Читать книгу Song of Silence - Cynthia Ruchti - Страница 8

Chapter 2

2

Want to go for a walk?” Charlie sounded like a new dad trying to figure out how to make his toddler stop crying.

“No.”

“Retail therapy?”

Lucy considered aiming her mouthful of coffee just slightly his direction. She swallowed. “Retail therapy? Where did you even learn that term?”

“Live . . . with Kelly and Michael.”

“You watch too much daytime TV.”

“Nothing else to do. I only watch while I’m loading the dishwasher.”

In a second-fragment, she flew through an image of his typical day since taking early retirement from the paper mill a year ago. Retiring. The word sat like lethargic rocks in her stomach. Some cultural advances should never have become a staple of the American dream, in her opinion. Like red donkeys versus blue elephants—or was it the other way around?—she and Charlie might forever disagree on that point. He’d been on a countdown toward retirement since his first day at the mill thirty-five years ago. She’d resisted all discussion of stepping away from the passion that secondarily happened to provide her a paycheck—steering young people toward an appreciation for music. I love you, but worms are not a passion, Charlie.

He disappeared from the kitchen for a minute and returned with a bottle of ibuprofen. Like announcing a cure for cancer, he plopped the bottle on the table in front of her. “You’d probably appreciate a couple of these, huh?”

He’s a good man. He’s such a good man. I should be grateful to have a husband who doesn’t try to stuff chocolate in my mouth as a cure-all for this.

“I know,” Charlie said, opening the bottle, dumping two green capsules into his palm, and extending them toward her. “What you really need is chocolate.”

Boom.

“We’ll go out to Bernie’s for broasted chicken, and then we’ll split the chocolate volcano for dessert. With vanilla bean ice cream. And whipped cream.”

He looked so hopeful this would be the peace offering she’d embrace. Fix-It Man strikes again. Rescues brokenhearted damsel and gets his favorite meal in one fell swoop.

“LucyMyLight?”

She pushed out her diaphragm as if preparing for a high note. Hold. Hold. Exhale. “I think I’ll go take a shower. If you want to bring home chicken from Bernie’s, that’s fine. I don’t feel like being out in public right now, though. Okay?”

“Rumors are flying, huh?”

She hadn’t thought of that. But yes, they probably were. The budget conscious would cheer the school board’s decision. All the smart people would be in an uproar. Did she just think that completely judgmental thought? Yes, she did. Today wasn’t the day to work on a better attitude. Today was the day to spend an inordinate amount of time in the shower, the music in the bathroom cranked full blast, like the water, and later succumb to a chocolate coma. She’d beat back chocolate guilt with a fire poker if necessary. Two. One in each hand.

***

“Help has arrived,” Charlie announced, rustling thin plastic and thunking around the kitchen.

Lucy sat on the front edge of the couch, planted her palms on her thighs, and tried to stand. Her second attempt succeeded. Halfhearted effort accomplishes nothing. She had a poster in the music room that confirmed it.

Charlie looked up from where he’d laid out their supper on the granite island. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“It’s that bad, huh? I haven’t seen that sad-looking sweatshirt since the stretch when Sam wasn’t sleeping through the night.”

“You mean the eighties?”

“Stubborn son of yours.”

“Ours.” She paused. “Mostly yours.” She picked at the loose, crispy skin on a chicken thigh. “Did you bring—?”

“Yes.” Charlie smiled.

“Mashed potatoes?”

Crestfallen. There was a word for the expression his face made. “No. I thought . . . under the circumstances . . . you’d want fries with that.”

With silent apologies to all the hardworking people whose job it is to ask, “Want fries with that?” Lucy let her mind drift to the suffocating smell of overused cooking oil embedded in the fabric of her color-defying sweatshirt. Not that a burger joint would let her wear her own clothes to a new job. She’d be assigned a uniform. Something in a shade not even close to complimenting her skin tones.

“Lucy? Are fries going to be okay? I really don’t want to go back.” He sliced along the chicken’s sternum and pulled off a hunk of white meat.

She leaned her elbows on the table. “You’re too good to me.”

“Well, yes. That’s a given.” He winked.

“That you would even consider going back for mashed potatoes . . .” She thought the hot shower had pelted all the tears out of her. But no. They had friends.

“Hey, hey, hey, Luce. I’m not that wonderful.” Charlie moved to stand behind her chair and started a boxing manager’s version of shoulder massage. The pressure he applied showed it was to relieve his own tension, not hers. Bless him.

She sniffed back tears and patted his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll be okay. Just not right now.”

“You’ll find another job.” His imitation of Perky Life Coach fell flat, like two-week-old amorphous road kill.

“It wasn’t a job. It was my life’s work.”

The RIF letter had probably eaten through her purse like acid by now. She loved that purse. Chicken, she did not love. Not tonight. She’d lost her taste for chocolate, too. That couldn’t last long without dire consequences.

