Published to FB Notes March 10 2018
I’m writing this in an effort to exorcise this memory from me and so I don’t have to retell this story again and again. My father returned from the Philippines last week which means my Saturdays are for seeing him so we planned on lunch at Glendale Galleria. My sister/friend Emily was in town with her girls for a birthday party and we had plans to hang out after my lunch and her birthday party. Since it was raining and since I was at the Glendale Galleria, we settled on meeting up at Giggles and Hugs. Charlie would leave us to have our girls’ hang. After lunch my father took Audrey shopping at Target where he bought her her first toy gun. My friend Emily had just been through some pretty traumatic gun related events recently, so when Charlie left, I gave him the toy guns to take home.
Giggles and Hugs is on the top (3rd) floor on the far end of the Galleria by Bloomingdales, it’s a bit of a trek to get there but Emily, the girls and I met up on time. Like no time had passed, Emily and I got to catching up and the girls immediately got to playing. Emily and I sat at a table at the far end of Giggles and Hugs, opposite the entrance and restrooms. As the Limbo game was about to start, Emily noticed her younger daughter walking away from the play area, close to the entrance, so she got up and ran to get her. Almost as soon as she ran away from me, in that same direction, by the entrance, everyone started screaming, turning tables over and running in my direction, away from the entrance. I thought a fight broke out and that this was the ensuing chaos, so my immediate reaction was to grab mine and Emily’s bags and phones, which were on the table. I didn’t want our things to get lost in the scuffle. Then I ran TOWARD the crowd screaming for Emily and Sierra, but everyone was screaming “Get out, get out! GO! GO! GO!” I saw an employee close the doors and I saw Audrey calmly walking around the empty play area by herself covering her ears. I ran to her and picked her up and she said “I’m scared, mommy!” I ran toward the bathrooms screaming for Emily thinking she was hiding in there and an employee screamed at me to “GET OUT NOW! NO ONE IS IN THERE!” I was insistent on not leaving Emily and her girls. I was literally the last non-employee leaving the place and I was still not sure what was happening.
When I was finally pushed out a back exit, there was a huge crowd of families in the back cement hallway holding their babies and in various emotional states of crying to really angry. I was screaming “EMILY!!” scanned the crowd and we saw each other and I ran to her and started bawling because I finally knew she was okay. I told her I had her things, handed her her phone and we both contacted our spouses.
The crowd just stood there and some people were saying they saw “people” shooting at the children on the other side of the window, some people saying they heard glass breaking and semi-automatic weapons. Half the people were screaming and half of the people were telling other people to calm down. I scanned the area and there was a dumpster and a few empty garbage cans. I considered putting the kids in there and hiding them. We were in a back hallway of all the stores so nothing was keeping shooters from just coming back here and mowing all these families down. There was a stairwell, at first Emily said she didn’t want to be in the stairwell but I told her we had to leave and that was the only way out. Neither of us wanted to stand around to see what was happening.
The girls were all still in their socks and we had, what I thought was three flights but turned out to be four flights of stairs to go down. She sent me down first and stayed back with the girls on every flight while I checked to make sure no one would be coming through each of the doors in the stairwell before telling them to come down. When we got to what was the bottom floor, I told her I wanted to make sure it was a door that didn’t go INTO the mall so I checked and saw it went to the street. I told them all to come down and when we got outside, the streets were full of people who were crying, worried, hysterical, and they were all standing out in the rain. The girls were barefoot.
We were “safe” and we were both really, really crying.
We couldn’t get to my car, the whole mall, including the carpark was under lockdown. I gave Charlie access to my location and told him we would be migrating north as far as we could away from here with the girls walking in the rain, again, barefoot. Emily held her younger daughter and I walked with the older girls. Emily’s oldest daughter was saying nowhere is safe, I want to move to Venus. I want to dig a hole to the center of the Earth. My heart was breaking. Of all the families I could have been with when this happened, why them? Even now, for me that is the worst part of all of this. We walked four blocks north of the mall and hid under the doorway of a leasing office. I told Charlie’s we’d wait for him there. I kept reminding the girls we are safe, everyone is safe, we are safe, Audrey’s daddy will be here soon.
It felt like forever but he finally pulled up and we all filed in, car seats be damned we just got the fuck out of there. The kids all sat on the floor of the back seat still hiding from a shooter. We reunited Emily and the kids with their dad and her sister and kind of sat around for a little while crying and quiet and talking about how ridiculous this country is. It made me think of this other piece I wrote about the Paradox of Fear in the US.
In the hours since the incident, the mall has reopened, a man has been arrested and supposedly is was an attempted jewelry heist gone bad a few doors down from Giggles and Hugs. Ira Glass said “Great stories happen to those who can tell them,” but I think I’m ready for great stories to stop happening to me now.
