The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (13 page)

LYDIA FITZPATRICK

FROM
One Story

I
N THE GYM
, the children are stretching in rows. Their arms are over their heads, their right elbows cupped in left palms. Class is almost over, and this is the wind-down—that is what the gym teacher calls it—though the children move constantly, flexing their toes inside their sneakers, shifting their feet, canting their hips, biting their lips, because they are young, and their bodies are still new to them, a constant experiment. The gym teacher counts softly,
one, two, three, four,
and before
five
there is a sound that reminds a boy in the back row of the sound a bat makes when it hits a baseball perfectly. In the front row, a girl thinks it is the sound of lightning, not lightning in real life, because it is sunny out and because she can't remember ever hearing real lightning, but like lightning on TV, when the storm comes all at once. Next to her, her best friend thinks it is a sound like when her mother drives her into the city and the car first enters the tunnel, only this sound is sharper than that one and stays within its lines, and she is not inside it. One boy recognizes the sound. He has been to the range with his father and brother, and he has worn headphones and stood a safe distance and watched the sound jerk his father's arm and push his brother off-balance. This boy is the first to let his elbow drop.

The gym teacher is thinking
five,
and then he knows. He looks to the door that leads to outside, to the ESL trailers, to the walkway that connects the elementary school to its middle school, because that is where the shot has come from, and there is this throb of hope for the girl who teaches ESL, who has just moved here and still bakes brownies for the teachers' lounge. The gym teacher is calm, and in his wind-down voice he tells the children to be quiet, completely quiet, and to run into the boys' locker room. The gym teacher is old, has been at this school for decades, and with each passing year the children like him more and listen to him less, but they know to be afraid from the carefulness in his voice—they are not talked to carefully, except when they ask questions about death and divorce—and at first their fear is only for the tone of his voice, but then they remember the sound. They run, and their sneakers are the sort that light up with each footfall and their shoelaces whip against polished wood, and the gym teacher is not worried that they will trip but that they will stop—because they are that age when rules are God and shoelaces must be tied—but they don't stop, and they don't trip. There are eighteen of them. They are as fast and graceful as he has ever seen them.

When they reach the locker room, one boy grabs the gym teacher's sleeve. It is September, and he has not yet memorized their names, but he knows that the boy's brother was a student of his years ago and that the boy's father is back from the war. The boy whispers, “Gun.” He is the one who recognized the sound and he has worried, as he sprinted across the basketball court, that the gym teacher might not know. The gym teacher nods, puts a finger to his lips. He is thinking means of egress. He is thinking police, hide, gun. He is thinking of his cell phone, which was a present from his son last Christmas, a tongue-in-cheek present, a comment on character, and it is in the pocket of his windbreaker on the back of the ladder chair in his kitchen at home.

The children have gathered around him when usually they scatter, and he can see in their eyes that they want to be picked up and held. One girl has forgotten the sound. She smiles and raises her hand. She has a question. She wants to know whether they should change out of their uniforms, but before she can ask, the gym teacher points to his office, which is in the middle of the locker room, and he tells them to lie on the floor behind his desk and to be quiet, and the carefulness drops from his voice—he can't help it, there are more shots, inside the school now, and a yell cut short.

As the children file into his office, the gym teacher turns out the lights in the locker room and looks out into the lighted gym. The floor is perfectly bare, perfectly clean, glowing like the surface of a planet seen from afar. The cones and Frisbees and hula hoops are back in their bins, and there is nothing to show that a class meets this period. Through the windows of the double doors he sees pale yellow wall tiles (they are the color of butter, of winter sun, but the tiles are more a constant in his world than butter or pale suns, and so when he sees those things he thinks that they are the color of the school). The boy whose father is just back from the war, the one who recognized the sound, watches the gym teacher look to the doors, and he wishes that the gym teacher were his father, because the gym teacher is old and afraid, and his father has only been afraid twice and both times were at the war, never at home, because here, he says, is paradise compared to there. This boy is the last into the office, and as he lies down next to the girl who thought of lightning, he goes on wishing for his father in the fervent way that children wish for things because they think those things are almost in their grasp.

