I WALKED JEREMIAH OUT OF CLASS, down the hall, out to the yard, and let him scream into a square yellow pillow. i watched the veins in his neck fill with blood then contract as though his blood had drained out with his sound. if he’d forgotten his pillow, i put my hand over his mouth. my hand wet with his phlegm as he screamed into my palm.
We would stand shaking, looking out into the woods around the school for a few spaces of breath. I held my right hand away from my side and his face flooded with relief. It was December in Connecticut, and the weatherman said we had remarkable apricity, a warm sun in winter.
I’m a class aide to Mrs. Albrecht, third-grade teacher at Franklin Arts Charter. I take the children to the nurse to get their medication and I step in to manage them when they’re out of line. Jeremiah had been put on another pill, an orange one, and his psychiatrist said he would act out this way for a while. Albrecht and I came up with plans for him. Letting him scream outside was one of our more bizarre routines, but it worked. It was extreme, but not that crazy. Crazy was the amount of medication he was on. Craziest was pure Jeremiah, no medication. Something had to give.
After one particular session, we headed back into Classroom West, where he cut quick past the group tables to the long windows. He knelt at the sill and watched for birds, for their numinous quicksilver presence in the thick of white oak edging the yard.
He turned to me. Dark-brown hair, yolky eyes, a thick eyelash fringe that made him look like an exiled prince. “Where is he? When will he come back? Will he come close to the window?”
None of us knew. He meant the cardinal, the one that lit on a tree that lined up with the center of our room. That winter the small red king took an interest in our class. When he lit high up, he turned to look back down at us, at all the children, their small necks straining, full of blood and more blood, looking up at his brighter body’s blood on the leaves.
And so the children caught the fever to see the bird. Whether he flashed diagonal or lingered on a branch for a minute, his presence lit up the room and turned them ecstatic. All the lighter, bilious males had cleared out months before, and he remained. Throughout the day, the children waited for Jeremiah to see the cardinal, because he always saw the bird first, caught him, and then cried out, There, there, there. Look.
The second week into this bird-watching, Albrecht paused at the window. “How fantastic,” she said, leaning over Jeremiah to watch. “A red animal! A bright red animal. And it’s so gray and cold outside. Isn’t it nice to see some color?”
Jeremiah took up most of my days at Franklin. I gave him his pills in the morning and afternoon. He was seven. He needed them all. His whites, his oranges, his yellows, his blues. White and yellow for focus, blue for happiness, orange for calm and impulse control. He rarely ate; he traded parts of his lunch away throughout the day. During gym, he ran and ran. Large heavy head and swollen stomach.
Carolina Tearstone, his mother, explained that the pills brought him down to speed. As she spoke, she flattened the air before her with her hands. Carolina was a spindly lawyer with bloodshot eyes and she lived in a townhouse in the historic district. I had once heard her staccato on the phone as she walked the length of the halls.
“Then we send him away. Send him to a boarding school or a special school and they can deal with him there,” she snipped. “He’s a boy. He can handle it. Let him handle it. Throw him in cold water and make him learn. That’s how I learned! He’s been a nightmare, Jeremy, you aren’t here to know—”
Hang on tightly, I told him, as he swung from my arm, dragging me down with each step down the hall. The halls dwarfed us on that long walk to the nurse’s office. The auditorium was locked. Pipes exposed, roofs leaking, rooms that changed from hot to cold on a dime.
The school nurse cut the big pills with a small knife then slid them across the counter toward me. Five, six, three, and two. Two, one half, three, and three. I turned each pill in the light. In college, my roommate, a Gold Coast princess, had been on the same pills since she was eight years old. Thirty minutes after taking her dose, when their effect was heaviest, she would talk about how her parents had abandoned her. I thought of all the kids in college taking triple rounds to bang through finals, then going on to become doctors, lawyers, and bankers. Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, Dexedrine.
Hang on tightly, let go lightly. I picked up the phrase from a movie. I also had read, in a poem, Lose something every day. I tried to learn how to lose everything in my life with a little less pain each time. I lost my parents, pop, pop, two soup cans filled with water knocked off a railing into the grass. My mother, that was last winter. I saw her body wheeled briskly out our front door in the middle of the night. The toxicology report noted no foul. Clearly, it had all gone foul. I hadn’t been able to help her. I didn’t even know she was ill, or where all the medication in the bathroom had even come from. What had I been doing but building a brick wall around my selfish life? Rich tapestry we weave.
Over the past year I let the loss sink into my flesh, learned to pass it through me as slow waste. That job was the twine holding my life together. I was twenty-four years old. I sat in the corner of West and watched the children and felt fear, hope, longing for each of them. I was afraid for their delicacy, their heads filling with all the images and stories they’d carry for life.
Emil Jones, Lisa Taliaferro, Leah Thompson, Gwendolyn Rael, Jeremiah Tearstone, Julian Squire, Amy Wadsworth, Tessa Hansen, J. P. Lilly.
