Making Faces (3 page)

Ambrose sat down beside Fern. “I'll help
you bury him.”



Fern was up and running across the grass to
her own house before the words had left his mouth. “I have a
perfect little box! See if you can scrape him off the sidewalk,”
she shouted over her shoulder.

Ambrose used a piece of bark from the
Sheen's flowerbed to scoop up the spider's remains. Fern was back
in thirty seconds. She held the white ring box open as Ambrose
deposited the spider guts onto the pristine cotton. Fern put the
lid on and gestured to him solemnly. He followed her to her back
yard and together they scooped out handfuls of dirt from a corner
of the garden.

“
That should be big enough,” Ambrose said,
taking the box out of Fern's hand and placing it the hole. They
stared at the white box.

“
Should we sing?” Fern asked.

“
I only know one spider song.”

“
Itsy Bitsy?”

“
Yeah.”

“
I know that one, too.” Together Fern and
Ambrose sang the song about the spider getting washed down the
waterspout and getting a second chance to climb when the sun came
out again.

When the song was over, Fern put her hand in
Ambrose's. “We should say a little prayer. My dad is a pastor. I
know how, so I'll say it.”

Ambrose felt strange holding Fern's hand. It
was moist and dirty from digging the grave and it was very small.
But before he could protest, she was speaking, her eyes scrunched
closed, her face screwed up in concentration.

“
Father in Heaven, we're grateful for
everything you have created. We loved watching this spider. He was
cool and made us happy for a minute before Ambrose squished him.
Thank you for making even ugly things beautiful. Amen.”

Ambrose hadn't closed his eyes. He was
staring at Fern. She opened her eyes and smiled at him sweetly,
dropping his hand. She began pushing the dirt over the white box,
covering it completely and tamping it down. Ambrose found some
rocks and arranged them in an S shape for spider. Fern added some
rocks in the shape of a B in front of Ambrose's S.

“
What's the B for?” Ambrose wondered out
loud. He thought maybe the spider had a name he didn't know
about.

“
Beautiful Spider,” she said simply.
“That's how I'm going to remember him.”

September, 2001

Fern loved summertime, the lazy days and the
long hours with Bailey and her books, but fall in Pennsylvania was
absolutely breathtaking. It was still early in the season, not
quite mid-September, but the leaves had already started to change,
and Hannah Lake was awash in splashes of color mixed in with the
deep green of the fading summer. School was back in session. They
were seniors now, the top of the heap, one year left before real
life began.

But for Bailey, real life was now, this
instant, because every day was a downhill slide. He didn't get
stronger, he got weaker, he didn't get closer to adulthood, he got
closer to the end, so he didn't look at life the way everyone else
did. He had become very good at living in the moment, not looking
too far ahead at what might come.

Bailey's disease had taken away his ability
to raise his arms even to chest level, which made it impossible to
do all the little things people did every day without thinking
twice. His mom had worried about him staying in school. Most kids
with Dushenne MD don't make it past twenty-one, and Bailey's days
were numbered. Being exposed to illness on a daily basis was a
concern, but Bailey's inability to touch his face actually
protected him from germs that the rest of the kids managed to wipe
all over themselves, and he rarely missed a day of school. If he
held a clipboard in his lap he could manage, but holding the
clipboard was awkward and if it slipped and fell he couldn't lean
down to retrieve it. It was a lot easier for him to work at a
computer or slide his wheelchair in close to a table and rest his
hands on the top. Hannah Lake High School was small and not very
well-funded, but with a little help and some adjustments to the
normal routine, Bailey would finish high school, and he would
probably finish at the top of his class.

Second hour pre-calculus was filled with
seniors. Bailey and Fern sat in the back at a table high enough for
Bailey to utilize, and Fern was his assigned aid, though he helped
her more in the class than she helped him. Ambrose Young and Grant
Nielson sat in the back of the room as well, and Fern was tickled
to be so close to Ambrose, even though he didn't know she existed,
three feet away from where he sat wedged in a desk that was too
small for someone his size.

Mr. Hildy was late for class. He was
habitually late to his second-hour class, and nobody minded really.
He didn't have a class first hour and you could usually find him in
the mornings with a cup of coffee in front of the TV in the
teacher's lounge. But that Tuesday he came into class and flipped
on the TV that hung in the corner of his classroom, just to the
left of the chalkboard. The TVs were new, the chalkboards old, the
teacher ancient, so nobody paid him much attention as he stood
staring up at the screen, watching a newscaster talk about a plane
crash. It was 9:00 am.

“Quiet, please!” Mr. Hildy barked, and the
room reluctantly obeyed. The shot on the screen was trained on two
tall buildings. One had black smoke and fire billowing out of the
side.

“Is that New York, Mr. Hildy?” someone asked
from the front row.

“Hey, isn't Knudsen in New York City?”

