I was standing next to my son in the cold. We weren’t speaking, but the silence was companionable. I thought it was, anyway, though the morning had been full of acrimony. There’d been a fight about the shower, a fight with his sister about toast (“I’m sorry to have to say this,” she told me, “but I wish I had a different mother”), a fight about high, yelping laughter, not welcome at any time of day, least of all before 8 AM. But all of that had dissipated, floating away when we stepped outside, and now my son and I were on the sidewalk, waiting for the field trip to begin.
“My hands,” he said with sorrow and held them up for me.
“Where are your mittens?”
He shook his head.
“We talked about this,” I said, and gave him mine.
It was the coldest day of the year, and the trip to the botanical gardens had almost been canceled. Part of me, naturally, had hoped for a cancellation, but a more forward-thinking part was glad we were going through with it. I had a policy about field trips; every year I chaperoned one for each child. I’d checked off my daughter’s quickly, accompanying her class to the Neue Galerie at the end of September, and after this trip — in a few short hours — I’d be free and clear, done with all of it for months.
The other classes were filing onto buses, but the doors for our bus, at the end of the line, were closed. Through the dim glass I saw the driver sitting still, maybe meditating, or, more likely, there was a phone somewhere I couldn’t make out; people often appear a little frozen when they stare into their phones. I was shifting around, perhaps looking impatient, and a teaching assistant standing next to me said, “I’m sure we’ll be leaving soon.” He was very thin and young, and at drop-off the week before a few parents had been whispering that he had a drinking problem. He did have a strong smell — not of alcohol but heavy cologne. It hung around us, stinging my eyes and nose. I smiled at him and he blinked a few times.
“Everyone on the bus,” another teacher shouted from somewhere behind me. The doors opened, hissing softly, and my son and I fell into the slow, winding line.
The driver was tall and sturdy; her body seemed composed of elementary shapes, rectangles and ovals. She had hair the color of wet sand, a raw, pink face. Her eyes were small and her eyelids looked shimmery and damp. She’d given me a long look when I stepped onto the bus, and made a motion with her arms. “Sorry?”
“Keep moving. No time to waste.” Her voice was calm, and the words had a round, settled quality, like stones at the bottom of a pond. But the look she gave me was of naked assessment, as though I were a specimen she was inspecting for obvious flaws. She kept her eyes on me for a moment, then turned to look at my son, and instinctively I shifted my body.
My children were curious about school buses, which we’d see lumbering through the neighborhood, long dark child ferries, like something out of a folktale. Occasionally there would be a sign posted on the back window: This Bus Has Been Checked for Sleeping Children. The sign disturbed my daughter, who wanted to know what was behind it. Had another little girl slept through her stop, ended up in the outer reaches of the city, in a bus depot? No, I’d say, that hasn’t happened, and she’d say, Good. But the next time we saw a bus with a sign, she’d ask again. We had the same conversation over and over; it was one of several sequences we repeated. There was one about what happens when you die, and, requiring even more delicacy, one about what happens when you go to middle school. There was one about which child I loved more. She’d recently stopped believing in Santa Claus, and now we had a new routine. I’d say, What’s wrong? She’d say, Nothing. A few moments later she’d put her mouth to my ear and whisper: Santa.
Of course children fell asleep on buses every day, and surely some of them were forgotten. In fact, my husband told me, it had happened to him. He’d slept through all the stops, ended up back at the parking lot of his school. The driver had left the bus, locked the doors; he didn’t know how long he’d been alone in there. Eventually his mother found him, woke him, brought him home.
Not scared at all, he said. Sleeping.
“Oh hi,” said the mother of a boy named Ryan. “I didn’t know you’d be coming.”
One day waiting for pickup, this woman, Danielle, had said to me, “You know, I support Trump.” We’d been talking about the new municipal composting program — not obviously related to national politics, but also not entirely unrelated. I told her I didn’t support Trump, then added in case there was confusion that I was in favor of composting. She looked at me quietly, and then the children came out. I hadn’t spoken to her since.
“Why don’t you speak to her,” my daughter said, one night after dinner. “You can still speak to her.”
“Stop listening in,” I said.
“Stop talking.” She walked toward her bedroom, returned, and said, “You can still speak to her.”
“I suppose I can.”
“Because you still like her.”
“No, I don’t like her.”
“But you can like her. You should like her.”
“Under other circumstances, when I disagree with someone, I can like them.” But I found many disagreements, disagreements about all kinds of things, off-putting. “It’s different with this. I can’t.”
“Let’s just say you like her,” my daughter said.
“I like her,” my husband said.
“No you don’t,” I said. “Think about it.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know who she is.”
“She’s rich,” my daughter said.
“Why do you think that,” I said.
“She wears all those rings.”
“Rings?”
“She has fancy hair.”
“What’s fancy hair?”
“Beautiful hair. Not like yours.”
“What does it mean, liking someone,” my husband said.
“I’m just going to say you like her,” my daughter said.
Danielle’s hair — there was nothing special about it; now it was mostly hidden beneath a hat. Her husband was sitting across the aisle from her, next to Ryan, who had a smudge of ink on his cheek that looked like a bruise. I wondered if Ryan was the one who started the jail game. A handful of boys, including my son, ran around the schoolyard putting one another in jail. Occasionally they put children in jail who hadn’t chosen to play the game. One of the teachers had put a stop to it, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to have to intervene, talk to my son about incarceration. Conversations like that always went badly; I’d confuse the children, frighten them. I’d explained to my daughter what could happen if her image showed up on the internet and now she was afraid of mirrors; she worried there were tiny cameras hidden in the glass. The teacher just said, Jail is not a good game. Something simple like that.
