The Language of Sparrows (8 page)

Sierra stared at him. “They let you go where?”

Carlos gave a short laugh. “Stupidest thing. During the summer, I hung out by this gas station with the illegal guys from Mexico waiting for someone to come by looking for workers. I was tall enough I could blend in. I got jobs mowing lawns, cleaning out warehouses, laying concrete, and at night I slept under a bridge.” Carlos shot her an embarrassed grin.

“I got a landscaping job from a tip, and this guy, Enrique Salinas, found me. He owns several apartment complexes. Told me if I could carry my weight, I could work for him and stay with his family. It didn’t take me long to see I needed an education. So I went back to school.” Carlos spread his hands. “Ricky, he pays me for the work I do, but he and his wife, they take care of me.”

Sierra looked at him, feeling a new shape come into focus for the guy she’d thought she’d known.

“Don’t look at me like that.” He laughed a little nervous laugh. “Look, I know I’m crazy. I’m not going to hurt you though. That’s all.” He stood and looked down at her. “I just thought maybe I’d walk you home from school sometimes, and we’d have something to say to each other.”

Desperately, she searched her empty word banks for something to say to him, anything to let him know she’d heard him.
Sorry about your parents?
No, a story like that needed some kind of deep response. And she couldn’t even string
hello-how-are-you
together on a good day.

The only sound was of the water lapping against the edge of the pond. She opened her mouth, as if the words would magically take flight if she just gave them an opportunity. But there was nothing, just nothing to say.

Carlos waited for her to speak. Finally he looked off at the stars. “Okay, Sierra. I’ll take you home now.”

Chapter Thirteen

It wasn’t a good day for a visit from the principal. That morning, Nick had dropped off Dad’s prescriptions, and they’d had words. In third period, one of his students almost hit him, and Nick lost an entire period to a dialogue on the power of self-control. By the last class of the day, he was not in a peacemaking frame of mind.

The principal’s familiar high-heeled step clicked down the empty hall, and Nick knew before she stopped at his door that she was coming to see him. It surprised him she hadn’t visited his classroom sooner. She asked probing questions after staff meetings, but so far she’d left him alone. She was new this year, and new principals usually didn’t take to Nick. They liked things done by the book.

But his kids had years of failure behind them. The book had never worked for them. It always took new principals some time to believe in his methods.

To the naked eye, his classroom would seem like chaos. Some of his kids clustered in groups. Some worked alone.

Teresa held court with three of her friends, putting chapter twelve of
Ender’s Game
into street language. “So the dude in charge is saying, ‘This guy wants to kill our boy, right? The one the whole world’s been waiting for, and you ain’t gonna do anything about it?’ And the battle-school dude says, ‘You got that right. Our boy, Ender, he can take care of hisself.’”

Juan-Luis, unable to keep still, stacked books on the bookshelf. He didn’t appear to be on-task, but he was. He absorbed everything Teresa said as he sorted. Keep him at a desk, though, and his energy would explode.

Farideh sat still as a hawk, listening to
Ender’s Game
on an MP3 player. When she’d come to him in August, she’d been reading at a fourth-grade level. Her reading level had jumped two grades since she joined his class.

Jackson sat alone. He’d finished the book ahead of schedule and sat drawing impossibly small pictures of
Ender’s Game
for a comic book. He hadn’t turned in one assignment until Nick discovered a page of gang art under his binder and began giving him assignments that involved art.

Liza Grambling came into the room and looked for a chair. Principals liked to sit in the back and observe, but his classroom didn’t have a back. Students sat facing different directions in scattered chairs. She found an empty desk close to the door and began writing notes. The pursed set of her mouth spelled trouble.

Nick circled through the students, stopping to join in their conversations. He’d put up large posters in his classroom that lined up with the required lesson plan. A computer spit out work sheets for the entire tenth-grade English team, but while he made sure his classes were familiar with the lingo for the state test, they needed more than those cookie-cutter work sheets.

The bell rang and the kids trailed out of the room. Liza closed her notebook with a thump. “Interesting lesson, Mr. Foster,” she said.

She strutted to the whiteboard, stopping to stare at today’s objective:
Deciphering unfamiliar vocabulary through context clues.
Nick crossed his arms and leaned against his desk. The school must have scored low on that part of the test last year. He had no issue with teaching context clues, but it was the fourth time this year the assignment had come up, and it wasn’t even Thanksgiving.

