The Biker Who Walked Her Home

There was an ambulance in the bus lane with its lights going and no siren. A knot of teachers stood by the gate. The last few children waiting on rides had been herded up onto the steps, and they were all staring at the same place.

On the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the fence, I saw a pair of big black boots, toes pointed out.

Two paramedics were bent over the rest of him. I got out of the car and my legs would hardly carry me. I could see a gray beard and a plastic mask. His bandana was gone. His head was bald underneath and pink, and for some reason that was the thing that undid me. It looked so bare.

Lily was standing six feet away. She had his black bandana in both hands, wadded up against her stomach. She wasn’t crying. She was past it. Her face was the color of paper.

“Mama,” she said. “I told them about the pills. In his vest. I told them where.”

“She did,” one of the paramedics said without looking up. “Smart girl. That was the right thing to tell us, sweetheart.” He glanced at me. “Are you family?”

“No. We’re…” I did not have the word. I had to go hunting for it. “We’re his neighbors.”

“Is there anybody we ought to be calling for him?”

“He doesn’t have anybody,” Lily said. “He told me.”

They counted three and lifted him. As the stretcher went up, his hand came off the blanket. Two fingers, held out a little from the rest, feeling at the air for something. Then they slid him in and the doors shut.

Mrs. Novak came straight across the grass and took me by both wrists. She is sixty-three years old, and there were grass stains on the knees of her stockings, and her good cardigan was lying folded on the ground where his head had been.

“Amy, it isn’t what your husband thinks,” she said.

“Then what is it? Jean, what happened?”

“He kept saying one thing, the whole time we were waiting. Over and over, like I might forget it.” Her eyes were wet. “He kept saying, don’t let her walk by herself.”

She looked over at my daughter and then back at me.

“Do you know why she asked him, and not you?”

I didn’t. God forgive me, I did not have the first idea.

She took us inside to her classroom. She sat Lily in the reading corner on a beanbag with a carton of chocolate milk from the cafeteria, and she sat me down at a table built for seven-year-olds, with my knees up near my chin, and she pulled a little chair around to face me.

“First I owe you something,” she said. “When the office passed along your husband’s call, I watched for that man for a week as if he were a wolf. I stood at that gate at dismissal with my phone in my hand. I want you to know that before I tell you the rest, because I’m not proud of it.”

“What happened today?”

“There’s a fifth grader. Kyle. A big boy, big for eleven. He waits at the corner of the fence at three o’clock. I thought he was waiting on his little sisters.” She pressed her lips together. “Lily went out the gate at five after. He stepped out and put both hands on her and shoved her off the sidewalk into the drainage ditch. Backpack and all. I saw it. I started moving, but I don’t move fast anymore.”

I couldn’t feel my hands.