Dear Parents
by Nick Miranda
Dear Parents,
Your child was delicious.
Sincerely,
The Faculty at Riverview Elementary.
* * *
Dan had read the letter more than a dozen times. It was on the school’s letterhead—all very official-looking.
The worst part was that he hadn’t seen Emily since Wednesday, when he put her on the bus taking her and her classmates for a school-sponsored camping trip. If he had opened the letter on a day where he had picked her up from school, he would have tossed it out without more than an aggravated second thought. But her absence was the fertilizer for the seed of insanity that the note had planted in his mind.
Dan loosened his tie with one hand, afraid to let the letter out of his grasp; afraid that if he set it down the words would change. He had to wait for Kelly to come home—needed to show it to somebody, to have another opinion. Kelly would tell him it was a joke and he would believe her. She would call him silly for even having the slightest inkling that the faculty at the elementary school were flesh-eating monsters. She would call one of the other parents in Emily’s class to reassure him. She would poke fun of him for the rest of the night, casually deflating his perceived fear.
But until she got there, Dan felt trapped, isolated. He was aware that it stemmed from his memories of Emily’s mother, Ruth. She had been raped and murdered on her way home from the grocery store. She’d said that she would be right back—and wasn’t. He should have gone with her, should have turned off the damn baseball game and went just for the hell of it—like in college when they would wander around Wal-Mart at two in the morning for no other reason than to do something together. But the Reds had been creeping up on the Braves, scoring three runs in the top of the eighth and bringing the score to within one. A win meant a wild card spot in the playoffs. The grocery list wasn’t that big; couldn’t she handle it without him?
He had succumbed to a masochistic, self-flagellating torturous guilt. He was starting to snap often. If Emily coughed, he had to be talked out of taking her to the emergency room. If she let go of his hand for more than a second, his mind frantically went through all the horrible scenarios resulting in her brutal demise. Just when he really felt that he couldn’t live his life is such a way, he met Kelly during a family therapy session. She meant the world to him and Emily. Having suffered the loss of a brother at a young age, Kelly knew the pain they were suffering and she had practically been running the group when Dan joined. The personal attention she paid him was really the catalyst that cemented his feelings for her. Emily took to her fast and gave Dan the go-ahead to marry her.
When Kelly came in, Dan shoved the letter in her face before she even had a chance to shut the door.
“I need you to read this and tell me what you think,” he said, his voice coming out in a single, rushed wave.
Kelly took the letter and read it. Then read it again. She did not smile like Dan had hoped. She looked at him over the top of the paper, then read it for a third time. She let out a long sigh as she lowered the letter to her side, out of view.
“What is this?” Her tone was flat, careful not to be accusatory.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I opened the mail when I got home and I thought it was something about the camping trip.”
Sensing his eminent, emotional collapse, Kelly reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing tightly.
“Probably just a nasty joke from one of the older kids at the school,” Kelly said.
“I thought about that. But then I started to wonder how they did it.” He began pacing, two steps one way, two the other. “Could a school kid break into the main office and type this up, print it off, and put it in the out-going mail without anyone knowing? Then I started asking myself if any other parents got one, or just us?”
Kelly pulled him to her, embracing. He felt how tense his own muscles were, a subtle trembling in the arms he wrapped around her. She smiled and he realized for the first time that he had said “us” when talking about parents. Had he finally included her into his life so deeply that he considered her Emily’s parent? Emily thought so, calling her Mama-Kelly. But he had to keep an eye on things, make sure she didn’t forget about her real mother.
Dan broke away. He felt better, but his face was pallid and his posture rumpled. She vigorously rubbed his back.
“Come on,” she said, smiling. “We’ll order some Moo Shu and I’ll call Vicky, see if she was pranked, too.”
It was just like Dan had expected from her. She was going to help him, going to fix this.
Kelly had turned her back to Dan when she called Vicky Bollinger so that Dan couldn’t see her face while she spoke. She often did that for his benefit so that he wouldn’t get freaked out if it was bad news. Dan mentally tallied all the little things she knowingly did to ease his stressful condition. All the times she went casually through the paper and pulled out the pages with content he might find disturbing. Sure, his mind spent a few seconds wondering what terrors those missing articles contained, but in the end he forgot about it while reading the drollness of the rest. One of his friends called these actions of censorship, said that Kelly was babying him. Dan called them acts of tenderness.
He could hear Kelly’s part in the conversation with the other woman, a mother of a little boy in Emily’s class. There were lots of “Uh-huh” and “Mmm.” He briefly wished that he could hear what Mrs. Bollinger was saying. Had she gotten a letter as well? Were she and her husband taking it seriously or had they done what Dan should have done and pitched it a second after reading it?
Kelly said “Goodbye,” and turned, hanging up the phone. She tried her best to keep a poker face, letting her eyes stay locked on the molded plastic answering machine next to the phone. Her hair dangled in front of her eyes, blocking Dan’s view of her face.
“Well?” he asked impatiently.
