wreck a car or smash a fist through a basement wall, not even knowing why they’d done it, only that it had to happen. Most of them grew up in rectangular postwar homes that by 1988 were called tear-downs by the local real estate agents. Nice lots. Nice trees and vines. Nice views.

As far as I could tell, Jason and I were the only married students ever to have attended Delbrook. It wasn’t a neighborhood that married young. It was neither religious nor irreligious, although back in eleventh-grade English class I did a tally of the twenty-six students therein: five abortions, three dope dealers, two total sluts, and one perpetual juvenile delinquent. I think that’s what softened me up for conversion: I didn’t want to inhabit that kind of moral world. Was I a snob? Was I a hypocrite? And who was I to even judge? Truth be told, I wanted everything those kids had, but I wanted it by playing the game correctly. This meant legally and religiously and – this is the part that was maybe wrong – I wanted to outsmart the world. I had, and continue to have, a nagging suspicion that I used the system simply to get what I wanted. Religion included. Does that cancel out whatever goodness I might have inside me?

Jason was right: Miss Priss.

Math class was x’s and y’s and I felt trapped inside a repeating dream, staring at these two evil little letters who tormented me with their constant need to balance and be equal with each other. They should just get married and form a new letter together and put an end to all the nonsense. And then they should have kids.

I thought about my own child-to-be as I stared out the window, turning the pages only when I heard everybody else turn theirs. I saw fleeting images of breast-feeding, prams and difficult labor, my knowledge of motherhood being confined mostly to magazines and cartoons. I ignored Lauren Hanley, two rows over, who held a note in her hand that she obviously wanted me to read. Lauren was one of the few people left from my Youth Alive! group who would still speak to me after rumors began spreading that Jason and I were making it.

Carol Schraeger passed the note my way; it was a plea from Lauren to talk during homeroom break. We did, out by her locker. I know Lauren saw this meeting as being charged with drama, and my serenity must have bothered her.

“Everyone’s talking, Cheryl. Your reputation is being tarnished. You have to do something about it.”

Lauren was probably the key blabber, but I was a married woman, so why should I care? I said, “Let people say what they want, Lauren. I take comfort in knowing that my best friends are squelching any rumors from the start, right?”

She reddened. “But everyone knows your Chevette was parked at Jason’s all weekend while his parents were away in the Okanogan.”

“So?”

“So you guys could have been doing anything in there – not that you were – but imagine what it looked like.”

Truth was, Jason and I were doing everything in there that weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left.

In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE/GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin. But all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still.

Stillness is what I have here now – wherever here is. I’m no longer a part of the world and I’m still not yet a part of what follows. I think there are others from the shooting here with me, but I can’t tell where. And for whatever it’s worth, I’m no longer pregnant, and I have no idea what that means. Where’s my baby? What happened to it? How can it just go away like that?

It’s quiet here – quiet like my parents’ house, and quiet in the way I wanted silence when writing on my binder. The only sounds I can hear are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to where I am.

I can only hear the words of these prayers and curses – not the voice of the speaker. I’d like to hear from Jason and my family, but I’m unable to sift them out.

Dear God,

Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vileness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent. Erase their memories of today.

As I’m never going to be old, I’m glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita”; pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I’d get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle – moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.

The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn’t have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch – six girls from the Youth Alive! program. We’d go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I’d stolen a blusher from the drugstore; I’d peeked at my brother’s porn stash – nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. In the end, it was simply easier to be with five people in a restaurant booth than three hundred in a cafeteria. I was antisocial at heart. And if people knew how dull our lunches were, they’d never have bothered to waste energy calling us stuck-up. So, I was surprised when I went into the cafeteria to meet Jason to find the Bunch hogging one of the cafeteria’s prime center tables. I asked, “So what’s this all about?”

Their faces seemed so – young to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I’d now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.

Jaimie Kirkland finally said, “My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee’s Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we’d go native today.”

“Everyone must be flattered.” I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique’s designated spokeswoman. “Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit cocktail from the cafeteria counter.

Dee cut in: “Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to us.” Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.

“Confess to what?” Forcing them to name the deed was fun.

“You,” said Lauren, “and Jason. Fornicating.”

I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness melting away like snow on a car’s hood. And that was when I heard the first gunshot.

Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology class. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town. I knew that Jason’s attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who’s seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.

Jason appeared to be heavily into Youth Alive!, which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic participation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason’s older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of Alive!‘s Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent’s dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into planning and preparing for the next step. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relationship was a slap on Kent’s face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.

