Days of Awe Read online

  “OMG!” Claire Whitley said loudly, and she did a wiggly little dance in place, throwing her shoulders and hips about. Claire was tiny and redheaded and wiry, pale as a cloud, and she liked to rile things up. Her social studies presentations were stand-up comedy routines. She could turn quiet reading time into a hoedown. She was a walking disruption. It was physically impossible not to like her.

  The kids around her started laughing. “Shhh,” Kelly whispered, laying her hands on Claire’s shimmying shoulders. “Hush.” And like a miracle, just for a moment, everyone did.

  For the next half hour, we wandered around the shore and across the dock, searching for the wildlife on our list. A turtle. A lily pad. A pussy willow. A school of fish.

  “It’s a fun game,” Margo told us, “and being quiet is the only way to win.” I was liking Margo more and more.

  For many of our students, this weekend was their first experience of nature beyond the brightly colored playground at school, with its giant slide and its one perennially broken swing and its wood-chip-covered ground that was meant to cushion their falls but probably hurt worse than concrete. They were soaking up the day’s brilliant sunshine, unfettered and free as the swooping heron. It made them bonkers.

  Which is why, when Brady Kieslowski shoved his best friend, Kyle Gilson, into the lake, no one was surprised: not me, not Josie, not Kelly or Andrea or Margo, not even Brady. Not even Kyle. We heard the scream and the splash, and we went running, our feet making hollow clopping sounds on the dock. “Stay here!” we shouted at the other kids. “Stay right here!”

  And of course not one of them did. They came tearing after us, a commotion of arms and legs and scrambling feet and fear and delight, and it was only sheer luck that no one else fell in the water.

  “Help!” Kyle yelled. “Somebody help me!” He thrashed and sputtered in the four-foot-deep water, coughing and crying, looking tiny and terrified, and even though we all knew the water was shallow, we felt his terror.

  Fleet-footed Margo got to him first. Josie was just a second behind her. They squatted at the edge of the dock, and Josie calmly extended her arm to Kyle. In truth he was only a few inches away from the dock in water he could stand in.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” Margo said.

  “Take my hand,” Josie murmured. A breeze ruffled the wisps of curly brown hair that had escaped her ponytail. She rearranged herself so that she was balanced on one knee now, braced to pull Kyle up. Her T-shirt blew flat against her stomach.

  Brady, who was responsible for the whole scene, hunched next to Josie, his face in his hands, sobbing. I put my arm around him. Some of the kids were screaming and jumping and calling out for Kyle. A few ran back to the shore. Others stood silently, awed or terrified, taking it in. Someone yelled, “Stay calm, dude!” and another cried out, “Oh, my God, he’s going to die!” Above the din I could make out laughter. Some kids, predictably, probably from nervousness but maybe it was meanness, just laughed and laughed.

  For better or worse we were all our elemental selves for those few moments. I have understood this since the first playground fight I had to break up: how a crisis can reveal the inner workings of our nervous systems before we even know our own hearts.

  In just a few seconds, Kyle was out of the water, shaking himself off, refusing comfort, glaring at Brady. His shaggy, dark hair was plastered to his forehead and his cheeks. He gleamed in the sunlight like a seal pup.

  “We’ve got some towels in the visitors’ center, hon,” Margo said.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Brady sobbed. “I’m sorry!” But Kyle turned his back to him and let himself be surrounded by the mob of kids eager to celebrate his newfound status as the kid who ALMOST DROWNED AT LAKE KASS.

  “I’m really, really sorry!” Brady called after him, high and bereft.

  I corralled the children, who were still howling with excitement, back to the shore, and I thought, This is the end of that friendship.

  But it wasn’t. It would take Kyle and Brady all of forty-five minutes to reconcile. They would be pelting pretzels at each other by the end of the day. They would come back together with the purity of ten-year-old boys, until, four years later, Kyle’s parents would split up and his mother would move Kyle and his sister to Kenosha, where she would find a job as the manager of an apartment complex.

  Josie came up behind me, shepherding her own group. “Jose,” I said, “you’re an American hero.”

  She chuckled and held out her hand to me. “I’m still trembling.”

  “I swear to God,” I said, shaking my head.

