Three

AT HOME, I MARKED COMPOSITIONS AND LISTENED TO SEASONAL SELECTIONS on the radio until “The Little Drummer Boy” became the holiday equivalent of Chinese water torture. In silence, I continued working. Macavity the cat slurked over, on the prowl for moving ballpoint pens. I looked at Laura’s paper again, sighed, tried in vain to find my way through to its secret heart, then put it aside. There were other papers to grade.

Macavity immediately sat down on her composition, purring, poised to thwack my pen the next time I used it.

I had a few pleasant surprises that began with “I never thought I’d say this, but…” and went on to express actual pleasure in the experience of poetry.

Not enough, though. The numbers were on the side of the maddening fakes who numbly regurgitated my words, my least favorite species of student.

Forced to make a choice, I’d take the depressing but honest variations on “Why All Poems (Especially the One You Assigned) Are Incredibly Stupid and Boring.” For example, from the pen of Clemmy Tomkins: “A person should say what he means so normal people could understand without a teacher. Who cares anyway because mostly its about symbols and images and dumb things no normal person cares about anyway except love maybe but even then it isn’t love like for a normal guy so its still dumb.”

I fixed his punctuation, suggested changes in wording and then gave up, since brain transplants haven’t yet been perfected, and I could think of no other method of improving Clemmy’s writing. I put the paper aside for Mackenzie, who thinks of himself as a normal guy even though he’s known to show off with a line of poetry from time to time.

There was only one paper to go when I heard C.K.’s knock. I took that as a sign that we were almost in sync—emphasis on the “almost.”

We have developed a discreet, efficient system. He knocks, then uses his key. If I am otherwise occupied—so far a hypothetical situation, since I have chosen not to be since meeting him—I use the chain lock as well, and he retreats into the night. This is rather ornate, but it accommodates my independence and his unpredictable working hours.

Before he finished knocking, I opened the door and felt the happy rush the sight of him inevitably produced. C.K. Mackenzie is a fine specimen of manhood, but not tritely Hollywood or Madison Avenue handsome. I am dangerously overfond of his salt-and-pepper curly hair, light blue eyes, slouch, drawl and all the ephemera that make up his style.

Actually, I am overfond of him, period. At least, I think so. He’s never around long enough to be sure. Certainly we are not career compatible. I don’t know if it goes deeper than that, because his job interrupts, disrupts, dictates and generally keeps us at arm’s length, so who knows which part is Mackenzie and which is The Detective?

Mackenzie says that I have artificially separated the two, and that, not his job, is my problem. He claims that the man and the job are one and the same, and I have some kind of learning disability.

It isn’t as if I’m pushing for an ultimate commitment. I’d panic if a major life decision loomed. But lately I feel as if I’m part of a movie, stuck in a freeze frame. I’d prefer a hint as to what’s going to happen. Even a promise that something, anything, eventually, will.

This year, Sasha, who never worries about the longevity of love but insists it be painted in primary colors while it’s around, gave me an early gift, a photo of a man and woman completely out of focus and dimly lit. She titled it, “C.K. and Mandy, Wherever at Last.”

“Feels so fine to be here,” he said after the initial kissing and hugging. He meant it, because his accent deepens under the press of emotion, and he was almost unintelligible, mushing his way through “fahn” and “heah” in a soft slur. He retrieved a beer from the refrigerator and hunkered down near me.

“One more paper,” I said.

“No problem,” he murmured, but all the while, his hand greeted my anatomy in ways that did not facilitate concentration.

“Be amused.” I passed him Clemmy’s paper.

He read, chuckled and sighed with exasperation and then, having exhausted the nuances of Clemmy Tomkins’ world view, resumed distracting me.

“Two seconds,” I said. “If you’re bored, please decipher that damned answering machine for me.” Then I remembered Laura’s paper. “Wait, read something instead, would you? I want to know what you think.”

He settled in again, long legs crossed as he studied her paper. One of the many traits I admire about Mackenzie is his ability—very rare, very sexy—to give the subject at hand his full attention. “Showed me her stuff before, haven’t you?” he said after checking her name.

“This feels different.”

I read an airball essay on “Thanatopsis,” frequently glancing at Mackenzie, monitoring his reaction. I had never before realized how poker-faced he could be. Finally, my eyes rested on Laura’s last paragraph, waiting for him to join me there. “Nothing has changed since then,” she’d written. “Nobody cares about anything except his own life and concerns. Icarus, unnoticed, still dies every day.”

