One Breath Away

“I had fun,” I protested, though that was pretty much a lie. My childhood consisted of taking care of my parents, who, for reasons still unknown, were completely defeated by life, and trying to stay out of the way of my volatile brother. When Tim and I had Maria I was determined to make her childhood as carefree and joy-filled as mine wasn’t. I think we did a pretty good job of this, at least until the divorce, and even then Tim and I did our best to protect Maria. We didn’t argue in front of her, we didn’t bad-mouth each other, but she knew. How could she not? Even if we didn’t make a big spectacle out of the end of our marriage, she had to have seen my red, swollen eyes, Tim’s tight, forced laughter.

In minutes I pull up to the school and find Chief McKinney already there along with Aaron Gritz—curious, because he isn’t on duty today—trying to keep a small, angry-looking group away from the school’s entrance. Chief McKinney’s deep baritone fills the air. “Go on back to your cars or you are all going to freeze standing out here. We need to find out exactly what’s going on and we can’t do that if we have to concern ourselves with—”

A woman steps forward, waving her cell phone, and in a trembling voice interrupts the chief. “My son just called me from inside and he said there was a man with a gun. Can’t you get them out of there?”

“Based on the information we have,” Chief McKinney says patiently, “we’ve determined that the best response is to contain the area and not send officers into the school at this time.”

“But my seventh grader called and said there were two men,” another woman speaks up.

A man in a dress shirt and tie, no coat, rushes forward. “I heard there’s a bomb threat. Are you evacuating?”

“This is exactly what the problem is,” Chief McKinney says to me in a low voice, pointing first at the school and then the crowd, snowflakes collecting on his bristly gray mustache. “We can’t begin to know what’s going on in there if we’re chasing rumors out here.” He turns his back to the crowd and drops his voice to a whisper. “Meg, dispatch got a call from a man who says he’s inside the building with a gun. Said for everyone to stay out or he’ll start shooting. I want tape and barriers set up around the entire perimeter of the school.” He turns to Gritz. “Aaron, escort everyone about three hundred feet back.

“Okay, folks,” the chief says in a firm but nonconfrontational voice. “Please follow Officer Gritz’s directions now. We need to get to work here. I promise if we have any news to share, we will let you know immediately.”

I know what each of these parents is thinking of. The mass shooting at Columbine. It crossed my mind, too. Columbine changed everything in the way law enforcement responds to these situations. If we had evidence that the perpetrator in the school had started shooting, the chief would have immediately sent in a rapid deployment team to the source of the threat. Thankfully that hasn’t happened in this case. Yet. Because the suspect called dispatch and threatened the students and anyone who entered the building, we were approaching this as a hostage situation, meaning we were going to try to contact the intruder, find out what he wants and attempt to calmly talk our way out of this. The second there is evidence that shooting has started, we’d be in there. But for now, we needed more information.

“Won’t forcing the parents away from here cause a panic?” I ask Aaron in a quiet voice so the crowd won’t hear.

“I think they are already in a panic,” Aaron responds. He is wearing his rabbit-trimmed aviator hat with earflaps and his nose is red from the cold.

Just after my divorce was finalized, I got the police officer position with the Broken Branch Police Department. Aaron was on the interview team. Aaron is fortyish, divorced with two children and very handsome. At the interview Aaron asked me why I wanted to move to such a small community as Broken Branch when I was used to the larger, more urban city of Waterloo. “The fact that Broken Branch is a small, rural community is exactly why I want to settle down here. It’s a perfect place to raise a daughter.” What I refrained from telling the interview team was that I needed distance from Tim and our divorce. Waterloo wasn’t such a big city. Every time I turned a corner I ran into someone who knew my ex-husband, my parents, had been scammed by my brother. Besides, the hours that I worked for the Waterloo Police Force were terrible for a single mother. Broken Branch was only about an hour from Waterloo, close enough for Tim to easily see Maria.

I fell in love with Broken Branch years earlier when Tim and I drove through on our way to Des Moines. We stopped to buy honey from an old man selling jars of the amber liquid out of the back of his pickup truck.

“How did Broken Branch get its name? It’s so unusual?” I asked.

