One Breath Away

Mrs. Oliver took a deep breath, trying to slow down her own brain. She often used such relaxation techniques with her students, before spelling tests or before they began the dreaded Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Now she was beginning to doubt the effectiveness of the strategy she had so emphatically pressed upon her students. She felt panic blooming in her chest, felt her heart pounding so hard that she thought the beads embroidered on her jumper were going to burst from her chest. She tried combining her deep breathing with thoughts of Cal. Cal always had a calming effect on her.

Surprisingly, Mrs. Oliver wasn’t always Mrs. Oliver as most had come to believe. For the first seventeen years of her life, of course, she was Evelyn Schnickle. Then she became Mrs. George Ford.

George was just her height, was handsome and funny and had the most beautiful green eyes. He was the first boy Evelyn had ever kissed and she decided the minute that his lips touched hers that this would be the man she would marry. They were married the weekend after they graduated high school on a rainy June afternoon. At the reception George teased her that the only reason she married him was to shed her last name. And while she agreed that Evelyn Ford sounded so much better than Evelyn Schnickle, that was certainly not the reason she married him and she glanced daringly downward, causing poor George to blush. Two months after George and Evelyn were married, George was sent off to Vietnam and Evelyn lived with George’s parents in Cedar Falls and enrolled in the teacher’s college there. Three months later, two uniformed soldiers showed up on the doorstep with the message that her new husband had died at Plei Mei along with one third of his battalion. Upon hearing the terrible news, Evelyn threw up all over one of the soldier’s shiny black shoes, which she tried to clean up with the elder Mrs. Ford’s favorite afghan. So after a mere five months of marriage, at the tender age of eighteen, Evelyn was a widow. And pregnant.

Evelyn didn’t know how to be a widow; she hadn’t even had time to figure out how to be a wife. She cried, in private, of course, for the loss of George. She couldn’t sleep thinking about him dying all alone in a steamy jungle. Her in-laws were touched by their new daughter-in-laws’s obvious heartbreak and did their best to comfort her. They told her she was welcome to stay with them as long as she needed. That was the thing, though; she thought she would go absolutely insane if she had to stay with the Fords any longer than she had to. She felt suffocated by the sadness in the house and, if she was honest with herself, terrified at the thought of becoming a mother.

All that changed when she met Cal Oliver. Now forty-five years later, she wondered if this time it would be Cal being visited by a man in uniform, a police officer, telling him that his spouse was dead. Killed by a crazy man with a gun in the middle of March in a snowstorm in a classroom in a small town in Iowa. Who would have dreamed this was the way she would go? She assumed she would die of a stroke like her father or of breast cancer like her aunts had. Not by some murderous cretin. She wondered if Cal would cry and sniffed at the thought of him being dry-eyed at her funeral. Of course he would cry, though; he was the emotional one. She wondered how he would tell their children. He was so bad on the phone. Whenever she stuck a receiver in his hand his power of speech would disappear. The man could talk for hours to someone in the same room with him, but not through a phone. “I like to see their faces when I talk to them,” he tried to explain. Evelyn just clucked her tongue at him and snatched the phone right back from him. She regretted that now, the way she could be impatient with Cal. If she got the chance she would do things differently. She would never nag at him about the way he would walk into the kitchen, reach into the cupboard and grab a box of crackers or cereal and walk away leaving the cupboard doors wide open for someone to crack their head on. She wouldn’t gripe about how fastidious he could be about keeping the garage clean and orderly but couldn’t throw away even one piece of paper without agonizing over it.

No, Mrs. Schnickle-Ford-Oliver was not going to die today. She was going to go home this afternoon, kiss her husband. Hard. Call her children and grandchildren, then change out of her rainbow-studded dress.

Will

Climbing into his pickup truck, Will wondered if he should call Marlys to let her know that something was happening at the kids’ school. He quickly nixed the idea. He had no idea what was going on, knew that Marlys would have a load of questions that he could not answer and then she would be left with the burden of whether or not to tell Holly. No, that wouldn’t be fair. There was nothing that Marlys could do way over in Revelation, Arizona, to help this situation. Her job was to take care of Holly, who just couldn’t seem to catch a break. The latest setback was an infection that somehow seeped into her bloodstream even though she had been pumped full of antibiotics the minute she arrived at the hospital. No, Will wouldn’t say a word about the goings-on at the school until he had solid information and even then he might not mention it. Marlys was exhausted, Holly needed to concentrate on getting better and worrying about P.J. and Augie wouldn’t be beneficial. Instead, he called his son Todd, whose wife was the fourth-grade teacher at the school.

“I’m already here,” Todd said when Will mentioned he was on his way and would meet him in front of the school.

