by T. Greenwood
Tights made her feel itchy. But it was cold out and she had wanted to wear her purple dress. It was too cold out to wear a dress with no tights, so she’d sat at the edge of her bed as her mom helped her put them on this morning. They were a little bit small, so her mom did the trick where she lifts her up by the tights, which stretches them out and puts them on all at the same time, the waistband coming practically up to her armpits and making her giggle. But now, they were hanging down again; she could barely sit Indian-style on the rug, the middle part practically to her knees again, making it hard to cross her legs.
They were sitting on the carpet for the morning weather report. Her spot was the red square in the front row sandwiched between Connor With an O and Conner With an E. This put her right at Mrs. Kelly’s feet when she sat in the teacher’s chair. She liked to look at Mrs. Kelly’s shoes. She had the fanciest shoes she’d ever seen. Her favorites were the shiny black ones with the little silver bows at the toes. They were made of metal, and just shaped like a bow, not really tied. She also liked the brown ones that had ribbons that wrapped around her ankles like a ballerina. Today she was wearing her plain brown ones, the ones with the tassels. Boring.
She uncrossed her legs and stretched them out into the blue square next to her where Conner With an E would be if he weren’t absent today. He was absent a lot of days because he got ear infections, and head lice once. He came back to school after three days with a shaved head, and he had to hang his coat with a garbage bag over it so the lice didn’t jump to the other coats.
“Okay, let’s see,” Mrs. Kelly said, leaning toward the chore chart on the wall. “Who is our Weather Reporter today?”
Her arm shot up into the air. She’d been waiting to be Weather Reporter for so long. The last time she was Weather Reporter, it was still hot outside. She didn’t like the face on the sun magnet. It looked creepy. But today it looked like snow. She loved the snow magnet. It was a smiling puffy cloud with snowflakes coming out of it.
“Okay, Gracy, come on up,” Mrs. Kelly said, smiling.
But just as she was going to the board to pluck the snow magnet from the pile, Mrs. Moody, the lady from the office, poked her head into the classroom. “Excuse me? Can you send Grace Kennedy to the office? Have her bring her coat and backpack.”
Gracy looked at Mrs. Kelly, who shrugged. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. You can do the report tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.” Disappointed, she went to her cubby and got her backpack and her jacket. Then she took the hall pass from the hook by Mrs. Kelly’s desk and opened up the heavy door to the hallway. It was kind of spooky in the hallway when the other kids weren’t there. Her boots made squeaky sounds on the floor. Like a funny music. She stopped for a drink of water and wondered if there was any way she could pull up her tights.
A man wearing coveralls was standing by the girls’ bathroom. He had a mop bucket, but he wasn’t mopping. Usually Mr. Douglas mopped the floors. Maybe he was a substitute. “Hi, pretty girl,” he said, smiling. But she didn’t smile back.
In the office, Mrs. Moody nodded at her to have a seat in one of the orange plastic chairs by her desk. Maybe she had a dentist appointment, she thought. But she’d just been to the dentist last week.
She sat there for a long time, her legs dangling off the edge of the seat. Nobody paid any attention to her, and so she pretended she was invisible. It was fun. Then the door opened, and a lady came inside. She smiled at her. “Hi, Gracy,” she said. She could see her!
“Hi,” she said. And then she remembered where she knew her from. It was weird seeing people where they weren’t supposed to be. One time she saw Mrs. Kelly at Luigi’s getting a pizza with her husband. It made her feel shy.
Mrs. Moody wasn’t in the office anymore, but Mrs. Bell, the nurse, was. She was at the counter looking through some papers. “You can just sign her out there,” she said to the lady, pointing to the clipboard on Mrs. Moody’s desk.
“I’m going with you?” Gracy said to the lady.
“Yep,” she said. “Your mom asked me to pick you up.”
“Bye!” she said to Mrs. Bell and hopped down off the chair. She reached for the lady’s hand. Together their boots squeaked all the way down the hall to the door.
Outside, Gracy climbed into the backseat of the lady’s car. “I’m supposed to be in a booster,” she said.
