The Giving Quilt (25 page)

Jocelyn clung to her and tried to remember how to breathe.

The district offered counseling to the students who had witnessed the accident and soon thereafter extended it to the rest of the school. An investigation found that the driver was not at fault and would not be prosecuted, although he was so traumatized by the accident that he left school for the semester. Someone—fortunately for them Jocelyn later could not remember who—gave her the business card of a lawyer brother-in-law and told her she could still sue the driver's family for damages in civil court. Jocelyn had been too stunned to reply. Why would she put herself or that poor young man through such an ordeal? It wasn't his fault that Noah had carelessly, heedlessly ignored the one simple rule they had both endlessly, emphatically repeated to their daughters as soon as they learned to walk: Look both ways before crossing the street. Noah had not, and now he was gone, and sometimes it was difficult not to be angry, shaking with grief and fury at him for making such a stupid, senseless, fatal mistake, but she could not take her anger out on this boy. He was exactly the sort of young person Noah had dedicated his life to helping. It would bring Jocelyn no comfort to punish him.

The memorial service was moving, touching her even in the fog of her grief. On the day of his funeral, hundreds of students, former students, parents, and educators filled the church. On that day Noah belonged to all of them, and she felt their grief as keenly as her own.

In the weeks that followed her return to work, students Jocelyn had never taught approached her as she drifted numbly through the halls. They stammered out a few broken phrases and fell into her arms, sobbing. The track team circulated a petition asking the school to be renamed after him, but the school board offered them the stadium instead. The eighth graders dedicated their graduation ceremony to Noah, but Jocelyn could not bring herself to attend. Later, someone mailed her the program, which included a reverent biography and a poem written by one of his honors biology students. It was probably lovely, but Jocelyn quickly put it away in a drawer unread, awaiting a time when she could bear to see his wonderful life, which should have stretched on decades longer, condensed to fit within the empty margins of a single page.

As soon as the school year ended, Jocelyn packed the girls' suitcases, put the mail and newspapers on hold, and arranged for a neighbor to mow the lawn and keep an eye on the house for the summer. Her own suitcase had sat forgotten on the floor at the foot of her bed, packed for the Traditional Arts and Crafts weekend at Greenfield Village she had not attended. She emptied the suitcase and filled it again with clothing more suitable for the season.

It was a relief to lock up the house and drive away.

Jocelyn and her daughters spent the summer on a small island in North Carolina in the house that had once belonged to her maternal grandparents, and before that her great-grandparents, who had tried to grow cotton in the rocky soil but had eventually abandoned farming in favor of fishing and crabbing. The forests had reclaimed the tilled fields ages ago, and now the cottage and its seventeen acres belonged to the whole family, to be enjoyed as a vacation retreat and site for reunions. Noah had never been one for the outdoors other than the hammock and grill in his own backyard and the perfect oval of a cinder track, so he and Jocelyn had never spent time at the ancestral homestead except when the entire clan gathered for significant occasions. Thus the cottage held few memories of the husband and father they missed and mourned so desperately, which made it the perfect place for them to spend the long, lonely summer months.

August waned. They returned to Michigan and a house that seemed smaller and emptier than Jocelyn remembered. Rahma enrolled in sixth grade at Westfield Middle School, but the day before classes, she panicked and begged Jocelyn to send her to another school—any other school, anywhere, she didn't care. Rahma had looked forward to middle school for so long that her meltdown bewildered her overwhelmed mother. It wasn't until later that night that Jocelyn realized that the middle school of Rahma's fond imaginings didn't exist anymore. Of course she didn't want to go to a place that echoed with her father's absence. It was hard enough to walk through the front door of their own house, to sit at the dinner table where his chair was conspicuously empty. Jocelyn didn't want to return to school either.

But return all three of them did. On that first day, Rahma held her mother's hand as they walked from the car and did not let go until they reached her first-period classroom. Friends on the faculty hugged Jocelyn and urged her to let them know if there was anything they could do. For days, students and staff stopped her in the halls to tell her how much they missed Noah, what a good man he had been, what a wonderful teacher. At the first faculty meeting of the semester, the new track coach hesitantly introduced himself, an apology in his eyes as if he feared Jocelyn blamed him for the circumstances that had led to his hiring. She made an effort to smile and be kind to him, because it was obvious how much he needed her to do so.

In mid-September, Noah's name went up in huge letters on the side of the stadium. The rededication ceremony took place during a school assembly on a bright, sunny autumn day that reminded Jocelyn too much of his memorial service. At the conclusion, the wives of the assistant coaches presented Jocelyn and her daughters with a patchwork quilt sewn from emblems cut from track team uniforms and T-shirts from the most significant meets of his coaching career, with sashing and borders in the WMS colors of blue and orange. Each image carried a memory of triumphs and defeats, of student athletes who had demonstrated grace under pressure that belied their years, of the man they admired and whose respect they strove to earn and whose approval they cherished.

It was a beautiful, heartfelt memorial, more tender and precious to her than the renamed stadium. Jocelyn wished she could have created such a tribute to him herself.

One day after school at the end of September, Jocelyn was chatting with the mother of one of Anisa's classmates about an upcoming eighth-grade field trip when the friend's mother said, “I suppose we won't be doing Imagination Quest this year. It's really too bad. The team did so well in the state finals last spring that we all hoped they might place at nationals this time, or maybe even win.”

Jocelyn took a deep, shaky breath. “I hadn't even thought about it.” As the faculty adviser, Noah had always taken on the responsibility of registering the school's team. All Jocelyn had been obliged to do was make sure she kept the family calendar clear for their weekly meetings and charged up the video camera battery before the tournament. “Maybe one of the other parents would be willing to take over.”

