Collateral Damage, by Kate Norris

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Collateral Damage Kate Norris

Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Nonfiction Editor

Elena Passarello Poetry Editor

Camille Dungy Fiction Editor

Katie Cortese Managing Editors

Fiction Trifecta

2016

Joe Dornich Sarah Viren Chen Chen

Associate Editors: Chad Abushanab, Kathleen Blackburn, Margaret Emma Brandl, Rachel DeLeon, Nancy Dinan, Allison Donahue, Mag Gabbert, Jo Anna Gaona, Colleen Harrison, Micah Heatwole, Brian Larsen, Essence London, Beth McKinney, Scott Morris, Katrina Prow, MacKenzie Regier, Kate Simonian, Jessica Smith, Amber Tayama, Robby Taylor, Jeremy Tow, and Mary White.

Copyright © 2016 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is published six times a year at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

Collateral Damage

M

ost students at Hannah’s college forgot to pay for things because they didn’t need money and couldn’t conceive that others might.

They’d grown up wealthy, with the kind of stealth money only recognizable to other initiates, money that showed in their beat-up Birkin bags—carried by their mothers in the ’70s—and in their scuffed $500 shoes and bespoke blazers.

Hannah’s family had money, too, but the riches had come late, pouring in quick and shameful soon after the hate mail. Your Killer, Our Son—coauthored by her mother and father, and ghostwritten by a brooding, balding man whom Hannah liked to imagine hated their family even more than the victims did—was, according to her parents, an evil necessary to afford her brother’s defense. But the movie rights? The exclusive in People? The interview with Barbara Walters? Obviously the money had been more than they needed, because they still had enough that every couple of weeks Hannah went to the ATM and took out a few hundred dollars— because she always paid for blow, even though she didn’t mind using sex for other things—and her father never even asked what it was for.

Finding the perfect drug is like falling in love, or at least it was for Hannah. She’d smoked pot and parachuted molly and liked them well enough, but coke kept her from relaxing—she was a firm believer that there was nothing to feel relaxed about. And when it made her feel something almost like happy, she didn’t have to feel guilty because she knew it would only last a little while.

Hannah was a good student, and she was glad to be away from her parents at college, glad even to be away from her brother Theo, whom she actually loved, because there, with the regular use of helpful chemicals, she could sometimes forget that when her brother came to her high school that day and shot five students, he had come there for her. ***

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T

he party that got her kicked out of college was a disaster Hannah should have seen coming. She started the night suffering and wanting to make someone else suffer, too. She’d gotten a C on a paper and didn’t know if it was because the professor hated her (which he did—it wasn’t even up for debate) or if she’d just done a bad job. It wasn’t the prospect of unfairness that upset her, but rather the uncertainty. She thought the paper was good, and her instinct said the grade was punishment for being a bit of a smartass in class— an especially unforgivable offense given that she was female and pretty—but whenever she felt persecuted, she remembered how Theo’s paranoia was one of the early signs of what was to come.

Hannah was always on guard against that sort of sea change, waiting for reality and her perception of it to irrevocably diverge. “You think it’s inevitable that you’ll ‘go crazy’ like Theo did,” her therapist would say. “Let’s talk about that.” He had mentioned, many times, that schizophrenia occurred in less than one percent of the population, but Hannah countered with her own research that the likelihood of being diagnosed with schizophrenia climbed to almost ten percent among people who had a schizophrenic sibling.

Dr. Collins believed this concern was actually a sort of survivor’s guilt mixed with a strong identification with her brother—she wasn’t afraid of becoming schizophrenic, but rather she wished she were. Here, Hannah was butting up against the limitations of her therapist’s understanding, but she didn’t resent him for it. For him, it was a simple matter to imagine her having some cousin of Stockholm syndrome—that it would feel safer for her to identify with the shooter than the targets, especially because the shooter was, after all, her baby brother. Dr. Collins hadn’t seen the carnage, so he couldn’t understand what it meant to suggest that she would prefer to be author rather than object of that violence. He was such a saltine cracker of a man. How could he know what it felt like to fear what you might do? Because anything Theo did, Hannah might be capable of, too. Brother and sister—half their DNA was shared. She was, at most, a coin toss away from him.

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So when she caught herself feeling particularly victimized, it made her mad because she didn’t trust her judgment, and how dare she feel like a victim anyway?

At least all her blood was still in her body, her limbs attached: she was, physically at least, intact.

This was what she was brooding about the night of the party, although anyone watching her in her dorm room, smoking and flipping through Vogue, would have just seen a bored girl, not someone spoiling for a fight and ready to thrash around a bit. ***

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W

hen Chester knocked on her door, Hannah knew it was him because she was supposed to have met him at his room an hour earlier. “Come in,” she called, not bothering to stand or move away from the window.

Chester was wearing worn jeans and a gray V-neck sweater, but they were jeans bought pre-faded and artfully creased, and the sweater probably had a similar riches-to-rags provenance. He rowed, and the crew team practiced at five in the morning, Monday through Saturday. Hannah counted in her head—the team met in seven hours. He might not even sleep that night because he’d stay out with her, walk her home, take whatever scraps she gave him. She disliked many things about him, but if she had to pick just one under pain of death, it would probably be his capacity for cheerful dedication—to school, to crew, to her—which shone out of his every clean-scrubbed pore. Hannah knew it wasn’t as if he really cared about her. He just wanted someone to save, and she was the most fucked-up person he could find.