We taught them how to call things by their names. School, temple, bird, snow, god. Some days, I could see my own edges blur. I was Jeremiah, I was Emil, I was Leah. I was all of their mothers and I was all and I was in each of them.
I thought about Jeremiah’s brain, the synapses cleared by cold blue fire, cotton balls shoved in the spark plugs. A few glass layers snapped into the gel of the optic nerve, his gaze contracting. I thought about him waking one day and wanting his mind back, wanting his singular disturbances all to himself. Wanting reparation for all the time he could have spent in the woods, ears open to its silent music.
On a class trip to the carnival, he told Albrecht that he heard a violin playing in a tent on the edge of the grounds. We didn’t believe him, but then, leaving the carnival, I saw him, a man facing the train tracks, tuning his violin.
I watched for the cardinal with Jeremiah. I didn’t know what he wanted. The more I saw it, the more unlikely its existence seemed. Red! The audacity!
The cardinal’s black pebble eye held all of us within it. A perfect siren set off in the middle of a white-sun day, like a wild and blessed emergency. Brilliant, imperious, cresting, black masked throat all full. It chirred and shook a fall of powder off its branch.
Jeremiah, sentinel, marshal, held on with both hands. His body shook with the effort of not flailing and not shouting. I hoped there was a place in him that I could reach. This seemed possible, because imagining him older was easy, longing all built up into something so much more vast and uncontrollable than one ever imagined it could be. You started to see it as a large spinning phantom on the horizon, receding, your longing.
I saw words—dysfunctional, impulsive, lazy—words he heard at home, at school, every day, entering his ears and sliding on down into his blood, stamped toxic in his cells. Words distilling his future selves. I saw him at fourteen climbing down a fire escape, clambering into a car with other boys in search of better pills. I saw him shuttled from high school to high school, then resisting his way through college in a funk of stimulants and downers. A smart, creative kid, but not a truly ambitious one. Not a closer.
Albrecht asked the class, “Who do you want to be? What do you want to learn along the way?” Each day she wore a blazer and taught grammar from a lectern. She believed in each child’s passion and talent, in the genius in each tiny creator’s heart. “Your children will learn to look at the world with open hearts, with minds attuned to beauty,” she’d told their parents.
“Boring!” Jeremiah rolled his head back to gaze out the window upside down. The children tittered. Later that day, I saw his assignment. He’d written, I want to be red.
Surely, I saw him first slip a pill in his pocket that second week of January. He pretended to swallow it, then showed me the pill in his hand and I smiled and didn’t say a word. I felt true, thrilling fear passing from my neck down through me in a wave. I saw him do it the next day, and I felt less. Then each day, effortless, quick, I let him put his oranges away. He slammed open the boy’s bathroom door to flush them. Accretive, small, splinters lodging deep.
Snow fell relentless over the bay, the lighthouse, the streets long winding into town. The children had cabin fever and couldn’t focus. They drew birds in quiz borders, on their hands. They took their lead from Jeremiah, who tracked the king’s halting flight in a composition book: the tree it landed on that day, whether it let out its full-body sonar chirp and how many times it did.
I paged through his book. Page after page of trees with cardinals colored in as ornaments. I’d loved horses that much, once, when I was ten. But I couldn’t remember a time since when my every thought and breath were sunk into another living thing.
When I saw our cardinal, I felt fear. I felt him catch in me, arrest me, disrupt my hard-won peace. I saw him and thought, Today a mother lost a child, and today, in some far corner of the earth, yesterday’s skirmish broke into a massacre. The king flipped, on to the next oak; a train skipped on its tracks in the middle of the night.
Come February, Albrecht and I managed to get the children out on to the playground. Jeremiah practiced his cardinal calls at the wire fence.
And there it came, and we held our breath, let its fist of heartsong strain and beat against our silence. Its song alternated between a searing, warning intensity and a frenetic, small chucking, back into a coppery stream of whistled chirring. Somewhere, salmon-gray wings shuddered in response. A song honed over fifty generations to earn the queen’s ear.
It turned on its tail and looked at Jeremiah, and then it looked at me. I thought, He’s mad. His black full eye is mad. He comes from dinosaurs. He moves the winter to burn. He careened off and the snow swallowed up his place and we were left alone, listening to his fading call and somehow, there was nothing right in any of it.
After it took off, Jeremiah crumpled against the fence. I held his hand as he got the look that said he’d throw himself on the ground in a paroxysm of violent, incoherent need. His eyes sealed up as he gulped for air. He writhed in his green ski jacket, kicked my shins, and howled.
“No! No! No! No!” He wept.
Albrecht swooped in, windmilling her arms. “Jeremiah!” she boomed.
He crouched in the dirt and continued to wail quietly. He squinted, as though spotlit.
