Читать книгу For Alison - Andy Parker - Страница 11

The Night

It was dark by the time we set off toward the interview with Megyn Kelly. I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I’d been drinking for hours. I had no business being behind the wheel of a car, but that thought never crossed my mind at that moment. I even had a “to-go” kit: a red Solo cup full of wine.

Chris and I didn’t say two words to each other the whole way, just stared ahead into the black as the road twisted and turned through the mountains. It was the same road Barbara and I had driven earlier, but we were going much farther (or so we thought), and somehow it felt much more desolate. I sped the whole way. Chris told me later that I crossed the double yellow line a handful of times and almost hit a semi head-on. He said he was thinking, Well, if I die, at this point I don’t give a shit. At that point, I obviously didn’t either.

The map showed that we were approaching our destination, but I still didn’t know exactly where we were going. It was pitch black. Then we rounded a bend and everything was lit up like Times Square. I instantly knew where we were.

We were right across from the marina. Every major network was there; their trucks parked hither and yon, thick cables snaking across asphalt parking lots, satellite dishes mushrooming upward toward a thin sliver of moon. The media had set up a tent city, each network with its own little enclave. The whole surreal scene was set ablaze by every watt they could find in Southwestern Virginia and probably more trucked in from miles away.

I couldn’t believe we were at the marina.

I couldn’t believe they had brought us to the marina and that no one thought to tell us where we were going. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.

I was furious.

Across the street, the marina was deserted. Once upon a time I had loved that marina. Less than twenty-four hours earlier I had loved that marina. I had so many happy memories there, and for a split-­second I saw her, the TV trucks and the news crews fading away and my darling pigtailed little Scooter skipping her way toward the boat we no longer had.

Now I didn’t have her either. I had nothing. I had nothing, emptiness, a void, a hole, a hole in my heart, my heart that was somehow still beating even though a big piece of it was gone, irretrievably gone, gone forever, but I also had Chris and Chris understood because Chris had suffered the same loss; our losses were one and the same, and now Chris had the same aching hole in his heart and in both of our hearts the hole was shaped like Alison, the one thing we didn’t have, either of us, and would never have again, the one thing that could have filled the hole and made our lives complete once more.

As long as I had that hole, I knew I would never come back to the marina. I was a leaky vessel and I knew I would sink under the weight of my grief.

In the darkness, the marina looked sinister, downright evil, a terrible place where my brilliant, beautiful daughter had lain dead on the planking for hours until she’d been photographed and fingerprinted and identified, until she’d been searched and tagged and bagged, until she’d become not a she but an it, not a person but a body, not Alison but evidence. She had lain there for hours, her precious blood soaking into the decking, until at last someone came to take her away.

Did they cover her? Did someone think to cover her face when the hot summer sun was beating down on her perfect porcelain skin? Did they shield her from the eyes of the crowds that inevitably gathered when they heard the shots, when they saw the news? The eyes that probed and profaned even as she lay stiffening like the splintered wood underneath her?

This was the last place she had ever been. Something here was the last thing she had ever seen. Somewhere around us was the last breath she’d ever drawn, her last exhalation, thrumming in the air around us. I took a breath, maybe sharing some of the same molecules, and then I turned my back on the marina. I have never looked at it again.

Chris and I were met by law enforcement and escorted through the mad bustle of media frenzy, everyone chasing the same story. En route to the Fox News camp, the CBS producers caught up with us—now I understood how they’d planned to find us—and were brushed off by the Fox handlers before we could say a word to them. It was like watching seagulls fighting over a chicken bone, and we were the chicken bone.

Fox’s field studio was a large collapsible tent in the middle of the grassy field across the street from the marina. They intended to put us on air with the marina at our backs. That was fine with me, just so long as I didn’t have to look at it. The producers miked us and fussed with our shirt collars. Chris was wearing a black-and-white striped dress shirt; I’d apparently changed into a solid black button-up at some point, though I couldn’t tell you when that had happened. They fitted us with earpieces so we could listen to the audio before we went on. Rick Leventhal, the Fox correspondent, was describing the shooter’s “manifesto”: he’d had a list of targets at the station, Leventhal claimed, and he’d used hollow-point bullets with his victims’ initials Sharpied onto the tips.