Refund (27 page)

Someone tugged on my jacket. It was Keisha Jones. She was chewing the tip of one of her brown braids. She wore her eagle mask, on the top of her head like a hat.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Who's picking you up today?”

“I don't know.”

“Your mom? Your dad? Your aunt?”

She raised her shoulders and dropped them; “I don't know.”

We made our way through the police back into the office, where the secretary was sitting, typing an announcement, and weeping softly.

“Keisha Jones? No pickup again?” She handed me the phone contact list. I called her home.

“Who's this?”

“This is Miss Samson, Keisha's teacher. We wondered who was coming to pick her up.”

Silence.

“Shit,” said her aunt. “Oh. Sorry, I guess it was supposed to be me—”

“Is her mother around?”

“She's on second shift at the hospital. Not back until late—”

“Is anyone else there who could pick her up?”

“I can't drive, or I did, but—”

“Can you get on a bus?”

“I broke my foot, miss, and I can't walk.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I can't walk.” Her voice was rising. “Her mom's not coming home till late—”

“Anyone else I can call?”

“I don't know . . . her uncle, maybe, but, no, he's on till nine
tonight, they're doing a big fundraiser at Chick-fil-A . . . they need him. Her dad's . . .” she paused. “I can't walk, honey, really, I can't—”

There were the various excuses we heard, the relatives who were assigned pickup but had been arrested; there were the family friends who had offered to do a good deed but were too depressed and forgot; there were broken-down cars, etc., but mostly the reasons people missed school pickup were dreary—the assigned person was at work. Everyone was always at work. The first job, the second job, etc. There was no car and there was a broken foot and there was another kid, waiting.

“I'll drive her home,” said the secretary, rising from her chair. “If we go quick. Come on, sugarplum.”

“No. Miss Samson,” said Keisha, gripping my hand.

“I'll do it,” I said. I didn't know why I said it. Keisha jumped up and took my hand.

“You know the way?” said the secretary, raising an eyebrow. “She's on North Ninth.”

She said it that way because this was where the “free lunch” children lived; she thought I'd somehow be intimidated. “I can figure it out,” I said, annoyed.

“Well,” said the secretary. She regarded Keisha. “Keisha Jones, you turn in your signed permission slip for the trip tomorrow?”

Keisha looked at her, and her shoulders wilted. “I forgot,” she said.

The woman shook her head. “Then you can't go.”

Keisha stared at her. Then one tear, two, began to run down her face. “I want to go,” she said. “This time, I got to go!”

“Rules, baby,” said the secretary, patting her on the shoulder, and then Keisha turned and hurried out the door.

Keisha stood, crying noisily, in the corridor. I knelt down and hugged her. Her sobs were loud, and then softer. Then she stepped back.

“I want to see a sea turtle,” she said. Her voice rose. “I
want
to! Now.”

Her voice echoed inside me. I heard her. I knew that tomorrow she would be sitting at a desk in the fourth grade, where they had some extra seats, probably coloring in sheets on a marine theme. Someone in the sadistic school bureaucracy would think this was a way to include her, but obviously this would just make her feel more left out. I hated the whole world, for a moment.

“Okay,” I said, quickly.

I was a kindergarten teacher, which meant that I was not an impulsive person. But she was one of those students who seemed to have decided I was good. It was a silly, rash decision; I had done nothing but give her a little attention in class. We sat and sounded out words together.
I see a c-at. The c-at is s-oft
. She was the best one in class, my speed reader.
The cat is soft. The cat jumps. I see the cat
. Done. Next book. It was the rare, divine dance between teacher and student, in which I helped her locate what she already knew.

“Okay?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“Yes,” I said, deciding. “Now, let's go.”

I signed her out. She set the mask back on her face again, in an attempt, perhaps, to look fierce, grabbed my hand, and did some long leaps to the car, the way an eagle might, if it were trying to take off into the air.

I
HAD A CAR SEAT IN THE BACK FOR TIMES
I
HAD TO CHAUFFEUR
children home. She buckled herself in. She removed her mask and surveyed my car. “Messy,” she said.

“I know. Sorry about that,” I said. The backseat was basically a museum of fast food wrappers. I swept them onto the floor and tossed my cell phone into the glove compartment. Keisha gingerly settled into a seat.

“It smells,” she said. I was both ashamed and offended and opened a window.

“How's that?” I asked.

“Okay,” she said.

I started the car. We sat there, in silence. She kicked at some of the crumpled wrappers on the floor.

“Why'd he shoot Mrs. Hill?” she said. “She was nice.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror; she was rubbing the gray feathers of the harpy eagle mask against her lip.

“I thought he was going to shoot me,” she said.

“Oh, no,” I said, though I couldn't answer this—why Mrs. Hill? Why anyone?

“Why did he shoot her?” She had put on the eagle mask, but incorrectly, so she resembled an eagle with a human mouth.

I swallowed. There was no reason. Oh, some religious types would put it somehow into “God's plan,” the gun-control advocates would say it was because we didn't have any gun laws, but truly there was no reason I could give her. So I said nothing. The cars in front of me fled to their glimmering futures.

“He needed a time-out,” she said.

My hands felt like limp flowers on the steering wheel.

The classroom was one place where it seemed that the world could be explained; I sat in the tiny seats beside the students and showed them: This is an
A
. It begins the word
apple
. This is a 1. If you add another 1 you have 2. You didn't have to believe in anything but these facts, and the students started, at various paces, to absorb them. But what did you do when you were crouching in the classroom, listening to gunshots outside and not knowing where to run? The teacher's best trick was that she appeared to know everything. But that afternoon, in that room, it was clear that I knew nothing, and that made me deeply ashamed.

