Day 22

Mrs. Snowburn reached for a glass of water, but the closest thawed glass was across the room. “Hang on, I’ll grab you some water.” As I walked across the room I noticed that Tim was putting the space heater back together. “How is it? Are we going to have heat again?”

Time nodded, though I knew he was worried about something. “She’s not gonna be able to push out as much heat as before. One o the coils is busted, which prolly means that the rest are gonna follow suit soon. To the extent that we use her right now I’d say she’s only got a few hours left, five at most.” As he wiped his hands off he nodded to Mrs. Snowburn. “What’s wrong? Stress finally get to her?” I nodded slowly and watched as Mrs. Snowburn slowly turned on the bed to find a more comfortable position. “Ah, well, I’ll go tell Coach Z what’s happenin’ and we’ll try and keep Jessica out of you hair for as long as we can.”

As he walked away I grabbed his shoulder to stop him. “Tim, could you go clear a path in front of the building? See if the storm’s let up at all.”

“You ain’t plannin’ on walkin’ through that to find help are ya?”

I shook my head, though it hadn’t even crossed my mind it was something that I placed in the back of my head as soon as he’d said it. “I’m hoping that if the storm lets up enough we can get someone’s attention. Maybe we can get Mrs. Snowburn to a hospital, whoever is there will be able to do more for us than any of us can and even if they can’t, the supplies there will be more adequate. That space heater has been the only thing keeping us going by melting the ice on out food, thawing water, and keeping us warm enough to keep going. But if that heater dies we need to begin to think about leaving. Staying here in the cold will only kill us.”

***

I’ve been told that there are at least five major points within a person’s life. The names change a little from person to person and the number fluctuates a bit as well, but there are a certain five that will occur, whether directly or through a friend. These points are birth, coming of age, marriage, retirement, and death. Different societies focus on different events and view them in different lights. While one society mourns the loss of someone another celebrates the life of the individual had. My first introduction to this idea came when I was talking to a friend about writing and what it meant to write. They said that they wrote moments in peoples lives, moments that reflected major turning points or major life changes. It made sense, after all a story with no change is almost impossible to pull off, the reader wants there to be a change and the reader expects it.

I’ve thought about what it meant to experience one of these events for years, before and after the storm. Surely I’d been born and, in some ways, I’ve come of age. But the idea that the turning points that happened were self contained within the story bothered me. I was born, sure, but I don’t remember the birthing process. I’d come of age in that I could support myself more or less and was working on living on my own away from crutches that would support me, but it didn’t happen during one incident. I didn’t leave the storm of the century with the understanding of the workings of the world, ready for the next big step in my life. A wedding takes a day to complete, but a marriage takes lifetime to accomplish.

By this point I’ve already done the big reveal. I’ve told you how it ends, you’ve known from the beginning. Since there are no apprehensions about whether or not Mrs. Snowburn will recover I’m going to let the story sit where it is, with me walking to the glass after speaking with Tim about our future at the school.

Instead, I’m going to skip ahead a bit for now. In the months after the storm the entire world was watching us as we picked up after ourselves and salvaged what we could. Hundreds of people died from hypothermia and pneumonia due to inadequate supplies. Most of the country affected had millions of dollars worth of property damage to work through, though those numbers seemed to matter more to the people outside the blizzard. We were just happy to be alive, and disheartened when we heard of someone who hadn’t made it through.

My parent’s made it through the storm adequately well. They’d prepared themselves with enough provisions and batteries to warm the bedroom while they stayed under the covers as best they could. They’d even invited in neighbors who hadn’t been quite so prepared and, by the end of the blizzard, the entire room was filled with people huddled under blankets and in sleep bags trying to keep warm. The neighborhood joked about the big slumber party at my parent’s place for some time after that, and a few people even spent time returning the favor by helping to clean up the house. Most of my stuff was ruined though, besides a few files on my computer, most of it was expendable or recoverable. Even those files weren’t really important, just things that I would have liked to have around.

When the storm finally stopped and we were able to leave Claire and I had done a last walk through of the school to see if we could find Diana or Harold who were still missing. We found Harold shivering in the corner of one of the farthest classrooms and, despite his attempts to stop of from helping him, we got him moving and out of the school. He was admitted and released from the hospital. We asked where Diana had gone to, but all he said was that she was gone. “You mean left the school?” Diana asked.

