Stranger Will (21 page)

“Twenty-Three,” he says, slow, bubbling through a smile. “Monday.”

One week. Three days.

These are the winding moments of his life, out here with a stranger, and all William can do is cry. “Good,” William says.

Encouragement over repression, over his own desire to stop the child, to tear the paper and bury it, is hard because William has never seen Eugene more excited; his first paragraph, containing questions over the logistics of his own burial. But the both of them exist according to the shoulds and should-nots of a single person.

“He is…”

Mrs. Rose appears at the far end of the playground. Her posture heated, her march firm.

“…a di-fi-cult…” Slow. Syllable by syllable. “…chi-ld to care for…”

Her features materialize. Angry cheek bones. Angry lips. Angry eyes.

“…and this…” She is a hunter.

“…is the best way…” A collector.

“…for all of us.”

She is less than ten feet behind him as Eugene smiles the biggest smile his face can hold. “I am going to read perfect one day,” he says. “Mrs. Rose will give me a gold star.”

William cracks. The tears erode trenches into his cheeks. “Good,” he says.

Mrs. Rose slides up behind Eugene and opens her arms so wide it seems more a gesture of accumulation than of reception. With her teeth sheathed and bright she kneels to Eugene’s height and says, “a gold star for sure.”

He runs into her arms, slams his head onto her shoulder and squeezes. He situates the paper behind her back and says something that sounds like “thank you” muffled by the principal’s knitted sweater, embroidered with images of crayons and lunch boxes.

“Now what’s this paper you are reading?” she says and pulls him away.

“My mom’s. She has a bird, but I gave him to William.”

She looks to William with a subtle confusion. His gut drops. He knows how the glare is supposed to make him feel. She turns back to Eugene. “You know you are not supposed to talk to strangers.”

“But William—” and before he can free another word Mrs. Rose points to the school. “Go,” she says.

“He’s not—”

“Go inside,” she says, and he does.

Mrs. Rose, William, they watch as the child runs, as he kicks water out of puddles, skipping every few steps. The teacher leans close to her stranger. “Three words,” she says and drops her ginning face into a shallow sway. “That’s all it took.”

What he sees is pride etched into her years, on her face and her eyes, the weight of ambition and a pulse throbbing with drive. Her hair still holds strong under the misty gray sky. Her clothes bead dew like sweat. Her shoes remain dry, and William knows it’s only because she wants them that way.

When Eugene has slowed to a walk, she turns. “Most kids listen at one word,” she says. “But Eugene, he,” and she bites her bottom lip, “well you know him.”

“He’s a good kid,” William says.

“Sure,” she says and starts walking, “for someone interested in
good
.” William follows. “You look good. The tie works.”

He looks down at the gray noose. Through his wet eyes the asphalt-colored tie looks melted into the shirt leaving a hole, something he can look right through to see their mismatched footsteps paired for long breaths back.

“Parents like ties,” she says. “It conveys structure.”

Once Eugene gets to just three eager steps from the school’s entrance Mrs. Rose yells, “stop,” and immediately the child obeys.

“One word that time,” she says.

Eugene comes running back, laughing at the sudden change of direction. The paper, still tight in his hands, waves white flag submissive in the cold.

They hug again.

The three walk together to the school building, each leaning on the others. Three bodies walking as one unstable structure.

Chapter Twenty-Three

She opens the doors into the school. No sound but the echo of the group’s six feet through the hallway. The space traps humidity like a body cavity, and stinks of cleaning supplies, bleach or ammonia—both would not surprise—so when the secretary speaks her concern William blames his tears on their sting.

“You’ll get used to it,” she says, perky, bouncing, an empty coffee pot warming at the corner of her desk.

“Parent teacher conference,” Mrs. Rose tells the woman and accepts a sticker with ‘guest’ written on it below the Harold Straton Elementary logo—a horse it seems—graphically rendered with a wooden veneer, but through the tears, it could be anything. She presses the sticker to his chest, peeling it off and re-sticking until satisfied with the results. “It’s not a complete lie,” Mrs. Rose says softly, “considering how we got to know one another.”

“It looks good,” Eugene says and butchers the pronunciation of William’s new title while Mrs. Rose continues escorting them down these hallways with too much light.