  She leaned into me for a second as we walked. There was a feeling between Josie and me, the goodness and pleasure of our friendship an electric thing humming and buzzing. We had this new story to tell Chris and Mark, and we shared the full and mutual delight of having survived it. I was already picking out phrases to quote to her later. Oh, my God, he’s going to die!

  When more screaming erupted from the horde of kids on the shore, I figured it was residual drama, an aftershock. We weren’t even concerned. We wandered back down to the dock. We lollygagged. And the screaming grew louder.

  “Ugh, what now?” Josie said.

  “I’m gettin’ out of this here racket,” I said, hooking my thumbs through the belt loops of my jeans. “Thinkin’ about gettin’ into real estate.” We hurried the stragglers along, started jogging toward the confusion. Kelly and Andrea were there already.

  “Claire Whitley has been stung by a bee,” Kelly announced, her words sharp and fast. “We need the med bag now, Mrs. Abrams. Can you please give me Claire’s. Epi. Pen. Right. Now.”

  The children huddled in little groups, staring and whispering. Claire Whitley was still and scared at the center of it all, tears pouring down her face, which was, impossibly, paler than usual, a blank moon edged in pink. She was holding her wrist. She coughed a few times. Her lips were already starting to look swollen and strange. “I am very allergic,” she whispered, which of course we already knew.

  And Josie was gone, sprinting toward the bus.

  The medical bag was her responsibility, and she had left it on the bus. Later I would think, It could have happened to anybody. Anybody could have made that mistake, which both was, and was not, true. It didn’t matter. It was Josie’s mistake.

  I sat on the ground and eased Claire into my lap, and I rocked her while we waited, the longest minutes, endless breaths. Andrea rounded up all the other kids and hurried them over to a spot on the shore about a hundred yards away. Kelly stood nearby, her terrified eyes a mirror to mine. “It’s okay, sweetie,” I whispered into Claire’s fine, red hair, which smelled earthy and sharp and not pleasant, like cheese. I had the feeling that I was whispering to Hannah, the odd sense that I was in my daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night. “It’ll be okay.”

  Claire wheezed. I felt her heart thudding through her narrow back. I thought that she would die in my arms while her mother was oblivious back in Milwaukee, probably enjoying a margarita or watching a movie or sending an e-mail or grilling a steak as her daughter gasped for air.

  Lake Kass was placid and clear. There was the sound of birds. My heart pounded with Claire’s.

  Josie was back four minutes later. The parking lot was two minutes away, down the path and up the hill. We heard her banging on the bus door; we saw her flying back to us, black med bag at her side.

  Kelly grabbed the satchel and whipped out the EpiPen, snapped out the syringe, and jammed it into Claire’s thigh.

  Anaphylactic shock can set in in moments. The slightest delay can affect the patient’s outcome. We were subjected to a mandatory student-health tutorial every fall. So we knew.

  I held her. She was no bigger than Hannah. Please. She slumped over on me, her eyes closed. Kelly crouched next to us; Josie stood, her arms at her sides, fists clenched, breathing hard. Her face was gray and sweaty. I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Claire? Claire, honey?” Kelly touched Claire’s cheek, her f
orehead.

  The other children were a brightly colored, frightened flock in the distance: a hassle of children, an irritation of fifth graders, a vexation of tweens. I closed my own eyes for a second to make them disappear.

  From far off, an ambulance siren rose and fell, rose and fell: incongruous here, coming closer.

  ···

  She drops her littlest sister off at Rhodes Avenue every morning before heading over to the high school two blocks away. Usually she’s in a mad rush to say goodbye to Nora and make her 7:55 bell. But every once in a while she pops her head into my classroom and waves to me, her smile bright and familiar. She’s not the live wire she was six years ago. Adolescence has rounded her edges and calmed her manic energy. She’s almost, but not quite, graceful now—she’s still elbowy and kinetic, but I can see that in her, how she’ll inhabit her adult body in a few years, balancing a backpack full of books or a bag of groceries, holding someone’s hand, a husband’s, a child’s.

