“I need to see,” said Jed.
Emmanuel nodded. “We’ll go together.”
The men parted for Jed. Jed opened the schoolhouse door.
This is where that man came in on The Day, Jed thought. He walked right in through this door. He saw the chalkboard just like I am seeing it now.
The inside of the school looked like a scene from a dream. The headlights shining in from outside cast shadows where they had never been before.
It all looked strange, but Jed could still see the rows of plain desks. The big desks at the back were for the older students. The little desks at the front were for the young ones. Jed saw the woodstove and the alphabet cards on the wall.
Below the chalkboard, Jed could see the dark stains on the plank floor.
The teacher, Miss Steinman, had been teaching the fourth-grade class about the parts of a flower. The children were holding up the wildflowers they had picked at recess and were looking closely at the petals. Jed was at his desk, mid-way in the rows with his age group, closer to the back than the front. He was watching the flower lesson because it was more interesting than the geography book he was supposed to be reading.
The man walked into the school slowly, Jed remembered, but seemed to get to the front of the room before anyone really realized he was there.
“You — get up here,” the man said. He pointed a gun at a boy in the front row, one of the second graders, and waved the gun toward the chalkboard.
The boy, little Daniel, who never seemed to grow into his older brother’s hand-me-downs, went to the board. He picked up a piece of chalk. That’s what children did when they went to the front of the schoolroom.
“Can I help you?” Miss Steinman asked.
Then, seeing the gun, she spread her arms out like a mother hen spreading her wings over her chicks.
“Please go,” she said.
The man ignored her. He pointed to students at random, ordering them to the chalkboard.
Did it happen quickly or did it happen slowly? Was he shouting?
Jed didn’t think so. He would have remembered that. People did not usually shout in the community. He would have remembered shouting.
Jed took steps toward the chalkboard, toward the spot where it all happened.
Jed’s sister, Melinda, in the third grade, was one of the ones called up to the board. He could never imagine what the man would do. He had no way to imagine it.
Maybe, if I had known, I could have said something to change his mind, or done something to stop him, he thought. He took some more steps toward the front.
“Jed.”
He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Jed, that’s far enough,” said Emmanuel. “There is no purpose in going closer. Let’s put our grief to work.”
Jed nodded. Work was why he was there.
He and Emmanuel carried out desks while others dismantled the woodstove. Already the windows were being taken out carefully to be reused in the new school. He heard the sound of shingles being pried off one at a time, framing being taken apart and lumber being stacked.
They all worked hard. Those with skills and strength did the heavy parts that required know-how. Those with less experience loaded wood and shingles into trucks and wagons. The floorboards were taken up, and even the fence Jed had been sitting on was dismantled.
The townspeople, who seemed to be constantly talking whenever Jed was among them in town, worked in silence like the rest of them, speaking only about the work, only in quiet tones.
Jed thought he might cry while he worked, but he didn’t. He didn’t think very much, either. He just worked.
I’m just doing chores, the same as every other day, he told himself. Nothing different about this day.
The sky went from black with stars to gray with a hint of mist. By the time the sun peeked up at the edge of the Brubacher farm, the school was down. All the parts were in trucks, much of it already taken to the new schoolyard, a corner of the Sauder farm two lanes down.
The rakes and shovels were brought out next. The ground where the school had been was smoothed over. Shrubs and clumps of wildflowers from people’s yards and fields were put into the ground. Jed planted a maple sapling close to where he thought the chalkboard had been. There was no marker put on it, but he would remember.
The sun came fully up. Everyone shook hands. The trucks were loaded up with townspeople and the wagons with plain people.
“Hop on,” Emmanuel said to Jed. “I’ll give you a ride back.”
“No,” said Jed. “I walked here this morning. I’ll walk home, too.”
Emmanuel shook Jed’s hand as if Jed was grown.
“Don’t make your mother wait too long for you,” he said. Jed promised he wouldn’t.
He watched everyone drive away.
The last of the pickups and wagons had just disappeared from Jed’s view when a new convoy of cars and trucks came driving up from another direction. The out-of-town media people got out and walked around in city clothes and shiny shoes.
“Where did the school go?” Jed heard them say from where he stood on the other side of the road. “This is the place, right? Did they move it? We were just here yesterday. Did they up and move a whole school?”
“I don’t get these people,” Jed heard someone else say. “Don’t they want to remember? They don’t even seem angry.”
Jed turned his back on them and headed home.
Women from the community would be there. They would have a good breakfast ready for him, and would have helped his mother with all the chores.
Today, he could just be with his mother.
Tomorrow, he would add his sister’s chores to his own.
He could shoulder both. That was something he could do.
6
The Day-off Chair
Bea was sitting on a wooden bench, pretending to read a book.
It was a daring place to sit. The bench was on the sidewalk right downtown.
