Читать книгу For Alison - Andy Parker - Страница 10

The Day

I want to tell you what I was doing the day before the worst day of my life.

It was a good day, a great day even. Back when I served on the Henry County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors (I won by a single vote, so don’t let anyone tell you voting doesn’t matter), I worked to get weekend power generation at Philpott Dam, to allow kayakers to enjoy the Smith River on weekends.

I didn’t achieve that goal during my time on the board, but seven years later, during the summer of 2015, all of the gears I’d carefully put into place finally meshed. Philpott Dam, an unassuming hydroelectric dam built along the Smith River during the New Deal era, would now have weekend generation.

I’m a paddler. One of my greatest joys, even now, is to gather together some friends and family, drop a few kayaks in a river, and enjoy nature’s splendor. It’s peaceful, relaxing, and when the speed picks up on that silvery ribbon of water and you’re working to point the kayak’s nose in the right direction, operating off of your instincts and your experience, it’s exciting, too.

It’s also great for tourism, which was my main goal. Henry County is a beautiful place, ripe for tourism, and paddlers are willing to travel miles and miles to find a good river. A good river is a fast river with just enough depth to keep a kayak from scraping the bottom, and until recently, the Smith was only a good river on weekdays, since that was when Philpott Dam was generating power and pumping a few million gallons of Philpott Lake through its twin turbines. I figured that if we could get at least one day of generation on weekends, it would be a boon to our river tourism industry.

On August 25, 2015, my labors finally bore fruit and weekend generation at Philpott Dam was made official. I drove out to the dam, parked in the narrow lot along the river, and then got out to greet a few folks. I saw Craig “Rocky” Rockwell, the project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers; he’s a tall, good-natured older gentleman who always has a few sardonic quips at the ready should the need arise. We congratulated each other. He would end up retiring in a little more than a year, and I think he was glad to see at least one more positive mark on his record before he took his leave.

I saw Tola Adamson, a reporter from Channel 13, there to cover the big announcement. We said hello; she knew me because she knew Alison, a thread that continues to weave its way through my life.

I saw others, too, county officials, local politicians, American Electric Power employees, various local dignitaries of all stripes. It was a day of celebration, a day of speechifying, a day for people to line up at a podium and rattle off lists of all the folks who deserved a pat on the back for the good work that had been accomplished.

At this point, you might be thinking: that’s all well and good, but what the hell does it have to do with this book?

The answer, in a real sense, is absolutely nothing, and that’s exactly why I’m telling you about it.

When tragedy strikes—real tragedy, horrific tragedy—all the little things that you cared about prior to that moment are swept away as if by a blast from a neutron bomb, leaving only crumbling structures in its wake. Maybe you’ve got tickets to an upcoming concert you’ve been excited about, or you just bought a new designer handbag you had been scrimping and saving to afford, or you just got a promotion at work; whatever it is, when the black tidal wave of tragedy hits, everything else becomes meaningless, inert. You wonder why you cared at all.

August 25, 2015, was a day of celebration and personal victory. Less than twenty-four hours later, I would have barely been able to spell the words “weekend generation,” let alone explain why anyone should care. And a little more than twenty-four hours later, I would find myself back at the dam, my former site of triumph, attempting to shout God Himself down from the Kingdom of Heaven.

•

I’m going to tell you about the worst day of my life.

The list of disagreeable things I’d rather do would make for a book at least twice the length of this one. I realize, however, that it’s important for you to know what it was like. It’s important for you to have a taste of what I went through on the day my daughter was killed.

Make no mistake, it will be just a taste. I don’t know that a team of the finest living writers could record that day so that you would feel exactly what I felt. I can tell you about it; I can show you what happened; but I cannot truly put you in my shoes, and frankly, I wouldn’t wish that on you if I could. If I can make you feel at least a fraction of what I felt that day, even 1/100th, I’ll feel I’ve done my job.

Recalling the entire sequence of events precisely is as impossible as filling a jar with mist, but I will tell you what I remember, and I will tell you the most horrible parts I will never forget.

My wife, Barbara, woke me up a little before 7 a.m. on August 26, 2015, shortly after she received a phone call from Alison’s live-in boyfriend, WDBJ anchor Chris Hurst. Chris says he didn’t call until at least 7:15, but who can know? It was early, especially for me.

I was working from home in those days as a corporate headhunter, and I was accustomed to waking up about 8:00. I didn’t usually watch Alison’s early morning segments live; I would watch them on the internet over breakfast. I am eternally grateful that I’m not an early riser.

“There were shots fired at Alison’s location,” Barbara said, stirring me from sleep. “We don’t know what’s going on.”

I stared at the gently whirring fan blades overhead, the fog of sleep still clinging to my brain. The words made little sense, but the uncharacteristic tremor in my wife’s voice prodded me.

Shots fired? Alison was a morning news reporter an hour up the road. She wasn’t a war journalist. Why would shots be fired?

“Huh?” I said.

“Just get up,” Barbara said, leaving the room and padding down the hall toward the kitchen.

I watched the fan rotate against the backdrop of the white popcorn ceiling, watched as the blades stirred dust motes to life in the rays of sunlight streaming through the bedroom’s wooden blinds. I crawled out of bed, grabbed the T-shirt and shorts I’d left on the floor the night before, and tried to sort out this new information.

A couple of months earlier, Alison had been covering a story on a meth lab bust in Jacksonville and someone had fired a warning shot to scare off the news crew. This was probably something similar, I thought; some story the locals didn’t want covered.

But where was Alison, anyway? I rubbed the sleep from my eyes as I struggled to remember. The marina at Smith Mountain Lake? That seemed right. We’d spent a lot of summers at that marina when Alison was little, tubing and waterskiing behind the boat before retiring to the little Chinese restaurant nearby for some fried pork dumplings. The restaurant was gone, and I’d sold the boat, and since then, the marina had become a major tourist attraction replete with shopping and dining and minigolf for the kids. Why would someone at the marina fire off a warning shot? It didn’t make any sense. It was an unlikely site for a meth lab, to say the least.

I figured the easiest way to get to the bottom of this mystery was to just text Alison. Hell, she’d probably already texted me. She was good about that. Ten minutes before her first live CNN report, she’d texted me to tell me to tune in. If she flubbed a word in the middle of a live broadcast, I’d hear about it by the first commercial break. There was little question that by the time I’d slipped on my flip-flops and shuffled into the kitchen to retrieve my phone, I’d have a text message waiting for me—probably two or three.

I walked into the kitchen to find Barbara sitting in her usual roost at the terra-cotta–topped island in our kitchen. The whole house has a Southwestern-style, uncommon for our little town in Henry County. It was one of the reasons we’d picked the place when we’d moved in two decades earlier. The turquoise walls and bleached-pine ceilings reminded us of Texas, which we called home until the late 1970s.

Barbara’s coffee mug was in the sink; this was a bit of comforting normalcy. She usually woke up about 6:30 to make coffee, take a stroll in the nearby park, work through a Sudoku puzzle, and watch the videos from Alison’s morning segments.

