N O V E M B E R  1 9 9 9

Mariel held her daughter by the shoulders and looked into her speckled eyes. The world was full of horrifying things -- dead children turning up in the trunks of cars, bombs falling, cancer and other illness -- from which, despite misgivings, Mariel had tried to shield Finny. But it hadn't worked: Finny sensed the existence of disaster, and was afraid

by Julie Schumacher

Interviews with authors of recent Atlantic Monthly short stories.

In four days they were supposed to leave the country on a long-awaited family vacation, and she worried, glancing at the message from the school nurse, that Finny (a nickname for Fiona) had a cold or the flu. Goddamn lousy timing,Mariel thought, dialing the nurse's number and scanning her desk for what could be worked on at home, what could be canceled, what could be transferred immediately to the trash. It was Tuesday; Finny could be home for the rest of the week, and Mariel hoped she would recover by Saturday morning, when they would board the plane in Minneapolis for Cancun, strap themselves into their seats, and inhale four hours' worth of recirculated air, which Finny declared made her vomit.

"I'll let you talk to her," the nurse said, in response to Mariel's question about how Finny was feeling. Mariel thought this was a little odd -- did the nurse have no diagnostic skills? The phone clicked. She heard a shuffling. A sniffle. "Finn? Finny? Is that you?" She pictured her daughter's round face, a sweet freckled pie, the short braids ragged and uneven because Finny had wanted to braid them herself.

"I hurt Nan," Finny said. "I didn't mean to."

"Nan who?" Mariel asked, searching beneath her desk for her shoes. "You aren't sick?"

"I pushed her," Finny said. She had a way of confessing to her crimes that involved copious amounts of self-deprecation, and Mariel didn't want to let her get started.

"Of course you didn't mean to." Finny's sniffling was probably the result of some sadistic line of questioning at the hands of the school nurse, a broomlike woman with short thick hair that stood up unnaturally on her head. True, Finny had a tendency to be clumsy -- some kind of lapse occurred between what her body felt and how it moved. Still, she was a gentle and shy girl, emotionally frail, and now she was obviously traumatized. "Is Nan at the nurse's office too?"

"No," Finny said.

"She's back in class?"

A pause.

"Finny?"

"They took her away," Finny whispered, and Mariel could hear the tears gathering, the monsoon clouds massing just offshore.

"I'm sure she'll be fine," Mariel said, but the phone had been repossessed by Mrs. Wassler, child-hater, Nazi-nurse.

"You need to pick up your daughter and stop by the office," Mrs. Wassler said. Mariel heard Finny sobbing. "I'll keep Fiona here with me."

NE of the things that most often surprised Mariel about being a parent was the desire for other parents' approval. Some days, despite her better understanding, she felt, regarding Finny, as if she had produced an object out of clay and placed the object on a table to be evaluated, compared. No one could argue that Finny was the brightest in a sizable group of children, or the best-looking, or the most adept. Oh, but look!Mariel wanted to say. No child on earth could be more endearing, more humanly whole. She knew that. She understood Finny's graces. Still, there she stood at the edge of the table, nudging her sweet imperfect object, both of them subject to the whims and critiques of passersby.

She tried to resist evaluating her only child, but the feelings rose up in her, unbidden. And Finny was so sensitive, so easily discouraged. She was bound to be one of those girls, Mariel knew, who would look into the mirror at thirteen and suffer from the lovely roundness of her face, her strong and shapely forearms, her dusky hair. She was a highly compassionate child, prone to cry at the sight of roadkill, and timid in the face of cruelty. Though she liked to play with other children, she often preferred to play alone, and her games were eccentric and imaginative, unintelligible to others. Mariel loved her so fiercely that her teeth hurt when she looked at Finny; at the same time, she felt in herself the desire to correct her daughter, to pinch and mold her -- a little more confidence and sass, a little less fear.

On the way into the school building Mariel had to walk a gauntlet of older children, and she couldn't help wondering if they knew who she was, if they knew about "the accident" or had leaned out their classroom windows to see the ambulance come. It was stunning to see the fifth- and sixth-grade children, some of them huge, the girls with breasts, the boys tackling one another, already needing feminine notice and encouragement and approval: they mugged and opened the door for Mariel in a kind of rehearsal for the upcoming mating dance, displaying their gaudy colors like so many birds.

