Shadows

by John Saul

  Blessedly, the school principal seemed to understand. Almost to her surprise, she heard him agree. “All right. I’ll keep him in my office. But try to make it within an hour, would you? I’ve got a meeting with the head of the school board, and I don’t intend to be late.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Hodgkins. I’ll get there within an hour, I promise.”

  She hung up the phone and hurried toward the pass-through, where Annette was trying to cope with the backlog of orders. Max was hunched over the grill, his back to her.

  “Trouble?” Annette asked.

  Brenda nodded, then spoke to Max. “I’m going to have to take off for an hour after we get through lunch. It’s Josh …”

  Max glanced sourly up from the griddle where he was tending to a dozen hamburgers. He shoved his spatula at one and flipped it with a violent slash of the wrist. “How come he always has problems on my time?”

  Brenda took a deep breath, wanting to snap back that Josh was only ten years old, that all kids have problems, and that this particular problem was cutting into her day just as much as it was his. Unless, she reflected darkly, he was suddenly planning to pay her for the hour she would be gone. Now that would be a first. But she said nothing.

  Finding this job hadn’t been easy; finding another would be even harder.

  Annette, sensing her distress, smiled encouragingly. “Hey, take it easy. You can have a couple of my hours tomorrow night, and it’s not like the tips are heavy after lunch. Do what you have to do, and screw Max, right?”

  “Right,” Brenda agreed, her lips twisting wryly as she picked up another batch of orders and started toward a table next to the window. But screwing Max wasn’t the answer, because Max wasn’t the problem.

  Josh was, and right now she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was going to do about it.

  At one-thirty, with all but two of the tables empty and reset for the after-school crowd of teenagers, Brenda took off her apron and hung it on one of the hooks at the end of the kitchen where the lockers were. Max’s perennially angry eyes fixed on her as she started for the door.

  “You plannin’ to wear my uniform on your own time?”

  “It’s only an hour, Max. It’s not like I’m taking the afternoon off to go dancing.” She glanced down at the pink nylon dress with a too-short skirt. “And if I were, I wouldn’t go wearing this crummy thing.”

  “That ‘crummy thing’ cost me fifteen bucks,” Max growled. “An’ I don’t have to provide uniforms at all, you know. If that kid pukes on it—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Max! Can’t you be a human being for even five minutes? Josh isn’t sick, he’s just—” She floundered, searching for the right words, but Max cut in before she found them.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s just too smart for his own good, right? ’Cept it seems to me if he was so damn smart, he’d learn to keep himself out of trouble. You just get back here in an hour, understand?”

  “Okay,” Brenda replied, taking his dismissal as tacit permission not to bother changing her clothes. She hurried out the back door, the midday heat instantly making her break into a sweat that caused the nylon dress to cling clammily to her skin, and slid behind the wheel of her nine-year-old Chevy.

  The engine ground disconsolately when she turned the key, and Brenda swore silently. “Please, please,” she murmured, twisting the key over and over again, and resisting the urge to press the accelerator to the floor. “Just this once, don’t give up on me.”

  Just as the battery was about to give out, the engine caught, coughed grumpily, then began chugging. Keeping her foot on the gas, Brenda reached back and cranked down the rear windows, then leaned over to the one on the front passenger side. It was permanently stuck in the closed position, but she always tried anyway, on the theory that miracles do happen now and then, and one of them just might befall her ruin of a car.

  No luck.

  She backed out of the parking space into the alley, and a moment later was on Main Street, heading out to the school. Eden Consolidated, a group of mock-adobe buildings was huddled on the edge of town. Beyond it was nothing but an arid expanse of desert, eventually broken by mountains dimly visible through the constant haze of smog that drifted out from Los Angeles, two hundred miles away.

