In the third week after the massacre, Kent returned to Alberta and we moved back into the house. Now I was a semi-hero, but at that point screw everybody. On the first Monday, around 9:15 in the morning, just after the soaps had started on TV, Mom asked if I was going to go back to school. I said no, and she said, "I figured so. I'm going to sell the house. It's in my name."

"Good idea."

There was a pause. "We should probably move away for a while. Maybe to my sister's place in New Brunswick. And change your hair like they do on crime shows. Find a job. Try and put time between you and the past few weeks."

I made some forays into the world, but wherever I went I caused a psychic ripple that made me uncomfortable. At the Capilano Mall, one woman began crying and hugging me, and wouldn't let go, and when I finally got her off me, she'd left a phone number in my hand. Downtown I was spotted by a group of these dead Goth girls, who followed me everywhere, touching the sidewalk where my feet had just been as if their palms could receive heat from the act. As for school-related activities like sports, they were off the menu, too. Nobody ever phoned to apologize for abandoning me. The principal showed up on Tuesday - the For Sale sign was already on the lawn by then - and there were still eggs and spray-painted threats and curses all over the house's walls. Mom let him in, asked if he'd like some coffee and settled him at the kitchen table with a cup, and then she and I went through the carport door and drove down to Park Royal to shop for carry-on baggage. When we got back a few hours later he was gone.

A week later I was out in the front yard with a wire brush, dishwashing soap and a hose, trying to scrape away the egg stains; the proteins and oils had soaked into the wood, and scrubbing was turning out to be pointless. A minivan full of charismatic Youth Alive! robots pulled into the driveway. There were four of them, led by the intrusive jerk Matt. They were wearing these weird, desexed jeans that somehow only Alive!ers seemed to own. They all had suntans, too, and I remembered an old brochure: "Tans come from the sun, and the sun is fun, and Youth Alive!, while being a serious organization charged with the care of youth, is also a fun, sunny, lively kind of group, too."

I had nothing to say to these guys, and ignored them as my father might ignore a pickup truck full of satanists listening to rock music being played backward.

Matt said, "Taking it easy, huh? We thought we'd come visit. You're not back in school."

I carried on scrubbing the house with steel wool.

"It's been a rough few weeks for all of us."

I looked at them. "Please leave."

"But, Jason, we just got here."

"Leave."

"Oh, come on, you can't be ..."

I blasted them with the garden hose. They stood their ground: "You're upset. That's natural," Matt said.

"Do any of you have any idea what traitorous scum you are?"

"Traitors? We were merely helping the RCMP."

"I learned about all of your help, thank you."

In spite of the hose, the foursome advanced. Were they going to kidnap me or group hug me? Lay their bronzed fingers on my head and pronounce me whole and returned to the flock?

Then a shot was fired - and two more - by my mother from the second floor. She was making craters in the lawn with Reg's .410. She blasted out the minivan's lights. "You heard Jason. Leave. Now."

They did, and for whatever reason, the cops never showed up.

Word of Mom and the gun must have kept away quite a few potential visitors. There were a few press people; a few family friends who'd vanished during those first two weeks; some Alive! girls leaving baked goods, cards and flowers on the doorstep, all of which I unwrapped and threw into the juniper shrubs for the raccoons. In any event, we never let anybody through our front door; within a month, the house was sold and we'd moved to my aunt's place in Moncton, New Brunswick.

My brain feels sludgy. It's late, but Joyce is always up for a good walk.

Just in the door. A warm, dry night out, my favorite kind of weather, and so rare here. During Joyce's walk I saw a car like the one Cheryl's mother, Linda, used to drive - a LeBaron with wood siding. The model looked good for the first week it was out, but a decade of sun and salt and frost have made it resemble the kind of car people in movies drive after a nuclear war.

Linda wrote me some time after we moved away; the letter is one of the few items I've kept across the years. It was mailed to my old address and forwarded to my aunt's house. It read:

Dear Jason,

I'm deeply ashamed that I've not contacted you before this. In the midst of losing Cheryl, we were vulnerable and chose to listen to strangers and not our own hearts. At the time when you needed comfort and support the most, we turned away from you, and it's something Lloyd, Chris and I face every day in the mirror. I don't ask your forgiveness, but I do request your understanding.

It's been a few months since October 4, but it feels like ten years. I've quit my job and, in theory, I'm supposed to be overseeing the Cheryl Anway Trust, but all I do is wake up, dress myself, drink some coffee and drive down to this office space we've rented on Clyde Avenue. There's not much for me to do here. Cheryl's Youth Alive! friends take care of the Trust's every function - handling cash, cheques and credit card receipts, sending thank-you notes, manning the phones, filling out tax forms, and so on. It's a busy place, but I don't fit in. I wish I could derive some sort of consolation from the Trust's success, but I don't, and they all work so hard - they've got bumper stickers, bracelets and postcards, and, for what it's worth, a ghostwriter will soon be doing a book about Cheryl's life which may or may not help other young people or their parents. It won't help me. I shouldn't be telling you this - this letter may never even find you - but nothing in the past months has brought me any solace, and how could it? In the last year of her life, my daughter was no longer my daughter. She was somebody else. I have no idea who it was who died in the shooting. What sort of mother would say that about her child?

I've just had one of those moments. Maybe you've had them, too - a moment when the distance and perspective I think I've put between me and Cheryl's shooting dissolves, and I'm right back on October 4 again - and then suddenly it's months later and I'm a middle-aged woman sitting in a rainy suburb on a weekday, and her daughter is dead for no reason, and she never knew her daughter at all. Her daughter chose something else; Cheryl chose something else over me and what our family offered, and she did it with smiles for everybody, but with condescension. And what am I to do? There is nothing I can do. Some man or woman is going to write Cheryl's life story, and they're going to ask me questions and I won't have a thing to say.

I don't know if I'm angry with Cheryl or angry at the universe. Do you get angry, Jason? Do you? Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?

Lloyd and Chris are taking things much better than I am. I'm lucky in that regard. Chris is young - he'll heal.

There will be scars, but he'll make it through okay. We have no idea what to do with him and school. He's having a hard time readjusting at Delbrook, which they've just reopened - they bulldozed the cafeteria and built a new one in just four weeks. We might have to send him to a private school, which we can't afford. That's for another letter.

Jason, I apologize. You don't need this on top of everything else, but then maybe you do. Maybe you need to know that there was someone else out there who loved the girl beneath the perfect smile, the girl who, to my mind, foolishly prayed for suffering so she could play at martyrdom. Jason, there's no one to talk to about this. All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.