by Anna Quinn
Once they are seated and she’s taken attendance, she stands in front of her desk, leans on it, smiling and fighting an urge to run from the room.
“Okay,” she says, “today we’ll begin with a freewrite.”
There are a few groans from the audience but mostly grins. Freewrites are easy for most of them—they like that there’s no right or wrong. “Remember,” she says, “this isn’t about sounding smart or clever. It’s about listening to your thoughts and recording them in whatever way they come out.” She feels then, suddenly, that someone is behind her, though she knows there isn’t, how could there be? No one has left their seat or come in the door. She resists the urge to look over her shoulder, but still, the pervasive sensation unnerves her.
“I hate freewrites,” Jessica mutters, slumping back in her seat and sucking on a strand of her hair.
Good, Nora thinks. Good. Focus your attention on her. The girl who likes math because there are answers. Look at her. You are the teacher. Nora moves to the whiteboard and picks up an orange Magic Marker. Orange. The orange box. Shit. Don’t go there. You are the teacher. Teach. Nora plucks the cap off the marker and draws the outline of a brain with a wiggly line splitting it in two. It looks like a cracked lima bean. She does this sometimes, teaches them how the brain works. She points to the drawing and says with a forced steadiness, “Jessica, here’s the thing. When you freewrite, you know, just free associate and write as if no one will read it, you’re tapping into the right side of the brain.” Nora taps the right side of her drawing with the Magic Marker, surprised she can act as if she’s fine. “The right side can offer us discoveries,” she continues, “aha moments, ideas no one ever thought of before. I mean, don’t get me wrong, important things happen over here, too”—she taps the left side of her drawing—“but”—now she points to the right side, draws a light bulb with an exclamation point inside it—“here in the right hemisphere—well, this is where the new stuff happens. And honestly, Jessica, if you want to come up with some new mathematical equations someday, you might want to spend some time over here.”
Jessica considers Nora for a moment, smirks, and says, “Whatever,” but picks up her mechanical pencil as if she may indeed write.
“Okay, everyone, go ahead and begin,” Nora says and begins to walk up and down the aisles, watching pencils slide over paper, thoughts like freed prisoners finally breathing fresh air.
Except for Elizabeth, who sits there with her notebook closed.
“Elizabeth?”
“I have nothing to write about,” Elizabeth says, not looking up, tapping on her notebook with the eraser-end of her pencil.
Nora bends down and rests her elbows on Elizabeth’s desk. She’d tried to talk to her after the Bluest Eye conversation, but Elizabeth had only looked at her shoes and mumbled, “I’m fine.” And when Nora had pressed her, said, “Are you sure?” Elizabeth had looked at her for a moment, eyes full of tears, but then turned away and walked down the hall.
“Elizabeth, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know what to write.”
“Well, maybe start with ‘I don’t remember’? That prompt gets me started sometimes when I’m stuck.”
“What’s the meeting after school about?” Elizabeth whispers.
Nora has a meeting at 3:00 with Elizabeth and her parents, some of her teachers, and the school counselor to discuss Elizabeth’s lack of progress in her classes.
“Is it about The Bluest Eye?”
“No, that meeting is in a few weeks. Today is—well, your parents are concerned about you,” Nora says. Elizabeth’s eyes are so tired, so glazed with sleeplessness. “It’ll be okay. Really.”
“Fuck my parents.”
“Elizabeth, listen. We can’t talk about this right now. Okay? We’ll talk after school.”
Elizabeth jerks her notebook open and begins to write, pressing hard into her paper.
Nora stands up and leaves her. She feels guilty. Twice in the last month, Nora watched Elizabeth rip her freewrites from her notebook, ball them up, and throw them in the wastebasket. And both times, after class, Nora unfolded them and read them. She’d read the pages of ugliness, horrible sentences of self-loathing, lines and loops plunging deep into bottomless holes, and when she’d tried to talk with Elizabeth (not confessing she’d read the notes, how could she?), said, “If you ever need anything, please ask,” but of course Elizabeth didn’t ask, so Nora had felt obligated to show the notes to Joyce Robertson, the school counselor, and now there’s a meeting.
