“Can we listen to the ocean?” Rose asks. They’re eager for routine.
“It’s over here. On this tape.” Alicia points to an old boom box. “It has seagulls, too.”
“A big yes to seagulls,” Jake says, moving to help Kenji with the pillows.
I place Patrick gently in the chair near his dad and give him a squeeze before letting go. He watches as the others settle in.
“Can Patrick sit with us?” Kenji asks, looking at his friend across the room.
“Patrick’s okay, honey.”
“Here’s his pillow.” Kenji hands it to me. I smile at Patrick and toss it to him. He looks pleased as he hugs it to his chest.
“Thanks, Kenji. You’re a good friend,” I tell him.
Patrick holds out Lamby, and Rose looks up at me. I nod and she runs to the front of the room to retrieve her stuffed animal for nap time, then returns, rubbing him against her face.
Simon reaches over and slips his small hand in mine as I pull a chair up beside him.
“What happened here?” I ask, touching the blister on his palm.
“Monkey bars,” he says.
“Can I sit in your lap—just for a minute?” Rose whispers.
I shift position and pat my legs. Her face lights up and she climbs onto my lap, curling against me with her head burrowed into my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her and turn a little so I have a better view of Stutts and Patrick. I make eye contact with Patrick across the room, and he lays his head on his pillow.
The kids are slow to settle down, except Patrick, who’s asleep almost immediately. Jake’s gone back to the computer. I look over at the top of his head, just visible above the monitor, and try to remind myself why I used to hate him.
Even though they don’t all sleep, their eyes are closed, so there’s no one to see the tears that roll down my face and drop onto the top of Rose’s head. She doesn’t notice, and I’m able to stop the flow before the waterworks get out of hand.
I can’t let my guard down. I have to hold it together for the kids.
It’s going to be all right, I tell myself. Everyone’s going to walk out of here today. We’re all going to be fine.
Everything will be okay. It has to be.
“Miss Emery?” Rose looks up. “Are you okay?” She pats my arm protectively.
And I realize I’m shaking—hard.
CHAPTER 18
JAKE
I STARE AT THE COMPUTER SCREEN.
When examined, female hamsters have their anal and genital openings close together, whereas males have these two holes farther apart (the penis is usually withdrawn into the coat and thus appears as a hole or pink pimple).
Okay, I admit it; I had to look it up. I’m a Wikipedia nerd. I knew Alicia’d made that up about the boy hamster’s tail being longer. But sometimes when these kids say something crazy, it turns out they’re right. It was gonna bug me until I checked it out.
Poor little hamster guy. A penis that looks like a pimple? Man, that would be depressing. I click to another site to double check.
Wait a minute. There it is. Unbelievable! Crap, Alicia wins again.
The back end of the male tends to be elongated and rounder in appearance in comparison to the female.
I’ll be damned. She must have heard somebody say that and misunderstood tail? Or maybe I misunderstood tail? Hell, I must be losing it. Researching hamster sex is probably not the best use of my time right now. I open Facebook and Cole is there.
molly told me about the dude. scary shit. guys not playin with full deck
f’real
hold on. chaps back. wants to talk to you
Jake, Mr. Chapman here. Chief Walker wants you to describe the room and tell us exactly where the gunman is sitting.
stutts, his name is stutts.
Mr. Stutts, sorry.
hold on a minute. i have an idea.
I shut down Facebook and reach for Mrs. Campbell’s cell phone. I gotta be a fool to try to take a picture right now, but if it would help them see where everybody is in the room . . . I don’t even want to think about them rushing the guy, but if that’s what they’re planning, I sure as hell want it to go well. If I can prop the phone between the two stacks of books on Mrs. Campbell’s desk, maybe I can pull it off.
The ocean tape Emery’s playing for the kids is getting to Stutts. Even though he hasn’t taken his eyes off the door, he’s kinda spaced-out looking. He’s leaning his head back against the wall, but his eyes are open.
