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When Patricia lost the eye, she was told the adjustment period might be difficult. In particular, that she wouldn’t be able to visually concentrate on anything for too long without fatiguing her surviving eye. So naturally, she immediately took up painting.
They’d all been right. It had taken a while to adjust. It had upset her a lot at first; suddenly being without something you’d taken for granted your whole life was difficult, after all. Everyone knew it was difficult, but it was the small things that had really ticked her off.
She hadn’t liked carpooling with her colleagues on the way to work while she re-adjusted to driving in the first few months after the accident. She missed the quiet of her own car and the ability to choose the music she listened to on the way to work. She didn’t much enjoy the company of her colleagues either, wishing they could all find some sort of middle ground between constant pitied looks and calling her Blackbeard behind her back. Her car could have provided a temporary escape from that, but apparently it wasn’t safe for her to drive while she adjusted.
She also hadn’t liked gently reminding her friends and family that she had lost an eye. She didn’t think she’d have to do that, but despite the now constant presence of an eye patch on her face, she did. They’d sit on her left side when they visited her house, and she’d have to politely inform them once again that she’d prefer if they sat on her right so she didn’t have to keep turning her head at an awkward angle to see them. What she really wanted to do was yell, “how do you keep forgetting I no longer have my left eye?!” at them. There was another middle ground people couldn’t quite seem to navigate with her anymore; she was either constantly reminded of the accident through pitied looks and degrading nicknames, or people were acting like nothing had changed. She just wanted to be treated like herself again.
Painting had helped her feel better about it all, even if she had to keep taking breaks when she first started. As the years passed, the breaks got shorter, and the fatigue stayed away for longer, and she became more proficient. She’d built a little makeshift studio next to her sitting room with a big easel for her and eventually a smaller one for Tessa. It became a comfort for her, even in the days following the accident when nothing brought her much comfort. There wasn’t much anyone had control over in life, but Patricia had total control over her paintings, and that was something.
Today, it was a mild Saturday in January, and she was painting a ship on an ocean. She’d started it a while ago and had only picked it up again recently; preparations for Tessa’s birthday party had taken time away from her painting, but she didn’t mind. She smiled to herself as she considered adding a pirate flag to the ship when she was done. It could be a pirate ship. Why not? Of course, as nice as this painting was shaping up to be, no pirate ship would match the one she’d made a few years back.
It was her first day back teaching, and Patricia had been sitting in her car outside Bill Snyder Elementary School, an hour early for the sole purpose of psyching herself up before she went inside. One hour, then she’d have to talk to Carol about her return to work, make awkward small talk with her colleagues and then wait in her old classroom and pretend not to know about the “Miss Beard wears an eye patch, pretend it’s not there so you don’t upset her” assembly they were holding for the children before they came to class, and eventually she’d be teaching again. She didn’t mind the teaching part, in fact it felt great to be back doing what she was meant to do. It was everything else that scared her.
She knew one of two things were waiting for her inside that building; she was either going back to a cacophony of chants of “Blackbeard” that nobody thought she could hear, or the second she walked in the door she’d be hit with more pitying stares than she could handle. Neither were ideal to her. And as was the case with many things since losing the eye, there wasn’t much likelihood of a middle ground.
She rested her head in her hands and sighed, gripping her hair. God, what a mess. She loved teaching, she was good at that. She wasn’t good at being pitied. That’s why she’d taken up teaching in the first place. She wanted to be a rock; someone kids could look to for support. She didn’t want to be the one who needed other people. Teaching let you help people without being in the spotlight yourself, and this whole situation had very much put her in a spotlight.
She couldn’t stop imagining all their faces in the time following the accident. God, their faces. All the teachers’ faces. Horrified, or mocking. The kids’ faces. Horrified, or mocking. Randy Bradley’s face. Horrified. Just horrified. Changed. Seven years old. Only seven.
Patricia released her head from her grip and slapped the steering wheel in frustration at her own train of thought. God, Randy. That poor kid. She hoped he was okay. She hated that the last thing she remembered about him with any clarity was the image of his wide frightened little eyes out the corner of her good eye, his whole body trembling, and then the screaming. She wasn’t sure if it had come from him or her. Probably both.
