The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Lydia Fitzpatrick Safety

From One Story

In the gym, the children are stretching in rows. Their arms are over their heads, their right elbows cupped in left palms. Class is almost over, and this is the wind-down — that is what the gym teacher calls it — though the children move constantly, flexing their toes inside their sneakers, shifting their feet, canting their hips, biting their lips, because they are young, and their bodies are still new to them, a constant experiment. The gym teacher counts softly, one, two, three, four, and before five there is a sound that reminds a boy in the back row of the sound a bat makes when it hits a baseball perfectly. In the front row, a girl thinks it is the sound of lightning, not lightning in real life, because it is sunny out and because she can’t remember ever hearing real lightning, but like lightning on TV, when the storm comes all at once. Next to her, her best friend thinks it is a sound like when her mother drives her into the city and the car first enters the tunnel, only this sound is sharper than that one and stays within its lines, and she is not inside it. One boy recognizes the sound. He has been to the range with his father and brother, and he has worn headphones and stood a safe distance and watched the sound jerk his father’s arm and push his brother off-balance. This boy is the first to let his elbow drop.

The gym teacher is thinking five, and then he knows. He looks to the door that leads to outside, to the ESL trailers, to the walkway that connects the elementary school to its middle school, because that is where the shot has come from, and there is this throb of hope for the girl who teaches ESL, who has just moved here and still bakes brownies for the teachers’ lounge. The gym teacher is calm, and in his wind-down voice he tells the children to be quiet, completely quiet, and to run into the boys’ locker room. The gym teacher is old, has been at this school for decades, and with each passing year the children like him more and listen to him less, but they know to be afraid from the carefulness in his voice — they are not talked to carefully, except when they ask questions about death and divorce — and at first their fear is only for the tone of his voice, but then they remember the sound. They run, and their sneakers are the sort that light up with each footfall and their shoelaces whip against polished wood, and the gym teacher is not worried that they will trip but that they will stop — because they are that age when rules are God and shoelaces must be tied — but they don’t stop, and they don’t trip. There are eighteen of them. They are as fast and graceful as he has ever seen them.

When they reach the locker room, one boy grabs the gym teacher’s sleeve. It is September, and he has not yet memorized their names, but he knows that the boy’s brother was a student of his years ago and that the boy’s father is back from the war. The boy whispers, “Gun.” He is the one who recognized the sound and he has worried, as he sprinted across the basketball court, that the gym teacher might not know. The gym teacher nods, puts a finger to his lips. He is thinking means of egress. He is thinking police, hide, gun. He is thinking of his cell phone, which was a present from his son last Christmas, a tongue-in-cheek present, a comment on character, and it is in the pocket of his windbreaker on the back of the ladder chair in his kitchen at home.

The children have gathered around him when usually they scatter, and he can see in their eyes that they want to be picked up and held. One girl has forgotten the sound. She smiles and raises her hand. She has a question. She wants to know whether they should change out of their uniforms, but before she can ask, the gym teacher points to his office, which is in the middle of the locker room, and he tells them to lie on the floor behind his desk and to be quiet, and the carefulness drops from his voice — he can’t help it, there are more shots, inside the school now, and a yell cut short.

As the children file into his office, the gym teacher turns out the lights in the locker room and looks out into the lighted gym. The floor is perfectly bare, perfectly clean, glowing like the surface of a planet seen from afar. The cones and Frisbees and hula hoops are back in their bins, and there is nothing to show that a class meets this period. Through the windows of the double doors he sees pale yellow wall tiles (they are the color of butter, of winter sun, but the tiles are more a constant in his world than butter or pale suns, and so when he sees those things he thinks that they are the color of the school). The boy whose father is just back from the war, the one who recognized the sound, watches the gym teacher look to the doors, and he wishes that the gym teacher were his father, because the gym teacher is old and afraid, and his father has only been afraid twice and both times were at the war, never at home, because here, he says, is paradise compared to there. This boy is the last into the office, and as he lies down next to the girl who thought of lightning, he goes on wishing for his father in the fervent way that children wish for things because they think those things are almost in their grasp.

On the teacher’s desk is the blue parachute that the children play with on Fridays. On Fridays, they grip the silk and make it ripple and buck, they run underneath it and around it, but one of its seams is split, and the gym teacher meant to take it home to his wife, who would stitch it up as she has dozens of times before. Behind his desk, the children are lying in two neat rows, and he has seen children lie this way before, on the news, in other countries, but not these children, his children, and he almost tells them to get up, that it is tempting fate to lie this way, but there are more shots, closer, in the cul-de-sac of classrooms across from the gym, and the gym teacher grabs the parachute and spreads it over them, and they are so small that it covers all eighteen of them easily, and at the thought of them — of how many and how small — his chest seizes, and he thinks that he will be the one to make a noise, but then he hears the clang of the gym doors opening and the long sigh of them swinging shut and his fear becomes the biggest thing he’s ever felt. It is so much bigger than him that for a second it eclipses him entirely.

