Woody pressed the boy’s sticker back into his outstretched hand. The boy turned away from him and hunched over his sticker. It had the green, smiling face of Shrek on it.
“Where’d you get this?” Woody asked the boy.
“At school. They called my name in the cafeteria,” the boy said. “I heard my name. They said it like this: Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen. They chose me. They said I could go home. The lady gave me this when I walked out. She said hold this and go right to the car. I held it the whole way.”
Diane remembered this from the day before, the first time she had picked up her son by car at school. The car riders waited for their parents in the cafeteria, while the parents, in cars at the traffic circle, told their names to the pickup coordinators, who called their names on the walkie-talkie. “Tommy Bernstein,” Diane had said to the coordinator. She imagined her son’s name floating over the loudspeaker in the cafeteria, where the children were sitting on long steel benches. She pictured all the children, Tommy and Raisha and Juan and Christopher and Sandra and the others, hunched over the tables, waiting to be summoned back to their lives. How many times in their lives would they sit like this, waiting to be called—for work, for love, for good fortune or bad, for luck or despair? What joys or sorrows would each of them be chosen for? She wished she could see how her son hurried down the dingy, dim brown public school corridors, how he walked to the doors that burst open to the afternoon light.
She was relieved when she saw him coming to her car; it was as if he had just been born. “What happened?” she asked. He had told her the same thing: “They said my name like this”—her son cupped his hands together and spoke into them—“Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen.” He said these words with awe, as though they had been spoken by the voice of God. She watched his face in the rearview mirror, blank but suffused with a new brightness, and she wanted to touch his beautiful young face and feel what hope was in it, but she simply drove on.
Now Woody leaned toward the boy. “Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen. You did a good job,” he said.
The boy nodded at Woody’s correct pronunciation. “Yes,” he said.
“Your parents will be proud,” Woody continued.
“My father calls in the morning,” Tommy said. “I hear him, but I don’t see his face.”
“He must miss you,” said Woody.
Stop, she thought. Don’t pity him. Woody rolled up his shirtsleeves. He bent so he was looking into the boy’s face. “Tommy,” said Woody. “I know how you feel. When I was a boy, I woke up, and the house was quiet. No one called me. Tommy, I didn’t have a mother. My father was at work long before I got up.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “I dressed and got myself to the bus stop. I rode the school bus. I waited for it to pick me up. Sometimes I said my name, too. Woody Wilson. I said it over and over. WoodyWilson. WoodyWilson. I said it so many times it sounded like the name of some other person.”
His voice had become quieter as he spoke to Tommy. The boy gazed at him, strangely lulled. She felt the little girl grab her leg, and Diane touched her hair. How had her life come to this, hoarding minutes of kindness doled to them by strangers who knocked on her door? She wondered if this would be the future texture of their lives, this hoarding, and she wished Woody Wilson would leave but also appreciated the fact that someone was with them in the room. She looked away from his pale, thin hair, his shirt rolled halfway up his solid, pink arms. She was afraid that her son would ask him to stay.
But the boy suddenly turned his back to Woody, squatting over his stickers with a fierce expression. “Tommy?” Woody asked. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t care,” the boy said sharply. “Guess what? I don’t care.”
She did not know what would comfort him; she barely knew what would comfort herself.
“Well,” said Woody. “Hey.” His voice broke a little, and he laughed, a hearty, rehearsed laugh. “Well, you never know what will work with kids, what will help them. Never hurts to try, right, Diane? Got to keep trying?”
He wanted to be reassured, and so did she, and for what? They were soft, graying, halfway to their deaths. They both knew that each person’s love for another resided within oneself, miraculous and blind and strange; they both knew that everyone would die alone.
“Okay,” she said carefully, and shrugged.
“Thank you,” he said.
The tinny sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner” burst into the room. It was Woody Wilson’s cell phone. Woody’s face assumed a stern expression as he held it to his ear. “Yes. Still on Greenfield. Yep.” He turned it off. “Well,” he said. “Time to go.”
