Second Chance (35 page)

Chapter 29

When
Sharla
Jackson woke up that Monday morning, she felt no different than usual. A little tired, maybe. She hadn't slept too well the night before.
Bad dreams
, she thought, though she couldn't recall what they were about. There had been that other thing, too. That little blackout or whatever it was she had the evening before, walking back to her apartment from the pool after one last swim.

It was the last weekend the pool was open, and she had wanted to spend as much time in the water as possible. Fortunately the air was still balmy, and she lay at poolside through most of Sunday, going inside only to eat and get a second Danielle Steel paperback when she finished the first one. Reading them made her feel guilty, since she knew she should be reading someone like Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, sisters who knew what the world was like, and not some rich white woman who made a
helluva
living out of sunsets and happy endings.

The thing was that
Sharla
liked
sunsets and happy endings. She had seen too many sad ones during the years she taught in the inner city. Children didn't die all the time, but it happened, and it happened a lot more often there than it did where she worked now, near Shaker Heights. There the children were relatively polite and well behaved, though there was the occasional problem kid. Hell, there was anywhere. But poverty and broken homes seemed to cause a lot more problems than affluence and family stability.
Sharla
liked being away from the battle zone, teaching behind the lines, working with kids who really wanted to be there in her class.

But it didn't help the guilt. She had felt for the past dozen years that she had betrayed her people. She taught mostly white kids now, children who didn't need her love and understanding nearly as much as those she had tried to reach in the city schools. Sometimes she had helped, but most of the time she hadn't, and her frustrations grew as quickly as the virus of drugs spread, even in the lower grades. She had had no users at that early age, but there were plenty of little ones who held onto drugs for older siblings or friends, or who even sold packets at their elders' commands.

What drove her out had been when a fifth grader she had in class three years earlier was found dead in a booth in the boy's rest room, a crack bowl beside him. His name was Martin, and as a second grader he had been very serious about his school work, looking at
Sharla
with big, solemn eyes. "Diligent. A hard worker," she had written in the comments space on his report card. More honestly, she could have said that he wasn't bright, but he tried. And he had given the other teachers that impression right up until the morning he died.

So
Sharla
had moved from Grover Cleveland Elementary to Parkway Elementary, from Alice Walker to Danielle Steel (who she would only buy used, never new, to cheat the author out of more royalties). She moved from dreams of saving the children to the reality of saving her sanity. It was not as rewarding, but it was stable and non-threatening, and she worried less at night.

But last night she had worried, just a little, before going to sleep. Dusk had come, and she had been walking back to her apartment, her beach bag in one hand. She was just entering a covered walkway between two of the complex's buildings, and the next thing she remembered she was standing by her front door, the key in her hand. She didn't remember taking the key out, didn't even remember leaving the walkway. But there she was.

There was another thing too. It was darker, maybe ten or fifteen minutes darker, as though she had blacked out for that time. Still, other than feeling displaced in time for a while, she felt all right physically, except for a little bruise on her left thigh that she didn't know how she had gotten. Probably scraped it on the edge of the pool, she thought.

Now, on another Monday morning, she showered, and as she did so she noticed the bruise was gone. Then she had a quick breakfast, gathered her plan book and the materials for the banner she planned to put over the blackboard before school started, left her apartment, walked to her car, and opened the door.

That was when she stopped and listened to the voice.

~*~

It told her what to do, and she knew that it was right, that this was the only way.

She drove the mile and a half to her school, got out, opened the trunk, and took from it a wide tube four feet long with metal caps at each end. She carried this under one arm, and her bag with the other. As she entered the building, her principal, Mr. Newman, smiled and nodded.

"Morning, Kevin," she said with a big grin.

You fuckin' white pig.

"Hi,
Sharla
. What's that, a poster?"

"
Mmm
-hmm. Huge Brian
Wildsmith
—all kinds of animals. Come on down later and see it."

So I can drop your lily white ass.

She walked to her room, unlocked it, and set the tube in a corner near her desk. Then she put up the banner, a series of scenes from fairy tales illustrated by
Tomie
de Paola. But instead of putting it over the blackboard, she taped it up over the translucent glass panes next to the door. When the children came in, she smiled at them, settled them gently in their seats, and, when the time came, closed the door, taping the final 2x2 panel over the little inset window.

"Good morning, children," she said. "I have a big surprise for you today. I think you'll find this very interesting."

The children whispered excitedly as
Sharla
walked to the corner, picked up the tube, opened one end, and put it on her desk. She reached inside, and slid out the automatic rifle with the clip in place, just like the voice had said it would be. It hadn't told her what kind of weapon it was, but it looked like the kind the people on the TV news wanted to ban. The voice had told her that as long as she held the trigger down, the gun would keep firing. And when it stopped, there were six other clips. The voice had told her how to remove the empty one and load a full one. It looked very easy, she thought.

"Now, children, I want you to stay in your seats and not get up and not make any noise. If you do, I'll have to punish you. You know I don't do that very often, but today I will, if you don't obey me."

"Is that a real gun?" one boy near the back asked.

"Yes, it is, Brian. Now. Francis, Chris, Jenny—I want you to take your desks and put them in front of the pretty pictures I put up by the door . . . that's right, just slide them over there. William, Sam, Richard, you pull all the blinds down, please . . . No, Elizabeth, I didn't ask you to help, did I? You stay in your seat. It's very important that you do everything I say. . . That's fine, boys, thank you. Now sit down."

