The Passenger (13 page)

I barely socked away any money that summer, but I got by. I splurged on a proper haircut for once. The stylist colored my locks sandy blond and cut sharp bangs and gave the ends an even sweep just above my shoulders. When I looked in the mirror, I didn't resemble any version of Blue, but I didn't see Tanya Pitts or Amelia Keen, either. I saw someone completely new. She would go by the name of Debra Maze, but I knew I'd never really feel at home with that appellation.

I returned to the DMV, claiming that I'd lost my driver's license. Filled out the forms with one minor change. I checked the box for brown eyes instead of blue. It was nice to have one less lie to keep under my hat. Two weeks later, when my new ID arrived, I completed my transformation.

N
OW
I was ready to make the leap from motel sanitation into the educational field. But when August and the beginning of the school year finally arrived, I was foiled immediately. I would have to undergo a constitutional exam and had to produce proof of state-accredited testing. I had Ohio paperwork, not Wyoming. Blue had made it sound so easy; she had only looked into the fingerprint challenge and hadn't considered the credential issue. My generous spirit chalked her error up to oversight. But in the back of my mind I wondered if it was deliberate.

Even lowering my expectations and applying for a substitute or teacher's assistant position was out of range in the real world. So I widened my net and found a small private school in a town called—I kid you not—Recluse, Wyoming. The school was bankrolled by the estate of John Allen Campbell, Recluse's most distinguished citizen. In a town where there's no industry or nothing happens, the tiny schoolhouse was hard up for a third-and-fourth-grade teacher. I e-mailed Blue's revised résumé and it only took a few days before I got a call for an interview.

A heat wave was just getting started that day. I wore a modest sundress and practical shoes, the kind I figured a teacher dealing with watercolors might wear. I hit the road early to make a good impression. The Cadillac felt like a sauna even as I was pumping air into the car; I watched the thermostat rise precariously. I took a few breaks to let the engine cool down.

I still arrived an hour before my appointment time, steaming off the highway into a town that seemed to be surviving in a chokehold, one tight squeeze away from becoming a ghost town. I found a gas station with an attendant and mentioned my car's difficulties. Gil, the mechanic, gave me a strong reprimand for not checking fluid levels. He made a good point. Once the Cadillac was rehydrated, Gil pointed me in the direction of John Allen Campbell Primary School.

I found Principal Walt Collins sitting behind a desk in a room not much larger than a storage closet. It looked like it might have been the maid's quarters one day a long time ago, when someone of means might have lived in this forgotten town. Hell, maybe it was his family's home. Principal Collins was long past the age of retirement and I had to wonder if he was holding on to this job because no one else would have it.

I had spent so much time bracing myself over the past six months that it was hard to notice when something was going right. I should have known when I walked through the front door that Collins was desperate and ready to hire anyone. You can never see anything clearly when you're running. That nervous buzz in your brain deafens the sounds of the outside world. But people believe what they want to believe. I was a pretty young woman applying for a job Mr. Collins needed to fill. All he saw was an honest, out-of-work educator, looking for a simple life in a small town.

“What brought you to the teaching profession, Miss Maze?”

“When I was young, I hated school.” The truth when possible.

“You wanted to figure out how to reach children who had the same resistance to education as you did?” Principal Collins said.

“Yes, exactly.”

“I see you worked for five years at an elementary school in Akron, Ohio.”

“Yes.”

“And you got your teaching credential from Cleveland State University?”

“Go Vikings,” I said. Then I regretted it.

“Are you a football fan?”

“Not so much.”

“I see you didn't list any references on your résumé. Was there a problem at your former school?”

“I'm afraid I have to bring up something delicate. I hope it doesn't leave this room, whether you decide to employ me or not. I had a husband back in Akron. He was not—he is not—a good man. When I left, I didn't provide any forwarding information. I have lived off of savings and have avoided using credit cards and anything else that could lead him to my current location.” Always go with the partial truth when you can.

