There was a time—yesterday, for example—when I might have been tempted to dash into her office and give it a quick vacuum and dust, with a heaping side of snooping. But after the way she snapped at me for breathing outside her office door, no thank you. Imagining the look on Mimi’s face if she reappeared while I was pretending to straighten up the pages of her manuscript—I pictured something steps beyond “skeptical”—sent me scuttling back to Frank’s closet.
I WAS SO in the purging zone that I yelped when a coyote howled from what sounded like its nest in my hip pocket. It took me a minute to realize it was my cell phone. Frank must have changed its default ring so I’d recognize it as mine in a crowded room. Like, for example, a room crowded with all his clothing, and me.
The call was from Frank’s school.
“This is Paula in the office,” a scratchy, friendly-sounding voice on the other end said. “You need to come and pick Frank up.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“His teacher says he’s disrupting class. Wait. What? Stop crying, honey, and use your words.” She hung up abruptly. Was she talking to Frank? Was he hurt? Had he hurt another kid? Set a vexing math textbook on fire with sunlight and his monocle? Anything was possible.
I scooped up the pile of too-small clothing I’d winnowed from Frank’s wardrobe, ran to my room, and stuffed it under my bed. In the hallway I could hear Mimi’s typewriter clacking away again, which meant the car was back. I checked my watch. Eleven-thirty. I slapped a sandwich together and wrote a note that said, Picking up Frank a little early. I sped Mimi’s lunch tray to her office door where I slid the note under the door and left without knocking.
I was at school by eleven-forty. I must have looked pretty wild-eyed when I got there, because the first thing the woman behind the desk said when I lurched into the office was, “Calm down. It’s not a bad break. We’ve got her arm iced down and splinted with a vocabulary workbook and an Ace bandage. That should hold her until she gets to the emergency room.”
“She who? He broke somebody’s arm?”
“Who are we talking about here? Aren’t you Fiona’s mother?”
“I’m nobody’s mother,” I said. “I’m here to pick up Frank Banning.”
“Oh. I thought you might be the new third-grader’s mom.”
Again? I was twenty-four years old. Twenty-four. Did I really look old enough to be the mother of a kid more than halfway out of grade school? Oh, wait. This was Hollywood. So, yes.
The office lady was still talking. “Tough start at a new school, getting her arm broken the first day.”
“Frank broke a third-grader’s arm?”
“Fiona was pretending she was an astronaut and jumped off a swing. You’d think she’d be old enough to know better. Frank had nothing to do with it. But that boy, bless his heart, is the best argument for life insurance I ever met. Are you Alice?”
I recognized Paula’s scratchy voice then. “Yes. And you must be Paula. Is Frank okay?”
“Oh, honey, did I not tell you that? When I call I usually say that right after ‘hello. I’m calling from school, blah blah isn’t hurt.’ I’m so sorry. Fiona came in with her arm at a crazy angle right as I was dialing you and it threw me off my game. You have to pick Frank up at Room Five. Sign him out here first.” Paula handed me a pen. She had a big smile and glasses and fluffy caramel hair and was wearing a macaroni necklace like the ones my kindergarten students made me.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.
“Not exactly. Nothing bad, I know. Some days are just harder than others for Frank. You tell him I’ll miss him at lunchtime. He sits right here at my desk with me every day and we eat together. I love him to death.”
I’d wondered how Frank made it through the days at school. Now I had a much better idea.
I GUESS I was meeting Frank’s teacher the first day of school after all.
I found Frank on his back across the doorway just inside Room Five, looking like a cross between a pinstriped doormat and a felled statue of a deposed Communist dictator. “Oh, hello,” his teacher said. “I’m Miss Peppe. You must be Alice.”
We stood just outside the classroom so we could talk while she kept one eye on the children inside. “We were worried you wouldn’t get here before lunch,” she said.
“What happened?”
“His circuits overloaded. His third grade teacher warned me this would happen. When Frank gets overwhelmed, he jumps out of his seat and heads for the exit. I think he wants to keep running, but being out in the open makes him more anxious than being in here. So he lies down across the doorway and goes stiff. Then the children can’t get out. They don’t like stepping over him.”
“I can’t blame them.” I went and crouched alongside Frank. His eyes were closed and he looked remarkably serene. “Frank,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I was on my way to the gentleman’s room when quite by accident I ended up here. I suspect myself of having fallen asleep, as we were doing mathematics at the time. If my mother should ask, Alice, please tell her the only thing I threw today was my body onto the floor.”
“Get up, Frank,” I said. “Right this minute.”