Patricia hung her head back against her seat. Randy was long gone by now. She regretted that. She wished she’d been up for returning to the school before he’d moved on. She wanted to tell him that she was alright, that he didn’t have to be horrified anymore, anything to get rid of the image of his scared, guilty little face.
Maybe she’d even joke about how she was a pirate now. He’d loved pirates when he was in her class. He was always talking about how cool it would be to sail around the world and sing songs with your friends every day. During every arts and crafts hour, he’d draw himself on a pirate ship, but usually as a first mate rather than a captain. Like Patricia, he hadn’t been a massive fan of the spotlight.
One day she’d gently informed him that pirates stole things, just in case his pirate fascination got him in trouble with Mrs Bradley. He’d looked her in the eye, given her a wide toothy grin, and said, “that’s okay, Miss Beard! They’re not real!”. Patricia had laughed fondly at that. She was laughing fondly now at it. Everything was fantasy to him, of course, because he was seven years old. Part of why she loved teaching was that she got to protect that innocence. She’d watched Randy’s die the day of the accident. God, what a mess.
No, redirect the thoughts. She had to redirect the thoughts. This wasn’t helping. Patricia drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She imagined the scenario she wanted; she imagined that she had returned in time to see Randy again. What would she do if he were here today?
Then Patricia had a marvelous idea.
Patricia had had to put her brush down to take a call from Tessa. Her face always hurt from smiling after a call from Tessa, and it was wonderful. While she didn’t want to take time away from Tessa’s father, it was always lovely that Tessa wanted to hear from her at the weekend.
“Yes, I’ve sent the invites to all of your friends for the big birthday party,” Patricia had happily assured her when Tessa reminded her mother once again that she was going to be nine very soon. “They’re all very excited, especially about the big cake that’s coming.”
“What kind of cake?!” Tessa’s grainy voice had chirped through the phone.
“It’s a surprise,” Patricia teased, delighting in her daughter’s excitement.
Tessa had been called away for dinner then, and once they’d said their goodbyes, Patricia absentmindedly dropped her phone into the bowl on her coffee table and returned to her painting. God, her kid was great. It was nice to have one of her own.
Being a teacher had always made her feel like a mother, in a way. She’d always felt a protectiveness over her students that she imagined wasn’t dissimilar to a mother’s love. Patricia also had a habit of referring to all her students as ‘her kids’; never in front of them or to their parents, just in her head. It had made her both excited and worried about having Tessa. She was good with kids, she always had been, but this was different; this one really was her kid. Would it be different? How different? Maybe she was only good with kids that weren’t hers. And yes, raising a child proved to be more difficult than only teaching them for a few hours a day, and the added challenge of doing it after the divorce was daunting, but ultimately, she wouldn’t trade Tessa for the world. Even if she knew she’d be in for quite the clean-up job after this birthday party was over.
Patricia had decided yes: a pirate flag would suit this ship painting very nicely. Perhaps she could hang it in Tessa’s room once she was done with it. She’d been adding the skull and crossbones when the doorbell rang. Familiar barking rang out through the hallway at the sound of it.
“Quiet, Crisco,” called Patricia affectionately as she strode towards the door.
Patricia had been warned to be careful when she’d been cleared to drive again, and she’d thrown that advice right out the window when she raced around town trying to find a store that would sell her a pirate outfit and several craft supplies at this hour.
Through sheer willpower, some helpful store workers and the occasional disregard for the speed limit, she’d done it. She had everything she needed. Now to get to work.
With half an hour to spare, she was back in the parking lot. She didn’t stop to ruminate or panic this time; she gathered up her purchases and raced through the entrance, kicking the door in the absence of free hands.
“Goodness!” she could hear Carol exclaim at the noise as Patricia rounded the corner towards her classroom. Carol’s expression went from surprise to sympathy when she saw who it was. “Oh, Miss Beard! Welcome back, I hope—”
“SORRY, CAROL, LATER!”