She’d been riffed. The term stabbed like a cross between fired and assassinated.

RIF. It once meant Reading is fundamental. An excellent thought. Reduction in force turned the acronym sour, biting. RIF. Could she live the rest of her life avoiding those three letters?

The name Charlie used two of them. Not that he could help it.

***

The worst Monday in the history of Mondays. Perhaps in the history of days.

She’d slogged through the weekend, dodging despair, awkward questions, and piles of bitterness like tiptoeing through a heavily used dog park. Avoiding church seemed counterproductive, though tempting. But arriving late and leaving early kept it from turning into a sympathy-fest, a party she couldn’t handle yet. Too soon.

Then dawned the inevitable Monday. Lucy didn’t have to wonder who among her teacher friends had heard the news and who hadn’t. Their eyebrows told the story. Neutral eyebrows? Hadn’t yet heard. Pinched together with a slight head tilt—even without a word spoken—signaled a wave of sympathy that became an undercurrent riptide by midday. Survivor guilt kept some from talking about it. They’d received contracts, not RIF letters. Others expressed their sympathy in rib-dislocating hugs. Like Charlie’s.

If it hadn’t been frowned upon by the administration, she would have stayed in her room to eat lunch. Lucy considered breaking the rule this one time. What was the worst they could do? Fire her? It was the closest she’d come to laughing in days.

But she’d vowed to behave herself to the end. Two more weeks of classes. No vindictive actions. No tantrum-like rebellion. No cement in the toilets or graffiti on the walls. No letters to the op-ed page of the local newspaper. No anti-school-board picketing or bucking-the-establishment T-shirts. No coasting. No phoning it in or phoning in sick.

“Résumé polished and ready to send out?” Ania Brooks slid onto the one blank square foot of Lucy’s desk.

“At my age? Your chances of finding another teaching position are a lot better than mine. Age does make a difference.” Lucy snagged a piece of music too near the clear zone. “And right now, applying to substitute teach feels like the difference between running a karaoke machine and composing a symphony.” The words felt coarse in her mouth. Some of her favorite teacher friends subbed. Bright, skilled educators willing to rewrite their schedules when needed. What was wrong with her?

Ania flipped her thick, loose black braid over her shoulder. “Don’t be so sure. About my flood of opportunities.” The younger woman picked at loose threads of her fashionably tattered jeans.

Wait. Tattered jeans? Not exactly school policy for staff. Lucy retrieved her insulated musical score lunch bag from the bottom drawer of her desk and pointed with it toward the spot where Ania’s bare knee showed through. “Dress code no longer applies to you?” She feigned the voice Principal Rust might use.

“Contract no longer applies to me.” Ania pulled an apple and a bag of microwave popcorn from the deep pockets of her hand knit cotton sweater. Coral. Somehow the faded blue scarf looped around her neck and the fused glass pendant strung on what looked like an athletic shoelace screamed “art teacher” without Ania having to wear a nametag.

“We’re still under contract for two more weeks.”

“A technicality, my rules-bound friend. Merely a technicality.”

The hitch in Ania’s voice belied her mask of courage. She couldn’t be as cavalier on the inside as she appeared on the outside. Not yet thirty, she was sure to find another position, though. Maybe in a larger public school without the budget woes of Willowcrest.

A school without budget woes. And other fairy tales.

The two recently riffed walked the hallway toward the teachers’ lounge as they had many times. Never this speechlessly.

Was it imagination, or did the level of chaos in the halls decrescendo as they passed? Like freeway drivers reducing speed for the quarter mile before and quarter mile after the state patrol car parked in the median, the students quieted a few decibels then resumed their normal ear-splitting volume.

“Hey, Mrs. Tuttle. Sorry to hear about—”

A rib-jab cut the condolences short. “You tosser!” the jabbing student said.

Ania’s look revealed a need for translation.

“A meme of British expressions is circulating on social media again. The students think we don’t know.”

Ania smiled. “Some of us don’t. What’s a ‘tosser’?”

Lucy lowered her voice. “Idiot.”

“Are you going to call the kid on it?”

“And blow our cover? Don’t worry. I gave him my fierce look.”

Ania’s laughter helped cut through three days’ worth of tension. “On you, Lucy, fierce looks an awful lot like ‘Oh, you sweet child.’ ”

“I squinted.” Even Lucy knew that was a lame defense. She squinted? No wonder the school board had no trouble making her a target.

She stopped herself. Paranoia wouldn’t help. They’d dumped both the arts and music programs. Nothing personal, they’d said. Uh huh.

Two steps into the teacher’s lounge and Lucy knew the better choice would have been to sneak her egg salad and grapes in her room. The lounge erupted with anger over the school board’s decision. Lucy wasn’t ready for anger yet. She held tight to despair.

***

Her students watched her more intently than on an ordinary day, far more intently than they would under normal circumstances this close to the end of the school year.

