12. Lucy
LUCY
The parents came in through the wrong door.
Somebody had chained the front entrance shut from the inside, so all of them had to come around by the flagpole and up the corridor past the trophy case.
At twenty past eight, the line of them still ran back along the wall, coats over their arms, one man steering a stroller with a travel mug held in his teeth.
Lucy was sitting in row four. She'd taken the two seats closest to the aisle and draped her coat across the second one before the room filled. She had been sitting in the folding chair long enough that the front edge of it had printed a red line across the backs of her legs.
The multipurpose room smelled like floor wax and lemon peel.
The risers were up at the front in three tiers, and above them a paper banner ran most of the width of the stage with THINGS WE FOUND OUT cut out one letter at a time and glued on by seven-year-olds, the G sitting lower than the other letters around it.
Renata Ford stood at the end of the first row with her clipboard held flat against her chest, counting heads.
Her phone buzzed against her leg at eight thirty-one.
"Lucy. It's Nadia." Something clicked twice on the other end. "Does it finish by nine-fifteen?"
"No," Lucy said.
"How far off?" Nadia said.
"Nine-forty." Lucy leaned forward to hear her voice under the room. "There are eleven classes and third grade is second from last. Renata puts the little ones first so they can go back to their classrooms before they get too rambunctious."
"Right," Nadia said.
The clicking stopped.
"Is that a problem?" Lucy asked.
"Ms. Cole was flying out at nine-fifteen," Nadia said. "The state geologist walks the eastern parcel at one o'clock and she doesn't come back for another six weeks. I've canceled the plane. Which door does she come in? There's a chain on the front one."
"The one by the flagpole," Lucy said. "It's propped open with a bucket."
"Thank you," Nadia said, and was gone.
Lucy set the phone face down on her knee and left it there. Two rows up, the man with the stroller was still trying to fold it with one hand.
Carrington walked up the aisle at quarter to nine, one clean note at a time on the gym floor over the noise of two hundred people, and a woman two rows ahead turned all the way around in her seat to look at her.
Lucy took her coat off the second chair and put it over her knees.
Carrington sat down still wearing her own coat and set her bag upright on the floor between her shoes.
She was wearing a gray suit and small gold earrings, and her hair was fixed in an updo.
The folding chair she sat down on had a strip of blue tape around one leg and a number stenciled on the back.
"Ms. Harper," Carrington said.
"Ms. Cole," Lucy said.
Up ahead, somebody's grandmother lowered herself into a seat with a cane and a plastic bag of knitting, and the man with the stroller gave up on the aisle and rocked it with his foot against the wall.
Two seats down the row, a woman in a sturdy work jacket looked over at Carrington and kept looking a moment past what was considered polite, then said something quickly to the woman next to her.
The woman didn't turn around. She pulled her phone out instead and held it low against her knee, face down.
"How is she sleeping? Grace," Carrington asked.
"All the way through," Lucy said. "Every night since Sunday."
Carrington nodded once and faced front, and people kept filling in the room around them.
The woman in front turned around in her chair. "Do you know if they're doing the picnic sheet today?"
"I don't know," Lucy said.
"They always do it out in the lot," the woman said. "So you can't get away." She smiled at Lucy, and then at Carrington, without the smile dimming at all in between, and turned back around.
Carrington sat with her eyes on the strip of tape stuck across the front of the bottom riser. "Has Grace told you her line?"
"No," Lucy said.
"She wouldn't say it for me either," Carrington said, and faced the front.
Renata started them at nine exactly. The kindergarten sang first, twenty of them on the bottom riser in a line that kept bowing forward at both ends until an aide walked down and pushed them back.
Their song about rain had words that four of them knew.
The rest opened and closed their mouths a beat behind.
Then it continued class by class, and every child said one thing.
A first grader had found out that the moon doesn't make any light of its own.
The boy after her had found out that his grandfather was born in a country that isn't there anymore, and he said it into the microphone at a volume that made the woman knitting jump up off her seat.
A second grader reached the front, opened his mouth, but said nothing.