In any event, Pastor Fields’s sermons on chastity could only chill the blood in Jason’s loins so long. So I began attending Youth Alive! meetings three times a week, singing “Kumbaya,” bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles – all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.

And I did – nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn’t ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.

The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that’s not something I’d expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle – no God being feared there. My family wasn’t so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don’t know. I’d be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it’s a different place from where my family’s headed.

My family didn’t know what to make of my conversion. It’s not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith – the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.

My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she’s-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.

Dear God,

I’m going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can’t see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.

I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.

For starters, nobody screamed. That’s maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers – part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits – military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition – and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension cables broke and a light bank fell down onto a table of food – the not-very-popular photo club and chess club table. The second guy, in sunglasses and a beret, plucked out two grade nine boys and one girl who were standing at the vending machines. These were messy shots that left a mist of blood on the ivory-colored cinder-block walls. A group of maybe ten students tried bolting for the doors, but the gunmen – gunboys, really – turned and showered them with buckshot or bullets, whatever it is that guns and rifles use.

Two of them got away cleanly and I could hear their footsteps echoing down the corridor. As for the rest of us, there was no escape route, so we clambered underneath the tables, as if in some ancient nuclear drill from the 1960s.

In the summer between grades eleven and twelve, after my conversion and after landing Jason, I had a summer job at a concession stand at Ambleside Beach. It was a dry hot summer and the two other girls I worked with were fun – kind of skinny and nutty and they mimicked the customers quite wickedly. They also didn’t go to Delbrook, so they didn’t have any history with me, which was a relief, and I felt guilty feeling this relief. Youth Alive! was concerned that my constant exposure to semiclad skin, sun and non– Youth Alive! members would make me revert to the World – as if listening to screaming babies and groping for the last purple Popsicle at the bottom of the freezer bin could be a test of faith or tempt me into secular drift. Lauren and Dee and some of the others visited me a bit too often, and I don’t think a night ever went by without returning to my car at shift’s end and finding an Alive!er eager to invite me to a barbecue or a hike or a Spirit Cruise around the harbor.

By the end of that August, Jason was going mental for me. He came into the city on weekends from his job up the coast, surveying for a mining company. A sample conversation from this period might go:

“Cheryl, God would never have made it feel so right or so good unless it was right and good.”

“Jason, could you honestly hold up your head and say to Pastor Fields or your mother or the Lord that you’d been fornicating with Cheryl Anway? Could you?”

Well, of course he couldn’t. There was only one way he could land what he wanted, and that was marriage. One weekend in my bedroom, he said we could get married after graduation. I removed his hand from near my right breast and said, “God doesn’t issue moral credit cards, Jason. He’s not like a bank. You can’t borrow now and pay later.”

“My strength – Cheryl, I’m losing it.”

“Then pray for more. God never sends you a temptation that you aren’t strong enough to overcome.”

I did want Jason but, as I’ve said, only on my own terms, which also happened to be God’s terms. I’m not sure if I used God or He used me, but the result was the same. In the end, we are judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We’re the sum of our decisions.

During none of my lunch-hour confessions, whether at the White Spot drive-in eating fries with the Bunch, or at an Alive! weekend seminar on kingdom building, did I ever once confess how much I needed Jason, in every sort of way. Even thinking of him made me drunk, and all the teenage girl stuff that came with it: bees needing flowers; wanting to dissolve like sugar into tea.

Of course, everybody else in the school was going at it like minks. Nothing was forbidden to them, so why not? It’s indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels. And while the ever-present aura of casual sex saturated the school like locker aroma, I didn’t surrender to my own instincts, though I really did have to wonder why God makes teenagers so desperate. Why could we see Archie and Betty and Veronica on dates at the malt shop, but never screwing around in Archie’s dad’s basement covered in oil stains, spit and semen? Double standard. You can’t do one without implying the other. Preachy me.

Dear Lord,

Protect our children, while they…Lord keep them as…Sorry. I can’t pray right now.

Dear God,

What’s hardest here is that I simply can’t believe this is happening. Why do You make certain kinds of events feel real, but not others? Do You have a name for this? And could You please make all of this feel real?

As I was saying, silence.

In the first few moments of the attack, I remember briefly seeing a patch of sky out the window and I remembered how crisp and clean the day was.

Then one of the boys shot his gun in that direction and stemmed the exodus. I know nothing about guns. Whatever they were, they were powerful, and when they cocked them, it sounded industrial, like a machine stamping something flat.

Under the tables we all dove – thumpa-thumpa-thump.

