5.
At the high school, Elizabeth goes through the motions, attempting to pull concentration out of the ruin she feels in her heart. In the faculty lounge, before classes begin, she encounters Mr. Petit, who looks terrible, looks, she might say, how she feels. She almost does say it. There’s a hollow cast to his face, the bones of his cheeks showing, and his complexion is gray, his eyes a shade of yellow. When he rests his hands on the table on either side of his coffee mug, she sees that his knuckles, too, are yellow. She wants to avoid him, but he follows her with his gaze, sitting there waiting for the coffee to cool a little.
“Waste of a day,” he mutters.
She says, “Yep.” She can barely keep her voice. She pours coffee and moves to the bulletin board, staring at communications concerning plans and activities for the day, the week, the month—the busy life of the school—without really attending to them. She doesn’t want to sit down, doesn’t want conversation. The room is too brightly lit. It makes the cloudy day outside the windows seem darker. The tables scattered 338
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around are polished and new, reflecting the lights above them. Nobody else is here but Petit.
But then James Christ comes in, hurrying, smelling of the outside, his coat collar twisted, his hair mussed by the wind, cheeks burnished by sunlight reflecting from snow. He squints at her and only glances at Petit.
“Got a job interview,” he says. “Monday after Thanksgiving.”
“Good for you,” Elizabeth says.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He looks at Petit, shrugs, and then puts his shoulder bag down on the table with a thump. His lunch is packed in there, along with a thermos. He brings it all out with an attitude of someone removing fresh purchases, examining each thing as if to be sure it’s what he bought, then setting it down next to the bag, like a display. “I’m finally going to get out of here,” he says.
Without looking up, Petit says, “I have a headache.”
“Sorry.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“I’m so gone from here.”
“You didn’t give it to me J.C. but you can make it worse.”
“Sorry. I don’t know how many times I have to say I don’t like being called that.”
“J.C.?”
Christ sighs but doesn’t speak.
“I’ll try to remember,” says Petit. “Tough to think just now.”
Elizabeth sees Calvin Reed at the entrance of the room, and she walks over to send him on his way. Calvin’s got his hands in his pockets, and there’s a smirk on his face. “You didn’t like my sentences about the mountain and the mist,” he says in that unbelievable squawk.
“Go on to your homeroom, Calvin.”
“You sent me to Petit.”
Mr. Petit stands slowly, unsteadily, and moves to the other end of the room with his briefcase. He sets it down and takes a seat there. It’s clear he wants to be far from the sound of Calvin’s voice. When he sits, it’s t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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almost a collapse into the chair. He puts one hand to the side of his face, leaning the elbow on the table. He doesn’t look up.
“Hey, Petit,” says Calvin. “That you?”
“Go now, Calvin,” Elizabeth tells him.
“Just want to talk to him.”
James Christ says, “This is not an area for students, Calvin.”
“Hey Petit,” Calvin says. “You scared?”
Petit doesn’t seem to have heard. He opens his briefcase, removes a folder, and opens it. His chin is lifted slightly, so he can look through his bifocals. The gray light from the windows reflects complicatedly with the room light off his glasses. You cannot see his eyes.
Elizabeth says, “I’ll count to three, Calvin.”
“Okay,” the boy says. “Okay. I thought this was a free country.”
She stands there and waits for him to move. It comes to her in her anguish that she never disliked a student as much as this one, and that a part of this feeling is indeed tied to his appearance: the trunk-heavy, lumbering solidness of him, that amazingly shrill voice. For an instant, she has a sense of how everything about him is determined by these unfortunate facts, but her own discouragement shifts inside her like a force kicking aside everything but the simplest sensation of aversion to him: she wants him gone, far from her.
He reaches into his loose jeans and brings out a knife, a switchblade.
With a click, the blade is exposed, a long, thin shine.
“Uh,” James Christ says. “Not allowed. Not—not—not allowed.”
His tone is nearly that of a boy calling someone on the rules of a game, except that his voice has a tremor in it. He’s frozen where he stands.
Elizabeth says, “Calvin, you are in such serious trouble now.”
“Take your blouse off,” he says.
She doesn’t move. In the tail of her eye, she sees Mr. Petit sit back and put his hands to the sides of his head. He looks like someone in the throes of a terrible headache, in the middle of shattering sound. She wants him to do something; she can’t see James Christ, who has begun a sort of toneless muttering about this being completely out of line and against the rules.
“Come on,” Calvin says. “Do it. Take it off.”
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“You go ahead and do whatever it is you think you’re up to,” Elizabeth says evenly, trying to control her fear and her rage. Finally, something snaps in her. She says: “Go ahead. You want to use it. Use it. You think I’m afraid of you? You think you’ve got trouble? Everybody’s got trouble. And I don’t care. Go ahead. Fucking use it. I don’t care.”
He’s just inside the door now, holding the knife out blade-first, between his thumb and index finger, a pose.
Mr. Petit stands, holding his briefcase. “The world makes no sense anymore at all,” he says. “And then it does.” He reaches into the case and retrieves something in brown paper, unfolding it slowly, shaking his head. It’s a revolver.