Ryan’s father had a kind of plain face, with translucent eyebrows and a soft neck. His expression conveyed satisfaction, his posture complacency; even before Danielle’s Trump comment I hadn’t liked him. But now he looked at me with a certain bleakness and said, “Welcome aboard,” and I felt we were in sympathy. It occurred to me that he might not have voted for Trump, and Danielle could be one of those people I’d read about, a normal person who’d been captured by a conspiracy theory and functionally lost her mind. In that case, my daughter was right, and I could still like her, or, as people said, hold her in compassion. I could reserve all judgment. I wondered what the schoolyard teacher, the one who’d handled the jail game, would advise.
I made my way further back, passing a well-known defense attorney whose client, a notorious con man, had just been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. The lawyer’s daughter was pulling her arms out of a ski suit while he laid snacks between them on the seat, small bags of cheese puffs, pretzels, gummy candy made of fruit juice, all lined up neatly on the worn black vinyl. “Beef jerky?” he said to me. My son referred to this as that meat stick, and one morning had asked me if it was a real food or something he’d dreamed.
“How long . . .” the lawyer said, and turned to his daughter. “I’ll be with you in just one minute.” He looked back at me without speaking. “How long?” He glanced around the bus with a helpless expression, and I saw him move between a frantic kind of impatience and acceptance. “Never mind.”
“They said they’d get us back before lunch,” I told him.
“Lunch,” he said regretfully, and as with Ryan’s father, I was in sympathy with this man, the lawyer. Total accord.
I kept moving, stopping here and there to help children with their seat belts, flattered to be asked, but what else was I there for? The children had correctly identified me as a kind of general assistant. I helped Ava and Milo, Rosie and Gabriel. Now they were strapped in, speaking to one another, or sitting in silence, concentrating perhaps on not throwing up. This is what I imagined my son was doing; he was very quiet.
I took a seat a row behind him, across the aisle from an actress, who was around my age. I hadn’t seen anything she’d appeared in, but I knew some things about her because a friend who was an acupuncturist had treated her for sinus-related balance problems. They’d planned to write a book together, maybe host a podcast, but when the actress’s real career took off those plans were dropped, and there was now some bitterness between them. My friend, who often ended up in small-claims court with people she knew, considered suing her. The actress looked like someone easily thrown off-balance — you could call it ethereal; an unkind person would say weak. But still lovely. Narrow shoulders, delicate nose, long arms, legs, hands. She wore a short coat, a violet scarf, sunglasses on the top of her head. None of it was remarkable except for the all-encompassing scarf, which reminded me of the mist I’d see sometimes early in the morning, settled over the river. Thick and silvery, it gave the boats a ghostly appearance, their outlines softened, lights blurring as they pushed through the water. The scarf didn’t entirely cover the actress’s face. She had thin cheeks, and the whites of her eyes were completely clear. This was true of a number of people; many people, even of advancing age, had beautiful, clear eyes.
We were passing through streets with little houses and a number of trees, their branches thin and disorderly. Neighborhoods like this were more commonly found in another borough, and I wondered about the route the driver had chosen. There was probably a race blocking the main roads, though it was very cold, and a weekday, so something other than a race. An infrastructure project, road repairs. I’d worn several layers to prepare for the weather, and I now regretted it. It was extremely warm, my legs were constricted, and one of them — the entire leg — was falling asleep. I thought of the urgent way the lawyer’s daughter had removed her arms from her ski suit. I’d have to find a place to change at the gardens.
The actress wasn’t overly bundled, but she didn’t look comfortable. Everything about her — her bent head, a tightness in her clasped hands — suggested strain. Why had she come on this trip? For that matter, why send her child to public school? I’d ask the acupuncturist if she knew anything about it, though her attention was now focused on a banker, whom she was trying to lure away from his wife, also a client.
The actress’s child was named Astrid, and I tried to remember what my son had told me about her. Was she a screamer? A biter? Was she the one who’d thrown her water bottle at a teacher’s head? The one who said fuck all the time? Maybe she was the cause for the emails about not peeing in the schoolyard. I tried to look at her, but she was on the other side of the actress, fully blocked. My son had requested not to sit next to me, which was typical of my children, my family. The couples therapist my husband and I saw often complimented us, sincerely, on the aggression openly expressed in our household.
“This is a funny way of going, isn’t it?” said the alcoholic, who was sitting behind me.
“I don’t know where we are,” I said.
“Me neither.” His voice was relaxed, slightly drowsy, the whites of his eyes cream colored with red veins. “It looks just like where I live, but see?” He pulled up his phone and showed me the little blue dot in a maze of taupe crisscrossed by thin lines. He put it away before I could orient myself, and when I took out my own phone, it wasn’t connecting to the internet. I smelled his cologne again; it seemed to coat my airways, and, in the close atmosphere of the bus, made me slightly sick.
“I imagine there’s something happening on the roads and we have to take the long way,” he said.
“There’s always something.”
He nodded and spoke about the loud, bothersome roadwork around his apartment, pile driving at 3 AM, visits from ConEd. Floodlights and walkie-talkies. “And when it isn’t the city, it’s the movie people. Film shoots.” He glanced at the actress and blushed. I shook my head, trying to tell him that she wasn’t listening.
“Where are you from?” I said.
“Minnesota. Minneapolis.”
“Do you miss it?”
