We drive to Red Lion, Pennsylvania.
We travel at warp speed back to 2003, when a fourteen-year-old kid shot his principal and then himself in front of hundreds of people. Mama reads an article aloud about the day it happened. She says that according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 77% of witnesses to a school shooting will end up with PTSD.
Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Seventy-seven percent.
Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H would know this is bullshit. He’s a doctor. He’d laugh, dressed in his red bathrobe on top of his olive drab, and he’d say something smart like, “What happens to the other twenty-three percent? Do they get eaten by bears?” He’d probably be a little drunk on homemade gin. He’d probably have a girl on his arm. A nurse. She’d laugh at his joke and say, “Oh, Hawkeye.”
We get to the school in Red Lion and we can’t go in, of course. All we can do is park in the empty Sunday parking lot. We stare at the building and Mama cries. Pop rubs her back. I do what I always do. I think about how I’m split down the middle. Part of me wants to blow up everything. Part of me searches for a needle big enough to stitch it all together again. I think Hawkeye Pierce felt like that, too.