Woody grasped the boy’s hands. “Let go of your sister,” said Woody quietly.
“She stole it!” screamed the boy.
Woody held a hand out, as though to calm the air. “Now wait, everybody,” he said. “Wait.” He reached into his pocket to pull out a Woody Wilson sticker. “I’ll trade you.” He handed the girl his sticker: Vote for me. The girl grabbed it. She was already possessed of a startling rage, as though she foresaw the difficulties her life would bring her. When the girl stared at someone, as she did at her brother, Diane saw how she would someday regard a lover, the assumption that the other would feed some endless hunger inside of her. She gazed at Diane with the same expression, and Diane whispered to her, ashamed before its vastness.
Woody pressed the boy’s sticker back into his outstretched hand. The boy turned away from him and hunched over his sticker. It had the green, smiling face of Shrek on it.
“Where’d you get this?” Woody asked the boy.
“At school. They called my name in the cafeteria,” the boy said. “I heard my name. They said it like this: Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen. They chose me. They said I could go home. The lady gave me this when I walked out. She said hold this and go right to the car. I held it the whole way.”
Diane remembered this from the day before, the first time she had picked up her son by car at school. The car riders waited for their parents in the cafeteria, while the parents, in cars at the traffic circle, told their names to the pickup coordinators, who called their names on the walkie-talkie. “Tommy Bernstein,” Diane had said to the coordinator. She imagined her son’s name floating over the loudspeaker in the cafeteria, where the children were sitting on long steel benches. She pictured all the children, Tommy and Raisha and Juan and Christopher and Sandra and the others, hunched over the tables, waiting to be summoned back to their lives. How many times in their lives would they sit like this, waiting to be called — for work, for love, for good fortune or bad, for luck or despair? What joys or sorrows would each of them be chosen for? She wished she could see how her son hurried down the dingy, dim brown public school corridors, how he walked to the doors that burst open to the afternoon light.
She was relieved when she saw him coming to her car; it was as if he had just been born. “What happened?” she asked. He had told her the same thing: “They said my name like this”—her son cupped his hands together and spoke into them—“Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen.” He said these words with awe, as though they had been spoken by the voice of God. She watched his face in the rearview mirror, blank but suffused with a new brightness, and she wanted to touch his beautiful young face and feel what hope was in it, but she simply drove on.
Now Woody leaned toward the boy. “Tom. Mee. Bern. Steen. You did a good job,” he said.
The boy nodded at Woody’s correct pronunciation. “Yes,” he said.
“Your parents will be proud,” Woody continued.
“My father calls in the morning,” Tommy said. “I hear him, but I don’t see his face.”
“He must miss you,” said Woody.
Stop, she thought. Don’t pity him. Woody rolled up his shirtsleeves. He bent so he was looking into the boy’s face. “Tommy,” said Woody. “I know how you feel. When I was a boy, I woke up, and the house was quiet. No one called me. Tommy, I didn’t have a mother. My father was at work long before I got up.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “I dressed and got myself to the bus stop. I rode the school bus. I waited for it to pick me up. Sometimes I said my name, too. Woody Wilson. I said it over and over. WoodyWilson. WoodyWilson. I said it so many times it sounded like the name of some other person.”
His voice had become quieter as he spoke to Tommy. The boy gazed at him, strangely lulled. She felt the little girl grab her leg, and Diane touched her hair. How had her life come to this, hoarding minutes of kindness doled to them by strangers who knocked on her door? She wondered if this would be the future texture of their lives, this hoarding, and she wished Woody Wilson would leave but also appreciated the fact that someone was with them in the room. She looked away from his pale, thin hair, his shirt rolled halfway up his solid, pink arms. She was afraid that her son would ask him to stay.
But the boy suddenly turned his back to Woody, squatting over his stickers with a fierce expression. “Tommy?” Woody asked. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t care,” the boy said sharply. “Guess what? I don’t care.”
She did not know what would comfort him; she barely knew what would comfort herself.
“Well,” said Woody. “Hey.” His voice broke a little, and he laughed, a hearty, rehearsed laugh. “Well, you never know what will work with kids, what will help them. Never hurts to try, right, Diane? Got to keep trying?”
He wanted to be reassured, and so did she, and for what? They were soft, graying, halfway to their deaths. They both knew that each person’s love for another resided within oneself, miraculous and blind and strange; they both knew that everyone would die alone.
“Okay,” she said carefully, and shrugged.
“Thank you,” he said.
The tinny sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner” burst into the room. It was Woody Wilson’s cell phone. Woody’s face assumed a stern expression as he held it to his ear. “Yes. Still on Greenfield. Yep.” He turned it off. “Well,” he said. “Time to go.”
He picked up his briefcase. “Thank you for your hospitality, Diane,” he said brightly. The politician’s voice burst out of him; he seemed almost surprised to hear it. He smiled as he had on the bill-board, holding out his hand. “Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” she said, shaking his hand, the firm, remote grip of a stranger. His palm was soft and startled her; she let go and stepped away.
He gripped the envelope marked CONTRIBUTIONS and smiled shyly. “I suppose you wouldn’t care to contribute to my cause?” he said.
“I don’t think I can,” she said.
He nodded, as though he had expected this. He stood on her porch and slipped his envelope under his arm. The bump on his head was dark and monstrous.
“What should I tell people?” he asked. “How did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Tell them you tripped.”
“Yes,” he said, brightening, delighted by the idea of simplicity. “I just tripped.”
Silence bore down on them; there was nothing more to say. Woody Wilson hurried up the sidewalk to the next house. His lips were moving; she believed that he was murmuring his name. Stepping out into the pink air, she looked at the names of all the candidates stuck in the green lawns. They sat, arranged in rows under the sky. Woody Wilson reached the next house. He rubbed his palms against his jacket, took a flyer from his briefcase, and, slowly, he lifted his hand to knock on the door.
The Sea Turtle Hospital
The lockdown at Arthur Elementary was the second at the school this week. It began while we were doing our class presentation: the Amazon Council of Beings. The secretary’s flat voice announced it just as Keisha Jones was introducing herself as a harpy eagle. The Council of Beings capped off the kindergarten’s Amazon rainforest unit and involved twenty-two five-year-olds sitting in a circle wearing paper-plate masks they had made of their assigned endangered animals, with Mrs. Reeves, the senior teacher, on a bongo drum. Keisha Jones announced she was a harpy eagle, and we all said, in unison, “You are one of us!” and Keisha was describing what foods she ate and before we could tell her, also in unison, “We hear your needs,” and watch Mrs. Reeves majestically bang the bongo, the secretary said, statically, over the intercom, “Lockdown. School is currently in lockdown.” The golden lion, tamarin, manatee, and jaguar were mad because they hadn’t announced yet what they were; Mrs. Reeves told me to lock the door and draw the blinds while she got the safer job of herding the kids into the reading nook. This pissed me off because she clearly didn’t mind if I took a bullet before she did. It was as though she voiced what I was thinking: the assistant should go first.