Say It Plainly

Ms. Dhillon had lost her notebook, and she taught the whole day and set up six parent meetings after it as though she had not lost the one thing in the world with her entire self inside it.

She had torn the room apart at lunch. She had gone through the recycling. She had stood very still in the middle of the classroom and tried to remember the last time she had seen it, and could not, because the last time she had seen it she had been at the window doing her breathing, which she did precisely so she would not have to remember things.

Somewhere in Moose Jaw tonight, a small grey notebook was loose in the world, with her mother in it, and her flinching in it, and every unguarded thing she had never once said out loud, and she did not know whose hands were holding it, and at four o’clock she had to smile at parents and say he’s doing very well six times.

She put the Gill meeting last. She always put Kabir’s mother last, because Kabir’s mother was the parent she was most afraid of, and she had not, until this week, let herself wonder why.

Kabir waited in the hall with a book he was not reading. His mother had told him to sit, and be quiet, and touch nothing, and he was doing all three, which was itself a kind of report card.

Suman came in at four with her chin up and her coat still on.

She kept the coat on the way you keep armour on. She had the notebook in her bag. She had read every word of it twice, and had lain awake with it, and had decided, on the drive over, exactly nothing about what she would do, which for Suman was a state of near-collapse.

“Mrs. Gill. Please.” Ms. Dhillon gestured at the small chair across the desk, the chair all parents were made too big for. “Thank you for coming.”

“Of course.” Suman sat. “How is he. Tell me plainly. You don’t have to make it nice.”

Ms. Dhillon opened her mouth.

“Because I know he talks. I know he argues. I know he says things,” Suman went on, before she could. Her voice was level and her hands were not. “I know what he is at home. I can imagine what he is here. So you can say it plainly. I would prefer it plainly.”

Ms. Dhillon looked at this woman, who had come in braced to be told her son was a problem, braced so hard it was the only thing holding her up, and understood that she was looking at the parent version of a child covering a workbook he had forgotten.

“Would you like to read what I wrote,” she said, “instead of me saying it.”

She turned the report card around.

Suman read it the way she read everything now, badly, waiting for the blow. It was a short comment in a careful hand.

Suman read it twice. She had come armed for disruptive, for does not follow instructions, for we should discuss his behaviour, the whole vocabulary of the verdict she had spent a lifetime ironing to outrun. She had not come armed for this.

“You’re being kind to me,” she said, and it came out like an accusation, because after the week she had had, kindness was the thing she trusted least. “People are kind to me when they’ve decided something about me. When they’ve decided I need it.”

“I’m not being kind,” said Ms. Dhillon. “I don’t have the notebook I’m usually kind out of.” It slipped out before she could iron it, and she flinched, visibly, the exact flinch she had written about not wanting her student to learn.

Something in Suman came loose then. She had come in armoured, and after a week of the worst kind of week, the armour was simply gone, and under it was only the thing she had driven all the way here holding, and no more strength left to keep holding it.