In later police reports, a rough approximation of the sequence of events could be put together, from forensic evidence and statements from those in the presence of the individuals immediately before and after the incident. It was determined, from the hysterical ramblings of his wife, that the shooter left home at roughly 7:49 am, eastern standard time, on 22 January, 1980. At 8:01 am of the same day, the first gunshot was heard, by nearby resident Alex Llewelyn. Three minutes later, a second gunshot sounded, prompting Llewelyn to step outside. He saw the first victim on the ground and returned inside to call the police.
Forensic reports identified the first gunshot to have been long range, a direct hit in the left chest of the first victim. Because it was from a distance, and went through two double plated windows, the bullet splayed on impact, sending pieces through the fabric and creating several smaller flesh wounds. The main point of entry, however, did create an exit wound, and because of the location of the wound the first victim bled out before emergency services could arrive.
The second gunshot was at contact range, judging from the pattern of soot and gunpowder around the entrance. The muzzle was most likely applied directly to the right temple and fired without hesitation, as victim two had already walked seventy-five feet into the forest and the second shot was only three minutes after the first. The exit wound was just above the left ear and it is assumed victim two died immediately.
The bodies of victims one and two were identified by family members as Michael Bartlett and Charles Bragg, respectively. The most likely cause of the incident is psychosis brought on by Bragg's late disseminated Lyme disease infection. No further investigation is expected.
m m m
He's vaguely aware of his mother dragging him out of bed on the Thursday after the event, of her duct taping all clothing orifices on both of them. If possible, everything that's happened has made her even more paranoid about ticks than before—now, regardless of whether they were only crossing the yard, she secures all sleeves and hats and pant legs, perhaps taking advantage of the fact that he won't bother to argue.
They settle into the car, and she turns off the radio left on from two days ago with one decisive jab of her finger. Silence falls on them; only a week has passed and already they hardly notice it between them.
They arrive at school just in time for class change. Eyes bore into them as they wait outside the office. He stares blankly at his shoes, his mother at the wall. When they're called in, they take seats in the plaid covered chairs, and he hears the low murmuring voice of the sympathetic principal, sincere but clueless. Of course Scott will need some time off from school. Of course we'll gladly accommodate it. No, it shouldn't be a problem. Of course, we'll send the transcripts right over whenever you're ready.
Scott doesn't hear any of it. The world has become a very foreign place and he's slowly coming to terms with that, with this reality where nothing even has a prayer of being normal again. With the possibility that, perhaps, the best years of his life are over. Everything changes, Charlie had told him. Change is the only constant. And now Charlie himself is a victim of change, a victim of the change inside him that had once been so insignificant and had progressed to something so intolerable.
They have to fight their way through a cloud of condolences to get home.
Brenda is poised, more poised than she's ever been, giving full concentration to each person who approaches her. His death, it seems, has taken away any hint of self-consciousness in her walk, in her grace. A mourner's freedom. She can do what she likes and remain unjudged, untouched, but she chooses to behave rationally. It's a long while before they're swishing down the rain dampened streets again.
At home, neither is surprised to find Jimmy's car parked on the curb, or his body asleep on the couch. Bereavement leave. It looks like the service can spare one of it's communications specialists. Jimmy awakens when the door clangs behind them, and for a moment they all look at each other like they're strangers.
But then Jimmy seems to wake up fully; he blinks the sleep from his eyes and stands up on wobbly knees. The house is half dark from the gray day and January's general lack of sunlight but his pale skin stands in contrast to the dinginess of life as it currently is. For a moment, he looks both absurdly young and infinitely old, and somehow neither of these states of being is equipped to handle this situation.
Brenda goes to him first, pinching at a tobacco stain on the collar of his t-shirt before pulling him into a hug. They sway slightly together, as though accommodating the tilt of the planet on its axis. Scott leans against a door frame so he doesn't topple over. Jimmy makes eye contact with him when she pulls away, and before he's really aware of what he's doing Scott is in his arms, pressing his face into his shoulder, trying to pretend like their height difference is more remarkable than it is.
"What the hell happened?" Jimmy mutters to Brenda, and Scott can hear the vibrations in his chest as he speaks.
He hears shuffling behind him, than a muted click as she turns on the television. The local news has been covering exactly one thing recently, rehashing all the details and adding in whatever tiny tidbits of information are added in the week after something like this. The whole town is stunned; Scott imagines them watching the television in their own homes with dead, stunned eyes, trying to make sense of something so unbelievable. Because plenty of people are involved in affairs and they never end up on the evening news. Plenty of people get sick and don't end up on the evening news. But, somehow, the confluence of the two is both deadly and enthralling for the masses.