“Now, that is a great story,” the man said as he placed a large glass jar of clover honey, slim honey sticks and homemade beeswax candles carefully into a plastic bag and handed it to Tim. “Most people say it’s because the poor people who first settled here discovered a huge fallen tree over fifty feet long filled with an enormous beehive in it. Thousands and thousands of bees were buzzing inside and around the tree. Wanting the honey inside, they called on the help of an old woman who was known to have a way with bees. The story goes that she walked down to that hollowed-out tree and began singing a strange foreign song and all the bees became silent and followed her as she walked and sang. There were bees in her hair and on her arms, but still she walked and sang. Not one bee stung her. She led the bees to another felled tree down by the creek and the bees created a new home there. The settlers, who were poor and starving, gathered all that honey out of the broken branch and lived off of it for the winter. They were so thankful to the old woman that they offered to name the town after her, but she said that the thanks should lie with the bees and the tree that housed them. So they respected her wishes and named the town Broken Branch.”

I was completely enchanted by the story, and as Tim and I explored the peaceful streets lined with modest homes and towering trees, I knew I would return to Broken Branch. Little did I know that it would be to stay.

Fortunately, I impressed Chief McKinney, Aaron and the rest of the interview team enough for them to offer me the job.

A few months later, I found myself sitting alone with Aaron at a local bar after Broken Branch’s citywide softball tournament where I played first base. I had too much sun, not enough food and two lousy beers, and in the singular most embarrassing moment of my life, I made a halfhearted pass at Aaron. He gently pulled me off of him and told me that he wasn’t interested.

“I’m boring, too serious, aren’t I?” I asked. He looked at me for a very long time.

“No, Meg, you’re not boring, you’re great. It just wouldn’t be a good idea,” he said, and left me standing there. Though a few years have passed since that mortifying encounter, and Aaron has not brought it up once, I still blush bright red whenever I think of that night.

As I return to my car to retrieve a roll of crime tape, once again I feel my phone vibrate. Stuart. He just doesn’t give up. A text this time. I decide to ignore it and begin unraveling the police tape.

I met Stuart last January when Maria and I were cross-country skiing in Ox-eye Bluff. Maria, a novice at skiing, fell down one too many times. The final straw was that after the umpteenth tumble Maria’s skis became tangled in a thorny bramble of twigs at the side of the trail. By the time I freed her, Maria had worked herself into such a snit she refused to put her skis back on or to even walk out of the valley. We sat there for twenty minutes, Maria’s tears freezing against her cheeks, until a skier came gliding down the trail. He swooshed to a stop in front of us “Everything okay?” he asked.

“We’re fine,” I answered. “Just an equipment malfunction. We’re resting up for a few minutes.”

“Your mom can’t keep up with you, can she?” the man said to Maria, eliciting her first smile of the afternoon. “That’s what happens when you get old.” He smiled conspiratorially at her. “People can’t maintain the vigorous pace of us youngsters.”

“Exactly how old do you think I am?” I asked him through narrowed eyes.

“It’s rude to comment on a lady’s age.” He sniffed and then gave me a mischievous smile. “Why don’t you help me get her up,” he said to Maria. “If we leave her here much longer the wolves will start circling.”

I was about to tell him I was obviously fifteen years his junior and could drop a wild animal at two hundred yards with my eyes closed, but to my surprise Maria quickly scrambled to her feet and held out a hand to help me up. “Let’s go, Mom,” she said. “I think I hear howling.”

“There are no wolves in Ox-eye Bluff,” I said, reaching out my hands for the man and Maria to pull me to my feet. “I don’t think there are any wolves in Iowa for that matter. Coyotes, yes. Wolves, no.” The man was tall, at least six foot, fit with a lean face and closely cut brown hair flecked with gray.

He caught me looking and had the decency to blush. “It’s premature.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, raising my eyebrows. Together, the three of us skied to the end of the trail and then hiked our way out of the valley to where my car was parked. We didn’t talk much but I did learn that the man’s name was Stuart Moore and that he was a writer for the Des Moines Observer, the largest newspaper in the state. He also worked into the conversation how he had three grown children and was separated, the divorce held up by his wife.

“You don’t look old enough to have three adult children,” I said in mock disbelief.

“Well, child marriage, you know,” he answered as he clipped my skis onto the top of my car.