When everyone was seated,
Sharla
picked up the phone connecting her to the office. "Sarah," she said into the mouthpiece, "put Kevin on . . . I don't care if he's in a conference, Sarah. Put him on
now
. . . What's it about? It's about inequality and injustice, Sarah. It's about political prisoners who must be freed. It's about the nation's jails filled with my brothers. Now put Kevin on right away, or you're going to hear something, and you won't need the phone to hear it. You're going to hear some gunfire, you white bitch.

"You're going to hear the voice of black revolution."

Chapter 30

Woody was tired. He had been working in his home studio, trying to write, but it had been hard. He was too worried about Tracy. Ever since their conversation two weeks earlier about Keith, she had been depressed. She smiled at and joked with the children, but when she was with Woody, or when she thought she was alone, she was another person, holding the weight of the world on her shoulders.

And maybe, Woody thought, that wasn't so far from the truth. He felt the burden too, though he tried to dismiss it, and tried to ease it from Tracy, suggesting things to do as a family, or places she could go during the day when the kids were at school. But still, the sorrow hung blackly over their white and airy house.

He had broken his self-imposed code of silence on the matter only once, when he had called Frank McDonald to share his discoveries and concerns. But Frank had not wanted to be a partner in Woody's paranoia and guilt, and Woody couldn't blame him. So he and Tracy bore the burden of proof alone.

Now, exhausted from trying to force joy from his reeds, Woody sat down in front of the television in the family room adjoining the kitchen, where Tracy and Louisa were preparing dinner. He found a moment of solace amid the domestic clatter of pans and mixing bowls, then picked up the remote and pushed the button so that Dan
Rather's
grave face appeared.

". . . in a suburb of Cleveland today. The woman, identified as
Sharla
Jackson of Warrensville Heights, and a teacher at Parkway Elementary School where the incident took place, apparently hid an automatic rifle in a poster tube, and held her second grade class hostage for six hours while she made Black Nationalist demands over the school's telephone system. At three o'clock eastern time a S.W.A.T. team attempted to enter the room, and gunfire was exchanged, leaving Jackson and one student dead. Three other children were wounded in the melee . . ."

Rather went on to a story about flooding in a Mississippi town, but Woody did not hear it. He sat, scarcely believing what he had heard, then punched the channel buttons to ABC.

"Tracy . . ." he said, but there was no reply. "
Tracy!
Come here!"

She appeared in the rectangle of the open serving bar, a wooden spoon in her hand. "What?"

He could only point to the television, which displayed the face of Peter Jennings and a window behind him that read,
Terror in Cleveland
, with a silhouette of a rifle. Jennings's story was similar to
Rather's
, and Tracy gasped when he gave
Sharla
Jackson's name and her picture filled the window. Jennings added that there was a possibility "that no shots were actually fired by
Sharla
Jackson. We've received no official word on this, but preliminary reports indicate that this may indeed be the case. Ted Koppel will cover the incident on
Nightline
tonight, and hopefully ABC will receive either a confirmation or a denial by that time. In other news . . ."

"
Sharla
?" Tracy whispered. "
Sharla
, Woody? My God, how could she? She'd never do something like that."

Woody swallowed. He felt as though tar were stuck in his throat. "No," he said, turning off the TV. "She wouldn't. Maybe she didn't."

"What?"

"What's up, you guys?" said Louisa, appearing over her mother's shoulder. "Mom, how long do I have to keep stirring that stuff?"

“Just a
minute
!" Tracy said, then shook her head. "I'm sorry, hon. I've got to talk to Daddy. Just . . . keep stirring it, okay?"

She came into the den and sat next to Woody. "They said she didn't fire any shots," Woody said.

"They don't know."

"No." He shook his head again. "It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. She wouldn't have done this on her own."

"Oh Christ, Woody, you think it was . . ." She broke off, as if she were unwilling to say the name.

"Yeah. Keith."

"I don't know," she said, looking so vulnerable that Woody's grief became even deeper. "
Sharla
was always angry when she was young. Maybe she just wasn't able to bury it. Maybe it just grew inside her until it came out . . . But like that . . . and
Sharla
dead . . ." Her voice was tight with tears. "Woody? Where are you going?"

"I've got to call Frank," he said, leaving the room and going down the hall toward their bedroom. "He's got to know about this," he shouted to Tracy as he ran.

Frank answered on the first ring. His hello sounded impatient, excited.

"Frank, Woody. Did you hear about
Sharla
? On the news?" He had not, and Woody told him that their friend was dead, and how it had happened.

"I'm sorry," Frank said when Woody was finished. His voice sounded uncaring.

"Sorry? Frank, did you hear me?
Sharla
is dead."

"Woody . . . God
damn
it . . .” Woody heard Frank start to cry, heard words come up out of the bubbling. “Judy . . . went crazy . . . wrecked the gallery, nearly killed a guy . . ."

"Frank,
Frank
, easy . . . easy. Now what happened? Take your time and tell me." He looked up and saw Tracy in the doorway, and mouthed
Extension
to her. She nodded and vanished, and a moment later he heard the soft click of a pick-up. "Tracy's on too, Frank. Just relax and tell me what happened."

Frank did, disjointedly, but clearly enough for Woody to understand that Judy had also suffered some sort of breakdown. Woody told Frank to let him know if he could do anything, and they said goodbye. He met Tracy in the hall.

"You heard?"

She nodded. "It's not a coincidence, Woody."

"Isn't it?"

"Violent sixties idealistic-politico-flashback? Two people we know in as many days? I can't believe that. What I believe in is Keith. Or whatever it is he's become. He did something to them." She went into his arms, and gripped his shoulders as if to draw strength from them. "That bastard. What's he doing to our friends?"