One Breath Away

“Okay, folks,” the chief says in a firm but nonconfrontational voice. “Please follow Officer Gritz’s directions now. We need to get to work here. I promise if we have any news to share, we will let you know immediately.”

I know what each of these parents is thinking of. The mass shooting at Columbine. It crossed my mind, too. Columbine changed everything in the way law enforcement responds to these situations. If we had evidence that the perpetrator in the school had started shooting, the chief would have immediately sent in a rapid deployment team to the source of the threat. Thankfully that hasn’t happened in this case. Yet. Because the suspect called dispatch and threatened the students and anyone who entered the building, we were approaching this as a hostage situation, meaning we were going to try to contact the intruder, find out what he wants and attempt to calmly talk our way out of this. The second there is evidence that shooting has started, we’d be in there. But for now, we needed more information.

“Won’t forcing the parents away from here cause a panic?” I ask Aaron in a quiet voice so the crowd won’t hear.

“I think they are already in a panic,” Aaron responds. He is wearing his rabbit-trimmed aviator hat with earflaps and his nose is red from the cold.

Just after my divorce was finalized, I got the police officer position with the Broken Branch Police Department. Aaron was on the interview team. Aaron is fortyish, divorced with two children and very handsome. At the interview Aaron asked me why I wanted to move to such a small community as Broken Branch when I was used to the larger, more urban city of Waterloo. “The fact that Broken Branch is a small, rural community is exactly why I want to settle down here. It’s a perfect place to raise a daughter.” What I refrained from telling the interview team was that I needed distance from Tim and our divorce. Waterloo wasn’t such a big city. Every time I turned a corner I ran into someone who knew my ex-husband, my parents, had been scammed by my brother. Besides, the hours that I worked for the Waterloo Police Force were terrible for a single mother. Broken Branch was only about an hour from Waterloo, close enough for Tim to easily see Maria.

I fell in love with Broken Branch years earlier when Tim and I drove through on our way to Des Moines. We stopped to buy honey from an old man selling jars of the amber liquid out of the back of his pickup truck.

“How did Broken Branch get its name? It’s so unusual?” I asked.

“Now, that is a great story,” the man said as he placed a large glass jar of clover honey, slim honey sticks and homemade beeswax candles carefully into a plastic bag and handed it to Tim. “Most people say it’s because the poor people who first settled here discovered a huge fallen tree over fifty feet long filled with an enormous beehive in it. Thousands and thousands of bees were buzzing inside and around the tree. Wanting the honey inside, they called on the help of an old woman who was known to have a way with bees. The story goes that she walked down to that hollowed-out tree and began singing a strange foreign song and all the bees became silent and followed her as she walked and sang. There were bees in her hair and on her arms, but still she walked and sang. Not one bee stung her. She led the bees to another felled tree down by the creek and the bees created a new home there. The settlers, who were poor and starving, gathered all that honey out of the broken branch and lived off of it for the winter. They were so thankful to the old woman that they offered to name the town after her, but she said that the thanks should lie with the bees and the tree that housed them. So they respected her wishes and named the town Broken Branch.”

I was completely enchanted by the story, and as Tim and I explored the peaceful streets lined with modest homes and towering trees, I knew I would return to Broken Branch. Little did I know that it would be to stay.

Fortunately, I impressed Chief McKinney, Aaron and the rest of the interview team enough for them to offer me the job.

A few months later, I found myself sitting alone with Aaron at a local bar after Broken Branch’s citywide softball tournament where I played first base. I had too much sun, not enough food and two lousy beers, and in the singular most embarrassing moment of my life, I made a halfhearted pass at Aaron. He gently pulled me off of him and told me that he wasn’t interested.

“I’m boring, too serious, aren’t I?” I asked. He looked at me for a very long time.

“No, Meg, you’re not boring, you’re great. It just wouldn’t be a good idea,” he said, and left me standing there. Though a few years have passed since that mortifying encounter, and Aaron has not brought it up once, I still blush bright red whenever I think of that night.

As I return to my car to retrieve a roll of crime tape, once again I feel my phone vibrate. Stuart. He just doesn’t give up. A text this time. I decide to ignore it and begin unraveling the police tape.