Vindicated, maybe, William felt standing above the muddy grave of his child. Now, Eugene pronounces a hard “G” with a softer “J” and when Mrs. Rose whispers to claim it as evidence of her noble endeavor William wants nothing more than to correct the child. Not for the sake of salvation but to prove that salvation doesn’t exist as defined by Mrs. Rose.

Eugene tries the “U” and “E” as separate sounds; the confusion is more genuine than any structure.

They arrive at a third-grade classroom, a large room at the end of a moist hallway. A plaque on the wall labels the room 3-B. William makes note of the absent Braille at which Mrs. Rose laughs like his comment was an intentional joke. “Blind,” she says. “We’ve dealt with worse I suppose.”

The classroom is silent. Children fill the room in a strict grid of desks stained the color of dirt. Eugene runs to a set of two outlying desks at the back of the room, separate from the community, pushed against a back wall, veiled by a glare. One desk dominates the others, and as William finds out—being squeezed from the back against the doorjamb—is necessarily so in order to accommodate Shelia.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Is everything alright?” Not a genuine muscle to the frown. She wipes the tears from William’s cheek with her thumb scratching him with her fingernail. “Sorry.”

His skin bleeds, though he takes no offense; by this time her bird is roughage for stray dogs.

Eugene perks at his desk when she walks. Mrs. Rose leads William away, to a teacher ’s desk at the front of the room—“I’m substituting today,” she tells the boy—and pulls a student chair close, motioning for him to sit. He bites his knees to fit.

“The Turners,” Mrs. Rose says and throws a short stack of paper to what’s left of William’s lap. “Janice and Anthony.”

Birthdates, eye and hair color, an address, hobbies, grocery lists, pet names, favorite colors, psychological evaluations including fears, fear of spiders, fear of confined spaces, fear of dirt—and this one is circled heavily—all in Mrs. Rose’s hand.

“Not a particularly happy couple,” she says. “But smart.” Page two is collaged in photographs. Mug shots, amateur shots of a house and the surrounding landscape, random roads, each with a caption typed too small for his distant eyes to read.

“They have a problem, William,” and she drinks coffee from a ‘World’s Greatest Teacher ’ mug. “And we are going to fix it.”

Page three is a sonogram, barely discernible as a child. William stares through it like a Rorschach test.

“It’s rare,” she says “to see one of those. The parents don’t usually care enough to get one, but every now and then, even this late in the game, they haven’t yet made up their minds.” She takes the photograph and places it in front of her on the desk.

“This one, though. Shouldn’t have wasted the paper.”

William begins to speak, but Mrs. Rose hushes him with a finger. A small boy has approached her desk holding a sheet of paper. The boy asks questions, points to empty blanks, makes guesses, and Mrs. Rose responds with encouraging words until he walks away. “That’s a good kid,” she says. “That one is on his way.”

“Why Eugene?” The child perks at his name and turns to the front of the classroom. William drops to a whisper. “Why kill Eugene?” He waves at the boy, who grins with teeth so crooked they alter the shape of his face.

“You know him,” she says. “I’ve seen you two together. He can play, run, form coherent sentences on good days, but any more than that and he’s full. You know this, William.”

He is a good kid
, William wants to say, but he knows she puts no stock into just
good
.

“He’s faulty,” she says. “I’ve been doing what I do for a long time. I’ve seen the progress, and I’ve see the stalemates.”

“He’s a grown child.” William’s voice carries through the room. Children turn, stare, until Mrs. Rose waves them back around.

“And it pains to see him still slipping through.”

“But he is alive.” The sun heats the room, the air swelling. “Doesn’t that mean that he is supposed to be here?” Mrs. Rose’s logic. Now William’s logic.

“The system is faulty,” she says. “We are human and still evolving. It’s easier when they are younger, and I do wish the mother would have made this decision eight years ago, but she didn’t. It took a lot of convincing, a lot of messages. No help from you.”

The Fury Man. The Family Secrets. The Karma Debates. Neighborhoods of messages, now burned, once the interrupted desires to kill.

“What about miscarriages?” William asks. “What about natural selection?”

