38
Not much happened during the next few weeks after Mr.
Panim’s death.
Mrs. Panim, after grieving for a spell, ended up putting
the urn with her husband’s ashes on a shelf in the living room that held
numerous photos of Mr. and Mrs. Panim during happier days, including their
wedding portrait. She had never taken the photos down during Mr. Panim’s
absence; the urn was the first addition to that shelf since he left.
Abraham Lincoln Panim’s grieving time was much less than
his mother’s. He really did not know his father well, so although he had met
the man briefly, it is not as if the man was a major presence in his life.
However, he continued to think constantly about that
unfinished sentence, constantly asking himself, “Dad, what did I become?” over
and over again.
He continued to take walks late into the afternoon into the
early evening, hoping that Ariel and Snuff would venture back into his sights,
but that never happened. He also looked for the older woman sitting a few
benches away from him but she, too, had vanished.
Every once in a while, when he would sit on the bench, his
mind would drift to the same question he constantly asked himself: “Dad, what did
I become? What did I become.”
He asked himself that question constantly, but he never
formulated a possible answer to the question.
Mrs. Panim took some time off from her duties at school,
but after mourning for a few days, she decided that the best place for her to
be was in school, and she returned.
Abraham Lincoln Panim returned almost immediately to
school. At this point, school had become his refuge, but things seemed
different to him even there.
When he would walk to school or back home at the end of the
workday, no one appeared to be looking at him, and he found that he was staring
more at the people he passed in the street than they were staring at him.
When in school, his class had pretty much returned back to
the way they were when he first took over the class. The students were not as
attentive as they once were, had stopped staring at him, and there were some
occasions that he had to discipline a few students for their behavior in class.
As for his relationship with other teachers, he continued
to take his lunch in the teachers’ room each day of the workweek, but the teachers
pretty much ignored him, and he often sat alone while eating his lunch. Nobody
stared at him anymore, none of the female teachers fawned after him, and the
teachers pretty much excluded him from any discussions they had.
He was cordial to the other educators, always saying hello
to them when he entered the room, but he rarely received any reply.
The days turned to weeks, and the warmer weather had come
upon the school as it moved on to the last days of the school year.
On one of these days, Abraham Lincoln Panim had another
rough morning in the classroom when the bell sounded, and his room emptied as
students went to lunch.
As he always did, Abraham Lincoln Panim took his lunch out
of his drawer, and proceeded to the teachers’ room. He entered, and said
“Hello” to the other teachers without any response. He sat down on the same
couch he always sat on, and proceeded to eat his lunch. And as had been the
norm, nobody spoke to him, or even seemingly acknowledged that he was there.
As he ate his lunch, he saw the usual group of teachers
talking. On the far side of the room, he also saw someone he had not seen
before, who was sitting at a small table in the corner of the room.
To Abraham Lincoln Panim, at least from what he could see
from the back and with a glare in his face coming from the window by the table,
the person at the table appeared to be a woman who was sitting there, all
alone. Based on what he could see through the glare, it appeared to be a woman
who was sitting away from everyone else in the room.
He didn’t think anything of it, and he continued to eat his
lunch. He was also looking over some papers, a recent spelling test that he
gave his class that needed to be graded, so he took out a pen and looked over
the tests one by one.
But as he was finishing his lunch and concentrating on the
tests, he felt a “p-lunk!” right next to him, and he looked up from the tests,
and the woman who he had seen sitting alone at the table on the far side of the
room, had sat next to him on the couch.
“Hello, how are you doing?” asked the woman.
Abraham Lincoln Panim looked up from his tests, and he
looked at the woman. He did a double take.
“Anything wrong?” asked the woman, who was now clearly in
his sights.
The woman was older, and even though she was sitting, he
saw that she had thick legs and he also saw that she wore her hair in a bun on
her head, something he did not see when she was sitting across the room.
“Mrs. Stottle? Are you Mrs. Stottle?” he asked her, now thoroughly
focused on her.
“Mrs. Who?” she asked. “I didn’t get the name you asked—“
“Mrs. Stottle. Mrs. Stottle. You are Mrs. Stottle.”
“No, you must be mixing me up with someone else.”
“But your ARE Mrs. Stottle.”
“No, I am Mrs. Meyer. I guess I must look like someone
else. But I have been Mrs. Meyer for the past, I don’t know, many years.”
“But you look like Mrs. Stottle. You talk like Mrs.
Stottle—“
“But I am not Mrs. … Mrs. Stottle.”
When Abraham Lincoln Panim calmed down a bit, Mrs. Meyer
told him about herself.
“I was a teacher, a regular teacher, so many years ago. I
met another teacher, we were married, and I left the profession. But when he
died a few years back, I came back to teaching, as a sub.”
“But … well … –“
“Yes, I know, you have never seen me before, Actually, in
all my years of teaching, I never taught at this school, not as a regular
teacher and not as a sub. Just about all of my teaching was at the school on
the other side of town. This is my first time here. No one knows me here at
all. But you have to go where the work is.”
