1

We hadn’t expected it; the sky had been clear. But as the afternoon waned, clouds converged above the beach, and then the first shocks of rain came down stinging. Soon the wind picked up, and the drops collected in pools. Most of the kids were in short sleeves. I hadn’t thought to bring umbrellas. I crouched in the downpour, waiting out the clock, watching the two men in the stranded boat.

They were thirty feet away in a deep and narrow cove, edged by the sand on one side and a rock wall on the other. Their boat bobbed gently, their fishing rods shimmying in the wind. They had just set off for deeper waters, but hadn’t gotten far before the motor cut out. As the older man stood with an appraising scowl, his puffed vest darkening with water, the younger man ripped at the pull-cord. Nothing happened. They would have to wade ashore.

It was, on warm weekends, a popular beach. On past trips I had seen teenagers negotiate the jagged rocks in flip-flops, lifting starfish from suctioned slumber to chuck them into the surf. But it was a Friday afternoon, so there was just me, the two parents who had come to help, and my two dozen second graders. For a listless hour, as we moved incrementally down the beach, my students inspected the kelp-littered dunes with clipboards in hand, making tick marks on their flora observation lists and rubbing their noses with their palms. Now, I wiped the water from my wristwatch and folded my soggy newspaper, ready to call it a day and begin the weekend. It was close enough, I reasoned, to when we had planned to leave.

One of the parents walked over—Mr. Noel, a burly, hulking creature built like a linebacker. Mr. Mason, he barked, I’m getting my umbrella. Then we’ll line them up?

I scanned the beach for the other chaperone. Where’s Mrs. Stone?

She went to get her daughter’s coat, he said. You’ll be okay alone for a minute?

I nodded—I’m alone with them every day, I thought—and he took off at a jog toward the bus; with his jacket pulled high above him he looked headless. As I watched him, one of my students approached me. Since the beginning of the year, eight months earlier, I had worried about her—Emma was thin to the point of frailty, and when I spoke, her eyes remained unfocused, as though she were blindly aiming her face toward the sound. I would call her house to arrange conferences or check up on unreturned permission slips, and listen to the phone ring and ring. Her mother hadn’t dressed her for the weather. She was shivering.

Can I please go to the bus? She pointed to Mr. Noel, who was halfway to the parking lot. Caleb’s dad is going.

You have to line up like everybody else, I said, shoving the newspaper into my backpack. I’m blowing the whistle in three minutes.

She began the tantrum dance, her clipboard against her chest.

Consult some classmates until departure time, I said. Scientists collaborate, remember? Go share your findings.

I didn’t find nothing, Mr. Mason, Emma said. I don’t even see what’s here to find.

I hesitated, then unzipped my jacket and gave it to her. In seconds the rain had pasted my shirt to my back. I glanced at the men in the boat, and then, in the foreground, the children. I felt myself tense.

They had gathered into one still group.

I heard shouting. The men in the boat were now both standing, their vessel rocking as they waved their arms. I took a step forward. The children—nearly every one—turned around, several mouths open in alarm. A few of them broke away and ran in my direction, their feet failing beneath them in little stumbles. Mr. Mason, they said in chorus. I could see Jacob panting, and as they reached me I heard the characteristic rasp, the beginnings of an asthma attack curling around his chest. Mr. Mason, Mr. Mason.

I took off at a run, waving to the men in the boat and shouting, I’ve got it, not knowing what that meant. I hollered for the children to go immediately to the bus, my voice shrill, unmistakably panicked. The rest of the children at the water’s edge mostly dispersed, starting toward the parking lot, but a few remained, still looking down at whatever was there. I called up the beach for Mr. Noel and Mrs. Stone. They were out of earshot. I barked at Emma, behind me now, Go get them, and as she ran up the beach in my jacket the sleeves grazed the sand. I paused midrun, remembering Jacob. Someone go in my backpack! I yelled. Inhaler, get his inhaler. I didn’t wait to make sure someone did as I asked.

One of them is hurt, I thought. Somebody’s head is cracked open. A tableau unfurled—the sound of sirens, the arrival of an ambulance. The things I had learned in first aid returned to me: Assess responsiveness. Press firmly on the wound.

I squinted at the water; my feet moved slowly in the sand. The boat was now empty. Then I spotted the two men, wading ashore, chest-deep in the gray inlet. One of the kids fell in, I thought. He’s filling with water. Tilt the head with two fingers under the chin. Breathe for him until help arrives. Sharp points pressed into the soles of my sneakers as I stepped over the rocks at the cove’s mouth. The gaze of the four remaining children—Jeffrey, Marcus, Edmund, and Benjamin—remained fixed on the place where the water met the sand. Go, I said, and though I was in motion, I saw it plain as anything: they hesitated. I snapped, Get over there, and watched them move toward the dunes. I stepped forward, headlong and terrified.