“No.” His brother, who still lived there, had turned his basement into a gathering space for men. There was a TV, a wine cooler, a place to throw knives, and a small shooting range in the back. His brother and his friends would lie around, smoke pot, play with their weapons. He wasn’t sure of the legality of it, but putting that aside it was just a very frightening place. Every time he set foot in that basement he was sure he’d die; it was the same way he felt when he got on a plane. Actually, he’d become nervous about most forms of transportation. He biked to work and today, to board the bus, he’d had to layer a benzo on top of the SSRI he was always on.
Of course children fell asleep on buses every day, and surely some of them were forgotten.
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We drove down a wide street, past large white houses and a woman dragging a wagon with a child in it. The woman and child wore thick wool coats and black bonnets, and with the starkness of the houses and the bare trees, without any other cars in sight, it was like an image from another time. We were probably in the middle of a traditional community, a religious community. I brought out my phone and took a picture of the woman and child. They had paused with their heads turned toward the bus, looking up at us, puzzled. I wanted to send the picture to my husband, but still didn’t have any bars.
The assistant teacher was saying something about a peculiar disease his father had picked up while camping along the Canadian border. “Did you see them?” I said. “The people out there?”
“Hm?” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.” His face was now completely red. He looked so young.
My impulse was to tell him it was fine, keep talking. I generally wanted people to keep talking, to a point, but when the point was reached, I’d find myself eager to end the conversation, and I usually would. I didn’t want to do this to the nice young teacher. I didn’t want to encourage further disclosures and then abruptly withdraw. So even though I also had thoughts about planes, and even though I had a lot to say about benzos in particular, I didn’t go into any of that. I said, “It must be very cold in Minneapolis.”
“Today would be nothing,” he said. “It wouldn’t count at all.”
Caught up in the young man’s story, his fears, I’d forgotten about the cold outside, and that I was overwarm, and uncomfortable, and losing sensation in one leg. I’d forgotten the bus driver’s unpleasant face, and I’d more or less forgotten about my son. He’d just dropped out of my awareness, which would happen sometimes. Now I looked around the seat, and saw that he was half awake. When he didn’t become motion sick, cars, buses, and trains had this effect on him, as they did on many people — all those sleeping children — as they did sometimes on me.
The bus stoppedand we slowly made our way off. The driver was staring straight ahead, but gave a little nod as each person passed, as though making a note. She was smiling with her lips slightly parted, and I saw her large, thick teeth.
Outside, the scenery was familiar, with a few red brick buildings across the street softly glowing in the wan sunlight, and a gray stone church on the corner. The gardens were nearly deserted, not a surprise on such an inhospitable day. They’d only decided to carry on with the trip when it was determined we could spend the whole time in the greenhouses. There were three of them, each with a different climate, different plants, different birds. We loitered outside the large stone gate as the teachers handed out xeroxed maps and counted heads, looking over lists, counting again. There were other buses parked along the road, but it was quiet and they appeared to be empty; they must have arrived some time before us.
I’d been asked to keep track of four children: my son, Vanessa, George, and Hannah, and the responsibility weighed on my mind. I found the care of other people’s children to be a heavy burden; this was among the reasons I’d been a bad teacher, and it was why I was also a fairly bad chaperone, though I wasn’t sure what a good chaperone looked like. Not like the lawyer, tapping away on his phone, or the actress who, though present in body, was clearly absent in other important ways. I’d yet to hear her speak, or see her look at anyone, including her child. She was actively not looking at Ryan’s mother, Danielle, who was standing very near her; every time the actress shifted position Danielle tried to catch her eye. Seeing them together, I began to understand my daughter’s idea that Danielle was wealthy, that there was something glittery about her. The actress was more beautiful, but there were similarities. They both looked well cared for, with clean, soft clothes that fit just so. Danielle’s husband also had a comfortable look. The three of them were like a group of dogs I often saw around the neighborhood, pampered golden retrievers with thick, smooth fur.
“Whose mother are you?” Vanessa asked me, and my son gave her a murderous look.
He claimed me, and I wanted to hug and kiss him, but he had ideas about the right and wrong moments for that kind of thing, so I just patted his head.
George said, “I knew she was your mom.”
Hannah didn’t take part in this; she was wandering back toward the bus, taking a few steps, pausing, starting again, as though she were following a trail. “Hannah,” I said. “Hannah, come back.”
“Time to go in,” said the thin young man, and when I looked around I saw that everyone was several yards ahead of us.
We walked along a looping path, passing shrubs with hard, sharp leaves and a half-frozen pond. Little admonitions from the teachers sounded like birdcalls. Don’t touch. Hands to yourself. Stay with the group. These were mixed in with some short, pedagogic phrases. What do you see? What are you noticing?
The sunlight, clear and cool, without any warmth, was covering the field, the bushes, the apartment buildings in the distance. Ahead of me, the lawyer and the actress were walking together, their hands brushing. He wasn’t looking at his phone and she wasn’t looking into the middle distance; they were looking in a somewhat focused way at each other. What did I know about each one’s family life? Married? Divorced? Danielle also had her eyes on the actress and the lawyer, and was observing them in a patient, neutral way I found distasteful, but maybe this was the way I was looking at them, with unselfconscious interest. I thought of the bus driver’s gaze, which was like the package of chicken thighs I’d had to throw out a few weeks ago. I knew right away they’d started to rot.
Danielle’s husband approached her and murmured something.
“What?” she said.
“Gloria.”
“Who?”
He shook his head and ran a few feet into the field to deal with their son. A boy named Ethan had Ryan in an embrace and was shouting “Prisoner! Prisoner!”