“Shoot,” she said. “I don’t have a booster seat, but you should be fine as long as you buckle up.” The lady buckled her seat belt and then got into the car. She looked at Gracy in the rearview mirror.
“Where are we going?” Gracy asked.
The lady pulled away from the curb and headed down the street, the school disappearing behind them. “Just for a ride,” she said, glancing up at the rearview mirror and smiling at Gracy’s reflection. She was pretty. And nice. She taught her what to do when you get a bloody nose. But still, it was kind of weird seeing her without her Walgreens shirt on.
Elsbeth sat at the kitchen table with her cup of coffee, unsure of what had just happened in the bedroom. Kurt hadn’t said a word. Even afterward, when they were both covered in sweat and breathless, he had simply staggered into the bathroom. Shut and locked the door, run water into the sink. Elsbeth had completely undressed and pulled her robe on, looked at her startled self in the mirror.
Glancing down the hallway to make sure he wasn’t coming, she slowly parted her robe and reached between her legs. The place between her thighs was tender. She might even be black-and-blue tomorrow. She stung. He’d never been so rough with her. Never anything but gentle. Gentle to the point of boredom even. She didn’t know whether to be thrilled or frightened.
She could hear him in their bedroom, his heavy footsteps as he moved across the floor. She tried to read the sounds, the silences. She had no idea what was going on in his head. What had brought this on. He’d seemed almost angry.
The bedroom door slammed. He coughed. Then his familiar footsteps echoed down the hallway. On any other day, he’d come to the kitchen, gather his coat and wallet and keys, kiss her gently on the forehead, and mumble, “Have a good day. Love you.” But now she felt her whole body stiffen; for the first time in ages, she couldn’t predict what would happen next. She pressed her hand against her chest, felt the rapid percussion of her heart against her bones.
Kurt stood in the doorway, his hand against the door frame, and looked at her. She raised her eyebrow and cocked her head. Tried and failed to read his expression.
“Well, good morning,” she said, hoping to sound playful, but her voice cracked.
He stared at her, his eyes wide. He shook his head.
“Baby?” she asked, feeling suddenly scared.
He closed his eyes and kept shaking his head.
“What’s the matter?”
“Goddamn you, you ...” he said, his voice like a blast, but then there was another sound. Also loud. Also terrible. It was far away, but loud enough to make both of them turn their heads toward the front door.
Kurt swung the door open, and Elsbeth followed behind him in her robe, careful not to slip as she navigated the icy steps. It was freezing outside, snowing now. Her entire body was trembling. There was already easily an inch on the ground, and it was sticking. She could feel the icy earth through the thin soles of her slipper socks. Wind whipped through the thin fabric of her robe. “What was that?” she asked, reaching for his arm.
“I don’t know,” Kurt said, pulling away from her and walking quickly down the driveway. He peered out into that thick white sky.
“I think it was some sort of explosion,” he said. “Do you see that smoke?” He pointed to a place in the distance beyond the tops of the trees, and she could see enormous billows of gray smoke rising up into the sky. A vague orange glow.
There were several more loud cracks.
“What the hell?” Kurt said.
His cell phone rang in his pocket, and then inside the house phone started to ring.
It was third p
eriod, art, and Angie was working on a still life of three apples and a banana. Mr. Franklin had set up the display a week ago, and the bananas were brown now. Rotten. The whole room smelled vaguely of things gone bad. Remarkably, over Thanksgiving break, her own oil pastel bananas remained ripe and yellow on the page. That was the great thing about art, she thought. It preserved things.
She studied her fingers, smudged with every color in the box. She didn’t mind getting messy. Not like her sister. Crystal couldn’t stand getting dirty. She was always rolling her eyes at Angie’s messes in their shared bathroom, muttering in disgust when she cleared the table and Angie’s place setting inevitably was littered with crumbs and spilled food. They’d had a thousand arguments over their bedroom. Angie never made her bed, couldn’t seem to keep her junk from spilling onto Crystal’s side of the room, had a bad habit of leaving her dirty clothes on the floor rather than stuffing them into their shared hamper.