The Sudoku book lay ignored on the kitchen island; Barbara was hunched over her iPhone, her chin-length blonde hair pulled back, working the phone’s digital keyboard with the speed and focus of a court stenographer. Her face was creased with concern behind her red-framed glasses.

She momentarily broke away from the phone’s screen to glance at me over the glasses.

“Alison’s last two hits never went up,” she said, then returned her focus to the phone.

“Huh,” I said.

When you spend half your life with someone, you learn all of their tells and cues, the subtle gestures that betray the workings of their mind. It might not surprise you to learn that of the two of us, my wife is the one more predisposed to holding her emotions close to the chest. Her eyes, however, never fail to tell the true story.

I’ve always called Barbara my “doe-eyed goddess.” Her hazel eyes are large and expressive, easy to read, a window into her heart. They were one of the first things I loved about her. They’ve been my saving grace more than once, letting me know when I crossed a line without her saying a word. Alison had those same eyes, deep and rich as chocolate, far darker than you would usually find in someone so fair and blonde. They had that same power to draw you in, and I loved them every bit as much as Barbara’s. Alison was my other doe-eyed goddess.

Barbara’s eyes revealed her true feelings that morning, and for the first time that day, I felt my heart rate kick into a higher gear.

Alison was normally on the air each weekday morning for three segments ranging from three to five minutes each. The first of those segments ran at 5:45 a.m. After her first week at WDBJ, the sleep deprivation began to get to Barbara and me, and we told Alison that, proud as we were, we’d be watching her segments on the internet when we woke up instead of catching them live. She understood completely. Of course she did.

The fact that the last two segments hadn’t dropped meant something was wrong. How wrong remained to be determined. It could be something minor, after all. The feed from the live truck had gone down a handful of times in the year and a half she’d been at WDBJ, which could delay videos for an hour or more. It was rare, but it happened.

I unplugged my phone from the wall charger and checked my messages. Alison hadn’t texted me. That was rare, too. Alison always had her phone on her because the station needed to be able to reach her at the drop of a hat. She must be busy, unable to reach her phone. In the middle of an interview, perhaps, or maybe she left her phone in the car, or maybe she dropped it in a puddle and it gave up the ghost. There were a million reasons that she might not answer. There was no sense in jumping to conclusions . . . but then Chris had called, hadn’t he? Barbara had mentioned that. And that was unusual, too, because at the time, we barely knew him. Alison and Chris had moved in together just three weeks earlier. It wasn’t yet public knowledge, because Chris was an anchor at the station and Alison was next in line for an anchor position. When she got it, he didn’t want anyone to think their relationship had been a factor.

Barbara and I knew that Alison loved Chris, and that was enough for us. We had all just celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday the previous weekend by kayaking through the Great Smoky Mountains, same as we did every year, staying in a rented cabin along the Nantahala River. He struck me as a good guy, but I didn’t think I’d ever spoken to him without Alison present. I didn’t even have his phone number, and I didn’t know he had ours. If the situation was bad enough for Chris to call . . .

I pushed the thought from my mind. A man can drive himself crazy gathering up what-ifs. I’d just give Alison a call. As I tapped the icon to open up my recently dialed numbers (knowing hers would be at or near the top of my list), I imagined exactly how the call would go. I figured I’d probably be interrupting some important meeting, probably about how the live truck had lost its connection.

“Oops,” I’d say. “Sorry, Scooter. Just your nervous dad. Heard someone was shooting, and I wanted to make sure it was just a camera.”

“Oh, Dad,” she’d reply with an exaggerated sigh, the smile and the comically rolled eyes somehow audible through the phone’s speaker.

“Just wanted to hear your voice,” I’d say.

“Don’t worry,” she’d say. “I’m busy on location. You won’t believe what happened, but I’ve gotta go, so I’ll tell you later. Loveyoubye.”

Immersed in that reverie, I pressed the “call” button. The phone rang once; twice; three, four, and five times, each unanswered ring adding to the uneasy, tingling sensation working its way across my scalp.

“Hi, you’ve reached Alison Parker with WDBJ News,” her familiar, cheery voice-mail greeting said in my ear. I ended the call.

Outside, I watched our nearly empty red plastic hummingbird feeder sway softly from the eave of the house. Beyond it, a bottle tree, an art project Barbara had assembled from some kit a while back, decorated with brightly colored wine bottles. When she bought the kit, she told me that the bottles were supposed to catch evil spirits and hold them at bay. Neither Barbara nor I are superstitious, but I sometimes wondered if those bottles ever needed to be emptied.

What the hell was going on? Alison always picked up the phone, always, even if just to tell me that she couldn’t talk.

I read once that before a tsunami hits, the tide rolls out, farther and farther, exposing sand and rocks and scuttling creatures that never see the light of day except just prior to cataclysm. The tsunami needs to gather strength, you see, to marshal every ounce of its resources before flinging itself back at the shore in a towering wave of destruction.

Right then, I could feel the tide rolling away, exposing the dark, squirming creatures to the light of day.

Barbara gripped my hand. We said nothing, attempting to hide our worst fears, neither of us able to muster any bland pleasantries about how all was well and there was probably just some unusual incident, perhaps an exploded transformer or a solar flare or some other such nonsense that had brought down both the live truck and the cell towers around Smith Mountain Lake.

I sat down at the kitchen island and opened my laptop. Barbara moved behind me and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. The laptop spun to life slowly (why do these damn things start slowing down the second you take them out of the box?) before creaking to life. I googled “Alison Parker.” Plenty of old news clips popped up, but nothing new. Nothing that told me anything. I opened a tab and went to WDBJ’s website. Nothing. Back to Google. Nothing. I opened another tab and typed in “Smith Mountain Lake.” There were sketchy reports of shots fired, but nothing concrete, nothing useful, nothing that answered any questions. I navigated between the three tabs, compulsively clicking the reload button, the minutes ticking away.

My ringtone for Alison was Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Surely the phone would ring any minute now, Van the Man’s tinny voice echoing off the turquoise walls. I conjured an image in my mind of Alison picking up the phone, her eyes widening in mild surprise at the missed calls she had received, tapping the numbers to reply in order of importance. I knew I’d be the first one she called. I willed the phone to ring.

“I’m calling Lane,” I said.

Lane Perry is Henry County’s sheriff. I’d known him for years, back since I was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2003. He’s a good guy, a tall, plainspoken man with a crew cut so perpetually close-cropped that it probably requires daily maintenance. If Lane knew anything, I knew he would tell me.

Lane answered his cell immediately. He said he was sorry to report that he didn’t know much more than I did. He had also heard that something happened up at the marina, and he was reaching out to his colleagues in Franklin County to see what he could learn. He promised to call me back as soon as he heard anything.

As I got off the phone with Lane, I heard the tail end of Barbara’s phone conversation. She had been calling area hospitals, but no one named Alison Parker had been admitted, and they hadn’t heard anything about a shooting.

