The Night the School Gym Opened

The first night

I’ll tell you what a gym sounds like at two in the morning when forty strangers are sleeping in it.

It sounds like a tide. A slow rise and fall of breath, the creak of canvas cots, somebody’s snore going deep and then catching. The boiler hummed in the wall. Outside the high windows the wind kept up its long low howl, but inside it was a different world.

I didn’t go home. I sat in a folding chair by the door with a blanket over my knees and a thermos of Bev’s coffee, and I watched the room the way you watch a sleeping child.

Otis’s cot was nearest the door. At a quarter to three, I saw him sit up and fumble in his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small zippered case.

“Everything okay, Otis?”

“Insulin,” he said. “I keep my vial in the truck fridge, but I never thought to bring it. Got the pen in my pocket at least.”

“Do you need food? Gordon’s got the ambulance crew on call.”

“Got a sandwich in the other pocket,” he said. “I’ll be fine. I just didn’t want to wake anybody.”

I got him a cup of warm milk and a roll from the kitchen anyway. He ate it sitting on the edge of the cot with his boots off, in gray wool socks with a hole in the toe.

“My wife used to do this for me,” he said. “Since she passed, I eat out of a gas station. Nobody’s brought me warm milk in four years.”

I didn’t say anything. I put the blanket back over his shoulders and sat down next to him until his breathing slowed.

At four in the morning, a small figure in pajamas came tiptoeing across the gym floor with a stuffed bear under her arm.

Her name was Piper Gunderson. She was eight. She was Gordon’s granddaughter, and Gordon had brought her along when her mother got called in to the hospital for a shift, and she had fallen asleep on the bleachers.

She walked straight to Marcus’s cot. He was awake, lying on his back, holding his phone against his chest.

“Is it your birthday?” she whispered.

“It was my daughter’s,” he said. “Yesterday.”

“How old?”

“Four.”

Piper studied him for a minute with the solemn attention only an eight-year-old can give.

“She can have my bear,” she said. “I have three more at home. His name is Mr. Buttons.”

She set the bear on his chest and padded back to the bleachers.

Marcus looked at it for a very long time. Then he pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and held it there. I got up and found him a box of tissues, and I left him alone with it.

He took the bear home to Ohio. Four months later, I got a photograph in the mail. A little girl in a pink coat, holding a stuffed bear with a ribbon at its neck. On the back, in a man’s careful handwriting, it said: Mr. Buttons says thank you.