Caitlin Horrocks
teacher
Nine years after he was a student in my fourth-grade class, Zach Nowak threw a brick off an I-75 overpass. It smashed straight through the windshield of a white Subaru into the driver’s face. She lived long enough to be brought to the hospital where my ex-sister-in-law was a nurse. I’d been divorced for almost five years, but Helen had stayed closer to me than to her brother. “He was a jerk,” she’d say. “The new one’s dumb as a box of rocks. Even he knows he made a mistake.” I was skeptical on that count—he’d never tried to come back to me, or even apologize. But I appreciated Helen’s lie.
We met up for dinner every few weeks, mostly at The Thirsty Sturgeon, the only restaurant worth eating at anywhere near Walleye Lake. No one lived here for the food. Or the walleye, really. Or the sturgeon. Mostly, we lived here because we’d always lived here, in the forested swath of north-central Michigan that everyone else drove straight through on I-75. The family in the Subaru had been pressing north, planning to stay overnight in Mackinaw City and take the first ferry over to the island to do the usual: horse-drawn carriages and bike rentals and fudge. The brick came down at 9:30 pm, just after sunset.
Our first dinner together, after the brick, I thought Helen was bringing it up the way any of us in town might: a terrible thing had happened in a very small place, and we worried at it like a rash, the scratch of “what was he thinking?” and “that poor family.” I hadn’t realized that Helen had been working in the ER when the family was brought in. “We’re not an official trauma center,” she said. “We’re not supposed to see things like that.”
After we ordered, she told me just a little of what she’d seen, how the husband, who’d been in the front passenger seat, had had pieces of his wife’s face on his clothes. Their kids had been strapped in the backseat, unharmed except for what they’d seen. I understood that she wasn’t saying any of it to horrify me, or impress me, but because she needed to say it to someone.
When the server came with our food she ordered two whiskey sours, both for her, although she usually nursed one beer all evening. “Was he in your class ever?” she asked me, doing the math. Zach Nowak was eighteen, barely, when he threw the brick. I’d been teaching at Walleye Lake’s only elementary school for fifteen years.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What was he like? If you remember.”
“I remember.” He seemed like the kind of kid who might someday throw a brick off an overpass, is what he seemed like. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding either flippant, or as if I should have done something to stop him.
I was sure we all remembered him, every single person who’d ever been in a classroom with Zach Nowak. But we’d also known crooked kids who turned into straight arrows, or at least into adults who held down a job, went home and watched TV, and didn’t make trouble for anyone else. We’d known sweet kids who went the other way. Life is long and strange and none of us sees what God does.
But what I’d seen in Zach had scared me. When other kids angered him, he didn’t yell or hit. He waited until they were distracted and then he took his revenge. It wasn’t always violent. He liked pissing on things: people’s backpacks, books, faces. During one winter, when the hallway was lined with snowboots, he’d walked along spraying the whole row of them.
“Honestly, he was creepy,” I said. “But—kids. You have to believe in them. You have to assume there’s time for them to turn out okay in the end. If you can’t reach them, maybe someone else can.”
Once Zach had flagged me down during a math test. I laid one palm flat on his desk while we spoke. He stabbed me in the back of the hand with his sharpened pencil as hard as he could. When the principal asked him why, he said I made the test too hard. Zach got a week’s suspension. After the week, he was back.
“What did you do after that?” Helen asked. “Helped him via megaphone? I wouldn’t have been willing to get within arm’s length.”
I mostly hadn’t helped him, was the real answer. I’d ignore his waving arm as long as I could. At parent-teacher conferences, I’d thought I might discover that the parents were neglectful or cruel in some obvious way that I could report, and whatever was messing up this kid could start to get fixed. But the parents, when they came, were tidy and polite and kind. Which doesn’t, of course, always mean anything. But then they started telling me everything they’d tried, every kind of therapist they’d already been to see, driving three hours down to Lansing for appointments. “Don’t give up on him,” they begged. “We know he’s a difficult kid. Just please don’t give up.”
Of course I wouldn’t, I said. He was just a child. And maybe if I’d managed to be kinder to him, he would have risen to the kindness, turned toward it like a plant and flowered. I watched Helen demolish her napkin, tearing it into small strips, and felt like maybe I could have spared her this, like she was one more person Zach had managed to hit with that brick I hadn’t stopped him from throwing.