On the teacher's desk is the blue parachute that the children play with on Fridays. On Fridays, they grip the silk and make it ripple and buck, they run underneath it and around it, but one of its seams is split, and the gym teacher meant to take it home to his wife, who would stitch it up as she has dozens of times before. Behind his desk, the children are lying in two neat rows, and he has seen children lie this way before, on the news, in other countries, but not these children, his children, and he almost tells them to get up, that it is tempting fate to lie this way, but there are more shots, closer, in the cul-de-sac of classrooms across from the gym, and the gym teacher grabs the parachute and spreads it over them, and they are so small that it covers all eighteen of them easily, and at the thought of them—of how many and how small—his chest seizes, and he thinks that he will be the one to make a noise, but then he hears the clang of the gym doors opening and the long sigh of them swinging shut and his fear becomes the biggest thing he's ever felt. It is so much bigger than him that for a second it eclipses him entirely.

The gym teacher cannot think, and then, just as suddenly, he can. He turns out the lights in his office and the parachute is not quite as dark as the shadows around it—the silk has a gleam—but it is the best he can do. He crouches under his desk. He is between the children and the door, and he whispers to them one more time, “Do not make a sound. Do not move.” Under the parachute, a girl pees without thinking of holding it. She feels it hot and soaking the seat of her gym shorts, and the parachute is light on her face. On Fridays this is the best feeling, and she thinks of that, of how she is getting to feel it today even though it is not a Friday. There are footsteps moving across the gym. A boy thinks, Dad. A girl thinks, Mom, Mom, Mom. One boy thinks it is the principal, because the principal is the only one who walks through the halls when they're empty. One girl begins to count silently. She panics sometimes—when she sees the road disappearing too fast under the car's tires; when the train cuts through their town, its whistle blaring; when she is in the swing at the park and finds herself too high—and her parents tell her to count, to breathe, to count and breathe, and they count with her, lead her from one number to the next.

The footsteps are slow. The gym teacher knows that this means it is the man with the gun and it means something about him too. The gym teacher is curled around his own knees. He has never made himself so small. Behind him, the parachute moves with each of their breaths.

There is a new noise. A clang of metal on metal. The boy who recognized the shot does not know what this sound is, and he realizes now that there was comfort in knowing. He does not love Fridays and the parachute. He does not love anything that hems him in, and his mother tells him that even as a baby he did not like to be held. He edges out from under the parachute. He is between the wall and the girl who thought of lightning, and it is dark, but he can see the gym teacher's coat rack branching over him and he can see the windows that line the walls of the office and look out into the locker room. Deep in the dark there is a red haze from the exit sign over the door that leads to outside, to the ESL trailers, and to the walkway to the middle school where his brother is, and the boy could run that walkway in twenty-two seconds—he has timed himself on a watch that is both waterproof and a calculator—but his brother does not like him to come to the middle school. Instead his brother meets the boy on the hill above the soccer field, where there is a tree with peeling bark and a path that leads through the woods to their house.

The clanging noise shakes in the air and gives way to the footsteps. The girl counts thirty, thirty-one. The man with the gun is close, the gym teacher thinks, by the showers, whose dripping is the metronome of his days. The showers are separated from the office by three banks of lockers, and as he thinks of the lockers, he realizes that that was the clanging sound, metal on metal—the butt of the gun or the muzzle. The children's things are inside the lockers and strewn around them, their backpacks and jackets and lunch bags and dioramas—they are that age, when teachers tell them to pick their favorite place in the world and fit it in a shoebox and they can—and the man with the gun will see these things, and he will know that they are here. The gym teacher shifts into a squat and one of his ankles cracks. He doesn't know what he'll do when the door opens, but he keeps his eye on the dark square of the window next to the door. The footsteps are closer and closer and closer and far away there are screams, and a girl—the youngest in the class—has heard these screams before, at the hospital, when she was having an arm set and down the hall someone else was having something worse. Next to her, a boy wishes for something to hold on to. His palms burn with the need, and he finds the girl's hand next to his and grabs it, and she thinks this is like the hospital too, where everyone was holding hands.