Broken Branch School was a twenty-minute drive over gravel and county roads and Will made the trip in just less than twelve. As he pulled into the school parking lot he could see that a crowd had already formed. Inaudible shouts rose from the pack and were swept away by gusts of wind. Will looked down at his Mossberg on the seat next to him, trying to decide whether or not to bring it out with him. His cell phone erupted in a mind-numbing thrum of rap music that Augie programmed in as his ringtone. She thought it was hilarious whenever a torrent of curses set to music would explode from his phone in the middle of dinner or worse in public at the café or the grocery store. “Dammit, Augie,” he would say, pressing frantically at the buttons, trying to silence the phone.

“What?” Augie said innocently. “You say those words all the time.”

P.J. would nod his head gravely in agreement. “You do,” he would say.

“Hello,” Will barked into the phone.

“Will?” came the timid reply, so unlike Marlys. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine. How are you? How’s Holly?” Will asked, looking through the windshield at four of the Broken Branch police officers trying to manage the growing crowd.

“She still has a fever and isn’t eating,” Marlys explained in a trembling voice. “How’re the kids?”

“Fine, fine,” Will said again. “P.J. has been a big help with the calving. He’s a natural cattleman.”

“And Augie?”

“Augie’s …” Will couldn’t bring himself to say anything negative about his granddaughter when he had no idea as to her safety at this moment. “Augie is trying,” he finished. Which was true. She had even joined him and P.J. in the barn the other day where number 135, a gorgeous Hereford with a shaggy red-and-white coat, was giving birth. Augie watched in awe as the calf dropped from his mother’s uterus, slick with afterbirth but undeniably beautiful.

“Ohhh,” Augie breathed, getting caught up in the excitement, her eyes shining, a smile appearing from her normally glowering face.

Another truck pulled in next to his and Will recognized fellow farmers Neal and Ned Vinson. Will tipped his chin in greeting and saw that the brothers had also come heavily armed.

“Will?” Marlys said tentatively. “You sound funny. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Will said, immediately regretting the sharpness of his voice.

“Are you taking your pills?” she asked, referring to the high blood pressure medication she constantly had to remind him to take.

“Yes, yes, I’m taking my pills.” Will’s eyes followed the Vinson brothers as they moved purposefully toward the school, their shotguns nestled in the crooks of their arms.

“Then what’s going on?” Marlys said tearfully. “I can’t stand worrying about Holly and have to worry about you and the kids, too. I can’t take it.”

“Nothing to worry about.” Will tried to make his voice sound casual, light. “Augie dyed her hair red. Her head looks like a goddamn rooster’s comb. I just forgot what it’s like to have a teenager in the house.”

“I know something else is going on,” Marlys said sternly, “but I’m too tired to fight with you about it right now and I need to get back to Holly. I’m going to call you tonight and you better be straight with me, got it?”

“Okay,” Will finally answered. Any other excuses would be just lies. Marlys was going to find out what was happening at the school sooner or later. It was best if she heard it from him. Just not this minute.

“All this is so hard.” Marlys sniffled.

“I know, Marlys,” he answered in agreement, though they were talking about two completely different things.

Holly

“What day is it?” I ask my mother, whose capable fingers are flying over her knitting. The beginnings of a sweater maybe. Funny, since it’s probably sunny and eighty-eight degrees outside, just like it is almost every day here.

“It’s Thursday, March twenty-fourth.” I’ve been in the hospital for almost exactly eight weeks now. In some ways this seems like an eternity but the days have somehow melded together, one running into the next. Pain, medication, therapy, surgery. A constant cycle of healing. My mother glances up at the clock on the wall, her hands never stopping, the clicking of the needles a comforting sound that I remember from my childhood. “I called your father just a bit ago. He said everyone is doing just fine. P.J. is looking forward to helping your father with the calving.”

When my mother sat down to knit, it was her quiet, relaxing time. I had never seen a person work as hard as my mother did. In the mornings, she was up before anyone else, the smell of coffee and bacon and eggs our alarm clock. After breakfast and the dishes, my mother would go out and help our father with the cattle, feeding and watering them, checking the pasture fences for loose wires or nails that might cause injury. Then she would go back to the house to clean, do laundry, make lunch, go grocery shopping, take care of the needs of five very demanding children and one equally demanding husband, make dinner, do the dishes, help with homework and finally, finally, exhausted, she would be able to sit down for a few moments and knit. Sure, we helped our mother, but there was just so much to do, there was never enough time in the day. Watching the weariness of our mother, though she never complained, I swore that wouldn’t be my life and I knew I would get out of Broken Branch as soon as I was old enough.

