Free Days of Awe by Lauren Fox

yards away. Kelly stood nearby, her terrified eyes a mirror to mine. “It’s okay, sweetie,” I whispered into Claire’s fine, red hair, which smelled earthy and sharp and not pleasant, like cheese. I had the feeling that I was whispering to Hannah, the odd sense that I was in my daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night. “It’ll be okay.”
    Claire wheezed. I felt her heart thudding through her narrow back. I thought that she would die in my arms while her mother was oblivious back in Milwaukee, probably enjoying a margarita or watching a movie or sending an e-mail or grilling a steak as her daughter gasped for air.
    Lake Kass was placid and clear. There was the sound of birds. My heart pounded with Claire’s.
    Josie was back four minutes later. The parking lot was two minutes away, down the path and up the hill. We heard her banging on the bus door; we saw her flying back to us, black med bag at her side.
    Kelly grabbed the satchel and whipped out the EpiPen, snapped out the syringe, and jammed it into Claire’s thigh.
    Anaphylactic shock can set in in moments. The slightest delay can affect the patient’s outcome.
We were subjected to a mandatory student-health tutorial every fall. So we knew.
    I held her. She was no bigger than Hannah.
Please.
She slumped over on me, her eyes closed. Kelly crouched next to us; Josie stood, her arms at her sides, fists clenched, breathing hard. Her face was gray and sweaty. I couldn’t meet her eyes.
    “Claire? Claire, honey?” Kelly touched Claire’s cheek, her forehead.
    The other children were a brightly colored, frightened flock in the distance: a hassle of children, an irritation of fifth graders, a vexation of tweens. I closed my own eyes for a second to make them disappear.
    From far off, an ambulance siren rose and fell, rose and fell: incongruous here, coming closer.
    ···
    She drops her littlest sister off at Rhodes Avenue every morning before heading over to the high school two blocks away. Usually she’s in a mad rush to say goodbye to Nora and make her 7:55 bell. But every once in a while she pops her head into my classroom and waves to me, her smile bright and familiar. She’s not the live wire she was six years ago. Adolescence has rounded her edges and calmed her manic energy. She’s almost, but not quite, graceful now—she’s still elbowy and kinetic, but I can see that in her, how she’ll inhabit her adult body in a few years, balancing a backpack full of books or a bag of groceries, holding someone’s hand, a husband’s, a child’s.
    “Mrs. Moore,” she says, when she has time to pause. “Have a good day!” And to any of my other former students I would just wave back and say, “You, too!” but with Claire, when I can, when I’m not surrounded by children or trapped in the middle of some minor crisis, I’ll hurry over to her and give her a quick hug, just to feel her sharp little shoulders beneath my arms, her breath and her bones, the working machinery of her fragile body.
    ···
    Maybe Earth Science Weekend should have concluded then and there, after little, limp Claire was carted off on a stretcher to Kass Memorial Hospital, after Kelly snarled at Josie, “You should have had that bag with you!” and stalked off, and Josie bowed her head, horrified, remorseful, defeated. But we decided to soldier on. After all, there were still mallards to identify, inchworms to count.
    But the molecular structure of the field trip had disintegrated beyond repair. Josie was remote, barely functioning. Kelly and Andrea were icy and efficient. The kids were uncharacteristically snarly and combative with one another. We separated so many children so many times that day that enemies had to be seated together by dinner; girls who had made each other cry at lunchtime were paired up in cabins by nightfall. We trudged through the swamp, all of us, weighed down by the psychic burden of one ten-year-old’s near-death experience.
    Some darkness