First I saw the flies. They were giddy, drunk on what they had found, big and overfed. They were indifferent to my presence, letting me step into them. I no longer remember the smell, only what it did to me. I doubled over. The tableau evaporated. There would be no CPR, no wound to staunch. I knew what I would find. I looked back, delaying. Most of the kids were going to the bus, but others stood where I had been sitting, staring back at me. Jacob was coughing frantically, inhaler in hand. He doubled over, desperate for air. I took another step and saw an outcropping of damp wood half-buried in the sand, surrounded by tiny footprints. Bunches of yellow grass wavered in the wind. And a few feet away, beside a slick tangle of brown kelp, was the body.

 

I see myself as the children must have seen me: a young man stepping cautiously forward, rocks and reeds obscuring his bottom half. His face distorts as he bends at the waist, his palm goes to his open mouth, and then the back of that same hand moves to his nose. The children are afraid. Unexpected events frighten them. But they look at the man and they are, in a small way, put at ease. They look at him and think, He’s our teacher.

And then they hear him scream. And as two men emerge dripping from the water and pull him away, the children drop their clipboards. They do what their teacher has commanded them to do whenever they feel they are in danger: they run.

Roughly one year earlier, I had received my teaching certificate in a quiet ceremony at a local state college. I secured a job in the struggling district with unsettling ease, and began looking for holes in the prescribed curriculum that I could fill with art, the People’s History, the teaching of tolerance. At home, I practiced finger painting, free-association writing, explosive science experiments, a segment on cooking. I swore I would take my students outside no matter the season; we would do a unit on international sports, like jai alai and cricket. I would teach them the silly camp songs of my youth—Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar. I stood in front of the medicine cabinet mirror and practiced my enthusiastic lectures, my voice low so Greta wouldn’t hear me from the bedroom. I perfected faces to use when they spoke, so they would know that I was really, truly listening to them.

I could see the San Francisco Bay from the roof of the school building, the dividing line between gray sky and gray water nearly indistinguishable. I occasionally left Greta in our bed before dawn to drink my coffee up there in a lawn chair, staring down the sun as it rose over the playground. Sometimes I went up there to grade homework as the evening wind kicked up, watching stragglers play foursquare while waiting for their parents. I knew I could be seen from the apartments nearby, and that I wasn’t hard to peg: a young guy just starting out as a teacher, his wrinkled clothes flecked with last week’s tempera paint, crumbling sneakers stained with soccerfield mud. With my conspicuous glasses and purplerimmed eyes, I looked the part.

Large-scale additions had been made to Hawthorne Elementary in the fifties, accommodating the bulge of children born after their fathers returned en masse from the war. The dismal chunky-block design betrayed its quick, utilitarian construction: it was all cement and stucco, later accompanied by a sea of prefab portable classrooms huddled on the former kickball diamond. But I was lucky enough to be placed in the older wing. Tall dark-wood pillars anchored my classroom, their proximity to adjoining walls creating odd nooks—one I used for a storage area, another for a small study lab. The interior was paneled in that same dark wood, like a saloon.

On my first day, I was surprised by my confidence; nervousness had always been my default setting, but that morning I couldn’t wait to get started. I arrived long before the children did, and sat staring up at the posters I had chosen: Martin Luther King Jr., a lesser known Matisse, Einstein with his tongue out. I realized, too tired to fix it, that they were hung crookedly. I had put them up hastily days earlier, preparing like mad but slowed by the unrelenting heat. Though outside it was a mild September, the room was stuck at eighty degrees, and the oscillating fan I had brought barely moved the air. But the lessons were planned, the books were on the shelves, and I marveled: whatever happened in there would happen because of me.

My students sat in small blue chairs at tables rather than individual desks, each of the six tables named for a state. I was the president, and they voted on things like where to go for field trips, whether we should play dodgeball or softball in afternoon gym, chalkboards versus whiteboards. The thrill they experienced when given a choice was immense. Their wonder, too, came easily, and was wholly uncomplicated. They cried when I read them Charlotte’s Web, viewed repro impressionist paintings with pious reverence. When we made buffalo stew for the unit on California’s Native Americans, they leaned over the pot like we were cooking up magic. Those first months, I swelled with something unfamiliar: a secure knowledge of the good I was doing.

