She kicked loose pebbles against the wheel of the car, and she thought, This is silly. Why do guns still exert their fascination?
Her love of guns, the hold they had over her, had reversed in the instant she received the news of Andy's death. It was as if she had suddenly been able to see her life from a different direction: her fife was the same, but her view changed. From right to left, from looking down to looking up, whatever it was.
That skill she had with guns, the facility, the deadly accuracy, suddenly became a curse to her. In her hand was the object that ultimately had killed the person she loved most in all the world.
She hated the way her father's personality had changed when his gun friends were around, or when he was practising with his weapons: it was as if he grew several inches in all directions, taller, broader, rounder, thicker. His voice was louder, he moved with more energy. His physical stance became threatening or confrontational, became that of someone who could only cope with the complexities of the world by putting out a challenge to it. And she had hated the way her own skill converted to the dark side: a deadly efficiency, the side of her that gave pain, the unyielding side of her.
Also in the long moment of the news of Andy's dying she had thought, for the first time in many years, about Megan.
That shocking instant of childhood had been effectively camouflaged over the years. lt was so long ago she could barely remember it, and whenever she did try to remember it she could not find the truth. She had never really
disentangled what had actually happened from the lies and evasions her parents told her.
They said she had dreamed the whole thing; Megan was an imaginary friend; all little girls had imaginary friends. But surely she had been born a twin? said Teresa, prodding for the truth, knowing this at least was so. Yes, there had been a twin sister; yes, and her name was Megan. But Megan had died at birth, so frail, so small, such a tragedy. You wouldn't remember Megan, they said. What she thought she remembered was untrue, unreliable.
If it had happened the way she remembered, and not the way they told it, how could they have covered up such a death? A small child, killed by gunshot? Even if they had found a way, why had they done so? lt was surely an accident? But they never admitted anything.
What Teresa remembered as a shattering mirrorimage of herself, a dying friend, a gun whose recoil had twisted her arm so painfully it had hurt on and off for more than a year, was changed by them into a tragic delusion, a persisting error.
Then decades later Andy died, and in her moment of penetrating grief and understanding, Teresa had known at last what must be the truth about Megan's death.
Her father's house was full of guns, in every room in any place they lived. The guns were always loaded, always ready for this chimera of expert selfdefence. She, like any other child, explored and tested, and did what she was told she must not do. The greater the warnings of danger, the more attractive were the temptations of ignoring them.
From this, the greater truth: the more there were people who owned guns, who made themselves expert with guns, who prepared to defend themselves with guns, who went on hunting trips with guns, who mouthed slogans about freedom and rights being dependent on guns, the more those guns were likely to be abused and to fall into the wrong hands.
just once, that time when she was seven, her little hands had been the wrong ones.
SO, finally, Andy was dead, and that had been hard enough, but it was not entirely unexpected. The risks went with the FBI territory.
She grieved, she mourned, she was prescribed medication, she took a vacation to see friends in Oregon, she joined selfhelp groups, she underwent counselling. She was a widow, but life eventually began to cohere once more around her. What she was unready for, though, was the other consequence of Andy's death: the profound reversal of her trust in guns.
All her life until this point seemed to be a deceit. Everything she had grown up with, and all the work and training she had done as an adult, she now turned against.
During this period a word, a name, a place, kept circling somewhere on the fringe of her awareness. Bulverton, England.
What did it mean? Andy's death had swamped everything, and for weeks she had stayed away from newspapers and TV news. For a day or two she herself had been the news. Media celebrity distracts, no matter what the reason. Even so, the name of Bulverton crept into her consciousness, and although from the start she had known on some buried, unarticulated level what the link was, what the coincidence was, she could not take it in.
Denial, her bereavement counsellor told her. You are blocking everything to do with your husband's death.
Even this puzzled her: how was Bulverton linked with Andy's death? What am 1 supposed to be denying? What is being assumed that I am unaware of?
Finally, the grief and confusion lifted sufficiently for her to be able to think for herself once more, and soon
afterwards she began to ask her colleagues, she looked up Bulverton on the web, she searched the newspaper files for the story.
There the coincidence was laid before her: Bulverton, Kingwood City. Two massacres by outburst gunmen. Same day of the year, same time of the day.
The parallels were not exact: twentythree people died in Bulverton, only fifteen in Kingwood City. (Fifteen? Is that not enough, when one of them was Andy?) The general circumstances were different: Aronwitz was obsessed with God, while Grove was apparently not. (But Aronwitz's spree began in a church and ended in a shopping mall; Grove's began when he stole a car from outside a shop and ended inside a church.) Fiftyeight other people were wounded in Kingwood City, and fiftyeight were wounded in Bulverton. The same number of law-enforcement officers were killed or injured in both places.
The guns carried and used by the killers were the same make, although different models. The same number of
