*
She always went the long way home, taking the highway to the exit and then doubling back, but today she got in the car and without telling herself what she was doing she drove out on the main road and turned right at the light. She drove straight through town, past the strip of doctors’ offices, the dollar store and the liquor store and the Taco Bell, past the fire station and the boarded-up department store, heading out toward the cornfields where the turnoff to their house was, and McKinley.
McKinley Elementary was a low, concrete box pierced with vertical slits; it was built in the sixties, when they didn’t believe in windows, and had that grim, prison aspect you found sometimes in churches and schools from that era. Inside had been a different story, the halls plastered with pictures and stories, the rooms vibrating with the bustling life force of young children being educated.
She had avoided this building for years, like a face that you tried to put out of your mind, and yet there it was, there it had always been, a mere five minutes from their house, and she realized now that during her days at the nursing home there was a part of her that knew what was happening, at every moment, at the school: that at 8:45 the bells were ringing and students were lining up for class; and at 12:40 they were eating lunch; and at 1:10 they had recess. Eleven years she’d taught there and its rhythms were ingrained in her bones.
She parked opposite the school, two doors down from the Sawyers’ house, where Tommy used to go after school some days to play video games with Dylan. The video games at the Sawyers’, she remembered now, were more violent than the ones she had let him play, and there had been some disagreements about that. She and Henry had argued about whether they should say something to Brenda Sawyer, or rather, she had gone back and forth, her disgust with the violent games battling with her natural reticence about telling other people how to raise their children, until Henry got sick of the whole issue and vowed to call Brenda up and tell her that there was no way any son of his was shooting anybody, even if it was only a game.
And in the end—in the end they had not needed to resolve this issue. They didn’t get the chance to figure it out, or to discover what kind of parents they would be to Tommy at nine and a half, or eleven, or fifteen. The Sawyers had been part of the crowd in those first few weeks plastering posters of Tommy all over Greene County, delivering doughnuts and coffee to the police officers with a subdued excitement, an intensity of purpose that she was initially grateful for but, as the days passed, couldn’t help but resent. And Brenda and Dylan had been among the few who came calling a month after Tommy had disappeared, toting along a casserole and some flowers, as if they couldn’t decide what to bring. She’d watched them from the bedroom window, the mother and son standing side by side on the doorstep with nervous faces, saw their bodies sag in relief when they realized that no one was going to let them in. They left the casserole and the flowers on the stoop, and when they had gone she tossed the flowers and scraped the disgusting noodley thing the woman had made into the garbage, washed and scrubbed out the glass pan, and had Henry deliver it back to them that very evening so she could be rid of them forever.
And there was the Sawyers’ gray house with the basketball hoop, same as ever, and there was McKinley. There were lights on in the office. Too late for afterschool and there weren’t enough cars to suggest a meeting; probably it was the custodial staff. Or Dr. Ramos was working late.
If he was still the principal. Probably he had moved on. He had always been an ambitious man.
The light went off. She should go. But she sat in the car until the robust figure of Roberto Ramos exited the building, heading for his car in the parking lot. The same Subaru. He reached into his pocket, fumbling for his keys, and then out of some instinct he looked up and saw her car across the street. They looked at each other across that distance, a tall figure in a black coat; a battered minivan. She shivered in the cold air of the car, rubbing her arms. Maybe he’d just wave, get in his car, and go on. She hoped that was what he’d do.
And yet there he was, knocking on the window. She paused a millisecond and then unlocked the door. He slid in beside her in a rush of air and body heat, so vivid with his smooth pink cheeks and black hair and red scarf that it hurt her eyes to look at him. It was a mistake to have come here. So many mistakes today. She focused her attention on the steering wheel.
“Denise. It’s so good to see you.”
“I was just passing by on my way home. I work over at the Oxford Home now, you know, on Crescent Avenue.”
“I’d heard that.”
He rubbed his hands together. He was wearing winter gloves. “Some spring, huh. Hard to believe it’s April.”
“Yes.”