“The Bollingers also got a letter,” she said. Kelly lifted her head and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear that didn’t stay there for more than a second. Her face reminded Dan of a life-like rubber mask—yeah, it looked like Kelly, but there was just enough wrong with the expression that he felt lied to, bothered. She wasn’t taking this as well as she was pretending. “They think it was some kind of joke being played by a student or a janitor, maybe even one of the teachers.”
“But how?”
“The school sends out mass mailings all the time. We get four or five a month about fund-raisers, rule changes, and up-coming events. It wouldn’t be hard for one of the night cleaning crew to print off a fake letter and send it out to the entire enrolled mailing list.”
Her forced casualness bugged Dan. And she wouldn’t look at him, which made him think she was more concerned than she wanted him to know about.
Dan felt the collar of his shirt begin to dampen with nervous sweat, making the fabric feel cold and heavy, like it was slowly tightening around his neck.
Not able to stand it any more, Dan grabbed the letter from the dining room table and walked out of the house. Evening was birthing night quickly. The sky was the blue-gray color of the milk in the bottom of Emily’s cereal bowl after eating one of her sugary, fruity breakfasts. He knew that if he wasn’t able to find a suitable answer by the end of the night he sure as hell wouldn’t be able to sleep—maybe not until Emily came back on Sunday afternoon. If she came back. After all, the letter said that she’d been eaten, hadn’t it?
Across the street, and four houses down, was the Chapman residence. Christine Chapman was the room mother for Emily’s class and often drove her son, Todd, and Emily to school. Dan remembered that she worked for the police as some kind of analytical accountant. Maybe she could help, call in some favors, get a cop—or SWAT—to head up to the campsite and check on the kids. If not, then she could at least use some clout to start an investigation as to the letter’s author. She probably owned a gun—didn’t everyone who worked for the cops have a gun? The thought of stealing the gun crossed Dan’s mind, but he pushed it aside when he realized that he, first, didn’t know what he would do with it, and, second, that he was too much of a coward to actually use it.
Dan knocked on the Chapman’s door, his knuckles rapping out a variety of hurried rhythms. Why weren’t the answering? Was Mrs. Chapman already deep into her frantic search for her own child? Was she, at that very moment, on the phone with the squad commander, organizing the police raid on the campgrounds, strutting through her living room in her pants suit and high heels, talking firmly and authoritatively, plotting the safe return of her son?
Engrossed in his own series of scenarios, Dan didn’t notice the door fly open. The sudden shock sent him jumping back. He tripped on his own feet and stumbled into the railing.
“Christ,” Bob Chapman cried. He paused and waited for Dan to recover himself then said, “What the hell do you want, Dan?”
Dan stepped forward, brandishing the school’s letter like a TV cop showing his badge.
“Did you get one?” he asked.
Chapman squinted at the letter in the softening light. He looked from the letter to Dan, then turned to look over his shoulder. He stepped out on the porch, closing the door quietly behind him.
“Now’s not really a good time, man,” Chapman said. “Christine’s a little upset.” His eyes darted to the letter at Dan’s side, then back up. Dan knew that Chapman had hoped that he hadn’t seen him look.
“What did yours say?” Dan demanded.
“Same thing as yours,” Chapman said.
“Is she doing anything? Is she calling her friends on the force? Has anyone gotten a hold of the principal?”
The door opened and Christine Chapman stepped out. She was pale and her hair hung in knotted clumps—clearly she’d been running her fingers through it many times. Dan could see the stress attached to her like dust on a forgotten curio.
“Ten other parents,” she said, “got letters today. All of them have kids on the camping trip.”
The air thickened in Dan’s lungs. That was most of the families with children on the trip. Were they being targeted because their children weren’t home? If so, then it had to be someone at the school who knew who was going on the trip.
Christine finally looked up and saw Dan. She didn’t need to see the letter in his hand. “You make eleven.”
“And no one got one who didn’t have a kid on the camping trip?” Bob Chapman asked. Christine stepped closer to him and his arm hooked around her waist.
“Not that I’ve been able to tell,” she said softly.
Dan got the sense that he should go, that the Chapman’s needed each other. Silently Dan left their porch and started back home. He had just crossed the street when Kelly came flying out of their house, her eyes wide. She grasped him by both elbows, and took a second to catch her breath. Dan felt her heartbeat in her thumbs as they pressed into his arm—it couldn’t be thumping that fast from just the short run.
“Just got a call,” Kelly said, her words kicked out of her mouth in favor of big gulps of air. “It was the principal—some kind of prerecorded message.”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t know. The machine got it. I heard some of it, but I was too far away."
* * *
“Hello, parent,” the principal’s voice said. It came through the small speaker of the answering machine with a hollow, plastic sound. “We’ve gotten many distressing phone calls regarding a letter that some of you have received today. Let me assure that the letter is completely—.” Dan gripped the edge of the counter as the words were erased by the ringing of the school’s bell in the background. The clanging lasted several heartbeats, each one, Dan considered his last. “I hope that clears everything up,” the principal concluded. “Have a good evening.”
The machine clicked and was silent.
Dan looked at Kelly. Her face was a mirrored expression of confused shock.
