Days of Awe

by Lauren Fox

  She shrugged one shoulder, a tiny surrender. I could see her collarbone jutting sharp and birdlike through her shirt. We used to joke that she didn’t have enough fat on her body to see her through a long morning. “Oh, Jose,” I said.

  She took a step toward me, and then the bell rang, and children started pouring into the building. It was my favorite part of the day—the breath between stillness and chaos. Once the phalanx began its invasion, there was no more time to chat.

  “I guess we’ll talk later,” Josie said, over the roar. “Okay?”

  ···

  I can’t say it started on that awful day at Lake Kass, or that night at the beach when she told me about Alex Cortez, or the morning in my classroom when we didn’t finish talking, or at some other crucial moment that passed me by as unimportant. Anyway, I don’t think it was a free fall. It was more of an untethering: not a terrifying death spiral, but a slow loosening of the safety ropes.

  There were those things she had been saying to her students: Don’t always listen to your parents; learn it for the test and then forget it; sometimes you have to lie to protect the ones you love. Oh, yes, she said that, too.

  There was the Lily Barrett cell-phone debacle, of course; the stolen coat incident.

  There was, maybe worst of all, Josie’s confrontation with Principal Coffey—because although she may have been right, or at least right enough to be steamed, miffed, and/or definitely disgruntled, everyone knows you don’t pick a fight with Principal Coffey. Well, you don’t win a fight with Principal Coffey. And even if you win a fight with Principal Coffey, you don’t win.

  Josie had put in a request for funds from the school’s discretionary account, which we all did once in a while, when our classroom materials proved insufficient or outdated: $300 to upgrade a microscope, $325 for a grand, all-school papier-mâché Day of the Dead project, $250 to bring in Global Warning, a local group of middle-aged scientists who performed rap songs about climate change. (Polar bear nowhere, penguins gettin’ hot./It won’t be cathartic if we lose the Arctic!) By unspoken agreement, these funds were judiciously requested and therefore almost always approved.

  Josie had asked for two hundred dollars for a subscription to an online, interactive women’s history database and was already filling out the purchase form when Principal Coffey turned her down. The math teachers had gotten together (What could I do? Josie said later. They had the numbers.) and put in a request for a pricey new software program for a small group of advanced sixth graders—Principal Coffey’s pride and joy. “I’m sorry, Ms. Abrams. But of course we’ll consider your request next year.” He gave her one of his patented sympathetic smile-frowns and, resigned to the disappointment, she was about to leave his office, when he chuckled to himself. “Or maybe you’ll have changed your mind by then,” he said. “Ha-ha! A woman’s prerogative!”

  And that, she said, was what flipped her lid, was why she spun around to face him in the open doorway, crossed her arms over her chest, and said to the esteemed principal of Rhodes Avenue, “You, sir, are a sexist ass!”

  “I said it in an English accent,” she whispered to me later that day, in the front seat of my car. “An English accent! Where did that come from?” She laughed and laughed when she told me this story, loudly enough to compensate for my silence. She couldn’t see that her own judgment had tacked off course. It was as if she had been lit by the spark of something wild and wrong.

  And so. The day after that outburst, but based on the totality of her recent questionable judgments and behaviors, Josie had been reprimanded, had been given a quiet in-school suspension, where her teaching was to come under direct scrutiny until such time as Principal Coffey no longer deemed it necessary.

  But who was to say this wasn’t all just part of the glorious roller coaster that was Josie? If you loved the rush, you had to accept the nausea. Her heart was fierce, and she told a good story.

  I had first lunch period that day, eleven thirty, which was always annoying, because I was never hungry that early, but if I didn’t eat, I’d be shaking by two. When I went to grab my peanut butter sandwich from the refrigerator, I didn’t notice that Josie’s Diet Pepsi was gone.

  I was heading to my classroom when I passed Webber Gale in the hallway. He was spiky haired and small for his age, a snarky little whippet of a fourth grader. He was known among his peers for his outlandish behavior, and he had quite a following at Rhodes Avenue, a cadre of kids who delighted in his transgressions. We had all seen it before, of course; every few years there was a Webber Gale. The most poignant thing about them was that each thought he was a gloriously misbehaving original, the only one of his kind.