Within minutes, my phone rang; not “Brown-Eyed Girl,” but a generic ringtone. Lane Perry.

“They said there has been a shooting at the marina,” Lane said, “but they think the news crew is OK. I’ll let you know just as soon as I hear anything else.”

“That’s encouraging,” I said weakly, and ended the call.

I thought about grabbing my keys and driving to the marina, but Smith Mountain Lake was at least an hour’s drive away, better than half of it down a long, twisting two-lane road with intermittent cell service. What if Lane called back with news, or Alison called to tell me all was well, that she had just misplaced her phone about the same time a car had coincidentally backfired nearby? I was terrified to miss a phone call, so I stayed at the kitchen island with Barbara.

We sat there in silence for the most part, looking out the window at the hummingbird feeder, the bottle tree, the middle distance beyond. I’d occasionally refresh my tabs on the browser; there were no updates.

I couldn’t tell you the exact minute that we began to lose hope, but it happened sometime after that second phone call with Lane.

Years ago I read a story—I can’t remember where—about twin brothers in Kansas, or maybe Nebraska, one of those perfectly flat Midwestern states. They were both power company linemen, and one day one of the brothers touched the wrong wire and got zapped, dying instantly. Fifty miles away, his brother was in a work truck with a coworker. He pulled over and stopped the truck.

“Oh God,” he said, sobbing, “my brother is dead.”

As the story goes, they checked the times, and sure enough, he called it to the minute. He just knew.

Maybe that story is bullshit. It sure sounds like it. Or maybe there’s something to it. Maybe close family—twin brothers, or parents and their children—have some sort of deeper connection, some quantum physics thing that science doesn’t yet understand, an invisible umbilicus that connects us no matter how far apart we travel.

I don’t know. But I do know that as Barbara and I sat at our kitchen island, the morning sun pouring through the windows, filtering different hues by those wildly ineffective evil-capturing glass bottles outside, we began to realize that our daughter was dead. It wasn’t something we ever would have voiced. I don’t know that we even realized it on a rational level. But on some subconscious wavelength, we knew it to be true.

We waited for the call.

•

I always had a premonition that Alison would die young.

Some would probably chalk that statement up to confirmation bias; the death of a child is every parent’s greatest fear, after all.

Some might also blame it on intrusive thoughts. They say that a lot of new mothers end up going to psychologists for that, convinced they’re psychotic. They tell the doctor that they were sitting in the lovingly assembled nursery bedecked with stuffed animals, stencils of the ABCs on the walls, their infant nursing peacefully at their breast, when they suddenly had a mad thought: What if I took my tiny, fragile, defenseless child and threw it against the wall as hard as I could?

That is an intrusive thought, perhaps the worst one. But the psychologists assure the new mothers that they wouldn’t act on that impulse; it is simply human nature to imagine the worst things possible, the things that would utterly destroy us, and replay them in our minds like a looped filmstrip. The brain can be infinitely cruel.

For me, though, it never felt like an intrusive thought, and it never felt like confirmation bias. This was not standard-issue parental anxiety; it was disturbingly specific.

For one thing, Alison drove like a bat out of hell and it scared the living shit out of me. Barbara and I would white-knuckle our way through rides with Alison, instinctively pumping the imaginary passenger-side brake pedal as she streaked through curves.

I was afraid she would die in a car crash, but my imagination went far beyond that. I would imagine the scene of the crash, the twisted wreckage, the guttering flames on the asphalt from the spilled gasoline. I’d imagine having to identify her body. I’d imagine gruesome, unspeakable images of my child’s death, and I wouldn’t wish that on any other human being. To be clear, I wouldn’t wish death on anyone, but I wouldn’t even wish those mangled images my mind had conjured on another human being. For most of Alison’s life, my imagination was a taped-off crime scene.

A car crash was the reigning fear, just because it seemed so eminently possible, plausible even. But my imagination wasn’t limited to car crashes. I saw malevolent shadows at her periphery wherever she went.

I never imagined a shooting, though, not even in my wildest fears. Alison was in elementary school when the Columbine shooting occurred, in high school when the massacre at Virginia Tech took place, and then there had been Sandy Hook, Charleston, and all the others. So many others. For whatever reason, it had never even crossed my mind that Alison would die by someone’s hand. Even as I compulsively imagined fiery car wrecks, maybe a shooting was just too terrible to even consider.

•

My phone rang a little before 8 a.m. It was Greg Baldwin, WDBJ’s assistant news producer. I answered.

“Mr. Parker, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t even imagine . . .”

I don’t remember what else he said, or what I said, or even if I said anything at all. The last thing I remember is my vision narrowing to a point, blackness swallowing me up on all sides.

Barbara says that I gasped and crumpled to the floor, one hand stupidly clutching the handle on the oven door. I believe her, but I don’t recall it.

I do remember sitting on the floor, Barbara holding me and me holding her, because of course she knew without a word passing between us. I remember blackness, the absence of light, the absence of everything. Whatever essence I had, whatever life force or soul, drained out of my body, from the crown of my head down the chest, gut, and limbs, down into some yawning abyss beneath me. Gone, never to be refilled.

I couldn’t breathe. I looked at Barbara, my throat closed up, both our eyes pinched, mouths drawn as if to cry. But we couldn’t, not then. That would come later. But in that moment, the shock was too great, like some horror so frightening that you can’t even scream, you can only stand there mutely, waiting for the end.

I pinched myself at some point, because maybe this was a dream. Yes, there was something to latch onto, a dream, the worst I’d ever had to be sure, but a dream nonetheless, and now it was time to wake up, and when I finally did wake up I would tell everyone about it, what a hideous nightmare, the worst I’d ever had or ever hope to have. Maybe in time I would laugh about it, Alison would laugh about it too; we would laugh about it together because it was just so crazy and she would suggest that I probably shouldn’t eat leftover pizza right before bed and I would say, You’ve got that right, lesson learned, Scooter; I’m just glad that wasn’t real, thank Christ that wasn’t real.

I would call Alison, that’s what I would do, I would call her up and she would answer, just like always, because she’s so good about that, and she’d tell us a wild story about that car backfiring or that transformer blowing up, and Barbara and I would hop in the car to drive to Roanoke, and there she would be, just like always, and Barbara and I would hug her. We would squeeze her so tight that she would joke that she was the one who couldn’t breathe, and we would press our faces into her waves of shoulder-length blonde hair, and we’d smell that hairspray she loved that smelled like roses, and we would never let her go, never, and she would understand completely, she was always understanding, and everything would be normal again because nothing had happened at all, really, it was all just a bad dream.

I sucked in a ragged breath and held my wife, and she held me, and we sat there on the kitchen floor.

It didn’t feel real then. It wouldn’t feel real for days, weeks, months. Some mornings, when I first wake up and my brain is still winding itself up to full consciousness, it still doesn’t feel real.

My daughter, my Scooter, was dead. My treasure was stolen. My world was obliterated; its carefully assembled parts, pieced together across a lifetime, picked up by the hand of a cruel, capricious God and dashed to the floor.

