'Deceptively Strong'

A 'Mystery of Faith'

The doctor wonders about Derek: Is he still interacting with his peers, is he socially withdrawn, is he sleeping enough, or too much? Joanne Hawley is a clinical pharmacist at the veterans hospital in Salem, where she has spent years treating soldiers with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. But questions that come so naturally to her are the ones she doesn't dare ask. Derek is her son, not her patient.

Stop, he told her when she started in with her questions. I need you to be my mother.

She's tried to back off these past months, appeased by the waiver Derek signed allowing his therapist to share information with his worried parents. The counselor was the one who advised them not to throw away the bloodstained book bag his father retrieved from police after the attack. Let Derek decide what to do with it, the therapist said, because he has so little control over anything else. The book bag sits in a big brown sack atop the old upright piano in the O'Dell living room.

"I don't know if anyone believes in closure," Hawley says. "We're all living with this forever."

Sitting at their kitchen table, her husband, Roger, nods in agreement: "People would call and ask are things back to normal yet. I'd think, 'Of course not. It's never going to be normal again.' "

Hawley was at a conference in Colorado when the attack occurred; her cellphone was turned off when Derek called from the emergency room to report that he had been shot but was okay. She kept the message for six months, just so she could play it and hear her son's voice when she needed to. When Derek grew impatient with their daily phone calls -- just checking in!-- his parents learned how to text instead.

Over time, other parents of Tech victims began to get in touch. They formed an e-mail group, and met for an occasional lunch or dinner. They shared frustrations and concerns, comparing notes on their grown children as if they were anthropologists studying a lost tribe. With one another, they were free to worry out loud. Every single student wounded that day, except for the six who graduated, returned to Tech, their loyalty unwavering.

Derek felt drained by the mediation talks, the 3 1/2 -hour conference calls, the claims to file, the red tape. He was disheartened to discover that the university hadn't, in fact, waived tuition for the returning survivors; it had paid itself from the nearly $8 million in donations in the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund.

It was left to the parents, for the most part, to demand answers, voice concerns, negotiate reparations. Derek refused to hire a lawyer, and was so worried about offending the famed "Hokie spirit" that he had his father read his testimony for him before the governor's review panel.

Roger O'Dell, a semi-retired civil engineer, became deeply involved in the round-robin discussions about the equitable disbursement of the millions in donations the university had collected on behalf of the 26 injured survivors and the families of the 32 slain students and faculty members. He spent long hours pondering accountability and crunching numbers, and even more time grasping for ways to somehow ease the great, collective heartache. What if thousands of people joined hands to ring the sprawling campus in a symbolic embrace?

"It puts you in the ocean and keeps you there," he says. "You feel carried by the tide, and you can fight enough to stay afloat, to not drown, but you don't have the strength to get out of it. People outside, on the shore watching, don't understand how engulfing it is."

Derek discovered two more holes in his fleece jacket, most likely from the bullets fired through the classroom door as he held it shut. He tried the jacket on; one of the holes was over his chest. He fingers the silver cross he always wears, a gift from his girlfriend; it was the only shield, he thinks, between a bullet and his heart. A Catholic, he remembers asking his priest why his life was spared that day, what this all meant. It's a mystery of faith, he was told.