I leaned forward; it was hard to see. The late-afternoon sun was so bright the cars in front of me resembled hazy, pale elephants moving into the day. I had that sensation that I had sometimes waking up, that somehow I was about to vanish.

Left was the direction of her apartment; my hands turned the car to the right. The sea turtle hospital was about a twenty-minute drive; if I drove fast, we could get there and back to Keisha's house in no time, and I could blame any delay on traffic. Keisha petted the feathers on her mask. She did not notice the turn at all.

W
E DROVE
. T
HE CITY FLASHED BY US
. P
EOPLE LIVED THEIR LIVES
. They were lining up at the Hardee's and getting money at the drive-through ATM and joining the army of cars in the Target parking lot. It was impossible to see anyone's expressions from the car, but everyone moved through the day as though they believed there would be another minute, as though they believed there were more and more and more.

“Miss Samson,” she said, “am I your favorite?”

The children sniffed this out, the teacher's preferences, with great and accurate stealth. You were to deny it, always, but there were ones you loved more than the others, it was true.

“Keisha,” I said, “I love you and all of your classmates.”

“I want to be the favorite,” she said, firmly.

“Well, you are the best reader,” I said. She nodded, firmly.

“I know,” she said. She looked around for something to read, to show off. “Ex. It. Exit,” she said.

“Good!”

“Cook. Ay-ee,” she said, looking at a sign on a store.

“Cook. Eee. Yes.”

“Here,” I said. “Read these.” I had a bag of picture books in the front seat. I handed her one:
Sea Turtles: Wonders of the Ocean
. At
a red traffic light, I read her the facts: They nested at a beach not far away. I read: “Nesting occurs May through August. Turtles lay about 120 eggs in a nest. After the hatchlings come out, they head to the sea. Only a lucky few survive; some people estimate 1 in 1000 survive the first year, and about 1 in 5, or 10,000, become adult turtles. No one knows why.”

The pictures showed the turtles swimming; they resembled hunched old men, flapping small fins in clear aqua water.

I drove. It was May, and the sky was bright and burning and young, a faded blue rimmed with pink, barely any sense of darkness behind it; abundant, golden clouds moved through it, and light fell through the clouds in a column, translucent. I had not noticed the sky's beauty in a while; as I looked at it, not with astonishment as much as restlessness, I wanted to run toward those clouds, that burning, gorgeous light, wrap my arms around the clouds and consume them, taste their salt and sweetness; I wanted to drag them as walls around the classroom so no mean thing would get in; I loved the clouds, the air, so deeply my skin felt thin.

Keisha flipped through the book quickly. Then she tossed it onto the floor.

“I want to see one,” she said. “Now.”

I
T WAS
4:00
PM
. I
WAS A TEACHER ON A MISSION
; I
WAS GOING TO
show her the sea turtles, something miraculous and new. The light was escaping from the sky so that it was now a golden pink color like the inside of a shell. Keisha sat in the backseat of the car. She slipped the rubber band over her forehead and rubbed her fingers along her eagle face as she looked out the window.

I thought of what she had asked me—why Mrs. Hill and not her? Or me? The drawings, the footprints made of blood. I didn't want Keisha to remember that today. My hands trembled on the
steering wheel; I didn't want to be wrong or unreasonable, but I wanted Keisha to see the sea turtles; hell,
I
wanted to see one now, see these animals with their grand, hard shells floating dreamily in their tanks. I wanted us to have something new and gorgeous in our minds.

The coast passed by us, barely visible through the haze, the ocean wrinkled silver sheets. I parked at the beach just next to the sea turtle hospital. She leapt out, running into the sand.

“Keisha, you need to take off your shoes!”

She looked puzzled. “I can be barefoot?”

“Yes! That's what you do at the beach.”

“I
know
,” she said, regarding me skeptically. Then she removed her shoes. There was no public bus from her neighborhood to the beach; the city council of the wealthy white beach community kept claiming they were not “zoned” for a route here. Keisha poured the sand out of her shoes, handed them to me. Her eagle mask was dangling from her wrist, and she put it on. She had drawn the mask with the bird's eyes wide open, so she appeared to be very surprised. She started running across the sand. I did too, and we ran toward the ocean, the sand rising up around us, a pale glittery haze. The waves came down, clear blue cylinders, rising up from the flat plain of gray. The roaring was tremendous, as though it could fill every corner of the world.

“It won't stop,” she said.

She stood in the tide a few minutes, the water pooling, foaming around her ankles. She was perfectly still. The wind riffled through the feathers she had pasted on. She nodded, briskly, every thirty seconds or so.

“Why are you nodding?” I asked.

“I want the wave to go down
now
,” she said. “And now. Now.”

We stood for a moment, and the waves came down at our
command. Now. Now. Now. The endless, cold expanse of water. She lifted the mask off her face and handed it to me.

“You want to be it?” she asked.

“Keisha,” I said, surprised. “Sure.”

I slipped the damp mask over my face. Now I was the harpy eagle. What was I supposed to feel? She watched me, a bit bemused. I stood, staring at the crashing water, the wanting a huge hole in me—wanting to be more than myself, wanting to know what would happen to any of us. I waited, listening to the roar of the water. The mask stuck to the heat of my face. I slipped the mask off my face and handed it back to her. She clutched it but did not put it back on.