“Are we still going over to Nate’s tonight?” Chester asked.

She shrugged. “That’s the plan.”

“Well, it’s ten. Want to head over soon?”

She finally stood up and walked over to her closet.

“How cold is it?”

“Not very. You’ll want a jacket.”

Hannah took off her robe and dressed. She had already gotten made up, but she went over to the mirror anyway. She fluffed her hair. Put on another coat of mascara. Put on lipstick, blotted it off on a tissue until just a bit remained, put gloss over that. She could have kept it up for fifteen minutes, and Chester would have just stood there. But toying with him like that wasn’t fun and hadn’t been for months.

Then, as if she’d been ready and waiting for him, she said, “Shall we?” ***

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N

ate lived with four other guys in a house over on Harrison. When they got there, things were low-key—some people listening to music and smoking weed, some people drinking and flirting. Hannah made herself a martini in the kitchen. The boys had learned to drink well from their parents, and she had learned from them rather than from her own father, who, having apparently learned to drink from some handbook for the nouveau riche, drank scotch that came in moss and gilt boxes, as if he got buzzed off clichés.

Time passed in little fits and starts. Hannah and Chester sat in the living room.

There was a movie on, but afterward, she couldn’t remember what. She was on her second martini, and Chester was nursing his first beer during the relatively early, lucid part of the evening when the trouble with the freshman started. She was a tiny thing, wiry and compact, with short, dark hair, and a tan and freckles—an aesthetic Hannah didn’t care for because it was the opposite of her own.

The freshman’s skirt was very short and her tank top was very low cut, but she didn’t have much to show. Nevertheless, Hannah’s friend Brian obviously had his eye on her. Hannah didn’t get it. Wouldn’t it be like fucking a thirteen-year-old boy? She shot Brian a look of disapproval. She’d thought more of him.

Hannah’s friend Nick was there, too, and another guy whose name Hannah didn’t know but would later learn was Ethan. Chester talked about the regatta scheduled for the next weekend. Ethan rowed, too, it turned out, and Brian was interested, and Freshman pretended to be, in that way freshman girls were interested in everything. Hannah played with her hair, then played with her cuff bracelet, then wanted to shoot herself in the head.

She’d stopped paying attention, so she was taken by surprise when the freshman girl pointed at her and said, “I’ve got it! I figured out where I know you from.”

Chester reached for Hannah’s hand, but she dodged him and started rooting in her bag for a cigarette. She lit one, inhaled, exhaled, and said, “Fascinating.”

The freshman’s cheeks reddened a little, but she wasn’t deterred. “I mean, you looked really familiar, but I couldn’t think from where. Then I remembered this special I saw. . . .”

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“Just fucking say it, Nancy Drew.”

By now, there was no denying it, even if one were barely eighteen, and tipsy, and perhaps not even very bright: the air had changed. No one would meet Freshman’s eyes, except Hannah, who wouldn’t let her look away.

“Your brother is that sociopath who shot up his school,” she said, a bit breathless. “I mean, isn’t he?”

Hannah flinched. She wished she could be used to it. Wouldn’t it ever scar over? Or would it always be right there on the surface, an open wound for anyone to stick their finger in?

But when Hannah spoke, she was pleased to hear that she sounded almost bored. “You shouldn’t throw around terms like sociopath,” she said. “If you saw the special, you should know Theo’s not like those Columbine killers.”

In the four years since the day Theo lost it, Hannah had become something of an expert on school shootings. She’d read all the pop psychology books and had her own patchwork profiles of other shooters, cobbled together from the pull quotes of prominent psychologists. She’d puzzled out her own subdivisions among these killers: there were the psychopaths, who were smart, cunning, ruthless—eager to seek revenge for real or imagined slights, and dying, literally dying, to shock the world with a bloody show; the depressives, who couldn’t bear the world anymore but didn’t want to leave alone; and the psychotics, whose fears and reasons bore no relationship to reality. It was this last category that contained her brother.

“So, are you saying your brother’s not crazy?” Freshman tried to throw Hannah’s sneer back at her, but it was a pale imitation. She hadn’t spent the past few years weaponizing her face.

Hannah took a drag. “Crazy? Crazy isn’t listed in the DSM.” Hannah couldn’t recall where, but once, after it had all happened, she’d read about this man who’d strangled a woman who was out walking her dog around some decent cul-de-sac one evening—just strangled, nothing else, isn’t that always the first question?—then roasted and ate the woman’s dog, some small

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breed that couldn’t save itself or its mistress. The story struck her because there was a sort of innocence in it, a sort of randomness, a clear disassociation from the evil of human wickedness, a beastlike naïveté unique to endangered predators and certain mentally ill individuals.

Theo hadn’t worn a trench coat. He didn’t have a list. He didn’t target bullies or jocks or pretty girls. It hadn’t even been his school—he was already being bused to a charter school supposedly better equipped to deal with adolescents who were “unable to thrive” in a traditional setting. Her brother had simply wandered into the local high school, Hannah’s high school, deadly and unassuming as a bear, armed with a gun, but not knowing, Hannah was certain, just what he was going to do with it. He had no body armor, no excessive ammunition, just a secondhand .45 their father had bought for “household protection.” Theo had wandered around for a while with his face flat somehow, empty—an expression Hannah could barely recognize when she later saw the security video in court and blamed the mask-like deadness on the low resolution. Finally, he was confronted by a security guard in the cafeteria. There was a struggle, then the shots.