Speaking to the police, Zach didn’t pretend he hadn’t understood, what brick + overpass + windshield + driver might mean. He was just curious, he said, just messing around, but he said it like a toddler who looks straight at you before pouring his milk all over the floor. A toddler is old enough to understand upturned cup + milk + floor: he just wants to watch it happen. Zach was arrested when he drove back to the same overpass, that same night, to do it again.
“It was probably for the best,” Helen said, “that she didn’t make it. I’m not supposed to say that. I’m not even supposed to think it. But the injuries she’d sustained…”
“Zach was scary,” I said. “From the moment he started school. Before, probably. We weren’t supposed to think that. But he was.”
The last time I spoke to Zach he was thirteen and buying a yellow pouch of Sour Patch Kids at Walgreen’s. He was ahead of me in line, and I hoped he wouldn’t look backwards: I was buying tampons and a bottle of dandruff shampoo. Through the sliding doors, he was waiting for me outside. “Hey Ms. Z,” he said, the name I asked the kids to call me. My married name was very long and Polish and had never seemed worth it.
“Hi Zach.”
What’s dandruff?”
“Not really your business,” I said first, then felt childish. You’re an educator, I thought. I wasn’t going to be a wife for much longer by then, and after four miscarriages I knew I might never be a mother. But I was still an educator. So I educated. “Dry scalp. It gets itchy.”
“Where’s your itch, Ms. Z?” he asked, and smiled like he was ten years older.
I shook my head and started walking. “You don’t have your car, Ms. Z?”
I’d walked, because it was autumn and the weather was going to turn any day but hadn’t yet, and I was grateful for the warmth. My house was a quick walk through a patch of woods behind the drugstore. It was township land, the trails no more than deer paths. It spit out at the end of my street, and was so familiar to me it didn’t occur to me that I should stick to the road. But then Zach was following me through the trees, no one else around.
“Ms. Z, are you still Ms. Z? Or are you something else now?” My husband had left me three months before, and Walleye Lake was so small that everyone knew it.
“I’m still Ms. Z to you.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Can I call you Trisha, Ms. Z? Since I’m not at your school anymore?”
I’m still not sure how he knew my first name. “No, you can’t call me that.”
He kept following me. At first it was just his footsteps on the path, crunching through the autumn leaves, and then it was “Hey Trisha.” Over and over: Hey Trisha, hey Trisha, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey Trisha, hey. Hey Trisha, hey Trisha, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey Trisha, hey. Hey Trisha, hey Trisha, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey Trisha, hey. Hey Trisha, hey Trisha, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey Trisha.
This went on for half a mile. I didn’t see or hear anyone else. My lungs got tight, my breath fast and shallow. Sweat trickled down my sides. I wound the plastic drugstore bag tighter around my left hand. Finally I stopped dead on the path. I’d seen a gray rock half-covered in leaves and bent to grab it. I’d planned to rise in one smooth motion, rock raised, but it was almost too heavy, almost too big to hold in one hand, and I staggered a little before hefting it up and over my right shoulder like a baseball.
For a moment he looked startled, and then he grinned. “You’re not going to throw that at me,” he said. “You’re a teacher.” Puberty had barely gotten started on him. He was still shorter than me and probably fifty pounds lighter. His voice was high and thin. Was I really going to aim at a child like he was some stray dog? It would be an admission that I was afraid of a thirteen-year-old boy, still a boy, still with his whole future, supposedly unwritten, ahead of him.
I didn’t throw the rock, but I didn’t put it down. All the way home I carried it, cradled it in the crook of my elbow as I unlocked the front door and dove inside. He waited at the bottom of the drive, as if politely making sure I got home safely. He stood out there a few minutes longer, then walked away.
“You can’t save everyone,” Helen said, but I could tell she was still thinking about the woman in the driver’s seat with the obliterated face. She’d shoved the napkin strips aside and started tearing the red-and-white checked paper underneath her fish and chips. When she said it as a nurse it was true, but if I said it as a teacher it would be sacrilege. But it’s true, it’s true, you can’t save everyone. For years I thought that if I’d been the sun, the rain, the patient breath of kindness itself, maybe I could have brought him into flower. But now when I think about that moment in the woods all I can think is that I should have thrown that rock. I should have thrown it as hard as I could, straight into his face.
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the novel The Vexations and the story collection This Is Not Your City. Her stories appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.