The gym teacher cannot think, and then, just as suddenly, he can. He turns out the lights in his office and the parachute is not quite as dark as the shadows around it — the silk has a gleam — but it is the best he can do. He crouches under his desk. He is between the children and the door, and he whispers to them one more time, “Do not make a sound. Do not move.” Under the parachute, a girl pees without thinking of holding it. She feels it hot and soaking the seat of her gym shorts, and the parachute is light on her face. On Fridays this is the best feeling, and she thinks of that, of how she is getting to feel it today even though it is not a Friday. There are footsteps moving across the gym. A boy thinks, Dad. A girl thinks, Mom, Mom, Mom. One boy thinks it is the principal, because the principal is the only one who walks through the halls when they’re empty. One girl begins to count silently. She panics sometimes — when she sees the road disappearing too fast under the car’s tires; when the train cuts through their town, its whistle blaring; when she is in the swing at the park and finds herself too high — and her parents tell her to count, to breathe, to count and breathe, and they count with her, lead her from one number to the next.

The footsteps are slow. The gym teacher knows that this means it is the man with the gun and it means something about him too. The gym teacher is curled around his own knees. He has never made himself so small. Behind him, the parachute moves with each of their breaths.

There is a new noise. A clang of metal on metal. The boy who recognized the shot does not know what this sound is, and he realizes now that there was comfort in knowing. He does not love Fridays and the parachute. He does not love anything that hems him in, and his mother tells him that even as a baby he did not like to be held. He edges out from under the parachute. He is between the wall and the girl who thought of lightning, and it is dark, but he can see the gym teacher’s coat rack branching over him and he can see the windows that line the walls of the office and look out into the locker room. Deep in the dark there is a red haze from the exit sign over the door that leads to outside, to the ESL trailers, and to the walkway to the middle school where his brother is, and the boy could run that walkway in twenty-two seconds — he has timed himself on a watch that is both waterproof and a calculator — but his brother does not like him to come to the middle school. Instead his brother meets the boy on the hill above the soccer field, where there is a tree with peeling bark and a path that leads through the woods to their house.

The clanging noise shakes in the air and gives way to the footsteps. The girl counts thirty, thirty-one. The man with the gun is close, the gym teacher thinks, by the showers, whose dripping is the metronome of his days. The showers are separated from the office by three banks of lockers, and as he thinks of the lockers, he realizes that that was the clanging sound, metal on metal — the butt of the gun or the muzzle. The children’s things are inside the lockers and strewn around them, their backpacks and jackets and lunch bags and dioramas — they are that age, when teachers tell them to pick their favorite place in the world and fit it in a shoebox and they can — and the man with the gun will see these things, and he will know that they are here. The gym teacher shifts into a squat and one of his ankles cracks. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when the door opens, but he keeps his eye on the dark square of the window next to the door. The footsteps are closer and closer and closer and far away there are screams, and a girl — the youngest in the class — has heard these screams before, at the hospital, when she was having an arm set and down the hall someone else was having something worse. Next to her, a boy wishes for something to hold on to. His palms burn with the need, and he finds the girl’s hand next to his and grabs it, and she thinks this is like the hospital too, where everyone was holding hands.

He is here. There is a change in the darkness in the window that the gym teacher feels more than sees (just as he feels his wife’s absence some nights, when she is sleepless and moves through the house below him), and then the change is clearer: he can see the man’s glasses catch the red light of the exit sign. He can see the nose of the gun moving toward the window. There is a clink, a knife on a plate. Fifty-six, the girl counts, and the gym teacher knows the glass will splinter, he knows how this ends, but behind him the boy crouched under the coat rack sees something different: a half foot down the gun’s barrel, where the shoulder strap attaches, there is a dangling medal, a slim silver oval barely bigger than a thumbnail, but big enough for the boy to recognize it. It is a saint medal, the saint whose job it is to protect soldiers, and the boy knows the saint’s name because it is the same as his own, and he knows the medal because his mother gave it to his father years ago, before you were born, she tells him, before your brother was born, when your father left for the first time.

The gun drops from the window, and the boy does not hesitate. He is up. He opens the door and slips through it, his body filled with the certainty of it, with a wish fulfilled, his father, and as he turns the gun is ready for him. It is inches from him. Dad, the boy thinks, even as he realizes that the man is not tall enough to be his father, is not tall enough to be a father at all. In life, the boy has been fearless — he trusts the dark, trusts the slimmest branch, trusts that he alone can fly — but he looks at the gun and his mind goes cold and cavernous.

“Where’s your class?” the man says, his voice muffled by a ski mask.