One: shattered Robbie Tybold’s ankle, like really shattered it so that it was ultimately amputated and he could never play hockey again.

Two: bit off the small piece of flesh above Liza Bloom’s right clavicle as it sailed past.

Three: tunneled through the meat of Dan Berkowitz’s thigh until it split his femur like an ax.

Four: whistled through the window, and the shell was never found.

Five: lodged in the painted metal door of an exit.

And six: killed Timothy Granger, a sophomore Hannah didn’t know then and had tried but failed to learn nothing of.

Hannah had been a junior at Euclid Heights then, but after she fled with the others, pouring through the heavy, out-swung doors then waiting under the gathering beat of a half-dozen carrion news copters and the swoosh of the entire police force’s flashing lights, she never entered a high school again. She

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graduated early, was consumed by the trial for a year after that, then went to college. It was an exclusive liberal arts school, but she’d written one hell of an admissions essay.

Who could compete—by writing about volunteering in Haiti after the hurricane or teaching kids to make coin purses from trash in Honduras—when she was writing about being the sister of the Euclid Heights High shooter? Truth was, in some ways Hannah was better off than she would have been if the shooting had never happened.

She knew it was hopeless, but suddenly it seemed important to at least try to make Freshman understand. “Sociopaths don’t care if they hurt people. Some even enjoy it. The psychotic—people dissociated from reality—don’t enjoy hurting people. Sometimes they don’t even remember.”

Did Theo remember? If he were asked about it, even if the events were simply discussed in his hearing, he’d go into a sort of emotional seizure, deaf and flailing and beyond the comfort of anything but Haldol.

No one else said anything, so Hannah’s words just hovered there. Nick pulled out an eightball and cut some of it into six fat lines on the matte silver back of his iPhone. It was a gesture of goodwill to cut the tension, and it worked. Now people had something to look at; they didn’t have to pretend interest in the spiderwebs in the corner or the moldy rocks glass forgotten on one of the bookshelves in order to avoid looking at Hannah’s foot, which was kicking in agitation.

Hannah was sitting to Nick’s left, and he offered her the first line. She twisted her hair out of the way, leaned down, and snorted. She passed the phone to Chester, who, of course, passed it on without imbibing. Hannah examined his face closely, hoping to see judgment there, something she could store up for a fight later, but he just looked resigned. That was worse because it only made her mad at herself. His concern touched her, and she didn’t want to be touched.

When it was Freshman’s turn, Nick looked unsure. “Have you ever had blow before?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, and lifted her pointy little chin.

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Hannah sneered at her. “Have you ever done a rail this size of really pure shit?” she asked. “You’re not in Kansas anymore. Nick, just give her a bump.”

Freshman took Hannah’s words as a dare. She snorted a line. For a second, it looked like she was having an orgasm. Then her eyes rolled back, and she dropped to the ground, seizing wildly.

“Fucking freshmen,” Hannah muttered, but her eyes were wide like a spooked horse’s, and she was the one who dialed 911 on her cell. ***

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H

annah wasn’t worried when she was called in for a meeting with the Assistant Dean. Freshman hadn’t died. The party hadn’t been on campus; nor had it been her party. She figured she was in for a lecture, nothing

more.

Dr. Gladstone gestured to one of the green leather chairs in front of her desk, and Hannah sat. The chair tipped back, throwing Hannah off balance. While she was righting herself, Dr. Gladstone launched into her questions.

“Hannah, it’s my understanding that you were one of the students present when Julia Clark overdosed on cocaine. Is that true?”

“Is that her name?” Hannah said, then, “Yes, I was. I’m the good Samaritan who called the ambulance.”

“The cocaine was Nick Huntsford’s, was it not?”

“If you say so. It wasn’t mine.”

The older woman sighed. “Ms. Clark claims that you goaded her into taking that cocaine.”

“I wish you had a video of this or something, I really do, because I’m the one who told her not to.”

“I know that you purchase cocaine from Andy Reiner, the same dealer from whom Mr. Huntsford purchased his cocaine.”

“Who even told you that?”

Hannah was starting to get worried. She could feel what was coming; she’d seen it with her brother. When parents got scared, they wanted crazy things, and school administrations knew this. Even if no policy could have prevented what had happened, the school couldn’t admit there was nothing they could have done—it would be admitting that really they were powerless. Something had to change so people could feel safe again. With Theo, parents had started demanding that school counselors make their records public—they wanted to know who the crazies were. The request was absurd, and illegal besides, but they wanted it. Change the laws if they had to! In the end, the school hired an extra security guard, instituted a school uniform, and made students start using only transparent bookbags so no one could sneak in weapons. And people believed

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their kids were safe, because they had to. It was that, or never let their kids out of the house again.

Something would have to be done—why hadn’t Hannah realized this immediately? Her panic, coming late, hit hard.

“Who said I bought coke?”

“Ms. Greene, this is coming straight from the source. Mr. Reiner has given us the names of all eighteen students he has sold drugs to.”

Eighteen, Hannah thought numbly. No way were there only eighteen. Andy didn’t name everyone. She just hadn’t made the cut.

Hannah had never taken advantage of Andy, like other girls did, and she’d stupidly thought that made her special. No, she hadn’t thought her dealer was her friend, but wasn’t that why they had a relationship founded on mutual understanding and respect? And wasn’t that better than friendship?

