Part 3: The Teacher Must Face Her Actions.
The kitchen went deadly silent.
“Tell me everything,” I said, even though every instinct in my body wanted to cover my ears and run.
“He was just sitting at the back table,” Sarah whispered softly. “Ms. Bell gave him the blank paper and told him to apologize to you for ruining the Mother’s Day art wall. But he didn’t ruin it! Tyler did.”
“Tyler?”
Sarah nodded. “Tyler spilled purple paint all over the nice cards, and one ripped. Randy only had sticky glue on his hands because he was helping me fix my project.”
I looked down at the heartbreaking apology note again. The penciled letters were uneven. Some words were pressed so dark and hard it had nearly torn the cheap paper.
“He kept saying, ‘My mom knows I don’t lie,’” Sarah whimpered. “But Ms. Bell told him that even good kids can disappoint their mothers if they don’t take responsibility.”
My fingers tightened into fists around the paper.
My sweet, innocent son had left this world thinking I might believe he was a bad boy.
“What happened right after that?” I whispered.
Sarah pressed a little fist firmly against the center of her chest.
“He said, ‘Sarah, it’s doing the squished thing again.’”
I gripped the back of my wooden chair. “Again?”
She nodded, crying much harder now. “He told me his chest hurt before, but he said I couldn’t tell you because you had the bad flu and needed to rest.”
My knees nearly gave out from under me.
“He said moms think kids don’t know things, but they totally do,” she sobbed. “He said he would tell you he was sick right after Mother’s Day, when the unicorn was finally finished.”
“Oh, Randy…”
“I told him to drink some water,” Sarah cried, her small shoulders heaving. “My daddy used to say that when my tummy hurt. Drink water and wait a minute. I didn’t know human hearts were different.”
I dropped to the floor and knelt right in front of her.
“Sarah, look at me.”
“It didn’t help him!”
“No, baby,” I said, pulling her into my arms. “It wasn’t medicine. But it was pure kindness. You were a good friend.”
Her little face completely crumpled into my shoulder.
“Then he tried to put the unicorn away in his bag,” she whispered into my neck. “He said you couldn’t see the sad sorry note before you got the present. Then his chair scraped really loud, and he just fell over.”
I covered my mouth to muffle my sob.
“Everybody screamed,” Sarah recalled, trembling. “Ms. Bell kept yelling his name really loud. Then the paramedics came.”
Her voice dropped to a haunting whisper.
“I remember their big boots. They were black and shiny. One stepped right on Randy’s purple yarn. I wanted to move it, but Ms. Reeves yelled at us to stay back against the wall.”
“Is that when you grabbed his backpack?”
Sarah nodded against me. “After they put him on the bed with wheels and took him away. His backpack was still kicked under the table. Randy told me to guard the unicorn until Mother’s Day, and the bad sorry note was inside.”
“So you took it.”
“I thought if the grown-ups found it, they might throw it away or lie about it.”
She pulled back and looked at me with scared, fiercely loyal eyes.
“So I guarded it.”