“One o’clock, Iowa time,” I say. “I wonder what the kids are doing right this minute.”

Mrs. Oliver

Mrs. Oliver looked closely at the man. Getting a clear picture of him wasn’t easy. He had a gray baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead. Little tufts of curly, dark brown hair poked out around his ears. He wore a black jacket zippered up to his chin and sleek leather gloves on his fingers. By the lines that seamed the corners of his blue eyes she figured he had to be at least in his early forties. He seemed overly concerned that two of the students were absent. Lily and Maria. Was one of them his target? If so, why didn’t he just leave to go in search of them instead of remaining in the classroom? Was he in too deeply now, feel that he had nothing to lose?

P.J. was still staring unabashedly at the man and Mrs. Oliver had an inkling that P.J. might know the man, maybe had seen him before.

She wondered briefly if this could actually be Bobby Latham, her former student, forcing her to sit still for an excruciating amount of time just as she had done to him all those years ago. But no. She and Bobby liked each other. Had come to an understanding. She promised to never tell him to face front ever again as long as he didn’t use the pages of his math book to make soggy spitballs that he shot through the barrel of his ink pen at the back of Kitty Rawlings’s head. No, this wasn’t Bobby Latham. Maybe it was another former student.

In her mind she ran through the Filofax of children she had taught over the years. It couldn’t have been Walter Spanksi, the only student she had ever flunked. He would be in his fifties by now. How she had fretted over holding Walter back for another year of third grade. No matter how she had tried to help him learn his multiplication facts and how to read even the most basic of sentences, he just never caught on. She couldn’t very well send him on to fourth grade when he didn’t know a noun from a verb and consistently missed seventeen of the twenty words on the weekly spelling test. It had been her second year of teaching and she remembered vividly sitting in front of Mr. and Mrs. Spanksi, just three months pregnant with her second child, and informing them that Walter, while a very nice boy, would not move up to the fourth grade with his classmates. Mr. Spanksi held his hat in his large, earth-worn hands and pleaded with her to at least give him a chance. A lot could happen over the summer. They could work with him every day, get him a tutor. Mrs. Spanksi didn’t say a word, just cried noiselessly into her handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Spanksi,” Mrs. Oliver said, shaking her head. “I just cannot, in good conscience, promote Walter on to the fourth grade at his current skill level. I am confident that another year in third grade will be just the ticket to get him where he needs to be,” she said chirpily. Well, she had another year with Walter and, as it turned out, another year in third grade did him absolutely no good. Over the course of the additional nine months Mrs. Oliver had with Walter, she saw him transform from a nice boy to a very angry boy whose second shot at the third-grade curriculum showed no marked improvement. But the man with the gun was most definitely not Walter Spanksi, though she could clearly understand why he would be tempted to return to his old classroom where a twenty-three-year-old, second-year teacher had the gall to flunk him, and point a gun at her head. How very satisfying that might be. But Walter was too old to be this man.

Over the years she had caught students cheating, fighting, smoking, stealing and many other offenses, but no one hated her. She prided herself in being fair-minded and compassionate; she learned there was so much more to a student than his or her grades. They were human beings, young and certainly not fully formed yet, but that was where she came in. She learned after that horrible second year with Walter that she had the power, no, the supremacy, to make a child learn, to want to learn. And in her forty-three years of being a teacher, there was only one other student, besides Walter, for whom she felt she failed to make a positive difference. Mrs. Oliver squinted, trying to see past the hat and gloves the man was wearing, the years that had passed. It could be him, she thought. There is that possibility.

Kenny Bingley. He had been a weedy-looking child, tall with long legs and proportionally short arms. Like a sprig of big stem or turkey foot, as her mother had called the long, bland prairie grass that was abundant throughout their part of the state. It could certainly be Kenny Bingley. Right age—fortyish, brown hair, mean eyes. Kenny Bingley was perhaps the student whom she lost the most sleep over. He came to school tardy every day, if at all. A perpetual musty, wet smell clung to his pale skin as if his clothing was tossed into a corner and forgotten about until he needed to put them on. No matter the child, no matter where they came from, no matter their circumstances, Mrs. Oliver was always able to find a spark of wonder and curiosity in her students’ eyes. But in eight-year-old Kenny, above the blue smudges that shadowed his eyes, there was no flicker, no interest or amazement for the world. There was nothing. Just an eerie calm. He wasn’t disruptive in the classroom per se, but trouble seemed to follow him wherever he went. Recess football games ended in bloody noses, lunch money went missing, classroom pets died under suspicious circumstances. But there was nothing that she could actually pin specifically on Kenny. She suspected abuse at the hands of his mother; there were no bruises, no proof, just that air of detachment, his indifferent countenance.

