“What, Mommy? What?” Tug. Tug. Tug. Will Noelle ever stop tugging?
Directly in front of Mary Beth, the door to the supply room stays closed. It’s almost as if she expected it to have vanished. Like the school would have demolished the place with a wrecking ball.
That would have been nice.
The industrial paper cutter sliced clear through the bone of two of Miss Ollie’s fingers, just like they always warned the children it could. Mary Beth tries to picture how this could have possibly unfolded. Why would two fingers have borne the brunt?
Something must have happened. Miss Ollie must have been startled into bumping the open paper cutter. Or there was a struggle. She might have reached back behind her, to the counter, where the cutter sat, for support and—
But of course that’s not what killed her. Two fingers gone does not a dead teacher make. For the parents, the students, the rest remains a mystery. Maybe it’s better that way. Or maybe it’s worse.
Mary Beth stretches her hand out and touches the door handle. Twists. Locked. “Oh.” She hesitates. Her heart jumps rope.
“I think it’s so important—” Mary Beth swears her skin jumps a millimeter off her skeleton at a voice mere inches behind her. “—that we’re coming back to school sooner rather than later. Sorry, it’s just me,” says Megan Tolbert. Zeke and Noelle immediately latch on to one another, and Mary Beth tries to act happy to see them.
“Sorry,” says Mary Beth. “Jumpy today, I guess.”
“Same here. Zeke has been so needy ever since—well, you know.”
Mary Beth reads between the lines. Five days of being nibbled at and slurped from has left her feeling like a human vending machine. The only moments in those days that she managed to feel like a discrete person were, paradoxically, the ones during which her husband was inside of her. She remains determined not to miss a day in bed with Doug. When she isn’t careful, when she doesn’t stay focused, it feels like she’s sliding uncontrollably this way and that around her slippery life. It makes her practically seasick. But the 30-Day Challenge presents achievable goals. Fixed points on the horizon. See? Everything’s okay; everything’s fine. She’s having sex.
“Well, today will be good,” says Megan. “The kids need routine.”
Routine, yes. They just need to get through the days. Check them off, one by one, the way she and Doug are doing, but also not at all the same way, naturally.
Noelle and the other children at Little will grow out of it, this disgusting blood habit. As far as she can tell, the trajectory of a child with the syndrome is roughly the same as that of a more run-of-the-mill biter. Twelve months. Eighteen, tops. That’s not forever. It’ll just feel that way.
One day the tooth fairy will arrive for the fours of Little Academy and pluck their vicious peewee teeth out from beneath pillows and then maybe this will all be over and it will feel like something the parents collectively made up, like the tooth fairy herself.
“We need routine.” Darby joins them. Five days without childcare and look at them, all knocking at the gates, murder be damned. They’re supposed to be enjoying their children. Are they all really so eager to be rid of them? Mary Beth prefers not to answer that.
Instead, she thinks about the small footprints found at the scene, what they might mean for her, for all of them.
“Is everyone returning?” Megan asks.
“I think so,” answers Mary Beth. There seems to be little choice. Parents work. Parents have lives and custody agreements and other children. These are all things that must go on and so must the school.
“How does that saying go?” asks Darby. “If you stop traveling and doing normal routines, you let the terrorists win. That’s how I’m thinking about it. We can’t let the killer control our minds.”
Megan pales at that. A killer on the loose. A murderer. Haven’t they all been trying not to think about that? Haven’t they agreed not to say it out loud?
“It’s like marriages,” Darby continues, oblivious to the way she’s marched into a dark room and conjured Bloody Mary for them in the mirror. “In the face of tragedy, they either pull together or fall apart.” She flicks her fingers to sign an explosion. “We need to pull together.”
Mary Beth’s throat feels parched. She’s second-guessing whether this is a good idea. Perhaps she shouldn’t leave Noelle after all.
“Mary Beth, you’re always so good at that.” Megan’s medical badge swings from the pocket of her scrubs. “Please, tell us what you need. Anything. We’re there.”
Mary Beth needs a damp cloth. She feels hot and that swimming sense of seasickness again. “Not me,” she croaks out. “We just need to worry about the kids.”
One by one, each of the mothers in attendance hangs a backpack on a peg and sends their kid into a new classroom, off to a new, not-dead teacher, each trying to ignore the alarm bells ringing in their ears, trying to employ the same steadfastness they’ve previously reserved to tune out children’s questions while trying to carry on adult conversation, the same bullheaded fixity required to neglect their own needs. Somewhere Miss Ollie’s killer is on the loose and that somewhere may, indeed, very well be here.
* * *
Mary Beth scales the two flights of steps to Pastor Ben’s office on the church campus. The ministers’ offices are located on the third floor of a stone building off the beaten path. It’s an old structure, barely renovated, with window air-conditioning units and floors that still smell faintly of pine. She knocks on a white door on which gummy old paint drips have long since dried, one coat done over another without taking the time to sand in between.
“Just a moment.” The cast-iron knob turns noisily in the joint and then Pastor Ben is there right in front of her in all his Pastor Ben glory. She thinks: You can’t think Pastor Ben’s attractive after Miss Ollie’s been murdered. Only she can and she does. She remembers the way Erin mooned after him, asking her, the older woman, the sexless mother, what she thought of Ben. A lot, she should have replied. She thinks a lot about Ben.
He greets her wearing a clean undershirt and jeans, ushering her in as he moves for his own chair across the way.
The seat beneath her is an old schoolhouse chair with metal legs and a curved wooden back, designed to be stacked. Her bottom feels slippery on it. “I wanted to talk to you about—about what happened to Miss Ollie,” she says.
He drops back into his chair, his intense green eyes fastened on her. “I’m listening.”
“I want to make sure you’re prepared to protect the children.” She tries not to sound overly dramatic, but it feels important. They’re a community, after all, they need to act like it. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but a child’s footprints were found beside the body.” She can’t bring herself to mention Miss Ollie by name.
“A child’s footprints?”
She nods. “We have to think one of them might have … found the body and been too afraid to say anything.” A four-year-old witness. More than one person will be after these children. To say nothing of their … condition, which, in truth, only seems to be getting more pronounced.