I took them on field trips as often as possible. The first, in early October, was to the Rockland Hiking Trail, an hour north of the city, on the long, parched stretch to Sacramento. The children mostly slept on the ride up, the Indian summer heat wafting in through the open bus windows. Once we arrived, they started a game of soccer in the grassy field near the parking lot. I always brought a ball on trips, and had memorized easy diversions—Telephone, or the Alphabet Game: A, my name is Adam and I live in Antarctica—in case there was time to kill. I watched as Edmund, invoking Class Foundation #2 (We can always pass if we feel uncomfortable or need some time alone), stayed out of the game, tossing the ball back in if it went out of bounds and dutifully pointing out players who went offside. Ed was a squat, tow-headed boy with a strong jaw and watery green eyes. When we played sports he was always among the first chosen. The kids liked him, and I liked him too. When I told Greta stories about school, she would ask after him: How’s your pet?

After the soccer game, we began our hike: a two-mile jaunt up and then around a small hill, a green lake curving around the last half where the trail hit level ground. We passed a small quarry where ribbons of rust ran down the sloped limestone. I kept an eye on Edmund, who lagged a few paces behind.

Ed, everything okay? A moment passed, as though he hadn’t heard me. A bird called out in the quarry, the echo rising. The air was herbal, an acrid scent that registered in the throat. How come you didn’t want to play soccer today? You love soccer.

He knelt in the weeds.

Hey, what’d you find? I bent down, my voice gentle. Let’s see it.

His eyes glimmered. I never saw one like this before. He held up a striped pebble. I didn’t feel like playing soccer today, he said. He put the stone in his pocket and ran to catch up with the others.

I found the rock on my desk at school the next morning, on top of the homework I had nearly finished grading. That afternoon, soccer came up in our normal rotation and Ed asked to be a team captain, high-fiving each kid he picked. I watched, relieved, from a nearby goalpost.

I never did figure out what caused their moods to sink or lift. They were each little mysteries, improvising in a world they didn’t comprehend. They remained mostly unreachable. I could teach them how to add, or to enjoy a Monet, or to understand the basic tenets of baseball, but I would never know what they thought about, what they worried about. And as soon as I thought I had a handle on it, they stopped loving the things they had loved, stopped listening to the stories they had often requested, stopped wanting to play soccer when they always played soccer. As soon as I figured them out, they weren’t them anymore. For a while, I was content with that, thinking it added to the charm of the work I had chosen: helping them learn how to be people.

I was guided toward the bus, flanked by the wet fishermen. I watched the blurred ground pass as I took heavy, deliberate steps through the sand. Easy does it, the older man kept saying. My mouth seemed disconnected from my body. I tried to say, I’m fine, really. I’m okay, I just ... but I didn’t know what words came next. I was soaked, rainwater dripping from my chin. I could hear whimpering. Oh no, I thought, one of the kids is crying. Then I felt a dull pulling at my eyes: the sound was coming from me.

We walked as a threesome, the men holding my arms. I saw the younger man turn toward the older—I guessed then that they were father and son—and give him a look. What the fuck? the look said. We reached the parking lot. The younger man patted one of the kids on the head, and though I didn’t know why, it angered me. The men sat on a bench opposite me and stared blankly, openly, like I was a television.

I tried to parse it out, but the whole thing was nonsensical. We had gone to Steinhart Aquarium on a field trip, and then we had come here, to the beach, and this had happened. These children, my charges, had witnessed something far worse than the things routinely kept from them: the R-rated movies, the content of encoded conversations. And they had seen it on my watch. Everything that had happened here had happened because of me. The extent of the situation started to become clear: I would need to call parents, organize conferences, send home a letter. I would need to explain. Wisps of weariness for all I would have to do surfaced and, for a moment, clouded everything. And then the image of the body came back: nude, torn into, and without—my God—its limbs, color, or breath. I repeated the story to myself, trying to understand, and feeling for the life of me like there was something more, something else—something that was humming beneath my consciousness, not yet ready to be examined.

Everyone was milling, their words like insects. I saw Mrs. Stone dialing her cell phone. Emma broke from the crowd and walked over.

Why are you sad, Mr. Mason? she asked. She had tossed the arms of my coat around her neck like two scarves, and she looked bound, straight-jacketed.

The older man whispered to his son, I don’t think we should leave yet.

 

Mr. Noel did his gruff best to corral the children, clumsily getting them onto the bus. After a while, they ate whatever portions of their lunches they hadn’t finished at the aquarium. Mrs. Stone began calling the parents to explain why we were already a half hour late. When her cell phone couldn’t get reception, she paced the parking lot, holding the phone aloft like a torch. She perfected her recitation, shuffling through the yellow emergency cards. There’s been an incident. My insides crawled, sure that to the parents’ ears this statement was too cryptic, that her skirting of the subject implied guilt. My guilt. Her fucking euphemism: it let the imagination run to judgment for entire seconds before she elaborated, saying simply, The children came upon a crime scene.

 

Officer Buckingham found me sitting at the edge of the parking lot. He was bigger than me, with streaked silver hair and eyes creased at the outer edges, and he smelled like a sweet cigar.

