She called her husband, but there was no answer. She got in the car, hands shaking. They had gone out to Walgreens. Dottie had a poster due the next day. She was Star of the Week in her fourth grade class. They needed poster board, foam letters, and photographs, which was why she was searching for ink cartridges.
The last thing Dottie said to her was, “We never have anything we need in this house!” The last thing she had said to her daughter was, “I love you.” Because that’s what you say when you’re a parent — no matter how mad your kid is at you, no matter if they won’t say it back. You say “I love you” when they walk out the door, in case.
Goddamn poster board. Goddamn Star of the Week.
That first month, she kept finding herself parked in front of Walgreens, in a haze, sitting there, about to go in to buy poster board. If she could just get the poster board, none of this would happen.
Here’s the thing: you have to start somewhere. A law is a law is a law, until somebody changes it. Death is impersonal until it happens to your family. She knows this, everybody knows this. But she wants people to know it in their guts, the way she does. She wants this man’s wife to feel it when she wakes up in the morning, rolls over in bed, and her husband isn’t there.
She even wants the sons to feel it: the absence of their father.
They won’t know her name tomorrow. It will be years before they know her name, because this is a very long story. Longer than she wants it to be. It starts in Alabama, but who knows where it will end? She’s determined to pull the pesky thread until the whole thing unravels.
Advertising? an old friend asks her on Facebook.
Marketing, she clarifies. Like any decent campaign, this one won’t mean anything until it goes viral. One dead senator is a story, sure, but what she wants is much bigger. A movement. Something so catchy, the public can’t turn away.
For a campaign to really take fire, you can’t let the messenger get in the way. It has to be an invisible machine. No one can know who’s working the levers.
In order to go viral, a campaign must be visual. Some say it’s wrong to show the bodies of the victims. She understands, she gets it. On the other hand, she thinks of Emmett Till, how his grieving mother insisted on a photograph that changed the whole conversation.
Only bodies show the true nature of the violence. Without the bodies, the brutality is whitewashed, a blurred vision with a movie-like sheen. Just another action movie you forget after you leave the theater. All the movies run together; they’re putting out so many these days. Her own family’s death barely made the news. Only seven people died at Walgreens, after all. Twenty-three had died in a mass shooting on a high school campus the week before, fifty-seven at a concert a few months before that. “The incident” at Walgreens hardly even qualified, to the outside world, as a horror.
Four months after the senator’s death, when the mystery remains unsolved, she takes a flight to Paris, a bus to Belgium. At an Internet café in Brussels, she enters the dark web. She posts three photographs of the senator lying on his living room floor in his own blood. There is a hole in the back of his head. This was not a matter of torture, but of expediency: she wanted to make it quick, and did. From the angle of the photo, you can see the exit wound in his forehead. The phrase exit wound sounds tidy; the reality is not.
After he fell she put a hole in his back, another in his right calf, another in his upper arm. Four bullet wounds, just like her nine-year-old daughter. She wanted to show what a body with multiple gunshot wounds looks like. Not under a body bag, but in full color.
Six months before she entered the sliding glass door at Plantation Estates, nine weeks before the murder of her husband and child by a man with a history of mental illness who legally obtained an assault weapon in Nevada and brought it across the state line to California, where such weapons were illegal, the senator had stood on the senate floor and lambasted the parents of dead elementary schoolchildren for “politicizing” a school shooting. He had led the charge against a bill that would prevent people with mental illness from purchasing weapons, and had sponsored a bill making it illegal to publish photographs of the bodies of victims of mass shootings.
There are those who will say that her grief made her crazy, but the fact is, her grief made her rational.
She had expected to feel more. She had expected to hate herself. But as she stands over the senator’s body, gazing at the shredded exit wounds, the bits of brain and tissue scattered across the room, amid the rising stench of it, she does not feel guilt. She feels sadness, but not for the dead man on the floor. She is thinking of her daughter at Walgreens, and of her husband, who would have shielded their daughter’s small body with his own if he’d had the chance. But he’d been in the next aisle over, and the gunman got to him first. He had been shot in the back, running toward their daughter. Only after the fourth bullet struck him did he collapse, and he was hit with three more after that. Then, one aisle over, the gunman found their daughter, crouching on the floor, trying to hide behind a sheet of neon-green poster board. The whole thing was caught on the store’s surveillance camera.
The next day, after the detectives had completed the crime scene investigation and brought her family to the morgue, she insisted on seeing the bodies of her daughter and husband. She was told that she should not see them, but who was she, what kind of wife and what kind of mother, if she could not face the truth of what happened to her husband and child?
The senator had often boasted that he kept more than a dozen guns at home to defend his property and his family. “A gun in every room,” he’d say with a wink. “If the bad guys come to my house,” he had drawled in a widely televised ad for his latest senatorial run, “they’re gonna have a fight on their hands.” In the advertisement, which had been, after all, too common and too cliché to go viral, the polished wife and his polished sons were all holding guns of their own.
All along, she had suspected he might use one of them on her, and this thing might all be over before it really began. A failed marketing campaign, like so many other failed marketing campaigns.
So be it, she had thought. If she died, she died. She does not believe in heaven, and yet... if, somewhere in the ether, some atom of her dead husband and child exists, perhaps she would find them there. Probably not. And yet.
She walks back out through the sliding glass door into the hot, sticky Alabama night. She is wearing plastic gloves, plastic covers over her shoes. She is waiting for lights and sirens, but they don’t come.
She is thinking, This should have been more difficult.
Walking through the yard, she feels the crunch of pecans underfoot. She reaches up and touches the leaves of a tree, rubbing them between her fingers. She remembers the last time she was here, thirtysomething years ago, on the land that was briefly in their family, until suddenly it wasn’t. She and her sisters had competed to see who could gather the most pecans. In her sweat-drenched shirt, she lugged the heavy bag from tree to tree. Later, after the trip down I-65 to the nut-processing plant, they returned home and her mother had made the first and only pecan pie of her childhood.
“How Southern are you?” her husband once said affectionately. “You don’t even like pecan pie.” Her mother’s pie was burned around the edges, a heap of brown on more brown. The outside of the pie, where the pecans had caramelized, was pleasingly crunchy, the burned taste not unpleasant. Inside, the pie was dense and gooey, the sugar so sharp it hurt her teeth. She and her sisters sat hip to hip on the floor in front of the television, drinking cold milk and eating pie.