“Was he a violent man?” Principal Collins asked, adjusting his forehead to properly convey sympathy. He was playing a part just as much as I was.

I nodded my head, as if saying it aloud was too painful.

“I see,” Principal Collins said, making a few minute adjustments to his forehead again.

“My husband can be very persuasive. I'm afraid that if anyone is called for a reference, they might inform him where that call originated. I lasted five years at that school. That's got to count for something.”

“I'm sorry you had to go through that.”

“It's in the past,” I said. “Where I hope it will stay.”

The conversation needed shifting. It was time to play the only card I had. I fished through my backpack and pulled out my fingerprint card. I slid it across the table to Principal Collins.

“I believe you need this for the background check.”

“It seems you've come prepared,” Collins said.

“Just dotting the i's.”

Collins stared down at the card as if he wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

“We can't pay you much,” he said.

“I understand.”

“And there isn't much for a young woman to do with herself around here. You can see that, right?”

“I've never had grand ambitions,” I said.

When I said that, I suddenly realized how many ambitions I had lost along the way. It was one of the biggest lies I had ever told.

“You're hired. You can start Monday.”

I gave him the broad smile and flitter of excitement that I knew he needed to feel comfortable sealing the deal. It felt like pure theater. The better I got at the performance, the more I despised the show. But I got what I needed: a decent job, money, a new life.

“You have a place to live?” Collins asked.

“I'll start looking right away.”

“Until you find something permanent, or even if you don't, we've got a little apartment in the basement. One hundred and fifty a month.”

I took it sight unseen. I would need to be saving my pennies. Considering all that had transpired since Frank tumbled down the stairs, it was a great day. And yet, I would have given anything to be me again, whoever she was.

W
AKE UP
. Wake up, Andrew.”

Andrew raised his head from the desk and rubbed sleep out of his eyes.

“Good morning,” Andrew said. He always said that when I woke him up.

“Do you need a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“No, I'm good,” Andrew said.

“My mom lets me drink coffee,” Abby said.

“My mom lets me have a sip of her beer sometimes,” Cody said.

A chorus of beverage-consumption confessions followed, and order had to be restored.

“You can all discuss your drinking habits at recess. Back to our lesson.”

I directed my quiet attention to Maggie. She was the alpha girl in my class of eighteen third and fourth graders. “Maggie, can you tell me the capital of Georgia?” I deliberately gave her an easy one to boost her ego.

“Atlanta.”

“Very good. Who knows the capital of Oklahoma?”

Martin shouted, “Oklahoma City!” before he was called on.

“Martin, thank you for volunteering for our road trip game.”

This was my twist on a geography lesson. Behind me were regional road maps of the US pieced together like a bad puzzle. I'd requested one huge national road map for my class, but since most curriculums don't care about highway arteries, I was denied. We were missing most of North and South Dakota, part of Michigan, and a small chunk of the Virginias.

“Martin, what is the capital of Idaho?”

“Boise.”

“And what is the capital of Washington state?”

“Seattle?”

“I don't think so. Abby, do you know?”

Abby knew all of the capitals, plus the first ten presidents and the last three, and could multiply any two-digit number by a single-digit number. But she never raised her hand.

“Olympia,” Abby said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now, Abby, let's say you're in Olympia, Washington, and you want to drive to Boise, Idaho. How would you get there?”

Abby timidly approached the map board and studied our collage, tracing her finger along the prominent blue lines.

“I'd take I-5 South, and then in Portland take 84 East or South. It goes both ways.”

“Very good,” I said. “Some highways run in clear directions. North and south, east and west. Some take you in directions you'd never expect.”

The bell rang for recess. I didn't make my class wait, like Miss June's combined first and second grade, for my go-ahead. The bell rang and they were free. I rolled my whiteboard in front of our map wall. My lesson plan wasn't exactly a secret, but I didn't put it on display. Once when Principal Collins asked me about my unorthodox teaching methods, I mentioned that the world today had become too dependent on GPS systems. Since no one in Recluse was too dependent on GPS systems, I could tell he didn't buy my argument—especially for eight- to ten-year-olds. So I told him I thought it encouraged problem solving. Privately, I wanted these children in this middle-of-nowhere town to look outside of it and start imagining all of the places they could go. And I wanted to learn a few things myself, if I was going to spend all day in a classroom.