  They elicited a kind of mass psychological transference: Webb’s followers egged him on so that he would do the risky thing—sneak into the girls’ bathroom, steal a stack of lunch trays and chuck them into the bushes outside the cafeteria, leap from the top of the monkey bars—and get in trouble for it, and they would get to experience the vicarious thrill of it all from the safety of their desks, or the lunchroom, or the ground.

  I liked Webber. Once, when the other kids were out at recess and he was sitting alone on a bench in the office (because it is not okay, Webber, to run through the hallway yelling, “MONSTERS ARE ATTACKING!”), he told me: he didn’t always want to be bad, but he had his reputation to consider. He was just a skinny kid, overcompensating.

  So it was no surprise that he stole Josie’s soda and chugged it before music class. The surprise was that Josie had brought a rum-spiked Diet Pepsi to school.

  Ken the custodian discovered Webber in the staff bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror. “What are you doing, son?” Ken asked.

  Webber’s reaction time was slow, his eyes bloodshot. Ken was suspicious even before it took Webber a full sixty seconds to come up with an answer. And that answer was a loud burp, and only by the grace of Ken the custodian’s quick reflexes did Webber Gale not then smash his forehead into the edge of the bathroom sink as he stumbled forward.

  Ken steadied Webber Gale and walked him to the office. “I don’t know how it’s possible,” Ken reportedly told Principal Coffey, “but I know sauced when I see it, and this little guy is sauced.”

  Webber started crying. “Mrs. Abrams’s soda made me feel funny,” he sobbed. And then he threw up.

  In short order, these things happened: Josie was ordered to the office, where she quickly confessed to ownership of the Diet Pepsi, while insisting that it was a terrible, terrible mistake—that there was a regular, untainted bottle of soda sitting at home on her kitchen countertop, which is no excuse, Josie whispered, raggedly, wretchedly. I know that. Webber’s parents were called (simultaneous to, I imagine, a hushed, urgent phone call to the school’s legal counsel), and he was taken to Children’s Hospital for evaluation, where it was determined that Webber’s blood alcohol level was a whopping .10, that he would have to stay overnight for observation, but that there would be no lasting ill effects.

  At first Webber’s parents, equal parts concerned and irate, threatened to sue the school district, Principal Coffey, and, of course, Josie Abrams, the Rhodes Avenue Middle School teacher who had brought a cocktail to school and stashed it in the staff refrigerator. On further discussion and acknowledgment of the school’s long history of lenience involving the activities of their son, and because they were not the litigious types, the Gales agreed not to bring legal action against the school or the parties involved, after having been assured, completely and definitively, that Josie would lose her job, which, after a brief disciplinary hearing, along with some ancillary input from select colleagues, she, of course, and without argument, did.

  Charges were brought against Josie, though. Once Children’s Hospital reported the incident, it was legally required that an investigation be initiated.

  The Andes spoke out against Josie during the disciplinary hearing. They stalked like panthers into Principal Coffey’s office—I was there, too—and they took turns railing against
her.

  They had an aura about them, the golden glow of the righteously indignant. I know for a fact that she once told a student that almost all Republicans are assholes. She once made a boy stay after school because he misbehaved and then she took him out for ice cream. What sort of example does that set? What sort of example?

  “Thank you, Ms. Brauer,” Principal Coffey finally said, interrupting them, convinced by their litany or just finally exhausted by it, “but we are handling the situation. The situation is being handled.”

  ···

  “Josie,” I said to her that very first night at her house, “this is not great. There’s no getting around that. It’s pretty bad. But it will be okay.” I made my voice a low murmur, as if I were trying to calm a small, trapped animal. “You’ll be okay.” I didn’t even believe it myself. But what else could I say?

  Mark wasn’t really talking to her, but he had made her some soup, which sat in a blue mug growing cold on the coffee table. Josie was on the couch, her legs tucked under her, wrapped in a heavy gray blanket.

