Present, Fifteen (1)

Joyce Setzer got to the school at ten past eight with the box on
the passenger seat and the heater still not warm.

The lot behind the cafeteria had frost on it. She parked in the
third space, which was not assigned to her but which nobody used,
and sat for a moment with her hands in front of the vent. The
Buick had been her husband's brother's. It threw heat about a mile
after you needed it.

She carried the box in with both arms.

The kit was a county kit and she was supposed to return it to
Lexington at the end of the month. It had come to her in October
with a mimeographed sheet listing what was inside: four records,
two posters, the manual, the storybooks, the puppet. She had used
it twice with the first grade. The children liked the puppet more
than they liked anything else in it, which the manual had
predicted, and she had not yet worked out how to get them from
liking it to saying anything.

The box went on the floor of her office because there was no room
on the desk.

There was no room on the desk because of the folders.

Joyce had a table in her office and a desk in her office and the
folders were on both. They had started in September. A man from
the state had come down to Lexington in August and talked for four
hours about the new law and what it required, and the part Joyce
had understood clearly was that every child who had ever been
called slow now had to have a meeting, and a form, and a plan, and
a second meeting. She had sixteen names. She had been told there
would be more.

She took her coat off and put it on the back of the door.

At eight twenty-five she went up to the office to get her mail.

Mrs. Daughtry was at the front desk with the attendance tray in
front of her and the telephone beside her right hand. She did not
look up.

"Morning."

"Morning," Joyce said.

Mr. Talley's door stood open. The light was off. He had gone to
the county office for a principals' meeting and would not be back
until three, and he had told Joyce this twice, once last week and
once in the parking lot yesterday afternoon, in the way he had of
telling a person something so that later he could say he had told
them.

Joyce's box had two things in it.

One was a mimeographed notice about the Thanksgiving program.

The other was a note from Anne Prevette in the first grade,
folded once, with Cline's name on the outside.

Joyce read it standing there.

It said that the Whitener girl had cried through most of lunch on
Monday and had not eaten, and that she had cried the Thursday
before, and that Anne thought somebody ought to know. The girl had
a brother in Cline's room. Anne had written thought you might
mention it to Ruth Ann at the bottom and underlined might.

Joyce folded it again.

"Has Mrs. Cline been up this morning?"

Mrs. Daughtry ran her thumb down the edge of the attendance
slips.

"She's been up."

"I didn't see her."

"She came up." Mrs. Daughtry pulled a slip halfway out of the
stack, looked at it, and pushed it back. "It's here."

Joyce put the notice in her pocket and kept the note in her hand.

---

The second-grade hall ran off the cross-corridor past the
drinking fountain. There were four rooms on it. Room 6 and Room 8
on the left, Room 5 and Room 7 on the right, and at the end of it
the girls' room and a door to the outside that was kept chained
because of the loading drive.

Joyce came down it at twenty to nine.

The door to Room 6 stood open. Inside, a reading group was going.
She could hear the teacher and then a child and then the teacher
again.

"—went down the road and—"

The child stopped.

"No. Start that sentence again."

Joyce went past the open door.

Room 7 was three doors from the corner. The number was printed on
a white card beside the frame and somebody had drawn a blue line
around the edge of the card with a ballpoint pen. The line did not
quite meet at the corner.

The door was closed.

That was not remarkable. Cline closed her door. Several of them
closed their doors. There had been a memorandum about it in
September, from Talley, about heat.

Joyce knocked.

"Mrs. Cline?"

She waited with the note in her hand.

Across the hall the reading group started again and one voice got
ahead of the others.

"Together."

The children began over.

Joyce knocked twice.

"Ruth Ann?"

She put her hand on the knob and turned it.

The knob turned.

The door did not move.

She pulled again, harder, keeping the knob turned all the way
down. The door came out of the frame less than an inch and then
something took the weight of it and held.

Joyce let go.

She looked at the gap. It was a dark strip and there was nothing
in it but the edge of the door.

She crouched and looked at the floor. Nothing had been pushed
underneath. No coat, no folded paper, no wedge. The tile ran flat
to the bottom of the door and under it, and there was no light
coming through from the other side.

She stood up.

That was the first thing she could not account for. The room had
two windows. She had been in it. Cline kept the reading charts on
the wall beside them because of the afternoon sun, and in the
morning that room was bright enough that the overheads did not get
turned on until after lunch.

There was no light under the door.

Joyce put her hand flat on the wood.

"Ruth Ann, it's Joyce."

She waited.

A toilet flushed at the end of the hall. The radiator beside Room
7 made two clicks as the heat came on and then a longer sound like
water moving.

She leaned in and put her ear against the door.

At first there was nothing.

She held still and let the hall noise settle, and then it was
there, under everything, low and even and without any pattern she
could put a number to.

Breathing.

Joyce lifted her head.

She listened again.

It was still there.

She knocked once with two knuckles, not hard.

"Carl. Is Carl Whitener in there?"

The breathing went on.

She said the boy's name again and then she said Marcus Foil and
then she said Dana Kepley, and none of it changed anything on the
other side of the wood, and she stopped because she had started
going down the roll in her head in alphabetical order and it
occurred to her that she was standing in a hallway saying
children's names to a door.

She stepped back.

The bulletin board beside the frame was covered with the fall
work. OUR FALL WORDS, cut from orange paper and stapled along the
top. Under it, ruled sheets with one word each in pencil and a
sentence beneath.

LEAVES.

APPLE.

COLD.

THANKSGIVING.

One sheet had come loose at the lower corner and hung by a single
staple. Joyce took hold of it and pressed it back and the staple
would not hold it, so she pulled it free and turned it over.

Dana K.

COLD.

It is cold in the morning.

Joyce put the sheet on the ledge under the bulletin board and set
Anne Prevette's note on top of it.

She tried the knob one more time.

The door gave, and took up, and held.

---

It was ten to nine.

She could go to the office and tell Mrs. Daughtry that the door
to Room 7 would not open.

Mrs. Daughtry would ask her what she meant.

That was the difficulty, standing in the hall working out the
order of the words. Locked was not right. It was not locked. The
knob turned. Blocked was a word that would make Mrs. Daughtry
pick up the telephone, and the telephone went to Lexington, and
Lexington would reach Talley in a meeting, and Talley would come
back down the road at fifty miles an hour to find out that the
second grade had a bookcase against the door.

Which was very likely what it was.

Cline had a low bookcase at the back of the room. It was on
casters. Joyce had seen a child sit on it once and be spoken to
about it. If two of them had got behind it and pushed, it would
travel, and if it travelled far enough it would come to rest
against the door, and Cline would be on the other side of it
telling them all to sit down while she worked out how to move it
by herself.

That did not explain the light.

But the charts were on the wall by those windows, and paper comes
down.

Joyce stood with her hand on the frame.

There were fifteen minutes before the first-grade group and she
had the kit in her office and she had not looked at the manual
since Thursday.

She did not go to the office.

She went the other way, past Room 8 and around the corner toward
the gym, because Cline took her class to the gym on Tuesdays when
the weather was bad, and it had frosted, and it was possible that
the whole room was down there and the door had been shut behind
them with something against it, and that she had spent eleven
minutes talking to an empty room.

It was the thing she could check without saying anything to
anybody.

She walked faster than she needed to and she was aware of walking
faster than she needed to, and when she came past the office
window Mrs. Daughtry looked up, and Joyce lifted the flat of her
hand about four inches off her hip and kept going.

 

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