She and I would spend afternoons skulking around the cobbled streets of the historic New England town where our school was located, I like a sharpshooter, armed with my camera, hunting my crush.
Then I’d head to the darkroom and excise anyone besides Paul who wound up in the frame of my photos. I remember the meticulous scissoring of card stock in the exact shape of Paul’s outline and placing it precisely over his image as I exposed the photographic paper for such a long period of time that everything else around him turned black.
Goodbye, students or colleagues he was talking with.
Goodbye, innocent bystanders.
Goodbye, wife.
I had created a universe in which no one but Paul existed. In which I could pretend he did not have a wife. After all, if she wasn’t in the pictures, maybe she didn’t really exist. Maybe he was all mine.
I shut the album. Where is Paul now? Could he be somewhere nearby? Is that him in the black Audi?
And why now, after all these years?
The phone rings again. This time, I get up to answer it. Somebody wants to reach me, and it might be important.
I’m able to make it to my cell in the kitchen before voice mail picks up.
“Hello?” I ask, slightly out of breath.
“This is Ms. Lippman from Eastbrook Elementary School,” a woman says. “Principal Flowers would like to see you.”
39
Cole lies curled up like a newborn kitten on the bench in the school’s main office.
I rush to him and kneel down. “Are you okay, sweetie?”
He throws his arms around me and buries his head in my neck. “I miss you. I hate school.” I breathe in his scent, lavender shampoo mixed with his tangy sweat.
“It’s all right, baby. I’m here now.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” he says in a tiny voice.
I pull back and look straight into his brown eyes, Mark’s eyes. “I believe you.”
Mark taps me on the shoulder, and I stand up.
A plump woman wearing a corduroy dress and bright red clogs introduces herself as Principal Flowers. She looks like a character on a kids’ PBS program from the seventies. “Mr. and Mrs. Ross? Please follow me.” Then she turns to a girl in braids who looks to be about ten, who is dropping off a folder of papers. “Gigi, could you please walk Cole back to Mrs. Liu’s class?”
Cole grabs the sleeve of my coat and shakes his head.
“It’s all right, honey.” But a part of me just wants to grab him and head home. I watch as, shoulders slumped, he shuffles out the door after Gigi. Mark and I follow Principal Flowers into her office, where she shuts the door and motions for us to sit. Plastic daisies, chrysanthemums, and sunflowers adorn the room—stuck to the wall, poking out of vases, attached to pens, staplers, every conceivable surface.
“People just give them to me,” she says. “At least I don’t use my maiden name—Dix.” She guffaws at her own joke. Mark and I exchange a look. I place her in her fifties, the kind of woman who would rather bleed to death than be considered unpleasant. She reminds me of Susan in that way.
“So Cole was involved in an altercation today.” Her words have the cadence of a child’s rhyme.
“Let’s define altercation.” Mark’s voice cuts through her Kumbaya bubble like a sharp knife. I love him for it.
Flowers blinks twice before continuing. “In this particular case, it means your son cut off the ponytail of another child.”
“He what?” I look to Mark to see how he is taking this news, but he is staring straight ahead.
Flowers’s tiny, blinking eyes shift back and forth from Mark to me like one of those old-fashioned Kit-Cat clocks whose bulging eyes flit with every passing second. “He took a pair of scissors—a pair of adult scissors, I might add, which he must have taken from the teacher’s desk—and he cut off a fellow student’s ponytail.”
Mark remains as still as a statue. “And you know this how?” he asks.
“We know this, Mr. Ross, because the victim informed Ms. Liu what happened, and we found her severed ponytail in Cole’s backpack.”
Mark snickers. “I see. And we’re supposed to take this girl’s word for it?”
“Noooooo.” Principal Flowers stretches out the word, a sappy smile plastered on her face. “We don’t need to take her word for it. Cole has confessed.”
“Why would he cut off some girl’s ponytail?” I ask.
“Well, and this is not to excuse Cole’s behavior in any way,” the principal says. “But apparently, this other child had been picking on Cole.”
Mark shifts in his chair. “What do you mean, picking on him?”
Flowers offers up a toothy smile. “This is a tight-knit community. Word travels fast. Kids hear things, they see things. They don’t always understand what they’re seeing and hearing, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to process it or discuss it with other children.”
“Just tell us what’s going on,” Mark says, impatience bursting through his words.
Flowers straightens an already tidy stack of papers on her desk and looks at me. “Look, Tenley Avery is a student here, too.”
I flinch. During this entire ordeal, I have given no thought to the little girl who lost her father. “You’re saying Tenley Avery was involved in this? She’s not even in Cole’s grade.”
“No, I am not saying Tenley Avery is involved. I am simply pointing out that children talk. And from what I understand, Ms. Ross, you’re involved in the investigation of her father’s death in some capacity.”
My face flushes. I open my mouth to speak, but Mark beats me to it.
“That is frankly none of your business,” Mark says, “and should have no bearing on Cole’s education.”
“Of course, Mr. Ross.” The principal’s voice breaks. She knows she has pissed him off. “I realize that this is not really any of my business—”
“No. It isn’t.”
“But children don’t live in a vacuum. They hear things on the playground, they eavesdrop on their parents—”
“What does any