Don’t shoot at me – I’m not making any noise! Look! Look at How! Quiet! I’m! Being!

Shoot someone else over there! Shoot me? No! Way!

I could have stood up, shouted and caused a diversion and saved a hundred people, or organized the lifting of our table to create a shield to ram into the gunmen. But I sat there like a meek little sheep and it’s the only thing I’ve ever done that disgusts me. Silence was my sin. I sinned as I cowered and watched three pairs of ocher-colored work boots tromp about the room, toying with us as though we were bacteria under a magnifying lens.

I recognized all of the boys – working on the yearbook is good for that kind of thing. There was Mitchell Van Waters. I remembered seeing him down at the smoke hole by the parking lot with his fellow eleventh-grade gunmen, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle.

I watched Mitchell, Jeremy and Duncan walk from table to table. Take away the combat fatigues and they looked like the kid who mows your lawn or shoots hoops in the driveway next door. There was nothing physically interesting about them except that Mitchell was pretty skinny and Duncan had a small port-wine birthmark inside his hairline – I knew about this only because we’d been looking at photos as part of paste-up and layout during class.

As the three walked from table to table, they talked among themselves – most of what they said I couldn’t make out. Some tables they shot at; some they didn’t. As the boys came nearer to us, Lauren pretended to be dead, eyes open, body limp, and I wanted to smack her, but I was just mad at myself, perhaps more than anything for being afraid. It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that one up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else’s blood trickling onto their leg.

One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness. I write songs about horses; you make owl-shaped wall hangings; he combs his hair like some guy on TV; she knows the capital city of every country on earth. Inasmuch as uniqueness is an arrogant human assumption, Jason was unique, and because of this, he was lovable. To me. First off, he was terrific with voices – ones he made up and ones he mimicked. As with the girls from my summer job, I was a sucker for anyone who could imitate others. Jason with even one beer in him was better than cable TV. He used his voices the way ventriloquists use their dummies – to say things he was too shy to say himself. Whenever a situation was boring and there was no escaping it – dinner with my family, or party games organized by Pastor Fields’s wife that incorporated name tags and blindfolds – Jason went into his cat character, Mr. No, an otherwise ordinary cat who had a Nielsen TV ratings monitor box attached to his small black-and-white TV. Mr. No hated everything and he showed his displeasure by making a tiny, almost sub-audible squeaking nee-yow sound. I guess you had to be there. But Mr. No made more than a few painful hours a treat.

Jason could also wiggle his ears, and his arms were double-jointed – some of his contortions were utterly harrowing, and I’d scream for him to stop. He also bought me seventeen roses for my seventeenth birthday, and how many boys do you know who’d do that?

I was surprised when Jason did propose – in his dad’s Buick on a rainy August afternoon in the White Spot parking lot over a cheeseburger and an orange float. I was surprised first because he did it, then second because he’d concocted a secret plan that was so wild that only the deadest of souls could refuse. Basically, using money he’d stockpiled from his summer job, we were going to fly to Las Vegas. There in the car, he produced fake IDs, a bottle of Champale and the thinnest of gold rings, barely strong enough to retain its shape. He said, “A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one.”

“Fake IDs?” I asked.

“I don’t know the legal age there. They’re for backup.”

I looked, and they seemed to be convincing fakes, with our real names and everything, with just the birth dates changed. And as it turned out, the legal age was eighteen, so we did need the fakes.

Jason asked me if I wanted to elope: “No big churchy wedding or anything?”

“Jason, marriage is marriage, and if it were as simple as pushing a button on the dash of this car, I’d do it right now.”

What I didn’t go on about was the sexiness of it all. Sex – finally – plus freedom from guilt or retribution. My only concern was that Jason would develop chilly feet and blab to his buddies or Pastor Fields. I told him that blabbing would be a deal wrecker, and I made him vow, under threat-of-hell conditions, that this would be our secret. I’d also recently been reading a book of religious inspiration geared mainly to men, and I’d dog-eared the chapter that told its readers, essentially, to trust nobody. Friends are always betrayers in the end – everybody has the one person to whom they spill everything, and that special person isn’t always the obvious person you’d think. People are leaky. What kind of paranoid creep would write something like that? Well, whoever it was, it helped further my cause.

The important thing is that we were to marry in the final week of August in Las Vegas. I greased the skids at home and told my folks I was attending a hymn retreat up the coast; I told Lauren and the Alive! crew I was driving to Seattle with my family. Jason did the same thing. It was set.

Dear God,