At three-eighteen, we were sitting in the small, quiet nurse’s office that always smelled like rubbing alcohol, old band-aids, and the peanut butter crackers Darlene kept in her bottom desk drawer for kids who missed breakfast. Annie sat on the paper-covered examination cot with her legs dangling down, her little black patent leather shoes kicking rhythmically against the metal legs while she picked at a loose thread on the cuff of her sleeve.
Darlene didn’t use her professional school-nurse voice. She talked to Annie the way she talked to her own grandchildren when they came over for Sunday pot roast, soft and slow, asking simple questions about who helped with the bath at night and who got mad when the cereal bowl spilled on the floor.
Annie wouldn’t answer a single word. She just stared at the linoleum floor between her shoes, her mouth pressed into a thin white line that looked just like her grandfather’s used to look when he was stubborn about taking his medicine.
Darlene didn’t push. She reached into the plastic cup of supplies on her desk, pulled out a yellow Crayola crayon that was worn down to a flat stub, and laid it on the white paper next to Annie’s knee along with a fresh sheet of printer paper.
“Why don’t you show me where you like to sit, sweet girl?” Darlene asked.
Annie didn’t draw a chair or a television set or her bedroom with the pink curtains her aunt had sewn for her birthday. She drew our hallway closet.
It wasn’t a fancy drawing. Just a tall brown rectangle with a small circle for the brass knob on the right side. Inside the rectangle, she drew a tiny stick figure with no mouth and two X’s for eyes. Then she carefully pressed the yellow wax down onto the paper and wrote the number forty-seven underneath it in shaky little block letters that slanted uphill toward the corner.
Darlene looked up from the paper and looked right at me over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t an angry look. It was worse than that. It was careful, professional pity, the kind of look people give you when they know you are standing too close to the edge of something deep and dark and you still haven’t figured it out yet.
At three-forty, right while I was staring at that number forty-seven, the phone on Darlene’s desk rang shrilly. Darlene picked it up on the first ring, listened for ten seconds without saying anything except for one short nod, and then covered the mouthpiece with her palm.
“Helen,” she said, and her voice had changed into that flat, official tone adults use when there are forms to fill out and witnesses waiting in the hall. “Principal Alvarez wants us both in her office. Mr. Coleman just walked up to the front desk with another note from his route.”
My hand was still resting on Annie’s small, thin shoulder, feeling the way her shoulder blades hitched every time she took a shallow breath. I looked down at the yellow paper with the brown rectangle and the number forty-seven, and I finally understood what Mr. Coleman meant when he told me kids don’t flinch at backpacks. I had spent two months telling myself we were just getting by, that we were safe because there was a man around the house who knew how to fix things, while downstairs in the dark hallway, forty-seven minutes was a unit of time measured in the silence behind a closed wooden door.