I was numb then, but that numbness would fade throughout the day, replaced by new emotions that made me yearn for the numbness to return.

I don’t know how long Barbara and I held each other in the kitchen. I don’t know how long we stared out at that hummingbird feeder. I don’t know who spoke first or what was said. There’s a lot about that day—The Day, as I’ve taken to calling it—that I’ll probably never know. Some of it I don’t want to know. Eventually, though, we decided we needed to tell our families. Part of me didn’t want to. Part of me, I think, felt that it if we kept it to ourselves, it would be like it had never happened.

I knew we didn’t have a choice, though. I’d gotten the call and I was fairly certain I wasn’t asleep; I’d pinched myself, just to be sure. Barbara knew about it now, too, and I didn’t think she was asleep. What were the odds that we’d both had the same dream at the same time and emerged into that state somewhere between dreaming and waking where you’re not sure which is which and you don’t know how much of what you remember has actually happened and how much of it was all in your head? I don’t know if that even makes sense. Nothing made sense. It couldn’t be real.

If it was real, we knew the shooting would soon hit the news and we wanted our families to hear it from us first. While Barbara called her sister in Sherman, an hour north of Dallas, I called Drew. As I mentioned, Drew has Asperger’s, and he doesn’t register emotion in the same way that you or I would. That call elicited as much shock and sorrow as I’ve ever heard from him.

I called my sister Jane Ann back in Austin, and I asked her to tell our mother, still living on her own at ninety-one. It felt strange to speak the words, to say something I knew was true—that Alison was dead—but still couldn’t bring myself to believe. It was like I had found myself in the Twilight Zone, some parallel dimension where the sun didn’t shine and water flowed uphill. I hadn’t moved more than three feet from the kitchen island all morning.

As we were spreading the news, I got a call from someone telling me to meet at a staging area near the marina at 10:00 a.m. The words barely registered, but I made a mental note. Then the phone rang again. I didn’t know the number, but I picked it up anyway. I would have answered it on any other day without a second thought. Maybe, I thought, if I answered like I usually would, things would finally return to normal.

“Hey, man,” a voice said. It was Trey Weir, a client of mine from a bank in Charlotte. Nothing felt different yet, I thought, but give it time. “I need you to find me a new portfolio manager.”

I said nothing. Still waiting. For what, I honestly didn’t know.

“Andy?”

“Trey,” I said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to help you. My daughter’s just been killed.”

It was probably unfair of me to dump that on him—he couldn’t have known, but what was I supposed to say? What was he supposed to say? He managed to stammer, “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine.”

I hung up. I might have thanked him first.

Looking back, I see a weird coincidence and wonder what to make of it. Just the year before, while working on a similar search, I sent a résumé to Trey and he passed on it. I emailed the candidate and told him the position was “not a good fit” but that I would keep an eye out for him for future opportunities. A few days later, Trey called to ask me if I’d heard the news about this banker. I hadn’t. Apparently, he’d left a long, rambling message on Trey’s voice mail and then shot himself. A forty-year-old with a wife and two young kids.

“Andy, you’ve got to start letting your candidates down a little easier,” he said.

Of all of the phone calls I might have gotten at that particular moment, why was it Trey on the other end of the line? Was there some meaning in it, some cosmic message that was lost on me?

I might have thought that sharing our grief would somehow lighten our load, distribute the burden, but instead it seemed to multiply, the words landing with dull thuds, disbelief, then detonation. Every phone call made me feel worse. I’m sure it was no picnic to be on the receiving end either.

Soon it was time to go to the staging area. Staging for what? I wondered. I didn’t know what we were supposed to do when we got there, but I never considered not going. Maybe I should have. With some effort I finally abandoned my post in the kitchen. It was much lighter in the bedroom now. The fan still whirred, the air purifier still hummed, the blinds were still drawn, but the window now lay in full sun.

This is where I was, I thought, when she died. If I go back to bed, will she be alive again?

My arms and legs felt heavy and numb as I went into the closet to change. I grabbed a polo shirt and khaki shorts, the first things I saw that looked reasonably presentable, feeling all the while like a condemned man preparing to walk down death row. In my mind I could clearly see the weather-beaten row of wooden planking at the marina leading down to the water, no doubt glistening in the late August sun. Death row, I thought.

It should have been me. Why her and not me? I’d have given anything to trade places with her. I imagined Alison lying on that planking. I didn’t want to, but that’s how intrusive thoughts work.

For weeks afterward, every time I stopped for even a moment, I found myself imagining her death. At the same time, I genuinely felt that if I saw it, if I ever saw the video I’d learned there was of it, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I wouldn’t necessarily die. I would just end. I would cease to be.

They say that sharks swim even while they’re asleep, because if they stop swimming, the water stops flowing over their gills and they drown. Like a shark, I couldn’t stop. Even then, even on the day Alison was killed, I knew that I needed to channel all of the emotions coursing through my veins into something bigger than myself. I needed to pick a fight. It didn’t really matter with whom. It was the only thing I could think to do, the only way I thought I’d be able to survive.

And I needed to survive. I needed to do it for Alison. If she was really gone, then her death had to mean something. Then and there, standing at the closet and picking out a polo shirt, I vowed I would make her death mean something.

Barbara must have been changing right alongside me, but I don’t remember it. The next thing I knew, we were sitting in our new charcoal­-gray Honda CR-V heading north on Route 220 toward Roanoke, Barbara with her hair pulled back under a khaki Nantahala Outdoor Center ball cap the way she always did when she wanted to look presentable but didn’t have the time or energy to make a big show of it.

The staging area was about forty-five minutes away. For the first half hour it was virtually silent inside the car. We didn’t turn on the radio, didn’t play any music, didn’t say a word. There was no sound aside from the wind whipping past the windows and the tires on the road. Route 220 winds through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the road surrounded on either side by a dense wall of evergreen trees. At the top of a hill we rounded a bend and the landscape opened up in front of us. From the crest of the ridge, the rolling wooded hills lay spread before us under a deep blue sky, the sun shining through fluffy white clouds. The scene was picture-perfect, like something off of a postcard. Scenes like that are the reason people move to Virginia, why the colonials settled here in the first place, why the Confederates fought and died over the land. Barbara and I had raised our family here because we loved this land too. As I stared out into that ethereal blue, I realized that that’s where Alison was now. She was no longer on this earth. Her soul was out mingling somewhere in the vast expanse before me. And in that moment, the dam burst. Feeling finally returned to my body. I wept uncontrollably for the remainder of the drive.

For the first five minutes or so, Barbara reached over and held my right hand while I drove with my left. Then the tears picked up and I needed to wipe my eyes, so she moved her hand to my knee. All morning I had felt numb. Now as I felt pressed back into myself, I felt a heaviness settling over me like an astronaut might feel while being launched into a brave new world. Barbara asked a few times if she needed to drive, but I was not going to pull over. I couldn’t stop.