He picked up his briefcase. “Thank you for your hospitality, Diane,” he said brightly. The politician’s voice burst out of him; he seemed almost surprised to hear it. He smiled as he had on the bill-board, holding out his hand. “Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” she said, shaking his hand, the firm, remote grip of a stranger. His palm was soft and startled her; she let go and stepped away.
He gripped the envelope marked CONTRIBUTIONS and smiled shyly. “I suppose you wouldn’t care to contribute to my cause?” he said.
“I don’t think I can,” she said.
He nodded, as though he had expected this. He stood on her porch and slipped his envelope under his arm. The bump on his head was dark and monstrous.
“What should I tell people?” he asked. “How did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Tell them you tripped.”
“Yes,” he said, brightening, delighted by the idea of simplicity. “I just tripped.”
Silence bore down on them; there was nothing more to say. Woody Wilson hurried up the sidewalk to the next house. His lips were moving; she believed that he was murmuring his name. Stepping out into the pink air, she looked at the names of all the candidates stuck in the green lawns. They sat, arranged in rows under the sky. Woody Wilson reached the next house. He rubbed his palms against his jacket, took a flyer from his briefcase, and, slowly, he lifted his hand to knock on the door.
The Sea Turtle Hospital
The lockdown at Arthur Elementary was the second at the school this week. It began while we were doing our class presentation: the Amazon Council of Beings. The secretary’s flat voice announced it just as Keisha Jones was introducing herself as a harpy eagle. The Council of Beings capped off the kindergarten’s Amazon rainforest unit and involved twenty-two five-year-olds sitting in a circle wearing paper-plate masks they had made of their assigned endangered animals, with Mrs. Reeves, the senior teacher, on a bongo drum. Keisha Jones announced she was a harpy eagle, and we all said, in unison, “You are one of us!” and Keisha was describing what foods she ate and before we could tell her, also in unison, “We hear your needs,” and watch Mrs. Reeves majestically bang the bongo, the secretary said, statically, over the intercom, “Lockdown. School is currently in lockdown.” The golden lion, tamarin, manatee, and jaguar were mad because they hadn’t announced yet what they were; Mrs. Reeves told me to lock the door and draw the blinds while she got the safer job of herding the kids into the reading nook. This pissed me off because she clearly didn’t mind if I took a bullet before she did. It was as though she voiced what I was thinking: the assistant should go first.
The school shut down, locking windows and doors, supposedly allowing no one in or out, when there were reports of violence in the neighborhood. The first lockdown of the week happened after a tenth grader at the nearby junior high stood up during algebra class, brought out a hammer, and started whacking his classmates. A month ago, the owner of a convenience store two blocks away had been killed during a regular transaction, and I passed the memorial of supermarket torches of roses and carnations set out by the mart every morning. I had seen the man the day before, a bald figure with a shiny, toffee face, who had moved here from Beirut. He had been sweeping the sidewalk then, and I remember brushing against his arm as I passed him, the way his upper arm was soft like a balloon. I read about his family in the newspap
er for a couple days, the fund to send his award-winning clarinetist daughter to summer camp, and then I had to stop reading. I put a rose wrapped in a plastic paper on the memorial site. The next day, I walked down a different block.
I didn’t know what was going on today. I had worked here for a year and a half, and the lockdown protocol still messed me up, the click of the lock, the brisk, absurd drawing of the blinds, as though the thin plastic provided any protection from anything. I was not in a mood to be locked anywhere now, not since my boyfriend Hal left about four months ago. The kindergartners were supposed to go into lockdown position, sitting, crouched, knees to chest, in their uniforms, the blue pants and crisp white collared shirts. I was secretly glad that they ignored this. The girls clustered to make their own hair salon. The children didn’t want to stop introducing themselves; the Bengal tiger, orangutan, and poison dart frog wanted their turns even if, or perhaps especially if, a gunman burst into the room. Tyree rose slightly out of the group and announced, “I am a tapir,” and we all chimed, “You are one of us!”
Who was going insane this time? Was it a husband and wife? Was it a fed-up parent? Was it someone so lonely her body felt like it might split? Was it someone who had been stomped on so many times he had forgotten how to feel anything good? I stepped away from the nook and lifted one of the flimsy plastic blinds, peering at the empty playground; it was blanched, white from the sun, the metal slides starry with heat.