  “Mark is so mad,” she whispered to me, as if that were the problem. After he set the soup in front of her, he had disappeared upstairs. We could hear the thump of his footsteps above us, muffled music, a rush in the pipes of running water: routine domestic sounds, but somehow hostile now.

  A great gaping hole had opened up next to Josie, a cavern. Deep inside it was the possibility of comfort, relief. Forgiveness, it seemed, was already just an echo in the blackness.

  “This is not the end of the world,” I said. “I promise.”

  Josie nodded. Four months later, on an ice-slick overpass, she slammed her speeding car into the guardrail.

  For her twelfth birthday, Hannah requested only one gift, and so we were obliged to give it to her. She wanted to go out to dinner with Chris and me.

  “Sweetie,” I said to her when she announced her desire a few days ago. “How about a camera instead? Or a new bike? Or one of them new-fangled camera-bikes!” She shook her head, and I saw the stubborn two-year-old who used to go limp when she didn’t want to leave the playground—baby Gandhi, we called her; the three-year-old who ate only plain bagels and strawberry yogurt for a year; the four-year-old who wore her shoes on the wrong foot every day for six months just…because. “How about a pet monkey!” I said.

  “Dinner,” she said, fiddling with a long twist of her blond hair. “You and me and Daddy.”

  And so here we are, Chris and I, sitting across from each other at La Tagliatella Insolita. I’m halfway through a glass of white wine. The soft lighting has changed Chris’s face into a reproduction of its past self, and I am filled with affection, a full-body memory knocking against other, more recent ones. I have a funny inkling about being here, about Hannah’s intentions.

  It’s a windy, warmish night: April 1, the birthday nobody wants. When Hannah was seven, she came home crying on her birthday. “No one believes me!” she sobbed. “Eight other kids said today is their birthday, too!” From the day she was born, people have not been easily convinced.

  “Should you go check on her?” Chris asks. Hannah slipped off to the bathroom five minutes ago and hasn’t emerged. He takes a sip of his wine and looks at me.

  I shake my head. “Let’s give her a few more minutes,” I say. “Actually, I think she might be parent-trapping us.”

  “Hmm. Hayley Mills or Lindsay Lohan?” he says.

  “Oh, that’s impressive.”

  “We watched both a few weeks ago. Movie marathon.” Chris sets his glass down, and then, without warning, everything is awkward, and we are unable to hold each other’s gaze. We both turn to look out at the dining room, transfixed by it, as if a bear in a tutu has suddenly danced into the room.

  La Tagliatella Insolita is our local restaurant, the place where they don’t exactly know us but they definitely sort of recognize us, a little Italian café with better-than-average mushroom ravioli and pretty good eggplant Parmesan. It’s nothing special, except that we’ve been here a hundred times, for birthdays, minor celebrations (congrats on coming in third!), even just nights when, at the last minute, we realized that nobody had the energy to cook. And so it’s ours, in that way, or it used to be: full of our mundane history and food that might not be surprisingly delightful but that never surprises us, which is its own kind of delight.

  I’m watching a waitress walk through the dining room with four plates on her forearms. It’s a marvel that we’re here together, Chris and Hannah and I. Maybe there is a future for us that doesn’t involve pain, an inching, quotidian life we can build together. I feel a surprising breath of hope. It turns out to be an actual breeze blowing through the front door as a family walks into the restaurant. Still, it’s something. I turn to Chris and smile.

  “I’m sorry if this is strange,” he says quietly. “Being here together.”

  Hannah reappears from the bathroom before I can answer and slides into the booth next to him. “Hi, Mommy.”

  “Yo, birthday girl,” I say, and she rolls her eyes, but she’s still smiling. Her hair is brushed and shiny, and as she takes off her light jacket, I see that she’s wearing a shirt I don’t recognize, deep blue and long-sleeved, with a little splash of white daisies on one arm. Has Chris taken her shopping? There are these moments—every day, really; they pile up on top of each other—when I think my heart will stop from too much love and grief. But it never does, or at least it hasn’t so far.

  Chris slings his arm casually over Hannah’s shoulders, and she leans into him. “Remember when you would only order spaghetti here?” he says to her.

  “I’m ordering it tonight!”

