In the Shadow of Man
Ben was late for school pickup; Wednesday was Diana’s day, but he’d forgotten that she had a meeting at the university until she texted him just after 3:00. When he picked Olivia up on time, he had to wait in a long line of cars until one of the teachers checked his dashboard sign, then walkie-talkied inside to summon his daughter. On accidental late days like this—about once a week, no matter who was doing pickup—he parked in the small paved lot and walked inside to find her hula-hooping or coloring or helping her teacher, Ms. Susan, sort math manipulatives or clean the old-fashioned chalkboards.
They were lucky to have gotten into Sunshine Charter, Diana reminded Ben when he complained about the lack of bus service or school lunches. “The Free Friends,” some of the other parents called it before praising the school’s philosophy of project-based learning, the copious time outside, the fact that homework was forbidden—forbidden! A lottery system with sibling preference and a wait list a hundred kids deep—what were the chances? Ms. Susan, who’d come down South from Brooklyn, as she often reminded people, was more traditional than some of the other teachers, sneaking in worksheets and occasional math homework and insisting on the respectful (and hierarchical, some parents felt) Ms., but Ben liked her no-nonsense attitude and strict control over the class. Some of the other classes, Olivia said, could be a little wild.
Diana, who taught evolutionary biology at Duke, liked the field trips, and this was Olivia’s favorite part of school too. So far this year they’d been to all the free local museums, plus the water treatment plant, an artist’s studio, a welding shop, and a biodiesel plant—and it was only October. The field was where real learning happened, Diana maintained, though it had been some years since she’d been to the African preserve where the baboons she studied lived.
Olivia had asked him to chaperone the one today—please, Daddy?—but Ben, who was on furlough from his own government job, had a networking event to attend.
“Not back yet,” Ms. Susan told him as he entered the classroom. Ben was relieved—no admonishments from Olivia—until he saw two other parents seated grumpily at the small desks. What were their names? Margaret, he thought, mother of Declan? And someone else’s dad, in heavy steel toe work boots, scrolling on his phone.
“Can you call again?” asked Margaret, standing up and hooking her purse over her shoulder, like her own readiness might be convincing. “Can I call? We have a game soon.”
“I’m sure they’ll be here any minute,” Ms. Susan said. She was seated placidly at her desk, working through a pile of notebooks—the journals the third-graders kept for recording observations about nature. Squirrel Studies, Olivia called her notebook, Ben remembered. He felt a sudden possessiveness, the desire to have his child back.
“It’s Todd who’s driving,” Margaret told him, with a significant look. “Todd Dougherty. He and Lori are divorcing.” She ticked off the kids in the car: “He’s got his daughter Lizzie, Olivia, Luis, and Declan.”
“It happens sometimes,” Ms. Susan said, turning pages and applying stamps and stickers. Last year’s teacher, who just went by Amy, never used stickers but instead wrote notes in colored pencil that neither praised nor criticized, only made observations. You are paying a lot of attention to color, one might read. Or, It rains a lot in spring. Olivia liked the stickers, some of them featuring the Disney princesses forbidden by the handbook.
“Divorce ain’t a crime,” Ms. Susan continued, almost as if she were talking to herself. “If it was, half this school would be in jail.” Ben found her saltiness reassuring—a reminder that the keyed-up anxieties that came with a certain brand of modern parenting were a waste of energy. A reminder that the kids would be fine, no matter what bullshit their parents or the world exposed them to. She looked up and said, in a softer tone, “He probably took them for ice cream and lost track of time.”
“Declan is vegan.”
“Sorbet,” Ms. Susan said. “I’ll call them again in a minute. Why don’t you go downstairs and look around the gallery wall? The kids just finished a big project in art class.”
“But when—”
“The Year 2030,” Ben announced. Margaret looked at him with such distress that he quickly clarified: “The art project. That’s what it was about. The kids imagining life in the year 2030.”
