The Kindness of Strangers (26 page)

“Something happened,” Sarah said. “Do you know what it was?”

“We were hoping you could tell us. The day before we found out—the last day Jordan was here at school—he even refused to be partners with Danny for a class activity.”

That broke Sarah’s heart. “I just . . . I don’t . . . I haven’t noticed anything wrong or any other changes besides that.” She hated admitting that, as if it were proof that she was a horrible mother. The last thing she wanted was to offer more evidence of her family’s apparent dysfunction, but she heard herself saying, “To be honest, I’ve been consumed with his older brother, who’s been a bit of a discipline problem at the high school.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Miss Holt said, so sincerely that Sarah loved her for it. “I always enjoyed Nate so much.”

Sarah’s eyes watered. She wiped at them, then realized she was probably streaking mud across her face.

“How are the boys handling the death of their father?” Ms. Zimmerman asked.

Sarah froze. “That . . . that was two years ago.” She never dreamed she’d hear herself say that. She was the one always being told those very words.

“Sometimes it takes a while for grief to surface,” Miss Holt said. Both women leaned toward Sarah now, sweet, sympathetic concern in their eyes. “Especially if Danny might have been too young to truly understand it initially.”

Sarah felt her back stiffen. She’d been ambushed. “I . . . I don’t think so.” She wanted to change the subject. “So what happens now?”

“School policy is a mandatory three-day suspension for the fire alarm.”

For God’s sake. She might as well home-school, as much as her kids were out.

Ms. Zimmerman smiled apologetically and went on. “And we’re required to notify the police and fire departments. We don’t press charges, but they do a good job of impressing the seriousness of the offense on the student. We’ll contact them now, if that’s all right with you.”

Sarah agreed. Ms. Zimmerman excused herself to make the call, and Miss Holt went back to class. Sarah went to the bathroom and scrubbed her hands at the miniature sink. She washed her face with wet paper towels and patted her hair down with damp hands. Why would Danny do such a thing? This was the same sweet boy who used to
cry
telling Sarah that no one had chosen Jordan for a team in gym class.

She stood outside the room where Danny sat waiting. They said she could talk to him while they waited for the police to arrive, but she found she didn’t want to right away. For a split second, she felt fury at him—he had no right to do this; she depended on him to be the good child—but she knew that was unfair, so she finally went in.

Danny lifted his head from the table, his eyes red and weepy. Something melted within her, but she clenched her stomach muscles and said, “You are in so much trouble.”

He nodded, and tears ran down his cheeks.

Sarah began to cry, too, which infuriated her. “I love you, Danny. You know that. But . . . I can’t even speak to you right now.” She sat at the opposite end of the table in a small, child’s chair. Papier-mâché birds hung from the ceiling. Sitting under this enormous flock of outstretched, swaying wings unnerved her. From below they took on a sinister quality, as if they might swoop down and attack. “Why did you do this?”

He lowered his head to the table and hid his face in his arms. The door opened, and Ms. Zimmerman ushered in the police.

Sarah’s stomach rolled over when Detective Kramble stepped into the room with another officer. The sense of relief almost startled her, made her feel foolish. Heat flushed her cheeks. Why did she only ever see this man when she was at her absolute worst? She still had his handkerchief, clean and ready to return, but this wasn’t the appropriate time to mention it. The men ducked their heads under the colorful hanging birds, but Kramble bumped a blue-and-pink eagle, which pecked him in the temple with a dull thunk. He frowned at it, then made eye contact with Sarah and nodded.

The other man, who introduced himself as Officer Woolridge, did most of the talking. He asked if Danny knew the handicapped students in the school who had to struggle down the stairs during the alarm because the elevators couldn’t be used during a fire. He talked about the massive expense involved in answering a false alarm, the criminal charge that could be brought if the school didn’t choose to protect Danny. “What do you think would have been the right thing for you to do when your teacher sent you down to the office?” Woolridge asked.