Barbara has always been my rock. Even in the depths of her unfathomable sorrow, her incredible pain, she was stoic. She did not weep. In contrast, I was a wreck. All I could think about was how Alison was gone and I had failed her. I hadn’t been there to protect her when she had needed me most. Certainly, there had been no God to protect her—as T. C. Boyle wrote: “We are powerless. We are bereft. And the gods—all the gods of all the ages combined—are nothing but a rumor.”

I wondered what she had thought about at the end, whether she had thought of me, had wished for me, had called for me. I felt like I was going to throw up, simply erupt like a volcano, but I wasn’t sure whether I was about to spew grief or sadness or stomach bile or red-hot molten rage or some combination. I wished again that I could have been there for her, that I could have gone in her place. Had any sort of supernatural being appeared to make the offer, “Devil and Daniel Webster”-style, I would have gone at a moment’s notice.

I still would, if anyone’s listening.

The staging area turned out to be a small church parking lot cordoned off and monitored by a middle-aged officer sporting a khaki sheriff’s uniform and a crew cut, squinting behind aviator glasses in the glare of the late summer sun. He might have been a dad himself. He didn’t know us, though, and when he asked who we were, it set me off.

“We’re Alison’s parents, goddammit!”

I regretted it as soon as the words left my mouth. He didn’t know any better. He was just doing his job.

It was my first—but sure as hell not my last—angry outburst since it happened, even as I was still having a hard time saying what “it” was, even just to myself. It was only 10 a.m., but it was already oppressively hot. I could feel the heat rolling in through the open car window and rising into my face. I imagined one of those elementary school volcano diagrams, the lava merely a surface manifestation of deeper turmoil below the surface, turmoil touched off by a tectonic shift that threatened to topple all structures and all lives on this suddenly unstable terrain; lava that would rise and explode to incinerate everything it touched, buildings and bridges alike, leaving nothing but ash. Just like the diagrams, I felt the burning lava rise in my throat, molten anger that erupted from me in the form of vicious words I had little control over.

The officer winced, took a step back, put his hand to his mouth as if to protect his face. Chagrined, he apologized and waved us into the lot. We quickly spotted Mike Bell, the program, promotions, and operations director at WDBJ. I had met Mike the previous spring at the Franklin County Moonshine Festival. Barbara and I had met Alison and Chris there and they’d introduced us to Mike. His wife, Nancy, worked in the Henry County school system and Barbara knew her quite well. Mike was a kindly, professorial man with a salt-and-pepper vandyke beard, a shock of unruly hair more heavily salted than peppered, and dark-tinted glasses. He had a dry wit and habitually carried his mouth in a slight downturn while still managing to be warm and welcoming. What I noticed first, though, was his cane: he had just had his knee replaced. I was walking with a cane, too, and would soon be heading in for surgery of my own. We became fast friends and remain close to this day.

There were no smiles that morning in the church parking lot, the sun beating down on the blacktop, heat rising up beneath our feet. I had tried to wipe away my tears before exiting the car, but when Mike and I embraced, I lost it again. He was crying too. To tell the truth, it looked like he had just been to hell and back. I found out later that Mike, a former firefighter, had been asked to identify Alison and Adam’s bodies. He later told me it was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do. I know it will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Mike lost a foster daughter to gun violence. He knew what we were going through. Because he knew our pain so well, he still has post-­traumatic flashbacks to that miserable morning, episodes that contributed to the dissolution of his marriage. Despite all of the morbid images that had been flooding my mind, I hadn’t even thought about identifying Alison’s body. I don’t think I could have done it. I don’t ever want to know what Mike saw that day, and I’m grateful he was there to do it for me.

Mike told us that the third victim, the interviewee—a woman named Vicki Gardner, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce—had survived the shooting and was in emergency surgery. Then he dropped the bombshell.

“We think we know who the shooter was,” he said.

The suspected shooter was a former reporter at the station, he said, a man by the name of Bryce Williams who had been fired almost two years earlier. That didn’t make sense to me. A former employee of the station? Everyone loved Alison and Alison loved everyone. What brought this on? Why would he shoot his old coworkers? Why Alison?

Mike shrugged, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “We really don’t know,” he said.

“Mike,” I said, my arm wrapped around Barbara’s shoulder to support myself as much as her, “I just have to know if she suffered. Please tell me she didn’t suffer.”

He assured me she did not.

For a long moment none of us said anything; we just stood taking in the horror and the heartbreak in one another's faces. Cars went whizzing by on the road in front of the church, off to who knows where, the people inside minding their own business as usual. Couldn’t they feel it? Didn’t they know what had happened here, down by the water just over that rise? How could they carry on as if nothing had happened?

The chief deputy of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, a barrel-­chested, no-nonsense sort of man, snapped me back to attention. I hadn’t even noticed his approach until he was right in front of me. He stood at least six-foot-four, and in a commanding voice, he confirmed that they had a suspect and were working on tracking him down. I asked what we needed to do next, and he said we should go home and wait for further information.

“When you catch this guy,” I said, struggling ineffectually to contain the rage in my voice, “I want a few minutes alone with him.”

“I understand, Mr. Parker,” the deputy said. “I wish I could.”

I have no doubt he meant it.

In that moment, all of my anger was directed toward the shooter, about whom I knew almost nothing. If the police take him alive, I thought to myself, I’ll kill him. I will find a way to get to him and then I’ll make him watch home movies of the lives he stole. I’ll make him live the moment when my little Scooter, all of six years old, wearing pigtails and overalls and missing a front tooth, got so scared by the special effects at Universal Studios’s brand-new Twister attraction that she jumped straight up into my arms and buried her head in my chest, eyes wide as saucers. It was always one of my favorite memories of her. It still is, actually, and even as I write these words, the page is swimming and I can feel the old familiar lump rising up in my throat. I used to tell that story over and over again and Alison would always put up a pro forma protest, but secretly she loved it. That was the moment I became her protector, and it was a lifetime appointment. If she ever needed me, she knew that all she had to do was say the word and I’d come running.

Except when I didn’t. I wasn’t there for her this morning. I didn’t know she needed me until it was too late. I didn’t know how I could possibly live with the shame, the incredible gut-wrenching guilt that wracked my insides, the barely contained rage bubbling just beneath it.

When I got my hands on the shooter, I decided, I would show him the pictures of that family vacation and then I would end him. An eye for an eye. At that moment, I didn’t care if the whole world ended up blind. There was nothing left I wanted to see. I was so focused on catching the shooter and bringing him to justice that I never imagined what we would ultimately learn about him, or the heartache it would bring.

I was the same sobbing mess on the way home. Somehow we made it back in one piece, and at home we found our friends Lynn and Noel Ward waiting for us (no relation to Adam). I don’t know if Lynn called Barbara or Barbara called Lynn. Maybe the Wards just heard the news and came right over, no questions asked. Barbara and Lynn had worked together for years at Piedmont Arts, the center of the social scene in small-town Martinsville, and they had been our best friends for most of the nearly twenty years we’d lived in town. Lynn looks like a made-to-order grandmother straight out of a holiday catalog. She’s almost always smiling a big warm smile, and she has a cute button nose in the middle of a round face framed by wavy gray hair. Noel, with his square jaw, asymmetrical nose, and short, wavy gray hair, may have looked like an aging prizefighter but was actually an accountant who had done well enough with a local manufactured-home company that he had already retired. Barbara and I had spent quite a few enjoyable weekends with the Wards at their beach house.