The school had been generally tense the last week, too, as the third, fourth, and fifth graders got ready for the End of Grade Tests, or EOGs. The flyers in the hallways started twenty days ago. Twenty days to the EOGS! Then Nineteen days, and so forth. It had the subtlety of a hurricane watch. Did they really think any of us would forget? The administration wanted Arthur to again be a “School of Distinction,” getting more government money if their test scores kept going up, and teachers gave the students the practice tests every day for three weeks; some demented fifth-grade parents kept showing up at school with the intent expressions of hunters. They were in search of scores. They followed them with the discrimination of statisticians, knowing the slight advantages a 95 gave over a 94; they stared at them as though they could predict the future of the world. Miss Eileen Hill, the guidance counselor and expert in student evaluations, was the one the parents sought out this time of year; she believed in numbers, percentiles, which all parents—suburban, inner-city, white, black—ate up. A score in the top 5 percent got you into Gifted. A score in the top 10 percent got you into an Honors track in sixth grade. The parents were greedy for every point, every question, every tiny glimmer of hope.
My cell phone buzzed. Tyree’s mother texted me twenty minutes into the lockdown. R U OK? I hoped, in a sanguine moment, that she was asking about me. That made her one of the good parents. The good parents were the ones who complimented my blouse, who touched my shoulder and asked, how are you? We were all there “for the children,” black, white, and brown, poor and rich, the ones who lived in the district and the ones who clamored for the waiting list. We were the public magnet school with the best test scores in the city—top five in the state. Mostly the parents wanted compliments about their children; no, the correct word was craved. They craved reassurance that their kids wouldn’t end up in the same sorry messes they were in, and this was true across the board, upper-middle class to lower.
“Who is it?” Peter Olsen whispered.
“I don’t know,” whispered Savannah.
“Do you think he has a hammer?” whispered Peter.
There was the sound of walking in the hallway, a skittering kind of walk, someone not running but falling across the hall. Mrs. Reeves looked up. She walked to the nook and gripped the sides of one of the bookshelves.
“Give me a hand,” she said.
She pushed one end, and I pushed the other, and we positioned a bookshelf so it was blocking the children. I looked at her.
“Class!” said Mrs. Reeves, clapping her hands in a rhythm that the children were supposed to imitate. They did, in a straggly way. The cramped nook, the bookshelf wall made them chatty. It was a bit hard to see them through the tower of chairs. Mrs. Reeves paced to the door and back and said, “It is time to sort macaroni.” She said this with a honeyed, calm authority, as though, of course, this was the only activity permitted at this moment in time. “Each of you move forty pieces of macaroni from this bowl into this one.” She set a few plastic bowls inside the reading nook. “Get exactly forty in each bowl. Go.”
WHICH CHILD WOULD I SAVE FIRST? I TRIED TO IMAGINE HOW MANY my body would cover. Five? Mrs. Reeves, taller than me, maybe eight? That left twelve of them to fend for themselves. Mo Sampson, the biter, maybe on one of his vampire-ish days, he could go. The girls . . . I couldn’t sort through the girls. Keisha, the best reader, and who seemed, for an unknown reason, to see something good in me, could be saved first.
They sorted the macaroni. Mrs. Reeves sang “If I had a Hammer,” which was, I thought, a poor choice. Travis bit his fingernails until one began to bleed. I sat down in the nook with them. “You all turned in your permission slips for our field trip to the sea turtle hospital tomorrow, right?” I asked them, trying to normalize, distract, which was a teacher’s first strategy, in all situations; I told them all I knew about turtles. They leaned forward, the air thick with the salty sourness of their breath. They wanted to know how the injured turtles were rehabilitated, and if your hands smelled bad after you petted them. Keisha climbed into my lap. I tried not to encourage sitting on laps or they would all Velcro themselves to me, but since Hal left, and I was now alone in this town where we had moved together, I was so lonely I felt it, a cold pain, when I breathed. Keisha leaned back against me, and I let her.