“Oh,” she said. “That does sound interesting.” She followed him out the door
The gallery was nothing more than a dimly lit hallway on the school’s first floor, with a strip of corkboard used to display the kids’ work, hung a little lower than an adult’s eye level. The art teacher was in a band that toured each summer in Europe, stateside during the school year, and had full tattoo sleeves that made Ben’s own bare arms feel a little naked. Everyone’s bio at the school, it seemed, had something interesting attached to it, some complexity that suggested that the work of teaching was just one of a vast array of interesting vocations that could occupy their time. The kids could go weeks without an art class, but Ben had to admit that the projects were well-done, far more elaborate and interdisciplinary—a major code-word for the teachers—than the color wheels and still lifes he remembered from his own years in elementary school.
THE YEAR 2030: CHALLENGES AHEAD, read an ominous sign at the start of the hall.
“Declan will be twenty-two,” said Margaret. “Graduating from college. And I’ll be…” She started counting on her fingers, then trailed off. “Old.”
“And itchy, apparently,” said Ben, nodding at the first poster. poison ivy will overrun wild spaces, the poster claimed in green bubble letters. The tempera-painted leaves-of-three trailed off the poster’s edges in a way that suggested invasiveness, and the student listed the reasons for her prediction at the poster’s base: deforestation, climate change, biodiversity loss.
“Not swimming in the ocean,” said Margaret, pointing at the next one: JELLYFISH CLOG OUR WATERS. A SEA OF STINGERS. OUCH!
Ben walked down the hall, scanning posters. He realized, despite his own work as a water quality specialist for the state—a furloughed water quality specialist—that he was hoping for good news.
ZIKA IS COMING. EVEN MORE HORRIBLE DISEASES. MOSQUITOES WILL LOVE IT IN 2030.
It will be easy to get a tan, read a cheerful-looking poster painted with a bright orange sun. AND CANCER.
“Here’s Olivia’s,” said Margaret, peering at a small, neatly lettered poster. “Clever. It’s scratch-and-sniff.”
“I wouldn’t,” Ben warned. Olivia had based her project on some of the work that he had been doing before his furlough, about pollution in the state’s chicken and pig farming regions. She’d mixed up a noxious concoction in the kitchen, using moldy fridge scraps and essential oils, and painted it onto strips of fine-gauge sandpaper. She’d chosen the title of her project herself—FOWL SMELLS—and translated it into Spanish.
“I worry about these kids,” he said, partly as a way of deflecting the anxieties he knew Olivia’s detailed poster, with its puns, graphs, and tables, would provoke—not about chicken waste, but about the other kids’ invented spelling, clumsy lettering, and monolingualism. “All this doom and gloom. They’ll have ulcers before they’re in middle school. There’s probably a poster about that somewhere.”
“I find their passion inspiring,” Margaret said. Declan’s poster was noticeably missing. She checked her watch. “But this thing with the field trips—it makes me nervous. What happened to buses? And head counts?”
“I’m sure they’ll be back any minute,” Ben assured her. But privately he agreed. The system was unbelievable to him—parents and teachers, driving their own cars as chaperones, stood in the school’s commons and held up fingers to indicate the number of free spaces that remained in their vehicles as students raced around with their friends, musical chairs–style. The object was not to have to ride with the principal, Olivia told her parents—Tamara listened avidly to books on tape, which you were not allowed to interrupt by talking above a whisper, and did not allow eating or even gum chewing in her station wagon. The best was to ride with a smoker—anything goes with a smoker, Olivia believed. Does someone write down who goes in what car? he’d asked, exasperated. Olivia had shrugged. It’s not hard to remember
Diana called the system ingenious—it made field trips free, or almost free, and easier for teachers to schedule—but Ben thought that her years studying and working in developing countries had made her somewhat blind to basic safety issues. He sometimes thought Diana led a charmed life, with her smooth path to tenure, the comfortable mix of public and private grants that funded her research, the legions of devoted student acolytes, eager to do anything she asked. She wore no makeup (she didn’t need it), ate only when she was hungry, and woke every day at 6:30, with no alarm.
Of course she worked hard and made sacrifices—she’d lived for more than a year in a minimally equipped tent in the Amboseli National Park, and now was more often in the business of dispatching graduate students and managing their research from her lab, which she found far more oppressive than the African savannah. But still: her work mattered. It would last. It was not subject to the whims of anti-environmental state legislators who tracked her every email.