“My God in heaven!” James Christ says.
Calvin Reed sees it, too, and drops the knife. “I wouldn’a done nothing,” he says.
Mr. Petit moves slowly to Elizabeth’s side. She reaches for his arm, but something in his expression makes her pause. His eyes are wide, round, his mouth is agape, lips pulled back, a mask of pure fright, though his motion is steady and determined. “Suppose we go down to my office and have a little chat,” he says to the boy. “You and me.”
“I put the knife down,” Calvin says. “Man, come on. I wouldn’a hurt nobody.”
“Well,” says Petit. “Turns out I would.” He gestures for the boy to precede him out of the room.
The boy looks pleadingly at Elizabeth, who gives back a helpless expression. She can’t believe any of this.
“Call the police!” James Christ says. “My God!”
Elizabeth moves to the doorway and watches Calvin’s progress, slow, down the hall, followed by Mr. Petit. Several others are there, and they step back, move aside, startled and confused, too.
“Call them, James,” Elizabeth says to the quailing man in the room behind her. “Do it. Call them now.”
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6.
Nothing happening on Alison’s watch this morning but a backache and a feeling of having missed a night’s sleep. Roy is out sick, and she’s stuck with a man she hasn’t ever worked with and doesn’t know very well. His name is Rick. He looks like a high school kid. Blocky and overmuscled, and there’s something about the crispness of his uniform that makes her think of his other habits; probably he keeps all his socks and underwear folded and accounted for. No one should be that perfectly creased and spit-shined. They have spent the first hour learning that they do not much like each other, arguing about the Clinton scandal—his opinions about it all are just too obtuse to leave alone. He’s on the side of Cong
ress, he says. Does Alison actually think she knows better than Congress? She decides to change the subject. But on other topics—children, schools, the international situation—he’s also annoyingly tight-assed and dim. With effort that increases the wattage of her back misery, she manages, over the hours, to narrow the range of conversation to procedural matters. She can afford to be tolerant, too, because her father is coming home this morning, just as her night shift ends, and she’ll go with Stanley to pick him up. She understands that she’s at that place of anticipation where even with these irritations provided by the oblivious man beside her in the car—the smell of too much bay rum and the continual clearing of his throat—she feels glad, and the hours can crawl if they will. The end of it all is the welcome-home for Oliver.
The call comes in just past eight o’clock: something at the high school. Trying to put down rising panic, she turns the roof light on and the siren, and heads there, speeding.
“My son goes to that school,” she hears herself say.
“Small odds,” says Rick.
It takes her a moment to realize that he’d meant that her son is most likely not involved in whatever this is. It hasn’t been characterized as an emergency yet.
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thinking, along with her, of Moses Lake, Washington; Dunblane, Scotland; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Springfield, Oregon; and, only last April, Littleton, Colorado: Columbine.
Just last month, there was a mandatory seminar and a briefing about high school shootings, characteristics that seemed repeated in the separate horrors—similarities between them.
“God,” Alison says, without even quite realizing that she’s said it.
Another squad car has preceded them to the parking lot, and the officers are out, standing with some teachers and people from the surrounding neighborhood. Children are coming rapidly but in an orderly way out of the front doors, and she sees Jonathan among them. Jonathan leaves the line of others and walks over to her. She grips his arms and looks into his eyes.
“What is it?” he says to her. “What’s happened?”
“We don’t know yet. Just go on over there with your class, and stay away from the building.” She squeezes his wrist, and then watches him go over to stand with everyone, on the far side of the lot. Buses are lined up. Apparently, they never left from the morning’s drop-off. Children are filing back into them, to be taken to another location, for precau-tion’s sake.
The other officers are Eddie and Harvey. Eddie raises one hand as she and Rick approach.
“Hostage situation,” he says. “We think. We guess. A teacher.”
“A teacher’s the hostage?”
“Teacher’s holding somebody hostage. No kidding,” Eddie says. “Petit. That ring a bell?”
Elizabeth comes from the main entrance of the school. She walks over to Alison. “I don’t really know what we’ve got,” she says. There’s a darkness around her eyes, a kind of drained detachment, as if she’s reporting everything from a distance. She tells Alison about Calvin and the knife, Petit and the revolver. “He wants everyone to go away for a while, or something might happen. That’s what he said. Whole thing’s—I don’t know.”
Alison can’t speak for a moment.
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is it, what caliber? Elizabeth simply stares at him. Alison glances over at Jonathan moving along in the line of children and feels a rush of gratitude while worrying about someone else’s boy, Calvin. She turns back to Elizabeth, whose eyes seem opaque, giving off no light at all. “Elizabeth, do you think he’ll talk to me?”
“He won’t say what he wants. Well—he says he wants quiet.”
“Can you show us the way to the room?”
Elizabeth walks with them to the intersection of the two main hall -
ways and starts down the right one.
“Just point, honey,” Alison says.
Elizabeth shakes her head and then leans against the wall. She looks like she might fall over.