She looked toward the wooden bowl of rotten fruit and felt a pit in her stomach. Something was weird with Crystal. Well, something had been weird with Crystal for a long time now, ever since she had the baby. But that was just her being sad. Anyone who knew her could figure that out. But this morning had been different.
Angie usually slept until the last possible second before tearing herself from her bed, from the soft, warm nest of her comforter and sheets. Most days, Crystal got ready quietly, letting her sleep. She was careful not to turn on the light or make any noise as she pulled open her drawers to get dressed. It was one of those things that Angie loved about Crystal. Their mom would run the vacuum at six in the morning, bang pots and pans, have loud conversations on her phone right outside her door, but Crystal was always thoughtful. She would have made a good mom, Angie thought sometimes. She knew she shouldn’t think like that; the baby was gone, not hers anymore. But Angie knew it was true.
But this morning, instead of letting Angie sleep, she had woken her up, gently nudging her shoulder. She was sitting on the edge of Angie’s bed, already dressed.
“Hey, Ang,” she had said. She wasn’t wearing her Walgreens smock, which meant she wasn’t going to work. Why was she up, then? Angie could never understand that. On days when she didn’t have school, she slept until it was time for lunch.
Angie had sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Yeah?”
“I want to give you something,” she said.
“What?” Angie asked. Couldn’t this have waited until she was up? Or at least awake?
But Crystal looked like she was going to cry. “Here,” she said, pressing whatever it was into Angie’s hand. Then she stood up, all business. “Mom wants you to come down for breakfast. She’s leaving for work in five minutes.”
Angie opened her fist. In her hand was the charm bracelet that Crystal had gotten for her birthday a few years ago. The one that Angie had borrowed without asking, and, within hours, lost. It was missing for almost a whole week before their dad finally found it behind the toaster. It had probably slipped off her wrist when she was making a piece of toast. She knew Crystal had to have been furious, but she hadn’t said.
“I added a charm,” Crystal said as she stood in the doorway. “One that’s just for you.”
Angie looked at the silver chain in her hand: at the shamrock charm, the heart, the soccer ball. There was a 16 with a space where her birthstone used to go and, of course, a striding runner. But near the clasp was the new charm: a palette, a tiny silver palette and brush, with gemstones like miniature dollops of paint: red, yellow, and blue.
“Why?” Angie asked.
Crystal, still looking like she might cry, just shrugged.
Angie had put the chain on her wrist, felt the heft of it, the cold metal against her skin. Now, at the art table, as she studied the brown bananas and the bruised apples, trying to remember what the fruit looked like before it started to decay, the bracelet felt strange. Too heavy. Too cold. Something was wrong. For as generous as Crystal was, she didn’t just give up her stuff for no reason.
Next to her, Heidi Lemeau’s bananas looked like summer squash. Her apples were like cartoon apples: too round, too red. The two boys at the end of her table weren’t even drawing; they were horsing around with a stolen banana, making obscene gestures behind Heidi’s back. As weird as he was, she really missed that kid Trevor. At least he took art class seriously. But she’d heard he got suspended, and somebody said they’d put him in the special-ed classroom. She felt bad for him. She knew some of the other eighth-grade boys were really mean to him. He was always getting in fights, but she was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be fighting if they weren’t always teasing him. The special-ed kids didn’t come to the art room, as far as she knew. That was just sad.
Mr. Franklin was sitting at the desk at the front of the room, looking bored. If Mrs. D. was still there, she would be walking around, looking at what they were doing, clapping her hands together or putting her hand on her hip and leaning in close for a better “look-see.” Angie was pretty sure that any excitement Mr. Franklin had had about his new job was gone now; most days he just gave them an assignment and then sat back, leafing through a magazine while they worked. They had pop quizzes once a week about whatever artist he told them to read about in the lame textbook he’d passed out the first day. He wouldn’t let them into any of the messy stuff: clay, oils, Cray-Pas.
