3. Becci (I)
The
school day at Wilmore Elementary School begins at eight o’clock a.m., though
the first students trickle into the cafeteria for breakfast at 7:40. By 7:45, the teachers are expected to be on
duty. And so, quarter till eight found
Mrs. Rebecca Littrell standing in the corridor outside her classroom door,
where she waited every morning to greet her students as they arrived.
All
teachers are, to some extent, actors and actresses. They feign enthusiasm over learning the rock
cycle, the weekly spelling words, and long division, in hopes of inspiring genuine
enthusiasm in their students. They
pretend to like even the most unlikable of children, so as to boost their
self-worth. They give “The Look” to the
class clown, and their lips do not twitch, because even though they want to
laugh too, they must be firm about their expectations for student
behavior. They hide colds, teach through
fevers and morning sickness, and give their directions charades-style when
laryngitis claims their “teacher voice.”
They claim to hate missing a day of school, but really, they just hate
writing sub plans. On most days, they
love what they do, but on the days they don’t, they still act as if they
do. The classroom is their stage. They are teachers.
In
the fall of her eleventh year of teaching, Becci Littrell was no exception. At 7:44, she was frowning, far away with
worry over her husband, but when the bell rang a minute later, she was at her
post, a smile pasted onto her face.
“Good morning, Serena,” she said to the first little girl who rounded
the corner.
Serena
smiled back and echoed a soft “Good morning,” as she glided past Becci and into
the classroom. She was the first child
in the room each morning and the last one to leave at dismissal. When the final bell rang at 2:45, she trailed
behind the pack of walkers and car-riders, but stopped short of the main
exit. There was never anyone there to
walk her home or pick her up; she was a latch-key kid, and on most days, she
was at school longer than Becci was.
Becci
peered into the room after her and watched as Serena dutifully went about the
morning procedures, emptying her bookbag, stowing its
contents in her desk, turning in last night’s homework. She was a bright student, thoughtful and
dependable, and there was a wisdom, a maturity, about her that was uncommon in
a fourth-grader. It separated her from
the other girls in the class, made her different, and Becci sometimes wondered
if the difference stemmed from the fact that she had no mother. She was being raised only by her father, a
father who had to work long hours.
Serena had no sisters, no brothers, and so she spent a lot of time
alone.
Watching
her, Becci thought of her own son, who was also – for the time being – an only
child. With a pang, she wondered what
Calhan would turn out like if something happened to Brian, and he was left to
grow up without a father, without siblings.
She cursed the thought the moment it entered her brain, but she couldn’t
get rid of it; it was something she had been thinking about since the school
year had started. From her years of
teaching, she knew a lot about nine-year-old boys, but almost nothing about
raising them. Her smile wavered at the
next student who appeared, a tiny boy named Andrew who had a full wardrobe of Indianapolis
Colts apparel. Studying the horseshoe
logo on his sweatshirt, she realized she didn’t have the slightest clue what
the Colts’ record was like this season. How
would she ever raise a son without his father?
Jackie
would help, of course. Her mother-in-law
had done a wonderful job raising two sons of her own, Brian the youngest. She’d already had a hand in Calhan’s rearing,
seeing him through diaper rashes and stuffy noses and the cutting of his first
baby teeth this past year, while Becci and Brian worked and made trips into
Lexington to see the cardiologist. It
was only thanks to miraculously good timing that he’d turned one this summer
and hit the two major milestones – first steps, first words – while Becci was
out of school to witness them. Already,
she feared she had missed so much in Calhan’s young life, and she knew Brian
felt the same. Their son’s first year
had been tarnished by Brian’s illness.
When Jackie called Becci at school, her first thought was not, as the
other young mothers’ would be, for her child, but for her husband. The secretary would ring down to her room and
say, “There’s a phone call for you – it’s your mother-in-law,” and Becci’s
blood would run cold, and her hand would shake as she pressed the phone to her
ear and waited for Jackie’s voice to come on the line and give her the bad
news: that Brian was worse, that he’d
been rushed to the hospital, or, worst of all, that he was dead. She always sagged with relief when she found
out that Calhan was running a temperature or had bumped his head on the toy box
– because neither seemed bad compared to the scenarios her mind had come up
with.
Sometimes
she felt she had no business teaching school this year, as distracted and
overwrought as she was. But what choice
did she have? Brian couldn’t work, the
medical bills were piling up, and someone’s salary had to pay them. It was only necessity which forced her to
drag herself to a job she had once loved, and now dreaded, because it took her
away from her husband. Her worst fear
was that Brian’s heart would give out while she was gone, and he would die
alone, without the comfort of his family nearby.
Tears
threatened to start, there in the hall, as her thoughts got away from her, but
she fought them back. It was ten till
eight now, and the buses had all arrived; the students were appearing in groups
of twos and threes. She refused to let
them see their teacher lose it, and so she put her acting prowess to use,
stretched her lips back into a thin smile, and chirped, “Morning!” as they
filed into her classroom. If any of them
noticed the moisture in her eyes or the shrillness of her voice, they didn’t
mention it.