He was wondering if he should call her now, to tell her about the missing car of students, when they heard the school’s front door open.
“They must be here,” said Margaret. “Finally.”
They walked rather quickly through the exhibit space and then the commons, a maze of backpacks and lunch bags dropped by the school’s after-care kids. Those kids were playing outside, and Ben knew that Olivia, an only child, would ask him if she could stay a while and play with them. He’d say yes, he decided, even though he had a complicated chicken stew in mind for dinner. Screw it: they’d have pasta instead. Maybe Declan and Luis would stay too—maybe they all had ice cream, or a funny story to tell.
But it was only Tamara, back from some errand. She carried in grocery bags—did she look worried?—and waved to them from her windowed office, cell phone clutched to her ear. Luis’ dad had come downstairs from the classroom and was waiting on the bench by the entrance, hand-painted by the kids to read welcome in charmingly crooked yellow letters, outlined in green. He was texting someone from his phone and looked even unhappier than before.
“Ms. Susan left,” he said, not looking up. “She had to get her own kid from the high school.” He finished his text and looked at Margaret. “What did you say about Todd?”
“I heard,” Margaret began, but then her eyes filled with tears. “You know, you hear about these disgruntled dads, on the news…”
Tamara came out of her office then, smiling broadly, and greeted each of them with a practiced, energetic calm. “José, Margaret, Ben, you’ve had to wait a while now. Can I get you some snacks? I brought some veggie trays and hummus, some pita.”
“Hummus?” Ben said. “Are you fortifying us for some kind of longer—where are our kids, Tamara?”
“It’s been an hour,” José said.
“We’re in touch with Lori, who is on her way,” Tamara said. She took the various clipboards and papers—invitations to volunteer for this or that, to plant flowers, to build a treehouse, or man the ham radio—off the small table next to the entrance and set them on the floor. Ben had volunteered far more often in Olivia’s first year than he had this year, when he was on furlough, halfheartedly waiting to return to a job he hated. He’d spent almost a week putting together the European-style playground equipment, which mysteriously included no swings, no slide, and no instructions. If only he’d volunteered for this one thing—this field trip to where? A solar house?—he could be making chicken stew with olives in their sunny kitchen, or idly watching while Olivia and her friends created fairy houses from the playground’s thick layer of cedar mulch. He had not even attended the networking event. He thought of that stew-making self, easily irritated by the lack of an ingredient, or the one who passed the volunteer table without stopping, with an envy that bordered on hatred.
Ben texted Diana: Olivia not back from field trip yet, waiting at school. “You haven’t talked to Todd?” he asked with a steady voice. He’d already looked up the class parent phone list and sent half a dozen texts, none of them returned. Hey Todd! the first one read. We’re here at Sunshine. Give us a call?
Hey man, read the last one. Getting a little worried about you and the kids. Please call when you can.
“Lori has been trying to make contact with Todd,” Tamara said carefully, unpacking the unappetizing plastic trays of carrots and broccoli and grape tomatoes. The way she said it—make contact—made it sound like they were on the moon. “His phone is going straight to voicemail.”
“I knew it,” Margaret said. “When is he coming back? Where are they?”
“We have to talk to Lori,” Tamara said. “Todd didn’t answer Susan’s calls. He didn’t answer my calls.”
“What about the police?” José said. He held up his phone, showing a long string of texts. “Luis’ mother is asking where he is. If she finds out he was in trouble, and I didn’t tell her—”
“Declan has a phone,” Margaret announced suddenly. Ben realized she’d been gripping her own phone, wrapped in its tire-size rubber case, for the better part of the last hour. She must have been waiting for it to ring or vibrate with a text. “I pack it on field trips, for emergencies.” She admitted this rather defensively, as cell phones—along with Disney princess images and homework and adult surnames—were forbidden.
Yes, let’s call him, everyone agreed, so happy with Margaret’s paranoid and rule-breaking foresight. Why hadn’t she called him already, Ben wondered, until Margaret explained that the emergency phone was for outgoing calls only. “I told him, emergencies only,” Margaret said. “I really emphasized that.”