Apparently not. Lesson learned: even when she didn’t think someone cared about her much at all, they still cared about her less than she thought they did.

“He’s lying,” Hannah said, in a voice that sounded false and flat, even to herself.

“Hannah, it’s important that you be honest with me right now.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“At this stage, I’m just gathering information about the incident that happened over this past weekend. I have some questions for you, and I need you to tell the truth. Are we clear?”

Hannah nodded.

“Ms. Clark is epileptic,” Dr. Gladstone said. “Did any of you know?”

“I never even met her before,” Hannah said quickly, shaking her head. “I don’t think the others did either, but I couldn’t say for sure. They probably wouldn’t have let her if they knew.”

“Did you dare her to take the cocaine?”

“No. I told her she couldn’t handle it, that she should take less. But I guess I wasn’t very nice about it. I was mad.” Hannah hesitated, then added, “She’d been talking about my brother.”

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The woman gave Hannah a gentle look, but pressed on. “So, no one was trying to trick her or take advantage of her?”

Hannah was horrified. “God, no! Who, Brian? He’s a puppy dog.”

“All right, Ms. Greene. You can go now. I’ll let you know what the disciplinary board decides.”

“What? That isn’t fair!” Hannah said, her stomach twisting from wariness to icy panic. “I thought you just wanted to know what happened?”

“I have an obligation to pass all this information on to the disciplinary board.

This isn’t about you or me. This is about keeping our student body safe. But, as I said, I’ll let you know when the board has made their decision.”

Well, that was it. Hannah would be cut now. What chance did she have? She was out. Hannah grabbed her bag and walked shakily from the office. ***

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W

hen his problems had first started, she’d shielded Theo the best she could. Hannah still didn’t know if she’d been wrong to do it. What if her parents would have been able to help Theo if they’d known? Of course, the thought was absurd—her parents help Theo?—but it wasn’t impossible.

She’d had her first inklings at the dinner table, the only time the four of them were all together. The family would converge for perhaps an hour, then drift back to their own private spaces to do homework, read, watch television, lick the various wounds of the day. Dinner was something to be suffered through for all involved, a sort of burnt offering to the family gods, who apparently cherished the mingled stench of magazine recipes and asinine questions.

“How was school?” Hannah’s mother asked.

“It was all right. We got Latvia for Model UN. I was hoping for Estonia, but at least it’s still a Baltic state.”

“What do all think of the casserole?” her mother asked. “The recipe is from Real Simple —it uses Greek yogurt instead of sour cream. I bet you couldn’t even tell.”

“No,” Hannah lied. “It’s good.”

“There was a snake on the bus,” Theo said. “It scared Rachel so bad she got a nosebleed.”

Hannah threw Theo a surprised look. He had messed up one of his lines.

Theo was supposed to say something about AV club, which their father would have smiled at politely; or talk about a prank his friend Rob had planned or pulled, which their mother would frown at, but delicately, so as not to give herself wrinkles; or describe the premise of his new video game, which neither of their parents would have heard at all.

“A snake? Was this another of Rob’s pranks?” their mother asked, straining to bring these comments back to something that was, although distasteful, at least familiar.

Theo shook his head. “No, it was a wild snake,” he insisted. “There was blood everywhere. It wasn’t even red; it was this maroon-black. I wonder if Rachel will even come back to school.”

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Hannah’s parents looked at her, and she looked at Theo. His eyes were bright in a way that disquieted her.

Hannah laughed, then reassured her parents. “He’s joking. Nothing happened on the bus.”

Theo looked uncertain. He was going to say something, but Hannah gave him a look that told him to shut up. Instead, he smiled tentatively, and their father laughed, and their mother told Theo he shouldn’t play so many video games.

That was the beginning of the dance where Hannah fought to keep what each of them knew and what each of them thought they knew in the sort of perfect balance that would at least let things stay the way they were. The end had come when their mother tried to take the section of newspaper Theo was marking up with a red pen and Theo snarled like a feral dog.

“You’re always spying on me!” he said, then retreated to his room.

Later, their mother approached Hannah, newspaper in hand. She had retrieved it from the trash. “This is not normal,” her mother said, holding out the newspaper.

There were pen marks everywhere, lines of pale, glossy red, words underlined three times, phrases circled, boxed, connected with arrows, like the paper was some private message that was his to crack.

Hannah had made herself the intermediary between Theo and her parents, but for once, when she was called on for answers, she had nothing to say.

“Hannah, what is this?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

That was when the fear that had occasionally fluttered through her chest began to live there. They sent Theo to a psychiatrist. He was prescribed anti-anxiety medication, and her parents moved him to that charter school.

Even before the trouble started, Hannah had been the favorite. Both she and Theo knew it. It seemed to Hannah that they cared about appearances more than other people’s parents did, about how their children looked to the world, and what that said about them. So Hannah’s ballet recitals were a delight because her mother could say, See? Hannah has my legs. I danced as a girl, you know.

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Who knows what might have happened if I hadn’t given it up? And when Hannah led the debate team to victory, so poised and intelligent behind that podium, her parents could sigh as one and think, She got our brains . . . and our beauty. Lucky girl! Lucky us!

But what could they do with Theo’s World of Warcraft ranking? With his drawings, not even very good, of bulky heroes and buxom Amazonians? What kind of reflection was that? Nothing about him said anything they wanted to hear.

