“There’s nothing to be frightened of. I just want you to know something.” He reached out an open hand toward the window. “Going into a stranger’s house is life and death sometimes.”
Sierra’s face crumpled. She started to speak, halted, and began again. “A stranger?” she croaked.
Something in the teacher’s face changed. Muscles tensed. But his words were still soft. “He’s a stranger to you, Sierra.”
April looked from Sierra to the teacher. A line of electricity flowed between them, but she couldn’t work it out. What was it that smoldered between their words? But then whatever it was fizzled out, and Sierra turned to stare at a bland watercolor on the wall.
“What if I go anyway?” Sierra said. “You don’t understand anything about him.”
Mr. Foster’s chest heaved, but he didn’t answer. The officer spoke up in the silence. “I spoke with Mr. Prodan, Sierra. He agreed to send you home if you come to his house again.”
Finally, Sierra turned toward April, a look of silent pleading written on her face. A small whimper escaped her. April’s eyes burned in sympathy.
April stood. “I thank you for your concern.” She sent a firm nod to the four adults. “I think we can take care of things from here.”
Sierra raced out of the room. April watched her go, tapping her feet, until she heard the outer glass door open and swing shut. When Sierra was gone, April turned to the adults in the room, speaking in a low voice. “If one of you, just one of you, had taken Sierra aside and spoken to her like a friend, she might have heard the sense in what you’d said. All you’ve done here is make her feel she’s under attack.”
Ms. Barnes opened her mouth, but April stepped out of the room and into the hallway. If the woman dealt with children in crisis every day, surely she should see the problem with a conference like this.
Sierra was all the way down the hall and entering a classroom, so April leaned against the wall, willing the tension to leave her.
Mr. Foster walked out but stopped upon seeing her. He looked back at the glass wall.
April straightened. “Something went on in that room between you and my daughter. I’d like to know what it was.” She regretted the accusation in her voice. He had a way about him. He was probably good at his job. But she was at a loss.
The bell rang and a rush of kids flooded into the hall. The noise level was overpowering as kids called out to one another and hooted with laughter. They had to step aside as a couple of boys shoved into each other on purpose, jibing each other with insults.
Mr. Foster moved in closer to be heard. “You have every right to understand what took place in there, Mrs. Wright, but I have to get to class right now. Can I call you?”
April and Mr. Foster spoke by phone the next day. He said he didn’t believe in having conferences by phone if it could be avoided. April wasn’t surprised. That piercing blue look he gave was something else, and he probably knew just what he had and how to use it—with students and with parents.
“I’d be happy to meet you during my conference period or after school, even up to six,” Mr. Foster said over the phone. “What time is good for you?”
“I’m afraid it would have to be next week. I’ll be working afternoons and evenings all week.”
“What about Saturday?”
Saturday? Was he some kind of superteacher? “That’s so generous, but I’m afraid I’m working Saturday, too. Really, a phone conference might be best.”
“What time is your lunch break Saturday?”
“Uh, noon,” she mumbled. “No, look, Mr. Foster, you’re a busy man.”
“Not too busy for this. And it’s fine. I owe a buddy of mine a visit. He just happens to live in West University. That’s just a few minutes away from your gallery, right? We’ll talk, and then I’ll drop by his house.”
When the bamboo chimes clacked in tune and the gallery doors opened, April was busy with a customer. She nodded to Mr. Foster and checked her watch. He was ten minutes early.
He nodded as he entered the store and then moved off to a side alcove. With his hands behind his back, he inspected a piece of melted jewelry and coins. April couldn’t help but think the work of art looked like child’s play in front of him.
She turned to the woman at the register. “I’m slipping in a care guide with your receipt. And of course, you can call us with any questions.” But the whole time she spoke, she studied the teacher.
As her customer left, April came up beside him. “I don’t think that’s exactly your style, Mr. Foster.”
A glimmer of a smile crossed his face. “Not exactly. And it’s Nick. I don’t think we had a good introduction Monday.” He reached out a hand to her. He looked across the street to the café. “When’s your lunch break?”
She looked at her watch as if she didn’t already know the time. “In ten minutes.” Then she looked across the street to the café.
Without looking back at her, he said, “I’ll reserve a table.”
She watched him cross the street from the window. There was something about him, some undercurrent, and April was more anxious than ever about his exchange with Sierra. What was between them? And how was he involved in her visits to this stranger’s house? The fact that Sierra wouldn’t discuss the teacher or the old man only put her that more on edge.
The store remained quiet for ten minutes, except for the chattering in her head. The minute hand moved as slowly as a turtle. When it finally hit twelve, she called to the back. “I’m at lunch, Ellen. Be back in thirty.”
“Righto,” came the reply.
She strolled into the café and sifted through the Saturday lunch crowd. A hum of voices in conversation filled the restaurant, settling the rising disquiet inside her. Passing polished tables and gleaming wood floors, she found the teacher around a corner.
He was tapping his fork against his napkin and looking out a narrow window. He stood when he saw her and pulled out a chair. This wasn’t like any teacher conference she remembered. But then, in the not-so-distant past, teacher conferences had been easy. “She’s a pleasure to have in class,” her teachers used to say. “She excels.” Never had April thought she’d be having a conversation like this one with Nick Foster.
