Mrs. K, in the doorway with the fish, made a sound that she would have denied to her grave was a laugh.
Chapter 18: The Playground
The school had a fence the color of wet slate and a rule, printed on a laminated sign in three languages, that no adult crossed the yellow line during recess without a visitor's badge.
Nora had a badge. She was standing where she always stood at the Tuesday game, on the grass inside the fence with Maisie on her hip, because Maisie's class came out to watch the big children's soccer and Maisie narrated it to whoever's ear was nearest β when she became aware, not saw, not heard, became aware, the way you become aware of weather changing, that the street beyond the fence had gone wrong.
There was a car that did not belong. There are cars that belong outside a school: parents' cars, patient and double-parked; the crossing guard's ancient Subaru; delivery vans with somewhere better to be. This one sat at the mouth of the side street with its engine running and nobody getting out of it, and Shay β who had been at the far goal with his arms folded β was already moving, unhurried, enormous, toward the yellow line. That was the first thing. The second thing was the sound.
People who write about gunfire say it doesn't sound like gunfire. Nora would say later that it sounded exactly like a door being slammed by somebody furious, in a house with no other sound in it. One slam. Then a second, closer to the first than a heartbeat allows, and the playground β forty children, three teachers, a referee with a whistle in his mouth he never blew β did the thing a field of grass does in a high wind: it flattened and screamed all at once.
She did not decide anything. There was no deciding in it anywhere. There was Maisie's weight leaving her hip as she put the child down and forward, under her own body, and Jack β Jack had come off the field at a run, not away from the fence but toward her, toward his sister, because Jack Doyle at nine ran toward the small person in danger β and Nora got an arm around his waist and took all three of them down into the grass together, her body over theirs like a roof coming down, her face in Maisie's hair, her hand spread across the back of Jack's head. She heard herself saying their names in a steady, ordinary voice, as if it were a game: "Down we go. Down we go. There's my brave ones. Down we go."
The third slam never came.
What came instead was a sound she would hear in her sleep for a year: Shay's voice, and not the voice he used for children, roaring something at the street β and then a man shouting, one raw animal shout of pain or fury β and running footsteps, and a car door, and an engine doing violence to itself getting away. And then the most terrible quiet she had ever stood inside of, full of children crying in separate small keys all across the grass.
Nora got up slowly, on legs that belonged to somebody else. Maisie was screaming with her eyes squeezed shut, unhurt, furious at the fright of it. Jack was white to the lips and silent, holding his sister's sleeve in his fist. Nora counted them the way she had counted them every day of her employment, by touch: head, hands, knees, whole. Whole. Whole.
"Miss Bennett." It was Shay. She had never seen Shay run before, and she never wanted to again; he came across the field like a building deciding to fall in a particular direction. "Miss Bennett. You stay with these children. You do not cross that line, do you understand meβ"
"Shay. Whoβ"
"Stay with the children."
Beyond the fence, at the mouth of the side street where the car had been, a man was down on the pavement beside the open door of a grey sedan she knew. Shay's car. And the man was getting to his knees β or trying to, with one hand pressed hard into his own side and the other flat on the asphalt holding him up, and even at that distance, even with her heart still slamming the doors of her chest, Nora knew the coat. She knew the coat the way you know a voice in another room.
Frankie.
Frankie, who ran nothing now, whom the council had unmade on paper. Frankie, who was not on any schedule, not supposed to be within a mile of that school β who had come in secret, in an ordinary coat, to stand outside a fence with the other parents and watch his nephew play soccer, because he had promised Jack at Sunday dinner, in a voice he'd tried to make offhand, that he might come by sometime and see whether the boy's left foot was as bad as reported.
He had seen the car before Nora had. He had seen the window come down. And Frankie Doyle, raised in the arithmetic of rooms and streets and angles, did the arithmetic instantly and without a flicker of doubt: between the mouth of that street and the yellow line there was exactly one thing that could be put in the way, and he put it there.
The bullet that the street had sent to the Doyle name β to the school, to the children, to the message that a retiring man is a man who can be hurried β arrived instead in Frankie Doyle's side, an inch from ending a different story entirely.
He was on his knees on the pavement with his hand pressed to himself and his face grey as the fence, and when Shay reached him and took his weight against his own great chest, Frankie said something that made Shay laugh once, terribly, in the middle of everything β and later, when Nora asked him what it was, Shay would only shake his head and say: "He wanted to know if Jack saw him get there on time. I told him the boy saw everything. He said good. He said that's all right, then."
The ambulances took a long time arriving and no time at all. Somebody had the presence of mind to move the children inside class by class, singing, of all things β a teacher with more courage than Nora had ever seen in one body started "You Are My Sunshine" at the top of her voice and forty shaking children took it up in ragged pieces, and it was to that sound, thin and off-key and unbearably brave, that the stretcher carried Marcus Doyle's brother toward the gates.