She found Finny asleep on the nurse's blue-plastic couch, her dress hiked up, a hole near the crotch of her tights exposed, her head lolling back against the wall. So vulnerable. How could Mariel allow her outside in the world unguarded? Mrs. Wassler, thank God, had been called to officiate at a skinned knee somewhere; the assistant principal filled Mariel in. The other girl, Nan, had been taken to the hospital around noon; apparently she was stable, but she'd had a concussion and would probably be kept overnight for observation. The family was listed in the phone book if Mariel wanted to call them.

Mariel looked at Finny, still oblivious on the couch. Finny slept like the dead unless she was having nightmares, in which case she lurked around the edges of her parents' bed like a nervous spirit. Now she lay limp and removed from the world, as if planning to sleep for a hundred years.

"I'm sure it was an accident," the assistant principal said. "Finny's a great kid."

Mariel felt hideously, profoundly grateful. "I know that," she snapped. After wrenching Finny from sleep, she signed an absentee paper and took her home.

URING the car ride Finny was quiet, morose. She nodded her head very slightly to some kind of internal music, a habit that made her look obsessive. Mariel reached over the back of her seat and touched Finny's cheek, to stop her. When asked how the accident happened, Finny dutifully replied, as if she'd been coached, "I wasn't careful."

"Did you help her up?" Mariel asked.

"After she woke up, I did," Finny said. "She was crying."

"Accidents happen," Mariel said.

Finny was nodding her head again.

"Maybe we'll call her when we get home, to see how she's feeling. Do you think that's a good idea? Finny?"

"She's in the hospital," Finny said. In the rearview mirror Mariel could see only the cinnamon-colored smudges that were Finny's eyebrows and the zigzag part in her hair. When she adjusted the mirror to see her better, Finny moved out of her line of sight.

"The hospital has phones," Mariel said. "Phones in every room."

"She might not know it was an accident," Finny said.

"Well," Mariel said, "that's just another reason for us to call."

At home, though, Mariel discovered that calling wasn't easy. The injured child's first name had apparently been shortened to Nan in the public schools, but her last name was a tangle of consonants. Either the admissions clerk had spelled it wrong or the hospital didn't yet have the girl on record. Looking up the family's home phone number in the school directory, Mariel understood from the address that the family was poor. Nan didn't live within walking distance of the school, in one of the comfortable suburbs, but was probably bused in on one of the yellow trawlers that cruised through the white neighborhoods, small, tired faces at every window.

For the first few hours no one answered the phone. Finally, in the late afternoon, a child answered. No, her mother and father weren't there. Who was this?

"A friend," Mariel said, hating herself. Finny was playing on the carpet in the other room. "We wondered how Nan was doing. Is she better?"

A radio in another language was clamoring for attention in the background. "Nan's better," the voice said.

"Is she out of the hospital?"

"You want to talk to Nan?"

"No, that's fine. But she's at home?"

"Nan's at home."

"That's great," Mariel said. "Thanks for telling us." She looked at Finny, who was clearly listening. Whoever was on the other end hung up the phone. "Do you want to know what they said?"

Finny didn't move. She was hunched over a pile of coins that she was supposed to be learning to count; instead, twisting the assignment in her own odd way, she was wrapping each coin in a piece of paper and masking tape and then dropping it into a plastic cup.

"They said she's better. Maybe you'll see her in school tomorrow."

Finny shook the paper-covered coins, scowled into the cup, and unrolled a longer strip of tape.

"You can apologize again," Mariel said. "If you want to. It might make you feel better."

"She won't be in school," Finny said.

"Why not?" Mariel hated to think of Finny as a junior fatalist.

"She just won't be." Finny's shirt was a little tight, Mariel noticed. Finny developed crushes on articles of clothing and didn't like to let them go.

After Finny went to bed, Mariel unwrapped a few of the paper-covered coins; then she gave up and threw the rest away.

Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1999; Passengers; Volume 284, No. 5; page 92-102.