Three

It's a bit like a sixth sense, I suppose. Knowing you're being watched without actually seeing who's doing the watching. That was the feeling in the minutes before I woke up on Friday morning. Something was there. Some kind of presence. Taking me in, checking me out.

I opened my eyes. I was right. Only inches from my face was a nose that belonged to my seven-year-old daughter, Rachel. The other half of the bed was empty. Bonnie'd probably already been up an hour, slipped out without waking me. I'd slept in the last three mornings because it had taken me so long to finally nod off, and even when I finally did, I kept waking up after seeing bits and pieces of Mark LeDrew flying through the air.

"Hi, honey," I said.

"It worked," Rachel said, eyeing me through her glasses. "I was sending you a message from my brain to your brain to wake up."

"I'll be darned," I said, raising my head from the pillow. "You have a rare gift."

Her face brightened. "You got me something?"

"Not that kind of gift. A talent."

She looked only mildly disappointed. "I was also reading your dreams."

I had to hope she was not as skilled at that as she was at sending me a wake-up call. No seven-year-old should be able to see what was in my head.

"You were dreaming about cheeseburgers," she said.

"You sure you're not just reading your own dreams?"

She smiled. "I can read minds, too."

"Have you read your mom's this morning?"

Rachel smile cracked. "No."

I shouldn't even have asked. It was an underhanded way to try to find out where I stood this morning, and it wasn't fair to drag Rachel into it.

"But Mom did say you should take the weekend off and not go back to school until Monday, and I concur."

"Concur?" I said.

Her parents were both educators, so I shouldn't have been surprised Rachel used, on occasion, a more broad vocabulary.

A glance at the bedside table clock told me it was closing in on eight. "Get ready for school," I said, and Rachel departed. Bonnie and I had kept her out of her second-grade class Tuesday and Wednesday, worried there might be some kind of fallout from the events of Monday, that maybe some reporters would show up at her school, attempt to ask her questions about what her father had been through. Bonnie, an elementary school principal—not at the one Rachel attended—had taken a couple of days herself, but returned to work yesterday, leaving me on my own.

I'd walked Rachel to school yesterday. I didn't want to let her out of my sight right now, and even before Monday's incident we'd been worried about Rachel crossing the street, what with all the truck traffic lately. I think it's fair to say she was almost as reluctant to let me out of her sight. She'd almost lost her father four days ago, and attempts to shield her from what had happened had been fruitless. That first night, she had slept between Bonnie and me, afraid something might happen to either one of us by morning. Trouble was, I was the one waking up in a cold sweat, startling her and Bonnie, so the next night she went back to her own room.

I'd decided not to wait until Monday to return to Lodge High. I'd tidied up the boat that sat on a trailer in our driveway, searched through some old boxes in the garage and thrown out three bags' worth of stuff, gone through the fridge and pitched anything that was past its expiry date. I needed people to talk to, even if the one thing they were going to want to talk about was the one thing I didn't want to talk about.

I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I had small bandages on the left side of my neck and forehead. I'd been hit by shattered glass that had blown out of the double doors when Mark LeDrew's dynamite vest went off. It could have been worse... I mean, for me. It couldn't have been worse for Mark. It was a wonder I hadn't ended up dead, or at the very least blind.

When Mark tripped, he was facing away from me, and so was his explosive vest. Investigators determined that only one of the sticks detonated—Mark's reputation as a fuckup extended to his skills at wiring a bomb. But still, one stick packed a punch, blowing him to bits and sending shock waves out in all directions. I had already started to turn away when the glass panels in the door shattered, sending shards my way.

I showered, keeping the water off the bandages as much as possible, shaved and dressed, and threw on a sport jacket, which amounted to my school uniform. It was not, needless to say, the same one I'd been wearing Monday. That bloodied jacket had been taken by the forensic team, and even if they ever offered to return it, I didn't want it. It was not going to the dry cleaner's.

When I got to the kitchen, Bonnie was sitting at the table sipping her coffee and pretending to read the news on her iPad. She would normally have left for work by now, but was clearly waiting to see me before departing. She barely looked up.

"Hey," I said.

"You're really going back today." Not a question. More a statement of disapproval.

I grabbed a cup and went to the coffee maker. "Back on the horse, and all that."

"You don't have to be a hero. You've proved that."

I didn't hear anything praiseworthy in that. More like exasperation. According to Bonnie, this was my failing. A recidivist rescuer. I'm not saying she was wrong. I had a history that predated my encounter with Mark LeDrew.

