Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [84]
Gabby listened as I read. When I got to the second column, I knew what was ahead. I was going to come to a paragraph about the people who were killed and wounded in Tucson. I thought I’d smoothly and seamlessly skip over those sentences, but Gabby had been following along. She watched me bypass that paragraph. That’s when she grabbed the paper, ruffled it, and glared at me. Using her middle finger and forefinger, she forcefully and abruptly tapped the paragraph in question.
I had made a decision after she was injured that I wouldn’t mislead her. If she asked me a question, I’d give her an answer. Now here she was, nonverbally, asking me for the truth. And so I read to her, slowly: “Ms. Giffords was one of nineteen people shot in January while she was meeting with constituents in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson; six died.”
I looked up from the page and took Gabby’s hand. She didn’t ask, “Who died? Did I know them? Were they strangers?” She couldn’t formulate a question or express herself at that level. But now she knew that she wasn’t the only one shot that day.
She sat for a moment, digesting the news, and then Angie asked, “Gabby, are you ready to go to speech therapy now?”
“Yes,” Gabby answered, but I could tell her thoughts were elsewhere.
As Angie wheeled her to therapy, Gabby began crying. I sat in on her session, and she was very emotional. She had trouble getting through her verbal exercises.
That night, I was lying in bed with Gabby and I asked her how she felt about what we’d read in the newspaper. “Awful, awful,” she said. “So many people hurt.”
“Yes,” I told her. “It was a very terrible day.”
“Die,” she said. “So many people.” She cried and I held her.
On the morning of the shooting I was home in Houston. It was my weekend to have the kids. Claire was sleeping and Claudia was sitting with me, talking about a boyfriend I didn’t approve of. (It wasn’t totally the boy’s fault. I don’t approve of any of them.)
That’s when my cell phone rang. It was Pia. “I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll just say it,” she said. “Apparently, Gabby has been shot at the Congress on Your Corner.”
She was in Washington and had no other information. She said she had just received a call from Mark Kimble, Gabby’s senior press advisor, who was at the Safeway but uninjured. Mark said he was standing behind a pole with bodies all around him. It was about four minutes after the shooting. The police hadn’t even arrived there yet.
Pia recalls that I was calm while hearing the news. She told me she had no other information. The call was over in fewer than thirty seconds.
“Claudia!” I said. “Wake up, Claire.” And then, strangely, I thought to myself that maybe I had just imagined my short conversation with Pia. For a few seconds, I wondered whether I’d been hallucinating. I got out my cell phone and looked at it to make sure Pia’s phone number was my most recent call.
I hit redial. “Tell me this again,” I said to Pia, and she repeated what she had said.
This time, she added that she’d heard Gabby may have been shot in the head. I’m an optimist. Maybe that information was wrong. Maybe the injury wasn’t life-threatening, and the bullet had just grazed her. Pia could only tell me what she’d heard from Mark Kimble.
I hung up and immediately called Gabby’s parents in Tucson. When something terrible happens to your child, I believe you have a right to know immediately. Spencer answered the phone and took the news hard. He began sobbing. He said Gloria was at a dry cleaner in Tucson, so I called her on her cell. She was shocked, but she’s like me. She was thinking, “What do I do next?”
For me, the first question was “How do I get to Tucson?”
The next commercial flight wouldn’t get me there for six hours. If it had been a weekday, I could have flown myself in one of NASA’s T-38s. I always needed