I met Stuart last January when Maria and I were cross-country skiing in Ox-eye Bluff. Maria, a novice at skiing, fell down one too many times. The final straw was that after the umpteenth tumble Maria’s skis became tangled in a thorny bramble of twigs at the side of the trail. By the time I freed her, Maria had worked herself into such a snit she refused to put her skis back on or to even walk out of the valley. We sat there for twenty minutes, Maria’s tears freezing against her cheeks, until a skier came gliding down the trail. He swooshed to a stop in front of us “Everything okay?” he asked.

“We’re fine,” I answered. “Just an equipment malfunction. We’re resting up for a few minutes.”

“Your mom can’t keep up with you, can she?” the man said to Maria, eliciting her first smile of the afternoon. “That’s what happens when you get old.” He smiled conspiratorially at her. “People can’t maintain the vigorous pace of us youngsters.”

“Exactly how old do you think I am?” I asked him through narrowed eyes.

“It’s rude to comment on a lady’s age.” He sniffed and then gave me a mischievous smile. “Why don’t you help me get her up,” he said to Maria. “If we leave her here much longer the wolves will start circling.”

I was about to tell him I was obviously fifteen years his junior and could drop a wild animal at two hundred yards with my eyes closed, but to my surprise Maria quickly scrambled to her feet and held out a hand to help me up. “Let’s go, Mom,” she said. “I think I hear howling.”

“There are no wolves in Ox-eye Bluff,” I said, reaching out my hands for the man and Maria to pull me to my feet. “I don’t think there are any wolves in Iowa for that matter. Coyotes, yes. Wolves, no.” The man was tall, at least six foot, fit with a lean face and closely cut brown hair flecked with gray.

He caught me looking and had the decency to blush. “It’s premature.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, raising my eyebrows. Together, the three of us skied to the end of the trail and then hiked our way out of the valley to where my car was parked. We didn’t talk much but I did learn that the man’s name was Stuart Moore and that he was a writer for the Des Moines Observer, the largest newspaper in the state. He also worked into the conversation how he had three grown children and was separated, the divorce held up by his wife.

“You don’t look old enough to have three adult children,” I said in mock disbelief.

“Well, child marriage, you know,” he answered as he clipped my skis onto the top of my car.

“You must have been what? Like twelve?” I played along.

“Something like that.” He laughed.

“What brings you here?” I asked. “Des Moines is an hour and a half from here.”

“I actually live just north of Des Moines, so it’s not quite that far. I’ve skied all over Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ox-eye has some of the best trails and no one else seems to know about it. I almost always have the trails to myself,” he explained.

“Until now,” Maria piped up.

“Until now,” Stuart agreed.

Stuart and I took it slow. At first, anyway. I was still bruised from my divorce and Aaron’s mortifying rebuff and I had Maria to think about. That winter we would run into each other at Ox-eye and end up cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing. In the spring and summer we would, by some unspoken agreement, meet up at Ox-eye to hike the trails. Sometimes with Maria, sometimes not.

The first time Stuart and I slept together was only about two months ago. Maria was spending the weekend at Tim’s house. There wasn’t enough snow for skiing anymore so I invited him back to my house for the first time. Being with Stuart, the way he touched me, the way he tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, made me feel safe and needed. He confided to me how his soon-to-be ex-wife had an affair with one of his colleagues, how it tore him apart, tore his family apart. How the divorce was finally going through. I told him about my work as a police officer in a small town, about Tim and the slow burn of my marriage. We drank too much wine and for three hours I didn’t think of DUIs or meth labs or disputes over fence lines. I didn’t think of Tim or even of Maria. I led Stuart into my bedroom and shut out the rest of the world. For a while I thought that maybe, just possibly, Stuart and I would end up together. How wrong I was. Within a matter of days I learned two crucial things about Stuart: he was married and would do anything to get a story. I don’t think Stuart had this grand plan of using me to get his big scoop. But the opportunity presented itself and Stuart took it.

I finish unwinding the yellow tape, bright and almost cheerful against the whiteness of the snow, if not for the bold black words declaring Police Line Do Not Cross.