Ryan disengaged himself, screamed, “I’m gonna kill you,” lunged. His father lifted him up and away, and Vanessa — Vanessa from my group — helped Ethan to his feet. Certain children broadcast their self-regulation, and Vanessa was one of these. She wore yellow mittens, a coat that floated away from her like a dress, and furry blue boots, and she walked, or sometimes skipped, in small clipped movements. Her hair was neat, her cheeks clean. It didn’t worry me that she was slightly separated from the group; she seemed like she could take care of herself. But this thought made me look around for George, Hannah, and my son, who were all walking behind in a desultory, purposeless way.
“What are you noticing?” I said to George.
“It’s filthy here,” he said. “The city is a filthy, filthy place.”
“It’s not dirty here,” Hannah said, standing in front of George, speaking the words practically into his mouth. “Not here. Look at the birds.”
“The birds, the birds, the birds,” my son said, and the two others joined him. The birds, the birds the birds. The birds the birds the birds.
The older teacher, Greta, was looking at us. “Shhhh,” I said. “No chanting. Let’s keep our bodies to ourselves.”
“Our bodies?” Hannah said.
Some slight ill will might have been brewing between me and Hannah. I shook my head.
“Our bodies?” Hannah said.
“OK,” I said. “Shh. Look at the birds.”
The birds, the birds the birds, they said. Hannah, my son, George, and a couple of children from another group as well. The birds, the birds.
Ryan was struggling and kicking until his father, still holding him, whispered something into his ear and he relaxed completely, became entirely limp. His father gave him a little jostle and set him down on the ground.
My group subsided into silence. We passed a few cigarette butts in the grass (filthy city), and a plant with small red berries. “Don’t touch them,” I said. “Don’t eat them.” I was thinking about what qualities my son broadcast to other adults when I saw a dark, round figure sitting on a bench across the field. The bus driver. Outside of our group, she was the only person on the grounds. There were no other classes, no groundskeepers, nobody from the parks department. The bus driver was too far away for me to make out her expression, but I felt that she was giving us that look again, the chilly look of evaluation, as though she weren’t seeing me, my son, Danielle, but different collections of flesh, bones, and fluids; it was a look certain doctors had, the ones you could imagine in a different life becoming butchers, not out of sadism, but because of an ease with or indifference to viscera. I moved my body to block my son from the driver’s line of sight. Danielle came close to us.
“Kind of empty,” I said, thinking I’d tell my daughter I’d spoken to Danielle, and she would be pleased.
Danielle shrugged. “It’s freezing.”
I nodded.
“What’s she up to?” she said, pointing to the actress, still involved in some way with the lawyer. I thought this was so typical of a Trump supporter, to blame the woman.
“Hi, hi, hi,” Danielle’s husband said in a jaunty tone, holding Ryan’s hand.
It seemed odd they were both on this trip. Usually at least one parent had work, or somewhere else they’d rather be.
“Look at them,” Danielle said.
“Leave them alone,” her husband said. “Life is short.” He looked into the field and I saw his gaze rest on the bus driver. It rested very comfortably there for a moment, and he nodded, whether to her or to himself I couldn’t tell.
“Isn’t that our driver?” I said.
“What?” he said
“The bus driver.”
He looked away from her, his face expressionless. “We haven’t officially met.” His name was Matthew.
I shook his hand. “Long ride over.”
“She took a smart route. Gloria.”
“Gloria?”
“Who’s Gloria?” said Danielle.
“You know Gloria,” Matthew said to his wife. “Our bus driver.”
As it happened, Matthew worked for the city. He knew a great deal about roads and bridges, subway projects, bus routes. More than I knew, more than I cared to know. But whenever infrastructure came up, I worked to hide my indifference; it seemed irresponsible and frivolous not to be interested. So I let Matthew go on about the reasons Gloria had chosen such a roundabout path, even though the school and the gardens were fairly close. As suspected, a section of road was being repaired along the most direct route, and there was a small demonstration on another. On the third possible route, a block was closed to all traffic during the school day. During the pandemic, the street had been turned into a playground and lunchroom, and the parents at that school were so important that it had never turned back.
I wanted to hug and kiss him, but he had ideas about the right and wrong moments for that kind of thing, so I just patted his head.
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“They’re more powerful than the parents at this school?” I indicated the lawyer and the actress. “More powerful than them?”
He seemed to consider this.
Danielle said, “I’m going to write to Joseph.” This was the principal. “Why shouldn’t we get to use the street, too.”
We reached the first greenhouse and all my discomfort returned. Outside, the cold had that shocking quality that at first registers as a thinness in the air, almost an absence of feeling, but now, in dense humidity, I was in a frenzy to remove some layers. I thought of entrusting the children to Danielle’s husband, who seemed, apart from the teachers, the most responsible adult in the group, but I paused, remembering his long look toward the bus driver. Instead, I herded them over to the actress and asked her to keep an eye on them. “Oh sure,” she said. Her voice was low and husky and she spoke somewhat distantly, but I saw her look at each child, take each one in, and she seemed to smile slightly at my son. Vanessa was now up ahead, close to another teacher, Ms. Caroline, who was about a decade older than me and wearing a blanket fashioned into a coat-like wrapping. I said, “Vanessa’s with you,” and gave Ms. Caroline a thumbs-up. She looked at me blankly for a moment, then removed a hand from her ensemble, which took some choreography, and gave me a thumbs-up in return.