“That's the World Trade Center,” Mr. Hildy
said. “That wasn't a commuter plane, I don't care what they are
saying.”

“Look! There's another one!”

“Another plane?”

There was a collective gasp.

“Holy sh–!” Bailey's voice trailed off and
Fern clamped a hand over her mouth as they all watched another
plane burrow into the side of the other tower, the tower that
wasn't already on fire.

The newscasters were reacting much like the
students in the class--shocked, confused, scrambling for something
intelligent to say as they stared with dawning horror at what was
clearly not an accident.

There was no calculus assignment that day.
Instead, Mr. Hildy's math class watched history unfold. Maybe Mr.
Hildy considered the seniors old enough to see the images that
played out in front of them, to hear the speculation.

Mr. Hildy was an old, Vietnam vet, he didn't
mince words, and he couldn't tolerate politics. He watched with his
students as America was attacked and he didn't bat an eye. But he
quaked inside. He knew, maybe better than anyone, what the cost
would be. It would be young lives. War was coming. No way it
couldn't after something like this. No way it couldn't.

“Wasn't Knudson in New York?” someone asked.
“He said his family was going to see the Statue of Liberty and a
bunch of other stuff.” Landon Knudson was the student body
vice-president, a member of the football team, and someone who was
well-liked and well-known throughout the school.

“Brosey, doesn't your mom live in New York?”
Grant asked suddenly, his eyes wide with the sudden
realization.

Ambrose's eyes were fixed on the TV, his face
tight. He nodded once. His stomach was hot with dread. His mom not
only lived in New York City, she worked as a secretary in an ad
agency that was located in the North Tower of the World Trade
Center. He kept telling himself she was fine; her office was on a
lower floor.

“Maybe you should call her.” Grant looked
worried.

“I've been trying.” Ambrose held up his cell
phone, the one he wasn't supposed to have in class, but Mr. Hildy
didn't protest. They all watched as Ambrose tried again.

“Busy. Everybody is probably trying to call.”
He snapped the phone closed. Nobody spoke. The bell rang, but
everyone stayed in their seats. A few kids trickled in for their
third hour class, but word was spreading throughout the school and
the regular schedule was no match for the unfolding drama. The
incoming students sat atop desks and stood against the walls and
watched the screen along with everyone else.

And then the South Tower collapsed. It was
there and then it wasn't. It dissolved into a massive cloud that
swept down and out, dirty white, thick and fat, bristling with
debris, dense with devastation. Someone screamed and everyone was
talking and pointing. Fern reached over and took Bailey's hand. A
couple of girls started to cry.

Mr. Hildy's face was as chalky as the board
he made his living writing on. He looked out over his students
crammed into his classroom and wished he'd never turned on the TV.
They didn't need to see this. Young, untried, innocent. His mouth
opened to reassure them, but his intolerance for bullshit robbed
him of speech. There was nothing he could say that wouldn't be a
bald-faced lie or that wouldn’t frighten them more. It wasn't real.
It couldn't be. It was an illusion, a magic trick, just smoke and
mirrors. But the tower was gone. The second tower to be hit, the
first to go down. It took only 56 minutes from impact to
collapse.

Fern clung to Bailey's hand. The billowing
cloud of smoke and dust looked like the batting from Fern's old
stuffed bear. It was a carnival prize, filled with cheap, fuzzy,
synthetic cotton. She'd conked Bailey in the head with it and the
right arm had torn free, spewing fuzzy white fluff in all
directions. But this wasn't a carnival. It was a spook alley,
complete with maze-like city streets filled with people covered in
ash. Like zombies. But these zombies wept and called out for
help.

When they heard the news that a plane had
gone down outside Shanksville--only 65 miles from Hannah
Lake--students began leaving the classroom, unable to bear more.
They ran out of the school in droves, needing reassurance that the
world hadn't ended in Hannah Lake, needing their families. Ambrose
Young stayed in Mr. Hildy's room and saw the North Tower go down an
hour after the South Tower collapsed. His mother still wasn't
answering. How could she when he couldn't get anything but an odd
buzzing in his ear whenever he tried to call? He went to the
wrestling room. There in the corner, in the place where he felt
safest, sitting on the loosely rolled mat, he offered an awkward
prayer. He was uncomfortable with asking God for anything when He
so obviously had His hands full. With a choked “amen” he tried to
reach his mother once more.

July, 1994

High up in the rickety brown bleachers, Fern
and Bailey sat slurping the purple popsicles they'd pilfered from
the freezer in the teacher's lounge, looking down at the bodies
writhing and grappling on the mat with the fascination of the
excluded. Bailey's dad, the high-school wrestling coach, was
holding his annual youth wrestling camp, and neither of them were
participating; girls weren't encouraged to wrestle, and Bailey's
disease had started to weaken his limbs significantly.