Nora walks by Joe. He’s wearing headphones and a stained T-shirt that says excuse me for staring. He is drawing some sort of multiheaded creature on a tree with dead branches. He glances up at Nora with a smirk that is slightly defiant.
“Cool,” Nora says, admiring his drawing. And she means it. He is a talented artist, his attention to detail, exquisite. “I sure wouldn’t mind being able to see from every direction,” she says.
His smirk morphs into a smile, and he keeps drawing. She’s not going to require more of him in this moment. She knows what he’s up against, living alone with his older brother who’s the night manager at 7-11. Once, after Joe had yelled at his math teacher, “I don’t have time for fucking homework, you fucking moron,” the school counselor told the faculty that Joe did all the cooking and cleaning at his house and to please try and cut him some slack.
Nora walks to her desk and sits down—her head beginning to throb. She allows the students to write until the end of the period. She pretends to grade essays. Neurons firing glass shards into the vessels of her brain.
On her way to the meeting, things are magnified. Students just released from classrooms pour into the hallway, sweaty, in various moods and behaving with conspicuous nuances. Mouths open and close, and sounds come at her in scratching flats and sharps. Arms wave loosely. Lockers slam. Slam over and over again, the deafening slam slam slam and she wants to clap her hands to her ears, but of course she doesn’t. She rushes in and out through bodies, arms, and huge faces breathing close from all angles and she moves in and out, and shit, this must be how a bad acid trip feels, and she rushes into the faculty bathroom, into a stall, locks the door, mind raw, eyes blinking fast.
She is safe.
She sits on the toilet. Listens. A toilet flushes. A door opens. Clicking of heels. A faucet shoots water. Paper towel ripped, crumpled. Clicking of heels. A door opens and shuts with a thud. The clicking heels echo down the hall. Silence.
She shudders. Then, thoughts of Elizabeth. “Damn it,” she says half aloud. “Damn it,” she says again to something she has no name for. “You will not win.” She stands and opens the door.
She is only five minutes late. The counselor, the math teacher, the science teacher, Elizabeth’s parents, Elizabeth, and John sit around the large table. Only John and Elizabeth’s mother look at her. John smiles at her, and she relaxes a bit.
Nora takes a seat next to him. Rubs her temples. He leans over and whispers, “Really glad you’re here.” There’s a pitcher of water and paper cups in the center of the table, and she leans in to pour herself a cup and drinks it all down. The counselor and the teachers shuffle papers and make small talk. At the other end of the table, Mr. Guenther, Elizabeth’s father, sits. He is well-dressed in a suit and tie, thinning black hair slicked back. His clammy face makes Nora look away from him to the mother, who smiles uncertainly at her, her face the same pale white as her daughter’s. Elizabeth sits hunched between her parents, looking at her hands on her lap, eyelashes fluttering like trapped moths.
After the counselor, Joyce, makes introductions, she turns to Elizabeth and says, “Elizabeth, we are here today because we’re concerned about you. Concerned because you aren’t doing your homework, because you are lethargic in class, and, well, because frankly, you aren’t really participating anywhere.”
Elizabeth continues to look at h
er hands. Her body becoming smaller, more rigid by the second. Nora wants to go to her and carry her away.
“Elizabeth,” her father says. “Do you have anything to say to that?”
Elizabeth shrugs.
“How do you feel about school, dear?” Joyce asks. Her tone is syrupy and limp. She is the type of person who brings a big fruit bowl for the faculty room each Monday and drops off little foil-wrapped muffins in staff mailboxes with tags that say, “Have a good day! You’re making a difference!”
“I hate it,” Elizabeth whispers.
“Elizabeth,” her father says, “please speak up, and look at us when we speak to you.”
She looks up. Looks only at Nora. Her agitated eyes pierce Nora’s heart, but Nora smiles at her reassuringly.
“I want to live full time with Mom,” Elizabeth says suddenly, her eyes never leaving Nora’s.
The room is silent.
“What?” says Mr. Guenther, inflamed. “What the hell are you talking about? How can you say that?”