  Brenda drove slowly, wanting to take a few minutes to collect herself before she had to face Arnold Hodgkins. As tempting as it was to feel sorry for herself, she resisted. She suddenly had an image of herself in an old Bette Davis movie. What was the name of it? She couldn’t remember. The one where Bette was a waitress in a crummy café in the desert, and there wasn’t even a town around it, not even one as worn-out as Eden. And Davis had never had so much as a single romance, except with a poet who didn’t really care about her.

  At least I’ve been in love a couple of times, Brenda reflected with the innate honesty and black humor that had gotten her through some of the worst moments of her life, even if they were rats. And I’ve got a couple of kids who definitely aren’t rats! In fact, one of them’s a genius, for all the good it does any of us right now. And we’re not starving, and we have a place to live, and things could be a lot worse.

  Almost to her own surprise, she found herself humming as she pulled the car into the school parking lot and made her way to Arnold Hodgkins’s office. But her composure deserted her as she spotted her son slouched in a chair in the corner of the principal’s office, his large dark eyes, as heavily lashed and deep as his father’s, staring sullenly up at her.

  “Well, look at you,” Brenda said. “Sit that way much longer, and you’re going to get a hunchback.”

  “Who cares?” Josh replied, making no move to correct his posture.

  “I do, for one,” Brenda told him. “And until you sit up properly, I’m not going to listen to your side of the story.”

  Josh made a face indicating that he didn’t think she was going to listen to him anyway, but straightened up in the chair.

  “It was Ethan,” he said. “He started it. All I was doing was reading Les Miserables, and he came up and grabbed the book away from me. He wouldn’t give it back, so I threw my milk at him.”

  Brenda’s gaze shifted from Josh to Arnold Hodgkins. “What does Ethan Roeder have to say about it?”

  The principal shrugged, and waved Brenda into a chair. “Just what you’d think—that he didn’t do anything. According to Ethan, Josh had no reason to throw a carton of milk on him.” He shook his head helplessly. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I can do, since the rest of the children all back up Ethan’s story.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Brenda broke in. “Ethan’s two years older than Josh, and at least twenty pounds heavier and three inches taller. And I don’t care what other problems Josh might have, he’s not stupid. He wouldn’t pick a fight with someone as big as Ethan!”

  The principal’s hands spread in a gesture of frustration. “Mrs. MacCallum, try to calm down. I’m not taking sides—I’m simply reporting what I was told by the other children. Nor is it the first time there have been reports of Josh behaving with unprovoked violence.” He paused, then went on. “Unfortunately, this is not the only episode you and I need to discuss today.”

  Brenda hesitated, her indignation blunted. “You mean there’s more?” she asked.

  Hodgkins chewed uncomfortably at his lower lip. “Rita Schulze was here during lunch hour. It seems she had a little run-in with Josh just after the morning session ended.”

  Brenda’s eyes moved back to her son. Josh squirmed in his chair. “She wouldn’t leave me alone,” he complained. “Every time she asked a question, she made me answer it, like I’m some kind of freak or something. All the rest of the kids were staring at me, and talking about me, and—”

  He fell silent as he read the anger in his mother’s eyes.

  “So you were rude to your teacher, and threw milk on Ethan? Is that it?”

  “No!”

  “Don’t lie to me, Josh. I want to know what happened.”

>   “I’m telling you, Mom! I didn’t do anything!” Josh’s eyes flicked around the room, as if he were searching for some avenue of escape, and Brenda reached out, taking his chin in her hand, forcing him to look at her.

  “Is that the truth, Josh?”

  Silently, Josh nodded. After a moment Brenda let her hand drop away and turned tiredly back to the principal.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked. “It was the same thing last year. Bill Cooley was always holding Josh up to the rest of the class, like they should all be as smart as he is. It wasn’t fair to them, and it sure wasn’t fair to Josh.”

  Arnold Hodgkins’s gesture of helplessness expanded. “It’s a difficult situation.” he admitted with obvious reluctance. “But—”

  “But you shouldn’t have skipped him again.” Brenda cut in, her voice rising to an angry crescendo. “You should have left him with his class.”