It had come out much louder than expected. Oh well.
27 minutes. She could do this. She rushed into her old classroom, didn’t take a moment to look around and observe how much it had changed since she was last here because she didn’t have the time, and got to work.
15 minutes. A knock at the door.
“Hi, I’m busy, sorry!” called Patricia, sitting on the floor surrounded by glue, paper and crayons, looking more unhinged than any of her seven-year-olds ever had during an arts and crafts hour.
Carol entered anyway. “Miss Beard, we should discuss your return to work before—oh my.”
Patricia looked up, her eyes wide and determined. “Carol, good, I need help putting these waves up if you can.”
“Are… are those parrots on the ground?”
“Yes, they are. Not bad for ten minutes and some paper and glue, huh?”
With Carol’s bewildered help, the classroom was just about ready by the time the morning bell rang. Patricia donned her magnificent new outfit and patiently waited for the arrival of her students.
When the children entered the classroom fresh out of an assembly where they were warned not to draw attention to Miss Beard’s eye patch in any way, they were aboard a pirate ship.
The walls were covered in blue sheets of paper she had cut to resemble ocean waves. She’d hung rope and cloth from the ceiling in an attempt to recreate a ship’s sail. There were little crafted parrots everywhere, and she’d chalked fish on the ground. And then, the main event: Patricia herself was dressed in what the costume outlet’s employees had described as a Captain Hook outfit. But she wasn’t Captain Hook. She was going to be called something else today.
“Ahoy, mateys!” Patricia had declared with glee, waving her plastic hook around with much enthusiasm. “Welcome aboard Captain Blackbeard’s pirate ship!”
Patricia treasured the delighted surprise on her kids’ faces for years after that day.
Her curriculum remained the same for the day, with a few key differences. The first being that before class began, she had gone around and asked the children to choose pirate names for themselves and had them write them on name tags so she could use them for the rest of the day. The second was that she taught the class while speaking in a way she’d imagined pirates to speak, a voice that had ended up sounding like a terrible Irish accent. The kids reveled in it.
There was much talk of Patricia’s antics that day. The kids all loved it, of course, and the ones that weren’t in her class expressed envy that they’d missed out on the pirate ship. Most of Patricia’s colleagues (including her superiors) thought it was brave that she’d leaned into the unfair mockery she’d faced before the sabbatical and used it to make learning more fun for her students for the day. Others found it highly inappropriate and irresponsible, and let her know as much when Patricia made it to the staff room at noon.
During lunch, Patricia was approached by Mrs Collins. Patricia recalled that Mrs Collins was the first to co-opt the Blackbeard insults from the children in the first place. She was yet to receive an apology but didn’t much care if she got one or not.
“Miss Beard, do you really think it’s appropriate to glorify piracy to the children? What will the parents say if they find out we’ve been promoting a lifestyle of thievery?” demanded Mrs Collins.
Patricia gave the other teacher a wide toothy grin.
“That’s okay, Mrs Collins. They’re not real.”
For lack of a better way to put it, when Patricia opened the door there were two wounded animals on her porch.
Not literally, they were people. But they were wounded, on the inside. Patricia had a way of knowing when someone was hurt and trying to hide it. She also knew that people like that hated being figured out, so she did her best not to show it in her face.
“May I help you? It’s a little late for visitors…”
The one on the left was a little harder to figure out, to his credit. He looked angry, but in a tired kind of way. It was the kind of expression someone carried when they hadn’t known much else but anger for a long time. She caught his eye, and he looked right through her.
The one on the right looked… small. He wasn’t that small, he was around the same height as the other man, but he looked so small. Scared. Horrified. Horrified in a familiar way. Wide, deer-in-the-headlights eyes. The distant ghost of a wide toothy grin.
Oh. Oh my.
He stammered his way through an introduction, but he didn’t have to. She knew. It was him. The little boy that loved pirates.
“Randy? Randy Bradley, is that you?”
“Y-yeah. Hi.”
She pulled her kid in for a hug.