You never know with public restrooms. I hoped for something recently renovated, clean and polished. It wasn’t impossible; it had happened that I’d gone into a bathroom bracing myself and been surprised by a place that appeared almost as though it had never been used, with gleaming steel fixtures, and without any smells or bewildering areas of dampness on the floor. This bathroom was small, the sink was cracked, and the faucet gave only a trickle of water. There was no soap. The mirror was so scratched and clouded that I could only vaguely make out my reflection, but I preferred it that way, preferred not to be confronted with the sight of my face under fluorescent lights. The bathroom had an old-fashioned, institutional charm, though I wouldn’t have wanted to visit it on a day with better weather, when it would have been more crowded.
In the stall I took off my coat and sweater, shirt and jeans, and hung them all over the door. I took off the silky thermal shirt and pants, rolled them up, and put them into my bag. Now I was standing on top of my shoes in only my underwear, and I had a feeling of complete, uncontrolled contact with the environment, like swimming naked. The little stall seemed spacious in the total quiet. The sounds I made — shifting, rustling — were clear and detailed; I could hear all their parts. I was alone, but with a pleasurable feeling of attending to myself, listening to myself, which amounted to a kind of company. But then I heard Hannah say, our bodies, ourbodies, and I felt the bus driver’s gaze, not as a memory, but as though it were on me at that moment, penetrating the brick wall of the greenhouse and the gray metal door of the stall. I felt her take me in completely, moving easily past my rough outer form, all the surfaces that had given me, at different points in my life, so much trouble, and into different processes and systems. As though she were sifting through me, noting the glitches, casually peering here and there with malign disinterest.
There was a chalky sound outside, someone dragging a foot through gravel, perhaps a bird. I gave my attention again to the little public restroom, which seemed now to me not very clean. I tried to stay on top of my shoes as I stepped back into my pants. I tried not to touch anything. I gave a quick glance at my reflection in the clouded mirror above the sink, and I couldn’t recognize myself. I might have been looking at anyone.
When I emerged there was no one in the atrium or in the greenhouse proper. I didn’t hear people either; the only sounds were from moving leaves and running water — there was a small brook — and a bird who seemed to be saying oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There was a lovely smell in the little forest, a thick, mossy smell that I could almost believe was clearing away some trace left by the bus driver’s gaze, the last particles of the teacher’s cologne. I was almost sure the class had moved on, but I looked around, walking in the shadow of the trees. There were plush, mobile brook sounds, soft and gentle, insinuating. The brook was dim; you could see only a few yellow fish slipping between rocks and decaying branches. I touched it, just the surface of the water, and it was so soft and temperate I might have been brushing my hand against fabric. I left it there for a moment. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I couldn’t be sure how much time had passed. It seemed like I might have actually spent several moments with my hand in the water, and I had a sense of self-consciousness, as happens when you become lost in thought and realize that someone has been observing you, waiting for an answer to a question you didn’t hear. It was time to leave, to find Vanessa, George, Hannah. And my son. The thought of him caused a frightened sensation to come over me, something behind my eyes and in my throat. It was a strange feeling, though not unusual. Anytime I really thought about my children after a period of not attending to them, I’d have this — some guilt or sadness, a touch of dread.
Outside, the sun was patchy, but in places the frost on the grass twinkled, and after a few steps the landscape became so bright I was squinting. The cold washed over my face and neck, invigorating me, and I moved quickly toward the next greenhouse, a beautiful structure of copper and glass, like an ice palace. Inside the humidity coated my contacts and my vision fogged up a little, but I seemed to see a group of people on the other side of the trees, and I heard the high, slippery voices of children. I rubbed my eyes and saw the lawyer with a few kindergartners, and the thin young drinker, who was sitting on the ground. A looseness in his posture told me he could no longer be counted as one of the responsible parties in the group; he was essentially another child. Such a transition could happen to anyone. I assumed he’d gone a little too heavy on the benzo.
“Here I am,” I said. “Were they worried about me?”
“Were you gone?” said the lawyer.
I shook my head. “Not really.”
My son, Hannah, Vanessa, and George were not with him; only around a third of the class was in the greenhouse.
“Everyone else went on ahead,” the lawyer said. “We were finishing the scavenger hunt.” He held up a sheet of paper that asked the children to find a branch that looked like a hand, a tree with edible berries (don’t eat them), something orange. “We’re done now,” he said. “But Paul believes he was bitten by something.” He said it loudly, and the young man startled.
The lawyer gave me a certain look.
The assistant teacher was sitting on the stone rim of the greenhouse path, aimlessly inspecting one leg.
“A snake,” the child called Ava said. “A snake bit him.”
Paul glanced at me vaguely and moved his attention back to his body. “I can’t find the mark.”
“Could have been one of the leaves,” said the lawyer. “Out of the corner of your eye . . .”
I nodded. “Anytime I see anything moving on the ground, I assume it’s a rat.”
“But it probably is a rat,” Paul said. “Most of the time.”
“No,” I said. “Only some of the time.”
“There wouldn’t be any snakes in here,” the lawyer said with finality.
Paul said, “It was rounder than any leaf. Longer, too.”
“A vine.”
Paul said, “I saw it,” and put his head in his hands.
The lawyer looked at me for a moment. He crouched down and touched Paul’s shoulder. “Sure,” he said. “Listen, let’s get you up. Let’s get you to where someone can take a look at it. A snakebite,” he said, “should be looked at by a professional.”
Paul nodded. The idea of a professional seemed to reassure him.
“We should rejoin the group,” I said.
The children had been standing away from us, but now Paul began to recover, and he picked out two of them — “You, Everett. You, Avery” — to hold his hands, making a show of it. “You’ll help me walk.”