I’m pretty wiped out, too. My buddy Hunter, who’s a little obsessive sometimes, told me once that when he’s on an airplane, he holds his feet up a few inches off the floor the whole time ’cause he’s convinced the plane’ll crash if he puts them down. Well, that’s how I feel—like I’ve been holding an airplane in the sky all day.
I click on the camera icon, then glance up at Stutts. He’s not looking. I prop the phone on the desk, just to the right of the stack of books, checking the screen to get as much of the room in the photo as possible. The position’s too low to get a good view. I slide another book underneath. My left arm is hidden behind the books, but I keep my right hand on the keyboard and my eyes on the screen so it’ll still look like I’m playing a game.
I hold my breath and snap the picture. Stutts looks over at me. My body tenses and my heart misfires. Shit! I’m not sure what he’ll do if he catches me, but if past experience is any gauge, he tends to shoot when he’s mad.
I lay the phone flat and put both hands on the computer keys. I can feel his eyes on me as I stare at the screen and type random keys.
“What are you doing?” he yells at me.
I look up innocently. I rest my hands on the keyboard to keep them from shaking.
“Nothing—just moving a book out of the way.” My voice sounds high even to me.
He stares at me and squints his eyes.
“It was about to fall off the desk.” I turn away like nothing’s going on and focus on the screen.
Let it go, let it go, don’t come over here, please don’t come over here.
“Mr. Stutts, could we turn out the lights?” Emery asks, drawing his attention from me. I’m not sure if she’s doing it on purpose, but it was most excellent timing. “Maybe just the switch for the back?”
To my surprise, he stands up and flips the switch, leaving the back half of the room a little darker.
He goes back to his chair, and I pretend I’m playing the game. I don’t dare look over to see if he’s looking. Time passes and he seems to have forgotten me, thank God.
After a little while longer, I reach for the phone and slide it toward me. I click on the photo. Damn, Willoughby, you oughta be a private eye. You can’t see all the kids, but Stutts’s position in the room is clear in relation to the door. I’m not sure how much this will help them, but if Stutts goes crazy and starts shooting, they’ll know where he is, at least for now. Stutts shooting—shit, I have to make sure that doesn’t happen.
I click the message button and send it to Cole’s phone.
Stutts leans back in his chair again, focused on the door. I open Facebook again and look for Cole.
Cole: check yr phone. but tell them not to do anything yet. give us time to talk to him now that most kids are gone. maybe we can get him to let others go. ill check back when i can.
I close chat and go back to games. I lean back in my chair and yawn and stretch. I swear I should get an Oscar. It’s starting to wear me out—pretending not to be scared outta my mind.
I learned to be a pretty good actor when my mom died. The whole time I was standing next to her coffin in my new suit, shaking hands with people, I was just thinking, “I want my momma,” over and over again like a little kid.
CHAPTER 19
EMERY
Simon’s snoring quietly; he’s out. I give Rose a hug and slide her onto my chair. Alicia’s breathing evenly, her small hand under her freckled cheek.
I walk to the back of the room and get th
ree Diet Cokes from Mrs. C’s fridge. I put one in front of Jake, then take a deep breath, walk to the front, and hold one out to Stutts. He eyes me warily, then reaches for the can.
I pull up a chair beside him—not too close. Without speaking, I look back at the sleeping children. I feel Stutts watching me—and Jake watching us from the computer.
My heart’s racing. Maybe Jake’s right and I’m making a mistake, but I have to try. Any kind of connection I can make with Stutts could make a difference for us if things fall apart here. We can’t just sit and wait to see what happens. No matter how this goes, I have to know when it’s all over that I did everything I could to help these kids, to help Stutts see us as people instead of targets.
Stutts doesn’t say anything, just looks back at the door. Then, so quietly I almost don’t hear him, he says, “How long do they rest?”
It’s a start. “Um, the schedule says twenty minutes. We’re not usually here this time of day.”