She continued. "I'm not saying don't go back. I just thought, it's Friday. Go back Monday. Then it's a whole week. You heard what Marta said. It's like when cops are involved in a traumatic incident. They'd take more time before returning to duty, and they're trained for this kind of thing. They'd probably go for counseling, too."

Marta Harper, a detective with the Milford police, was Bonnie's sister, and one of the first on the scene after LeDrew died. She'd been to the house a couple of times since the event, once in an official capacity, and once as a concerned sister-in-law.

She'd also been able to tell me a little more about what LeDrew'd been up to since leaving Lodge High. He never did get his diploma despite efforts by our principal, Trent, to steer him into courses he'd be able to, if not ace, pass. His first job was at a fast-food franchise and he was fired from that for being belligerent with customers. He got a job with the city's roads department for six months until he was laid off due to budget cutbacks. After that, he worked for a quarry up around Naugatuck. That would have been where he became familiar with dynamite, and it was believed he'd stolen the four sticks from there at some point—maybe even after he'd left—and studied online videos to figure out how to make his own device.

After he was fired from the quarry for consistent lateness, he had a series of other gigs. Stocking shelves on the midnight shift at a local supermarket, loading and unloading trucks at Home Depot. But Mark didn't follow directions well, didn't anticipate what needed to be done next, lacked an ability to focus on whatever task was at hand.

He lived with his parents and when he was between jobs spent most of his time in the basement watching slasher movies like the Saw and Hostel franchises. He'd become depressed, by all accounts, and had taken to writing online posts about how the world had screwed him over, how everybody was desperate for him to fail, that perverts and pedophiles were running amok, and one of these days he was going to find a way to settle some scores. He did not, in any of his diatribes, mention by name anyone he sought revenge against.

I hadn't set foot in Lodge High since the police—Marta among them—finished questioning me at the school Monday and the paramedics tended to my injuries. Bonnie feared my return would be traumatic, and there was no reason to doubt that. I sure as hell had been traumatized. I spent the balance of Monday in a state of shock. I had a hard time telling the police exactly what had happened. The blast had jumbled my recollection.

Trent was able to fill in some of the details. I hadn't been wrong when I sensed someone was behind me, watching my interaction with LeDrew. My principal was just inside the school office doors, and while he hadn't heard all of the conversation, he got the general drift.

Maybe the most surprising thing was, Trent had been prepared to take action. And thank Christ he hadn't.

School shootings had become so widespread that Trent, contrary to the board's wishes and without their knowledge, had kept a handgun locked in the bottom drawer of his desk. When many on the far right had suggested arming teachers, Trent, a centrist, had never been one to immediately dismiss the idea. But I'd had no idea he kept a weapon on the premises, or that he had gotten it from his desk and was preparing to use it on Mark LeDrew.

In one of our conversations since the incident—Trent had come by the house to see me on Tuesday—he told me he'd been taking the gun back and forth between home and the school for the better part of two years. He said he'd considered shooting LeDrew, but wasn't sure he could hit him while missing me. Had he managed a clean shot, LeDrew would only have been a few inches from me when his thumb came off the button, instead of several feet.

We came under a nationwide media spotlight.

CNN, NBC—an entire alphabet of networks—had wanted to interview me, but I'd turned down all requests, referring them to Trent.

This is what he'd told Anderson Cooper over a Zoom link:

"It was a horrible, horrible thing, no question. Our hearts go out to that young man's family and what they must be going through now. But it could have been much worse. If it were not for the brave actions of teacher Richard Boyle, for his quick thinking, for the calm manner in which he handled the situation, I just... I shudder to think what might have happened. Our school got off lucky that day. God was watching out for us."

I didn't know Trent to be a religious man, and doubted the LeDrew family felt the same way about our heavenly father.

I'd done my best to relate to the police what Mark had said to me about Herb Willow, some unkind words about our guidance counselor, Sally Berwick, and the cryptic reference to a character from a science fiction/horror film, which made no sense to any of us. A lawnmower reference didn't sound all that ominous, although I had a memory of a scene in a Stephen King novel where a policeman got run over by one.

What little Mark had said about Herb sounded credible. I'd heard him bad-mouth kids, to their faces and behind their backs. Were Herb's insults a self-fulfilling prophecy? Even without Herb's negativity, Mark LeDrew wasn't destined to become a rocket scientist. Looking back, it was hard not to think he'd had a learning disability or psychological issue no one bothered to diagnose.