And then, as his behavior slipped and twisted from nerdy, to strange, to truly bizarre, the tension between their parents built. They were locked in a race to disavow him. Wasn’t your aunt in a mental hospital? Father would say. Then Mother: She was anorexic! And aren’t you forgetting about that news clipping? Your greatgrandfather arrested for driving his team of draft horses through the city, naked and preaching?

That was when Hannah had begun to hate her mother and father because although they avoided looking at her brother, he could still see them, could still boil their words down to the bone: Mine? That one’s not mine. He’s your son. ***

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“I

can’t go back there. I can’t,” Hannah said, practically panting. Every few moments she’d grab something—yank a sweater off a hanger, grab fistfuls of panties from the dresser—and shove them into one of her suit-

cases.

Chester watched her. She was like electricity arcing from a downed power line—he respected her, but also something else. He could ground her. Something in him could do it, something solid and heavy yet yielding, something like clay.

“I read their book,” he said. “I never told you because I didn’t know if you’d be upset.” He took a pair of jeans out of her bag and folded them.

Hannah raked a hand through her hair, then held it there, cradling the back of her skull as if the Assistant Dean had hit her with a two-by-four, rather than sent a chilly missive through campus mail: Ms. Hannah Greene, I am sorry to inform you . . . board of directors . . . possibility of readmission next semester . . . while drug rehabilitation is not a condition, it will greatly increase your chances . . . Sincerely, Dr. Josephine Gladstone— Hannah exhaled. She wished she were smoking, but she couldn’t keep still for the five minutes it would take to sit by the window and have a cigarette. Of course, what did it matter now if they smelled smoke from the hall?

“If you were curious about Theo, you should’ve just asked me. If there’s any insight in that book, it was added by the ghostwriter.”

“You haven’t read it?”

Hannah shot him an incredulous look. “Christ, Chez, even I have my limits.”

“It’s a flattering portrayal—of you, I mean. You come off as very loyal.”

Hannah gave the smallest shrug. “He’s my brother. It’s not like I deserve a medal for loving him.”

“You don’t have to go back,” Chester said. “You could stay here, with me.”

“In your dorm room?”

He shrugged. “We’d get an apartment.”

But Hannah knew it was impossible, as completely, physically impossible as just deciding to change the color of her hair. Yes, she could fake it for a while, but it would be artificial, and lots of chemicals would be involved. It wouldn’t

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fix things. It would be a Band-Aid—worse, a tourniquet. One of them could lose a limb.

“You can’t really think that’s a good idea.”

“It’s an idea.” He blew out a quick blast of air, like he’d taken a Lamaze class or something, Breathing Techniques for Discussions with Difficult Girls. “Remember when we first got together? How you said you didn’t want any commitment?

Well, I haven’t slept with anyone else since, and I know you haven’t either.”

Hannah was stunned. Did he really think that? The townie who’d gotten her into that bar in D.C.; that senior—Johnny?—after the Halloween party a few weeks earlier, when Chester had been sick; the drummer from that band that had just had a track featured on Pitchfork, in the bathroom of the Black Cat. . . . It was a finite list, but it did go on.

“I mean, at a school this small, I’d know if you had,” he said, sounding less certain now.

“You should listen to what I say, not what you think I mean,” she said gently.

She’d been trying to convince him to be done with her for so long, in lots of little ways— breaking dates; being late; flirting with his friends; ending evenings kneeling in front of the toilet for hours with him right outside the stall, waiting to make sure she didn’t pass out, didn’t die. Sometimes, he was put out, but he always boomeranged right back to her. Somewhere along the line, she’d forgotten he could actually be hurt. That had never been what she wanted. He just got this look sometimes, not just after they’d had sex, but at random times, too, when they were eating together in the cafeteria or he was dropping her off after walking her to class—this fuzzy, blissful look, like he was in love with her, or with whom he thought she was at least. And Hannah couldn’t stand it. There wouldn’t be any white picket fences and Labrador retrievers and babies dressed in Lily Pulitzer rompers in their future. She had to push him away.

She should have just broken things off with him, none of these pussy halfmeasures, but the truth was, when he looked at her like that, it made her think that maybe she did deserve to be loved after all. So she never pushed him hard enough.

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His face took on the slightly wrinkled look of someone about to cry. “You’re right, Hannah. You’re right.”

Suddenly, the eight-hour drive ahead and what waited on the other side seemed greatly preferable to seeing that wounded look on his face a moment longer. He was handsome, beautiful really, and rich and shining and good. Nothing in his twenty years had given him the tools to cope with this sort of disappointment. He couldn’t tuck his hurt away like Hannah could, invisible until she pulled it out to examine in private.

“I haven’t seen him since June,” Hannah said. “Really this is good. It’s been so long. . . . I should see him.” She sighed. “I just wish I didn’t have to see them.”

But Chester was done with all that, done talking, done wondering about her family. She figured he’d learned more about her than he wanted to know.

“Here, I’ll carry your bags,” he said. He sounded—civil. Hannah knew he wouldn’t be coming back this time. ***

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H

er cellphone rang again, but she didn’t answer it. She was driving west, straight into the sunset, in the Mini Cooper convertible her parents had bought her. Hannah hated the car and never would have chosen it herself.

They acted like the things the family could afford now were a consolation, but for Hannah, all the perks just made things worse. Theo’s life was basically over.