“To just go,” Danny whispered. “To do what they told me. I’m really sorry.”

“And I’d like to talk to you about why you got sent to the office in the first place,” Detective Kramble said. Color rushed back into Danny’s face. “Where did you get this picture of Jordan Kendrick?”

Kramble laid the picture on the table. From Sarah’s seat the picture was upside down, but she could see it clearly enough. It showed Jordan with just one other person, a woman, mostly in shadow, her face turned away from the camera. This photo was much tamer than the ones from the first disk Nate had opened. An almost artful, gentle pose, it was really erotica, not porn, nothing shocking if it weren’t for the fact that one of the participants was obviously a child. She thought of the
Hustler.
Maybe Nate was right; maybe it was Danny’s.

“From my computer,” Danny mumbled, looking at the table.

“How do you mean, from your computer?”

Danny paused and looked confused. “I . . . I got it on the Internet.”

“Are you sure?” Kramble’s voice was urgent. “What search words did you use?”

Danny breathed in that odd, gaspy way that usually preceded his throwing up. “I don’t know. I . . . I don’t remember. It was just a joke. I’m sorry. It’s not funny.”

“No it’s not,” Sarah said. “It’s not funny at all. Why would you do this? And are you telling me you know your way around porn sites?”

Danny shrank down in his seat. His mouth puckered as if he’d tasted sour milk.

“Danny,” Kramble said, and Sarah was grateful for the softness in his voice, his broad shoulders caving in on each other as he leaned toward her son, “how did you find this picture of him? We need to know. It can help us help Jordan.”

“It was on TV,” Danny said defensively, as if they were accusing him of lying. “On the news. They said Jordan was on the Internet.”

Kramble shook his head. “No. We’ve
tried
to find him on the Internet. This picture is really important. We need your help. Now, try to remember: how did you find it?”

Sarah thought they were missing the point. It wasn’t
how
she cared about but
why
. She didn’t give a damn about any clue in the Kendrick case; she only cared about what this picture revealed about her son.

“It was on my computer in the computer lab. It was just there. I didn’t look for it.”

Ms. Zimmerman frowned. “Here at school? I thought you said you got it at home.”

Danny’s face scrunched up, and he gulped in ragged breaths. “No. Here. When I logged on, that’s what came up.”

Kramble chewed his lip and rapped a drumbeat on the table with his knuckles. He turned to Ms. Zimmerman. “May I have access to your computer lab?”

“Absolutely. I’ll introduce you to the webmaster. She can help you with anything you need.”

“Thank you.”

While they discussed these details, Sarah felt invisible. She looked at the photo on the table. That was an image they hadn’t seen?

Sarah coughed, and Ms. Zimmerman and Kramble turned back to her and Danny.

“Danny,” Ms. Zimmerman said, “since this happened so early in the day, we’ll consider this the first day of your suspension. You can return to school on Tuesday. I hope you’ll spend a lot of time thinking during your three days off.”

“Believe me, he won’t have three days
off,
” Sarah said. “But he’ll have time to think.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Laden, for coming in and supporting us in this.” Ms. Zimmerman rose, signaling that the meeting was over.

Danny tearfully apologized again. Kramble seemed to hover in the doorway, as if waiting for Sarah, but Ms. Zimmerman spoke to her, telling her to take what they needed out of Danny’s locker, since he wouldn’t be permitted back on school grounds until Tuesday. Sarah asked Danny what books he needed, and when they stood up from the table, the principal had led Kramble away.

They gathered Danny’s things, then got in the van and drove. Neither said a word until Sarah pulled in to the parking lot at the hardware store. “What are you doing?” Danny asked.

“You’ll see. Come on.”

Inside, she bought a hasp and a padlock. Danny looked confused but didn’t ask questions. Back in the van, he said, “Mom, I’m sorry.”

