A Maidens Grave

opposite window. Do it. Now! The left window.”
    Then Melanie saw the car. And the blood. There was a lot of it. She shepherded the girls back to their seats.
    “Don’t look,” Melanie instructed. Her heart pounded fiercely, her arms suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. “And put seatbelts on.” She had trouble making the words.
    Jocylyn, Beverly, and ten-year-old Emily did as instructed immediately. Shannon grimaced and peeked, Kielle blatantly ignored Melanie. Susan got to look, she pointed out. Why couldn’t she?
    Of the twins, it was Anna who’d gone still, hands in her lap and her face paler than usual, in sharp contrast to her sister’s nut-brown tan. Melanie stroked the girl’s hair.She pointed out the window on the left side of the bus. “Look at wheat,” she instructed.
    “Totally interesting,” Shannon replied sarcastically.
    “Those poor people.” Twelve-year-old Jocylyn wiped copious tears from her fat cheeks.
    The burgundy Cadillac had run hard into a metal irrigation gate. Steam rose from its front end. The driver was an elderly man. He lay sprawled half out of the car, his head on the asphalt. Melanie could now see a second car as well, a gray Chevy. The collision had happened at an intersection. It looked like the Cadillac had had the right of way and had slammed into the gray car, which must have run a stop sign. The Chevy had skidded off the road into the tall wheat. There was no one inside; its hood was twisted and steam plumed from the radiator.
    Mrs. Harstrawn brought the bus to a stop, reached for the worn chrome handle of the door.
    No! thought Melanie. Keep going! Go to a grocery store, a 7-Eleven, a house. They hadn’t passed anything for miles but surely there was something up ahead. Don’t stop. Keep going. She’d been thinking those words but her hands must have been moving because Susan responded, “No, we have to. He is hurt.”
    But the blood, Melanie thought. They shouldn’t get his blood on them. There was AIDS, there were other diseases.
    These people needed help but they needed official help.
    Eight gray birds, sitting in dark  . . .
    Susan, eight years younger than Melanie, was the first one out of the school bus, running toward the injured man, her long, black hair dancing around her in the gusting wind.
    Then Mrs. Harstrawn.
    Melanie hung back, staring. The driver lay like a sawdust doll, one leg bent at a terrible angle. Head floppy, hands fat and pale.
    She had never before seen a dead body.
    But he isn’t dead, of course. No, no, just a cut. It’s nothing. He’s just fainted.
    One by one the little girls turned to gaze at the accident; Kielle and Shannon first, naturally—the Dynamic Duo, thePower Rangers, the X-Men. Then fragile Emily, whose hands were glued together in prayer. (Her parents insisted that she pray every night for her hearing to return. She had told this to Melanie but no one else.) Beverly clutched her chest, an instinctive gesture. She wasn’t having an attack just yet.
    Melanie climbed out and walked toward the Cadillac. Halfway there she slowed. In contrast to the gray sky, the gray wheat, and the pale highway, the blood was so very red; it was on everything—the man’s bald head, his chest, the car door, the yellow leather seat.
    The roller coaster of fear sent her heart plummeting toward the ground.
    Mrs. Harstrawn was the mother of two teenage boys, a humorless woman, smart, dependable, solid as vulcanized rubber. She reached under her colorful sweater, untucked her blouse and tore off a strip, making an impromptu bandage, which she wrapped around a deep gash in the man’s torn head. She bent down and whispered into his ear, pressed on his chest and breathed into his mouth.
    And then she listened.
    I can’t hear, Melanie thought, so I can’t help. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll go back to the bus. Keep an eye on the girls. The roller coaster of her fear leveled out. Good, good.
    Susan crouched too, stanching a wound on his neck. Frowning, the student looked up at Mrs. Harstrawn. With bloody fingers she signed, “Why bleeding so much? Look at neck.”
    Mrs. Harstrawn examined it. She too frowned, shaking her head.
    “There’s hole in his neck,” the teacher signed in astonishment. “Like a bullet hole.”
    Melanie gasped at this message. The flimsy car of the roller coaster dropped again, leaving Melanie’s stomach somewhere else—way, way above her. She stopped walking altogether.
    Then she saw the purse.
    Ten