How much could she really be expected to enjoy the trappings that came in the wake of his fall?

Her mother and father had each left half a dozen frantic messages. They were livid. Her father wanted to call their lawyer. Her mother wanted to alert the press.

Hannah wished they would yell at her, get mad at her, but they only blamed the school.

She’d talk to them when she got home. Let them wait.

Eight hours was too long for someone like her to be alone, though. She actually thought about calling Chester. She thought about just going back and telling him that she wanted to get that apartment after all. How perverse would that be? Letting him go just to turn around and snatch him back up again, cruel as a cat. She wouldn’t do it; she shouldn’t even think it.

It was when she was driving through the dark hills of Pennsylvania that the feeling she’d been flirting with the whole drive finally crept into her bones. She couldn’t possibly enumerate all the things she’d done wrong, not with fingers and toes, hell, not with a fucking abacus. She wondered why she hadn’t been punished then thought maybe that was her punishment: having to see people just smile at her as if she were a person instead of a collection of mistakes.

She picked up old hurts, dusted them off, and felt them like they were fresh again. That Christmas morning, when her parents were particularly unabashed in their favoritism and bought her more than they really should have been able to afford. How could they think she’d enjoy anything that broke her brother’s heart? But at the same time, the guilt of having gotten so many things she really wanted.

How one day, when Hannah had been in middle school, she saw this bearded man picking the lock on the shiny black Saab her father had bought so proudly

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Collateral Damage

the year before, as soon as business had picked up a little bit. She quickly found her father and brought him over to the window, but he just told her he’d sold the car and closed the blinds. It was quite strange until she thought about the late night muffled sound of her parents’ arguing, about her father’s increasing presence at home during the day. No clients today, kiddo, he’d say, but they still bought a big flat-screen television to replace the old one.

She had sufficiently warmed up for the grand finale—the memory that always hovered there in the periphery. Occasionally Hannah had to force herself to really look at it. Otherwise, the pain might fade away, and if she ever believed that she deserved to stop feeling this hurt, then she’d know she was done—totally irredeemable.

Hannah unwrapped her memory of the night before the shooting. ***

Kate Norris

23

H

annah had been reading The Sun Also Rises for AP English when Theo came in.

“Could you help me with this?” he asked, holding out his notebook.

Hannah set her book down. “Sure. What is it?”

Theo frowned. Just putting his thoughts into the words that she would understand was an act of translation. “It’s a sort of report,” he said finally.

“All right.”

Hannah looked at the notebook. There were words and line drawings, his writing shakier than it used to be because one of his medications had the side effect of giving him a slight tremor. It was all gibberish—notes on their neighbors’ movements, charts showing their water temperature day by day, quotes from the radio.

“What class is this for?”

“It’s not for a class.”

“Are you writing a story?” Hannah asked, then was immediately angry with herself. Why was she acting like her mother, trying to pretend that Theo’s behavior could be imagined into normalcy through some great act of make-believe? He opened his mouth, but she held up a hand to stop him. “Look, you have to cut this shit out. Seriously. Isn’t the medicine helping at all?”

Theo’s face had grown markedly rounder in the months since he’d first been prescribed anti-psychotics. The inner seams of the thighs of his jeans were all wearing away, and sometimes, when the sleeves of his T-shirts bunched up, she could see the snaking red puckers of stretch marks blooming on his upper arms.

If the medications could make such rapid changes to his body, surely they were up to the much smaller task of gently steering his thoughts back to reality.

“I stopped taking those pills,” Theo said. “They’re poison.”

“They are not. Go get them right now.”

His eyes flashed. “No! I flushed them all down the toilet.”

Hannah could feel herself trembling. She couldn’t think of another time she’d been so angry. Why wasn’t he even trying? Didn’t he care at all? “I’m going to tell Mom,” she said, “and she’s going to tell the doctor. If you won’t take pills

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Collateral Damage

then we’ll give you shots. I’ll stick you myself if I have to.” She jabbed him in the chest with a shaky finger.

“You’re a traitor. You’re on their side.”

“Mom and Dad are going to send you away! If you don’t stop this shit, they’re going to lock you up. You think they won’t?”

“They’ve always liked you better,” Theo said, for the first time naming the hurt that always hovered between them.

Hannah nodded. “They have. That’s why you have to stop this.” He tried to take his notebook, but Hannah snatched it back. “No. I’m going to show this to Dr. Patel.”

Theo wore a face she’d never seen on him before. She thought it might be hatred. Fine, she thought. Good. Whatever it takes.

When she finally returned to her room a few days after the shooting, it had been ransacked, and she knew Theo had been looking for the notebook. And when he didn’t find it, he came for it at school. ***

Kate Norris

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A

t home, when they talked about Hannah getting kicked out, it was never about what she’d done. Her father complained that the school wasn’t even going to give a partial refund of tuition for the semester and then told her to let him know when she was ready to talk to the lawyer. Hannah stiffened at her mother’s hugs and tried to keep her face impassive while her mother talked about how Hannah’s hair was brittle, how exhausted she looked, wouldn’t she please go see this great chiropractor she’d been seeing, who also specialized in these holistic supplements.

One morning after she’d been home a couple of days, Hannah said, “I think I’ll go see Theo today.”

“Oh,” her mother said, blinking a few times rapidly. “Okay.”

“You don’t want to come with me?” She wanted her mother to refuse so they could fight about it.

But her mother said, “Of course, I’ll come. If you want me to.”

