She went to school on Monday.
It was the stupidest thing she could have done, and the only thing. The letter said Friday midnight. The old man had given her a week. And if there was one rule of staying alive that Maya had learned in twenty-three years, it was this: when the world goes mad, do the ordinary thing, as ordinarily as possible, and nobody notices that you are on fire.
She put on her pressed intern blouse. She braided her hair. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and practiced her smile.
You're fine. You are a teacher. It is Monday.
The coin under her collar felt like ice.
She had turned it over a hundred times in the night. It was a tiny black disc with a hairline seam, and she did not dare pry it off. Perhaps it was a microphone. Perhaps a tracker. Perhaps something worse. She had sewn it back under the lining with six careful stitches, and whenever she touched it, her fingers shook.
He will know where I am. Every second of every day.
Fine. Let him.
Let him think I'm obedient.
She picked up her bag and went out into the rain.
…
"Ms. Maya." Principal Evans did not look up from her desk. "You are fourteen minutes late."
"I apologize, Principal."
"The security log shows you left this building with the Mark boy at ten past seven on Friday evening," the principal said. "A driver telephoned on Saturday morning to say he never collected him."
Maya's heart stopped.
"Mr. Travis's office has since informed the Board that the child is safe with family and that the matter is closed. Closed." The pen scratched. "I expect you to treat it as such. I also received a call from the Wallace family last night. Mrs. Wallace stated that her daughter was in a state of distress. She said the child had been told that a classmate was in 'trouble' and that his teacher 'had gone to rescue him.'"
Maya's heart leaped.
"I didn't say that."
"Evidently someone did." The pen tapped. "The children are speaking of a missing boy. Mark. The Board has been told he has been withdrawn due to a family emergency. We do not discuss family emergencies with five-year-olds, Ms. Maya. We do not frighten parents. Is that understood?"
"Perfectly."
"I would hate to see an internship cut short over a story."
"No, Principal."
"Then go."
She went.
Outside the door the corridor tilted, and she had to put a hand on the wall.
…
The Purple Sprout room was full of morning light.
Twenty small faces turned toward her as she walked in. Twenty pairs of eyes, round and bright, waiting. A flock of birds in blue blazers. A girl in the second row was sucking her thumb. A boy at the back had somehow gotten a crayon up his nose.
"Good morning, Purple Sprouts."
"Good morning, Ms. Maya," they chorused.
She set down her bag. She picked up the register. She called the names, one by one, in a voice that did not shake, until she reached the end of the list and stopped.
Mark.
Nobody answered.
She had known. She'd known before she opened the book. But the silence landed on her like a stone, and for one terrible second she forgot how to breathe.
"Ms. Maya?" The girl with the uneven pigtails had her hand up. "Where's Mark?"
Twenty heads turned to look at the empty chair by the window.
"Is he sick?" asked someone.
"My mom says he got taken," said a boy in a bow tie.
"He did NOT," said another. "He's on vacation."
"My dad says his dad's a gangster."
"What's a gangster?"
"Children," Maya said.
They fell silent.
She sat down on the little rattan chair at the front of the class, so that her eyes were level with theirs. Her hands were folded in her lap. Under the desk, hidden by the folds of her skirt, they were shaking so hard that she had to grip one wrist with the other.
"Mark isn't here today," she said. "He's had to go away for a little while. But I want you to know something very important. He is safe, and he is thinking about all of you." She smiled. It felt like peeling off her own skin. "In fact, I think he'd want us to have a very good day. So who wants to hear the story about the hamster's funeral?"
"ME!" they screamed.
"Is it true?" someone yelled. "Did the hamster really sit up?"
"Cross my heart."
"Do it again!"
"Let me tell it from the beginning."
So she told it. She told the whole thing, the procession, the eulogy, the twenty-minute dirge on kazoos. She did the voices. She did the hamster. She did the weeping teacher at the graveside, and the exquisitely annoyed rodent sitting up in his shoebox with a look of profound disappointment, and by the end of it, twenty children were shrieking and rolling on the carpet and holding their stomachs.
She laughed with them.
She heard herself laughing, and thought: this is a very good act.
Her hands did not stop shaking all morning.
…
At three o'clock, the last child's hand was in a parent's hand and the classroom was silent.
She sat alone on the carpet among the stars.
She had meant to gather her papers. She had meant to go. But her legs would not hold her, and she sat there on the faded rug with her back against the bookshelf and watched the light creep slowly across the floor.
The letter lay in her bag.
She had not opened it. She wanted to, in a distant, aching way, like a tooth she couldn't stop touching. She imagined slitting the wax with a fingernail. She imagined the paper. She imagined what it said.
Open it, and I shall know.
She pressed her palm flat against her coat.
Something tugged at her sleeve.
"Ms. Maya?"
It was the girl with the pigtails. She had come back. She stood in the doorway with her backpack on both shoulders and one pigtail unraveling, holding a folded sheet of paper.
"I forgot to give you this," she said. "I made it at recess."
Maya took it.
It was a drawing in thick wax crayon. Two figures stood hand in hand beneath an enormous yellow sun: a tall one with black hair and a pink apron, and a small one in a blue blazer with grey eyes. Between them, in unsteady capital letters, the child had printed:
MS. MAYA AND MARK.
HE IS COMING BACK.
Maya's throat closed.
"Is that okay?" The girl's face was anxious. "I wasn't sure about the sun. I didn't have a gold crayon."
"It's perfect," Maya whispered. "It's absolutely perfect."
"My nana says when people go away, you have to draw them back."
Maya laughed, a sound that was mostly breath. She pulled the little girl into her arms and held her, and the small warm body smelled of crayon and apple juice, and the sheer ordinary sweetness of it nearly undid her.
"Thank you," she said.
"You're welcome." The girl patted her back with grave solemnity. "Don't cry, Ms. Maya. He'll see it."
When she was gone, Maya sat for a long time holding the drawing in both hands.
Then she folded it in half and put it carefully in her wallet.
She stood up. She straightened her skirt. She picked up her bag and went out into the rainy afternoon, and she walked to the bus stop at the corner, and caught the six-ten to the end of the line.
…
The address on the back of the envelope was not in the city.
It took her an hour and a half. She changed buses twice. The streets became suburbs, and the suburbs became fields, and by the time the last bus let her off at a lonely crossroads, the sky had turned the color of old steel and the pines had begun to close in on both sides of the road.
She walked the rest of the way.
A narrow lane wound uphill through the trees, black with wet leaves. Mist hung between the trunks like cobwebs. She had her collar up, and her arms wrapped round her body, and every few steps she found her fingers creeping to the coin beneath her ear.
Her phone buzzed.
Seven o'clock.
She quickened her pace.
The road rounded a bend, and the trees fell away, and there, on the crest of a ridge, black against the bruised purple sky, stood a vast stone building with towers like the teeth of a comb.
A castle.
Lights burned in a hundred windows. A high iron gate stood closed across the drive. And behind the bars, in the rainy dusk, she saw the dark shapes of men: dozens of them, standing in a line, motionless, each one with a rifle held across his chest.
Maya stopped at the edge of the lane.
She looked down at her own cold hands, at the letter in her pocket, at the gate that rose before her like the mouth of a beast.
Seven o'clock.
Don't be late.
She walked forward.
