Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [74]
The Monday after the shooting, Claire returned to school. She was grateful for all the supportive text messages and Facebook postings her friends had left for her over the weekend, but she knew it would be a terribly hard day. She went to school promising herself she wouldn’t cry, but the tears came as soon as she arrived and embraced a good friend. Her first-period teacher, Mrs. May, whom Claire loved, gave her a hug when she got to class. One student asked why the teacher was hugging Claire, and another student blurted out, “Her mom got shot in the head!”
“That broke me,” Claire later said. “I had to leave the room, tears streaming down my face. I was an emotional mess.”
Another teacher gave Claire a box of tissues to carry with her from class to class. “I know Gabby would have wanted me to have a normal and productive day,” Claire decided, and through her tears, she tried to do just that.
In the months after the shooting, Claire was sad on another front. She didn’t like that I was unavailable for her, given how busy I was caring for Gabby and training for my space shuttle mission. “You have so much on your plate,” she told me. “I feel like there’s no room for me.”
Claire tried not to be resentful, but the changes in our lives after January 8 were very tough for her. All I could do was hug her, tell her I loved her, and promise that I’d try harder.
As Gabby’s recovery continued, she became more comfortable with the girls. She enjoyed when they came to see her. She told them “I love you.” But Claudia still wrestled with her emotions and her regrets. Like me, she was having dreams about Gabby’s full recovery. In my dreams, I was overjoyed that Gabby was almost back to normal. “Mine are more like nightmares,” Claudia said. “Gabby is fully recovered, but she doesn’t want a relationship with me. She can’t forgive me.”
She didn’t need to worry. I had no doubts that the relationship between Gabby and the girls would continue to blossom. I saw it happening day by day.
Meanwhile, our lives remained split between before and after.
There were little things the girls reflected on. Before the shooting, they knew that people sometimes described me and Gabby as a so-called power couple. If they typed “astronaut Mark Kelly” and then “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords” into the Google search engine, we both had a similar number of entries. We were each mentioned on websites here and there, but like a lot of ambitious B-listers, our online presence was fairly modest. After Gabby was injured, the number of entries about her on Google exceeded eight million. None of us could have predicted that Gabby would charge ahead on the Googling front because of such an anguishing event for our family and eighteen other families. But the Internet is a heartless inventory. It tallies entries, not grief. It hurt to think about Gabby’s mushrooming online presence.
My girls lost their innocence in the wake of the shooting. They grieved for the children of the other victims in Tucson, and for the parents and brother of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old girl who died that day. They saw how, in retrospect, our lives had been easy and idyllic. We didn’t fully know it, but we’d all been very lucky, and lucky to have each other. We see that clearly now.
As Claudia began looking at colleges, there were a few that rose to the top of her list. One was the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Another was the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she considered joining the ROTC program.
She liked the idea of U of A because she already had a network of family and friends there. While it was far from home, it was a place she’d find her dad, her stepmom, Gabby’s parents, and other familiar faces. She could hike with Gabby’s friend Raoul, or he could lend a hand if her car needed to be fixed. Another friend of Gabby’s, Nelson Miller,