Will

That morning Will had slipped into his warmest coveralls, his seventy-year-old joints protesting loudly. He tightly laced his brown leather work boots, pulled on the black-and-yellow winter hat that Marlys knit for him years before and wiggled his thick, rough hands into his insulated pigskin gloves. He stepped outside and made his way past the steel bins filled with corn and soybeans and past the concrete silo. It was a still, quiet morning; the sun had risen as a cold, dull orb in the gray sky, emitting a weak light. He moved toward the feed lot and the heifer paddock slightly out of breath, his heart thrumming with the exertion. Once Marlys returned home, he knew she would try and get him to the doctor and he would refuse.

The Angus had approached him in anticipation, regarding him with their large, soft eyes. And when Will bent over to check the feed bunks he saw that the cattle had licked them clean. The girls were hungry. He found the same slick bunks in the steer pen and checked his watch. He was late again. He had sluggishly gone to the barn where he methodically mixed the cattle feed, a mixture of hay, corn, cornstalks and corn gluten. Good thing he had Daniel, the hired hand, who had already cleaned out the paddocks and spread fresh hay across the frozen ground.

Being irresponsible regarding the farm chores was so unlike him, but without Marlys here everything he did was a little bit off his routine, off-kilter.

It was nearing one o’clock now and Will was making his rounds, checking on all the cows preparing for birth. This he couldn’t put off; if he did, he could have some dead calves and cows on his hands.

The nightly phone calls, always at seven-thirty Iowa time, five-thirty Arizona time, were the worst. First P.J. would talk, chattering on about how much he liked the farm, the snow and sledding, his new school, until Will would gently coax the phone from his fingers and hand it to Augie, who stood by nervously chewing her fingernails.

“Hi, Mom,” Augie would say, her throat dense with tears and something else, regret, guilt maybe. Then there would be a series of yeses, noes, okays. No elaboration on her new life in Broken Branch, short, curt responses. Augie would hand the phone back to Will and rush from the farmhouse, inadequately dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and tennis shoes. Will wasn’t sure where she ran off to, but figured it was probably the old hayloft in the south barn. That’s always where her mother had hidden when she was upset.

Then it was Will’s turn to try and make conversation. “How are you?” he would ask. “Feeling better today?”

Fine, yes, Holly would answer thickly, as if her tongue was swollen or she was heavily medicated. Both were likely.

“P.J. really has taken to farm life. Who would’ve thought? He’s a big help. Asks a lot of questions.”

“Oh, well, good.”

“Augie is a real city girl. Reminds me a lot of you.” Will chuckled. No response. “They miss you, but I’m taking good care of them. No worries, now, you hear?”

“Okay.”

“You get better fast, Hol. Love you.”

“Bye.”

He wasn’t a particularly demonstrative man. Wasn’t the hugging kind. But when his children were under his roof there was not one night that went by where he didn’t tell them he loved them. He saw his share of fellow soldiers cut down in Vietnam when he served as a lieutenant. Boys who would have given anything to tell their wives, their kids, their folks, they loved them one more time. Every night Will would go to his children’s bedrooms and tell them one by one that he loved them. When they were little they would throw themselves into his arms, even Holly, pressing their scrubbed faces into his neck, inhaling the complicated, earthy smells of the farm that rose from his pores. When the boys were older they would casually toss back a Love you, too, Dad, and Will was satisfied. Those words said, he could sleep well that night. Holly, his youngest, was another story. When she was twelve something shifted. She no longer looked at him through the eyes of a little girl who adored her father, but would look at him askance, her eyes judgmental slits. Love you, Hol, he would say, coming to the doorway of her bedroom but not stepping over the threshold into her realm of bottles of nail polish and piles of clothes.

“Good night,” she would say without looking directly at him, snapping the pages of a fashion magazine in irritation.

“Love you, Holly,” he would repeat a little more loudly.

“Uh-huh,” she would answer absentmindedly, and a spark of anger would ignite low in his breastbone.

Eventually he didn’t even bother opening her bedroom door to say good-night. He would knock twice on her door. “Night, Holly. Love you,” he would call through the closed door and briskly walk away. He couldn’t bear seeing the disdain on her face, of not hearing the sweetness of those three little words in response. Now here he was, eighteen years later, saying I love you to a daughter who still couldn’t seem to find one reason to say it back.

