Don’t think that I wasn’t aware the whole time of the tenuousness of my claim: she might have called me a true friend, but wasn’t I essentially just a common schoolteacher and a sometime co-tenant? There were, in my own life, people I’d treated as cavalierly: one was always aware of the hierarchy, however much one tried to pretend indifference to it.
And yes, in all this thinking, in the deafening silence, I started to be angry, a little. Who were they to ignore me? What sort of manners were these, not only in the broader, human sense but even professionally, even if there were no more intimate connection—perhaps all the more so in that case—didn’t you owe your son’s teacher a phone call, when she’d rushed him to the hospital and stayed there with you for hours, just to say that he’d be back and when, or wouldn’t be back, but that he was fine, or Christ, that he wasn’t really fine, but even then, to say one more time “thank you” because you know, in life, when people put themselves out for you it behooves you to express gratitude.
Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying—valiantly, fruitlessly—to eradicate. And I was aware, in all this emotion, that as soon as she called—if she called—all would be forgiven. Every time my phone rang, my heart turned in vain hope. It was a reflex; I couldn’t control it.
Owen had been expelled by Shauna, efficiently, unceremoniously, before noon on Tuesday morning. The school was thick with the gossip of it, from smallest to largest, and Reza’s fall to the ground, dripping scarlet blood in the snow, became mythic, almost Homeric. There were whispers that he was brain-damaged, that he’d been blinded, that the Shahids were going to sue—all kinds of garbage, from the playground to the staffroom, and repeatedly colleagues would stop me in the hall or in the bathroom to check the veracity of one rumor or another. Somehow, this hubbub blew past me like a dream: I could hear only the wind in my head.
On Friday morning we had the holiday assembly, where my class performed The Fir Tree from the Hans Christian Andersen story—God, it felt apt to me that week. Luckily, Reza’s part as a woodcutter had involved only three lines, which young Noah cheerfully usurped and delivered with gusto. Then everybody did a dance to “I Have a Little Dreidel,” after which a Nigerian girl named Ethel, in the fifth grade, performed a soaring rendition of “Silent Night”: the remarkable voice emanating from her slight chest billowed vast around us all, rich and clear, like some extraordinary divine food. Then Shauna said a few upbeat and largely inane words about the season’s festivals of light and the new beginning to which we all were looking forward—with no mention at all of the incident at the beginning of the week—and then, suddenly, it was lunchtime, and vacation.
The children dispersed both swiftly and slowly, their lovely disharmonious babble overtaking the air all the way to the ceilings, as they stuffed their packs and donned their gear and hugged and patted one another, depositing cards and parcels on my desk like religious offerings, some of them discreetly, so I wouldn’t notice, others proudly, some of the girls clutching at me, hugging my hips, my tummy, my arm; the boys less forthcoming, almost shy in some cases, and each of them calling, on their way out the door, “Bye, Miss E! Happy holidays, Miss E! Have a good Christmas! See you next year—get it? Bye! Bye! Bye!”
And then there I was, alone in my classroom with the fluorescent lights, the pile of bright trophies on my desk, the noise fading down the hall, the stairwell, the midday winter sun at the windows, my life suddenly empty, gone. I put away books, dusted the blackboards, tidied my pens into the drawers. There was a teachers’ lunch in the staffroom, but I didn’t want to go—the pleasantries we exchanged were always the same, only this time, surely, there would also be gossip about Reza, about Owen, about Shauna’s decision not to mention them in the assembly. I put on my coat, hunted for a grocery bag in which to stow my booty. (How many cards had I accumulated, over my teaching years? But