That day wasn’t a social visit—it was one of the first times I had ever seen Lynn without a smile—but I don’t know what we would have done without them. The house felt stale, sterile. The weight of our grief slowly filled each room like a water balloon, pressing harder and harder against us the more it inflated. Lynn had brought over a card table that she set up in the center of the tiled living room floor while Noel went out for coolers, ice, drinks, cups, paper plates, plastic utensils, a guest book, and all the other items that you inexplicably need when a life ends. He lined the items up on the kitchen island as soon as he returned, while Lynn started answering the phone and receiving the visitors who showed up at the front door unannounced. She directed traffic with quiet efficiency and organized meal deliveries for the coming days. According to the guest book, that first afternoon there was chicken salad and pimento cheese, followed in the next few days by barbeque and baked spaghetti and banana pudding, all manner of casseroles, and at some point, a whole tray of tacos and enchiladas donated by the local Mexican restaurant.

I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember eating anything that entire day—perhaps a spoonful here and there, but I certainly never sat down with a plate. I wasn’t hungry. For almost a week, the very idea of food made me ill. I lost five pounds before September 1 rolled around. The Lose-a-Daughter Diet Plan is damned effective, but the sales numbers are abysmal.

Lynn and Noel took care of many of the immediate practical concerns, which freed us up to do other things. Barbara, meanwhile, had totally bought into Barbara Kingsolver’s theory of grief, supporting the importance of staying busy: she moved fluidly from one task to the next without ever stopping long enough to let herself feel the pain I could see in her eyes. She sat down at the island—the same spot where we’d held vigil just hours earlier, to no avail—and called the funeral home to arrange a venue for Alison’s memorial service. I still don’t know how she made that call. The very idea of “Alison’s memorial service” would have been blasphemous if spoken aloud not even eight hours earlier. Barbara did it, though, and the moment she ended the call with the funeral home, she was back on the phone, this time with Alison’s alma mater, JMU, to set up a scholarship fund in her honor.

I look back now on everything Barbara did that afternoon and I can’t help but shake my head in amazement. She tells me that she did those things simply because they had to be done. Women are stronger, she says, and that was her job. Maybe she’s right. I once asked her if she resented me for not helping. Of course not, she said. She knew I wasn’t ready. We have different strengths, she said, and we divided the labor of our grief between us in the same way we split the housework: she does the dusting, I mop the floors.

It was comforting to see how many people felt compelled to come by, how many people loved Alison, but I was in no way up to entertaining them. They mostly left me alone. No one really knew what to say, other than “I can’t even imagine.” My part would come later.

On that first afternoon, unsure what else to do, I sat down in the kitchen, mostly oblivious to the chaos bustling around me, and I looked out at the bird feeder. It was getting low. I thought about going out to refill it, just to have something to do, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and read the CNN update:

POLICE: VESTER FLANAGAN KILLS SELF AFTER ON-AIR SLAYINGS

Vester Flanagan? I thought his name was Bryce Williams? Who the fuck is Vester Flanagan? My pulse racing, I skimmed the story: just before 11:30 a.m., Virginia State Police spotted the shooter’s car heading east on I-66, almost 170 miles away from the marina, and attempted to pull him over. Instead of stopping, he sped up and led police on a high-speed chase down the freeway until he crashed into an embankment along the side of the road. When officers approached the vehicle, they found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

It’s difficult to explain what I felt in that moment. I certainly didn’t mourn him. I obviously wasn’t sad that the world had lost him, but I also didn’t take any pleasure in his death. Mostly I felt the loss of a sense of purpose: he had killed himself before being brought to justice. There would be no arraignments, no trials, no tear-filled testimony, the shooter in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit at a solid oak table, Barbara and I sitting day after day with our arms around each other in the front row of the gallery, staring daggers into the shooter and choking back tears. To be clear, I didn’t want any of those things, but at least they would have given me a reason to get up in the morning. I felt, if anything, somehow emptier than before. I didn’t mourn the shooter, but I did mourn my loss of purpose.

As I stared at my phone, my head throbbing, my stomach in free fall, I flailed about for a new cause, a new reason to keep on living. There had to be justice for Alison. She was too special and meant far too much to me for her to fall victim to a senseless tragedy, to be just another statistic. Her life had meant something. I vowed that her death would mean something too. There would be justice for Alison yet.

Thumbing quickly through the rest of the story, I felt my stomach lurch before the words mentally registered: my daughter’s killing was recorded on video. Not just the interrupted news footage, which I knew existed but had no intention of ever seeing. The killer himself had taped the whole thing. He’d worn a GoPro camera mounted on his forehead. He’d shot three people in cold blood and then unloaded six or seven bullets into two lifeless bodies. Then he’d calmly walked back to his car and uploaded the footage to Facebook. On Twitter he added, “I filmed the shooting see Facebook.”

As if it wasn’t bad enough that my daughter, my vivacious, beautiful, award-winning daughter, had been murdered this morning.

Live footage of my daughter’s murder was on fucking Facebook.

No, this couldn’t be a nightmare. This was far, far worse than anything I ever could have imagined, because I didn’t have to imagine it. It was right there in front of my face, the little gray triangle pointing directly toward the moment at which Alison’s life was snuffed out.

This time I felt sure I was going to throw up. I stood up abruptly, my chair skittering across the linoleum, and quick-stepped my way to the bedroom.

I’ve been asked about that moment more times than I can begin to count. Yes, I was sickened, and yes, I was saddened, but those words aren’t strong enough. No words are strong enough. This was a whole new level of violation. It was like some medieval execution, having your beating heart torn out and shown to you as you die.

As every parent knows, having a child is the best and the worst thing that can ever happen to you, the source of your highest highs and lowest lows, your greatest joys and your deepest sorrows. When you have a kid, you’re no longer just wearing your heart on your sleeve. You’re wiping her nose and tying her shoes and walking her to the school bus in the morning. Alison was my beating heart, and this son of a bitch wanted me to watch it stop beating in real time.

Never.

I have never seen that video, and I will never see that video. More than once I have exploded at people who tried to show it to me. Why? Why would anyone assume I had seen it, and more than that, why would anyone assume I want to see it? Isn’t it enough that my daughter died? Do I really need to watch it happen on live TV? Isn’t it enough for me to know that it’s floating around out there on the internet for any sick fuck who wants to watch it? Who would want to, anyway? What kind of cruel, ghoulish rubbernecker would want to watch my daughter die?