After a long inspection of the board, she swiveled to Nick. “How did they manage on your assignment today?”

“Great,” Nick said. “My kids can knock vocabulary out of the park.”

“May I see some of the worksheets they turned in?”

“They didn’t do any worksheets, Liza. We did speak about great words like
translucent
and
percolate
though.
Null gravitation
, too. We also read chapter twelve of
Ender’s Game
.”

The pained look she gave him was almost comical. “I don’t believe that’s on the literature list this year.”

“That’s the beauty of skipping worksheets. You get to add in a few extra novels.”

She stepped close to Nick’s desk, peering at him in a way she obviously meant to be threatening.

Nick would have to give it to her straight. “No one fails in the same way. And none of my students can be turned on to school in the same way. If I use the worksheets everyone else is using, these kids will get the same result they’ve been getting: failure.”

She crossed her arms. “I appreciate your concern, Mr. Foster. But there’s a reason for the system. It’s been researched by experts.”

Experts? Did she even believe that?

Liza’s eyes grew harder by the minute.

“Look,” he tried. “Take a look at my test scores last year. A 70 percent passing rate, and that’s from one hundred and eighty plus kids. Each one was expected to fail.”

She sent him a frosty stare. “Your zeal is admirable, but I’m putting you on warning. I’ll be stepping into your class next week, and I expect to see the standard English II lesson taking place.” She flicked a glance at the objective on his board. “Being taught, Mr. Foster. Understood?”

She marched out of the classroom. He might have saved his breath. She hadn’t come to listen.

He’d like to crow over the kids who changed course while in his class. But he couldn’t forget the ones who slipped through his classes without tuning in, the ones who joined gangs or quit school instead. He refused to waste an entire week on worksheets.

The door to the stairwell clanged closed, and the sound of Liza’s heels tapping down the stairs carried up in a faint echo. He rapped his knuckles against the desk. He needed fresh air.

Nick went to the park a mile from school instead of going home. He pulled his truck into a space, slammed the door, and trekked down the dirt trail but came to a halt when he saw her.

April Wright sat on a bench, her camera pointed at a group of Chinese men performing Tai Chi by the pond. She didn’t have the camera in front of her eyes, but held it beneath her chin. Maybe she was testing the light. She sat so still, not just focused, but like something she saw had wounded her or thrilled her or both. He followed the angle of the camera to an old gray head. The man flowed in his movements, his expression serene.

April jumped a little when he sat beside her.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said.

“Mr. Foster.” She flashed him a smile, the joy and sorrow both gone from her face. A pity.

“Nick,” he reminded her. “Can I see?” He pointed at the camera.

She handed it to him. “There’s not much.”

There were no Chinese men on the screen. The first shot showed a weeping willow. It was good as far as landscapes went. He had a sense of the weight of the branches as they arched toward the ground. He clicked back and found an image of a little boy sitting in a swing, the expression on his face haggard. Two pictures, that was it.

He handed it back. “You’re good. I bet you have albums full at home.”

A look of yearning came into her eyes and disappeared as quickly. She laughed and flashed him a smile. Her eyes crinkled. It was a look of pure sunshine as she shook her head. “No, I haven’t taken pictures for years.”

He glanced at the camera. Nick had thought of getting a high-quality digital but had changed his mind when he saw the prices. The one she held in her hands cost a good five thousand dollars, a steep price for a woman in this neighborhood. There was a story there.

Nick had a weakness for stories, but he’d learned the hard way. Women with stories were a handful. So the words surprised him as they left his mouth. “If you like pictures, there’s a place I know you’d love. Are you busy?”

Her mouth opened and closed. She leaned back and gave him a once-over. “No,” she said. “Sierra is at a church youth club. I’m wasting time until I pick her up.”

He spread his hands in a question. “I bet you haven’t seen this part of your neighborhood.”

She smiled again. That spunky smile got him. He found he didn’t want to leave her just yet.
Just an afternoon looking at pictures, Nick,
he told himself.
That’s all.

They strolled back to his truck. He opened the door for her and she lifted herself in. They drove around the corner and parked in a shopping center blocks from school. Not a sign in the place was in English. There was a sari shop, a Vietnamese noodle house, a Spanish bookshop, a pawnshop that had signs in Spanish and Chinese, and an Ethiopian mini-mart.