The boy hesitates for a moment — he does not think of protecting his class, of protecting the girl who is his favorite, who is under the parachute, trying to remember the prayer that her grandmother mumbles in Polish each night — for a moment he hesitates because he cannot speak. Then that moment is over, and he is still alive, and he says, “Outside.”

“Outside,” the gym teacher hears, and he thinks that this might save them, but the silence grows long and he does not know what it means. He is listening for sirens, wishing for sirens in the fervent way that children wish, as though his chest is opening to dispatch some part of him that will find the sirens and usher them here. Behind him, the children know that for the first time they are hiding without wanting to be found.

The boy raises his eyes and looks up the long line of the gun to the medal. It is his father’s gun. The boy can see it here, and he can see it locked in the case in the hall between the door to his room and the door to his brother’s room, where it glows in the way things precious and forbidden glow — the grandfather clock with the damp brass gears and the ostrich egg with foreign letters inked on its curves and the tiny crystal bottle on his mother’s dresser — and the constellation of these things is as sacred and eternal as anything up in the sky, and the boy cannot believe that the gun is here and that its case is empty.

“Let’s go,” the man says, and his voice is muffled, but there is something strained in it that the boy recognizes. The boy looks up, past the medal, to the mask, which is a ski hat with holes cut for the mouth and nose and eyes, and over the eyeholes are glasses that could be anyone’s, except that they are his brother’s. They are across the table from him every morning, slanted toward a book whose pages are dusted with the crumbs of the toast his mother makes. They were across the table from him this morning.

The boy reaches out and puts a finger to the nose of the gun, and it is warm. He has never touched the gun before, and his brother yanks it away, and the medal jingles, this tiny silver noise, and his brother grabs his hand.

Under the desk, the gym teacher listens to them walk away and he begins to cry. He has always thought that you could know, that right and wrong were like bones beneath the skin — hidden but there, waiting to be laid bare — and his hands are empty and he cannot weigh the one against the seventeen. The girl who is counting hits a hundred and starts over again at one, and the boy’s brother pulls him toward the emergency exit, and the boy has dreamed of this, in certain stretches of homeroom, when he is filling a sheet with cursive L’s, he has dreamed of his brother taking him out of class and letting him sit on the back of his bike as they coast down the hill into the town to the store with the miniature models of helicopters and tanks and dragons that are all the color of flour, waiting to be painted with brushes whose bristles are thin as eyelashes, but even as he has dreamed this, he has known it will not happen because his brother prefers to be alone, likes to have space, though their mother says that as a baby his brother was the one who liked to be held.

They are at the door, and his brother pushes it open with a hip so that he can keep one hand on the gun. The gym teacher watches a wedge of light stretch across the locker room, the benches, the bookbags, and he is waiting for a child to speak, to cough — it is that season, when their noses run and their lips chap — but they are silent, and the light recedes, and he tells the children to stay quiet and that he will be back.

Outside, the air is cool and sweet. The light is too bright — it makes the boy think of Sundays, when their mother takes them to the movies, and the boy loves the movies, cannot sit close enough to the screen, and when the movie is over and they step out of the theater, the fact of the world outside is a shock to him, an insult. The boy’s brother lets go of his hand, and the bell rings, blaring from loudspeakers in the corridors and classrooms, from speakers mounted on the corners of the ESL trailer. It is time for lunch, but no one comes out of the trailer, and the school is still. There is the soccer field. The grass arches away from the wind, and they cross the parking lot to the field, and the boy looks back over his shoulder and sees a girl lying on the sidewalk next to the ESL trailer. She has fallen with one ear against the pavement, and the boy recognizes the girl. She is two grades above him, with dark hair and a red birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a cloud. Her face has gone so pale that even the birthmark is drained of color, and beyond her, on the steps of the trailer, there is a woman, and from the way she is lying the boy can tell that her face will look the same.

Under the parachute, the girl who thought of lightning is thinking of her grandfather, who is the only person she knows to have died — his heart had been good but turned bad — and her own chest hurts, and she wonders if it is her heart turning inside her. A boy begins to shake. His teeth are chattering and he puts a finger between them because the teacher said not to make a sound. He has never thought of himself as truly separate from his mother, and yet he is sure that at her desk in the office in the city she does not know what is happening to him and cannot feel his fear. In the years to come, he will think of this over and over, of how she did not know.

The boy’s brother is breathing fast behind the mask, and the boy knows that he shot the girl and the woman. The tip of the gun was warm, but the boy cannot make sense of it or of why he is following his brother, crossing the field at the same angle he does every afternoon. From the door to the locker room, the gym teacher watches the two boys — they are both boys, he can see that now — as they walk up the hill toward the woods. There is a dead girl on the pavement and on the steps of the trailer a woman moans, and when the boys are far enough away the gym teacher runs to the woman. It is the ESL teacher, and he puts his fingers to her neck and says, Please, please, please. Under the parachute the girl counts, her lips careful with the numbers: eighty-eight, eighty-nine. The silk is so hot that it begins to stick to them, to foreheads and noses and knees.

