The sound of gunfire pulls Jamie out of her terror. Twelve shots in quick succession. The phone rings, but is ignored. Every cop is already mobilized, running down the hallway. Ten SWAT men were already in front of the classroom, and have broken down the door. More shots echo from the walls.
Jamie pauses before entering the room. She remembers every scraped knee, every twisted ankle that had plagued her girls since their birth. She remembers the gymnastics lessons and the dance rehearsals, the field trips and the PTA meetings, the family dinners and the Sunday breakfasts. She remembers tucking Ella and Adah in bed at night, waking them up in the morning, until they started staying up later and waking up earlier than herself to do homework and get to school – something she fought at aforementioned PTA meetings since the twins started high school. She envisions her daughters lying in a pool of blood in a classroom of that very high school, life draining or already drained from their petite bodies.
Mac nearly barrels into her back, and Jamie continues forward. There are already three dozen police in there, holding their guns out with stiff arms. Bodies litter the floor. A few students huddle by the wall, crying softly and shaking. Jamie scans their faces quickly, not recognizing any.
She turns to the ground. There must be twenty kids there, under desks and chairs, splayed out in the open. Some are alive. Others are not. Jamie turns those in the latter group over one-by-one – and she is the only one doing so, as the rest of the police are preoccupied with calming the survivors and guarding the gunman, who in some twist of cruel fate survived the fire fight. She cringes at every new face, death mixing with youth in an unnatural grief cocktail. Blood soaks clothes, hair, books and papers.
Jamie strains to remember what Ella and Adah wore that morning, but finds that she cannot. All those visits to the malls that make New York City so famous, every morning being like a fashion show in her living room, and the one time it matters, Jamie can't remember her kids' outfits. Something blue on Adah, maybe, or purple? Perhaps Ella had on those boots Sam had gotten for her for their last birthday? Why couldn't she remember?
She registers Emily, one of her daughters' friends. Emily had come over last month to work on an art project with Adah. They had taken over the small living room with paint and canvas. They were making portraits of each other. Adah's had been so realistic that, once she had gotten it back from her teacher, Jamie had hung it up in the kitchen, bearing with a smile the light-hearted jokes from her husband about putting a picture of a random girl in their apartment. Now, a bullet has torn through that girl's right eye, making that half of her face all but unrecognizable. There is no pulse from the girl's blood-stained neck. She moves on.
She sees a mass of red and grey cloth, topped with a tangle of brown curls. Her feet stop moving for a moment. She tries to call out, but cannot find any words. She stumbles over to the two girls.
Adah is face up. Her eyes are open wide in fear, her mouth slightly cracked. Blood had bloomed out from the gunshot wound on her chest, showing through her skin-tight shirt. Don had protested that shirt the first time Adah had worn it because it showed a half inch of midriff, but Jamie had let her go, remembering her own escapades with revealing clothing in high school. As ridiculous as it was, she couldn't help wishing Adah had something else on when she died, something her father whole-heartedly supported. As if that changed anything.
Jamie checked for a pulse, even though she knew what she would feel. There was too much blood to have hoped, but she had. The body was not yet cold, but the heart had stopped. She was reminded of her first night of motherhood, where she was so positive her children had died in their sleep. This time, they actually had.
Ella is next to her sister, face down, curled into the fetal position. Blood had stained her grey sweater. Jamie pushed her over, so she was lying on her back, and gently pushed the hair out of her closed eyes. She fiddled with her daughter's clothing for a minute, delaying the moment where she stopped being a mother forever. Finally, she pressed her fingers to Ella's jugular.
She felt a pulse.
"Ella? Ella?" It's a whisper, slowly getting louder. Before she reaches an embarrassing decibel, her daughter's eyes open.
"Ella? Are you alright?"
The girl slowly raises herself to her feet, graceful even now. Jamie sees that, at least for the most part, the blood on her shirt is from the puddle forming beneath Adah. She puts her hands on Ella's shoulder.
"Ella, are you okay?"
The girl says something too quiet to hear.
"Are you okay?"
She repeats herself, but still is inaudible.
"Are you hurt? Are you alright?"
"I'm fine!" It is nearly a scream, and the noise turns into a sob. Jamie pulls the girl to her chest.