“If only,” she says. “Believe me, the numbers are on our side. More than anyone realizes. Most miscarriages go undetected because the thing is flushed out before a woman even knows she’s pregnant. But some bad ones are bound to get by.”

“
Flushed
,” he says.

Mrs. Rose smirks. “Even nature could use a boost.”

Another child approaches the desk, a large girl with brown hair and a combed part slicing her head from neck to brow. She hands a piece of paper to Mrs. Rose and points with her pencil. Their interaction lacks the affection of a natural student/teacher relationship. They part with another smile and a mechanical pat to the back.

“Another good one.” Mrs. Rose watches the child walk away. William squints into the sunlight pouring in through the windows. He sits in on a life before life. These children incubate, warming, growing, until at their prime and out they go to live a life according to one person’s reality. Shelia bites at her thumb, spitting what’s ripped into the air, as Eugene asks questions, begs an audience to hear him read, and erases mistakes from paper worn thin by incorrect guesses. Shelia watches her discarded dead skin and fingernails fall into the hair of children trained to ignore the hits. “I won’t do it,” William says, struggling to free himself from his tiny desk.

Mrs. Rose shakes her head. “I wouldn’t make you. I’ll get Mike or somebody. A veteran. He would love to deal with Eugene.”

“No,” he says. “Today. This thing with the tie, the parents.” She changes. Her eyes squeeze to slits. “Miss Shelia,” she

says, and Shelia with her always-confident stride comes to the teacher ’s side and awaits instructions. “Take over for a moment.” Shelia slides into Mrs. Rose’s desk. She busies herself folding paper and straightening paperclips.

In the hallway, Mrs. Rose corrects the off-center knot in William’s tie. She brushes dirt from his shoulder, dirt he imagines was never there to begin with, and she doesn’t stop. She points out wrinkles she says need to be ironed. She tightens his belt. “The Turner ’s kid won’t stay in utero forever,” she says moving to his hair. “It’s got to come out sometime.”

“Let it come,” he says.

“They don’t want it. A pinnacle cannot exist with weak will anywhere. You know this better than most people do. How happy would you have been knowing that your child was only half-wanted? Half-loved? Just plain half. It’s completion we want, William. A single child will one day represent the whole. And the whole, representative of a single child.”

“I won’t do it.”

She pulls him into a further corner in the hallway, a small womb, a cove occupied by a water fountain and various flyers advertising bake sales and sporting events, PTA meetings adjacent an itemized list of hallway etiquette. “I don’t want to give you an ultimatum, William. But I will. You killed your child. Through the eyes to the law, that’s murder. They are ignorant eyes, yes, but they are the eyes that govern.”

The cove tightens, William can’t breathe. This place is two heartbeats from crushing him and all he can do is hope to outlast the pressure.

“This is bigger than you or me,” she says. “This is bigger than this school, bigger than the strangers, bigger than whatever it is that you and Eugene have. This is bigger than ego. These are two people, parents, who want what’s for the world via what’s best for a child. We can give them that.”

“By tricking them?”

“Trick isn’t the right word. We won’t be clever about it. We are not politicians. We give them an option, and should they like what we say they take it. Simple.”

William grows numb.

“They are expecting us tonight. They need our advice,” she says, “our confidence. All they have left is adoption.” “But there is no adoption,” William says.

“Good.” She gives William’s dress a final brush. “Now try not to move around too much today. Don’t mess up your presentation.”

William is alone, watching Mrs. Rose walk back into the tight room. “Wait,” he yells and reaches into his pressed pocket. “I want to know what this is.” He pulls out a note, formed to the curve of his heated pocket, the pink thank-you note he’s carried for days.

She brings the note close. She glances over the words, stares through the sentiment and destroys its ironed press with a closing fist. “Yeah, I get those sometimes,” and she drops it to the bottom of an empty wastebasket.

“So much greater than ego,” he says under reborn breath as Mrs. Rose returns to 3-B. The balled message lays lonely at the bottom of the basket. He reaches down, feeling the strain of a back burdened by days of misdirection and opens the note. He presses it flat against the heat of his thigh and returns it to his pocket.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The lawn suffers under the sun. The house holds strong against the heat, paint bubbling in places and buckling in others, but the walls remain firm. William imagines this house demolished in ten years because it offends the neighbors.