Down some vanished corridor of time and circumstance and psychological need to make the past go away, Julie Lombardi lost the face of the one who fired the gun into her head.
The one with the gun shot it in the gathering gloom of a late afternoon last winter, at Reisterstown Road and Shirley Avenue outside Malcolm X Elementary School, where Lombardi had finished teaching her kindergarten students and was going home to her family.
She tried to find the gunman in Judge Clifton J. Gordy's little criminal courtroom the other day, but the face of the attacker was gone. She looked directly into the eyes of a young man brought to trial, charged with the shooting, charged with firing directly into her skull, and she studied him and studied him, and what she found was exactly nothing, not a memory, not a sliver of a trace of that person who almost took away her life nearly 10 months ago.
The one on trial is named Xavier Cornelius Wilson, who is no prize under any circumstance. He was 16 years old when Julie Lombardi was shot and, by the assertions of his own attorneys, he was a successful peddler of drugs on Springhill Avenue in Northwest Baltimore. If he beats this rap, it is no assertion of a life well spent; he still faces unrelated charges, from November a year ago, of robbing two women on their way to church.
Wilson looks strikingly like a teen-age Michael Jordan, his hair cut to the skull, the bony lines of his face running the same contours as the great athlete's. But, where Jordan soars, Wilson skulks. He sat at the defense table as Julie Lombardi relived her attack, and he never made eye contact with her.
"Can you make identification?" Lombardi was asked by prosecutor Donald J. Giblin.
Her eyes darted for a moment, then focused on the defense table. Wilson, in sweat shirt and jeans, did not look up. Lombardi stared and stared. Wilson made little marks on a legal pad, circles and squares, random lines going nowhere. Lombardi studied him, hoping to shake loose a memory. Wilson kept his face down, as though this court business, this story about the shooting of an innocent woman, a teacher of small children, a protector in the community, was some distant drama completely unconnected to his own life.
And maybe it is.
"No," Julie Lombardi finally said. She knew what Giblin wanted her to say, but she couldn't do it. The face of her attacker might be the one in front of her, but she couldn't tell.
In a front row seat in the courtroom audience, her husband and her father-in-law clutched crucifixes in their hands. Others dabbed handkerchiefs at their eyes, from Lombardi's halting testimony that, when the attacker made his move, she'd prayed to God to let her go safely home to her waiting family.
No further questions, Giblin said. Now Lombardi rose, and slowly she walked past Wilson, who never looked up, never took his eyes away from the pad on which he was now printing a note in small, even letters.
In a long hallway just outside the courtroom, embraced by a cousin and a priest, Lombardi collapsed in tears.
In court, the trial went on. A woman named Joyce Drumwright testified that she'd gone to Malcolm X Elementary three times on the day of the shooting, and Wilson was always there.
She said he was sitting on a tree stump, waiting and waiting. It was a cold February day. Drumwright was there to take one of her children to school, and then she rode past on a midday bus, and returned again to pick up her child. Always, Wilson was there, waiting on that stump.
By itself, this doesn't make Wilson the gunman. But, to a city grown frightened of its own young people, it brings images of a predator biding his time. Lombardi drove an Acura Legend. Wilson needed spare parts for an Acura Legend he wanted to buy, for $5,000, from his sister's boyfriend.
Where does a 16-year old get that kind of money? From drug dealing, his attorneys are happy to announce. In some measure, they think it gets Wilson off the hook. An entire community felt violated when Lombardi was shot. The pressure was on for the cops to arrest somebody. Wilson, nobody's dream child, became a convenient fall guy.
Maybe, maybe not. That Wilson is part of the city's predatory class, there is agreement. Whether he shot Julie Lombardi, we don't yet know. Lombardi looked for her attacker in court, but he was lost to her down some corridor that terrifies us all.