A waiter came for their order. “Just an iced tea for me,” April said. Lunch could wait.
Nick nodded. “I’ll have a Coke.”
The waiter left, and April took a deep breath. “My daughter won’t talk to me. She’s spitting mad at me because she thinks that man is a friend. I understand why she’s mad. What I don’t get is why she was furious with you.”
“That man is my father.”
April shook her head to clear it. At the conference, they’d spoken of the man as if he were a danger to society, a criminal even. And Nick Foster hadn’t once spoken in his defense. “Your dad?”
She caught the flash in his eyes.
A shiver went up her back. “Your father’s dangerous?”
He didn’t answer right away. “Not the five o’clock news kind of dangerous.”
“But?”
The noise of the lunch customers grew distant as he searched for words. “I know what Sierra sees in him. He’s read enough to fill libraries. On his good days he’s got laser insight. But, man, he’s a tough guy.” Nick shook his head. “He’ll be your friend one day, and the next, he uses words like jackhammers. He wouldn’t think about how he could scar a fragile girl like your daughter.”
April softened. This man wasn’t even Sierra’s teacher, but he recognized her for what she was.
“I’ve watched the way she takes it at school,” he went on. “She lets those boys intimidate her. Honestly, I’m afraid for her. Even if my father didn’t hurt her, what was she thinking? Whose house is she going to let herself be talked into next?”
April raised her chin. “Boys intimidate her
at school?”
“If she’d just tell them to get lost, the game would be over. It’s her distress that keeps them circling.”
Her voice shook. “The game?”
“Bad choice of words. It’s a game to them.”
When had Sierra stopped talking to her? Did she think April wouldn’t understand? Or did she simply want to save her mother from any more anxiety?
April looked up. The smells of garlic and tomatoes and fresh bread drifted over from the next table. But something edged in on her attention. His name. She looked up at him. “Wait. You’re Nick Foster, right?”
He looked straight at her. “And my father’s name is Prodan.”
April tipped her head, curious now. “And?”
“We came from Romania.”
April’s mind whirled. Nick Foster had no trace of an accent. The way he spoke wasn’t particularly Texan, but his words held no hint of a European background either. He could be from anywhere in America.
“I came here with my mother when I was four,” he continued. “My father wasn’t able to come with us at first. And then when the Romanian government offered him an exit visa, he chose not to accept it. He finally joined us when I was sixteen.”
“And you changed your name?”
He hunched a shoulder. It wasn’t a subject he was comfortable with, clearly. “Yes, when I got my citizenship. From Nicolae Prodan to Nicholas Foster. It’s a translation.”
He spread his hands, European in style, but quickly put them down as if they’d betrayed him.
She hesitated, unsure how to respond. “I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Foster. I’ll be sure Sierra stays away from your father.”
“Nick,” he insisted.
She gathered up her purse.
“I realize I’m not Sierra’s teacher. But we’re here. Would you like to talk it out?”
She held her purse in her lap. What was there to talk about?
He leaned across the table. “April, I teach the kids everyone else has given up on. The ones who sleep through class and fail the state test. The ones who are going to drop out as soon as it’s legal, maybe before.”
“What you do for a living is admirable, but I’m not sure what it has to do with Sierra.”
“I know Sierra is in a different category altogether. She’s smart. She’s got an involved mother. But in a way, she’s right there with them.”
She knew what he was saying. Sierra wasn’t living up to her potential. But April didn’t want to hear her child grouped in with failing kids. Sierra wasn’t like them.
She reached to take a sip of her tea but only knocked the glass nearly over. He had the glass upright and still full in less than a second. He began tapping his fork again, looking right at her, making her agitated.
“Don’t do that,” she snapped. And then in a softer voice, “Just say what you’re thinking. Please.”
He laid the fork down, and regret unveiled itself on his face. “I’m saying I deal with at-risk kids all the time. And I think your daughter is at risk. Dangerously so.”
April looked away.
“Have you considered therapy?”
April stifled a sigh. It must seem downright negligent to anyone who knew Sierra that April didn’t have her in counseling. How could she explain the years of counseling, psychiatrists, and hospitals, and Gary growing steadily worse with each treatment? How could she explain that counseling had driven Sierra deeper into depression until the counselor recommended checking Sierra into a psych hospital? She wasn’t having that conversation with a man she barely knew.
“Sierra saw a couple of therapists when we first moved here. It didn’t work out well.” She glanced at her watch. “Look, I have to get back to work. I appreciate your coming here on your day off. But I think this is something Sierra and I are going to have to deal with on our own.”
He wrote his number on a paper napkin. “If you want to talk about it.”
She shoved the napkin in her purse. The last thing she needed was someone else telling her Sierra was in danger. She could tell he knew she wouldn’t call. Just as well.
“Thank you for coming all the way out here, Mr. Foster. Nick.”
April walked across the street and back to work. Fifteen minutes later, as she looked over receipts in the back office of the gallery, Ellen popped her head in, holding out a takeout box. She winked. “You’ve got an admirer.”
