”Hi, I would like to tell you about myself. I`ll start with my hobbies. I like sports a lot. My favorite one is baseball and then football. Oh, I forgot, my name is Nick. Nick Corwin, really. My initials are N.B.C., Nicholas Brent Corwin. My birthday is April 9th. I am 7 years old.”
It was September, 1987, the first week of school in Mrs. Amy Deuble`s 2d grade class at the Hubbard Woods School, and all the students in Room 7 were writing about themselves on sheets of wide-lined paper.
”I have two brothers, one older, one younger. They are 5 and 10. My dad`s name is Joel. His job is a lawyer. My mom`s name is Linda. She takes care of us as her job. My favorite color is blue. My favorite letter is N. My favorite number is 3.”
It was the first entry in a journal each student would keep throughout the year. On special occasions, they would write how they felt, and Mrs. Deuble would take a picture of each of them, to be glued at the top of the page.
In September, Nicky Corwin had a suntan. He leaned toward the camera with his hands on his legs, just above his knees. A broad smile advertised the gap between his new front teeth.
The small handwritten booklet now sits unfinished on a coffee table in the bright living room of Joel and Linda Corwin`s Winnetka home. It`s among a stack of stories, drawings and dreams they found in Nicky`s small school desk, just a few feet from where he was murdered.
Photographs of him are everywhere in the whitewashed living room. On the piano against the wall. On the mantle above the fireplace. On the bookshelves. Linda and Joel sit close to each other on an overstuffed couch near the center of the room, surrounded by memories of their son and the horror of what happened at 10:25 a.m. on May 20.
They remember it was the first day Nicky was allowed to ride his bicycle to school. He was late, but his older brother waited for him anyway.
”It`s okay, Mom. I want to ride with Nicky,” he shouted from the edge of the driveway.
After two weeks spent learning the rules of the road, Nicky had earned this privilege. If he passed the written bicycle safety test at school that day, he could ride with his brother until the end of the year.
Linda Corwin had watched as her two sons rode off.
”They had one and only one day to ride their bikes to school together,” she said. ”And that was it.”
The nation knows what happened during Nicky Corwin`s bicycle safety test that morning. Around 10:15, just as he began the test, a ragged, dark-haired woman wearing shorts entered the 2d grade classroom and sat down. She said nothing and soon left. She returned at 10:25 with two guns and opened fire.
Five children were wounded. Eight-year-old Nicholas Brent Corwin was killed. He was shot once in the heart.
On a hazy Sunday morning almost two months later, the Corwin house is quiet. No more national magazine coverage or live television interviews. The flood of thousands of letters has slowed to a trickle. The new phone number is unlisted.
What remains are the stack of papers from school, the photographs and daily reminders of a boy whose name meant ”giver of gifts.”
”There is a void,” Joel says. ”It`s like a picture, and there`s a blank there. We`ll always have the feeling that he`s there, but he`s not.”
”We`re just left with the grim reality,” Linda said, continuing her husband`s thought. ”I`ve been experiencing a kind of sensory deprivation. I can`t see him or touch him. It`s very painful.
”Our world view has been permanently altered. All the rules were broken with this incident.”
The elementary rule in Winnetka used to be: Our children are safe-safe from the crime and violence the Corwins thought they left behind when they abandoned the city for Winnetka 11 years ago.
They had met at Yale University and graduated as part of the first coeducational class there. They were married and went on to the University of Minnesota to earn advanced degrees: his in law, hers in public affairs. They moved to Chicago and began to climb.
The urban lifestyle suited the new corporate lawyer and his wife, a city planner. But when Linda became pregnant, she willingly gave up her career and the couple prepared for a change.
”I could have done a lot of things, but there wasn`t anything I could have done that was more important,” she said. ”Anybody can be a lawyer or city planner, but there was one job that no one else could do, and that was to be a mother to my own kids.”
They sought refuge in the heart of the North Shore, where the homes were expensive and large, and the schools were the best. They chose a red brick and white stucco house on a street lined with close-cut lawns and 50-foot-tall oaks. It reminded Linda of her childhood home in Waterloo, Ia., which she remembers as being ”a suburb without a city.”