“You must have been what? Like twelve?” I played along.

“Something like that.” He laughed.

“What brings you here?” I asked. “Des Moines is an hour and a half from here.”

“I actually live just north of Des Moines, so it’s not quite that far. I’ve skied all over Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ox-eye has some of the best trails and no one else seems to know about it. I almost always have the trails to myself,” he explained.

“Until now,” Maria piped up.

“Until now,” Stuart agreed.

Stuart and I took it slow. At first, anyway. I was still bruised from my divorce and Aaron’s mortifying rebuff and I had Maria to think about. That winter we would run into each other at Ox-eye and end up cross-country skiing, or snowshoeing. In the spring and summer we would, by some unspoken agreement, meet up at Ox-eye to hike the trails. Sometimes with Maria, sometimes not.

The first time Stuart and I slept together was only about two months ago. Maria was spending the weekend at Tim’s house. There wasn’t enough snow for skiing anymore so I invited him back to my house for the first time. Being with Stuart, the way he touched me, the way he tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, made me feel safe and needed. He confided to me how his soon-to-be ex-wife had an affair with one of his colleagues, how it tore him apart, tore his family apart. How the divorce was finally going through. I told him about my work as a police officer in a small town, about Tim and the slow burn of my marriage. We drank too much wine and for three hours I didn’t think of DUIs or meth labs or disputes over fence lines. I didn’t think of Tim or even of Maria. I led Stuart into my bedroom and shut out the rest of the world. For a while I thought that maybe, just possibly, Stuart and I would end up together. How wrong I was. Within a matter of days I learned two crucial things about Stuart: he was married and would do anything to get a story. I don’t think Stuart had this grand plan of using me to get his big scoop. But the opportunity presented itself and Stuart took it.

I finish unwinding the yellow tape, bright and almost cheerful against the whiteness of the snow, if not for the bold black words declaring Police Line Do Not Cross.

Will

That morning Will had slipped into his warmest coveralls, his seventy-year-old joints protesting loudly. He tightly laced his brown leather work boots, pulled on the black-and-yellow winter hat that Marlys knit for him years before and wiggled his thick, rough hands into his insulated pigskin gloves. He stepped outside and made his way past the steel bins filled with corn and soybeans and past the concrete silo. It was a still, quiet morning; the sun had risen as a cold, dull orb in the gray sky, emitting a weak light. He moved toward the feed lot and the heifer paddock slightly out of breath, his heart thrumming with the exertion. Once Marlys returned home, he knew she would try and get him to the doctor and he would refuse.

The Angus had approached him in anticipation, regarding him with their large, soft eyes. And when Will bent over to check the feed bunks he saw that the cattle had licked them clean. The girls were hungry. He found the same slick bunks in the steer pen and checked his watch. He was late again. He had sluggishly gone to the barn where he methodically mixed the cattle feed, a mixture of hay, corn, cornstalks and corn gluten. Good thing he had Daniel, the hired hand, who had already cleaned out the paddocks and spread fresh hay across the frozen ground.

Being irresponsible regarding the farm chores was so unlike him, but without Marlys here everything he did was a little bit off his routine, off-kilter.

It was nearing one o’clock now and Will was making his rounds, checking on all the cows preparing for birth. This he couldn’t put off; if he did, he could have some dead calves and cows on his hands.

The nightly phone calls, always at seven-thirty Iowa time, five-thirty Arizona time, were the worst. First P.J. would talk, chattering on about how much he liked the farm, the snow and sledding, his new school, until Will would gently coax the phone from his fingers and hand it to Augie, who stood by nervously chewing her fingernails.

“Hi, Mom,” Augie would say, her throat dense with tears and something else, regret, guilt maybe. Then there would be a series of yeses, noes, okays. No elaboration on her new life in Broken Branch, short, curt responses. Augie would hand the phone back to Will and rush from the farmhouse, inadequately dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and tennis shoes. Will wasn’t sure where she ran off to, but figured it was probably the old hayloft in the south barn. That’s always where her mother had hidden when she was upset.

Then it was Will’s turn to try and make conversation. “How are you?” he would ask. “Feeling better today?”

Fine, yes, Holly would answer thickly, as if her tongue was swollen or she was heavily medicated. Both were likely.