We all started moving toward the door, Paul limping, to the delight of the children. I took a final glance around the space, filled with pink and yellow flowers and a few bright, flashy birds. There was a little one with a tiny orange beak, a fresh, clean slice of color. It flew into a vestibule as the lawyer opened the door.
“No,” he said, shooing it away. “Back inside.”
Now all of us were moving, both doors opening, and the bird was out again, this time fully outside. It flew, faltering, and landed near a bush. Paul let go of Avery and Everett and ran to it, moving easily. He scooped it up and trotted it back to the glass chamber.
“Is it all right?” We were now all outside and the cold had greeted me with an insistent, smothering kind of affection, wrapping itself right against my skin. Why had I gone to so much trouble to remove a layer that now sat rolled up in my tote bag, doing me no good?
“The bird,” I said again to Paul, who looked at me with dazed eyes. “Is the little bird OK?”
He shook his head.
“What about your leg?”
He shrugged, put his hands out, and walked away, limping every few steps.
“He’s on something,” the lawyer said.
“I know,” I said. “He told me. For anxiety.”
“Must be pretty strong.”
The bird from the first greenhouse was so far away, behind two sets of doors, but I heard it.
Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear.
“Let’s keep moving,” the lawyer said.
Paul was ahead, wandering toward the final greenhouse with three girls and three boys. One of the boys had the same jacket as my son. I was almost desperate to see my son, and embarrassed at having such a strong feeling in public, next to the very contained lawyer, who seemed to be taking Paul’s mental collapse in stride. The lawyer was dressed in interesting clothing — an orange jacket, peach-colored sneakers. He had, like my husband, a fairly small head. Crazily, he wasn’t wearing gloves, and his hands, too, were like my husband’s, with long, flat fingers. I imagined my husband, tucked away in his office, warm, consumed by work, not worried about the children. As far as my husband was concerned, the children were — just fine in some general, abstract way. Chances were, he wasn’t thinking of them at all. He wouldn’t be picturing my son out in the cold, or in some artificial forest. He wouldn’t be thinking of my daughter, but then I also hadn’t been thinking of my daughter. Now I brought to mind her classroom, which I’d seen only once, during parents’ night. I brought it to mind deliberately and placed her at a little round table, reading a book, eating a snack. I imagined her hands, which still looked like the hands of a toddler. My son had elegant hands.
To distract myself from unhelpful thoughts, I said something to the lawyer I ordinarily wouldn’t have. “I was reading about your client.”
There was a slight hardening of his demeanor, and he looked at me coldly. “Which one?”
“You have more than one like that? Who are the others?”
He laughed, a dry sound, like the scraping I’d heard in the bathroom of the first greenhouse. I wondered if the lawyer experienced the guilty verdict as a personal failure.
As if following my thoughts, he said, “It’ll be overturned.”
“You just know things like that?”
“He’s not guilty.” The idea seemed to amuse him.
Anytime I really thought about my children after a period of not attending to them, I’d have this — some guilt or sadness, a touch of dread.
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The lawyer’s client was a simple thief. His victims were rich, and some of them were true celebrities, more famous than our actress. He was contemptuous of their vanity, so much on display, and of their cluelessness. He didn’t seem very vain. He was careless of his appearance and health, and relied on the assistance of others, some of whom testified against him, for very basic personal tasks. He had a small team of women and men who made sure he slept and ate. Every few days, one of them would push him into the shower. Reading about this, I’d thought of a teenager I’d once tutored who usually didn’t get out of bed for our sessions. I’d meet her in her room, which was plain and bare except for a twin-size bed, a small white desk, and a sheet of paper taped to the wall on which she’d written SEX. A dispiriting room, a disquieting situation. I didn’t like being there, even though her parents were paying me well, more than I thought I should be paid for coaxing her to sit up and nudging a math problem into her lap. Her father would hover near the door, occasionally shouting, You know this! We went over this yesterday! He was petite, with a sharp, lively face. Her mother drifted aimlessly around the apartment; she had plump feet and soft ankles. I can’t remember what the teenager looked like; when I try to picture her, I see a lumpy white duvet and coils of glossy hair.
The shocking thing about the case of the con man, about all the cases like this — there was one every year or so — was that so many people who should have known better had entrusted their wealth to him, a man who wouldn’t feed and bathe himself.
“He’s as innocent as we are.” The lawyer paused. “You and I,” he added.
“Oh yes?” I heard my husband say, What does it even mean, innocence? “And him?” I pointed to Paul, who’d stopped in front of a bush, swaying a little, holding Everett’s hand.
“No,” the lawyer said. “He’s different.”
I related what Paul had revealed about his violent brother, his fear of planes. I wanted to pass along Paul’s question regarding the legality of his brother’s activities, but the lawyer was more interested in the planes. “I used to have trouble with them. Now, as long as I’m with her” — he tilted his head toward his daughter, a few feet in front of us, taking little, shuffling steps — “I don’t worry.”
“Oh?”
“Because we’re together,” he said, patiently. “Anything that happened on a plane would be over in an instant. As long as we’re together,” he said, again nodding at his child, “there won’t be anyone left behind.”
I tried again to remember what I knew about him. Was he a single dad? A widower?
“I’ve thought about it — excuse me a moment.” His phone had been chiming in his hand, and now he held it up, tapped on it quickly, put it away. “Excuse me,” he said again.
“Your phone works?”
“It always works. I wish it wouldn’t.”
“Sure.”