Mark's grudge against Sally was less clear, but from what I'd heard, she'd followed Herb's trail of breadcrumbs, steering the kid down a career path that didn't require a genius-level IQ. But unlike Herb, Sally was well intentioned. She'd have done what she believed was best for Mark.

Bonnie, bringing me back to the present, said, "I could take today off. They'd understand. Mitch could take the lead." Her vice principal. "We could pull Rachel from school, take the boat up to the lake, find a place to stay, make a long weekend of it."

This was a generous offer, considering how things were between Bonnie and me. It had been building for a while. She blamed my parents, both long gone, whom I never seemed capable of pleasing despite my best efforts. Said I kept looking for approval from others, going beyond what anyone would reasonably expect.

It was pure dime-store psychology, but I was willing to concede there might be something to it. The evidence was overwhelming. Sending money to my down-on-his-luck cousin without talking it over with Bonnie first. Disappearing on a Saturday afternoon to help an inept, handicapped neighbor repair a busted fence when I was supposed to be taking Rachel to the movies. Inviting a troubled student to drop by the house to talk and being unable to find my wallet after she left. I had to cancel all my cards.

"You can't get every kitten out of every tree," Bonnie liked to tell me.

It's not like Bonnie wasn't kind and generous and empathetic. She was all those things, just not to a fault. She wouldn't have been an effective principal without those qualities. But she understood we all have limits, and that we have to tend to our own before overextending ourselves. And she was having a particularly hard time with what I'd done Monday.

"You could have locked your door, called the police, stayed with your kids," she'd said. "But you ran toward the danger. We could have lost you. You're not James Bond. You're not Jason Bourne. You're not even my sister. You're a goddamn high school English teacher."

The best excuse I could come up with? It seemed like a good idea at the time. And at some level, she knew, had she been in the same situation, she might have done the same thing. Run to that door and tried to stop a kid with a bomb from getting into the building. But even acknowledging that, she couldn't shake the fact that she had nearly lost me. No matter how much my supposedly selfless actions annoyed her, I know she didn't want that.

Rachel had picked up on the tension between us, and not just in the last few days. She'd overheard the arguments, particularly after I sent three thousand dollars to my cousin Stan when he got fired from his meatpacking job in Duluth. I'd told him it was a onetime thing, and I'd stuck to that, but that hadn't made Bonnie any happier.

So Bonnie coming up with the idea of taking off today for a long weekend was a nice, conciliatory gesture. But I shook my head.

"If I don't walk back into that school today, I don't know whether I'll be able to do it Monday."

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. "Okay, then," she said.

We usually left for work at the same time. Bonnie would get into her Mitsubishi crossover, usually taking Rachel and dropping her off at her school along the way, and I'd get into my Subaru Forester, which was parked closer to the street because the boat—a sixteen-footer with a fifty-horsepower Merc outboard bolted to the transom—sat on its trailer up close to the garage.

As I was getting into my car, Jack Marshall, our next-door neighbor, was coming out his front door and heading for his van. He'd been to the house after the incident to offer congratulations-slash-condolences-slash-thanks, and his wife, Jill (yes, that's right, Jack and Jill), sent over a cherry pie, because nothing helps you get past witnessing someone blow up like pastry.

Okay, that's dickish. People meant well, and didn't know what to say. I mean, what would I have said to someone in the same situation?

Jack offered a thumbs-up just as a fully-loaded dump truck rumbled down the street and past our houses. Jack gave it a scornful, disapproving shake of the head. There'd been a regular stream of trucks going by lately. The excavation for some new apartment complex a few streets over was underway, and the trucks loaded with fill had been a regular thing of late.

Rachel hopped into Bonnie's car and I got behind the wheel of mine. Once we were both on the street, pointed in different directions, we usually glanced in our rearview mirrors and waved to each other.

Bonnie did not wave this morning.

I had sent a text to Trent the night before to let him know I was coming back today.

Use the main door, he wrote back. West entrance still being repaired. Even if that hadn't been the case, I wouldn't have been entering the school that way. I'd be avoiding that set of doors for as long as possible. Maybe forever.

For more mornings than I could count, I'd pulled into this staff parking lot, but today felt like a first time. This was not the same school I'd entered a thousand times before.

I'd almost died here. I'd watched someone die here.

I pulled into my spot, killed the engine, hit the button to retract my seat belt, and went to reach for the door handle.

And I began to shake.