Tooley braked at a red traffic light. He looked over his shoulder
“What’s wrong?”
“I just have to be there,” Jim said sharply, frustratingly.
“Sure, no sweat.”
Fear had rippled through Jim ever since he had spoken the words “life
line” to the woman in the supermarket more than four hours ago. those
ripples swelled into dark waves that carried him toward McAlbery School.
With an overwhelming sense of urgency that he could not explain he said,
“I have to be there in fifteen minutes!”
“Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”
He wanted to say, I didn’t know earlier. Instead he said, “Can you me
there in time?”
“It’ll be tight.”
“I’ll pay triple the meter.”
“Triple?”
“If you make it in time,” he said, withdrawing his wallet from his
pocket. He extracted a hundred-dollar bill and thrust it at Tooley. ”
this in advance.”
“It’s that important?”
“It’s life and death.”
Tooley gave him a look that said: What-are you nuts?
“The light just changed,” Jim told him. “Let’s move!”
Although Tooley’s skeptical frown deepened, he faced front again, took a
left turn at the intersection, and tramped on the accelerator.
Jim kept glancing at his watch all the way, and they arrived at the
school with only three minutes to spare. He tossed another bill at
Tooley paying even more than three times the meter, pulled open the
door, scrambled out with his suitcase.
Tooley leaned through his open window. “You want me to wait?”
Slamming the door, Jim said, “No. No, thanks. You can go.”
He turned away and heard the taxi drive off as he anxiously studied the
front of McAlbery School. The building was actually a rambling colonial
house with a deep front porch, onto which had been added two three-story
wings to provide more classrooms. It was shaded by Douglas and huge old
sycamores. With its lawn and playground, it occupied the entire length
of that short block.
In the house part of the structure directly in front of him, kids were
coming out of the double doors, onto the porch, and down the steps.
Laughing and chattering, carrying books and large drawing tablets and
bright lunchboxes decorated with cartoon characters, they approached Jim
along the school walk, passed through the open gate in the spearpoint
iron fence, and turned either uphill or down, moving away from him in
both directions.
Two minutes left. He didn’t have to look at his watch. His heart was
pounding two beats for every second, and he knew the time as surely as
if he had been a clock.
Sunshine, filtered through the interstices of the arching trees, fell in
delicate patterns across the scene and the people in it, as if
everything had been draped over with an enormous piece of gossamer lace
work stitched from golden thread. That netlike ornamental fabric of
light seemed to shimmer in time to the rising and falling music of the
children’s shouts and laughter, and the moment should have been
peaceful, idyllic.
But Death was coming.
Suddenly he knew that Death was coming for one of the children, not for
any of the three teachers standing on the porch, just for one child. Not
a big catastrophe, not an explosion or fire or a falling airplane that
would wipe out a dozen of them. Just one, a small tragedy. But which
one?
Jim refocused his attention from the scene to the players in it,
studying the children as they approached him, seeking the mark of
imminent death on one of their fresh young faces. But they all looked
as if they would live forever.
“Which one?” he said aloud, speaking neither to himself nor to the
children but to. . . . Well, he supposed he was speaking to God. “Which
one?”
Some kids went uphill toward the crosswalks at that intersection, and
others headed downhill toward the opposite end of the block. In both
directions, women crossing guards in bright-orange safety vests, holding
big red paddlelike “stop” signs, had begun to shepherd their charges
across the streets in small groups. No moving cars or trucks were in
sight, so even without the crossing guards there seemed to be little
threat from traffic.