River Angel (6 page)

The first bell sounded. She picked up her coffee cup, walked down the hall to her classroom. Seniority had earned her a permanent room in Main. Of course, she felt sorry for the younger teachers, who had to pick their way out to the trailers, hopping frozen puddles, high heels sinking into brown patches of snow, but she herself had spent several years assigned to North Trailer, the worst of them all, known unofficially as the North Pole. Her permanent room was a palace by comparison: well heated and spacious, with two chalkboards, windows she could open when the weather turned warm. Yet it was all she could do to hang her coat behind the door, to set her coffee cup on the corner of her desk already stained by dozens of overlapping rings. Maya Paluski said that she used to feel that way before she'd joined the Circle of Faith. She said that the Faith meetings had given her a new lease on life.

“We hold open meetings on the first of each month,” she often reminded Anna Grey. “You ought to come, Anna. It would do you a world of good.” When she spoke, she played with the plain gold cross all Faith members wore around their necks. “We're a family. We don't always agree, but we look out for each other.”

The Circle of Faith put Anna Grey in mind of the Skylark Bible Circle, a Baptist organization her mother had belonged to and enjoyed. Faith members did charity work, scheduled afternoon picnics and winter cider parties. They sponsored guest speakers and visited each other's churches, went on nondenominational retreats, explored faith healing and women's spirituality, and helped each other with everything from child care to tax preparation. But Anna Grey didn't want to air her troubles in front of Ruthie Mader, who lived on an idyllic hundred-acre farm overlooking the river, whose husband had been, by all accounts, a truly wonderful man, whose daughter had gone on to become so
popular and pretty she'd been crowned Festival Queen last Fourth of July at Cradle Park. Cherish Mader wasn't sitting home every weekend like Anna Grey's Milly, rereading her collection of science fiction novels. Besides, Anna Grey had her own church home, Christ the King Lutheran—she'd converted when she married Bill. She could always make an appointment with Pastor Floyd if she wanted someone to talk to. Pastor Floyd spoke against the Circle of Faith, which he said was a feel-good kind of thing with no spiritual basis.
People taking God into their own hands
, he'd said.
Well, God isn't like Play-Doh you can shape into anything you want. Man is the Play-Doh. God is God. And tradition teaches what he expects from us
.

Anna Grey sighed, checked her lipstick in the compact mirror she kept inside her desk. It was probably just the weather. She hadn't gotten used to Northern winters, the chill that never left her hands and feet. The children thundered in, and she smiled at them vaguely, but she did not come around from behind her desk. In September, it had been announced that teachers shouldn't touch the children anymore, because of liability. Some of the teachers were outraged, but Anna Grey herself hadn't touched a child in years. Strange, because she remembered hugging the children at her school in Indianapolis: the surprising cold of their cheeks after recess, the various shampoo smells of their hair. Gabriel's hair was uncombed and oily. That awful sore glistened—would it ever heal? He sat down at his desk as if he had no idea where he was; his expression was the same one the hitchhiker had worn as he stood beside the highway, watching or not watching Anna Grey drive by, untouchable, untouched. It was the same one Bill wore at night as he sat at the supper table, the flat line of his mouth rippling as he worked his roast like a cud.

The principal's voice came over the intercom, and Gabriel rose with the other children, pressed his hand over his heart.
I pledge allegiance—to the flag—of the United States of America
—

Anna Grey had neglected to rise, to put her hand over her own heart, and when they finished the pledge of allegiance, the children looked at her curiously. “You may be seated,” she said. “Open your math books to Chapter Fourteen.”

When Gabriel opened his book, Anna Grey could tell he was in the wrong place. His reading and writing skills were far behind the other children's. “Chapter
Four-teen
,” she said, but Gabriel wasn't listening. His hand was in his desk cubby, and Anna Grey thought she heard the irritable crackle of his lunch bag. Bethany packed him plenty of food, but the child was always hungry. All morning, he'd sneak bits of crushed Ding-Dong, a corn chip, a peanut butter cracker—that slow hand moving from his cubby to his mouth. By lunchtime, most of it would be gone; still, he prayed before he ate, seemingly oblivious to the mimicking gestures of the kids all around him. Looking for attention, Anna Grey knew, like the second-grade boy who always fell down or the girl—thank heavens she'd moved away—who kept taking off her underwear.
Poor child
, the other teachers said, and inevitably they'd ask,
Why isn't he in Living and Learning?
Living and Learning was Marty's pet project, a special class for special kids that met three mornings a week. But Anna Grey couldn't admit she was failing with Gabriel, especially not to Marty, especially not now. She wasn't the same green teacher who'd encountered Sandy Shore. She planned to surprise everyone, discover a special talent in Gabriel—art or, perhaps, music—and encourage him until he grew to trust her, blossomed like a flower. She imagined how he'd start making friends, play kickball and softball at recess, look boldly out at the world—but the fact was that, nearly a month into the term, Gabriel still was staring at the ground.