She watched him glance at his watch. There was still forty minutes left of class.
She raised her hand, felt the charm bracelet slip down her arm. The cold silver sent a chill down her back.
“Yes, Angie?” he asked, when he finally noticed her.
“Can I use the restroom?”
He nodded and reached for the enormous wooden pass labeled Girls in red Sharpie. She stood up and went to the desk and took it from him. He smiled miserably.
She walked down the empty hallway to the girls’ bathroom and looked out the window next to the handicapped stall, touched her nose to the cold glass. Snow was falling outside, and for a minute the dizzying display gave her vertigo. But she stayed, watching the snow falling up, blowing sideways. Upside down.
But then there was a shudder, a tremble, and a crack. Like thunder. And in the split second before everything went black, she thought, How strange. She’d never heard of thunder during a blizzard.
At that crooked little house downtown, Trevor made his way up the creaky stairs and knocked on the door. He heard Mrs. D. shuffling around inside, but when she opened the door, he barely recognized her. She wasn’t wearing her wig, and her skin and hair were the same silvery color. It made his ears hot, as though he’d caught her without her clothes on.
“Trevor,” she said, reaching for him. “Oh dear, come in. You look half-frozen.”
He followed her inside. It was dark but warm. He could smell whatever she had had for breakfast. Coffee. Toast. The snow that had dusted his shoulders and hair started to melt. Soon, his clothes would be wet.
“Can I get you something to drink? Maybe some hot tea?” Her voice sounded weak, smaller than before. “Can I take your coat?” She coughed, and her entire chest rumbled like thunder.
He shook his head and, without taking his coat off, without waiting for an invitation, he sat down on the worn couch.
“Did you have a good Thanksgiving?” she asked.
He nodded and his heart panged momentarily with the thoughts of the argument with Pop. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw only the splatter of sweet potatoes, the fury on his mother’s face. He thought of Disney World. Of airplanes and beaches. The cold crash of the ocean. All of those dreams seemed to belong to someone else now. A figment of someone else’s imagination.
“My brother was here for the holiday,” she said, sitting next to him. “The one I told you about. He brought me these,” she said, motioning to a box of a thousand watercolors, which looked like a tray of candy, on the coffee table. There was an open sketchbook, a still life of a melon and a single dimpled orange. Loose papers scratched with pe
ncil drawings lay scattered across the table.
“How is school?” she said, her face crumpled with concern.
Trevor looked out the window at the street below. The sky was white, achingly bright. It made his head throb, his eyes unable to bear all that light. He thought about all the things she’d told him. About how the quality of light is the only thing a photographer should ever really care about. That beauty lies simply in illumination. That a good photographer can use the light to change the way we see things. He wondered if there was any light that could shine on him and change who he was.
“I did something,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He turned to her and studied the lines on her face. Her skin was like paper in an old book. “I hurt somebody,” he said.
She reached for his hand. When she touched him, he felt his entire world starting to crumble. Like paper that’s been burned. Like something turning quietly to dust. Outside the snow was falling hard now, ashen flakes covering the entire world. “Did you have another fight?” she asked.
He shook his head. His entire body ached, and he knew the end started here. He only needed to say the words. To admit the truth.
“They’re right about me,” he said. “They’re all right.”
Crystal had downloaded maps from the Internet, the route that would take them away from here. She had memorized the directions, repeated them like a mantra each night to fall asleep. Even now as she clicked her right-hand turn signal and peered through her windshield, a kaleidoscope of crystals, at the entrance ramp to the interstate, the path was like a prayer: 91, 11, 279, then west, west, west. Farther and farther, until the world itself ended.
She’d called Lucia from work the day after Thanksgiving, surprised and grateful that she hadn’t changed her cell phone number yet. Grateful that she could still be found. Sobbing, Crystal had tried to get the words out to explain, and Lucia had soothed her, waited for her to catch her breath.
“It’ll be okay, sweetie,” Lucia said. “Everything will be okey-doke.” She assured her again and again that they would figure something out.