“That’s a good sign,” Tamara said. “He doesn’t think it’s an emergency. He feels safe.”
Ben had met Declan, a kid who wore a cape to school and often forgot his shoes on the way both in and out of the building, and did not feel reassured. Why hadn’t Ben thought of that—an emergency cell phone? He could easily have hidden it in Olivia’s backpack, and she would have known what to do with it, unlike this space cadet Declan kid.
As if she could hear Ben’s unkind thoughts, Margaret burst into tears. Tamara patted her, offering her a carrot.
Ben tried to conjure Todd, a big guy with a long graying beard. He taught music lessons and tuned pianos and because of his flexible schedule was almost always on field trip duty. Maybe this was the reassuring fact—he’d had plenty of opportunity to go AWOL, and never had. He had frequent occasion to interact with and potentially even harm people in their own homes, and he was not currently wanted or in jail. But then Ben remembered something else—Todd had a menagerie of pet lizards and snakes, which he sometimes brought to school, perched on his shoulder or wrapped around his arm. Even Diana, who studied baboon asses for a living, thought that was a bad sign about a person.
Margaret cried harder.
“I think, yes, call the police,” José said. “Maybe they can tell the location, because of the pings?”
“Is the phone on?” Tamara asked. Margaret shook her head. “Lori is afraid the police will make him more erratic. She’ll be here”—Tamara checked her watch—“any minute.”
Then suddenly it was nearly dark, all the warm October sunlight leached out of the sky. The afterschool kids had all departed, picked up by parents who complained—how stupidly they complained!—about the children’s slowness, or the way they always forgot their jackets and backpacks and sports equipment. Even after they were gone, there was a collection of puffy nylon coats in the corner, and Ben walked to the pile. Was that pink one Olivia’s? It was so small and familiar: the stiff arms that looked almost animated, the tiny hood. Ben stood over it, thinking he’d examine its pockets for the little collections Olivia carried: usually rocks and pebbles, but also errant Lego pieces, pen caps, acorns. He bent, lifted the coat, and saw that it was the very same one his daughter wore, but far too small, like something Olivia would have worn in kindergarten. Like something she would have molted.
“Hey, how’s it going,” said another dad, reaching past him. “I think that’s my kid’s.”
Ben nodded dumbly. As the coat disappeared—the last bright thing in the room—he had the sensation of falling backwards, forever and ever, into the growing darkness. He made himself walk back to the group. Ms. Susan had returned with her son, who made quick work of the veggies and hummus until Ms. Susan shook her head at him. They both sat on folding chairs near the door, solemnly doing homework.
Luis’ mom, Carmen, was next to Margaret on the welcome bench, holding her hand. José had left to take care of their other children—two of them, still at home—but he would be back once they’d been fed their dinner, back to collect Luis and Carmen. “Or else,” he’d said, looking darkly at Tamara. Then his look crumbled into something helpless. “Or else I don’t know what.” But he’d nodded in a determined way at Ben, just before he left—they’d decided that José would drive to Todd and Lori’s house to look around, and then back to the solar house. Ben offered to go himself—he didn’t have other kids at home, after all—but José said it was better for him to be there, in case the police arrived. José had a cousin who could watch his kids, and some neighbors who could help him look.
Margaret’s wife was in surgery at the hospital but would be there soon. Lori had gone to the police station, after all, and was answering questions about her husband: when they’d last talked, where he might take a carload of children.
Ben had still not called Diana, though he knew her meeting was likely over. She’d said not to expect her back until late, as she was working on a grant application and some article proofs. But she’d be there for bedtime, of course. She was reading In the Shadow of Man to Olivia, not an abridged version but the whole book, a fat sun-faded paperback she’s owned since college, of moment-by-moment chimpanzee observation. It was a testament to how much Olivia loved this time with her mother—her clear sonorous voice, her patient explanations of difficult words and concepts, the way she let Olivia page forward to the book’s few photographs—that she did not ask to switch to the newest Harry Potter, which waited on the shelf for Ben to read to her next. Diana, who spent long hours happily comparing charts detailing minute baboon behavioral changes, took Olivia’s patient attention for granted.
