Refund (25 page)

“I want it!” screamed the girl.

“Get off her!” Diane ordered the boy. She grabbed his thin shoulders and tried to shake him off, but the boy would not move. “Now!”

Diane imagined how Woody Wilson saw them, the disheveled middle-aged woman in the putrid kitchen, wrestling with the enraged son who was stronger than she was.
Legislate against this
, she thought. The girl opened her mouth to bite the boy's hand.

Woody grasped the boy's hands. “Let go of your sister,” said Woody quietly.

“She stole it!” screamed the boy.

Woody held a hand out, as though to calm the air. “Now wait, everybody,” he said. “Wait.” He reached into his pocket to pull out a Woody Wilson sticker. “I'll trade you.” He handed the girl his sticker:
Vote for me
. The girl grabbed it. She was already possessed of a startling rage, as though she foresaw the difficulties her life would bring her. When the girl stared at someone, as she did at her brother, Diane saw how she would someday regard a lover, the assumption that the other would feed some endless hunger inside of her. She gazed at Diane with the same expression, and Diane whispered to her, ashamed before its vastness.

Woody pressed the boy's sticker back into his outstretched hand. The boy turned away from him and hunched over his sticker. It had the green, smiling face of Shrek on it.

“Where'd you get this?” Woody asked the boy.

“At school. They called my name in the cafeteria,” the boy said. “I heard my name. They said it like this: Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen. They chose me. They said I could go home. The lady gave me this when I walked out. She said hold this and go right to the car. I held it the whole way.”

Diane remembered this from the day before, the first time she had picked up her son by car at school. The car riders waited for their parents in the cafeteria, while the parents, in cars at the traffic circle, told their names to the pickup coordinators, who called their names on the walkie-talkie. “Tommy Bernstein,” Diane had said to the coordinator. She imagined her son's name floating over the loudspeaker in the cafeteria, where the children were sitting on long steel benches. She pictured all the children, Tommy and Raisha and Juan and Christopher and Sandra and the others, hunched over
the tables, waiting to be summoned back to their lives. How many times in their lives would they sit like this, waiting to be called—for work, for love, for good fortune or bad, for luck or despair? What joys or sorrows would each of them be chosen for? She wished she could see how her son hurried down the dingy, dim brown public school corridors, how he walked to the doors that burst open to the afternoon light.

She was relieved when she saw him coming to her car; it was as if he had just been born. “What happened?” she asked. He had told her the same thing: “They said my name like this”—her son cupped his hands together and spoke into them—“Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen.” He said these words with awe, as though they had been spoken by the voice of God. She watched his face in the rearview mirror, blank but suffused with a new brightness, and she wanted to touch his beautiful young face and feel what hope was in it, but she simply drove on.

Now Woody leaned toward the boy. “Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen. You did a good job,” he said.

The boy nodded at Woody's correct pronunciation. “Yes,” he said.

“Your parents will be proud,” Woody continued.

“My father calls in the morning,” Tommy said. “I hear him, but I don't see his face.”

“He must miss you,” said Woody.

Stop
, she thought.
Don't pity him
. Woody rolled up his shirtsleeves. He bent so he was looking into the boy's face. “Tommy,” said Woody. “I know how you feel. When I was a boy, I woke up, and the house was quiet. No one called me. Tommy, I didn't have a mother. My father was at work long before I got up.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “I dressed and got myself to the bus stop. I rode the school bus. I waited for it to pick me up. Sometimes I said my name, too.
Woody Wilson
. I said it over
and over.
WoodyWilson. WoodyWilson
. I said it so many times it sounded like the name of some other person.”

His voice had become quieter as he spoke to Tommy. The boy gazed at him, strangely lulled. She felt the little girl grab her leg, and Diane touched her hair. How had her life come to this, hoarding minutes of kindness doled to them by strangers who knocked on her door? She wondered if this would be the future texture of their lives, this hoarding, and she wished Woody Wilson would leave but also appreciated the fact that someone was with them in the room. She looked away from his pale, thin hair, his shirt rolled halfway up his solid, pink arms. She was afraid that her son would ask him to stay.

But the boy suddenly turned his back to Woody, squatting over his stickers with a fierce expression. “Tommy?” Woody asked. “Are you all right?”

“I don't care,” the boy said sharply. “Guess what? I don't care.”

She did not know what would comfort him; she barely knew what would comfort herself.

“Well,” said Woody. “Hey.” His voice broke a little, and he laughed, a hearty, rehearsed laugh. “Well, you never know what will work with kids, what will help them. Never hurts to try, right, Diane? Got to keep trying?”

He wanted to be reassured, and so did she, and for what? They were soft, graying, halfway to their deaths. They both knew that each person's love for another resided within oneself, miraculous and blind and strange; they both knew that everyone would die alone.

“Okay,” she said carefully, and shrugged.

“Thank you,” he said.

The tinny sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner” burst into the room. It was Woody Wilson's cell phone. Woody's face assumed a stern expression as he held it to his ear. “Yes. Still on Greenfield. Yep.” He turned it off. “Well,” he said. “Time to go.”

He picked up his briefcase. “Thank you for your hospitality, Diane,” he said brightly. The politician's voice burst out of him; he seemed almost surprised to hear it. He smiled as he had on the bill-board, holding out his hand. “Goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye,” she said, shaking his hand, the firm, remote grip of a stranger. His palm was soft and startled her; she let go and stepped away.

He gripped the envelope marked
CONTRIBUTIONS
and smiled shyly. “I suppose you wouldn't care to contribute to my cause?” he said.

“I don't think I can,” she said.

He nodded, as though he had expected this. He stood on her porch and slipped his envelope under his arm. The bump on his head was dark and monstrous.