“Never mind,” Hannah said. “I can go by myself.”

Her mother set down the bagel she’d been eating and gave Hannah a crooked smile. “You were always such a good sister to him.”

“Not good enough,” she said, by which she meant Not good enough to make up for having a mom like you. ***

Kate Norris

27

H

annah had once received a letter from Timothy Granger’s father. He was sorry to be contacting her, it said, but when he’d sent a letter to her parents, he’d gotten one back from their lawyer. He didn’t want to cause any trouble, wasn’t planning a civil suit, just needed to make sense of things.

He told her about Tim. He was in the AV club. He helped build the sets for plays and was in drama club, but really what he was interested in was film, not theater. He won a scholarship to a screenwriting workshop at a university in New York City. He would have gone there that summer. His dad still got booklets and letters from film schools, addressed to Tim. He knew it was silly, but he saved them. There was a pile of them in Timmy’s room, on his desk. Sometimes, he would go in there, sit on his son’s bed, and flip through the pile, feeling so strongly that there was an alternate reality out there where Tim was at one of these schools, and he missed his son terribly but just because he only got to see him during school breaks and holidays, not because Tim was dead and he’d never see him again.

People say your brother is a monster, the letter said, but I know that’s not true. I don’t hate him. I know he’s just a troubled kid, mentally ill. I don’t even know if this will help, but I have to know—what was he thinking? Why do you think he did it? The newspapers, it’s all garbage. Sensationalistic bullshit. You went to school with Tim. I know you’ll tell me the truth.

Hannah took the letter to her next appointment with Dr. Collins. “What the shit am I supposed to do with this?” she asked, thrusting the letter at her psychiatrist.

Dr. Collins read it over and said, “I think this could be really helpful for you, Hannah.”

“I don’t have any answers. You know I don’t.”

What could she tell Mr. Granger? That she’d yelled at Theo, that she’d stolen the notebook that made him feel safe, that it was her fault her brother had been there that day? Dr. Collins had already told her that wasn’t true. Dr. Collins said there was no way Hannah could have known Theo would do something like

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Collateral Damage

that and no one was to blame for Theo’s actions—not her parents, not her, not even Theo, who was sick.

Obviously, Dr. Collins didn’t understand family. Hannah was supposed to protect Theo, and she hadn’t. Timothy Granger and the others who were shot were collateral damage from her failure.

“It doesn’t have to be about answers,” Dr. Collins said. “It can be about commiseration. You are one of very few people in a position to understand his suffering. He lost his son in this senseless way. In some ways, you lost your brother.”

“I don’t see what the point is.”

“Let’s set aside the idea of responding for a moment. We aren’t here to make Mr. Granger feel better. We’re here for you. What did it feel like to find out more about Tim?” “Why is someone automatically a saint when they die like that? If someone shot me tomorrow, everyone would have all this nice shit to say about me, too.

Something like this happens, and it’s like stepping into a Hallmark Special. Everything becomes all one way or the other, all good or all bad.”

“When you first started seeing me, you were doing a lot of research about school shootings. You wanted to know what the shooters had been like, as people.”

“Yeah.”

“It sounds like Tim’s father wants something similar.”

But in the end, this wasn’t something Hannah could give him. She knew she should respond, but every time she tried to think of what she would say, it seemed wholly inadequate. She wanted to say something about being a completely nonsensical thing no one could have prevented or explained—that he might as well think about it as if his son had died in a school bus crash—but at the same time and in complete contradiction, she wanted him to know it was her fault, and her parents’, that they all should have seen it coming and been able to stop it.

Hannah knew she should respond, but she couldn’t do it, and hating Timothy’s father for hoisting this obligation on her didn’t lessen the guilt she felt for failing

Kate Norris

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to meet it. This guilt calcified deep at the heart of her, next to all the others. She would feel it sometimes as a vague unease, the sense that there was something she was forgetting that she was wrong to forget, and the letter would surface for a moment in her mind but then she would push it under again. ***

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Collateral Damage

H

annah parked in the visitors lot of Maple View Hospital Center, the minimum-security mental hospital Theo had been moved to after he was six months “incident-free” at the maximum-security place, where he’d been locked up with the most terrifying people she’d ever seen—people Theo didn’t belong with. Maple View was similar to the mental hospital he’d done short stints in before the shooting, but with beefed-up security.

Of course, the real difference was that now Theo might stay there, or some place like it, for the rest of his life. He’d been tried as an adult and found not guilty by reason of insanity, which meant he had to be hospitalized until he was no longer a danger. What doctor would stake his or her reputation on a claim like that—that such a high-profile killer was no longer a danger to himself or anyone else? There was no chance of that happening.

It wasn’t that Theo had done anything worse than the patients who could reasonably hope for release. It was their parents. The families of other notorious killers released a brief statement, then battened down the hatches. They retreated from the public eye. They had no comment. Her parents had “written” a book.

Every time there was another mass shooting, reporters would call them—they were always good for a quote. “Our hearts go out to the families of the children murdered, but also to the family of their killer. . . .” Their mother had even started a support group for the family members of murderers along the lines of Al-Anon, although it didn’t gain much traction. Most people preferred to keep their anger and guilt and grief to themselves.

If it weren’t for her mother and father, everyone would have forgotten who Theo was by now. God knows there had been more than enough mass shootings since then.

