One thing for sure—she did fit right in. Fashion was not a major priority in
Simpson
,
“Hi, Jerry.” She tried to drum up some enthusiasm for the school administrator. He was nice enough and mainly harmless except for trying to rope her into his endless rounds of amazingly pointless good works. His last triumph had been to ship four hundred pounds of ham and woolens off to an earthquake-shattered Islamic country where the median winter temperature was ninety degrees.
“Hi, Sally.” Jerry Johnson smiled and pushed his glasses up his pug nose. He had dark, narrow polyester trousers that ended at his anklebone, a short-sleeved polyester shirt though it was sleeting outside and cheap plastic horn-rimmed glasses.
Who dresses this guy?
Julia thought, clenching her teeth.
Elmer Fudd?
“How ya doing?” Jerry asked, a puppylike smile on his face.
People were trying to kill her. She had been banished to Simpson,
Siberia
. Federico Fellini, her beloved finicky cat, was in a foster home. Would his foster parents remember to feed him only the choicest cuts of meat and take him to the homeopathic vet? She had lost a job she loved and was living in a house where not only the roof, but now the walls were leaking.
She smiled thinly. “Great, Jerry. Just great. What can I do for you?”
He smiled back, showing acres of white teeth. His wife’s brother was studying to be a dental hygienist and practiced on Jerry. A lot.
“Elsa and I are having some people over for dinner tomorrow night and we’d like to know if you can make it.” He leaned close and Julia caught a lethal whiff of mint. He’d had his teeth cleaned again. “Elsa’s making her macaroni special. You wouldn’t want to miss it.”
Julia perked up.
Pasta.
Visions of her favorite
trattorias
in
Italy
swam before her eyes and she almost wept. Gorgonzola and penne. Amatriciana. Pesto. She would give her soul for a taste of real food.
“I didn’t know Elsa cooked Italian,” she sighed.
“Oh sure.” Jerry beamed proudly. “Great recipe. We have it all the time. She just cooks the noodles for about an hour until they’re nice and soft, then adds ketchup and cheddar and shoves it in the oven.” He grinned, big brown eyes gleaming behind the oversized lenses. “Yummy.”
Julia closed her eyes and sent up a silent prayer to that Great Director in the Sky to get her out of this terrible cheesy B movie she was trapped in. She wanted a new script—a nice sophisticated romantic comedy, starring, say, Cary Grant.
Charade
, or
Bringing up Baby
. Not
American Pie
.
“You can bring someone along, if you like,” Jerry added. “A date. Elsa always makes extra.”
A date. Was that something soft and cylindrical that grew on trees? In her month in Simpson, all the males she’d met had either been married since they were twelve or lacked a faculty or two. Not a Cary Grant in sight. Heaven knew what the single female population of western
Then she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to date, wasn’t even supposed to fraternize with the locals and grew even more depressed at the thought of maybe never ever having sex again in this lifetime.
“Thanks, Jerry. That’s kind of you, but I’ve got a lot to do.” File my nails, alphabetize my spice rack, rinse out my stockings. “I’m really behind on my grading. But thank Elsa anyway. Maybe I can take a rain check.”
“Okay.” His cheerfulness grated on her already sensitive nerves. “You’re missing a fun evening, though.”
Julia smiled weakly then screamed. “Damn it! Er—darn it! Can’t you do something about that bell, Jerry?” Her ears were still ringing and she slapped the side of her head. “Where on earth did you get it? From a decommissioned submarine?”
“It gets the kids’ attention,” he replied mildly. “Well, gotta go. Sorry you can’t make it tomorrow.”
Julia dredged up a smile. “Another time, Jerry.” She braced herself and tried not to flinch as the second bell sounded—the one the kids called the “or else” bell, because the teachers shouted for them to settle down in their room—or else.
Her own kids were remarkably well-behaved. She clearly remembered walking gingerly into the class of twelve second-graders expecting…what?
It was hard now to remember the trepidation bordering on fear she had felt a month ago. Visions of black-jacketed hoodlums with knives and machine guns, driven crazy by whatever street drugs were currently popular, had flashed through her head. They would carve her up and dump her body on the outskirts of town and the law wouldn’t even be able to touch them because they were underage.
As it happened, she had walked into her classroom, introduced herself as the new teacher, taking over from Miss Johanssen who had to move suddenly to
Actually, in the beginning, the kids were so nice she had had the crazy notion that she had walked straight into a remake of
The Body Snatchers
; the kids really aliens grown in tiny little pods down in the basement of the school. Gradually, she realized that they lived in such a harsh environment and grew up doing chores as soon as they could walk that they were used to unquestioning obedience.
She walked into the classroom, then stopped as a small brown cannonball barreled straight into her stomach. She let out a whoosh of air, then laid her hands on two narrow shoulders. The small bones felt as fragile as a bird’s under her hands.
“Rafael.” She smiled and hunkered down. Rafael Martinez was her favorite pupil. Small, shy, with a sweet nut-brown face, he had hovered around her the past month, bringing her fistfuls of late-blooming daisies, a piece of filthy tea-colored bone he assured her was a dinosaur fossil and—her favorite—a tiny spring green turtle.
Julia had been worried to see him growing sadder and sadder over the last two weeks. Something was happening at home. She could have resisted the temptation to interfere if Rafael had become aggressive and violent, like kids did in the movies. But he had simply turned quiet, then morose, waves of unhappiness palpably quivering in the air around his little round, dark-haired head.
“Hey, buddy,” Julia said gently. She reached out a finger to casually wipe away a tear. “What’s the matter?”