“Good. You should be,” Sarah said. “I can’t control what you do in the lab at school, but I can control it at home. I’m putting this lock on the computer cabinet. You’re not using it again unless I’m in the room with you.”

“But I told you! The picture was there! I didn’t do it!”

“Even if that’s true, you printed it, Danny. You passed it around. And you pulled the fire alarm.”

He dropped his chin to his chest.

“And you’re going to work your little butt off until next Tuesday. You’re going to dream about going back to school.”

“It’s not fair. Nate gets in trouble all the time, and you don’t make
him
stay off the computer. You don’t punish
him
like this.”

She pulled in to their driveway, cut the ignition, and turned to face him. “Nate doesn’t hurt anyone but himself. He gets punished—”

“But you never make him—”

“But he has never,
never
hurt anyone else. He’s never ridiculed someone’s pain or disrupted the entire school. Don’t you understand what you’ve done? How serious it is?”

Danny stared at the van floor.

“Do you understand?” Sarah repeated. “If you don’t, we’ll talk about it until you do.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Then you need to go inside and clean both bathrooms while I do this. And I mean clean them. There’s all kinds of hard-water buildup on the tiles in the upstairs shower. I want it all scrubbed off. You know where the cleaning stuff is.”

He hesitated as if he didn’t quite believe what he’d heard.

“I meant what I said. You’re going to wish you were back in school.”

He sulked into the house, and Sarah followed on shaky legs. She hated to ruin the computer cabinet, but she drilled on the hasp, padlocked the cabinet shut, and added the key to the chain around her neck that held Roy’s wedding band. She felt he would approve. She also felt that this never would’ve happened if he’d been here. “Damn you,” she whispered. “Leaving me alone with all this shit.”

After checking on Danny in the upstairs bathroom, she went outside and slowly trudged down the back steps to finish the abandoned peas.

Some of her tomato plants in their little plastic containers had tipped over in the wind. She carried them out to the sun every day in aluminum casserole pans and took them back down to the warm basement at night. She righted the plants that had fallen, repacked the dirt over their roots, then checked her watch. Soon Nate would be home. She’d grown used to these conferences with Nate’s teachers; she’d developed a thick skin and a sense of separateness. But Danny in trouble felt new, raw, and wrong. Why would he do something so cruel? What had happened between him and Jordan? She planted rows of mint and lettuce. She worked blindly, rotely, trying to lose herself in it.

She looked at the gargoyle and pictured how her own parents would handle a situation like this. There’d been only Sarah, the one child, but there’d been a slew of cousins and friends always around the table at night. If anyone was in trouble, everyone knew it.

She stopped with her hands in the earth and saw, as if on videotape, her own bat mitzvah. Her mother, dressed in a lilac suit, smelling of roses, had turned her by the shoulders to look at all the gathered faces—all the people in her life who genuinely cared about her piano recitals and her scarlet fever, about her double back flip off the lake dock and her C-plus in penmanship. “Remember these faces,” her mother had told her. “Remember this love. It is your greatest treasure.”

Sarah stood up and brushed herself off, thinking maybe she should’ve moved back to Michigan to be near Ma and Pop after Roy died.

She went up the steps to the back door and called, “Danny? Can you stop what you’re doing and come down here?”

It took a while, but he appeared in the kitchen, frowning and wary. “What?”

Sarah gestured to the kitchen table. “Do you want to talk about this?”

A look of outright panic crossed his face. “No. I said I was sorry.”

His fear puzzled her. “What are you afraid of, Danny?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Sit down a minute. Please?” She sat, but he didn’t. “Tell me—try to tell me what went through your mind, hon?” She recognized a pleading, desperate tone in her voice.

He scowled. “Nothing. I thought it would be funny. I already told you—”

“Why would it be funny? Just because it was Jordan?” Sarah could almost feel his panic, like the pulsations when standing near an electric fence. “Why aren’t you two friends anymore? What happened? Did he . . . did he or his parents ever try to . . . touch you or—”