“What should I tell people?” he asked. “How did this happen?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Tell them you tripped.”

“Yes,” he said, brightening, delighted by the idea of simplicity. “I just tripped.”

Silence bore down on them; there was nothing more to say. Woody Wilson hurried up the sidewalk to the next house. His lips were moving; she believed that he was murmuring his name. Stepping out into the pink air, she looked at the names of all the candidates stuck in the green lawns. They sat, arranged in rows under the sky. Woody Wilson reached the next house. He rubbed his palms against his jacket, took a flyer from his briefcase, and, slowly, he lifted his hand to knock on the door.

The Sea Turtle Hospital

T
he lockdown at Arthur Elementary was the second at the school this week. It began while we were doing our class presentation: the Amazon Council of Beings. The secretary's flat voice announced it just as Keisha Jones was introducing herself as a harpy eagle. The Council of Beings capped off the kindergarten's Amazon rainforest unit and involved twenty-two five-year-olds sitting in a circle wearing paper-plate masks they had made of their assigned endangered animals, with Mrs. Reeves, the senior teacher, on a bongo drum. Keisha Jones announced she was a harpy eagle, and we all said, in unison, “You are one of us!” and Keisha was describing what foods she ate and before we could tell her, also in unison, “We hear your needs,” and watch Mrs. Reeves majestically bang the bongo, the secretary said, statically, over the intercom, “Lockdown. School is currently in lockdown.” The golden lion, tamarin, manatee, and jaguar were mad because they hadn't announced yet what they were; Mrs. Reeves told me to lock the door and draw the blinds while she got the safer job of herding the
kids into the reading nook. This pissed me off because she clearly didn't mind if I took a bullet before she did. It was as though she voiced what I was thinking: the assistant should go first.

The school shut down, locking windows and doors, supposedly allowing no one in or out, when there were reports of violence in the neighborhood. The first lockdown of the week happened after a tenth grader at the nearby junior high stood up during algebra class, brought out a hammer, and started whacking his classmates. A month ago, the owner of a convenience store two blocks away had been killed during a regular transaction, and I passed the memorial of supermarket torches of roses and carnations set out by the mart every morning. I had seen the man the day before, a bald figure with a shiny, toffee face, who had moved here from Beirut. He had been sweeping the sidewalk then, and I remember brushing against his arm as I passed him, the way his upper arm was soft like a balloon. I read about his family in the newspaper for a couple days, the fund to send his award-winning clarinetist daughter to summer camp, and then I had to stop reading. I put a rose wrapped in a plastic paper on the memorial site. The next day, I walked down a different block.

I didn't know what was going on today. I had worked here for a year and a half, and the lockdown protocol still messed me up, the click of the lock, the brisk, absurd drawing of the blinds, as though the thin plastic provided any protection from anything. I was not in a mood to be locked anywhere now, not since my boyfriend Hal left about four months ago. The kindergartners were supposed to go into lockdown position, sitting, crouched, knees to chest, in their uniforms, the blue pants and crisp white collared shirts. I was secretly glad that they ignored this. The girls clustered to make their own hair salon. The children didn't want to stop introducing themselves; the Bengal tiger, orangutan, and poison dart frog wanted their turns even if, or perhaps especially if, a gunman burst
into the room. Tyree rose slightly out of the group and announced, “I am a tapir,” and we all chimed, “You are one of us!”

Who was going insane this time? Was it a husband and wife? Was it a fed-up parent? Was it someone so lonely her body felt like it might split? Was it someone who had been stomped on so many times he had forgotten how to feel anything good? I stepped away from the nook and lifted one of the flimsy plastic blinds, peering at the empty playground; it was blanched, white from the sun, the metal slides starry with heat.

The school had been generally tense the last week, too, as the third, fourth, and fifth graders got ready for the End of Grade Tests, or EOGs. The flyers in the hallways started twenty days ago.
Twenty days to the EOGS!
Then
Nineteen days
, and so forth. It had the subtlety of a hurricane watch. Did they really think any of us would forget? The administration wanted Arthur to again be a “School of Distinction,” getting more government money if their test scores kept going up, and teachers gave the students the practice tests every day for three weeks; some demented fifth-grade parents kept showing up at school with the intent expressions of hunters. They were in search of scores. They followed them with the discrimination of statisticians, knowing the slight advantages a 95 gave over a 94; they stared at them as though they could predict the future of the world. Miss Eileen Hill, the guidance counselor and expert in student evaluations, was the one the parents sought out this time of year; she believed in numbers, percentiles, which all parents—suburban, inner-city, white, black—ate up. A score in the top 5 percent got you into Gifted. A score in the top 10 percent got you into an Honors track in sixth grade. The parents were greedy for every point, every question, every tiny glimmer of hope.

My cell phone buzzed. Tyree's mother texted me twenty minutes into the lockdown.
R U OK?
I hoped, in a sanguine moment,
that she was asking about me. That made her one of the good parents. The good parents were the ones who complimented my blouse, who touched my shoulder and asked, how are you? We were all there “for the children,” black, white, and brown, poor and rich, the ones who lived in the district and the ones who clamored for the waiting list. We were the public magnet school with the best test scores in the city—top five in the state. Mostly the parents wanted compliments about their children; no, the correct word was
craved
. They craved reassurance that their kids wouldn't end up in the same sorry messes they were in, and this was true across the board, upper-middle class to lower.

“Who is it?” Peter Olsen whispered.

“I don't know,” whispered Savannah.

“Do you think he has a hammer?” whispered Peter.

There was the sound of walking in the hallway, a skittering kind of walk, someone not running but falling across the hall. Mrs. Reeves looked up. She walked to the nook and gripped the sides of one of the bookshelves.

“Give me a hand,” she said.