The Last Night Of The Class Trip
To explain why that call knocked the plate out of my hands, I have to go back to the eleven days before it, and to every small thing I saw and decided not to see.
Lily had wanted that trip since October. The Ashby High drama and journalism kids went to Los Angeles every other spring, and she talked about it the way some kids talk about Christmas. The studio tour. The observatory. The pier at Santa Monica, where, she informed me, the actual edge of the actual country was.
I said no for months. Los Angeles is a long way from a town of four thousand where I know every cashier at the Hy-Vee by name.
She did not give up. That is the thing about Lily. She is quiet, she reads at the dinner table if you let her, she apologizes to furniture when she bumps into it, but once she decides something is right she will stand in front of it like a fence post.
“Two teachers for eighteen kids,” she said. “Room checks at ten. Buddy system everywhere. I’ll call you every single night. Mom. Everyone is going.”
My husband, Mark, finally took her side. “She’s fifteen, Ame. Straight A’s. Never been in a lick of trouble. If we never let her go anywhere, she’ll never learn how to come back.”
So I said yes, on conditions. She called every night at nine our time. She roomed with Maddie Kerr, her best friend since kindergarten. She did not leave the group for any reason, ever. She shook my hand on it at the kitchen table like we were closing on a farm.
And for six days it was perfect.
She sent pictures every afternoon. Lily and Maddie in matching navy Ashby Hawks hoodies with the gold bird on the chest, squinting in front of the Hollywood sign. Lily with a churro the size of her forearm. The whole group at the ocean, eighteen kids in navy, Dana Price smiling at one end and Coach Ray Dorsey at the other in his sunglasses, giving a thumbs-up. Every night at nine she called and talked so fast I could barely keep up.
I printed two of those pictures for the refrigerator. They were right beside my shoulder the night the plate broke.
On the seventh night, the last night, the phone did not ring at nine.
I told myself they were packing. I texted “Love you, safe flight tomorrow!” with a little airplane, and went to bed.
When I woke up there was one message.
“I’m coming home.”
That was all. No picture. No exclamation point. No heart, and Lily puts a heart on her texts to the dentist’s office. I read it twice in the gray light of our bedroom and felt something cold touch the back of my neck, and then decided, the way you decide things at six in the morning, that she was tired.
I noticed one more thing and set it aside. The time on the message said 4:14 a.m.
That is 2:14 in the morning in California. My daughter, who had to be up at six for a flight, was awake at a quarter after two, and the only thing she could send her mother was four words.
The bus from the Des Moines airport pulled into the Ashby High lot at three that afternoon. The kids came off in a loud, sleepy stream, hugging and shrieking and dragging bags.
Lily came off almost last.