Mr. Mason, he said. He loomed above me; to see his face, I had to look up. The U.S. Park Police intends to do everything possible to make sure the family of the decedent finds some peace.

Slowly, my ability to speak returned. You can call me Francis, I said carefully, aware of my swollen eyes. I knew he could tell I had cried. Are you going to speak to the children? I asked. I’d like to be there when you do.

My partner is speaking to them now, he said, brusquely clicking the end of his pen. I just have a few questions for you, Frank.

Through the bus windshield I saw his partner standing beside the driver, addressing the children. Down on the beach, a crew of people walked around the body, staring at the ground. I watched them long enough to see that they were moving in a spiral, looking for evidence. Another crew walked toward the beach with a long zippered bag. It looked too light, like a breeze could take it from them.

I shook my head. I can’t—I didn’t see much.

You saw the decedent, he said.

Something flooded my chest each time I heard the word. I saw it, I said.

Buckingham coughed, thick and wet. Did you move or touch the body? Did you pull anything off it?

No, I said.

What were you doing when the children found the body?

I closed my eyes. The newspaper, the men in the boat. Unzipping my jacket. I was speaking to a student, I said.

How much time elapsed between discovery of the decedent and when the children alerted you?

I didn’t answer. How could I know?

Frank, Buckingham said, smiling tightly. Did they all come at once?

My eyes were still closed. The group of them, all looking down. Emma behind me. The group that left when I said to. The small, stone-faced cluster that remained. Jacob, bent at the waist, and his dry, scraping cough. I have a student with asthma, I said, looking up. Do you know if he—

Do you have a sense of which child made the initial discovery?

I looked past him, silent.

Buckingham’s false smile disappeared. Mr. Mason, I need to get a feeling for how long the children were unattended with the deceased, for evidence reasons. He leaned down, his face not quite level with mine.

I watched his lips move, the wind wheezing around us. On the bus, his partner’s chin turned toward her shoulder as she pressed a button and spoke into the radio there. The crew began moving up the beach, carrying, in tandem, the bag. It was no longer amorphous, no longer light. It bowed in the center and came up at either end in the shape of a smile.

We had just moved to this part of the beach. I searched his eyes. It was only a moment, I said, turning to watch the crew place the bag onto a gurney, that they were alone with her.

Buckingham recorded something in his notebook. What a thing to have happen.

I squinted, feeling queasy. I never imagined that ... I didn’t know there could be so much damage, I said.

That’s the water, he said. Not the jump.

We were dwarfed by a rocky hill, beyond which stood the bridge, swaying and red. You must see a lot of these, I said.

One is too many. He put his pen into his shirt pocket. There’s no greater waste. He extended his hand for me to shake.

I’m so embarrassed, I said, stifling a smile of pure discomfort. Behind him, the ocean looked restless. I turned and watched the ambulance silently proceed down the narrow beach road. Buckingham dropped the hand I hadn’t shaken. He waited a moment for me to continue speaking, and when I didn’t, he left me alone.

 

I found Mrs. Stone leaning against the bus, the knees of her pants dirty from the wet sand. Her face was pinched, and her small billow of graying hair had flattened. It was nearly six o’clock.

Margaret, I said. You’ve called everyone?

She nodded.

How bad was Jacob’s attack?

She didn’t meet my eye. He’s asleep now. A few of the others, too.

We climbed into the chilled bus, the yawning driver long into overtime. I sat beside Jacob, and without waking him took the inhaler from his limp hand. His breaths were ragged, the beds of his fingernails faintly blue. A few rows ahead, Mr. Noel held his son, Caleb, tightly against him. I could see him leaning down to whisper. I placed Jacob’s inhaler in my backpack, daring to close my eyes.

But the image that came wasn’t the body—it was Jacob, gasping for the air that escaped him. Jake, hunched over, and then lifting his head like a baby bird, mouth wide, trying to do on his own what I was supposed to help him do. The first time I saw him have an attack had been six months before. He had scrambled up to my desk and choked out, Mr. Mason, I need it. I blinked. Like, soon, he said. I remembered his mother approaching me on the first day of school, the package she had placed in my hand. Fumbling, I had retrieved his inhaler from my bottom desk drawer and watched as he gripped it for one, then two minutes, throwing his head back with each intake of air, his eyes meeting mine each time he lowered his chin. The din of the other children reverberated from what seemed a great distance and then fell away, as I felt my breathing sync with his.

I opened my eyes again, the bus rattling as we rode home. We drove over the Golden Gate, the city on the left, the sea to the right. The kids were quiet. They looked so small. They were so little it startled me sometimes.

When we arrived back at school, the parents were lined up against a portable classroom. I exited the bus with my hands in the air, shouting, They’re okay. The sky darkened above us, as I began to explain what I could.