***
The
phone rang during reading groups that morning.
“Finish reading the page silently,” Becci told her small group, jumping
up from the kidney-shaped table. She
dashed across the room and caught the phone on her desk in mid-ring. “This is Mrs. Littrell,” she answered in a
rush.
“Becci,
there’s a phone call for you,” came the school secretary’s familiar voice. “It’s your husband.”
Both
relief and fear flooded her heart; it sunk like an anchor to the depths of her
stomach, making her feel queasy. If it
was Brian on the phone, then the worst had not happened, but what if it was
bad? What if he was sick… or, in any
case, sicker? Her mind whirled through
the possibilities.
“Put
him through,” she whispered, and her voice quaked.
They
say that when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. It had always sounded cliché to Becci, but in
the five seconds it took for the call to be transferred, the last decade of her
life, the life she had shared with Brian, played out in her mind like a movie
on fast forward. Somehow, she already
knew that, for better or for worse, his words were about to change it.
Becci
had just turned twenty-two when she was hired for her first teaching job. She signed her contract Rebecca Sue Callahan, a week before her college graduation. In June, she visited Wilmore Elementary to
see her classroom for the first time, and in August, she attended a two-day
orientation for all the new hires in the Jessamine County Schools. That was where she’d met Brian Littrell.
He
was twenty-three and as fresh-faced as she, having graduated from the
University of Cincinnati in May. But
while she felt overwhelmed and nervous about the start of the school year, he
seemed totally at ease, even as he strode in a mere minute before the
orientation was scheduled to begin.
There was only one empty seat, the one next to her, and he sank down
into it and leaned back, stretching out his legs beneath the table. As someone who was always prompt and felt
rushed when she wasn’t running ten minutes early, Becci thought he had some
nerve, coming in at the last minute like that and not even looking stressed
about it. But then he glanced over and
smiled at her, and his smile was so friendly and charming that her annoyance
melted away instantly. She smiled back
shyly, admiring the blueness of his eyes and the way they crinkled at the
corners.
“Rebecca
Callahan?” he asked, squinting at her nametag, and she heard the twang of a
native Kentuckian in the musical way her name rolled off his tongue. “Brian Littrell.” He held out his hand.
“Becci,”
she corrected, taking it. He had a
slight build, but a strong handshake; his grip surprised her as he pumped her
hand.
“Becci. Nice to meet ya. Where ya gonna be teachin’?”
“Wilmore
Elementary. Fourth grade.” Despite her nerves, she still felt pride and
excitement as she said it. “How about
you?”
“I’m
the new choir director at West Jessamine,” he replied.
She
nodded, smiling again. So he was a music
teacher. It seemed to suit him.
“So,
have you had much time to get your room ready?” she asked.
He
flashed a cheeky grin. “Haven’t seen it
yet. They just hired me last
Friday. School board hasn’t even had a
chance to approve it yet.” He paused,
and his eyes twinkled as he added, as if on a side note, “Hope I pass
inspection.”
Her
eyes widened as she let out a shrill laugh.
“Oh my gosh, are you serious? I’d
be freaking out!” She studied his face
incredulously; he didn’t look fazed at all.
“You’re not??”
Brian
shrugged. “I guess teaching high school
music isn’t the same as fourth grade. I
figure they’ve already got some sheet music and stuff for me to start with;
I’ll just slap some posters on the wall this weekend.”
She
shook her head in disbelief; she had spent weeks working to get her classroom
ready. Granted, he had a point –
elementary was a lot different from high school, particularly high school choir
– but even so, she could not imagine how anyone in his position wouldn’t be
freaking out.
She
would find out later that Brian Littrell was not nearly as confident as he’d
seemed. He hid his insecurities behind a
good sense of humor and a positive attitude, just as she hid hers beneath
makeup and nice clothes. On that first
day of school in mid-August, she wore a dress and shook in her heels as she
stood for the first time before her twenty-six fourth-graders. He wore a polo shirt and khakis and began his
first period with a warm smile and a bad joke (“What do you call a gnome from
the city? A metronome.”), earning a few
chuckles and plenty of groans from the freshman chorus. Somehow, they both survived their first year.
Novice
teachers have a certain camaraderie with each other, but for Brian and Becci, a
workplace friendship developed into more.
They started dating the year they earned their tenure, when Becci’s
first class became Brian’s freshman chorus.
The year those same kids graduated from the Jessamine County schools,
Becci left in May as Miss Callahan and came back in August as Mrs. Littrell.
Now,
with her new batch of fourth-graders trying to read their teacher instead of
their books, Becci Littrell clutched her classroom phone to her ear and
listened for the soft drawl of her husband’s voice. “Brian?” she asked.
“Guess
what, Becs.” His
voice sounded breathy, but she could tell by its tone that he was okay. She relaxed in time to hear his next words,
the words she had been waiting to hear for months. “The pager.
It just went off.”
***