  I pretend to read the menu for a minute. Chris murmurs something to Hannah, and she readjusts herself in her seat, looks at her own menu, takes a sip of her water. “Mommy?” she says.

  I smile, nod.

  “Hannah wants to run something by you,” Chris says. Maybe she does want that bike after all. Well, why not?

  “Mommy,” Hannah says again. Her voice sounds high and hesitant.

  I feel a little hitch in my own breath, which is not enough of a warning for my slow brain. “What’s up?”

  “You know how I haven’t been sleeping very well.”

  I reach across the table and pat her hand. “We will figure that out, sweetie. I was thinking about calling Dr. Gehr, you know, because you can’t be the first kid—”

  “—and so the thing is, it turns out I actually got, like, a really good night’s sleep at Daddy’s. Last week.” She stops, puts her hands up to her face for a second.

  “A good night’s sleep,” I say, terrified, suddenly. “That’s great.”

  She takes her hands from her face and drops them to her sides. “And so I was wondering.” She looks up at Chris, who nods gently. “Could I maybe stay with Daddy for a while?”

  “Just for a while,” Chris says quickly.

  “Yeah, just a month or so, so I can get some sleep.”

  “She thinks it might help,” Chris says. “And I don’t know, maybe it will. Clean slate? Anyway, she’d see you during the day, so I don’t see the harm.”

  They are so beautiful, my ex-husband and my daughter, my two loves. Their light hair gleams in the candlelight, their pale, matching faces full of worry. I’m gazing at them from the wrong end of a telescope. I would do anything to ease those identical lines of concern across their foreheads, their troubled eyes. “I’m really glad you got a good night’s sleep,” I say.

  Hannah nods. And am I imagining it, the flash of a challenge in her eyes? The desperate tug of a dare? “So, it’s okay with you?”

  This is the truth: You lose some things because you didn’t see the darkness rushing toward you. Some things disappear because it all snuck up on you so quickly and quietly, and you weren’t paying attention. Okay. But once in a while a loss is preventable. You can stop it. And if you don’t, you are to blame. The trick is knowing which is which.

  Hannah and Chris are waitin
g.

  “Oh, well, no.” I shake my head. “No. Not at all.” I lay the palm of my hand on the table next to the bread plate, stare at it for a second, lift it, then bang it down so hard that all of the dishes rattle, the wine sloshes, Hannah’s water glass wobbles and almost tips. The family that came in a few minutes ago is sitting a few tables away. Like a mutant, three-headed animal, they turn and stare. “NO,” I say again. Hannah looks at me, shocked, open-mouthed. Chris has an identical expression on his face that I would like to slap off. No harm. No harm? I feel a low growl in the back of my throat, fierce and primal.

  “Iz,” Chris says, “come on.”

  I ignore him, turn a laser focus to Hannah. “I’ll stay up with you. We’ll sit on the couch and watch TV shows about…boils. Cockroach invasions. I will stay up with you all night if you can’t sleep. But you.” I take a breath. When she was two days old, we brought her home from the hospital. I stared and stared at her, this brand-new, blinking person, and I wasn’t sure if I loved her. I knew I would protect her, that I would do anything to keep her safe and alive, but I didn’t know if I loved her. It took me a few more days to understand my heart. “You,” I say again, “are staying with me.”

  My whole face twitches a little. Nobody says anything. The staring family turns back to their bread basket.

  Chris clears his throat. “Well, then.”

  “Mom.” Hannah says. She sighs. And there is relief in that tiny exhalation. I know it’s there, even if she doesn’t. “God. Okay, fine.”

  The waitress who had balanced plates on her arms has come to our table, is standing above us, pad and pencil in hand. “Are you ready to order?”

  And I am so hungry. I’m starving.

  ···

  I’ve gotten used to being at school without Josie. Some days it feels like a grown-up, darker version of the year Hannah’s best friend Rooney moved away, and Hannah trudged off to school every day with a tragic expression and a stomachache. Except instead of moving to Seattle because both of her parents got jobs as software development engineers at Microsoft and pinkie-swearing to Skype every day and visit over spring break, Josie died.