April shrugged and took the box. An admirer? Hardly. Inside were rosemary chicken, wild rice, and a chocolate chip cookie. Square cursive spilled across the napkin: Couldn’t let you go back to work hungry. Nick.
What kind of teacher came all the way across town for a parent conference and then delivered lunch? He made her think of Sierra’s words about the old man—deep and real.
She’d take Nick’s word that his father wasn’t safe for Sierra to be around but wondered precisely why. She peeled a strip off the chicken and put it in her mouth. Of course she wasn’t about to let Sierra spend time alone with a man she knew nothing about. But “words like a jackhammer”? That was a rather vague threat.
Chapter Nine
Mom called for dinner. Sierra stayed by her bedroom window, mesmerized by the outdoors. When she came into the room, Sierra pretended she didn’t notice.
Mom didn’t leave, but Sierra kept her attention on the window. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat, Sierra.”
She didn’t answer. Mom put her hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get through this, I promise.”
Sierra breathed a sigh of relief when Mom finally went back to the kitchen. October had come, and the stifling heat had given way to the first cool front of the year. People opened their windows. Kids came outside to play on the playground. Adults hung flower boxes on their balconies.
Mr. Krishnamurthy and his wife paced around the parking lot. It was their afternoon ritual. It didn’t matter what the weather was like. Across the way, a woman had a tub of soapy water on the porch. She stood on her tiptoes, washing her windows, the railing, the door, the porch, everything. Her little girl sat on the porch, cooing at a terrier in her arms. How was it that life went on as if nothing had happened?
On the playground, a boy pushed his brother on the swings. Their mother looked away, so she didn’t see her older son hit the younger one hard in the middle of his back or the way the little one refused to cry.
Sierra stared over the fence.
Later, Mom brought in a plate of sliced apples and mozzarella. Sierra pretended to be busy doing homework, but the blank notebook paper gave her away.
She pulled up her legs and curled up on the chair in front of the window. She remembered a big red sketchbook her father had given her. He told her to record everything while he was away at his conference in Italy. A nature book, he said, to show him what he missed during her summer walks. She had sketched the dogwoods losing their blooms and the creeks receding from their banks, the hot July sky and Argie, their Labrador, sleeping under a tree. But when Dad didn’t come home, she’d put the sketchbook away. And they’d had to leave Argie with neighbors when they’d moved.
She kneeled at her dresser, looking through the book without taking it from the bottom drawer. She flipped through the pages. It was still three-quarters empty. Finally, she carried it to her desk, tore out the sketches, and put her pen to the paper.
A haiku came to her whole and already formed. She mouthed the words. “Standing on tiptoes / brown arms slick with soap-water / she scrubs the door clean.” There were a dozen more tumbling behind it. All she had to do was scroll her pen across the paper. There would be no egrets. She would tell about the Krishnamurthys taking their walk and about the little boy holding back his tears and his mom, though she pretended like she didn’t see what was going on, growing mottled with worry. She would tell about the wind swallowing the sounds of traffic and pl
aying children and the crisp light outlining her neighbors outdoors.
“Standing on tiptoes,” Sierra wrote. But she couldn’t make herself finish the haiku. Who wanted to know about the things she saw around her in the October world anyway? Only one, and she couldn’t take her poems to him.
What she really wanted to tell him was about the day they told her she was no longer allowed to visit him. She wouldn’t be able to write about the horrible things they’d implied about him, of course. But maybe he would understand how the world had turned into a strange faraway place and how she felt she was drifting away from everyone. She would write and write to him until her fingers cramped and the pen bled dry.
She flipped through the empty pages one by one as if she might find one that was so clean and inviting that she would be able to write on it. It was when she got to the last page that the idea occurred to her.
She found her drawing pencils, also shoved into the bottom drawer, and drew a portrait of him, sitting in his armchair, his hair mussed, his eyes penetrating, his head tilted, the way she remembered him. Using a heavy pencil, she shaded his eyelids to show their heaviness, and then she used a softer pencil to hint at the lightness of his eyes. With the edge of her graphite, she showed the sunlight pouring in on his bookshelves. She was no Rembrandt, but anyone could look at it and say, “Yes, this is Mr. Prodan, inside and out.” And he was not the kind of man they thought he was.
She tied the book up with a piece of Christmas ribbon and shoved it in her backpack. Without taking a shower, she turned out the lights and curled up in bed, dry-eyed.
The sun finally rose, and somehow Sierra got dressed and to school. She meandered from class to class, not quite remembering how she got to each room. After school, she passed a bunch of guys leaning against the lockers.
“Hey, hot thang,” one of them yelled out.
Emilio made a circle around her, looking her up and down and shaking a hand in front of his face. “Mmmm, mmm.”
Sierra froze and tried not to see him. There was laughter behind her, then it suddenly got quiet. She turned. Carlos had his hand on Emilio’s shoulder. Emilio reached up to remove his hand, but Carlos, with a face hard enough to be carved in rock, didn’t let go.
The Language of Sparrows Page 5