Behind her was Oak Street. Not the main street in her town but pretty close to it. Her bench faced a little strip of shops — the Curly Clip where the old ladies went to get their hair done, the Green Dream yoga studio, a real-estate office with a window full of pictures of houses for sale, and a print shop that did wedding invitations.
The print-shop place had a fake wedding cake on display. From where Bea sat, she could see a thick layer of dust on the fake icing.
Farther down the street was a lawyers’ office in one of the town’s red brick historical buildings. A low hedge surrounded the yard. There was a big rock in that yard, perfect for little kids to climb on. To stop them, the lawyers hired someone to plant flowers around the rock. No parent would let their kids walk through a flowerbed, not even to let them have the joy of climbing up on a great big boulder.
Oak Street was not the busiest street in town, but lots of people still walked down it, and they all looked at Bea sitting by herself on a bench in the middle of a school day.
Bea didn’t worry about the old ladies. She had sat on this bench before on her days off and the old ladies left her alone. Either they were afraid to confront her because kids scared them, or they remembered being young themselves at a time when a child could be alone on the street or in a shop or in a park without anyone thinking they were up to no good or about to be abducted.
The old ladies didn’t care that she was sitting there. When Bea’s grandmother was a girl, she used to go to the grocery store and the swimming pool and playground all by herself, returning home only when she got hungry or the streetlights went on.
The dangerous ones were the yoga ladies, with their mats rolled up under their arms and their noses in the air, looking all “If I can take time out of my busy day to be enlightened, there’s no excuse for you!”
Bea wasn’t being rude thinking that. She
actually heard one lady say it to her teenaged daughter who was rounder than her mom and looked like she’d rather be going to the dentist than into a yoga studio with her mother.
The yoga ladies were busybodies. Bea had only been sitting on the bench for half an hour, and already three of the mat-toters had come up to her, nosiness dripping off their faces.
“Are you lost, honey?” one asked.
“Is everything okay?” asked another.
The third woman came right out with it. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I am ten years old and have lived in this town my whole stupid life, so, no, I am not lost. Everything will be okay as soon as you get away from me. And, yes, I should be in school but I’m taking the day off because I’m sick of people BUGGING ME!”
Bea said none of those things, of course.
Instead, she looked up from her book, smiled sweetly and said, “I’m just waiting for my mother. She’s at the dentist. I’ve been already. My appointment was before hers. She told me to wait for her here since it’s such a nice day. As soon as she’s done she’s going to drive me back to school.”
That satisfied them. They went into yoga like the Queens of Neighborhood Watch. By the time their stretch class was finished, Bea would have moved to a different bench and they would have forgotten all about her.
The yoga ladies did not know Bea, and they did not know her mother.
Bea’s mother did not like yoga. She liked drinking. She called it her “sport.”
“I don’t need to carry a rolled-up bed or wear a step-counter for my sport,” she’d brag, cracking open the seal on a new bottle of gin.
“Maybe you should wear a drink-counter,” Bea’s father said.
They used to argue while drinking, but Bea’s dad went to AA and now they argued about drinking.
Mom had dropped Bea off at school that morning as usual. It was a silent ride because Mom had a hangover, but it wasn’t a quiet ride because Mom could get angry at anything at any moment. Mom’s silent anger was very loud. She could drive and hit at the same time.
Bea got out of the car at school. She watched her mom drive away. She watched the kids run around the schoolyard. She saw the teachers through the classroom windows, busy setting out papers and hanging up artwork, getting ready for the day.
Bea could not move. She could not leave the sidewalk and head into the playground.
She wasn’t afraid of being bullied. The teachers kept their eyes open at her school, so bullying wasn’t really a problem. There were kids Bea liked and who liked her. Her teacher sometimes bugged her about paying attention, but that was nothing Bea couldn’t handle.
There was no good reason she could not go to school.
“I just need a day off,” she said.
Bea pointed her feet, walked and walked and finally sat down on the Oak Street bench.
It felt good to just sit. It felt good to be left alone with her thoughts, and to not think at all if she didn’t feel like it.
Sit. She just wanted to sit.
She closed her eyes to shut out the world.
“Mom!”
Bea opened her eyes and looked for the owner of the voice.
“Mom!”
Bea saw a small boy, four or five years old. He was down in the lawyers’ yard looking past Bea and up toward the main street.
Bea looked to where he was looking. A woman at the street corner was talking to an older woman who was waiting to cross the street to go in a different direction.
“Mom!”
The mom-woman looked down the street and gave her son a little wave, then continued her conversation.
Bea watched the boy jump up and down with excitement. She looked back at the mom and saw the traffic light turn green. The older woman said her goodbyes and started to cross the street. Bea turned back to the little boy just in time to see him duck behind the rock in the lawyers’ yard.
He’s going to jump out at her, Bea thought. He’s going to pop up and surprise her.