They all took so much for granted.
He pulled up Diana’s number. They had argued this morning—shouldn’t he always be on pickup duty, she wondered, since he wasn’t working? The way she said “wasn’t working”—usually they both said furlough—implied some kind of choice, he said. That wasn’t what she meant, it was just a true statement. Was he working today, or not? It was her dismissiveness that rankled him, though he finished packing Olivia’s lunch bag without mentioning the networking event he’d later skip. This was how their arguments went: Diana too preoccupied to take note of his feelings, then silence from Ben, and she wouldn’t even notice. Or maybe—and this was worse—she noticed but chose to wait for his hurt to pass.
He looked at the round icon above her number: a tiny snapshot of Diana, smiling and windblown, from Olivia’s second birthday party, something they’d thrown together at a downtown park. Calling her would make the threat real, would transform Todd in a way that his mind was struggling not to, from mild-mannered music teacher to creepy reptile-obsessive. And shouldn’t he be able to take care of this on his own? But he wasn’t sure he was making the best moves. Already Ben’s texts—sent surreptitiously from the hallway, so not to scare Margaret or upset Tamara—had gone from casual to pleading to angry.
If you touch a hair on her head…
A mistake, he realized, as soon as he pressed SEND.
He thought of Diana, her broad makeup-free face illuminated by the computer screen in her office while she innocently ate her dinner—plain yogurt, an avocado, foods that took no preparation and could be shoved into her backpack first thing—without tasting it. He thought of José, with his heavy boots and extended-cab truck, slowly patrolling Todd and Lori’s neighborhood. Should he be out searching too, instead of sending these ridiculous, unanswered texts?
Tamara’s phone rang. It was Lori again. She called every ten minutes or so with an update, which Tamara related back to them: the police had Todd’s plate numbers and they were notified in a seven-county range, though it would take another hour for them to declare an amber alert. She didn’t think he would do anything harmful. It was true they’d decided to separate, but they still lived together. She’d told the police everything, everything she could think of. No amber alert, not yet—that was a relief, and it also felt cavalier.
I’m sorry man. I know you wouldn’t hurt our kids. Sometimes things are tough. I just want to talk to Olivia.
He and Diana had been through their own rough patches, over the years—perhaps they were on the cusp of one now. Ben thought about writing that, how the furlough had made things hard. It wasn’t even really a furlough, though that’s what his department called it officially, he guessed to avoid paying a severance. It was more like a layoff, with the possibility of rehiring when the budget improved, which it probably wouldn’t. And Diana had never had problems at work, which made it hard for her to understand. Maybe Todd and Lori were having issues like that—Lori a programmer, so friendly and competent, and Todd with his weird odd jobs and reptiles, his way of standing silently off to the side at school functions, arms crossed over his belly. Ben could hardly even call his voice to mind, and he knew that it was hard to feel voiceless, extraneous. But that was a lot to put in a text.
“I’m sorry,” they could hear Lori saying through the crackling speakerphone, her own voice unfamiliar with fear, at the end of the call. Just get in touch, please! He pressed SEND again. The families had been invited to the police station, but no one wanted to leave the place where their children expected them to be. Where their children last were.
“No apologies,” Tamara said to Lori. “There is only the present moment, in which we are doing everything we can.”
That was the current schoolwide culture project—focusing on the present moment, and eschewing apologies or second-guessing. “You can’t change the past!” Olivia was newly fond of saying, whenever Ben or Diana noticed that she’d forgotten some chore. He found this project frustrating on a regular day, but now it seemed to be an expression of everything that was wrong with the whole reckless enterprise. The past mattered. It was why he was on furlough, after meticulous research into decades-long pollution. It extended into the present, polluting the water people drank, and then into the future as they carried that pollution with them, in their bodies’ very molecules.
Don’t go back, Diana told him, when he first left the department. They don’t deserve you. You’re wasting your talent.
But Ben wasn’t sure about that—sometimes he thought his talent was being married to Diana, producing—his small effort! How it paled in comparison to Diana’s thirty hours of labor!—this child with her. Why had they waited so long to have her? Why didn’t they have another kid, two more kids, three? Each of them smart enough to undo the damage of their presence on earth.