At the top of the hill, where there is the tree with the peeling bark and where the path to the boy’s home begins, there is a cross stuck in the ground. It is two pieces of a yardstick that the boy recognizes because his mother used it to stir a can of paint — one end is the blue of their kitchen — and now it has been broken in two and nailed together. The boy’s brother stops at the cross and says, “They’ll ask you why.” Every word comes out like a splinter, like he is in pain, and the boy says, “Are you crying?”

The gym teacher hears sirens, faint as wind chimes, as he puts his mouth to the woman’s and exhales.

“Listen to me,” the boy’s brother says, and he gets down on his knees. “They’re going to ask you why.”

His brother’s glasses are fogged. The ski hat is their mother’s. It is the one she wears when she shovels snow and it smells of a dog, though they’ve never had one, and he does not know how to square these ordinary things with the way his brother is shaking — not gently, but wildly — as he pulls the gun over his shoulder and points it at him.

“Are you going to shoot me?” the boy says.

The girl counting reaches one hundred and stops, because her fear has dissolved, is a memory now. The gym teacher puts his fingers to the woman’s neck again, and this time there is nothing. Another girl hears the sirens and thinks of her dog and the way he howls with his throat arched whenever he hears a siren and of how he will be howling now, in her house, which is nearby, pacing the halls and filling the empty rooms with that sound.

The boy begins to cry. Not because he is afraid of being shot — he cannot think what that might feel like, though he has seen it in games and on TV, though he has seen the holes burned through the paper targets at the range — but because he is afraid that his brother hates him, has always hated him. That must have been why, one time, his brother held his palm open and ran the blade of a knife across it.

The gym teacher looks up the hill and he sees that the boys are the same height — the boy with the gun is kneeling — and he sees where the gun is pointed, and he gets up and begins to run across the soccer field. The seventeen are safe, under the parachute, but already he knows that it won’t matter against this one, that that is not how the scales work.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” the boy’s brother says, “because I’m not crazy. You tell them that. That I’m not crazy.”

The boy nods, but he will not tell anyone what his brother said, not his mother, not his father, not ever. He will insist that his brother was silent, that his brother was crazy, and he will dream of the girl with the cloud-shaped birthmark. With the gun, the boy’s brother motions for him to turn toward the tree with the peeling bark, and the boy turns. He is facing the path that leads home and he has timed himself on this path too. In two minutes and seven seconds he can be home, where his mother is pulling clothes from the dryer. She straightens, hearing the sirens, and it takes her a moment to unravel the sound, to register how many and how close, and she thinks there must be a fire — it has been a dry summer, a dry fall — and she goes to the window and looks toward the school. The boy can’t tell if the sirens are getting closer. They seem to be carried on the wind, like they are coming from the trees, and even though he knows this isn’t so, he looks up at the leaves that are red and brown and thrashing.

The gym teacher is halfway across the soccer field, and in two months, when the school reopens, his wife will walk from goal to goal for hours, eyes on the grass, looking for the gleam of a bullet in the dirt. Under the parachute, the children think of lightning and tunnels. They think of the gym teacher who said he’d come back and of mothers and fathers and of the sound of the man’s voice when he said, “Let’s go,” and how you are never supposed to go. Later, when the policeman finds them, when he pulls up the parachute and tells them they are safe, he will not be able to forget it: how still the children were, how silent, how they didn’t move a muscle.

The boy looks from the trees to the school. The gym teacher is running across the field, and he is old and slow, and from this high on the hill it seems like he is barely moving. The gym teacher’s heart is battering at his lungs, his chest is burning, and the boy only watches him for a second, but it is too long — his brother turns toward the field. The sirens are everywhere now. His brother is breathing in the way that means you’re hurt. The gym teacher is across the field, and he is afraid, but with his next breath his fear goes, and he does not know why, because the gun is aimed at him now, but he thinks of a morning years ago, when his son got a shoelace caught in the mower, and the gym teacher cut the lace with a pocket knife and watched the panic roll out of his son’s eyes, and an hour later, in the hospital, he will die, whispering to his wife about a knife through cotton.

The boy hears the shot. He begins to run, and the leaves slide under his sneakers and he keeps his eyes on the path because there is a root up ahead that tripped him once, walking home, and his knee had bled, and his brother had looked at him and kissed his knee and said, “What’s the point in crying?” The boy leaps over the root. He is running fast enough that the trees blur around him, and the gym teacher feels the hot rip of the bullet, and up on the hill there is another shot.