Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [25]
The principal has put on his suit jacket and straightened his tie. He is moving down the hallway at the fastest clip he is capable of with the school nurse in tow, the very small, very shy Miss Lambert. They are pushing through the crowds of students, and Mr. Fisher is reminding them to Keep moving! Get to class! The students reluctantly break up to let him through, and most of them head off to class. A few just draw back slightly to watch from a safer distance. No one is saying much. Mr. Fisher raises his voice and sends the stragglers on their way.
Somehow Henry is there and he is talking to the principal, gesturing and standing up straight, and even from where she sits on the floor barely daring to look at him through her lashes, Alice can tell he is being very, very convincing.
But this is a fleeting impression when what floods her mind’s eye is a road called Highway 10, fifteen miles west of Baghdad, a road she has Googled in the school’s computer lab and watched and contemplated, a road her father undoubtedly travels on.
Henry manages to get her to the nurse’s office and settled onto a cot. He’s about to leave when she hands him the clipping from the Democrat and Chronicle that has been burning a hole in her pocket. He bends his head to read the article.
Four American soldiers, members of the National Guard from New York, were traveling in three Humvees heading west on Highway 10 toward the city of Falluja. The U.S. military reports that they were on combat patrol when their convoy was attacked by improvised explosive devices, smallarms fire, and rocket-propelled grenades. Two soldiers were burned beyond recognition, a third soldier was dragged off. When found, the body was so badly mutilated the military announced it had found the bodies of two men, not one. The body had no head, legs, or arms. Organs were removed. A fourth soldier has been declared missing. There were no survivors. One of the Humvees burned with such intensity that the surrounding trees were incinerated.
He carefully folds the paper into a tiny square and puts it into his back pocket.
“Alice, you’ve gotta stop reading the papers.”
“How else am I gonna find out what’s going on?”
“Maybe it’s better not to know.”
“I don’t think so.”
“There are guys who—”
“Who what?”
“Who survive, who make it back.”
“Members of the National Guard from New York. Did you read that part?”
“There are dozens, maybe hundreds of men from—”
“Thousands.”
“Okay. Thousands.”
“He travels that road, Henry.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“It’s a good guess.”
“Reading about it will not make anything better.”
“Not reading about it makes it seem like I don’t care.”
“No, Alice, that’s not the way it works.”
“How do you know?”
“I know you’re making yourself a little crazy here.”
“Just a little?”
“And that Ellie needs you and your mom needs you and—”
“I took the paper so my mom wouldn’t see it.”
Miss Lambert sticks her head in the door to remind Henry to get to class. She waits, too, while he gets up from the edge of the cot.
“Could we just have a minute?” he asks her.
Lydia Lambert is young and thin and nervous. She is new to this job. She quit the hospital job she took right out of nursing school, then floundered for a while between two local nursing homes. It was distressing to learn, after all that school and all that training, that she didn’t actually like being around sick or dying people. They make her anxious, really anxious.
High school kids don’t make Lydia anxious; they make her sad, with their cramps and sprains and heartache and heartbreak and above all, with their loneliness. Being young can be so lonely, she thinks; more lonely than anything.
She decides to let them be.
“Do you want to go home? I could take you home.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’ll come back after second period. You’ll be going stir crazy by then.”
“Wait, Henry . . .”
“What?
“Don’t go.”
Henry sits on the floor next