She’d taught them to watch her hands and facial expressions as she directed, to listen for the breaths she took that reminded them when to breathe. She’d taught them to express the emotion of the song, not how they felt about the person with whom they shared a music folder. Under her guidance, they’d learned to focus on what the music asked of them, often a response contrary to their young nature, their personality, their mood, or how much sugar they’d ingested at lunch.

Now they watched, too, for her reactions to a crashing tympani blow to her life’s plans.

Lucy thought she had an easy out for the day. A way to survive without having to engage her overworked brain. Each class could review the video of last week’s concert. Tradition. The students expected it. She, on the other hand, didn’t anticipate the fortitude it would take to sit through that many replays of her final moments in concert.

The nuances she witnessed on the video hit like memories of a too-recently deceased loved one. Would she have felt the same if her choirs and band hadn’t performed as well as they did, if the audio didn’t resonate now as near-perfection with enough sniffles and coughs and squeaks for her to know it was real?

The parallels to life made her jaw hurt.

Everything seemed too tender to touch—a deep, aching life bruise. Memories of the concert high points, career high points, the tears when especially sensitive young people caught a whiff of gossip about the music and art programs, the condolences of other teachers, the pile of unfinished projects on her desk . . .

The music-themed gifts from students—mugs ad infinitum, pens, coasters, pins, note cards. Handwritten thank-you notes tacked to the corkboard, representing a hundred more in file folders.

She mattered here. The music mattered. It changed people. Including her.

If her heart kept beating until the end of the school day, she’d start packing her personal belongings. Taking them home a few at a time would be less painful, wouldn’t it? You can’t rip a bandage off a wound that’s still bleeding.

***

“Are you still here?” Ania’s voice carried too well in the acoustics of the empty, high-ceilinged music room.

Lucy nestled another resource book—Music and the Young Mind—into the nearly full cardboard box on the seat of her office chair. She reached for another from the top shelf. “Just a few more minutes.”

Ania’s clogs clunked across the tiled floor toward the narrow office. “There’s no such thing as overtime in this business. Or so I’ve heard,” she said, her sarcasm more pronounced than ever.

“Never was in it for the overtime.”

Ania’s floor gazing told Lucy the young woman had more responses than anger in her.

Another book landed in the box. “Did your afternoon go okay?”

“Did yours?”

“No.” Lucy flipped open the front cover of the book in her hand. “Ah. Thought so.”

“What?”

“I thought I’d purchased this one. But I’ve been here so long, I had to check to make sure it wasn’t school property.”

Ania planted her hands on her hips. “After what they did to us, you’re worried about accidentally absconding with one of their books?”

“I want to do this right. Have to do this right.”

“Faith getting in the way of reason again?” Ania flicked the edge of the verse-of-the-day flip calendar on Lucy’s desk.

“They’re not mutually exclusive, my friend.” Lucy deposited another couple of books in the box, enough to reach both the box’s and her back’s limit. She’d been looking forward to her summer pace of exercise. For once, September wouldn’t change her daily schedule. Some people in her position would be grateful. She couldn’t imagine mustering grateful yet. Ever.

As expected, Ania let the faith conversation drop. She sighed with her eyebrows, shoulders, and lungs, then turned and called over her shoulder, “See you tomorrow. If I decide to show up.”

Lucy gripped the back of her office chair. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She could wheel the box-laden chair out to her car. She could move a lot more in one trip that way.

Except for the doorways she had to maneuver, the idea turned out to be genius. She loaded the rear seat of the car and wheeled the chair back into the school, down the hall, around the corner, and into the music room.

It wasn’t empty.

“Evelyn?”

“Lucy. We . . . we thought you were gone for the day.”

“The light’s on in my office.” Maybe it was time to consider her doctor’s suggestion about blood pressure medicine.

Evelyn Schindler glanced at the two men with her, as if they could offer a response on her behalf. “This is a team from our contractor’s office,” she said. “Just here to take some measurements. We’ll”—she turned then to face Lucy—“try not to get in your way.” The woman’s smile hadn’t had much practice in her seven decades of living. It was so rusty now, it almost creaked.

“Measurements for what?” Lucy would ask forgiveness later for noting that Evelyn’s posture shift made her look like a sandhill crane prepared for liftoff.

Evelyn turned toward one of the men who extended his palm as if to say, “This is all yours, lady.”

“We hope to have . . . the room converted into two regular classrooms before school starts in the fall. Getting estimates now.” Matter of fact. Matter of farce.

And that’s when the rickety bridge Lucy’s emotions had been teetering on splintered. Lucy spiraled—free-falling without a chute—into the blind, bottomless abyss. The school board decision hadn’t merely eliminated her job. It had obliterated music. Remodeling shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Contractors were inevitable, contractors hired to erase the evidence that music once lived in this space.

As she plunged deeper into the cold darkness, she heard her insides crying over the loss, crying for the children.