Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Lynnea got out of her car and walked over to Sheba. A few students she recognized looked at her, but she pretended not to see them. “C’mon,” Lynnea said, “I’ll give you a ride home.”

Sheba looked at Lynnea with annoyance, then resignation, as though she’d weighed her options and had decided she might as well get a free ride. Sheba walked with Lynnea to the parking lot, and got in the car without speaking.

“Where do you live?” Lynnea asked.

“You know where I live.”

“Our Lady of Peace. I know that,” Lynnea said, “but where is it?”

“Hollander Ridge.”

“Where in Hollander Ridge?”

Sheba’s eyes bugged out. “C’mon, Miz Davis. You really don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.” They stared at each other. Sheba sighed. A cloud of her breath hung in the cold car interior.

Lynnea pulled off and headed down Thirty-third Street in the general direction of Hollander Ridge.

Sheba gave her a jumble of directions: Erdman, Moravia, Bel Air Road, and Frankford Avenue. Then the streets got small and narrow, with turns where Lynnea hadn’t expected streets to be at all.

“Scared yet?”

Lynnea didn’t answer. Sheba called out turns; otherwise the rest of the ride was silent.

Our Lady of Peace was its own planet: singular, immense, imposing. The statue of the Virgin Mary was larger than Lynnea thought statues of Virgins should be, and was covered with pigeon droppings. A sign with a picture of a lightning bolt on it was attached to the high electric fence that ran around the building. A whitewash of floodlights illuminated the sign. Next to it, another sign, wooden and hand-painted, read: TRY TO GET IN OR OUT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND DIE.

“Well. Here you are,” Lynnea said. She thought for a moment, then said, “If you need something, or want me to visit you, give me a call.”

“I don’t think I’ll be needing your help. But thanks for the ride.” Sheba slammed the car door and clomped up the sidewalk.

Lynnea stretched her head over to the passenger window and clumsily rolled it down. “Be good. Take care of that baby.”

Sheba stood, eyes still and unblinking.

OF COURSE she had said the wrong thing: Sheba obviously hadn’t wanted the baby, but what was said was said, Lynnea thought. On the way back, Lynnea sailed through the red lights hoping to get home as quickly as possible. There she could think. Cry. Maybe fry herself an egg. She went the wrong way down one-way roads. Streetlamps buzzed here and there, but most were broken and did not flicker at all.

She came to an intersection where the traffic lights were out, looked both ways, and zoomed through. The single Whuurp! of a police siren stunned her for a moment, but she kept driving, only slower now. She thought of herself as an ant, foolish enough to believe that if she kept ambling along, the giant foot above wouldn’t come smashing down. The police car trailed her. A voice barked through megaphone static, “Pull over.”

The policeman got out and his door made its official-sounding slam. He walked over to her car, hitching up his pants as if preparing to recite a blasé Miranda. She rolled down the window. The policeman bent his head down to greet her. It was Robert the Cop.

“Hey, man. How’s it going?” She smiled up at him.

Robert the Cop whippe out his ticket pad. “You were speeding.”

Lynnea kept the smile pasted on her face. Robert the Cop wrote something on his pad. When he flipped the page and kept writing, her smile deserted her. “I just dropped off a student, O.K.?”

He walked to the back of her car to take down her license plate number. She thought about running him over. No one in Hollander Ridge would care. One less cop.

He came back around driver side and stuck his head in again.

“It’s Lynnea. Lynnea Davis. Remember me? Teacher training? Bonza? Role-play?”

“Yep. I remember. Did you know you were speeding? Through red lights?”

Lynnea tried counting to ten to calm herself, but only got to three. “Do you know what it feels like to want to go home?” she asked. “To have worked one long motherfucking day with a bunch of kids who want to strangle your ass and you want to strangle theirs and you think about that sentimental shit — that ‘if I can only reach one’ shit — and you don’t reach anyone?”

He nodded once. “Yep,” he said. He tore the ticket from the pad.

SHE SPED out of the maze of streets. There was a green light and she whooshed through it faster than the reds. She could see the outlines of two boys walking across the street the way Baltimore kids walk, sauntering and primping and strolling all at once. They were the sort of kids who thought they had all the time in the world; time to play around, time to disobey, time to do whatever they wanted. They were the types of kids who seemed to love watching faces curse noiselessly on the other side of the windshield, their vengeance against the world. Lynnea knew they weren’t going to make it across at the speed she was driving. She would have to slow down. She pressed on the horn so hard it braced her in the seat. The horn bleated.

“It’s a green light! Get out of the way!” She knew the kids could only see her yelling, that they heard none of the words. One short outline flashed her the finger like a hearty salute. The taller one saw that she was going too fast and tried to limp a bit quicker, but the finger-flasher held on to him, as though to say, They gone stop. Make ’ em wait and get mad and shit.

She had a chance to slow down, and she didn’t want to. She’d scare them, for once. Make them run. Her foot slammed the accelerator for what seemed like no time at all, but when she changed her mind, trying to brake, she knew it was too late, she couldn’t stop in time.

Somehow she heard the strange hissing before she heard the brakes screech. She’d never associated hissing with car wrecks, at least not the ones she’d seen in movies, where metal crunched, tires squealed. On television, cars spun like compasses gone haywire, only to regain their sense of direction, speeding off to create other wrecks. She no longer saw the boys — the limper, the finger-flasher.

She promised herself that if these boys lived, if they turned out all right, she’d visit Sheba at Our Lady of Peace; she wouldn’t just pretend to care but would actually do something about it.

Just as she made this promise to herself, she heard the boys cursing and wailing somewhere near the front of the car’s grille. One boy howled, struggling to one foot, holding his knee, hopping around as though he were searching for someone in a crowd. The other one banged the passenger window with heavy thumps and curses. They were alive.

Lynnea closed her eyes. Of course she knew leaving the accident scene would be the wrong thing to do, just as she knew she’d never see Sheba again, knew that her teaching days were over.

She could still hear the boys, even as she reversed, even as she took off. Even as she imagined how ridiculous it would be to visit Sheba, to watch as the girl hitched up her scary fishnet stockings, her eyes narrowed and unforgiving, speaking up for every pissed-off kid in the world, “C’mon. Make me. ”

OPPORTUNITIES,” my father says after I bail him out of jail. He’s banging words into the dash as if trying to get them through my thick skull, “You’ve got to invest your money if you want opportunities.” It’s October of ’95, and we’re driving around Louisville, Kentucky, in my mother’s car. Who knows why he came down here, forty miles south of where he lives, but I don’t ask questions that are sure to have too many answers. I just try to get my father, Ray Bivens Jr., back across the river to his place in Indiana. Once we’re on the Watterson Expressway, it seems as if we’re about to crash into the horizon. The sunset has ignited the bellies of clouds; the mirrored windows of downtown buildings distort the flame-colored city into a funhouse. I can already see that it’ll be one of those days when the sunset is extra-brilliant, though without staying power.