He mumbled something at the floor. She thought she heard “Missy” and “mother” and glanced sharply at Missy Jensen, her cropped straw-colored hair and overalls making her look more like a little boy than a little girl.
Julia was puzzled. Ordinarily Missy and Rafael were best friends and swapped baseball cards and tadpoles.
“Baffroom,” Rafael mumbled into her waist, head down. He needed to cry in private. Julia opened her arms and the small boy snaked around her and rushed off to the bathroom across the hall.
She walked over to where Missy was staring after Rafael, a stricken look in her eyes.
“What was that about, Missy?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know, ma’am.” The little girl’s lower lip quivered. “I didn’t mean nothin’. All I asked was whether Rafael’s momma would take him trick-or-treating with me.” Missy raised troubled cornflower blue eyes. “Then he just runned away.”
Uh-oh
. Julia thought.
Trouble. Right here in River City
.
“Ran,” she corrected automatically. “Well, then, just let him be. We have to get to work if we want everything ready for this evening.” Julia stepped away and clapped her hands. “Okay, class, let’s get going. We’ve got Mr. Big to get ready.”
All the kids had brought their own pumpkins to prepare for Halloween that evening. Fourteen small pumpkins with crazed, skewed grins were lined up on the shelf. Now it was time to tackle Mr. Big. One of the local farmers had dropped by that morning and without a word—the inhabitants of Simpson were definitely not talkers—had deposited a forty-pound whopper of a pumpkin for the kids to carve up.
Carving the enormous pumpkin was going to be a class project and that evening the finished product would be put out on the steps of the school with a candle inside.
Like most expatriate Americans, Julia and her family had observed American holidays religiously, no matter where they were posted. Julia’s mother had managed to find a turkey for Thanksgiving in
Dubai
, pumpkins for Halloween in
Lima
and a Christmas tree in
Singapore
. Julia had felt cheated when she found out in
Boston
that kids no longer trick-or-treated because it was too dangerous.
Luckily, about the only danger to children in Simpson was getting gored by an elk. She was happy to note that her kids had been excited all week at the thought of dressing up and going trick-or-treating.
“Henry, Mike, I want you to get the big plastic sack. That’s where we’ll put the seeds and pulp.
Sha
ron
, get the felt tip pen so we can draw the face. Who’s got the candle?”
“Me.” Reuben Jorgensen gave a gap-toothed grin and held up an industrial-size candle.
“Great. Okay, gang, let’s get going. We’ve got half an hour to put the biggest, meanest jack-o’-lantern this town has ever seen on the school’s steps.”
“Yeah! Oh boy!” In a tangle of limbs and with a maximum of fuss and mess, Mr. Big began to take shape. Oddly, the noise and confusion soothed Julia, who was used to the clamor and bustle of a big city. Simpson was silent and deserted even at
and it creeped her out.
She watched the kids try to wrestle the seeds out of the enormous pumpkin, interfering only to pick up most of what slopped out onto the floor so the kids wouldn’t skid and fall down. Jim, the janitor, would take care of the rest.
After about a quarter of an hour, Rafael slipped inside the classroom, eyes dry but red-rimmed. Julia hoped he would join in the fun, but he stayed on the outskirts of the whirl of activity. Julia sighed, and penned another note to his parents, asking to meet with them, and slipped that one, too, into the little boy’s lunch pail. It was the fifth note in two weeks. Much as she hated the thought, if she got no response this time, she would ask Jerry for Rafael’s home number and call his parents up on Monday.
“Miss Anderson, lookee.”
Julia was thinking what kind of parents could be so indifferent to the sadness of such a sweet little boy. It took her a minute to respond to the excited request. She turned to find twelve shiny faces turned up to her, so many buds to her sun. If they only knew that she was winging it, she thought wryly.
“Look what we done.” Reuben stood proudly, one hand on the enormous pumpkin.
“Did,” Julia corrected. But she was smiling as she walked around the desk, raising an eyebrow at Mr. Big’s ferocious stare. Pressed for time, the kids had left a lot of pulp and seeds in, but the outside had been carved into a horror movie fan’s fondest dream.
Tongue in cheek, Julia tilted her head. “He’s real scary. Looks like something carved by Freddy Kruger.” Something sharp and painful tugged in her chest at the sighs of satisfaction. Her smile faded. They were so young. Being scared was fun at that age—things that go bump in the night, ghosts leaping out of closets, and mommy and daddy ready to make them go away with a hug and a smile.
Who would make her ghosts go away?
A wild clanging noise erupted. Julia jumped at the bell and cursed Jerry. Jumping and cursing Jerry was becoming an automatic reflex.
“Bye, Miss Anderson. Bye.” In the space of a second or two, the room was emptied. Nature knew nothing faster than small children leaving the classroom at the end of the school day. In an amazingly short time, the whole school was deserted. It was Friday and the teachers left as soon as possible, too.
She would see most of these children that evening, decked out in their costumes. A bag full of candy was waiting on the scarred and scuffed occasional table next to the front door.
A couple of times a week, Julia stayed on after hours with one excuse or another. Herbert Davis had asked her to call collect from a public phone every two or three days since cell phone reception was spotty in the boonies and he didn’t want her to use the land line.
Davis
obviously had no idea what Simpson was like. There were three public phones in the town, one outside the school, one in Carly’s Diner and one in the grocery store. Julia had to rotate her calls among the phones to avoid attracting suspicion.
Julia’s footsteps echoed hollowly in the corridor as she walked to the exit. The janitor would be coming soon, but for now she was alone in the deserted building. The cheery confusion created by the children hid how old and dilapidated the building was. She walked on cracked tiles, shuddering at the crumbling plasterwork and yellow waterstains of the walls.