The other mother shook her head wryly. “Maybe, but Noah is a hard act to follow. I can't think of many people brave enough to try.”

You're talking to one, Jocelyn almost said as a hot surge of desperate anger rose up within her. Noah had left voids all over the place that she struggled every day to fill—for her daughters, for his students, for herself. But some of the roles he had abandoned she simply could not take on—she could not teach science, she could not coach track, and she could not manage the Imagination Quest team.

Ironically, it was Jocelyn who had first learned about Imagination Quest at a teachers' convention, she who had been intrigued enough to collect pages and pages of information, she who had returned home and eagerly made a case to Noah for organizing a team at their school. Imagination Quest was a national, nonprofit educational organization dedicated to promoting creativity, problem solving, and teamwork beyond the classroom. Teams of five to eight students would work together over the course of several months to choose one of five challenges, solve it, and present their solution at a regional competition. Depending upon the challenge the team selected, the students might be required to build a device that could perform specific tasks within a certain time frame, write and perform a skit, or—most often—a combination of the two. Although each team had a parent or teacher acting as adviser, the work was explicitly required to be the students' own. Parents could teach their children how to hammer a nail and join two boards together, for example, but they could not build any part of any device used in the competition. They could drive the team to the hardware store and pay for supplies within the team's $150 budget, but they could not tell the students what to purchase. They could schedule a meeting with an English teacher to discuss how to write a skit, but the English teacher could not tell them how to write that particular skit, nor could the parents contribute a single scene or line of dialogue.

Noah embraced the idea with as much enthusiasm as Jocelyn had known he would. The very next day, he successfully persuaded the principal to let him form a team, although the cash-strapped PTA could not provide any funding and the students had to hold a car wash and bake sale to raise money for their entrance fee and supplies. In that first year, six students signed up, all seventh-grade boys, and after a few weeks of icebreakers and team-building exercises, they chose a challenge titled Construction Junction. They were required to design and build two identical structures capable of holding up to twenty golf balls, as well as some sort of transportation system for transferring the golf balls one at a time from one of the structures, around a course of traffic cones arranged at random by the judges, and into the other structure ten feet away. They also had to incorporate their creations into an original skit that addressed a real-world transportation problem. The boys attached a small aquarium net to a remote-controlled toy car and made up a story about transporting food and water to victims of Hurricane Katrina through a hazardous landscape of broken levees and washed-out roads. At the tournament, they managed to transport only four of the twenty golf balls and came in second to last. They were disappointed, but Noah insisted that it was a fine showing for their first venture. He was proud of them and declared that they should be proud of themselves.

The following year, all but one of the now eighth-grade boys signed up again, a seventh-grade girl joined the team, and they finished tenth out of fourteen in a challenge involving solar energy. A year later, they filled the roster with eight boys and girls from all three middle school grades and took third place in a challenge that required them to spend the preparation months studying the history, culture, and mythical creatures of six different civilizations; at the tournament, they were required to perform an improv skit about one of the civilizations that was drawn from a hat as well as an “unexpected problem” assigned by the judges ten minutes before their performance. That was the first time the WMS team made it to the state finals, where they were one of the few teams comprised almost entirely of minorities. They finished third from last, but Noah refused to let his heartbroken students wallow in disappointment. He praised their achievements and reminded them that their first trip to the state competition had been a valuable learning experience. “Someday,” he promised, “the WMS Wildcats are going to win state and go on to nationals. And someday, we're going to win nationals. Maybe none of us here today will be on that team, but we're breaking ground for those who come after us. They're going to benefit from what we learn, from the traditions we establish, and on the day they bring that trophy home to our school, we can all say we did our part.”

But that would never happen without Noah to lead them. The team would stall, and Jocelyn couldn't imagine anyone starting it back up again once the momentum Noah had worked so hard to sustain ran down. And Imagination Quest truly had been a marvelous learning experience, giving the students invaluable practice brainstorming and working with a team and solving problems. In an era when teachers were pressured to teach to a standardized test, Imagination Quest celebrated creativity and innovation. Jocelyn's only criticism was that due to the lack of parent volunteers to lead teams, it offered those lessons to far too few of their bright, deserving pupils.

And if no one took over Noah's team, even fewer WMS students would benefit from the program. Anisa had learned so much from her two years in Imagination Quest, but Rahma—Rahma would never have the opportunity at all.

She wouldn't, unless someone took over the team. And as the days passed, it looked more and more like that someone would be Jocelyn.

First she asked her daughters if they even wanted to participate in Imagination Quest that year. If they didn't, she would not lead the team, because she couldn't take on anything that would oblige her to spend more time away from them. As much as Anisa had enjoyed her previous two years in the program, and as much as Rahma had looked forward to joining the team as soon as she was old enough, it was possible that Imagination Quest, like so many other things they had once reveled in, would have become unbearable without their father. To her surprise and relief, when she broached the subject, the girls shrieked with delight and flung their arms around her, jumping up and down in their eagerness. “Thank you, Mama,” Rahma said. “I thought we couldn't, without Daddy.”

Jocelyn's throat constricted with grief when she thought of the great many things they would have no choice but to do without him in the years to come. “We can do anything we put our minds to,” she reminded them firmly. “Sometimes it all comes down to deciding to begin.”

Tears filled Jocelyn's eyes and she sensed, somehow, that they were moving forward, that they were at last choosing to brave a future without the man they all adored so much. They had no choice. They had to move on. The only way to do it, the only right way, the only way that would have made him proud, was with courage.

Three members of the previous year's team had graduated in June, but when Jocelyn contacted the parents of the remaining members, their outpouring of enthusiasm and support overwhelmed her. Rahma and two other sixth graders filled the empty places on the roster, and after taking a deep breath and murmuring a prayer, Jocelyn officially registered the team and scheduled the first meeting.