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 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.”
***