”We sought the peace of mind, the perceived peace of mind, that we thought we would have for our children-not having to worry about anything happening to them,” Joel explained, shaking his head.
The house was too big for the couple and their only child, a newborn son. But they were planning ahead. They were going to fill the rooms with a family. Three years later, son No. 2 practically jumped into the world.
Joel had little time to spare when he rushed Linda to Highland Park Hospital on April 9, 1980. They arrived at 12:45 p.m. Nicky Corwin was born in the emergency room at 12:48.
”I got there just in the the nick of time,” Joel said, displaying a brief smile as he recounted the hospital dash. ”That was part of the reason for his name. He was in a hurry to get into life.”
A third son followed three years later, and the family was complete. Joel and Linda Corwin had created the suburban dream. They had a Volvo station wagon in the driveway, a beautiful family and success.
But all the rules would be broken.
Laurie Wasserman Dann, a troubled 30-year-old with a history of bizarre behavior, shattered the Corwins` lives before ending her own during a brief but violent rampage. Her story and those of the five children and the young man she wounded are well known. But somehow, Nicky Corwin was lost in the crush of publicity.
Aside from a brief statement the Corwins released the day of his death, and a funeral sermon two days later, the story of Nicky`s short life was left to the memory of the neighbors, classmates and friends.
”A friend told us her daughter asked: `Why are there so many pictures of the bad lady in the paper and hardly any pictures of Nicky?` ” Linda said.
”There was a little bit of that feeling on our part. But I guess bad guys always make the headlines.”
The papers the Corwins brought home from the Hubbard Woods School show life through Nicky`s eyes. It`s a collection of stories, drawings and journal entries that reveal a creative young boy who passionately loved sports and learning.
”If I could study anything I wanted, I would choose math,” Nicky wrote to his teacher on one of the sheets.
”That`s the cruel irony,” Linda says. ”Normally he wouldn`t have been in that room at that time, he would been in an older (kids`) class for math. But they had the bicycle test that day. That`s why he was in that room.”
She picks up the journal Nicky kept and begins to leaf through it. It`s loosely bound in green construction paper; the handwriting is large and neat, and the words are descriptive. After the first day of school, the next entry was added at Halloween.
The picture shows Nicky and Linda in the classroom, mugging for the camera. The words tell of a party and candy.
The next page is from Thanksgiving, and a brightly colored turkey fills the page instead of the usual entry. In its giant feathers, Nicky wrote of the things he was most thankful for.
”Mom, Dad, little brother, older brother, house, bed, money, doctor, grandma, school, my friends, my life, and me.”
In January, the assignment was to write about three important strengths.
”I`m kind of nice. I am smart. I have good athletic ability.”
Linda Corwin laughs as she rereads the entry aloud.
”Only kind of nice?” she asks.
Her eyes begin to glisten as she stares at the picture on the top of the page. Nicky was growing. He was taller, and his dark brown hair was longer. The teeth in the smile were bigger, but the gap remained.
The final entry came after the Spring Sing, a class performance in April in which Nicky had a speaking part between songs.
”I had a really good time. Afterward we went to Peter`s for dinner and played Nintendo (video) games.”
He looked grown up, dressed in a coat and tie, head cocked a little to the left. And there was the smile.
Nicky Corwin had just turned 8.
”He played soccer, hockey, tennis, baseball and football,” Linda said.
”He was very much a natural athlete. He had a natural grace about him. I think he learned early on that to be cocky wasn`t going to get him anywhere. So he was very supportive of the other kids on his teams. He was very aware of the talents he had been blessed with.”
One of those talents happened to be climbing. Anything upright was fair game, especially the tallest trees. Acting the part of a monkey, he would climb to the top before calling his mother to see his accomplishment.
”I had to call the fire department because I was so petrified,” she says, laughing outright. ”He loved to climb high. He loved to scare us with his daredevil climbing feats.”