Renata crouched beside him and whispered into his ear, and he said it was something about sharks without sharing the fact, then returned to his spot.
His mother whistled and cheered from the audience anyway.
Their chairs touched at the leg. Carrington wore the same perfume she'd worn in the study on Wednesday night, close enough now to taste, and through the whole of the kindergarten's song Lucy wanted to lean four inches sideways and rest her shoulder against Carrington's arm.
Nobody in that room would have seen it. She shifted her own knee an inch closer instead and left it there.
Lucy spent the first two classes waiting for Carrington to stand and leave to take a phone call. Before, she had watched Carrington take a call at the kitchen island and be in the car in under four minutes, still holding the fork. This morning, the phone never came out of her coat.
At nine-fifteen, Lucy checked the clock over the door. The second grade still stood on the risers, working through a list of facts about worms. Carrington watched them and hadn't moved since she sat down.
Lucy read the banner all the way across, then again, then backward. The second grade sat down and Renata called the third.
Twenty-two of them climbed the side steps in a line, in uniform, shirts mostly tucked.
"Lucy." Carrington didn't turn her head toward her. "Middle row, third from the left, next to the tall girl with the braids."
"I see," Lucy said.
They worked along the row one at a time, slower than the second grade, because a few of them wanted to add information.
A girl had found out that her guinea pig was a boy.
Another said hers twice because nobody heard her the first time.
A bird had hit the window at her grandmother's house and gotten up again.
A boy had found out about the Titanic and had far more to say about it than one line, and Renata let him get to the part with the iceberg before she moved him along.
Grace stood three back in the line, heels together and chin down, then two back, then one.
The girl in front of her stepped away, and Grace walked forward and stood on the piece of tape.
She'd carried the strip of paper up with her, the one from the tide pools, folded to the size of a stamp and gone furry along the creases.
She didn't open it, but she said nothing.
It took about four seconds for everyone to understand that she wasn't going to speak, and then the ambient noise dropped in layers: the parents first, then the teachers along the wall, then the kindergarteners on the floor at the front, who quieted because everyone above them had.
The woman with the knitting laid both needles flat in her lap.
Renata took half a step toward the risers and stopped.
Lucy's hands lay in her lap, doing nothing at all, and she left them there. Grace stood eleven feet away. Lucy could have carried her out of that room in ten seconds, and she stayed in the chair.
"I counted nineteen anemones," Grace said, finally. "And nineteen was right on Sunday."
She said it flat, in the same monotone voice she'd used at the dinner table for a solid month. Somebody in the back laughed once at the wrong moment and stopped.
Then Grace looked out at the room. She skipped the front row, and she searched along the fourth row, past the woman in the work jacket and the other woman with the phone, until she found Carrington. Then she stopped.
Carrington looked back at her and didn't move.
Grace held the look far longer than a seven-year-old should have been able to.
The aide at the end of the riser started walking forward, then thought better of it.
Nobody clapped, then Grace stepped back into the line.
The next moment, the boy beside her announced that a group of crows was called a murder, and two hundred people let their breath out on that instead.
Lucy's face had been wet since Grace stepped onto the tape. She never wiped it. Lucy turned her head. Carrington stared at the floor between her shoes, and she stayed that way through the last four children in the third grade.
The fourth grade climbed the side steps and worked through facts about the solar system.
The fifth grade followed, and they had been told to project, which they did.
Renata thanked everybody for coming out on a Friday and announced that the picnic sheet would circulate in the lot.
Two hundred people stood up at once and started hunting for their coats.
Carrington stood. She lifted her bag off the floor and then stayed exactly where she was, people pushing past her on both sides. Lucy stood beside her. Neither of them said one word until the row in front had cleared.
It took eleven minutes to empty the multipurpose room.
Two hundred people had to funnel back down one corridor past the trophy case, and somebody's toddler had sat down in the middle of it.
Carrington moved through them without appearing to touch anybody.
Lucy came out four people behind her, into the light and the cold and the diesel smell of the buses.