  Hodgkins shook his head doggedly. “That’s not the problem! Not the problem at all! The problem, when you get right down to it, is that we just don’t have any programs for kids like Josh. The school’s too small, and the resources too limited.”

  Brenda MacCallum stared at the principal. “So what am I supposed to do? Take Josh out of school? It’s not my fault this place can’t deal with him.”

  Now Hodgkins leaned forward, picking up a pamphlet from his desk. “I didn’t say it was your fault, Mrs. MacCallum, and if I implied it at all, I’m sorry. But the facts are the facts. There isn’t much we can do for Josh here. He needs special programs, with specially trained teachers, and he needs to be with other kids like himself.” His eyes fixed on the pamphlet, which had arrived on his desk only last week, along with a computer-generated “personalized” letter suggesting that perhaps Josh MacCallum might be a candidate for the school the pamphlet described. Initially he had dismissed both the letter and the pamphlet, certain that the solicitation had been stimulated by nothing more than the centrally scored IQ tests all the Eden children had taken last spring. But after the incident in the cafeteria, he had studied the brochure more closely.

  Brenda, still dazed by thè principal’s last words, stared at him. “What are you saying? You think I should just pick up and move? You think I can just pide up and move? And even if I could, where am I supposed to go? How am I supposed to find the kind of school you’re talking about?” Before she could go on, Hodgkins handed her the pamphlet

  It was from a place called the Barrington Academy. A sketch of a large mansion surrounded by a broad lawn studded with towering pine trees was printed on the heavy buff-colored paper. She stared at it quizzically, then looked up at Arnold Hodgkins. “What’s this? It doesn’t look like any school I’ve ever heard of.”

  “It’s not,” Hodgkins replied. “It’s a private school designed for gifted children. It’s up north at—”

  But Brenda MacCallum didn’t let him finish. She was already on her feet, her eyes blazing. “Private school?” she demanded. “Where am I going to get the money for private school? I’m a waitress. I get minimum wage, plus tips, and let me tell you, in Eden the tips aren’t much! Since Melinda was born, I’ve even had to go on food stamps!” She paused to fight back her tears, then, summoning what dignity she could gather, went on. “I’ll have a talk with Josh, and make sure that from now on he behaves himself. I would appreciate it if you made sure the rest of the kids around here—and the teachers, too—stop making him feel like some kind of freak! Come on, Josh.”

  Arnold Hodgkins rose out of his chair and started around the desk. “Mrs. MacCallum, wait. There’s a lot more we need to talk about. If you’ll just calm down—”

  But it was too late. Brenda, clutching Josh by the hand, was already halfway down the hall. For a moment Hodgkins considered going after her, but decided that in the woman’s present mood, there was nothing he could say.

  The problem of Josh MacCallum could wait, but the president of the school board could not.

  Brenda drove silently along the ragged edge of Eden toward the decaying building in which she lived, feeling Josh’s anger radiating toward her, but doing her best to ignore it. When Josh finally spoke, she knew she had to respond.

  “You didn’t have to talk about me like I wasn’t even there,” he said.

  For a moment Brenda thought she might cry. She reached out and squeezed her son’s knee. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I just got so mad at Mr. Hodgkins that I forgot you were listening.”

  “Well, I was. And I heard everything you said. And it’s not fair, Mom. I didn’t do anything at all.”

  Brenda took a deep breath. “I’m not saying you did, sweetheart. But if all the other kids—”

  “They’re all liars!” Josh shouted, his anger bursting forth. “How come no one ever believes me? It’s not fair!” He reached into the book bag, jerked out the book he’d been reading in the cafeteria, then began ripping its pages out, one by one. Rolling down the window, he flung the pages out into the desert breeze. Brenda could see them fluttering behind the car.

  “Josh! What are you doing? Do you know how much that book cost? I had to order it special from Los Angeles!”