“Well, Bill,” Mrs. Guenther says, sitting up a little straighter, clearing her throat, “it is difficult for her to keep going back and forth. You know, keeping track of everything. Perhaps—”
“Perhaps nothing!” Mr. Guenther says, marching over his wife’s words like a tiger tramping on violets. He turns to his daughter. “You will NOT live with your mother full time! If anything, your mother is a huge part of the problem. Are there even any rules at her house? Do you ever do your homework over there? Ever?”
“Dad,” Elizabeth whispers, looking down. “Please. It would be easier, that’s all.”
“Easier? Easier?” He is becoming louder. “Isn’t that the whole problem? That you want everything easier? Do you even know what hard work is? Do you?”
When Elizabeth says nothing, he shouts at her, “Look at me, damn it!”
“Mr. Guenther, please,” Joyce whines nervously and looks at John to do something.
“Bill,” John says, clenching his pen tightly. “Let’s calm down here. Our goal here is to help Elizabeth. Losing tempers won’t help anyone.”
Nora wants to reach over and unfold his fist and leave her hand in his. But she keeps her hands folded together and her eyes on Elizabeth.
Elizabeth looks at Nora then, and her eyes fill with tears. This girl is not the rebel who talks tough in class and smokes behind the school. Nora thinks about the poems, all the stories she’s read of Elizabeth’s. The freewrites thrown in the garbage. And suddenly, she knows the reason for Elizabeth’s self-loathing. She knows. Fury begins to burn inside her, fury at the people around this table, fury at this man, this pathetic fuck of a father. How she wants to lunge at him, wave Elizabeth’s writing in his face, scream, “You fucking asshole!” But she is frozen there, torn between betraying Elizabeth and getting her the hell away from this man.
“Fine,” her father says with feigned calmness. “If she doesn’t do her homework, there should be consequences, that’s all. Obviously her mother just lets her run wild, and you people have no idea how to get her to complete her work. If anything, Elizabeth should live with me full time.”
Elizabeth looks up then, with such shock on her face, such despair in her eyes, pinpricks of adrenaline shoot through Nora’s body, and when Elizabeth whispers, “NO, NO, NO,” and the shrunken mother sits there, tight-lipped, doing nothing, and the father says, “No?” and becomes more red-faced, more belligerent and says, “We’re done here! I’m taking her out of this wasteland, this pitiful excuse of a school, this”—it is then Nora stands up and goes to Elizabeth, kneels down, and wraps her arms around her.
“Move away from her!” Elizabeth’s father says. He stands up, toppling his chair. “I said …” He glowers at Nora, everything about him clenched.
“Mr. Guenther!” shouts John, already next to Nora and Elizabeth. “Please. Sit down.”
“Elizabeth isn’t going anywhere,” Nora says evenly. She keeps her arms around Elizabeth. “You will not—” but before she can finish, Elizabeth’s father grabs Nora’s wrist and jerks her up from her knees.
“Daddy, stop!” Elizabeth cries, jumping up, pushing her father back.
John is already there, pulling him from behind. “Mr. Guenther, enough!” he shouts. “Stop this second or I’ll call security!”
Nora wrenches her hand from Mr. Guenther’s and backs away, keeps her eyes on him, the ugly impotence of his being nauseating her.
“Get your things, Elizabeth,” he says quietly.
Nora’s heart beats violently, the fury within her burning out of control. She pushes between Elizabeth and Mr. Guenther. She looks him in the eyes. She cannot stop herself. “You asshole. You fucking asshole,” she says, and punches him in the stomach. She hears him gasp and then his hand is flying hard across her face and now people are shouting and someone is lifting her off the floor—carrying her out of the room, laying her down somewhere soft.
* * *
“Are you okay?” It’s John. He’s pulled up a chair next to her. Brown eyes stunned, worried, nervous. He has an ice pack, and holds it lightly to her cheek.
She winces, resurfaces. Lies motionless for a moment. She is in the faculty room on a couch. She sits up abruptly; the ice pack flies out of John’s hand.
“Elizabeth! Where’s Elizabeth?” she asks, panicked.