They sit down to watch as darkness invades the living room, the only light the opalescence of the TV screen reflecting in the pits of their eyes. The news anchor segues from an update on last week's shooting into a human interest story about a shelter for homeless kittens. At this, Scott slips into another dimension and lets his head flop onto Jimmy's shoulder. When Jimmy begins to pat his hair, desiring comfort for one of them (Scott's not sure which), he hardly feels it.
m m m
"Is that Mom's?" Jimmy asks from the doorway, as he watches Scott dig out the baggy from the inside of a lego model of the Millennium Falcon.
"Adriana's."
"You've seen her?"
"This is from a while back."
"Oh."
Jimmy steps into the room, looking around nonchalantly before taking a seat on the bed across from him. Scott doesn't look up from clumsily rolling a joint.
"You're not gonna throw up again, are you?"
Scott shrugs indifferently in answer.
Jimmy pulls out a cigarette predictably, having explained to Scott once that he's been pointedly avoiding pot for some time now. Not necessarily looking out for his own wellbeing, he'd said, but rather looking out for the entirely likely possibility of getting his ass kicked into the middle of next week by his military superiors, should they ever catch him with a habit of the like. "If we're all gonna be smoking in the house...you gotta light?"
Scott tosses him a lighter, after firing up his spliff. "Where's Mom?"
"Funeral prep."
Scott sighs smoke and lies down on the floor, waiting for the drugs to kick in. The room fills with the familiar smell. Jimmy thinks about opening the window but is deterred by the thought of the humid cold of the outside. He takes a long drag from his cigarette, and when he can breathe again, he asks. "So you haven't seen her? Adriana?"
"I went over there with Mom, the first time she went to see Mrs. Bragg. But Adriana wouldn't leave her room," he mumbles, barely audible.
"Are you gonna give up?"
"What the fuck else am I supposed to do?" he scowls. "I mean, who the fuck else has this problem? Our parents were fucking each other, and then they were shooting each other. I mean, holy shit."
"True."
Scott props himself up on one incredulous elbow. "You think I should go over there?"
Jimmy gives his best noncommittal look. "I have no fucking idea what you should do. What any of us should do. Christ, it's like you said: no one else has this problem."
Scott thumps back down, gluing his eyes on the ceiling.
m m m
He knows Jimmy must hear him, because he's lost interest in tiptoeing. It's 2 am and Jimmy's always been a bit of an insomniac, supplementing his lack of nighttime slumber with frequent naps during the day. Especially now, when none of them are sleeping all that well. But Jimmy doesn't get up, just stirs warningly, and so Scott slips out the back door undeterred.
He slips through the forest, the sounds of long ago gunshots echoing in his ears.
At her window, he throws one damp, half crushed pinecone at her window, then walks away. Ten minutes later, she meets him at the train tracks.
"Hey," she says, with wandering eyes. Grief makes everyone a stranger.
"How are you?" he asks, and it sounds far more articulate than he expects.
"Fucking awesome," she challenges. "Just like everyone who no longer has a father."
"Me too," he mutters, and stares at the silver iridescence of the rails. When he looks up again, there are tears in her eyes.
"You must hate him," she chokes. "You must hate me."
He steps toward her, but she backs away. He says, "No. No, I...shit, I don't know. None of us know."
"So where does this leave us?"
He sighs, long and yearning. "I don't know that either."
She plops down in the gravel, crossing her legs and pressing her palms into her eyes. For a long while, neither of them speaks.
"We could start over," she says, and her voice is so muffled it sounds sourceless, like it's erupting from the Earth itself. He doesn't reply, and so she gets to her feet and approaches him directly, holding out one alabaster hand. "I'm Adriana Bragg. And you?"
He takes her soft fingers in his. "Scott Bartlett."
"Where are you from, Scott?"
"Queens. But I hardly remember it. You?"
"Connecticut. What's the most interesting thing about you, Scott?"
He doesn't think; his mouth moves of it's own volition. "My dad was shot by his neighbor."
Her eyes widen for a fraction of a second, then narrow just as quickly. She pulls her fingers from his, maintaining that incriminating eye contact. She doesn't say anything, he knows what he's done. But he can hardly think of anything else but the horror of the event, even when he's with her. It's all too much too soon. No matter how much he wants her back, he can't decide to be someone else.
She turns on her heel and walks back into the darkness.
m m m
The funeral is tense and silent, the Braggs noticeably not present. Whether this is a sign of respect or of resentment it's unclear—and probably best left ambiguous.
Brenda doesn't cry until the very end. It's here Scott realizes that this is the first time he's seen her openly mourn. At one point, he's afraid tears are filling his eyes too, and he's correct. It's all he can do to find his way to a bathroom stall before he's openly bawling into the sleeve of his Confirmation suit.
When he emerges, the service is over, his mother greeting the attendees with an unsteady voice and Jimmy standing awkwardly by her side. Scott wonders distantly if Jimmy cried also, but it's impossible to tell from this far away if his eyes are red rimmed or not. He supposes he might've, on all those nights he doesn't sleep. Or maybe he's hated dad too passionately and too long to feel anything at all.