Harold shrugged. “Gone. She’s just gone.” I, to this day, don’t know if Diana left the school only to freeze or if she found someplace warm to ride the storm out. I guess I’ll never really know, though it would be nice to one day learn the truth.Samuel,

Mrs. Snowburn’s son, tried contacting Harold and Dan at his mother’s request, but there seemed to be no way to get in contact with them. According to Tim Dan never returned to school when it was reopened.

Ms. George, much to Claire’s approval, was asked to leave the school by Sean himself. The two of them continued their relationship for some time I’m told, but eventually they broke it off and she went to a warmer climate. Though I don’t know any of that for sure, she left before I was hired.

Coach Z also stayed with the school for some time before stepping down from his position as the head of the Physical Education department. As far as I’m aware he still lives in the area and he and Jessica go to a local pond every winter where the skate, only now they use real skates instead of running around on their shoes.

Shortly after he asked Ms. George to leave the school and right before Mrs. Snowburn finally passed away Sean began looking for a replacement to the position that I now fill. The largest issue with his search, however, was that he wasn’t just looking for a replacement for the head of the Special Education department he was looking for someone to replace Mrs. Snowburn and all the roles that she had filled. The search didn’t end well and many people either left or were let go when they couldn’t fulfill the role Sean wanted, even if they were more than adequate at fulfilling the role as it was stated on paper. Eventually he gave up and left the school himself and was replaced by the current principle. Sean went on to work in the big city as a one-on-one with troubled children, similar to the work that he should have been doing with Dan. He stops by every year or so to check up on the progress of the school as well as Jessica and Johnny. He comes here because, by this point, I am the only he can find and, really, the only one that wants to talk to him. Though I can’t say he is the example of a good person, he has since found ways to redeem himself in my eyes and I have no problems talking with him and hearing what he has to say about his students. He clearly enjoys his job, though I feel he blames himself a little for Mrs. Snowburn’s death and will never forgive himself. I guess that’s why he works at the learning center.

It was during one of his visits that I truly learned how badly Sean felt for his actions. I was sitting at my desk writing notes on papers and grading assignments while Sean looked around the room at the art my students had made over the last week. “Have you ever been asked why you do it?”

I looked up from my work and sat there for a second trying to comprehend the question. “Do what?”

“Teach. Have you been asked why you teach before?”

Leaning back in my chair I smiled. “Not exactly, but kind of. I was asked why I wanted to work with children.” Sean nodded profusely that that was exactly what he meant when he said ‘teach.’ “The answer I’ve always given was because they’re the ones that need my help.” While it was truth that that was the answer I gave, it was a copout answer. I knew it and apparently Sean did as well.

“No, I don’t mean are there teachers. Of course children need our help, they’re children. I want to know why you teach.” Before I could answer Sean pulled down one of the drawings and showed it to me. It was a drawing of a huge dinosaur all colored in with purple. It towered over a single palm tree and shared the shape of a Brachiosaur, one of the dinosaurs we had studied that week. The assignment had been to draw a dinosaur, but I purposefully hadn’t been specific on limitations. Many of the students spent time drawing real dinosaurs that were as close to the real interpretations as they could manage but a few simply didn’t want to draw ‘real’ dinosaurs and made special ones that had their own names. This one had large feathery wings on its back, though the student who made it didn’t place a name and I had forgotten it but that point. “This is why I teach children. Their innocence and creativity, I teach because they have an imagination that no adult can see.” He took a good look at the picture and pinned it back onto the wall. “You know that Ms. George and I didn’t have sex the whole time we were out of the nurse’s room.” I didn’t move as he looked at me, whatever he was going to say he was going to say and a nod or a shake of my head wasn’t going to change that. “A lot of the time we sat in the various rooms of the school was spent sitting and talking about the students we had. It became very clear to me that Ms. George’s reason for teaching wasn’t well thought out and as we talked she began to realize more and more that this life just wasn’t for her. It’s why I eventually asked her to leave and why she did without a fuss.

“The conversations also made me think about why I was a principal. I knew all the skills to succeed, sure, I knew the ways to make the school run smoothly, but did I really care? The situation in the storm somewhat shined a light on the truth, though I fought against admitting it for years. Ultimately that hurt the special education students more than anyone else and I decided it was time for a change.

“I chose the learning center I work at now because I wanted to encourage student’s imagination. As a principal I was simply defining lines and making sure the children stayed between them. As a one-on-one I still do that to an extent, but sometimes I allow for a drawing to have wings.” He picked up the backpack he had brought in and walked for the door. “But, I guess you already knew that.” He came back a couple years later, but we’ve never discussed school or children other than Jessica and Johnny. He’d made his peace with me I guess and, for him, there was nothing more to say.