Joel remembers the autumn football. Nicky teamed with his older brother, against his dad and younger brother, for backyard games that would last past dark. When the snows came, it moved to the living room. Linda played quarterback, sending Nicky deep to the fireplace while rock blared on the stereo.
The floor in front of the fireplace now is covered with baskets of condolence letters. Some have been answered. Others wait. Linda has promised herself she`ll get to them all. The signatures are those of parents, strangers mostly, compelled to let the Corwins know they weren`t alone in their anguish. ”I`ve gotten so many beautiful letters,” Linda said. ”It means a lot to us to know that so many other people care, and it means a lot to know that he touched so many people, even though he was only around for such a short time.”
On the mantle above the baskets, a display of pictures depicts family trips to Arizona and Walt Disney World. Joel plucks a favorite from the bunch. Nicky, wearing a comically too-large cowboy hat, is tucked snugly under his father`s arm as they sit perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon.
”We were really on top of the world,” he says, absorbed in the memory.
”He wanted to go to Maine,” Linda says. ”I don`t know how he even knew about Maine, but he kept asking if we could go. One of these days I may be brave enough to get there.”
There`s a knock at the door. One of their oldest son`s friends appears in the hall, dressed in a Little League uniform, carrying a glove and bat. Linda and Joel remember there`s a game in an hour, and they have to stop for juice boxes on the way.
For their other two children, life has to go on. (Since Nicky`s death the Corwins have tried to shield the boys from publicity, asking that their names and photographs not be used in news accounts.)
”In the beginning, they asked, `Why?”` Linda said. ”They don`t ask about it any more. Partly because they know there really is no answer. Partly because I think they are trying to protect our feelings, too.”
On the day of the funeral, Rabbi Robert Schriebman had the family write notes to Nicky, to be placed in the casket with him.
”Our youngest just wrote, `I love you, Nicky,` ” Joel said. ”He understands what happened.”
After the funeral, Joel took his sons back to the cemetery. Together they walked the grounds near Nicky`s grave, looking at the other names. He wanted to make them understand.
”All the graves near his are of much older people,” Joel said.
”There`s one nearby where the person was 88. And I told the boys that`s how long a person should live-88, not 8.”
Frustration. Anger. Fear. Grief. Linda and Joel Corwin are left with these emotions, and a million more, every time they replay the events of May 20. All the activity has left them little time for each other, and the emotions.
”We`ve probably not done very well with that,” Linda said. ”One does not feel a whole lot like giving in this situation. I don`t know, I don`t feel I have a lot to give right now. I used to enjoy living life to the fullest. Now it`s a struggle.
”I think a loss is a loss. If you lose a child through an illness or a car accident, it`s a terrible loss and no less painful than this. But the horror of the way this happened is really too difficult for us to
contemplate.”
And what about the anger? Anger at a woman who can never stand trial for her crime. At a legal system that neglected, or couldn`t act on, repeated calls to remove her from the streets before she lashed out.
”It goes beyond that,” Joel says, almost in a whisper. ”There aren`t words to express that.
”But there are a couple of primary feelings. We miss hugging him . . . basking in his radiance. At the same time, there is a frustration that is difficult for me to deal with. He is missing everything life had to offer.”
Even harder, perhaps, were the things that had to be done shortly after Nicky`s death. There were necessary and painful things such as retrieving his bicycle from a deserted rack after all the other kids had gone home, cleaning out his desk and carefully removing the name tag so as not to rip it.
”There is no way to put closure on this kind of loss,” Linda said.
”All we can ever hope to do is come to terms with it. This is the kind of pain that will always be there. There may be some layers of protection over it, but it will always be there.
”Every day I see him smiling at me with a twinkle in his eye. That keeps me going.”
”Nicky would have wanted us to go on. He would have said, `Don`t fold,`
” Joel says.
The Corwins have to go. The kids are shooting baskets in the driveway, and Little League waits for no parent. They are gracious and say they would love to talk about Nicky all day, but it is time to pile everyone into the station wagon. It is time to move on.
