After the Nashville Shooting

An Essay by Emry Trantham

I.

It’s 2009. I am twenty-three. My husband will be turning twenty-four at the end of the week, and I’ve been working for the last month to get him the perfect gift. It’s his first birthday as a dad.

I want to get him a handgun. He can use it for target shooting, and for protecting our new family. I know he has a hunting rifle and an old revolver, but I think I can do better. I’ve gleaned enough clues from manipulation and thin air to decide that he will be happy with a 9mm.

I’m working with a small budget—I stay home with our daughter and Jeff works constantly to keep me there. I call my dad to help me find something I can afford; he works for the Sheriff’s Department and knows everyone. He finds me a deal at a pawn shop in Haywood County, forty-five minutes away. 

My wrinkled MapQuest directions guide me through the small-town backstreets of Clyde, NC, until I find the store. I lug the car seat in through a side door and tell the man at the desk all the information I have: my dad sent me. I did the background check. I’m here to buy the Smith and Wesson. 

He charges me fifty dollars less than the agreed upon price. I don’t ask questions.

Jeff loves the gun. He’s genuinely surprised, for once. I take pictures of him holding our daughter with one arm and opening his pistol with the other, the dining room smoky from the candles he had just blown out.

II. 

I’m at my mom’s house, rocking my one-year-old while my mom plays dollhouse with my oldest, now three. The television is on. A daytime talk show that has been buzzing in the background turns abruptly to a news alert. 

Sandy Hook Elementary comes into focus. For the next hour, I am in terror, unable to stop watching, willing myself to witness what has happened to children a few years older than my own. To the teachers who loved them. To their parents and families and our entire country.

Tears drop on my daughter’s fuzzy head. I don’t brush them away. 

I’m going to have to homeschool. 

III. 

When my oldest daughter is in first grade, we encounter several life changes in short succession. We enroll her in a public school, and for the first time in years I am not trying to homeschool and run my photography business and care for our three daughters. I’m relieved to hand off their elementary education to the capable hands of literally anyone else. 

A phone call comes through on a rainy day, hitting at a moment that feels an awful lot like fate, and I accept an interim teaching position at the high school I attended. Nine years after I graduated from Western Carolina with an English degree, I’ll finally be able to use it. 

I am excited. I am nervous. I am terrified.

IV. 

On my first day, a new coworker shows me around. He gives me keys and a temporary badge, shows me my classroom, and asks if I have any questions. I have too many to even begin asking.

He leaves me at my new desk but stops before he gets to the hallway.

Did they tell you how to use the Columbine locks?

I flinch. 

God. Is that really what they’re called?

He laughs. We both do. Covering discomfort with dark humor will become a familiar coping mechanism. 

Columbine locks are deadbolts that can only be locked by using a key inside the classroom. 

V. 

Teaching high school is my calling. I’d abandoned it when I couldn’t find a position in the dismal job market I graduated into, going so far as to pay back my student loans that would have been absolved with four years of teaching in a public school. I relished the time with my family, but my entire being knows that teaching is what I’m supposed to be doing now.

Ten months in and I’ve taught sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They’ve completed enormous projects and given presentations, taken standardized tests that last for hours, written poetry they didn’t believe they could create. I have become independent in ways that I desperately needed. I’ve made friends with my coworkers and have gotten into a routine that I’d not been able to manage in my entire adult life. I feel competent.

But the world goes sideways again on Valentine’s Day. A nineteen-year-old with an assault rifle kills 17 people at a high school in Florida. 

VI.

The temperature in every room rises ten degrees. Students make cards from construction paper that someone supposedly mails to Parkland, and while they color, the adults worry. They make plans. They research. 

Soon, we are practicing lock-down drills at a fast clip. We rearrange our classroom furniture. For the first time since I started teaching, our classrooms are locked all day. I’ve gotten the hang of the Columbine locks.

I dread the code red drills. We know, kind of, when they’re coming. Next week. Later this month. Three more this school year. Some mornings, when my stomach is twisted tight on the way to school, I call my dad and beg him to tell me when the next drill is. The dates and times are coordinated with the Sheriff’s Department, so he can usually find out. He isn’t supposed to tell me, but he does. I’m grateful.