  “Mrs. Moore,” she says, when she has time to pause. “Have a good day!” And to any of my other former students I would just wave back and say, “You, too!” but with Claire, when I can, when I’m not surrounded by children or trapped in the middle of some minor crisis, I’ll hurry over to her and give her a quick hug, just to feel her sharp little shoulders beneath my arms, her breath and her bones, the working machinery of her fragile body.

  ···

  Maybe Earth Science Weekend should have concluded then and there, after little, limp Claire was carted off on a stretcher to Kass Memorial Hospital, after Kelly snarled at Josie, “You should have had that bag with you!” and stalked off, and Josie bowed her head, horrified, remorseful, defeated. But we decided to soldier on. After all, there were still mallards to identify, inchworms to count.

  But the molecular structure of the field trip had disintegrated beyond repair. Josie was remote, barely functioning. Kelly and Andrea were icy and efficient. The kids were uncharacteristically snarly and combative with one another. We separated so many children so many times that day that enemies had to be seated together by dinner; girls who had made each other cry at lunchtime were paired up in cabins by nightfall. We trudged through the swamp, all of us, weighed down by the psychic burden of one ten-year-old’s near-death experience.

  Some darkness descended on Josie that weekend, and it never quite lifted.

  And I barely noticed that my pregnancy nausea and lethargy had disappeared, until two days after we got home, when I started to bleed.

  “Promise me you’ll never let Hannah go skydiving,” my mother says. “I just read the most awful story in the newspaper.” She breathes out, a familiar little achh that signifies her disapproval of a world in which anyone thinks skydiving is ever a good idea. “I want you and Hannah Banana to come over for dinner tomorrow night,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say. “Right after her parachuting lesson.”

  “And you need to wear decent clothes,” she says.

  “What? Why?” I look down at my sweatshirt, which is decorated with a little archipelago of coffee splotches from this morning.

  “Because I’m tired of seeing you in sweatpants. And I’m cooking something nice.”

  The last time my mother made us dinner, a few weeks ago, it was boiled carrots, boiled potatoes, and a chicken so overbaked that by the time it came out of the oven it had turned into a vaguely chickenish kind of cardboard. “Hey, I have a super idea, though! Let’s order from DiPalma’s.”

  “No, no, no,” she says. “I want to cook for you.”

  “I won’t even tell Hannah. You can come out of the kitchen wiping sweat off your brow, like you slaved over a hot stove. It will be our little secret.”

  Helene laughs, and her voice turns girlish and high. “Oh, you.”

  “Oh, me,” I say, laughing, too. “But seriously.”

  “You’re coming. I’m cooking,” my mother announces, no longer joking, and when Helene stops joking, you stop arguing.

  ···

  When I was in eighth grade, like eighth graders everywhere, I was given the assignment to explore my family history by interviewing a close relative. I figured this was my chance to get the answers to the questions my mother had been evading for months. I hounded her daily, right up to the night before the assignment was due. Every time I asked, she said things like, “Why don’t you call your dad’s second cousin Sascha in Lansing? He was a Communist!” Or “I’m so tired. I’ve been talking at work all day. I can’t say another word. Let’s do this tomorrow.” And finally, “For God’s sake, just make something up.”

  “Fine!” I said, and picked up my pen. “Helene Strauss Applebaum was born on Jupiter.” I scratched my head and pretended to write, drew circles and loops on the page. “Her parents abandoned her, and she grew up in a large family of green aliens, the only one of her kind. When she was thirteen, she embarked on a”—I sketched an alien with long antennae—“a lifelong search for her human parents.” I looked up at my mother, who was standing in the doorway, and scowled. “I think Mrs. Murphy will love this.” I snapped my notebook shut and said, “Hmph.”

  Helene had been about to leave the kitchen, but she turned and came back, sat down with me at the table, and sighed. “All right, Isabel. But you’re going to be disappointed. I’m telling you, I don’t…Grandma and Grandpa never really talked about Germany. And what do I remember?” She shrugged, answering the question. “A child’s memories. Not much of a story. Only bits and pieces. Fragments.” She shook her head. “A…a room with a red painted toy box. The smell of bread baking. A yellow apron. A cloth doll one of my cousins gave me. I named it Gustav. I thought that was the most beautiful name in the world. But Trude told me it was a boy’s name and insisted I change it, and I cried.”

  “Cousins?” I asked, my heart pounding.