What made it worse was that Marty himself had approached Anna Grey about Gabriel just last week, surprising her as she sneaked a cigarette in the teachers' lounge after the first bell had
already rung. “I think he needs more than you can give him,” he said matter-of-factly.

“My recommendation is to keep him mainstreamed,” Anna Grey said firmly. “You know how the Living and Learning kids get ostracized.”

“Gabriel is already ostracized,” Marty said. “Tortured might be a better word. Let me help the kid, Anna.”

“I'm late,” Anna Grey said, crushing out her half-smoked cigarette.

“Can we schedule a meeting to discuss this?” Marty said. “It would be, I mean, strictly professional.”

He blushed with the sincerity of those words, and Anna Grey blushed too, but angrily, because even as he spoke she was imagining the scrape of his beard against her cheeks, the edge of his teeth against her tongue. Strictly professional—of course, that December afternoon had been a mistake, a weak moment after his separation, her only infidelity, ever. Until that day, affairs had been something that happened only to other people, and even now, after the fact, it was unthinkable that she had fallen into such a thing herself. She almost wished she were a Catholic so that she could confess, receive her punishment, leave her sin in the care of someone bound by God's law not to repeat it. Maya assured her that the Circle of Faith meetings worked the same way—members took a vow of silence so that whatever was said between Faith walls was sure to stay there. “I know something's on your mind, Anna,” she'd said more than once. “You just don't seem yourself lately.” But Anna Grey could not imagine admitting something like this to anyone, though the fact was that she longed to tell Bill, to make a clean breast of everything. Her fear wasn't that he'd be angry, or hurt, or even that he'd leave her. Her fear was that he wouldn't care one way or the other.

She'd first met Bill on the IU campus during the terrible fall of Sandy Shore, when it seemed to Anna Grey that her life had
changed, that nothing was satisfying anymore. She and another teacher were there to see a football game. Bill was sitting next to them, and they all got talking during the halftime show. As the cheerleaders kicked their pretty legs, Bill told Anna Grey how his father owned a funeral home in Ambient, Wisconsin (
Where?
Anna Grey had said), and how he'd offered Bill a junior partnership when he'd graduated from high school. But Bill was worried about the draft, and he had an idea about becoming a veterinarian, so Bill senior gave his blessing, even paid Bill's tuition on the condition he spend his summers at the morgue. Now, three years into his undergraduate degree, Bill was failing all his science classes. The army had stopped drafting people, and Bill wished he had the guts to drop out and go home. If he'd taken his father's offer, he said, he'd be out in the real world, making money, instead of studying abstract ideas that meant nothing. As he talked, Anna Grey kept looking at the curious gray streak in his hair. (Later, his mother would tell Anna Grey he'd been born with it. The devil's kiss, she said.) She wrote her phone number on a corn dog wrapper, and the other teacher giggled about it all the way home. “Imagine all the dead people he's touched,” she said. “Imagine him combing some dead person's hair.” In spring, when he bought the ring with his fall tuition money, the other teachers teased Anna Grey that he'd taken it off a dead woman's finger. They said that on her wedding night, he'd ask her to hold her breath, tell her not to move.

Opposites attract:
That was what people always said about Bill and Anna Grey. She was short, fair, talkative, while he was the quiet type, tall and dark. Back in those days, she was interested in politics. She supported environmental causes, hunger drives, and women's rights. It was true that Bill seemed to have no opinions whatsoever on any of these subjects. But she'd grown bone weary of her life in Indianapolis, and she was still young enough to believe that change could only mean something good. Bill had
a solid future; he loved her, he wanted a family. At the time, it had all seemed simple enough.