Fifteen minutes went by. Twenty. I stood up, started organizing the chairs around the nook again. Outside, Tyree’s mother was unraveling.
LUV U WE’LL GET ICE CREM
TIE UR SHOES
U CAN WATCH TV TONITE
I LUV U
I texted back TYREE IS FINE, which led to a flurry of more texts: MAKE SURE HE PEES HE HOLDS IT IN HUG HIM CAN U JUST GET HIM OUT OF THERE
Mrs. Reeves looked up.
There, somewhere in the school, was a faint lifting sound, which I realized were screams. Then there was the gunshot somewhere in the school, one, two, sounding just like and unlike a gunshot, a firecracker. I thought my skin was starting to crumble. Mrs. Reeves dropped a package of macaroni, and the pasta skittered across the floor. She looked around the room, picked up the rainbow shag carpet, dragged the large square of it over to the nook, and flapped it over the children. They coughed; the underside smelled like rubber that had fermented in some disheartening way.
“It’s a tent!”
“Smells like shit!”
With the class under the tent, we couldn’t tell who had made this second statement, and usually it would have led to a few minutes sitting in the “office,” aka timeout zone, but right now it seemed that anyone could say anything.
Mrs. Reeves stood, holding the carpet at a slant over the kindergarteners; I went to the door. I peered through the window; there were police in vests and helmets running down the hallway—headed past the first-. Second-. Third-. Fourth-grade classrooms, running. Then right. The fifth grade. The administration. Cafeteria.
Another gunshot.
There was no place we could go.
The children were silent; they huddled under the rainbow rug. People in situations like this sometimes say they stop thinking. That was not true for me. I was thinking of everything: the way Hal had looked at me as he walked out the door, the freckle on his shoulder that I watched when we slept, Darryl’s expression when he sounded out his name on the page, the sweetness of the cinnamon roll I had for breakfast.
Then there was a knock at the door. “Police,” said a loud voice on the other side. “Checking the classrooms. You are okay to open up.”
I looked at Mrs. Reeves, and, slowly, she nodded. I w
ent to the door and unlocked it; it took a minute because my hands were shaking. A policeman came in, a black gun in his hand. The children sat up on their knees, openmouthed. It now felt like we were in a play.
“We have a suspect. One victim, injured.”
We stood there, frozen, unknowing.
His face blank in a practiced way. Oddly handsome for a policeman. Maybe he was an actor. The children peering out under the horrible-smelling rainbow rug. There had been gunshots in our school somewhere. We did not know how to act. The phone buzzed again. He nodded.
“Clear. We can get you out. Everyone, line up.”
We moved the bookshelf and the children, who went, without us asking, to the ordinary actions of their dismissal—putting on their outdoor shoes, hoisting their backpacks onto their shoulders. The policeman watched them line up and said, “This is how we’re going to do it. Put your hands on the person in front of you. Then close your eyes.”
A couple children laughed. A couple cried.
“How am I gonna see anything?” asked Darryl.
“You won’t,” said the policeman.
“But I want to,” said Darryl.
“This is the procedure,” said the policeman. “Hands on shoulders, everyone, now.”
The children were in two lines, and they grabbed each other’s shoulders. They now looked as though they were at a party and about to do a group dance.
“Okay. We’re going. Shut your eyes.”
I watched them squinch their eyes shut, or loosely flutter their eyelashes; they gripped the shoulders of the person in front of them and started to walk. We were in the hallway. There were the pictures of things that began with the letter R; there were the collages made of pine cones from the playground; there were other students marching out the same way, eyes closed. My eyes were not closed. Neither were most of the others’; there was the sound of an adult crying, which instantly meant no one’s eyes were shut; there were some footprints made of blood; there were the fourth-grade’s pastel drawings of their recent trip to the zoo; there were the children, hands on shoulders, most of them with their eyes open, looking at each other, stunned, I think, by the strange quality of the orderliness, the fact their drawings were still on the walls. The footprints. Whose were they? We had to keep walking. We were walking out and out and then through the doors and we were outside.
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