That’s what he loved about this part of town. It was as if the entire globe had poured itself into a few blocks. Though most of the immigrants who lived here came from Central America, they were from hundreds of other places too.

He led her into the glassed-in shop at the end. The smell of wool greeted them. Persian rugs hung from the wall and lay in stacks all the way to the back of the store. Almost before the door swung closed behind them, Ali came rushing to meet them.

“Nicholas, my friend.”

He kissed both of Nick’s cheeks and grabbed April’s hand. “You are a friend of Nicholas? Ah, he is a good man.”

April looked back at him, her head tilted. “So I’ve gathered.”

“You are searching for a carpet to buy?” he asked April.

“No, Ali, April is a photographer.” Nick pointed to the camera still hanging around her neck. “Do you mind if she looks at a few of your photos?”

His face lit up. “Photos? Come, come.” He yelled something in rapid-fire Arabic to the young man in the back of the showroom and led them to a curtained doorway.

Nick lifted the curtain for April, who sidled by him, and then they were in the back room he’d brought her to see. She made a little gasp as she looked around. The office/kitchenette had three walls of photos, hundreds of them cascading from ceiling to floor.

She went to the first wall and began browsing. Nick stood back, happy to watch. He’d been right to bring her here.

Ali came to stand beside him, a grin on his face. “I think your friend likes them, eh?”

She stopped next to a photo of a refugee child whose dark eyes appeared to look directly into the viewer’s, asking a single question:
why?

“You were a journalist?” she asked, turning to Ali.

“I took photographs for a newspaper. In Libya.”

She let that sink in. “But you couldn’t continue?”

Ali shook his head. “I did not wish to photograph propaganda. I thought perhaps in America I could photograph the truth. But I am a foreigner. Sometimes I take photos for a small Arabic newspaper, but for a career, I sell carpets.” He waved as if to dismiss his failed dreams.

“Look. Spend all the afternoon looking if you wish.” He turned to the telephone, dialed, and began speaking in a barrage of Arabic again. After he hung up, he strode back into the front of the store.

Nick stood behind her. “I only got to see two of your pictures. But I could tell you would like a place like this.”

She nodded, as if it would be too much to speak, and moved down the wall. He moved with her. She put her finger under another photo, this one of two sheiks embracing. It was a picture of peacemaking and diplomacy, yet their cold eyes told another story.

“When I was a kid, I saw myself behind the camera,” she said, “getting pictures like these. I thought I was going to work for
Time
, be some kind of big-shot photographer.”

“What happened?”

She laughed. “It’s not a dramatic story. I got married.”

“He didn’t want you to be photographer?”

“We were idealistic. We thought he could be a professor, holding down the homestead. I’d jet-set around the world taking pictures, coming home to my sweetheart when I could. But life doesn’t work that way.” Her brown eyes grew dark. “He passed away a couple of years ago,”

Nick put his hands behind his back. She looked up at him, and he caught the scent of her shampoo. Sun from the skylight above sparked red and gold lights in her hair, and he had a sudden crazy desire to trace the white line of her neck. She made eye contact, and he felt a flash of guilt, as if she’d read his thoughts.

He stepped back, shaking his head to clear it. He knew better. Teaching had taken the place of his wife a long time ago. It was best to keep it that way.

The awkward silence grew until Ali came rushing in with bags. Scents of saffron and steamed meat wafted through the room.

“Ali,” Nick chided. “What have I told you about feeding me every time I visit?”

The man chuckled. “The men and women who teach our children must be well fed. That is what
I
have told
you
!”

His wife bustled in with a teapot and poured out milky tea for them. She set the table for two, unpacked the boxes of lamb and yellow rice, and then she and Ali left. If Nick guessed right, Ali was up to a little matchmaking.

April looked at the table with a glint in her eye. “Mmm. I do like lamb.” She looked at the pictures. “Thank you, Nick. This is a treat.”

They sat at the table and ate quietly at first until she put down her fork. “Tell me about your job, Nick.”

He talked about his kids for a while. It didn’t take much to get him talking about them.

“How do you arrange your classroom when you’ve got them on all these different assignments at once?” she asked. She kept asking about his students, what their expressions were as they tuned in for the first time. Her questions were those of an artist visualizing a scene.