Hannah signed in at the reception desk. She barely heard the buzz of the metal door being unlocked as she was led to the big, windowed recreation room where Theo was. Some of the other inmates—No, patients, she reminded herself—were with visitors, and others were just killing time, in various states of lucidity. Some people were reading; others were so out of it that they looked as if, given a paperback, they would eat the pages. Hannah was afraid to make eye contact with anyone, so it took her a little while to spot Theo.

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His back was to her, and he’d gained at least sixty pounds, but she would recognize those ringlets anywhere. “Sausage curls,” their grandmother had called them. She walked around to the front of the table and smiled tentatively at him, not sure what to expect.

Hannah gave Theo an awkward little wave, and he jumped up and hugged her.

“Hannah! Hi!” She sat down across the table from him and saw that, across the room, an aide was watching them. Theo had cards laid out for solitaire, and she suggested they play gin. He shuffled and dealt.

He was happy to see her. Hannah knew she should have come more often. It was just that the other place had been so awful. One of the security aides had told her all sorts of horror stories about some of the worst patients—people who’d done some real Silence of the Lambs-type shit—in a misguided attempt to impress her. She still had nightmares about some of it.

As they played, Hannah was stunned by how well Theo seemed. Yes, he’d gained weight, and his acne was severe, both side effects of his medication, but his eyes were normal, which they hadn’t been for ages. They’d been alternatively fever-bright or dull as doctors tried to formulate the perfect cocktail. Now, it seemed they’d succeeded.

Theo won the first hand, even though Hannah played the best she could.

“You’re out of practice,” Theo said as he gathered the cards. “What do you do at that fancy school, anyway?”

“Seriously?” Hannah said. “Drugs.” They both laughed, and she knew this was as right a moment as she’d ever find. She took a breath and said, “There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you come to school that day for your notebook? The one I took from you?” she asked in a rush.

Theo messed up his shuffle, and cards scattered across the table, some showing their white faces, others their red scrollwork backs.

“Theo, did you come there for me?”

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Collateral Damage

“I don’t have to talk about that here. You can’t make me.” The way he said it, they were children again, bickering.

Just like then, she couldn’t let it go. “It’s not bad. I won’t be upset with you.”

Hannah’s hair swayed as a sort of tremor shook her. “I just need to know how much of it was my fault.”

“I won’t!” Theo shouted. A security aide was already striding over to them when Theo started banging his head on the table. “No! No no no no no!”

Hannah knocked over her chair as she stood up and backed away from the table. The aide was quickly joined by another. They secured Theo efficiently and started to drag him away. He flailed and tried to free himself, and she trailed after them, despite the aides’ commands, as they half-carried her brother down the hallway, until they reached a room and shut the door behind them. Hannah peeked through the small wire-reinforced window and watched as Theo was strapped down to a bed with lamb’s wool padded leather restraints, curiously old-fashioned among all the shining steel and white of the hospital. They injected him with something, and Hannah shivered at the echo: I’ll stick you myself if I have to.

Theo’s body took up almost the whole narrow hospital bed, and Hannah remembered how when they were young, Theo had often come into her room at night because he was frightened. She would let him sleep in her bed with her, but then they got older, and she started to think it was weird for them to sleep together. She started sending him away.

Later, during a rare time of clarity after he’d become ill, he told her he had been having hallucinations then, too. That was why he had been scared. His psychiatrist told their mother that Theo was remembering wrong—it was very rare for schizophrenia to have such an early onset. Thinking he’d suffered hallucinations as a child was a delusion. But Hannah figured that it didn’t matter. If what he remembered was having hallucinations, being frightened, coming to her for comfort, and being turned away, it may as well have been true.

If Theo told her he hadn’t come there that day for her, would it even change anything? It felt true, and always would, no matter what he said.

Kate Norris

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Kate Norris received her MFA from Ohio State University in 2015, where she served as Fiction Editor of The Journal and taught composition and creative writing. She currently lives and writes in Cleveland, Ohio.

This is her first published story.

About this story, Kate Norris explains that she is not Hannah and her younger brother certainly isn't Theo, but she does have a younger brother she’s very close with and he does have schizoaffective disorder. The early years after the onset of his illness were really rough, and she remembers, in particular, her mom telling her that his psychiatrist had called to warn her that Norri’s brother might want to hurt her. Even though she was in college, living several states away, the point was her brother could be dangerous. Her parents started sleeping with a baseball bat under their bed. Norris didn't really believe her brother would hurt anyone—especially not her—but what if he did? If he hurt someone, whose fault would it be? Norris knew that no matter what, it would somehow feel like hers. A lot of other stuff fed into the writing of “Collateral Damage,” but that phone call, more than a dozen years ago, was the first seed.

Kate Norris

Iron Horse Literary Review would like to thank its supporters, without whose generous help we could not publish Iron Horse successfully. In particular, we would like to thank our benefactors and equestrian donors. If you would like to join our network of friends, please contact us at ihlr.mail@gmail.com for information on the various levels of support.

Benefactors ($300) Wendell Aycock Lon and Carol Baugh Beverly and George Cox Sam Dragga Madonne Miner Charles and Patricia Patterson Gordon Weaver Equestrian ($3,000 and above) TTU English Department, Chair Bruce Clarke TTU College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Brent Lindquist TTU Graduate School, Dean Mark Sheridan TTU Provost’s Office, Provost Rob Stewart TTU President’s Office, President Lawrence Schovanec