He glances up at the clock.
I lean forward a little. “Were there a lot of kids over there—in Iraq?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer at first. Then: “Yeah.”
“Did you have much contact with them?”
He waits, like he’s deciding whether to tell me to get lost, then says, “They ran beside our vehicles, begging.”
“For food?”
“Candy . . . sometimes money. We had to stop giving them stuff because they’d run out in the road. And if you gave something to one kid, another one would beat him up for it.”
“Were they hungry?”
“Some of them. There were packs that ran together . . . dirty . . . barefoot.”
“Where were their parents?”
He pauses. “Some didn’t have any—orphans of the war. The ones who did—I don’t know. Sometimes schools were damaged in the bombing; I guess if the school was closed, the parents didn’t have anything to do with the kids while they worked, so they just ran wild.”
“Did they speak English?”
A rare half smile; for the first time I see how much he looks like Patrick. “Things like ‘give me’ and ‘USA.’ My buddy Tucker taught them some English.”
“Is he back home—your buddy?”
“Tucker? Yeah, he’s back.”
“Do you talk to him much?”
“No, Tucker’s not doing too great,” he says. “What people don’t understand is, you can’t ever go home. You pretend you can pick up where you left off, but you’re not the same person.” He looks around the room. “It’d be like you trying to go back to elementary school again. You think you could fit in here if you tried hard enough?”
I glance over at the kids and shake my head.
“War changes you,” he says. “You know things you didn’t before.” He frowns. “It takes something from you that you never get back. One day you’re pickin’ pieces of brain matter off your shirt from the guy who was sitting next to you, and a few weeks later—back at home—you’re supposed to get all worked up over whether the city’s gonna fix the potholes on Jefferson Street. Everybody wants to talk to you about gas prices or who’s gonna win the football game. Who gives a shit, man? People are dying all over the world.”
He shakes his head in disgust. “People see homeless veterans sleeping in the streets and they just turn away. They don’t care what happens to you after you get back. They don’t get it that you can’t sleep in a bed. Can’t be part of a family. Can’t be part of a community.”
His eyes darken. “You think you’ll appreciate life when you get back, but the sad truth is, you miss death, at least the fear of it. It’s like you can’t see what’s good in the world around you without the constant reminder that you can lose it all. You come home and realize you’ve turned into an adrenaline junkie. You crave the high, you need the drama. Civilian life doesn’t do it for you anymore.”
His words are coming faster now. “You’re surrounded by death every minute over there. You don’t wait for death to come for you; you have to go out every day looking for it. I used to pray not to die, first few weeks I was over there. I’d picture my kid at my funeral, and I’d pray I’d make it back home to watch him grow up. And then I’d have dreams that my legs were blown off, and I prayed I would die—if it meant not being a cripple for life. And then I saw a guy get burned up in a Humvee, and I started praying to die quickly if I had to go—a clean shot to the head. You get to where you don’t know what to pray for.”
He looks me in the eyes. “People don’t know what really matters.”
It’s the most I’ve heard him say—and the calmest he’s been.
Maybe it’s a little peek into what he was like before.
“What really matters to you?” I ask.
“My kid. My wife.” His voice cracks a little on the word wife and he looks away. “My country. In that order.”
“How long have you been back?”
“Eight months.” He looks over at Patrick. “While I was there, I couldn’t think of anything else but being back with my family. The pictures Silda sent of Patrick were what kept me going. But then when I got home, I couldn’t make it work.”
My heart races at the mention of Silda’s name.
“You can’t understand, unless you’ve lived for months in the middle of people trying to kill you. You live in constant fear, always on your guard because if you’re not hyperaware, you’re dead.” He leans toward me, his breath reeking of alcohol. “Not dead like in some fucking video game. Dead dead. Turned to pink mist, they call it.”
“Can’t the army help you,” I ask, “to readjust to normal life?”