Two things happened the week Kenny was expelled. A horned lark was found on the school steps with both its legs snapped. Once again, Mrs. Oliver had absolutely no tangible proof that Kenny was the one who had mortally wounded the beautiful bird. But she had been the one to find it there on the school steps, its twig legs unnaturally splayed; she was the only one there to hear the ragged, high-pitched chirps, or so she thought.

The second incident that occurred had to do with a pair of scissors and a very pretty third grader named Cornelia Patts. She had stepped into the hall for just a moment, wasn’t even actually all the way out of the room. The principal, Mr. Graczyk, had a question for her about some such thing or another, and had called her to the doorway. The next thing she knew, poor Cornelia was screaming and clutching at her bleeding hand. “He stabbed me,” she cried in disbelief. Mr. Graczyk ran into the classroom and yanked Kenny up out of his seat, the bloody scissors sitting on his desk in front of him. While Mrs. Oliver wrapped the wound in a clean handkerchief, the classroom was silent except for Cornelia’s soft sobs.

As Kenny was led from the classroom by Mr. Graczyk he pressed his thin, pale lips together, his shoulders slumped like a bent reed, and whistled a high, distorted tune, so much like that of the lark she found languishing on the school’s steps.

The man with the gun before her now could very possibly be Kenny Bingley. He had never returned to school after that day, was immediately expelled, and Mrs. Oliver never learned what became of him, though she often asked after him. She decided to test her theory and began whistling the dying lark’s song. Warbling and faint at first, then louder. The man, who had been sitting on the tall stool at the front of the room, the gun on his lap, looked back at her with his cold, flat eyes. “Kenny Bingley,” she said stringently. “You need to stop this nonsense right this minute.”

Meg

There are shrieks from the crowd as a chair comes crashing through a window. I, along with the other officers present, unholster our firearms and we watch in amazement as a pink-clad shape tumbles out of the window. Immediately I know this is no gunman. It’s Gail Lowell, the elderly secretary at the school. She is coatless, wearing a bright pink sweater and chunky metallic jewelry. Her necklace and bracelets jingle gleefully as she picks her way carefully through the snow, her purse dangling from her arm. As she comes toward us, voices from the crowd pellet her. What’s going on? Are the kids okay? Is there a man with a gun?

“How many intruders are there?” I ask in a low voice as she approaches. She appears to have been crying, but it’s hard to tell because of the snow. “Did you see someone with a gun? Any injuries?” Gail looks helplessly from me to Chief McKinney and then her face crumples.

“It’s all my fault,” she sobs.

“Gail, this is important. Tell us exactly what’s going on in there,” I say more sharply than I intend to.

“Now, now, Gail,” McKinney tries to soothe her. “Are you injured?” Next to them I shuffle my feet and make soft, impatient sounds until McKinney glares at me.

Gail snuffles loudly. “No, no. I’m not hurt.”

“Let’s get you warmed up and then you can tell us what’s going on.” He leads her to a squad car with an idling engine, opens the door and gently guides her into the passenger’s seat. The chief climbs into the driver’s side and I settle into the backseat. For a moment the only sound is Gail’s soft cries and shivers. Chief McKinney fiddles with the heat and a whoosh of warm air floods the car.

“Gail,” I say through the partition that separates the front and back seats, “I know how difficult this must be for you. How terrified you must be.” I look at the chief and he nods for me to continue. “We need to know just three things right now, then we can take you wherever you want to go. Okay?” She bobs her head up and down and presses her fingers to her eyelids. “First, is anyone injured inside?”

Her chin wobbles. “I don’t know,” she says in a small voice. “I don’t know. He went off down the hallway and then he was gone.”

“One intruder, Gail? Did you know him? Is that what you are saying? There was just one person? Young or old?” I ask, thinking of Dorothy Jones’s son, Blake.

Gail closes her eyes and shakes her head as if trying to conjure up an image. “I didn’t recognize him. It was a man, just one. Forties maybe,” she says in a whisper.

Chief McKinney and I look at each other in relief. At least we can assure Dorothy that her son isn’t the intruder and encourage her to get him the help he needs and fast.

“I saw him come in,” Gail cries. “Oh, God, he walked right by the office window. He had on a tool belt. I thought he was going to work on the boiler—the thing is always breaking down and it’s so cold today. I didn’t even give it a second thought. He just walked right on by. Gave me a little wave.” A fresh round of sobs erupts and the chief pats her on the knee. “I should have noticed that he wasn’t dressed like a maintenance man. He was wearing dress shoes. Not work boots.” She pulls her hands from her eyes and her fingers are smudged with mascara. “Can I call my husband? Please?”

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