Not that I didn't learn new things, or have my memory refreshed. I certainly never had the entire line of US presidents memorized before I took this job. I crammed all night for the next day's class, trying to create character associations with each commander in chief. But I still got stumped. The assignment was for students to bring in two biographical sketches of different presidents. They were encouraged to avoid the overexposed ones—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, either Roosevelt. Each student would stand in front of the classroom and read his or her sketch. Then the class would guess which president fit the bill.

“My president was born in Virginia in 1784. He was a member of the Whig party, a general in the army, and he died in office,” said Andrew. He was the presidential expert in the class. He didn't simply have the names memorized, he could provide a general biography and occasionally some amusing trivia.

“Class, which president is Andrew talking about?” I said, improvising. I didn't have a clue who Andrew was talking about.

Presidential names bounced around the room without any guess becoming the dominating choice. Normally when I ran into gaps in my own education, I would simply say, “Class, what's the answer?” and I could rely on the general consensus being correct.

“Grover Cleveland!”

“James Buchanan!”

“Ulysses S. Grant!”

The way Andrew blandly regarded his classmates let me know that, so far, no one had hit the nail on the head. I decided to cut through the noise.

“Andrew,” I said. “Congratulations. You've stumped the class. Why don't you tell everyone which president you chose?”

“Zachary Taylor, the twelfth president of the United States.”

“Right. Zachary Taylor. Who's next?”

Some days the classroom felt as precarious as being on the road with Blue. One false move, one fact misstated, a child tattles to the parent, the parent starts to ask questions, one bad answer, more questions. If anyone really looked at me, they'd realize I was a fraud.

T
ROTTING OUT
my new identification still felt like walking under a row of icicles, so I was grateful to circumvent the perilous apartment hunt, but living inside a schoolhouse was hardly without its own drawbacks. My standard of living had plummeted in recent months, but when you start to look at things in a more permanent light, you start to question your standards. The schoolhouse apartment would have been advertised in the newspaper as a studio with a bathroom and kitchenette. It was furnished with a double bed and a wardrobe. The mattress on the bed was probably produced in the sixties or seventies. It had a deep end and a shallow end. No matter how much I tried to sleep in the shallow end, I found myself floating into the deep. I've slept comfortably on floors before and I considered it as an option, but something about the look of that well-traveled carpet discouraged me. The only thing to recommend the place was that it had a private entrance off the parking lot. The other door, secured by only a hook latch, led up a narrow staircase to the schoolhouse.

I
N A
small town and an even smaller school, I knew to be friendly but to keep a healthy distance from my coworkers. There were only four of them, besides Principal Collins, so it wasn't all that difficult. There were June, Cora, Collette (whose real name was Jane;
Collette
sounded more Continental), and Joe, the only man. Joe had left Recluse ten years ago and made a solemn promise to himself never to return. Then his mom got sick, and then his dad, and he broke his own word, like so many of us do. My gut told me that Collette had an unrequited crush on Joe, so I did my best to pretend the man was invisible, since I was the only other woman of childbearing age on staff.

A new woman in a town where nothing happens is caviar bait. Collette's questions came like automatic-weapon fire. I tried to keep my answers short. Where do you hail from?
Ohio.
Ever been married?
Once.
What brings you to Recluse?
Recluse would take me.
If I shifted the conversation back to Collette, she could launch into some long-winded discussion about her sister's no-good boyfriend or her big plans to move to Jackson and buy one of those houses she once saw in a home décor magazine. People of modest means, she said, think they're unattainable because all they see is the price tag, but if you build one yourself, hell, all you need is some unclaimed land, lumber, a hammer, and some nails. At least that was Collette's line of thinking. She never did mention having a talent for carpentry.