After he finished feeding the cattle, he went to the big barn where he and Daniel had moved four expecting heifers earlier in the week. Over one hundred calves were due to be born by mid-May. Despite the shelter from the barn walls, the cold had still seeped in and Will worried that some of the new calves might perish in the bitter weather.

Will patted the sleek rump of the heifer. He would have to stay close and check on her throughout the day. He expected a calf by that evening. He looked up at the sound of a shout. Through the wide doorway, Daniel was waving and jogging toward him. Daniel Tucker was an equable, methodical man of around thirty, unmarried and thoroughly dedicated to the animals and the land. He was a great help to Will, had a calm, gentle way around the cattle, was dependable and a hard worker. In addition to helping Will out on his farm, Daniel was renting farmland from Will in order to raise crops, hoping to one day purchase his own slice of Iowa. As Daniel came closer, his normally placid face was creased in concern; Will realized something wasn’t quite right.

“The school,” Daniel said breathlessly, his cheeks red, his nose running from the biting cold. “Something is happening at the school,” he said again, swiping his arm across his nose.

“What happened?” Will felt his heartbeat gathering speed and guiltily he realized that his thoughts went immediately to P.J., Augie a beat later.

“Something about a man with a gun,” Daniel said, and pulled his stocking cap from his head. “My sister just called me, my niece and nephew go to the school—she’s frantic. Said there’s a big crowd of parents at the school trying to find out what’s going on.”

“My daughter-in-law teaches fourth grade at the school,” Will said, pulling his hat from his head. “I need to call my son. You want to go be with your sister?” Will asked, biting his lip.

“Thought you’d want to go check on P.J. and Augie,” Daniel answered, reaching into his coat pocket for a handkerchief and blowing wetly into it. “And Todd’s wife, of course.”

“I’d appreciate that, Dan,” Will answered gratefully. “Numbers 87 and 134 will give birth sometime today. Can you stay near?” Will asked, pointing toward a wide-shouldered black-baldie whose swollen flank and udders looked ready to burst.

“You betcha,” Daniel said, patting his boss on the shoulder. “If you hear anything, let me know.”

The two moved quickly but in silence back toward the house. The only sounds were the wind whistling between the outbuildings and the mild lowing of the cattle, now satiated and huddled together trying to keep warm.

“Who would do such a thing?” Daniel finally asked, stretching his stocking cap back over his ears.

Will shook his head in bewilderment. He knew just about every single person in Broken Branch, and though there were a few mean, crazy sons of bitches, he couldn’t imagine anyone walking into a school with a gun. “Don’t know, Daniel. I’ll go see what I can find out,” he assured him, and went into the house. Will didn’t bother to change out of his coveralls or his dirty work boots but paused to grab the cell phone he seldom used. Then, unaware of the streaks of muck and manure he was trailing across Marlys’s carpet, he made his way into his tiny office. He spun the lock on his Browning gun safe, pulled it open and retrieved his Mossberg 500 pump action shotgun and tucked a box of shells into his pocket. Just in case.

Augie

Mr. Ellery steps out of the room and Noah and Justin follow him to the doorway. “Go sit down. Now,” he orders, his voice so serious that even Noah knows better than to disobey him.

“What’s going on?” Beth Cragg asks nervously, chewing on her fingers. Beth is the closest thing to a friend that I have in Broken Branch. Our grandmothers are friends and had unsuccessfully tried to make our mothers into best friends when they were our age. I guess they thought this was their second chance, because ten minutes after P.J. and I arrived at the farmhouse Beth and her grandma showed up with a plate of lemon squares. But I was the one who looked like she had sucked on a lemon when I first met Beth. We seemed so different from each other. Beth is all farm girl. She wears Levi’s and John Deere sweatshirts or McGee Feed Store T-shirts every single day. Beth is one of those girls who is naturally beautiful and doesn’t even know it. She has freckled skin and pulls her shiny brown hair back into a ponytail or twists it into a braid that lies across her shoulder like a thick rope. Whenever I try to wear my hair in a braid it looks like an anorexic rattail. The boys in eighth grade love her because she is still interested in chasing toads and skipping stones across the creek and because she belongs to 4-H and raises calves that she shows at the county fair each summer. She can talk about crops and guns and goes pheasant and deer hunting with her father. All except this year, because of her parents’ divorce. In the past two months, though, we have become friends. Beth is nice and is a good listener. Plus, she was the one person, including my grandpa and P.J., who didn’t make fun of the way I dyed my hair red. Now that’s a true friend. And we do have something in common. Our parents. Mine are divorced and Beth’s mom and dad are getting a divorce. She listens to me while I bitch about having to leave Arizona to live with my grandfather and she complains about how sad her mom is and how her dad tries to make her feel guilty for taking her mother’s side.