He is here. There is a change in the darkness in the window that the gym teacher feels more than sees (just as he feels his wife's absence some nights, when she is sleepless and moves through the house below him), and then the change is clearer: he can see the man's glasses catch the red light of the exit sign. He can see the nose of the gun moving toward the window. There is a clink, a knife on a plate. Fifty-six, the girl counts, and the gym teacher knows the glass will splinter, he knows how this ends, but behind him the boy crouched under the coat rack sees something different: a half foot down the gun's barrel, where the shoulder strap attaches, there is a dangling medal, a slim silver oval barely bigger than a thumbnail, but big enough for the boy to recognize it. It is a saint medal, the saint whose job it is to protect soldiers, and the boy knows the saint's name because it is the same as his own, and he knows the medal because his mother gave it to his father years ago, before you were born, she tells him, before your brother was born, when your father left for the first time.

The gun drops from the window, and the boy does not hesitate. He is up. He opens the door and slips through it, his body filled with the certainty of it, with a wish fulfilled, his father, and as he turns the gun is ready for him. It is inches from him. Dad, the boy thinks, even as he realizes that the man is not tall enough to be his father, is not tall enough to be a father at all. In life, the boy has been fearless—he trusts the dark, trusts the slimmest branch, trusts that he alone can fly—but he looks at the gun and his mind goes cold and cavernous.

“Where's your class?” the man says, his voice muffled by a ski mask.

The boy hesitates for a moment—he does not think of protecting his class, of protecting the girl who is his favorite, who is under the parachute, trying to remember the prayer that her grandmother mumbles in Polish each night—for a moment he hesitates because he cannot speak. Then that moment is over, and he is still alive, and he says, “Outside.”

“Outside,” the gym teacher hears, and he thinks that this might save them, but the silence grows long and he does not know what it means. He is listening for sirens, wishing for sirens in the fervent way that children wish, as though his chest is opening to dispatch some part of him that will find the sirens and usher them here. Behind him, the children know that for the first time they are hiding without wanting to be found.

The boy raises his eyes and looks up the long line of the gun to the medal. It
is
his father's gun. The boy can see it here, and he can see it locked in the case in the hall between the door to his room and the door to his brother's room, where it glows in the way things precious and forbidden glow—the grandfather clock with the damp brass gears and the ostrich egg with foreign letters inked on its curves and the tiny crystal bottle on his mother's dresser—and the constellation of these things is as sacred and eternal as anything up in the sky, and the boy cannot believe that the gun is here and that its case is empty.

“Let's go,” the man says, and his voice is muffled, but there is something strained in it that the boy recognizes. The boy looks up, past the medal, to the mask, which is a ski hat with holes cut for the mouth and nose and eyes, and over the eyeholes are glasses that could be anyone's, except that they are his brother's. They are across the table from him every morning, slanted toward a book whose pages are dusted with the crumbs of the toast his mother makes. They were across the table from him this morning.

The boy reaches out and puts a finger to the nose of the gun, and it is warm. He has never touched the gun before, and his brother yanks it away, and the medal jingles, this tiny silver noise, and his brother grabs his hand.

Under the desk, the gym teacher listens to them walk away and he begins to cry. He has always thought that you could
know,
that right and wrong were like bones beneath the skin—hidden but there, waiting to be laid bare—and his hands are empty and he cannot weigh the one against the seventeen. The girl who is counting hits a hundred and starts over again at one, and the boy's brother pulls him toward the emergency exit, and the boy has dreamed of this, in certain stretches of homeroom, when he is filling a sheet with cursive
L
's, he has dreamed of his brother taking him out of class and letting him sit on the back of his bike as they coast down the hill into the town to the store with the miniature models of helicopters and tanks and dragons that are all the color of flour, waiting to be painted with brushes whose bristles are thin as eyelashes, but even as he has dreamed this, he has known it will not happen because his brother prefers to be alone, likes to have space, though their mother says that as a baby his brother was the one who liked to be held.