Math period ended; science began. Anna Grey divided the students into task groups, ignoring the groans of the three girls who got stuck with Gabriel. Their assignment was to design an ecosystem. All parts of the food chain were to be represented. If they didn't finish their ecosystems today, they could work on them again during science period tomorrow. She gave each group a poster board, tracing paper, and a stack of
National Geographics
; they already had glue and scissors and markers in their desks. “Plan the whole thing out in
pencil
first,” she warned, and then she went back to her desk, where she took three Tylenol caplets with the gritty dregs of her decaf. She thought about Bill undressing for bed, his spare tire spangled with varicose veins. How last night, again, she'd laid a warm hand on the small of his back and he'd twisted to look at her curiously. “What?” he'd said. “
What
?” She thought about Marty, how he'd fumbled with the front of her bra until she guided his hands to the back. How she looked away, shy, when he kicked off his trousers and how then—too quickly—he'd slid up inside her so that she never actually saw him, and this left her even more unsatisfied than his odd, staccato rocking.
He'd
looked at
her
, afterward, spreading her with his fingers to blow cool air on the place that didn't want cooling, and yet she had held his head between her hands until. he had blown the last of her desire out.

The lunch bell rang. Half the day down. At noon recess, a group of boys led by Bethany Carpenter's own Robert John—a troublemaker if Anna Grey had ever seen one—pinned Gabriel down and made him eat chunks of dirty slush that shot through the fence from the highway. The teacher on recess duty was Maya Paluski; she called Bethany at home, but Bethany had to clean house for someone in Killsnake and couldn't come in before her crossing guard shift started at three. “Call my husband at Jeep's,”
she said, but Fred was unloading stock and couldn't leave. “Handle it however you see fit,” he said. “I'll talk to Robert John again when I get home.” So Maya brought Gabriel back to Anna Grey's classroom, interrupting her half-hour planning period, the only break she would get all day. Gabriel's face was raw and wet, streaked black around the mouth. He didn't look at Anna Grey, but he didn't
not
look at her, either. Gabriel just
looked
. That was what always got to Anna Grey. “Maybe you should keep him here,” Maya said. “I mean, instead of sending him outside with the others. They're worse than wolves.”

Anna Grey imagined spending the rest of the term's planning periods under Gabriel's absent stare. “He has to learn to stick up for himself,” she said, perhaps a little more crossly than she meant to. “He won't always have teachers to look out for him.”

“Well, OK,” Maya said. “But if I can help, Anna, let me know.”

After Maya was gone, Anna Grey wiped Gabriel's mouth with a Kleenex from her desk drawer, careful not to let her fingers touch his sore. “You're
bigger
than those boys,” she said. “It's
silly
to let them do this to you.” She poked the Kleenex into his hand. “Here. You can wipe your own mouth, don't you think?” Suddenly he leaned over and spat into the wastebasket, a dark stream that made Anna Grey's stomach turn.

“Gabriel!” she said.

“It tasted bad,” he whined. “It still tastes bad.”

“Then don't let them bully you next time.”

He stared at the floor, unresponsive. It was as if she were talking to the air.

“Do you hear me?” she said. “Do you?” Then abruptly, cruelly, she knocked on his head with her knuckles. “Hello? Anybody home?”

He lifted his head to look at her, eyes brimming, an innocent child. Appalled by what she'd just done, Anna Grey turned and
walked away, down the hall and out the school's back entrance, where she inhaled deep, burning gulps of cold air. On the asphalt, a group of boys chased a red rubber kickball, slipping and sliding over the ice. Younger girls jumped rope, while the older ones floated in groups. Maya was right. She wasn't herself lately. The truth was that she wanted to go home—not home to Ambient, but to Skylark, where her sister still lived. She wanted to hear people speak her full name—Anna
Grey
—instead of shortening it to just plain Anna, the way Northerners automatically did. She wanted true heat that lasted more than a week or two in August, and she wanted humidity that left a person not knowing where her own skin ended and the air began. She wanted country music on the radio instead of rock 'n' roll, and she wanted to order a glass of tea in a restaurant without having to say
iced
tea. She wanted to open her mouth without somebody telling her, “You're not from here, are you?” And she wanted to walk down a street where people looked you in the face; but the thing was, Anna Grey's sister said that Skylark had changed. People who worked in Atlanta lived there now; it was more like a suburb than a town. It had been seven years since Anna Grey had gone back, though her sister had come twice to Ambient. “You don't want to see it, really,” her sister said. “It's one big parking lot.”