“What’s going on?” Beth asks again, her voice shaking. I feel my stomach flip with worry and I think of P.J. Then I think of my mother back in Revelation and I want to talk to her more than anything. My cell phone is in my book bag, which is in my locker out in the hallway, and I wonder if Mr. Ellery will let me go and get it.

“We’re in lockdown,” Mr. Ellery says seriously when he comes back into the room. “Not a drill.” He runs a hand through his black hair and pulls at his goatee. He shuts the classroom door and pushes the round button, locking us in. So much for going to get my phone.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Noah asks in surprise.

“Shhh, I’m thinking.” Mr. Ellery bites his lip and looks out the small window set into the door and then turns back toward us. “Let’s all move back to that corner.” He points to the space behind his desk away from the door and windows.

“Is it someone with a gun?” Felicia asks, her eyes wide.

“Oh, my God,” someone behind me whispers.

“We don’t know that,” Mr. Ellery says quickly.

“We can’t stay in here and wait for someone to come in and blow us away,” Noah says angrily, and I realize how much of a jerk he is all over again.

“No, we stay,” Mr. Ellery says firmly. “Until we get the all clear, we stay.”

Noah looks like he is going to argue, but as one by one everyone stands and goes to the back corner of the room and begins to squeeze themselves into the space between the teacher’s desk and the wall, he decides to follow.

“The boys should sit on the outside,” Savannah says.

“Fuck that.” Noah glares at her. “I’m not going to be anyone’s shield. I want to be as close to the window as I can. I’m going to get the hell out of here first chance I get.”

“Hey, Noah, just cool it,” Mr. Ellery says in a way that makes me think he wouldn’t mind climbing out a window, too. “No one’s going to be anyone’s shield. Does anyone mind sitting on the edges?” Five hands go up, including Beth’s and Drew’s. Slowly I raise mine. “Okay, guys, thanks.” Mr. Ellery nods at us. “Everyone take a seat. No talking.” He flips the light switch and the room turns gray, matching the sky outside.

I settle onto the hard linoleum floor and rest my back against the side of Mr. Ellery’s desk. Beth sits down on one side of me, Drew on the other. Mr. Ellery first goes to the window and lowers the blinds and then goes to the phone sitting on his desk, picks it up, puts the receiver to his ear and then eventually hangs up. He pulls himself up onto the desk, his long legs not quite touching the floor. “Phone isn’t working,” he says. After a minute he reaches into his pocket for his cell phone and punches in three numbers.

After several tries he finally says, “This is Jason Ellery from the school. Something seems to be going on here.” He listens for a moment. “Yes, everyone in my class is safe and accounted for.” He listens again and then reaches for his grade book that he keeps on his desk. One by one he reads off our names in alphabetical order. My name comes last, I suppose because I joined the class midyear. “Augustine Baker,” he says, and I hear Noah snort back a laugh. “Will Thwaite’s granddaughter.” Again there is silence as he listens. “The classroom phones aren’t working, my cell is about halfway charged.” He pulls the phone from his mouth and says in a loud whisper, “Anyone have their cell phone with them?” No one says anything. We’re supposed to keep our phones in our lockers and not bring them into the classroom with us. Supposedly, some kids were using their phones to look up test answers on the internet and texting during class and the principal banned phones in the classroom. “Come on,” he says more loudly. “We don’t have time for this. Does anyone have their cell phone with them right now?” Three hands slowly go up, including Noah Plum’s. No surprise there. “Make sure they’re turned off and bring them here.”