Refund (26 page)

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.”

W
HICH 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 went 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.

The air was unspeakably sweet with the scent of jasmine. Today, in addition to the yellow buses parked in front of the school, there were two ambulances and a news truck and police cars and more parents than I had ever seen. It was as though they had fled their workplaces, in their crisp business suits and their green nurses' scrubs and their bright polyester uniforms from Chick-fil-A and McDonald's and Hardee's, and when they saw us come out, a roar came up, kind of a cheer and a shriek, everyone's names called out at once. It was as though everyone was being named, for the first time, right then, in the parking lot. There was no order to the parents' grabbing for their children—they surged forward, ignoring the rules of the pickup line, and no one stopped them, which seemed almost weirder than the shooting itself. A sheriff's car whizzed past the school so fast it left a burned-rubber smell in the air.

The buses roared up, lumbering yellow dinosaurs, and the children jumped onto them, and the ambulance zoomed away, and after the endless wait in the classroom, the strange walk with the eyes no one closed, the footprints, in fifteen minutes everyone seemed to have gone home. A couple teachers were talking to a news crew.
There was another small group that had gathered to cry. Some were being met by husbands, wives, assorted loved ones. I stood in the front, and I realized that no one had come for me.

I
REMAINED THERE WITH
D
OLORES
J
EFFERSON, THIRD-GRADE
teacher, who was the repository of all current events. She was heading to her second job; peering into a tiny mirror, she was patting her copper-dyed hair, which was organized into a kind of small obelisk; she was making sure it was all in place. When she saw me, she lowered the mirror.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I guess,” I said. “You?”

“You know who was shot?” she said. “Mrs. Hill.”

My blood lurched. Mrs. Hill.

“Holy shit. Is she okay?”

Mrs. Jefferson looked at me. “Alive. ICU. Hit her in the back.”

Mrs. Hill, with her stacks of tests, parents trailing after her, wanting tips, the way she smiled at them with a bemused expression and said, “This is what they need to do.”

“Is she okay?”

Mrs. Jefferson shrugged.

“Who did it?”

“Trevor Johnson's dad.”

“Oh,” I said. I'd seen him striding down the hallways a couple times this week, waiting by her office; he was a realtor, a top-20 producer for his company, as the newspaper ads said, his face winking out of the pages, but he could not stand still as he waited for Mrs. Hill—he roamed around the hallway, staring at the fourth grade's artwork.

“He came here for her?”

“Trevor's math score didn't go up.”

“What the hell,” I said, “What the . . .”

According to the school handbook, teachers were not supposed to swear, but she did not correct me. “We started a get-well card,” she said, “Angela's taking contributions for flowers.” We looked at each other, marching through these gestures of sympathy; we did not know what else to do. She checked her watch. “I'm late for work—”

Mrs. Jefferson also worked the evening shift at the Macy's perfume counter, spraying innocent bystanders and inquiring politely if they wanted to buy Obsession or Happy. She sprayed with more abandon, she said, as we got closer to the EOG tests, particularly if her class was ill-prepared. She had developed a tic in her left eye over the last year, which she confided to me was easy to hide at the fragrance counter because she could pretend she got perfume in her eye. I had spotted the whole sixth-grade faculty hawking shoes after school hours at Shoe Carnival, and the art teacher bussing dishes at Ruby Tuesday.

“You can do it, too, hon,” she said. “You're a cute little girl. I'll put in a good word. For the holidays—”

We all needed the money. What if someone had said, “No thanks, I don't need a second job, I have enough! I'm heading to the gym now.” That would sound rude to us, frankly.

Mrs. Jefferson hoisted her purse onto her shoulder; she wanted to get out of here. “How do you have the energy?” I asked her.

“I don't,” she said. “The Lord helps me teach these children. He gets me through the day.”

She said that, merrily, though I had seen her at the perfume counter, one Saturday after I was on my own and I convinced myself to get out and walk around the mall. I saw her, clutching the spritzer bottle, aiming at customers with determination. She got everyone in her path. You buy perfume. You. You. I saw her hold out an exquisite bottle to a customer, a bottle designed to make anyone feel like a
queen. Each bottle, a path. I will buy my diabetic daughter medicine and keep her from eating Ho Hos.

“You, it's just you to take care of,” said Dolores. “You could work perfume and women's wear, you could rack it up.”

The sounds of the sirens drained away. It was just me to take care of. It was an easy thing to say. Hal had left four months before. We had moved here, to North Carolina, his idea. We had just graduated college, we did not know where to throw ourselves, so we tried each other. It was a way to be, imagining that we loved each other, and for a while, we did. I'm not sure what happened. His body beside mine was a fortress, but then it was a jail. It happened when we decided to get engaged. I knew that if I went through with it, I would not be able to breathe. There was no good reason. I said no, I waffled, I was not the team player he had wanted. And then he moved out.

Each morning, I woke and had a moment when I saw the pale morning sunlight brightening the floor, and I forgot everything that had happened in the last few months. Perhaps Hal was in the next room, perhaps I still thought I loved him. The morning began with a pure, calm moment of nothingness, of boredom, even—that luxury—before I remembered what was true. Then, sometimes, I had a sensation that my body was disappearing; I was starting, somehow, to vanish. It wasn't a good feeling. So I got dressed in a rush, ate breakfast, got out of the apartment, for I needed to get to school, to set the crayon baskets on the tables, to hear the voices of the teachers and students.

N
OW
I
STOOD ON THE CEMENT WALKWAY IN FRONT OF THE SCHOOL
. The sun was warm and brilliant, but I was shivering. No one had come for me; not that I had expected it. But the soles of my feet were cold; I had never felt that before. I had to get out of here, but I did not know where to go.