“I always told him,” Margaret sniffed. “I told him to ride with a woman, a mom. I know that’s terrible—I mean, he’s a boy himself—but a woman would not do this.”
“Yes,” said Carmen. “Me too. I always say to Luis, you get lost and have to find a cop, find a lady cop.”
“That’s what my mom always told me and my brothers, in Brooklyn,” Ms. Susan said. Ben could see, behind her composition journal, that she was surreptitiously grading math worksheets. “I repeated it to my own son.”
“But you don’t have to do that!” said Tamara. “We have taken our children on hundreds—hundreds—of trips, with moms and dads and teachers, women and men, and this has never happened before.”
“I thought you only cared about the present moment,” Ben said. “That’s this unbelievably shitty moment, where we’re waiting for the police to tell us where our kids are.”
Carmen and Margaret and even Ms. Susan looked at him with such surprised approval that he continued: “If you don’t care about anything but the present moment, what is that hipster art teacher doing terrorizing our kids with that nightmarish vision of the year they graduate from college?”
“You’re an environmental scientist,” Tamara said quietly. “You know the dangers. You are also welcome—encouraged—to volunteer.”
“I’m looking for a job! Because I am on furlough! For however long! Because Democrats only vote in presidential years and the lunatics we did not elect think environmental quality is about fishing and hunting and making sure we can drive on the beach!” He was shouting now. “I’m sorry! I know the art teacher is right—we are well and truly fucked—but it upsets me every time I come in here.”
“Ben—”
“Don’t tell me not to be sorry! I have behaved inappropriately by yelling and swearing and I’m fucking sorry!”
Ms. Susan had gotten up—he thought to find some soap for washing out his mouth, or some other kind of old-fashioned punishment he would welcome—but she returned with a roll of poster board. She slowly peeled off the masking tape that held it closed.
“This is Declan’s project,” she said. “He wasn’t finished coloring it in.”
Margaret stood and shakily unrolled the poster, holding the edges as if it were a fragile artifact, an illuminated manuscript or Egyptian papyrus scroll. Across the surface of the poster, Declan had drawn and mostly crayoned in a giant green cape. “2030” was written above the top, in red letters, and in the center of the cape a large red capital S, like the Superman logo. S is for scientist, he’d written in a blocky mix of upper- and lowercase letters. Scientists will be busy in 2030. Solving our problems. Making it OK to live here. So don’t be scared! Stay in school!!!
Ben didn’t know what to say. Margaret wept silently and showed the poster to Carmen before rolling it up again and tenderly refastening the tape. She sat down again on the welcome bench, hugging the poster gently.
“Why don’t we try a mindfulness exercise,” Tamara said, motioning for them to stand. Ben could feel Ms. Susan’s eyes rolling in her head, but he saw that Carmen and Margaret and even Ms. Susan and her son had followed her into the school’s center hallway, where there was more room to spread out. The school had no custodians—the children were responsible for cleaning, which meant that every surface was perpetually coated in a film of grime and dust—but Tamara seated herself on the floor quite naturally, as if she did this all the time, and closed her eyes. Ben watched them from the entrance hall, and took out his phone when he saw that they had all closed their eyes.
“Picture,” she said, then paused for a long moment, as if she could read, telepathically, what Ben was typing.
I will find you…
She took a deep breath and started again. “Picture something that makes you feel safe. A place. A special place where there is no fear, no judgment.”
How dare you take my…
“Think of yourself in this place, the sounds you would hear…”
It was hard to keep his fingers from tapping the tiny letters, but Ben made himself stop texting. What would he think of, if he were to picture safety? What would Diana think of? He went in his mind to the center pages of Jane Goodall’s book, with their black-and-white photos: chimpanzees in trees, chimpanzees in the rain, chimpanzees hugging and fighting and kissing their chimpanzee lips together. With a glittery ribbon, Olivia had bookmarked the single photo of Jane, young and slender, in the forest with her toddler son, holding him by one hand as they waded through a stream. But she never got to go back there, Olivia told Ben. After she became famous, she had to spend every moment of her life traveling to places that weren’t like the Gombe forest at all. Wasn’t that sad?
