laughed. “And I’m thirty-nine. We’ve still got time, hon’.”
But that was a year ago. Today Gayla has made clear that Ali has run out of time. She has fallen so fast and fallen so low, it stuns her even as she watches it happen day after day. If she didn’t have her boys, she might kill herself. Really, she might. How’s that for low?
Her classroom is 60’s-era: high-gloss linoleum floors, celery green cinder block walls, and a single row of six windows nearly white from the afternoon sun. The air conditioning is always too cold, the wall clock always too slow. She has missed one class already but is nearly on time for this one. When she enters, twelve juniors regard her with mild indifference. She’s the Art Teach, after all. Back in the States, a lot of schools don’t even teach art any more.
Alison draws a breath. Her rum lunch is just now hitting her, the room going wobbly. She says, “Today’s lesion—lesson—is a watercolor wash.” She begins to sort through the brushes on her desk, stalling for time.
Red-headed, freckled-faced, adenoidal Chase Sadowski says, “We did this last week.”
Alison looks up sharply. She surprises herself by smiling. “Aren’t you willing to humor me, Chase?”
He grimaces and half shrugs. “I just don’t want to be bored.”
“None of us want to be bored!” she says. “Show of hands, please. Who wants to be bored?”
Spacey Britney Losinger raises her hand eagerly before she realizes it’s a joke. The others laugh.
Alison picks up a long-handled brush, then aims it at Chase. “We’re going to watercolor wash—again—because anything worth doing once is worth doing twice. Don’t you think?”
“Depends if you teach it better than last week,” Chase says.
This wins a few titters.
Children don’t know their limits. That’s why they’re testing out their cruelty all the time. They have felt too little pain in their short lives. Already Alison sees mean streaks in her two boys. Doug didn’t want to invite Arnold Arnold to his birthday party. “You have to invite Arnold,” she told him. “He’s in your class.”
“He’s a loser,” Doug said glumly. “He’s gonna suck the fun out of everything.”
“You’re lucky you’re not the loser,” Alison said. It secretly pleases her that Doug and Stan are popular. Not team-captain popular, but popular enough to avoid the persecution poor Arnold Arnold suffers. Maybe his parents thought that giving him such a name would make him a stand-out. It has only made him a target.
Arnold Arnold—known to his classmates as “The Bug”—is slump-shouldered and pencil-limbed, with a head too large for his body.
“It looks like he lives under a rock!” Stan said.
“If you don’t invite him,” Alison said, “there will be no party.”
“Not fair!” Doug said.
“That’s bullshit!” said Stan.
“Don’t use that language,” Alison said. “Or you won’t get a party either, Stan.”
“Fine, invite him,” said Doug, “it’ll be a sucky party anyway ‘cause we don’t have the Stone Deaf Death Rangers video.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
This made Stan laugh in disbelief. “You haven’t heard of the Stone Deaf Death Rangers?”
“It’s game they made into a movie,” says Doug. “It’s so popular nobody can get it.”
He meant nobody out here in the middle of the Pacific could get that highly prized video.
With a knowing smile, Alison said, “I might be able to get it.”
“No way!” the boys said in unison.
“Way,” she said.
Wide-eyed, they regarded her with suspicion and wonder.
Yes, that’s more like it, she thought: Super Mom!
Alison asked Emil to buy her the DVD while he was in Hono last week. No problem, he said. But she forgot to get it from him at lunch today. Isn’t that why she went to his office in the first place?
She phoned April Arnold a week ago to invite Arnold to Doug’s party. Alison doesn’t particularly like April, who is as petite as a twelve-year-old, is fond of wearing pink, avoids the sun at all costs, and seems to take great pride in being a native of Atlanta, Georgia, as if she were an Old South debutante. But Alison likes her troubled son. Arnold has the quiet, watchful demeanor of a talented painter she used to know, a boy who could draw anything he saw. She suspects that Arnold is “special” in a good way like that.
April said, “You’ll make sure nobody bullies him, right?”
“I hate bullying,” said Alison. “I want him to have a good time.”
“You know his allergies?”
“Peanuts and milk products, shellfish and cured meats, and what else?”
“All nuts,” she said. “And no cheese, of course.”
“I think I said no milk products.”
“Some people forget that cheese is made of milk.”
“I won’t forget, April.”
“He’s a good boy, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Are you going to send him?”
April’s silence, pondering the risks to her odd little boy, was the kind of agony Alison wouldn’t wish on any mother. At last April said, “I’ll send him. He’d like a party.”
So everything has been arranged. Alison ordered a double chocolate cake from Rosalia Velasquez, the best baker on the island. Tonight she’ll clean up. It will feel like Christmas Eve, the boys giddy with anticipation. Tomorrow she’ll get the video and the cake. By the end of the evening tomorrow, she and the boys will be exhausted and gratified, even grateful and perhaps surprised at their good fortune. So she was half right when she spoke to Gayla earlier: she is getting some focus.
“Water is the most difficult medium,” she tells her class.
“Yeah, I remember,” Chase says. “It’s unpredictable.”
“Like life!” Brittney quips.
They gather around Alison’s easel to watch as she strokes a one-inch Grumbacher over the textured paper, soaking but not drenching it. To her peripheral left, she sees Chase snaking his hand into Cook Butler’s shorts, though Cook affects a poker face; to her peripheral right she sees Britney gazing out the window, where the cumulus clouds are rolling by as big as white elephants. Someone is wearing too much nutmeggy cologne. At her right elbow, Dana McGinty is whistling softly what sounds like “If I only had a brain.”
“See how quickly the paper absorbs?” Alison says in her singsongy teacher’s voice.
Someone—Steve Richardson?—says, “That’s cool,” and Alison feels a surge of satisfaction warm her face as she lets the deep blue bleed from one stroke to the next.
When Cooper wakes, he knows he’s higher than he’s ever been. It’s got to be an opiate of some kind because he’s all but levitating. At first he thinks he’s waking from a nap—he feels the bob and sway of his boat. Then a different reality starts to take shape: he’s on drugs, okay; he’s been injured, right; he’s in a hospital, of course . . . but then things get vague again and he can’t explain a distant kind of dread that tugs at him, like someone calling to him from across a canyon: Watch