“Well, I’ve thought about it, the plane situation. There’d be my ex . . .” He said it mildly, but now he smiled in a tight way. “I’m sure she’d be just fine.”
Everyone has a complicated relationship to family life. I’d once told my husband something I’d heard about a man disappearing. I seemed to attract these stories when my children were babies. I heard about it all the time: one parent or another abandoning the family. There were affairs, jobs taken halfway around the world, periods of psychosis involving extended hospital stays. This version was very simple. One day the man didn’t come home from work. That was it. In such circumstances, you could think an accident had taken place, but that wasn’t the way the story was conveyed to me. He hadn’t been hurt; he’d disappeared, vanished. My husband listened to this closely and asked me to tell him the whole thing over again, which had never happened before, and has never happened since.
The last greenhouse was filled with cactuses large and small, some covered in thin, white flowers, some bare, some with needles, also of various sizes, colors, thicknesses. Birds were chirping and screeching, over and behind me. I saw only one, small and tawny, hopping in the pale, rocky sand between the plants. It was indistinguishable from the sparrows that were all over the city, and maybe it was a sparrow, come in to escape the cold.
The greenhouse was also filled with people — children and teachers. It was noisy with all those invisible birds, and the teachers’ now continuous instructions — Don’t touch. Stay with the group — and I had an impulse to leave and return to the first greenhouse with the velvety water. But standing near the actress, who was sitting on the ground doing something on her phone, I saw my son. He had his reserved and cautious look. I walked over to him, put my arm around him, kissed his head. He shrugged me off, in an automatic, unthinking way.
The night before, after I denied him something, he’d told me, “I’ll hate you until you die.”
My daughter had looked up from a sheet of vocabulary questions. “Yeah, me too,” she said.
Now, following the shrug, he looked at me and there was a slight apology in his eyes, very subtle, but detectable. I put my hand on his head, and he let it rest there for a moment before drifting away.
“You’re back,” said the actress.
George and Hannah were there. Hannah seemed to give me an accusing look.
“Your phone is working?” I said.
“Sorry?” said the actress.
“Your phone? Mine hasn’t been connecting.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was looking at a picture.” She placed the device next to her, facedown on the ground.
I looked around at the children. “Where’s Vanessa?” I said.
She said, “Who’s Vanessa?”
I hadn’t left Vanessa with the actress, so that she wasn’t with her — this wasn’t concerning. I looked for Ms. Caroline, the teacher with the blanket coat. She was standing between the children and a cactus with purple flowers, guarding the children from the cactus and the cactus from the children. I left George and Hannah with the actress and took my son’s hand and walked toward this group. “Why are we leaving them?” he said.
“I’m looking for Vanessa.”
“Whatever.” It was a word he’d picked up — from his friends, his sister, maybe from me, and I hoped it would disappear. Just a few months ago he’d been saying what in the whole world.
“She was in your group,” said Ms. Caroline, in a tone of curiosity, not alarm.
“Yes,” I said. “I went to the bathroom. I left her with you.”
“You did? And the rest of your group?”
“I left them with Astrid’s mom. But Vanessa was already with you. I thought you saw me.”
“I didn’t see you.” She sighed. “OK. I’ll look for her.” She said this in a weary, resigned tone, as though she’d been asked to go look for the child’s hat, not the child herself. But maybe this was life as a kindergarten teacher — hours awash in near chaos, hats missing, children as well.
She walked away from me to Ms. Greta and also waved to Paul, thin, young, and drugged, who joined them. He was no longer limping. They consulted lists, counted heads, asked us all to stand in our groups in front of a row of cactuses, counted heads again. Vanessa was not there.
I felt bad for misapprehending the child, for thinking that because of her neat clothing and the competent way she’d helped Ethan to his feet, I didn’t have to worry about her. But Ms. Caroline had given me the thumbs-up sign. I might have misconstrued Vanessa, but I hadn’t doneanything to endanger her. This thought brought relief, and I was additionally relieved that Vanessa’s whereabouts weren’t, finally, my responsibility; the teachers would have to find her. On top of all that, I was very glad that my son wasn’t missing; he was right beside me. For the first time since stepping on the bus in the morning, I had the feeling that there was nowhere in the world I’d rather be; I was perfectly content to stand in the midst of a collection of cactuses and succulents, next to my son, in these moderately stressful circumstances. I thought about the lawyer and his ideas about perishing with his daughter in the sky. A field trip wasn’t a risky situation, but neither was air travel. Being a parent did this; you had superstitious thoughts, protective impulses. It was usually wise to ignore them, but occasionally they provided an unexpected form of comfort.
My son pulled my arm and said, “I know where Vanessa is.”
“What?” I turned to him. His eyes seemed to change color depending on his clothes, the light, and at that moment they were very green, and there was a strangeness to his face, alongside its bone-deep familiarity. “How do you know?” I said.
“I saw them.” He tugged me close to him and whispered.
“You saw Vanessa with the bus driver?” Ms. Caroline said.
My son nodded.
“Where were they?”
“They were walking that way.” He pointed.
Ms. Greta, the tall, older teacher, said, “She probably forgot something on the bus.” She had high cheekbones, a graceful, skeletal face. She looked at her watch. “It’s time we leave anyway.”
We all began walking back to the bus. I didn’t try to rejoin my group. George and Hannah would be fine. It was possible that another child could be lost — any number of children could be lost — but the idea no longer had a hold over me; I wasn’t worried about other people’s children. I held my son’s hand. “When did they leave?” I asked him. “How did they seem?”
“What do you mean?”
“Vanessa and the bus driver. Were they holding hands?”