“I hate this,” he said. His hands slipped against the fence. He looked into the trees. Leah began to weep too.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He crawled under a bench and lay on his back on the freezing concrete. I was afraid of the wildness in me, but I wasn’t afraid of that in him. He asked me for a hug and I knelt down and held him. Counted to three, released. He smelled like dry leaves and glue.
The teaching unit that month was on art history and the South, and the children were supposed to make face vessels. Artisan slaves in the Southern pottery trade made face vessels in their free time, built faces into jugs and pitchers. The faces were their real selves, the hidden, triumphant selves that lived through and despite all destruction.
Albrecht slid trays of cold, heavy clay from a deep fridge. Her white silk hair was clipped straight across her forehead. The class put on their smocks weakly, early as it was that morning. Albrecht struggled to explain the task.
“If you were a slave and this was your secret, what would you make? Does everyone understand what I mean?”
The children cut the slabs with white plastic knives, kneaded the clay. Jeremiah frowned and picked up his chopsticks and poked holes into his slab. He dug in his thumbs deep and pressed with his full weight into the holes.
The children were always teaching us. Make something where there was nothing. You had to take your pain and work it like the clay, press and stretch it with relentless force. You had to master your love and turn it outward, like the Mars rover, if your love was the Mars rover, smooth and clean in a new direction. Retract the legs and turn steady east and clamber forward. Soar high, wide, south, into the red stone sea.
They held up their masks when done. A laughing man, an old-timey pilot in goggles. Their little bodies shivered behind their masks. Leah had sculpted her own face but with fuller cheeks. J. P. had made the face of Benjamin Franklin from a poster of the Great Inventors.
Albrecht held Jeremiah’s mask under its chin and no one could say a thing, it was so real, its cheeks and brows and lips shaped around a grotesque happiness. Albrecht looked delighted and disturbed that Jeremiah had it in him, to make such an awful thing. The ropes of eyebrows and lips had been massaged into the flesh of the face. The eyes were human.
A shattered mug, the small bookshelf overturned, Julian with a pink slap stripe across the nose and out the window we could see Jeremiah running past the swings. I watched him watching the trees, his eyes separating and scanning each leaf, his small whorl ears combing the whole aviary’s calls, pinpointing, seeing his bird at the moment it made itself known. The first nomad who peeled off the group in search of water and food had the same restless eye gene.
I was in over my head and I couldn’t tell a soul. On our hall walks, I pleaded with Jeremiah to take all his pills but he said no.
His mother didn’t arrive one afternoon and I had to walk him home. Their town house had fig trees in a front garden sunk beneath high walls.
The front red door was open, and Jeremiah pushed his way in before I could speak. The kitchen was decorative and unused. In the narrow, dark living room, a cleaning lady had her back to me as she vacuumed with headphones on. The air was thick with dust.
I walked after his sound, up the narrow stairs. He knelt before a television in a small room.
In a large workroom filled with drafting tables and shelves, Carolina looked up at me. She had a phone in one hand. She waggled the other hand by her temple.
“You brought Jeremiah?”
“He’s in the next room.” I waited for her to speak. She looked back down at the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was calling the school. I need to come in to talk about him. I’m taking him to a new doctor tomorrow. We have to try and get this figured out.”
I wondered if Carolina wasn’t on something. She seemed to be unwilling to get up from the chair. As I left the house, I turned to see Jeremiah leaning in a window, watching me go. These were other people’s lives, their families, their unhappiness, not mine.
They were jumping because he was jumping and then he began to dance and punch the air, seized by a hundred small demons peeling him in every direction, and as he leapt they leapt in time, the air filling with quivering, precious bodies. Are they possessed, Albrecht asked, the floor shaking, and they laughed, whipped their heads about to see each other’s faces.
Then he was running down the hall and out of the double doors of the school. He stepped up on a bench, caught a foot in the fence, and lifted himself over into the woods. Once his foot hit the ground, he shifted gears into a run.
Out in the drifts, the white burning my eyes. My body twisted as I ran through the knee-high snow. I scanned the dark above for the legionary’s crest. And there, a riot exploding through the cold, across the path that Jeremiah had cleared. He lit low, filled with force, swept back across. No rest, no cover, weaving higher up toward his inversion, his natural law, his sandy wife. I’d never seen her before. Her tail and wings had been dipped in his color then dried to orange rust.
We were alone in the woods, running, Jeremiah’s green jacket and hysterical laughter just out of reach. I had to tell them what I’d let happen, and I’d probably be fired. Maybe they already knew. I felt Carolina, Albrecht, and the principal watching us, receding, from behind the glass.
Jeremiah whooped and bounded. The school was out of sight. He followed after a spatter, a sound, a burst. I felt a violent, sudden, and pure joy slice my heart in half, a joy that said, Marry the siren, marry my life to emergency. I saw him fall in the snow and I heard him laughing.