  “I don’t care!” he shouted. “I hate the book, and I hate school, and I hate Mrs. Schulze and Mr. Hodgkins and everyone else! I hate it all!” With every furious sentence, he yanked another page from the book and flung it out the window, until he was pulling them out by the fistful, filling the area behind the car with a storm of white. “And I hate you, too,” he yelled. “I hate everybody and everything!”

  Brenda reached over and snatched what was left of the book out of his hands, tossing it into the backseat. “Well, let me tell you, buddy-boy, right now I’m not too crazy about you, either.”

  For a moment she thought she was going to slap her son. Then her gaze settled on the open window by his side.

  For the first time in two years, it was wide open.

  The little miracle had actually happened.

  As Josh stared at her in amazement, Brenda threw her head back and began laughing out loud.

  A moment later, though, her laughter choked off, then died. As the reality of her life, and the life of her son, closed back in on her, she began to cry.

  The miracle of the open window, she decided, was just too little.

  What she needed was a much larger miracle.

  But where would it come from?

  3

  Brenda pulled the car under the sagging carport behind the apartment house and wondered for the hundredth time whether it would be better to call the landlord about peeling paint yet again, or simply organize yet another work party among the tenants to paint the building themselves. Bill Roeder might even be able to do something about the sagging beam under the carport—a post, or something.

  “This place sure is a dump,” Josh remarked, almost as if he’d read her mind.

  “It could be a lot worse,” Brenda reminded him. “There are millions of people who don’t even have something like this to live in.”

  They climbed the stairs to the second floor, and walked down the sun-drenched walkway to the apartment at the south end. The location was a mixed blessing at best; though the apartment had windows on three sides, it also was exposed to the sun on those same three sides. By four o’clock in the afternoon the rooms had usually taken on the less attractive aspects of a pottery kiln. Still, the rent was cheap, and though she was constantly looking, so far Brenda hadn’t been able to find anything better.

  As she slipped her key into the lock and pushed open the door, she was relieved to find that Mabel Hardwick, the downstairs neighbor who had volunteered to watch Melinda while she put in her hours at the café, had remembered to pull the drapes over the windows, reflecting the worst of the heat back out into the desert. The room, though relatively cool, was gloomy, however, and Brenda immediately moved to the draperies on the east wall and pulled them open. The light flooding in and the grinding sound of metal against the curtain rod awakened Mabel, who had
been dozing on the sofa, the television droning a few feet in front of her.

  “Oh!” the elderly woman gasped, stifling a yawn and self-consciously heaving her bulk into an upright position. “Brenda! What are you doing—” As she spotted Josh standing silently just inside the door, she clucked sympathetically. “Oh, dear. Didn’t you even make it through the first day?”

  Though Josh flinched—even Mrs. Hardwick clearly thought that whatever had brought him home early from school must have been his fault—he said nothing. Before Brenda could explain the truth of the matter, Melinda, who had been sitting in her playpen staring at the television set, caught sight of her mother, climbed unsteadily to her feet and began to wail.

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” Brenda soothed, picking up the little girl and cradling her against her bosom. “Mama’s here now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Melinda, the routine of her day unaccustomedly disturbed, only howled louder. Carrying the baby on her hip, Brenda went to the refrigerator, pulled a bottle out and put it in the microwave.

  “You just sit down and let me do that,” Mabel Hardwick said, pulling herself to her feet. “I shouldn’t’ve been dozing in the first place, but you know how it is when you get to be my age.” She started toward the tiny kitchen that was little more than an alcove off the living-dining area, but stopped when Brenda shook her head.

  “Why don’t you just take a few minutes for yourself, Mabel I don’t have to be back at work for another half hour.” A tiny little lie, but if she took an extra fifteen minutes, Max might not even notice. “Besides, if you’re going to have to look after both kids this afternoon, you’ll need a little breather.”