Hang on, a detective says, you left the gate open? You let the kid wander off? The teacher says, No, I don’t think so. I should have seen it happen. The detectives give each other obvious side-eye, meant to unnerve the teacher. The teacher dabs at her shirt with a wet paper towel.
A reporter leans in the hallway outside the mother’s apartment. She managed to get herself buzzed into the building, and now she’s waiting. Her desk needs a quote from the mother, and from a detective. This is theoretical, because the cops won’t talk to her yet. They prefer the big white guys with notepads, not the twentysomethings with iPhones and graduate degrees in journalism. A cop leaves the apartment, and before the door closes behind him the reporter sees a woman; she believes it is the mother, but it is the teacher. The reporter asks the cop her question, and he replies. The reporter taps away on her phone with both thumbs as he speaks. He’ll get in trouble, he shouldn’t be talking to her, he’s just a uniform, but it’s an emotional reaction the cop is dictating to the reporter. The city needs to be on the lookout for this boy. Return this boy back to his mother—it will take a city to find him. The reporter sends the quote to the desk right away, along with a physical description of the teacher, who she believes is the mother, and a promise of a photo. It’s a good story.
Pitchforks
Marion is doing the opposite of commuting on an empty N train that is trundling back to Brooklyn. She looks out the window into the darkness and occasionally into packed trains filled with miserable-looking people. Still, they presumably have slept, and she hasn’t. She must be more miserable than they are. However, it feels good to be, at last, on a train.
She is about to doze off when she remembers that this train will run under the school, the scene of her crime. In her office she felt the trains rattle by every ten minutes or so. She liked it. But to be so close to the place she has robbed for a decade, she must be vigilant again. What if she sees someone she knows? New York is like that.
She forgets that Brooklyn is large. She’s lived in it all her life and yet she fails to remember that parts of it exist. When a forgotten neighborhood looms up, she is bothered because she should have known it was there. It is like expecting another step on a staircase in the dark and instead hitting the floor.
Sunset Park. Where the young teachers of the school live. They are in their late twenties and early thirties, mostly unmarried. They complain about the N and the R. Marion wonders if she should reroute, if she should head deeper into Brooklyn, where not even the poor private-school teachers will go. She holds the knapsack tighter on her lap.
She decides no, it will be fine. The young teachers are far too involved with themselves to notice her. They are slightly hungover.
Besides, it’s a Tuesday morning. They are all above her, in the school, pretending to have authority over the privileged young of Brooklyn. The teachers may applaud Marion’s actions. They may admire her and decide that they too will embezzle. They will take what should be theirs, after all their hard work. The teachers will think of Marion Palm with affection as a woman who enlightened them to the glorious possibility of their own independence.
What will actually happen: the teachers will only be confused by Marion, and because confusion is uncomfortable for teachers, they will forget her.
There is a group of people who will prosecute, and these are the trustees and the administrators. They will always hate her. And the parents. She imagines pitchforks. She grins to the empty train.
Jaywalking
Jane is alight with the train ride to school with her sister. They walked through downtown Brooklyn together and unsupervised. Her sister did not wait for the walk sign. Instead they jaywalked between two cars when Ginny said, “C’mon.”
Head high, Jane enters her classroom and hopes someone will say, “Where were you?” No one does. The classroom is noisy with projects, and Jane’s late, so she collects herself in the cloakroom. The teacher does not even ask where she’s been.
Jane deconstructs the walk from the train station to the school once more. Her sister seemed really tall. She’s remembering when her sister briefly took her hand to cross the street. She dropped it when they hit the curb, but Jane’s in that moment of hand-holding when she notices the silence of the room and looks at her teacher, who is looking at her, along with the rest of the class.
“What?” Jane says.
The class laughs. Jane’s cheeks flame up, and the teacher repeats herself pointedly and slowly, as if Jane is too stupid to be in the third grade. The question is about a book they read yesterday, and Jane can’t remember the main girl’s name, so she says, “The girl,” but the teacher catches her, and she must admit to what she does not know.
Jane circles around her error for the rest of the day, and her sublime walk with her sister is gone.
Denise
Nathan Palm is frightened. Marion, he must remind himself, has done this kind of thing before. She comes back. But this time there is a difference: she’s involved the kids. She left them at a CVS. Nathan Palm has considered calling a number of people for help.
He wants to call his wife. It was strange to have a day without her voice. He has written about her voice before, because he says it was the thing that first attracted him to her. This isn’t entirely accurate, but he doesn’t remember as well as he should. When he first saw her at the café where she worked, he had a hard time not looking at her breasts. It made him focus on the objects behind her. He pictures the young Marion. He sees a foggy mirror behind the bottles, a chalkboard listing specials, a strand of white Christmas lights. He also sees Marion’s breasts.
When he looked at the things behind her, he listened to her voice. It sometimes disappointed him when she misused a word or agreed with a wrong opinion, but he eventually understood that Marion was performing for a clientele who did not want a dissenting waitress.
Then Marion would be on the phone, ordering two cases of Sancerre to be delivered by Wednesday, and she would become a different person, an older, capable person. And she would negotiate, she could negotiate! She had a head for details. She was never flustered. She had a smooth, deep, melodic voice; she enunciated her words, except when she didn’t. And when she didn’t, it was for some reason, he knew. Did she not want to be overheard? Did she want to hide her words from him?