The Evening News Read Free Page B

look out the windows too, but she pushes the five of us away.
    No, she says. I don’t want any of you to see this.
    We watch her watching. Then we hear the siren of a police car. We watch our mother make the sign of the Cross. Then we hear a shot. Another. I look at my sisters and brothers. They are crying. Worried, frightened, I begin to cry too.
    Did it come near you? our mother asks us. Did it touch you? Any of you? Linda reads her lips. She means the funny dog. Or does she mean the speeding automobile with its lights off? The Ohio doctors? The boy behind the alley gate? The shards of broken glass? The wolf surrounded by butterflies? The ten-and-a-half-pound baby?
    Diana, the oldest, speaks for us. She says that it did not.
    Our mother smiles. She sits with us. Then our father is with us. Bob cracks a smile, and everybody laughs. Alfie gives a bark. The seven of us sit closely on the sofa. Safe.
    That actually happened, but not exactly in the way that I described it. I’ve heard my mother tell that story from time to time, at times when she’s most uneasy, but she has never said what it was that she saw from the front windows. A good storyteller, she leaves what she has all too clearly seen to our imaginations.
    I stand in the corner of this room, thinking of her lying now in the hospital.
    I pray none of us looks at that animal’s face.

The Eyes of Children
    The two seventh-grade girls came running to the playground, their pink cheeks streaked with tears, the pleated skirts of their navy-blue uniforms snapping in the wind. It was a windy Friday. Some of the children looked at the sky to see if it would rain. They gathered in loose bunches by the gate near Sister Immaculata, the sixth-grade teacher, her skirts swirling like a child’s pennant caught in a stiff breeze. The black folds of her habit whipped away behind her, flapping toward the gate and the alleyway, now shifting as the wind shifted, as she turned to face the wind. Dry leaves and scraps of paper whirled in circles on the ground beneath the basketball hoops. Dust stung the children’s eyes. Not even Patrick Riley, the tallest eighth-grader and captain of the basketball team, risked trying a shot against the wind. He sat on the parish basketball against the fence, flanked by his teammates who chewed their fingernails or stood, hands in pockets, turning into the wind like Sister Immaculata.
    Gino Martini, a dark seventh-grader, knew he would have tried a shot. He stood near the players, fighting a yawn, his skinny arms folded across his chest. If he had the ball, he’d put it up. The ball would fall cleanly through the chain net, and everyone would cheer him. A yellowed sheet of newspaper rose suddenly in the air and slammed into the playground fence, spreading flat against the weave of chain link. Gino wassleepy from serving the week’s 6:45 morning Masses. He stared at a light-haired girl whose name he didn’t know, watching how the wind pressed her skirt back against her legs. The blonde girl was pretty and stood all by herself, but Gino was shy and she was an eighth-grader. The only seventh-grade boys the eighth-grade girls talked to were the guys on the school team. Gino had wanted to be on the team, but his father insisted he work after school, to learn responsibility, the value of a dollar. His mother insisted he serve God by being an altar boy. He had to obey. But no one knew him. The pretty girl didn’t look at him, and Mrs. Bagnola and Sister Bernadette walked past her toward Sister Immaculata, and Mrs. Bagnola looked at her wristwatch and shook her head. The wind blew. Traffic rushed by in the street. Someday, Gino thought, I’ll be part of something wonderful someday. Then everyone heard the cries of the two girls who ran inside the fence bordering the playground, and the girls grabbed the arms of their teachers, and the children crowded around them, pushed by the wind.
    â€œThe church!” shouted Donna