“The driver was pushing her.”
“Pushing her?”
“Not pushing.” He demonstrated, putting his arm around me and sort of encouraging me forward.
“I see.” I looked around the field, thinking I might see them. “Was Vanessa OK?”
My son frowned.
“I mean, was there any reason she needed to go back to the bus.”
“Don’t know,” my son said. “Don’t care. Don’t know, don’t care. Don’t know, don’t care. Don’t know, don’t care.”
“Stop it.”
“I don’t care.”
“But stop chanting.”
He kept it up, quietly. Don’t know, don’t care, don’t know, don’t care. We were passing the first greenhouse, and I listened for the bird, but I heard only my son. Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.
The grounds were still empty, and it had become even colder. The sky was plain white, covered with clouds, and there were small, irritating winds, which found all the gaps in my clothing and seemed to burn my skin. The children were breaking down. The lawyer’s daughter stopped and flung off the top of her ski suit and her father ran to her, lifted the jacket, and tried to hold it around her while she moved forward. They looked like the little lady and her servant, a tableau I often performed with my children. The actress was carrying her daughter, who put me in mind of a small pile of laundry, but she was moving fluidly, even with that burden. Whatever my friend had done for her seemed to have worked.
I walked quickly, and soon my son and I were next to Matthew, Danielle’s husband, who was also moving fast. We reached the bus at the same time. I knocked on the window of the doors, looking inside.
“You’re hurting me,” my son said.
“What?”
“You’re squeezing my hand.”
“You stay here,” I said, as the doors opened. “Stay right outside. Don’t move.”
Matthew looked like he might tell me to wait, to let him go, but he didn’t speak; he followed me in. I felt him right behind me, and I heard him say “Gloria” as he passed the driver, who was sitting at the wheel, very still again, as if waiting for the trip to begin. “Is Vanessa here?” I said, but she didn’t answer, and I saw a blue boot, just visible in the middle row of seats.
“Vanessa,” I said, putting my hand on the child. I felt the rise and fall of her back, and some part of me relaxed. The sequence was so familiar from nights when my children were sick, had been coughing, had a high fever, and I’d go into their room, look for breath in the movement of a body, place a hand on a chest, in front of a nose. It was such an accustomed pattern that I lost track of the particular moment and I thought, Who is this child? Why am I here? Where is my son? I looked behind me and saw Matthew. He was smiling a little, and I noticed the thick, sinking skin around his jaws. “Oh look,” he said. “She’s fallen asleep.”
I didn’t speak.
“I’ll pick her up.”
Outside, my son was drawing in the dust on the side of the bus.
“Stop it,” I said. “Look. You’re getting my mittens all dirty.”
He put his hands down. “If you take your seat belt off in an airplane,” he said, “you can float everywhere. Is that true?”
“Not exactly.”
Matthew came out holding Vanessa, whose eyes were half open, but she looked as disoriented as Paul on his benzo. “Just tired,” Matthew said. “Tired and cold. Gloria brought her back here for a rest.”
“Gloria?” said Ms. Caroline.
Greta put her hand on Vanessa’s forehead. “No fever.”
“Probably not enough sleep at home,” said Caroline. “She’s been having night terrors.” She lowered her voice. “You know about the family?”
Greta shook her head.
“Divorced. Mom joined a cult.” She glanced at me, then back to Greta.
“Let’s get on the bus,” Matthew said.
We began to file on. I held my son’s hand. “You’re sitting with me,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because I want you to.”
He shrugged and murmured don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.
I held him back to let Danielle get on with Ryan. She paused next to me. “I like field trips, but this one was kind of hell.”
I nodded, thinking I’d mention this to my daughter, too, that Danielle and I had found something to agree upon.
That morning my daughter, following the toast situation, had walked to her room and said, “I’m just going in here now, but when I’m 18, I will abandon you.” She’d spoken the words very evenly, and I was thinking about this when I walked back onto the bus.
Gloria’s gaze was on me. “Long drive back,” she said.
“What?”
“Just settle in.” She turned away, inviting no rejoinder.
“Did you hear what she said,” I asked Matthew, who’d come in just behind me.
“Didn’t hear a thing.” He gave a little laugh. “Nothing.”
None of the children asked for help with a seat belt, but I made sure my son was reasonably secure. He put his head against the window and his eyes began to close.
Someone said, “Where’s Paul?”
“He isn’t here?” Greta said.
Matthew stood up. “I thought I saw him crossing the street,” he said.
I looked out the window. The red brick buildings and the gray stone church had a run-down quality that I hadn’t noticed earlier. There was no one on the sidewalk.
Several blocks away, a smaller bus drove past, pale gray against the pale gray of the afternoon light, looking as though all its paint had been scraped off. It was quickly out of sight, its exhaust, black and heavy, seeming to settle over the street before it turned in on itself and disappeared.
I thought of Vanessa’s deep sleep and the birds in the greenhouse and felt a flutter within me, just a whispery apprehension.
Today would be nothing, Paul had told me. It wouldn’t count at all.
“We should wait for him,” Greta said. “I’ll call him.”
“My phone isn’t working,” Caroline said.
“Get up,” I said to my son.
“Mine isn’t either,” Greta said.
“Get up,” I said.
“What?”
“Let’s go,” I said. “We’re getting off the bus.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Are you looking for the young man?” Gloria said, when we reached the front of the bus. “Don’t worry about him. He’s taking a different way home.”
I waited for the doors to open.
“You’ll have to sit down now,” she said, starting the engine. “Take any seat you like.”
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