It was. Ben closed his eyes and pocketed his phone. He thought of the heat-shimmering Amboseli, where Diana’s research station chugged on with the grad students and post-docs who sent her their research but were not her, were not as smart or capable or dedicated. He could leave his job permanently, he thought, take Olivia out of school and go there, with Diana. They could live in tents, cook over a fire, see a night sky swimming with stars. But that was impossible, Diana would say. It was not their life now.
Here was life now: a school door clanging open, the entranceway suddenly filled with the yogurt and shampoo and dirt and honey smell of children. There were Luis and Lizzie and Declan and Olivia, all of them intact and laughing and talking over each other as if their parents, sitting stunned on the grubby floor or nearly fainting—Ben didn’t know he was a fainter—against the wall of Sunshine Charter, had not spent the last two hours in the worst panic and dread of their lives.
Carmen and Margaret pounced on their children first, enveloping them in hugs that swept them off their feet while Tamara made a call to Lori at the police station. Susan held the door open for Todd, who loped in, loaded with water bottles and lunch bags and backpacks. He didn’t say anything, but a familiar parental exhaustion shone in his eyes. Ben placed one hand on the wall and groped the other hand toward Olivia.
“Dad,” she said, ducking under his arm and hugging his side. She smelled like leaves and crayons. “We saved a turtle! A huge alligator snapper! It almost bit Todd’s hand off!”
“Oh” was all that Ben could say. He looked hard at Todd, who was gently arranging the children’s things near the door like some kind of large and penitent monk, matching the names on the water bottles with the names on the lunch bags. Todd straightened up and took out his phone, which Ben could see was badly cracked and taped across the front.
“I’m sorry,” Todd said finally. “I thought it would only take a minute, but once we started—”
“We couldn’t just leave the turtle,” Luis said. “It would get hit by a car.”
They took turns telling the story, how Declan had spotted the turtle in the other lane and they’d all talked Todd into pulling over. The snapper was two-and-a-half feet long! No, three feet long! And green with algae. She was trundling across the road, but so slowly. When they approached her she disappeared inside her shell, but they knew better than to pick her up.
“We knew better,” Olivia corrected Luis. “Todd tried.”
They found a strong stick and coaxed it into the snapper’s mouth. She bit down and did not let go. Olivia and Lizzie each took an end and led the snapper across the road while Todd and Luis and Declan directed traffic around them. It took a while to make sure the snapper was safely in the swamp.
“And,” Olivia said, “then we got lost.”
“I’m sorry,” Todd said. He held up his phone. “I was relying on my GPS. It ran out of battery and I don’t have a car charger. I thought I’d charge it here and call Lori.” He plugged it in and it came to life, then flashed and vibrated with incoming messages and texts. Ben winced at the texts he knew Todd would soon be reading from him, and probably also from Margaret and José and Tamara and even Lori, what he’d learn they thought had happened. It was no worse than what they had been through, sitting here. It was less bad because it was in the past, where you could not go. Not to change, not to fix.
“Declan,” Margaret said, “why didn’t you use your emergency cell?”
“My what?” Declan said. He was not wearing shoes. He did have on the cape. “Oh,” he said. “Oh yeah.”
“We thought—” Ben began.
“We thought something had happened—to all of you,” Susan said firmly. She was handing out backpacks and graded math worksheets. “But it didn’t. We were worried, but now we’re so relieved.” Tamara nodded at Margaret and Ben—it was best to go now.
“Look,” said Olivia, as they walked outside. It was fully dark, but under the streetlights, he could see the pastel Ariel sticker on her paper, which Ms. Susan had chosen, he knew, just for her. “I can do my sevens in under a minute.”
“That’s wonderful,” Ben said. Really it was. It had taken him a long time, maybe until the end of middle school, to learn his sevens. He sniffed the air: sharp and clean, a fall smell. In Africa baboons and chimpanzees were trading their ancient calls. And somewhere nearer, a turtle—prehistorically armored, infinitely determined—was digging its way safely into the mud.