“Are you all right?” Alison says.
“No. Everything’s—it’s all in pieces.”
“What is? Has he hurt anyone?”
“No.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Alison tells her.
“Down there,” says Elizabeth, indicating a door not twenty feet away.
“What’s his first name?”
“Roger.”
“And who’s with him again? Calvin what?”
“Calvin Reed.”
Alison and Rick make their way to the closed door. They listen for a moment, standing on either side of it. Behind them, Elizabeth murmurs to some others to go back, keep away.
Alison reaches over and knocks once. She starts to say the first name but then decides it’s better to appeal to him as who he is in this place.
“Mr. Petit?” she says. “Sir?”
Nothing.
She knocks again. “Can we come in there, please?”
“Go away,” comes the voice, low but strong.
She hears a lividness in it—rage, and something else, too. She says,
“Is the boy in there with you?”
Silence. Then, a murmur, another voice, impossibly high-pitched.
“Mr. Petit, is Calvin all right?”
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Again, there are only the other sounds in the halls, the bustle and motion outside, more sirens. Rick starts to bring his piece out of its holster, and she gestures for him to stop.
He nods importantly, and she can’t look at him.
She decides to address the boy directly. “Calvin, can you hear me?”
The voice that comes is the boy’s. “This man’s crazy. He’s gonna hurt me.”
“Okay, I want you to open the door, Mr. Petit, and come on out please. Or let Calvin out anyway.”
“Go away, for a while.” Petit’s voice, now rather frighteningly calm.
“Tell everyone to leave the building, please.”
“Everyone’s done that, Mr. Petit.”
“You go, too.”
“Let Calvin come out and we’ll do that. Everyone’ll go away for a time. We know you need time to think.”
“You don’t know anything about me, lady.”
“Well, but I do. I know you’re the beloved Mr. Petit. And I know you’ve got to give this up and come out.”
“Calvin brought a knife to school,” comes the voice. “What do you think of that?”
“Mr. Petit, does he still have the knife?”
“He’s got a fucking gun,” comes the boy’s voice in a shriek.
Now Rick does pull his weapon out of its holster. “Mr. Petit? We’re the police. We want you to open the door and slide the gun out on the floor, and then come out with your hands out in front of you.”
“Go away, please, and no one important will be harmed.”
“Mr. Petit, we can’t do that,” Alison says.
Again, there’s an ominous quiet from the other side of the door.
“Mr. Petit?”
No response.
In the hall now, there’s a stirring, and Alison turns, not without a sense of alarm, to find the old priest, Brother Fire, coming toward her with Elizabeth. “Go back,” she tells them. “There’s a firearm involved here. You can’t be here.”
“Can I talk to him?” says the priest, looking from Alison to Rick’s gun to Alison again. “I’m his confessor.”
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She stares.
The priest, to her astonishment, shrugs.
Alison knocks on the door again, very lightly. “Mr. Petit, your priest is here.”
Petit says, “You’re kidding.”
Now they are all quiet, looking at each other. Alison says, “Will you talk to him, Mr. Petit?”
“Through the door, yes. Just like in confession.”
“Mr. Petit,” says the priest. “I’m right here. Like you asked.”
“You got here too soon,” says Petit.
“Can you come out and we’ll talk?”
“Make everybody else go away, Father.”
“We’ll just move down the hall,” Alison says. “That’s all we’re allowed to do now. Okay, Mr. Petit?”
Silence again.
Alison gestures for Rick to move off, then indicates that the priest should stay to one side of the door. She nods and murmurs, “Go ahead.”
7.
Brother Fire steps forward and pauses. “Everyone’s gone now,” he says.
“I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, Father. Thought I’d take care of it here.”
“Mr. Petit, we are all in the hands of God.”
“I don’t believe that anymore. And neither do you.”
For a horrible little space, he’s unable to think of a response. Then:
“Of course I do. We do. We both do.” He feels a hot stirring in his gullet, an upsurge of stomach acid. He takes a breath and straightens, waiting for it to pass. He can’t find words beyond the ones dictated by the present trouble; he senses the need to move past this, to the suffering of the other man.
The voice comes from the other side of the door: “Now we’re in a B
movie, Father. Aren’t we. You’re Pat O’Brien, I’m Jimmy Cagney. What the hell’s the name of the movie?”
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“Why don’t you let the boy go?”
Petit’s voice comes in a bad Irish brogue: “Oh, it’s Father Flannigan, come to save the day.”
“Mr. Petit, please.”
Nothing.
“Mr. Petit?”
“I was just going to scare the lady,” comes the boy’s voice. “Somebody help me, please.”
Brother Fire reaches to try the knob on the door, and is conscious, as he does so, that it’s a ridiculous notion, given the situation, that it might be unlocked. But, to his astonishment, the knob turns, and the door rides open an inch, of its own weight, with a little squeak. Silence on the other side. Amazed, frightened, fearing the worst, expecting an explosion, a shot, he moves it a little more, saying, “It’s just me, just me,” and then he steps into the room—and takes another breath.
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