When we’re in a drill, I am fighting active panic. Lights out, blinds drawn, phones off. Students huddle in a corner, silent. I practice square breathing and remind myself that this is just practice. It isn’t real. There’s no threat. There’s no threat. There’s no threat. 

VII.

Summer is empty. The routine I have followed for the past ten months has disappeared, and I am again home with my children all day. I am glad for the hours with them, but I can’t enjoy the time. I know it is short-lived, that my two oldest daughters and I will be back in school within weeks. The spring’s anxiety has morphed into a depression I’ve never known. I’ve struggled with my mental health for most of my life, but I’ve always powered through. It has always gotten better. This time is different.

I nap every day. I’m not tired, but I crave unconsciousness. When I’m awake, I barely function. On a weekday in July, I lay on the playroom floor while the kids play around me. I stare at the ceiling so as not to see the mess. 

It occurs to me that if I accomplish something, I’ll feel better. Worthy. Alive. I decide to clean up the back patio, filthy from our dogs. But turning on the water hose proves impossible; the faucet is broken. I try and try to twist it on, but the water will not flow. I begin to cry tears of frustration and anger. I wake up my husband, who now works nights and sleeps days, and ask him for help. Bewildered but amenable, he turns on the water. He hands me a push broom and Clorox, then watches the girls while I scrub the patio for hours, sobbing with a force that scares us both.

When the patio is clean, I ask him to call my doctor. 

VIII.

The lockdown drills become less frequent, even if the shootings don’t. I’m on antidepressants for the first time, and I can’t quite remember why I was so scared of the code reds before. My body listens now. There’s no threat? There’s no threat.

Every year, the students ask the same questions.

Wouldn’t you feel better if you kept a gun in your desk?

Can’t we just go out the window?

What if a shooter comes from another direction?

What if someone from the school brings a gun and they already know our whole plan?

Should we try to climb into the ceiling? 

I answer when I can. I tell them no plan is perfect. We can’t predict every outcome. No, you shouldn’t try to climb into the ceiling. We’re doing the best we can.

Aren’t we?

IX.

I teach sophomores about argumentation by drawing the rhetorical triangle on the board. Ethos, pathos, logos. Credibility, emotion, logic—you must have all three to support your claim. 

Ethos: Why would anyone trust what you have to say? Establish your expertise. You are trustworthy. You know what you’re talking about and you are worth listening to.

Pathos: Why would anyone care? Give them a reason. Make them happy. Make them angry. Make them sad. Make them scared. 

Logos: How can you prove it? Throw numbers at them. Statistics, solid examples, data. Show them what’s true.

It’s a winning combination.

X.

After Uvalde, two people I love post on Instagram that it’s wrong to politicize tragedy so quickly. I’m so hurt that I respond, for once. This is a bad take. One family member takes down her post because she loves me, though she doesn’t agree, and the other doesn’t respond. 

Why argue? No one ever changes their mind.

XI.

Claim: We can, and should, do more to protect children from dying at the hands of mass-murderers who target schools with semi-automatic weapons.

Ethos: The American Pediatric Association. The UN. The World Health Organization. The American Psychological Association. 

Pathos: Children are dead. Yours could be next. 

Logos: Guns are the leading cause of death among American children under age 18. More than 349,000 children have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. States with laxer gun laws experience more mass shootings.

Why isn’t this triangle working?

XII.

The end of March. A heavily armed shooter kills three children, a custodian, a substitute teacher, and a principal in Nashville. I begin to cry while I read about it on my school computer. 

XIII.

The next day, a friend brings me a new pen. I haven’t been able to focus for the past twenty-four hours, but I pick up the pen and start writing. 

Two more days and I am almost finished writing this essay. But my appetite drops off. I lose the ability to get myself and my kids to school on time. Laundry overtakes the house. I take a day off, the day before a four-day weekend, because I simply can’t function. 

I haven’t missed this. 

XIV.

The teachers of The Covenant School are lauded for responding appropriately, and rightly so. The tragedy could have been so much worse. They locked their doors so quickly, they got their children into safe spaces, they saved lives. 

They did everything to protect the children that day.

Did I?

XV.

Did you?

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