“I’m not sure,” John says, his voice stressed. He reaches down and picks up the ice pack from the floor, sets it on the end table. “I was too busy getting you off Mr. Guenther. God, Nora, what the hell happened? You’re lucky you weren’t hurt any worse.”
“We can’t let Elizabeth go with him. He’s molesting her, John. We have to find her.”
John drew a deep breath, then released it as he said, “Nora, do you have evidence? Because if you believe he’s molesting her, shit.” He stood up, began pacing. “If we’re going to help her, we have to think this through. Call CPS before he hurts her again. We have to think through this carefully. We don’t want to make things any worse for her.”
Something hard and hot seethes in Nora again. She doesn’t have any evidence. It’s all in Elizabeth’s notebooks—if it exists anymore at all. “I need to talk to her. Now,” Nora says, and stands. “Don’t you understand? She’s already abandoned herself. I can’t abandon her. I won’t. I can’t. I need to find her.” But as she moves to leave, John reaches for her hand, holds it gently.
“Nora. Please. Ok. Let me figure something out. But Nora—we need to talk about what happened in there—at the meeting. We need to talk about what’s happening right now.” His voice is thick with emotion but he continues. “Nora, over the years, you and I have seen lots of kids like Elizabeth. We’ve helped them, or at least most of them. We’ve tried. We’ve had condescending asshole parents in that conference room, and you’ve worked through it with them. You made a difference by being rational and firm. You’ve never raised your voice. Even when you were outraged. Let alone raised your fist. But Nora, you punched a parent today. God knows he deserved it, but still. And right now—this is more than what’s going on with Elizabeth. What is it? Please. Can you tell me?” Her hand falls from his like a leaf.
She is quiet. She is bone tired. “Yes,” she says. She sits back down on the couch.
He closes the door, sits next to her, puts his jacket around her like a shawl. She looks out the window into the courtyard filled with rhododendrons and ferns and begins to tell him everything—about Margaret, the dissociation, Paul and Elisa, her worries about Fiona. He holds both her hands while she speaks. He wipes her eyes when she weeps. He promises to do everything possible to keep Elizabeth safe. Promises to call Child Protective Services right away. Promises to be there for her whenever she needs him. He tells her she is the bravest person he’s ever met.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The evening of February 1, 1997
Fiona has
emptied a box of candy hearts onto her pillow and is sorting them by color. She’s wearing her bluebird nightgown and the Minnie Mouse slippers Paul bought for her on their family vacation to Disneyland last year. Innocence surrounds her, makes her appear fragile and ethereal, and Nora feels then a fierce love for her, a need to take her somewhere unceasingly gentle and good, a place without pounding fists and ugly sounds, a place where she can protect her from anyone who might creep fear into her tiny heart. “Did I ever tell you that you are the most wonderful little girl in the universe?” Nora says.
Fiona giggles. “Yes, Mommy, a billion times. But, Mommy! Listen! I need more of these!” she says, holding high a purple candy heart that says hug me. “Valentine’s Day is soon, and I want to put a heart inside each of the cards I give out.”
“Where did you get these?”
Fiona stops counting and looks nervously at Nora. “Elisa gave them to me. She walked with Daddy and me to school this morning, and she gave each of us a box—is that okay, Mommy? Daddy … Daddy told me not to tell and I … I …”
Be calm, be calm, be calm. “Of course that’s okay, honey; she’s our neighbor, and she seems very nice.”
But of course it doesn’t feel okay. It’s demoralizing. She’d sensed from the start there was something more between Paul and Elisa then a platonic friendship. But she can’t think about that right now, not on top of the day’s events.
“Fiona, could you put those away now and get ready for bed?”
“Okay, Mommy, but we can get more, right?”
“Yes, honey, we’ll get more. We have two weeks until Valentine’s Day. Now clean up.” And they will have plenty of time. John has placed her on a three-month leave. He had to, she knows that. She is, in fact, grateful and relieved.
Fiona puts the hearts back into the box, one by one, reading each one as she does. Nora wishes only to lie down. Close her eyes. But now, “Mommy, here’s one for you! It says, ‘Kiss me!’”