“I didn’t hear what he said,” Kelly whispered.
Dan played the message twice more, and each time the important part was buried under the startling claxon. Kelly touched his hand, he knew, just to quell the coming flood of paranoia.
“Are they kidding?” he demanded. “I’m supposed to hear that and feel comforted?”
“Please, Dan,” she soothed. “Think about it rationally. I know you don’t want to hear the word ‘coincidence,’ but isn’t it at least sort of likely that things are turning out this way by chance?”
How could she ask that? It was nearly impossible that so many random events could transpire to create such a coincidence. Was he really supposed to believe that someone hacked into the school’s system and printed a fake letter? That the letter was mailed, by chance, to just those parents who had children at the school-sponsored camping trip? That a call from the principal of the school was accidentally diluted by the ringing school bells—at nearly six in the evening?
“You’re getting that look,” Kelly said. “You’re going to make yourself nuts. I wish I could convince you that on Sunday, the school bus will pull up and that Emily will come hopping down the steps.”
Dan stepped into her embrace, gripping her as if he were afraid she would be yanked away from him at any second.
“This is going to be a long weekend,” he sighed.
* * *
The rest of Friday and most of Saturday bled together. Dan stayed on the couch watching a variety of the worst television imaginable, trying to get his mind on Emily’s safety. He subjected himself to game shows, to mindless sporting events, even popular, scripted reality shows. Though his eyes took in the images, Dan’s brain refused to process them. Kelly made several attempts to encourage him to do something—anything—but sit there and fester in the insanity he was making for himself.
But Dan didn’t think he was crazy. He couldn’t separate himself from the creeping nastiness of his imagination, but he could differentiate between the plausible and the impossible. It was more than plausible that the letter was a real communication. It was even quite possible that the principal’s message was precisely timed to coincide with the blaring school bell, to distort the information that desperately desired. But it was impossible for Dan to shatter the glass prison of his overprotective subconscious. Kelly tried, and he appreciated her efforts, but he really would have preferred to be left alone.
His mind was constricted with memories of his bad decisions that had ended even worse than he could have thought possible. Naturally, he thought of Ruth. He recalled the look of genuine disappointment on her face as she looked over her shoulder at him, just before she closed the door and went out to die. He thought about the woman he dated just after Ruth’s death—how guilty he felt bringing her home for Emily to see, like the woman was some kind of animal in a zoo. Emily had looked right into the woman’s eyes and said, “I don’t think I want you for my new mommy.” The woman had left and never spoken to Dan after that. And then he’d met Kelly in therapy. And his decisions seemed to turn around and actually be the right ones.
Until he put Emily on that bus.
She hadn’t wanted to go, but Dan and Kelly thought it might be good for her. A chance to building intrapersonal relationships, they called it. As she got on the bus, she gave Dan a similar look to the one her mother had. Immediately Dan wanted to yank her down the steps and cradle her and kiss her and tell her she was never allowed to leave his arms again. But the firm pressure of Kelly’s hand on his shoulder seemed to override his better judgment. Then the doors closed and the bus rolled away, Emily’s small, round face smiling warily at him as it grew smaller and smaller, then indistinguishable.
Dan turned off the television and rubbed the rough stubble on his cheeks and chin.
“You ready to go?” Kelly asked.
Dan was already on his feet, his hands firmly clutching the car keys in his pocket. He strode briskly to the car and waited impatiently for Kelly to catch up. He drove a little more recklessly than he normally would have, but the bus was due back at the school in fifteen minutes.
Dan pulled into the parking lot and saw several cars parked at awkward, disjointed angles, some with the doors still hanging open.
“Looks like a scene from a zombie movie,” Kelly said, trying get him to laugh. In response, he grunted. “You know, when the people come across a freeway clogged with cars?” Dan found a spot set apart from some of the other cars. He got out. He didn’t wait for Kelly, but had to keep himself from running towards the throng of other parents.
The pack of parents were mostly silent, some whispering sibilantly to one another, but it was loud with nervous movement. There was the hushed rasp of rubbing cloth, the brash crack of a nervous cough, and the surprising shock of a sneeze. Dan waded into them, most looking down at their shoes. The tension was palpable. They had each gotten a strange letter stating that their child had been eaten. Dan looked over at the Chapmans. Bob looked at him with a strange coldness. Christine was sallow and had dark circles under her eyes. Dan hoped he didn’t look that bad. But his heart went out to her—he knew exactly what she was feeling, the horrors going through her brain at the speed of synapse snap.
Dan looked over his shoulder at Kelly. She was standing away from the rest, arms folded. She smiled when she saw him looking at her. She gave a quick, comforting nod.
“Here it comes!” The voice belonged to a woman.
In unison, the parents turned their heads. Dan saw a shimmering yellow blob coming down the street. There was a collective sigh that he could almost feel rustling around him like a soft breeze.
The bus got closer and closer and finally made the turn into the parking lot of the school. It came up to the knot of people as if it were sizing them up. It stopped and the doors opened.
The only thing that came out was a rush of hot, dry summer silence and the faint odor of roasted meat.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
