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By Root 644 0

lot in the mornings with a gleam in his orange-lidded eyes. Now he believed that I had been about to take Audrey to the pond to give her the same treatment, but that Mrs. Glevitch came to the door and within minutes had her Mary Kay samples spread out at our kitchen table. Mrs. Glevitch—and it wasn’t the first time—had saved the life of an innocent victim. He believed the postmortem had revealed bruises all over Lizzy’s body, that I had taken a large stick and—NO! I wasn’t going to lose my grip, I wasn’t! I wasn’t! I would leave the people in the cafeteria, Luke, Catherine, David Henskin, leave them, never think of them again, leave them to their distasteful thoughts about me, their thoughts about their cars, their games, their lawns, their vacations. I wasn’t going to think about awful, ugly things, was going to dive nose first into something exquisite!—Thirst after beauty, seek it out while everything crass and rude and demeaning and dark falls dead like flies in beauty’s wake. I was going to think of Lizzy as the lovely child who babbled and fluttered, made of flesh instead of rotting away—

Look at the sunset! I heard myself cry out.

The board members, the administration, the honest and responsible teachers and citizens in the audience, and the members of the press, continued to listen to a consultant talk about how difficult it was going to be to remove the oil tank that was buried under the school yard. They hadn’t heard me. I was having that same problem I’d had at the hospital, speaking under a curse so that no one heard me. I didn’t know if I had shouted or not. I wanted so much to tell them to look out the window, at the sunset. We had all forgotten color. Violet. Pink. Purple. They were displayed in front of us now, like a primer, to teach us what we had forgotten. I pushed my chair from the table and headed past the front row, in front of the table where the Powers sat, the board and administration, in front of the man who was trying to continue his presentation. I had both hands over my nose and mouth as if I might be going to vomit. Everyone was staring at me with their jaws unhinged. To leave in the middle of a discussion about the boiler was unthinkable. It was suddenly so funny, the boiler, the oil tank, Luke and Catherine, the seriousness of the evening and the splendor of the sky. I clutched my rib cage and went laughing out the door, and laughing down the hall, and into the girl’s room, and against the bathroom stall door, and laughing sitting on the toilet, and laughing into the sink, and laughing until I felt as if I’d been socked. Stars bloomed over my head like fireworks.

When I came out of the bathroom I nearly walked into the woman who was standing right outside, by the drinking fountain. I shied back into the door.

“Mrs. Goodwin,” she said. After the four years that I’d been working in a school I hadn’t gotten used to the fact that grown people addressed each other as Mrs. and Mr. For me, Mrs. Goodwin would always mean Nellie. “I’m Detective Grogan from the Investigation Unit in Racine, and this,” she said, turning to the policeman who was just coming from the boy’s room, “is Officer Melby.”

I think I nodded, sizing them up, and started to walk away. It didn’t seem to mean anything at the moment, that two police officers were speaking to me, or that an introduction implied a beginning. I was sick and tired, had had enough. She was dressed in street clothes, in beige slacks and a white sleeveless shirt. He, in his black pants, the billy club, the badge, was hard at first to see for himself. As a child I had felt that nuns and policemen did not inhabit their uniforms, that the outfit stood as if on its own power. But Melby was a handsome man inside his suit, big, brown-eyed, very white clear skin, fine front teeth. The woman followed me, falling into step and saying, “We’d like to talk to you for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

“Me?” I said, stopping, leaning against a locker.

“Just for a minute.” She smiled. She was shorter than I was, with curly blond hair, some of it falling into ringlets.