The mom, walking now with purpose, got closer and closer.
“She’s going to be shocked,” Bea said out loud. “She’ll jump back and she’ll be embarrassed and she’ll yell at him. She’ll get mad at him for getting his clothes dirty and walking on the plants. Maybe she’ll even hit him for scaring her!”
Bea could feel the sting of the slap on her own cheek.
The mom got closer to the rock.
Bea stood up. She could run fast. If the mom raised her hand to hit the boy, Bea would take off down the street, slam into the woman and knock her to the ground.
Bea imagined the little boy down behind the rock, peeking around it through the branches in the hedge, watching his mom get closer and closer, his muscles tight, giggling to himself, his legs getting ready to spring into action, until —
“Surprise,” he shouted.
“Don’t hit him!” Bea called out.
The mom jumped high and threw her arms up at the sight of her little boy. She opened her mouth — and laughed!
“You got me!” the mom said. “That was a good one!”
She put her arm around his shoulders. Bea heard the two of them laughing as they walked away together down the street.
Bea was shaking. She wiped tears off her face with the back of her hand.
“Sometimes things turn out all right,” a voice said beside her. One of the old Curly Clip ladies had been watching the mother and boy, too. The lady put her old hand briefly on Bea’s arm, then toddled off with her new hairdo.
Bea didn’t want to sit anymore.
Her feet started walking again.
They took her back to her school and into her classroom.
Her teacher took one look at Bea’s face and did not say a single word to her about being late.
7
The Glowing Chair
Miyuki was sitting on a tatami mat in the evacuation center.
The center was usually a high-school gymnasium. Now it was full of people who had run from their homes.
Miyuki’s father stood over her.
“You cannot go back,” he said. “How many times do I have to say this? You cannot risk yourself for a foolish donkey!”
“But she’s Mother’s donkey!”
“It’s a foolish donkey. Your mother was a foolish woman, and you are a foolish girl.”
Miyuki’s father had been a teacher in the before-tsunami world. His school had been broken by the earthquake.
Miyuki didn’t know what he was now, but he still lectured like a teacher.
“You cannot go into the danger zone,” the lecture continued. “You will come out glowing with radiation. All your hair will fall out and you will get sick. At twelve years old, you should be able to understand that.”
I understand it, Miyuki thought while she played with the buckles on her school bag in her lap. I just don’t like it.
“The government has made these rules for us, and we will obey them. We do not break rules in this family.”
“Mother broke rules,” Miyuki said before she could stop herself. “She broke your rules.”
His rules said that her mother could not study to be a veterinary technician. His rules said that she should stay at home and look after things there.
“Your mother agreed to those rules, and then she broke them,” her father said. “Look where it got her.”
Miyuki did not think that her mother going to work was what caused the giant wave to swallow up the veterinary clinic and other shops and homes, but she did not say so.
Father loomed large over her, like a shadow in a bad dream. She did not look up at his face, but stared at the crease in his trousers. After three days at the evacuation center, the crease was less sharp, and the cuffs had picked up dust and bits of rice crackers.
“Th
e donkey will be fine until we get back home,” he said.
“How can you say Hisa will be fine if it’s not safe for me to go back and get her?” Miyuki asked, unable to keep the anger out of her voice.
“Hisa? Who’s Hisa?”
Miyuki clenched her fists to keep from screaming. “You know the donkey’s name.”
It was a game her father played with her. When she got angry, he got light. It always felt like he was making fun of her.
“I named you Miyuki so you would be silent, like a snowfall. I should have named you Nariko, because you are always noisy, like thunder. All I have to say to you is that your constant insolence would have disappointed your mother.”
His comment was designed to fill Miyuki with shame, but it failed.
You don’t know how Mother talked about you when you weren’t around, she thought. “The grayer his hair, the smaller his mind.” That’s what she said about you.
Her father turned right around and stood with his back to his daughter.
This was an old trick. It used to work, making her beg for his forgiveness.
Now she just thought, Good. Lecture’s over.
He stood like that for a full two minutes. Miyuki timed it by the clock on the gymnasium wall. For those two minutes, she was the silent daughter he said he always wanted.
He finally gave up waiting for an apology and walked away, taking great care to keep his back to her as he went. This was a challenge, as he had to zigzag around tables, cots and clumps of people.
The earthquake that had changed all their lives shook Japan as far away as Tokyo. It opened up the ground under the ocean and sent a huge wave to swallow the land. It set off explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and radiation escaped into the environment. The government ordered everyone to leave the danger zone, twenty kilometers around the plant.
“You still whining about that stupid donkey?”
Tani, her fourteen-year-old brother, left the chessboard where he had just been defeated by his friend Yoshi. (Too easily, Miyuki thought. She had seen the board. She could have checkmated Yoshi in five moves.)
Tani sat beside her on the tatami.
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