“I know. Sorry about that,” I said. The backseat was basically a museum of fast food wrappers. I swept them onto the floor and tossed my cell phone into the glove compartment. Keisha gingerly settled into a seat.
“It smells,” she said. I was both ashamed and offended and opened a window.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Okay,” she said.
I started the car. We sat there, in silence. She kicked at some of the crumpled wrappers on the floor.
“Why’d he shoot Mrs. Hill?” she said. “She was nice.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror; she was rubbing the gray feathers of the harpy eagle mask against her lip.
“I thought he was going to shoot me,” she said.
“Oh, no,” I said, though I couldn’t answer this — why Mrs. Hill? Why anyone?
“Why did he shoot her?” She had put on the eagle mask, but incorrectly, so she resembled an eagle with a human mouth.
I swallowed. There was no reason. Oh, some religious types would put it somehow into “God’s plan,” the gun-control advocates would say it was because we didn’t have any gun laws, but truly there was no reason I could give her. So I said nothing. The cars in front of me fled to their glimmering futures.
“He needed a time-out,” she said.
My hands felt like limp flowers on the steering wheel.
The classroom was one place where it seemed that the world could be explained; I sat in the tiny seats beside the students and showed them: This is an A. It begins the word apple. This is a 1. If you add another 1 you have 2. You didn’t have to believe in anything but these facts, and the students started, at various paces, to absorb them. But what did you do when you were crouching in the classroom, listening to gunshots outside and not knowing where to run? The teacher’s best trick was that she appeared to know everything. But that afternoon, in that room, it was clear that I knew nothing, and that made me deeply ashamed.
I leaned forward; it was hard to see. The late-afternoon sun was so bright the cars in front of me resembled hazy, pale elephants moving into the day. I had that sensation that I had sometimes waking up, that somehow I was about to vanish.
Left was the direction of her apartment; my hands turned the car to the right. The sea turtle hospital was about a twenty-minute drive; if I drove fast, we could get there and back to Keisha’s house in no time, and I could blame any delay on traffic. Keisha petted the feathers on her mask. She did not notice the turn at all.
WE DROVE. THE CITY FLASHED BY US. PEOPLE LIVED THEIR LIVES. They were lining up at the Hardee’s and getting money at the drive-through ATM and joining the army of cars in the Target parking lot. It was impossible to see anyone’s expressions from the car, but everyone moved through the day as though they believed there would be another minute, as though they believed there were more and more and more.
“Miss Samson,” she said, “am I your favorite?”
The children sniffed this out, the teacher’s preferences, with great and accurate stealth. You were to deny it, always, but there were ones you loved more than the others, it was true.
“Keisha,” I said, “I love you and all of your classmates.”
“I want to be the favorite,” she said, firmly.
“Well, you are the best reader,” I said. She nodded, firmly.
“I know,” she said. She looked around for something to read, to show off. “Ex. It. Exit,” she said.
“Good!”
“Cook. Ay-ee,” she said, looking at a sign on a store.
“Cook. Eee. Yes.”
“Here,” I said. “Read these.” I had a bag of picture books in the front seat. I handed her one: Sea Turtles: Wonders of the Ocean. At a red traffic light, I read her the facts: They nested at a beach not far away. I read: “Nesting occurs May through August. Turtles lay about 120 eggs in a nest. After the hatchlings come out, they head to the sea. Only a lucky few survive; some people estimate 1 in 1000 survive the first year, and about 1 in 5, or 10,000, become adult turtles. No one knows why.”
The pictures showed the turtles swimming; they resembled hunched old men, flapping small fins in clear aqua water.
I drove. It was May, and the sky was bright and burning and young, a faded blue rimmed with pink, barely any sense of darkness behind it; abundant, golden clouds moved through it, and light fell through the clouds in a column, translucent. I had not noticed the sky’s beauty in a while; as I looked at it, not with astonishment as much as restlessness, I wanted to run toward those clouds, that burning, gorgeous light, wrap my arms around the clouds and consume them, taste their salt and sweetness; I wanted to drag them as walls around the classroom so no mean thing would get in; I loved the clouds, the air, so deeply my skin felt thin.
Keisha flipped through the book quickly. Then she tossed it onto the floor.
“I want to see one,” she said. “Now.”
IT WAS 4:00 PM. I WAS A TEACHER ON A MISSION; I WAS GOING TO show her the sea turtles, something miraculous and new. The light was escaping from the sky so that it was now a golden pink color like the inside of a shell. Keisha sat in the backseat of the car. She slipped the rubber band over her forehead and rubbed her fingers along her eagle face as she looked out the window.
I thought of what she had asked me — why Mrs. Hill and not her? Or me? The drawings, the footprints made of blood. I didn’t want Keisha to remember that today. My hands trembled on the steering wheel; I didn’t want to be wrong or unreasonable, but I wanted Keisha to see the sea turtles; hell, I wanted to see one now, see these animals with their grand, hard shells floating dreamily in their tanks. I wanted us to have something new and gorgeous in our minds.
The coast passed by us, barely visible through the haze, the ocean wrinkled silver sheets. I parked at the beach just next to the sea turtle hospital. She leapt out, running into the sand.
“Keisha, you need to take off your shoes!”
She looked puzzled. “I can be barefoot?”
“Yes! That’s what you do at the beach.”
“I know,” she said, regarding me skeptically. Then she removed her shoes. There was no public bus from her neighborhood to the beach; the city council of the wealthy white beach community kept claiming they were not “zoned” for a route here. Keisha poured the sand out of her shoes, handed them to me. Her eagle mask was dangling from her wrist, and she put it on. She had drawn the mask with the bird’s eyes wide open, so she appeared to be very surprised. She started running across the sand. I did too, and we ran toward the ocean, the sand rising up around us, a pale glittery haze. The waves came down, clear blue cylinders, rising up from the flat plain of gray. The roaring was tremendous, as though it could fill every corner of the world.
“It won’t stop,” she said.
She stood in the tide a few minutes, the water pooling, foaming around her ankles. She was perfectly still. The wind riffled through the feathers she had pasted on. She nodded, briskly, every thirty seconds or so.
“Why are you nodding?” I asked.
“I want the wave to go down now,” she said. “And now. Now.”
We stood for a moment, and the waves came down at our command. Now. Now. Now. The endless, cold expanse of water. She lifted the mask off her face and handed it to me.
“You want to be it?” she asked.
“Keisha,” I said, surprised. “Sure.”
I slipped the damp mask over my face. Now I was the harpy eagle. What was I supposed to feel? She watched me, a bit bemused. I stood, staring at the crashing water, the wanting a huge hole in me — wanting to be more than myself, wanting to know what would happen to any of us. I waited, listening to the roar of the water. The mask stuck to the heat of my face. I slipped the mask off my face and handed it back to her. She clutched it but did not put it back on.