Back in Scott's room, they've made a habit of smoking with the window closed. Scott gets stoned and Jimmy watches and they communicate, sometimes with words and sometimes with stares.
"You know what the last thing he said to me was?" Jimmy asks, sitting with his back against the foot of the bed, eyes inspecting the orange glow of his cigarette.
Scott shakes his head.
"He told me not to get shot. And he kissed me," he chuckles bitterly. "You know what the last thing I said to him was?"
Scott waits. Jimmy doesn't look at him.
"I said I was never gonna speak to him again."
Scott takes a long drag, coughs once, and says, "I guess you were right."
"I knew something like this would happen eventually," Jimmy's voice is tight. It sends a stroke of fear through Scott's chest. "I just figured it'd be a bar fight or some shit. Not a hunting rifle. I didn't...I didn't think you'd be a kid."
He takes a long, shuttering breath, then lays his forearms on bent knees and presses his face into them, a cigarette hanging limply from between his fingers. He breathes roughly, deliberately; Scott inches closer to him and finally reaches out a hand to lay on his tensed shoulder.
"I'm not a kid," he murmurs. "Confirmation. Jesus says I'm a man."
Jimmy just shakes his head without looking up.
"You really hated him, didn't you?"
"Fuck, I dunno," Jimmy groans weakly.
Grief wants to make everyone strangers and everything muddled. Grief always wins.
m m m
Reporters show up at the house every couple of days, sometimes from the big agencies looking for something gruesome to put on national television and sometimes just the local shitheads looking for scuttlebutt. Brenda tried to deal with them civilly at first, but now she's resorted to ignoring the doorbell.
Which is why, when Melissa Bragg comes up the front walk, she has to ring five times before Jimmy opens the door incredulously.
He invites her in for coffee on autopilot, unsure of how he's supposed to treat her. He knows he should fall back on basic human decency but he can't stop thinking of her as the woman who is responsible, at least in part, for the death of two men. Perhaps not solely responsible, but lord, her guilt is written all over her face. As soon as his mother appears he slips off to repent, or possibly stew in his own hatred—he hasn't decided which.
Scott is lying on the couch, not even bothering to pretend he isn't trying to eavesdrop on the women in the kitchen. He turns off the television and they both listen over the sounds of their own heartbeats.
The muffled voices are friendly and sympathetic, keeping at a volume that won't tempt the dead. How odd, Scott thinks, because these are not women that have much to get along on, now that everything's so obvious. But they're almost commiserating with each other, as though dead husbands were a minor inconvenience, like forgetting your grocery list or losing your car keys. Is it all superficial? he wonders. Is this light tone the only thing keeping them from clawing at each other in grief and hate?
Finally, words of farewell flow from the kitchen, and Melissa gives them a damp smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes on the way out. She can't quite see the expressions they return in the gloom of the living room—the dank weather combined with the trio's inability, it seems, to muster the energy to turn on lights has them living like the undead.
Brenda comes to them a few moments later. "They're going back to Connecticut," she says, as though she isn't full aware they just heard the whole conversation.
Jimmy nods. "As expected."
"Maybe we should think about getting away too," she says, like it's just occurred to her. "Get out of the limelight, away from all this attention. Go back to Queens, perhaps."
"Fucking of course." Scott swings his legs off Jimmy's lap, stalks out into the backyard and onto the crunching forest leaves.
m m m
He throws what might be the same pinecone at her window, then waits beside the train tracks for twenty minutes. It's twilight, and as he hikes back to her house he sees her moving around in the warmth of the windows, pointedly not looking outside.
He realizes, numbly, that her mother's given up on Long Island and she's given up on him.
Inevitable, really.
His chest tightens in the way that she could only ever inspire. It's a feeling he'll never forget.
m m m
"What do we do now?" Scott asks, sitting on the lid of one of the cardboard boxes stacked around the shell of his bed. The room is now saturated with the combined smell of marijuana and tobacco, smoke staining the ceiling. Still, they've never opened the window and they're not going to now.
"We go to Queens," Jimmy replies dully, dutiful cigarette in his hand. "Well, you go."
Scott eyes widen. "Jesus Christ."
"Until you graduate high school. By then my tour will be up and I'll either get a job at a base nearby or I'll get discharged and...fuck, I'll do something. And you go to college far, far away," he pauses, making meaningful eye contact. "We can't leave her alone. She doesn't do well alone."
"That's why she stayed with him."
Jimmy nods solemnly. "The best we can do is ensure one of us gets a life. The next couple of years are gonna be rough for you, I'm sorry, but then you'll be free. We'll see you at fucking Christmas and shit, yeah?" he gives dry, humorless laugh.
Scott wonders what it must be like for Jimmy to have known for so long, maybe since he's been at all self-aware, that he's got no good options.
"It'll be alright," Jimmy says to himself, as though coming to terms with his own terminal illness. "We'll be alright. Yeah."
It's a lie that Scott, at least, appreciates.