Leaves in the Hall
“I’m Annie, Maria’s mama,” I told the second grader as we stepped out of the classroom into the hall that smelled like Pine-Sol and a lunch hangover. This Renoir girl with gossamer blonde hair and peach cheeks. Her eyes. Blue as the sky. Her eyes. Pewter clouds pushing in.
“I know,” she asked, eyes flicking up under her nearly albino eyebrows. “And you coach soccer too.”
“I do,” I said.
“What do you need?” I asked, soft.
“To sit in your lap.”
The school’s beloved kindergarten teacher had died days before. She’d been the first teacher for most of the kids in the elementary school. She’d guided with love through the maze of how to hold scissors, how to hang up your own coat, how to make friends. She’d taught the parents too: how to let go. She loved hard and wide. She wrote the best Thank You notes. I still have one with Suzy Zoo on one side and her tidy, round handwriting on the other bursting with gratitude, with love. The day after she died the principal asked parents to come be grief support, to be ears and hearts for the kids. Not all of us came and that’s okay. I’m comfortable with grief. My first husband died when I was twenty-eight and pregnant with my son. Back then I lost everything. Back then I had to find a way to a new everything. I’ve said it for years: all that grieving? It’s the source of my superpowers. So I went. To be with littles. To be with growns.
I tucked the second grader’s iridescent hair behind her ear. I held my arms wide in welcome. My mama’s lap is a good lap, and I figured it’s why she picked me to go sit in the hall.
This little Renoir girl. With her girl wisdom. With her stacked up losses already at such a tender age.
“My grandma died,” she whispered.
Breast cancer.
“My aunt too,” she added, her lower lip in quiver.
Breast cancer.
I nodded as tears pooled in the basement of my throat.
Now Mrs. A.
Breast cancer.
And my heart stung. My own kids hadn’t lost a dog yet and here was this little human, already with huge loss. Tiny jolts of ache zipped through me. An electrical current zapped, zapped my heart. Grief lightning.
“You know how people say if someone’s died and then someone else dies,” she started and hiccupped.
“Yes?” I pushed that word out through my pinhole throat, clogged with tears, clogged with grief.
“People say it makes it easier,” she said in a rush, her sky-blue eyes straight at my bark brown eyes. Her sky-blue eyes straight through me.
I nodded and silently ticked off my dead loved ones: my first husband, two grandparents, my best friend from high school. I nodded because my piled-up deaths didn’t make this new death any easier.
“It doesn’t,” she said, tears swimming out.
“It makes it worse,” she said. “Because you know how hard it’s gonna be.”
She said those words and I got the shivers.
She leaned into me. Her trickle tears amped up to monsoon tears. My own tears dripped on the crown of her silky head. We sat like that. Two mourners on an orange kid-sized chair in a long hall. Two hearts. I thought of the platitudes I would never voice: Time heals all wounds. She’s in a better place. It might not make sense now and some day it will. Words that didn’t help me in the belly of my grief. Words I’ll never say.
As our tears slowed, she pulled back and those electric blue eyes pierced me. “I’m going to be okay,” she said. “You’re going to be okay.”
As she said those words, someone opened the outside door at the end of the hall and fall rushed in. A flurry of crimson, butterscotch, and caramel leaves swirled in this mini cyclone. A flurry of untethered maple leaves in a shaft of light like how sunbeams slice the canopy in a forest.
“Look,” she said. “It’s Mrs. A!”
Sparkle light warmed the hall, maybe whispered, “Good morning, Ducklings.” She laughed an elfin laugh.
“Do you want one?” she asked as she launched off my lap and raced to pluck the crackling leaves.