I slammed the bedroom door and collapsed onto our unmade bed. The room began to spin. My daughter, murdered on live TV, the video available for all the world to see. It truly was worse than my worst nightmare, the perfect tragedy for the digital age. Shakespeare couldn’t make this up. Already I felt wounded by all the unseen eyes gawking at the electric spectacle of her death, and I lay there listening to the muffled conversations in the kitchen, staring at the motes of dust aloft in the long shafts of sunlight, wondering if I could just go to sleep forever.

Why had this happened?

I had so many questions. I had to finish reading the article. Still flat on my back, the thin green blanket rumpled beneath me where I had thrown it off to get dressed earlier that morning, seemingly a lifetime ago, I curled one hand toward my face and unlocked my phone. Details were still coming in, the article said, and they would for days afterward. The biggest bombshells were yet to come, but what was known already was plenty explosive. Not two hours after the shooting, ABC News had received a twenty-three-page fax: “Suicide Note For Friends & Family By Bryce Williams (legal name: Vester Lee Flanagan II).” He’d gotten the fax number a few weeks earlier when he called the network wanting to “pitch a story.” He never said what the story was.

I was wracked with a new wave of agony roiling in my gut, but still I couldn’t stop reading. According to the article, the shooter alleged that he had been fired from WDBJ because of racial discrimination and sexual harassment, which he said had steadily fueled his anger. The final straw, however, came when he claimed that Jehovah appeared to him two months earlier, right after the Charleston church shooting, and told him to act. He put down a deposit on a gun two days later.

The murder weapon.

This guy’s fucking nuts, I thought, and he purchased his gun legally.

In his fax he professed admiration for the Columbine shooters and the Virginia Tech gunman. But he wrote such vitriol about the Charleston shooter that CNN felt compelled to redact every other word: “As for Dylann Roof? You [deleted]! You want a race war [deleted]? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE [deleted]!!!”

I shook my head. This guy was seriously messed up. He had needed real help. Part of the crime, I thought, was that instead of help, he was given a gun. This was the obvious outcome of handing a gun to a lunatic like him. The fault didn’t lie with gun owners, by and large, and it didn’t lie with gun sellers or gun manufacturers. The fault was with those who wanted to make guns available to anyone with as few restrictions as possible. The fault was with the gun lobby and their paid-for politicians.

How many shootings do we have to witness before we finally do something substantial to stop them? I had seen the president cry on national television, for God’s sake, and I knew those tears were real. I knew how President Obama felt about Charleston and Sandy Hook, and as I lay in bed, clutching my phone, my world spinning, I wondered why more people didn’t stand up, didn’t pressure their legislators to finally do something about the endless shootings, didn’t push to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people, to provide at least some half-hearted funding for mental health. I feared it was simply because they don’t know what it feels like to lose a child. They’re right; they can’t even imagine. I felt another eruption building.

My phone rang.

“Mr. Parker, this is Terry McAuliffe.” The governor of Virginia. In spite of my anger, I couldn’t help but be impressed. “I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter. I can’t even imagine what you and your family must be going through right now.”

Governor McAuliffe is a consummate politician with a perfect politician’s voice: smooth, confident, genuine, forceful enough to get what he wants, but polished enough that you wouldn’t want to resist anyway. We talked for about five minutes, me pacing in the half-light of the bedroom, the purifier humming, the fan blowing cool air across my face, until he asked what he could do to help. I told him I was not going to let my daughter die in vain. I told him I was coming after the NRA, any politicians who wouldn’t budge on gun control, and anyone who stood in my way.

“Andy, I’m right there with you,” he said. And he was.

When I hung up with the governor it was almost 2:00 p.m. and the emails from the news networks were rolling in. Just the day before, when I wanted to trumpet my success at the dam, none of the national shows would have given me the time of day. Today everyone wanted me. They were all clamoring for me to be on their show, to tell my story—Alison’s story—on their air.

And the funny thing is, I didn’t really want to talk to anyone. What was I supposed to do? Go on a press tour because my daughter is dead? The first email came from Sean Hannity. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. Then Greta Van Susteren. Nope. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any interviews, but I sure as shit wasn’t going to start off with Fox News, where I knew I’d have to tangle with some Second Amendment apologist who’d want to wipe away Alison’s shooting like so many others before it. Why don’t you wipe up the fucking blood at the marina? I thought. The image of her lying there on the wooden planking, eyes closed, haunted me. I imagine it always will.

Then my sister Jane Ann called back. Ian Shapira with the Washington Post had managed to get hold of her, hoping that she could put him in touch with me. I’ll say this much for journalists, they’re a resourceful lot. “He seems like a genuinely nice guy,” she said. “I really think you should talk to him.”

I sighed. So it begins. This is my Bull Run. I took down his information, hung up with Jane Ann, and punched in the number.

To his credit, Ian was every bit as kind and decent as Jane Ann had said. He really wanted to understand what kind of person Alison was, how devastated I was.

“Pretty damn devastated,” I said.

We talked for close to thirty minutes. I paced the whole time. It still didn’t feel real. He thanked me for my time and promised to email me a link to the story as soon as it was posted.

That was the first one, but it wouldn’t be the last.

After getting off the phone with Ian, I knew had to get out of the house. I needed air.

“I’m taking the dog out,” I told Barbara without breaking stride. Jack, our ten-year-old Chow-golden retriever mix, knew the drill. We often went out in the early afternoon, but that fluffball could sniff out a walk a mile away. We got in the car, Jack beside me in the passenger seat, and I started driving without really knowing where I was going.

I drove straight to the Philpott Dam kayak put-in. The icy, crystal clear water was rushing out of the lake, over the dam, and down the river, thin wisps of fog hanging just a few feet above the frothing surface of the downstream rapids. Jack and I crunched down the gravel path toward the water. Tall evergreens lined the banks on both sides, the scent of pine strong in the air. Jack lapped at the stream as it burbled by.

Of course I would come to the dam, just as a compass needle is drawn toward magnetic North. I’d told Barbara that I needed to be alone, but that wasn’t true.

I needed to be with Alison. This was where she’d be.

We’d been coming here together for years. Alison and Chris and Barbara and I had launched our kayaks at this very spot just last month, on the Fourth of July. It’s where I was the day before. The day before. What I wouldn’t give to go back. Just twenty-four hours earlier, I’d been so proud of my success, the centerpiece of my bid for reelection to the Henry County Board of Supervisors. Just twenty-four hours earlier, Alison had been alive. Now she wasn’t. And now nothing else mattered.

I gazed downriver and for a split second I saw her paddling around the bend, a big smile on her face. How could it be that I’d never see that smile again, except in memory? I ached to hold her in my arms again. I stood there, bitterness and resentment and anger rising within me, rage and vitriol and bile, and then I erupted with all the force of Etna, Pompeii, and Mount St. Helens put together.

This time it was directed toward God. I’ve never been particularly religious, but I gave that bastard an earful. People always tell me that it was Alison’s time to go, that God called her home. What a stupid fucking thing to say. What kind of comfort is that? What kind of God would do something like that? Not any God I want to know, that’s for damn sure.