“Yes, but Mrs. Stottle … I mean, Mrs. Meyer—“
“Look, the bell is about to ring for the next class. I walk
with a bit of a limp, so I have to leave a minute or two early. But just let me
leave you with this thought:
“Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat
other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”
When she uttered these words, Abraham Lincoln Panim became
so ruffled that he dropped his test papers on the floor. He bent down to pick
them up, gathered them quickly, and looked up, but Mrs. Meyer was gone.
“Mrs. Meyer … Mrs. Stottle … Mrs. Meyer—“ he shouted out,
but no one answered as the bell rang to begin the next period.
As the other teachers filed out of the room, Abraham Lincoln
Panim sat there, completely perplexed.
“Mrs. Stottle WAS here,” he thought to himself. “She was
here. I know she was here.”
The bell than rang, with Abraham Lincoln Panim having not
moved from the couch. Other teachers came into the room, and he realized that
he needed to get back to the classroom immediately. He gathered up his things,
and ran out of the room as quickly as he could, right to his classroom, where
he saw his class lined up outside the door.
“What happened to you, ‘Mr. Abraham.’ You look like you
just saw a ghost!” said Melissa, leading the class at the door as she always
did.
As he unlocked the door and let himself and the students
into the class, he had a tough time getting into the educational rhythm, as he
kept on thinking about the older lady with the bun on her head.
His class continued to be rambunctious, but he let a lot go
this time around, because he, himself, could not concentrate fully on the
class, only on that woman.
Somehow, he got through the day, and as the students exited
the class, Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to sit at his desk, pretty much
staring into space while he thought of the older woman.
Finally, he realized that he had been sitting at his desk
for many minutes, and when the janitor came in to start to clean the floor in
the class, he knew it was time to leave.
He gathered up his things and left the school, and this
time, he didn’t know if anyone was staring at him, and he wasn’t the one doing
the staring, either. He walked right home, opened the door, and went right into
his room.
The hand mirror was on his bed, but unlike most other times
since he lost his rat face, he did not look into the mirror at all. He pushed
it aside, and just put his head on the bed’s pillows, pretty much lost in his
thoughts about the older woman.
Later in the afternoon, his mother came home, and while she
was taking her coat off, Abraham Lincoln Panim hurriedly left his room and saw
his mother go into the kitchen and take out some food which she was going to
prepare for dinner.
“Oh, I didn’t think you heard me come home,” Mrs. Panim
said. “I know I usually tell you that I am home, but today was a really busy
day for me, and honestly, I don’t think I have the strength—“
“Mom, I had an interesting experience today,” Abraham
Lincoln Panim said to his mother as he sat down at the kitchen table. “Can I
talk to you about it now?”
“Yes, I guess so, but as you are talking, I need to get
this food going, or we won’t eat until late, and I know you like to go for a
walk—“
“Mom, I met a teacher today in the teachers’ room … well,
do you remember when we went to see dad, and the nurse … I mean … we both
thought that she looked like Mrs. Stottle?”
“Well … yes … I thought that she kind of did at first, but
the more I looked at her, the more I know that I must have been grieving for
your father, because I don’t think she really looked like her that much at
all.”
“Well, I did, and the more I looked at her, the more I knew
that she was Mrs. Stottle, as odd as that might sound.”
“It is impossible. But what is your point?”
“Well today at school, while I was eating lunch, I saw this
older woman … she was sitting alone, an older woman, and she … she started to
talk to me … I had never seen this woman before … but she looked like Mrs. Stottle.”
Mrs. Panim chuckled. “You know what they say … we all have
a double somewhere.”
“No, mom,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said. “She looked like
Mrs. Stottle, talked like Mrs. Stottle, was a teacher like Mrs. Stottle—“
“Just a coincidence. These things happen,”
Abraham Lincoln Panim then stood up from the kitchen table.
“And you said that the woman was older … a sub?” his mother
asked him.
“Yes, she was in the teachers’ room and she told me that
she normally taught at the school across town, and had never been in this
school, so she didn’t know anyone … but for some reason, she came over to me.”
Mrs. Panim stopped preparing her dinner meal, and turned
toward her son.
“Now, you are sure that you met this woman in the teachers’
room?” she asked.
“Yes, while I was eating lunch.”
“That is really odd. Do you remember her name?”
“Meyer, Mrs. Meyer.”
“No … no … I am thinking about today, and all of our
teachers were present, with the exception, or course, of Mr. Praeger, who you
have taken over for. We didn’t use any substitute teachers today.”
“What? How could that be?”
“And you are saying her name was Meyer? I don’t know a
single sub by that name, and an older lady … no, I don’t know any sub named
Meyer in the entire school district. You are sure of it?”
“Mom, I swear to you that she was there. She sat right next
to me. She was an older woman who walked with a limp, and she wore her hair in
a bun. I swear to you that she was there.”
“Sorry, you must be mistaken. There is no Mrs. Meyer who I
know as a sub, and we did not use subs today at all.”
Abraham Lincoln Panim made a bee line back to his room,
jumped on his bed in dismay, and the hand mirror feel to the floor with such a
thud that it cracked right down the middle of the glass.