  “Mmm-hmm. I had three girl cousins. We played together all the time. They lived in an apartment above their parents’ grocery store, and we played hide-and-seek there. There were so many places to hide, so many little closets and pantries. For years I thought, well, maybe they hid.” She brushed a little pile of crumbs from dinner into her palm, then got up and dumped them into the sink. Her back was to me now. “I remember when we left, everyone gave me presents and sweets, and I didn’t want my cousins to come, because I felt so special. I don’t remember anything else.” She turned on the water for no reason, turned it off, sat back down. She looked tired, and I thought, with a flicker of resentment, that I was seeing what she would look like when she was old. “Oh, I know who you should interview!” she said. “Dr. Fraser. He’s from Utah!” She said “Utah” in a strange, drawn-out way, Youuu-taw, as if it were an exotic place you could never go, as if magical elves lived there.

  “You know this is a family-history assignment, right?”

  “Well, I know, but Dr. F has a really neat story! Mormons,” she whispered. She smiled brightly at me, turned it off like that. So we were done. I knew I had to give up. After she went to bed, I sneaked off and called my dad, who told me detailed stories about growing up in Detroit after the war. I got an A.

  ···

  Hannah and I walk the three blocks to my mother’s duplex. Daylight saving time has just kicked in, and the air feels strange and brittle, too bright for 6:00 p.m. When Hannah was younger, she was always so confused by the time change. For weeks she would ask me, “Is it four but it feels like five, or four but it feels like three?” It would take her body weeks to catch up to it, too; there were nights when she couldn’t fall asleep for hours, mornings when she would wake up before the birds. “Mommy,” she would whisper beside my bed, the night sky outside our window still inky black. “I would like a waffle.” She is sensitive to change, cast adrift by it. I should have remembered that.

  I look up at the bare trees, the branches clawing at the bright sky. Chris works for the state, monitoring tree diseases. He and his buddies in the Department of Natural Resources can wax poetic on the history of the devastating D
utch-elm epidemic of the early 1970s or the dogged persistence of the emerald ash borer. Chris can hardly walk past a tree without fondling its leaves, tenderly stroking its bark. I used to make fun of him for it, his physical, almost-sexual communion with the trees. Oh, baby, let me feel your trunk. Now it’s just one more thing I miss. Baby, don’t leave.

  “It’s six, but it feels like five twenty-seven,” I say now, my old answer to Hannah’s question, our joke. She turns and looks at me, her face impassive, a mask. But then she loosens, almost imperceptibly—except I’m her mother, so to me it’s a tectonic shift.

  “It’s six, but it feels more like five fifty-eight,” she says.

  Most people celebrate the lengthening light. But I prefer the shorter days, the way winter darkness wraps itself around me like a blanket.

  “It’s six, but it feels like spaghetti,” I say, and then Hannah sighs, annoyed, because she’s not five years old, and because these days I never, ever get it right.

  ···

  “Darlings.” Helene kisses me, then wraps Hannah in a long, worried hug. “Where are your coats?”

  “It’s practically spring, Grandma,” Hannah says, her sweetness blinking back on for Helene, and I try not to be jealous. “It’s like a hundred degrees out! No coats.” Hannah slides past my mother and through the entryway into the kitchen, and we follow. She plunks herself down on the window seat and pulls out her phone, hunching over it like a mama bear guarding her cub.

  My mother moved into this duplex four years ago, when she had recovered enough from her stroke and realized that she wanted less space for herself and fewer miles between us. So now she lives shouting distance from Hannah and me on the ground floor of an old brick house, the kind of place real-estate agents describe as charming, which of course means creaky floorboards, ancient pipes, an unpredictable furnace, and drafty windows. Helene transported all of her furnishings from her old house to this one, and her modernist aesthetic is boldly out of place in this century-old shrine to crown molding and stained glass. It looks like a time traveler came back from the future to decorate. Here in these tiny rooms are the thick glass end tables and boxy vinyl couches that once fit perfectly in the open-planned expanse of her midcentury modern house in the suburbs: the same geometrically patterned pillows, the same uncomfortable chrome chairs that look like they belong on a spaceship. Every time I step inside, my childhood greets me with a befuddled wave.