I knew the purple coat. I'd seen it in a photo Carly sent me at Christmas, the kids on the front steps in the snow. I'd thought it was new. I'd thought, that's a nice coat.
"I emailed you about the coat," Mrs. Fjelstad said to Carly. "You wrote back. You said thank you, you'd been so busy with Finn's follow-up appointments, you'd take care of it. You didn't take care of it." She turned another page. "January. Elsie falls asleep in class three days running. When I ask her, she says her brother has bad dreams and comes into her room, and she sings to him so he doesn't wake up Mom, because Mom gets tired. February, the hundredth-day-of-school party, every child brings a hundred of something. Elsie brings a hundred grains of rice in a sandwich bag and tells me she counted them herself the night before because Mom was helping Finn with his hundred Cheerios necklace. March. Elsie's eye. She's squinting at the board. I send a note home about a vision screening. Nothing. In April I take her down to the nurse myself and the nurse says she should see an eye doctor, and we send another note, and there's still nothing."
"Her eyes are fine," Carly said.
"Her eyes are not fine. She can't see the board from the third row. I moved her up to the front in April. That's why she sits by the window." Mrs. Fjelstad closed the folder. "I emailed four times this year, Carly. I asked for a meeting three times. I called twice. I want you to understand I'm not saying any of this to embarrass you. I'm saying it because I'm a teacher, and teachers in Minnesota are mandated reporters, and I have spent a long time this year asking myself whether what I was seeing was something I was obligated to report."
That sat in the room. I felt it land in my stomach like cold water.
"And?" I said. My voice came out strange.
"And it's not what you'd think of," she said. "She's clean. She's healthy, mostly. Nobody's hitting her. She's never come in with a mark on her. I talked to Mrs. Engebretson, our counselor, in March, and she said what I already knew, which is that what I was describing is real and does damage and is very hard to do anything about, because it's not one thing, it's a thousand small things. It's a pattern of not being seen. And the system is built to catch the big things." She looked at me then. "And I'd decided that I would ask for a meeting one more time, in the fall, with both parents, and I would make her third-grade teacher aware, and Mrs. Engebretson would check in with her. And that's what I'm still going to do. And I'm going to put in writing what I saw today. Because now I've seen it. Not inferred it. Seen it."
"I never got any of those emails," I said.
"They went to the address on the form." She looked at Carly. "There was only one."