“Normal,” he grunts. “What the hell is normal? Oh yeah, they help you get ready to go home, all right. You know what the army calls reintegration? Some lame video they make you watch while everybody’s dog tired and half asleep. It’s a big joke.
“Yeah, people like you think you want to know all about it, but you don’t really want to hear about the stench of gore, the smell of charred bodies in the street—pieces of people. I don’t know which is worse—looking at that shit when you first get there because the sick part of you wants to know what it looks like, or later on when you don’t look at it because you’ve seen it all before. Stuff that’s so bad, it can’t be said out loud. Unspeakable, that’s what it is.”
I shiver in the warm room.
“Listen.” He looks in my eyes. I want to pull away from him, but I don’t. “Once you’ve pulled that trigger—once you watch a man die and you know you killed him—you’re never the same. You can tell yourself he was gonna kill you first. You can say over and over again that he was the enemy. But he’s still a guy just fighting for what he believes in—maybe a guy who’s a lot like you—and his life is over, done. His wife’s got no husband, his kid’s got no daddy. Why? Because you killed him—that’s why.”
He lapses into silence. The room is quiet except for Mr. Worley’s wheel creaking from the back of the room over the sound of Simon’s soft snoring.
“You start seeing him,” he finally continues, “that guy you killed, and you wonder if his ghost can find you. Is he watching you while you brush your teeth, while you eat your breakfast? Is he waiting for a chance to fuck you up?”
Suddenly he looks over at Jake at the computer and barks, “Hey! You better be playing video games!”
Patrick jumps in his sleep at the sound.
Jake looks up and holds up both hands. “Tetris, man. Come look. I’m just keeping busy over here. Trying to stay out of your hair.”
Stutts stares hard at Jake for about ten seconds.
“How long were you in Iraq?” I ask, trying to get him to talk again. But the mood is broken.
“Look, I don’t want to—”
And then, without warning, all hell breaks loose.
A bright light flashes above the door and a horrendously loud buzzing sound fills the room. I look up in confusion as Stutts yells above the noise.
“What the hell’s g
oing on? What are they trying to pull?”
It’s the fire alarm!
The kids sit up and look around, dazed. Several cover their ears with their hands. A couple of them stand up. They’re conditioned to respond, but when they look for the teacher to find out what to do, they remember she’s not here. And I don’t have a clue.
Stutts is freaking out. “It’s a trick. Nobody’s leaving. Shut that thing off. Shut it off! Now!” He’s yelling above the horrible racket.
“It’s okay,” I yell back. “We’re not leaving.” Jake moves toward the kids, and I hurry back to help him reassure them.
“It’s probably a false alarm,” I shout above the din. “Surely they’ll shut it off.”
And then, thankfully, the noise stops.
“We’re supposed to go outside,” Alicia says.
Jake shushes her, holding up a finger and cocking his head. “Wait a minute. Listen.”
In the sudden silence, we can hear the all-call intercom announcement from the hallway—even though our intercom box is blown to smithereens. We have to listen hard to decipher it.
“Teachers, please disregard the fire alarm. Do not leave your classrooms. This is a false alarm. We neglected to disable it for our once-a-month practice fire drill. Again, I repeat, do not leave your classrooms.”
Great! This is a drill; this is not a drill. If we weren’t confused before, we certainly are now. We’ve got a crazy guy with an itchy trigger finger, and they can’t remember to turn the fire alarm off. And these are the people I’m supposed to have confidence in to help us. I already felt like we were on our own here; now I know we are.
Stutts goes to the door and yells without putting his head out. “You people better keep that thing off. Don’t pull another stunt like that with me.”
Suddenly there’s an eerie noise from the back of the classroom, and we all turn toward the sound. It’s Simon—wailing for all he’s worth. The shock of waking up to such chaos has finally been the last straw, poor guy. He’s crying pitiful chest-heaving sobs, gulping and gasping for breath between cries.
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