When I ran out of expletives to hurl skyward, I collapsed onto the closest boulder, totally spent. Jack sat faithfully at my feet. There was no one else around, no sound but the soft murmur of the stream. I let the river wash away my anger.

One of our family’s favorite movies has always been Galaxy Quest, a Star Trek send-up from the late nineties that now seems to be a staple of late-night cable TV. The aliens’ motto in that movie is “Never give up. Never surrender.” Over time it became something of a mantra for our entire family. With Alison’s imitation of the aliens’ comically stilted cadence echoing in my head, I knew I had to listen. I couldn’t give up, no matter how much I wanted to. I had to keep her memory alive. I also knew that if I was going to make it through the night, I was going to need some help. Still propped up on the boulder, with Jack sniffing idly around the water’s edge, I dug into the pocket of my shorts for my phone.

Our family doctor had already heard the news by the time I got hold of him. “I can’t imagine,” he said. He called in a prescription for Xanax to help Barbara and me get to sleep and said to take care and call him back if there was anything else he could do. I thanked him and hung up and sat staring off over the rushing water, into the lush greenery and the flowering mountain laurels, and I thought, This is where she’ll be. I’ll always be able to find her here. I felt a great sense of calm in that idea. I have no idea how long I sat on the boulder, Jack at my feet, before I finally rose and we trudged back up the hill toward the car.

On my way back home from the river something compelled me to stop at Town Gun, our friendly local firearms store. Part of me thought I might need to buy a gun for protection. There was no reason to do so because the truthers had not yet descended. Another part of me wanted to know how fast a person could buy a gun. Looking back, I expect those reasons were a pretext for a different, darker reason.

The guy behind the counter didn’t know who I was and was quite eager to show me a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. According to him, it was the perfect self-defense weapon. “Is there a waiting period?” I asked, assuming there surely must be.

“Oh, no,” he cheerfully replied. “You just fill out this paperwork, and we’ll have the background check done in minutes. No waiting at all!”

What the fuck are you doing here? I thought to myself. Are you so deep in shock that you’re actually thinking of buying a gun? For what? Do you really think she wants you to join her?

I returned to my senses, such as they were, and told the clerk I’d think about it and come back later. I realized later that the visit to the gun shop was my subconscious taking control, directing me to peer into the abyss as I stood precariously at the precipice. I wondered how many others had paid a gun shop that same visit, hiding their misery as I had, and bought that .38 that would only be fired once. As I would later discover, it happens daily.

The moment I managed to step back from the brink, I realized I had to fight. I had to come out swinging hard.

When we got back to the house, Alison’s boyfriend, Chris, had arrived and Lynn had managed to clear out most of the other guests. Barbara’s family and mine would come up in the next couple of days, but they hadn’t arrived yet. It was Barbara, Lynn, Noel, Chris, and me, sitting around the island in the kitchen quaffing the finest Trader Joe’s boxed wine we had available. We were drinking because we didn’t know what else to do. It felt surreal, sitting there in the fading light of evening, the bottle tree backlit against the setting sun, the empty bird feeder aglow.

Was Alison still alive when Barbara and I sat in these very same seats not twelve hours ago? Or was it a lifetime ago? It was definitely a life ago. Maybe if we sat here long enough, I thought, this awful day would end and we’d wake up and she’d still be alive and we could try it again. Maybe it would come out better if we had a day to practice, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

Of all the days in my life to live over, this would be the worst hands down. There was no competition. I was tired of it already and the day wasn’t even over yet. I certainly didn’t want to live it over and over again. But at the same time, every day that passed would take me one day further away from her—one more day since I’d seen her, since I’d heard her voice and held her in my arms and told her how much I loved her, how much she meant to me. I would have happily died to spare her even an ounce of pain.

I’ve been told that each day is a day closer to “healing,” but I knew that day that I’d never be healed, never be whole again. There is no getting over it, there is no getting past it, there is only getting through it. Each day a constant struggle not to be overwhelmed by all the little things that remind me of her, of what I’ve lost, of what she’s lost.

Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I stop to think where Alison would have been, what she would have been doing, what she would have done in the interim between August 26, 2015, and that moment. And then I’m left with the miserable math, all too familiar to those who have lost loved ones: how old would she be now? How many days have gone by?

It never gets easier. It just gets more familiar. The pain doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it.

Chris was in pain too, it was easy to see. Chris has always reminded me of Opie from The Andy Griffith Show. He’s got the ginger hair, the big bright eyes, the cherubic smile. That he would show up at a time like this, I thought, even just to sit and drink boxed wine with us . . . well, that made him a stand-up guy in my book. We knew that Alison admired his character, his demeanor, his intellect, his compassion. But this—this was why she loved him. I don’t remember what anyone talked about. It wasn’t much, just idle chitchat in fits and starts, small talk whenever the silence started to weigh on us too heavily. I just remember sitting there next to Chris and staring out the window and watching the sun set on a whole new world. I put my arm around him and gripped his shoulder and we traded one of those clenched-jaw, tough-guy smiles even though we were both falling apart inside.

My phone buzzed again. In truth, it had been buzzing more or less all afternoon and into the evening, but since I’d returned from the dam I’d mostly ignored it. It was Ian Shapira, following up just as he’d promised. He’d posted the article. I read it. He nailed it. I lost it. Ian’s article was thoughtful and compassionate and it was exactly the balm I needed to face this new world.

The rest of my in-box was filled with an avalanche of media requests. One name stood out: Megyn Kelly. Ordinarily I disdained Fox News and everything they stood for, but this was right after her public dust-up with Donald Trump at the first Republican presidential debate and she’d gained some credibility in my eyes. Of the invitations I’d received, her program was certainly the highest-profile. If I wanted to send a message, her pulpit would carry it a long way. And as the enemy of my enemy . . .

“What do you guys think of this?” I asked the room.

“Fox News?” Barbara scoffed. “Are you sure?”

I explained my reasoning. “Chris, what do you think? I think we should do it. Both of us.”

If I was going to survive this, what was going to get me through it was channeling all of my grief, all of my frustration, all of my anger into something productive. Even lava doesn’t stay red-hot forever. It cools, it hardens, and if you haven’t shaped it into something useful before it does, then it’s just a dumb inert rock. I had to channel my rage, I told them, shape it into something useful. This was the start of what would become my life’s work, or at least, the work of the rest of my life. I’d found my fight and I was going to fight it for Alison.

Chris took a big swig of his wine. “Fuck it,” he said, “let’s do it.”

I wrote back to accept Megyn Kelly’s invitation. As a producer was texting me the address in Franklin County where we were supposed to meet, I got another text from a CBS producer. I don’t know how they got my number, but I was already drained, too tired to be surprised by anything at that point. Since CBS was “our” network, the WDBJ affiliate, I texted back to say that Chris and I would be available after our Fox News appearance and asked where we should meet him. He said he’d find us. I wasn’t sure how he planned to accomplish that, but I didn’t push him. I didn’t even pull up the address on Google. I figured it was going to be right off Route 220 in Rocky Mount, so I plugged it into my phone and off we went.