Mackenzie looked up. “Want a fire?” he asked. “You’re shiverin’.”

“What do you make of it?” I asked.

“Must be hard for her to be in the same class as that Clemmy,” he said. “I’m impressed, is what.”

I waited for more, but Mackenzie was eyeing the answering machine, as if revving his motors to begin the trek across the living room.

“It’s not her writing skills that concern me. Something’s wrong. I wanted to talk to her about it tonight, but…”I described the evening, the tension, the cryptic scenes, the sad end. Laura’s eyes. Save me.

He slouched back into the sofa pillows. “Don’t read too much into it. She’s brighter than your other kids, is all. Maybe this is about the homeless, kind of a meditation about what you’d been saying on sensitivity and caring.”

“There’s a second essay in there, Mackenzie, but it’s in invisible ink. This is written in code.”

“Don’t go overboard translating.” He stretched. “You wanted something with the machine?”

“I keep messing up.”

He shuffled over to the counter that divides my downstairs room into living and kitchen segments. I followed. “Her conclusion wasn’t part of the assignment. She didn’t have to write anything like that at all. She veered off into that—that—”

“That what?” He upended the machine and pushed buttons.

“I don’t know.” Indictment? Warning? Cry? Save me.

“Teenaged girls tend toward hysteria. That is not sexist, that is fact. Everything’s a matter of life and death. What you saw tonight is probably nothing. A daddy annoyed by his little girl’s boyfriend. You said the boy’s older, fierce looking, troubled. Who wouldn’t be upset?” He beckoned me over. “Look here, Mandy, push this for incoming calls. Adjust the volume here.”

“What about her mother?”

“Ah, that sure sounds sad, but it has nothing to do with Icarus. Now this here memo button is like a tape recorder. Say you have an idea, you press it down, see? Records what you say, for as long as you like.”

“You don’t think her paper means anything?” He’d perfected his shrug into a Gallic-by-way-of-New Orleans trademark. He used it now. “Give her an ‘A’ and relax.”

“But—”

“Now this changes your message. Push it down, wait for the light and say what you like. Only please, don’t make it cute.”

“I felt like this before about a composition. Turned out the girl who wrote it was pregnant and suicidal.”

He turned his head to me. “Killed herself?”

“No. I called her as soon as I’d read it and we talked and she got some help.”

“How come that time you knew what to do, knew for sure what you’d read?”

I shook my head. Maybe the message was clearer, or easier.

“Here’s how you pick up your calls from another phone.” He went over the code, and it sounded logical and easy. It had sounded that way when I read it in the manual, too. It had not worked that way when I tried it.

He checked his watch. “Goin’ on midnight. Too late to do a thing about Laura or her family now, anyway. It can wait till morning.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was motivated by logic or lust. “If you could have seen her eyes—” I began.

“This threatens to get real boring. The language of eyes is nice and literary, but I never did hear of an eye confession or anybody’s collected eye writings or somebody’s dirty looks being called pornography, did you? Eyes don’t really speak, and that’s why we had to go and invent tongues.”

“I’m sure—”

“Where’d you learn to read ‘eye’? Maybe you speak a different dialect, or you’re mistranslating.”

“But—”

“Because if you really can read eyes, how about mine?”

His were easy to decipher. Even so, it took a while to let go of the first part of the evening and embrace its remainder. Once I did, in the way of such things, I stopped thinking about cryptic compositions, half-glimpsed domestic strife and much of anything else.

Until the next morning, when the clock radio declared reveille. My alarm, which sounds like a Nazi storm trooper’s klaxon, terrorizes me every workday. Once I’m hyperalert, heart beating double time, I’m ready for the newscaster’s announcements of the imminent end of life as we know it. And then I’m ready for Philly Prep.

Mackenzie’s shift didn’t start for hours, so he selfishly made inviting morning sounds, sleepy, wistful moans and mewls. He attracted Macavity, the cat, who left his voyeur’s post on the chair next to my bed and snuggled in, but I was made of nobler fiber, and I left, staggering into the bathroom.

When I emerged, sans stratospheric heart rate and morning mouth, I dressed as serenely as is possible given that a delightfully rumpled alternative beckoned across the room. I felt jealous of my own cat, and wondered who cared whether I made it to school the day before vacation. Who was waiting desperately for his or her graded poetry paper? Why was I so determined to leave? Why not give a substitute a break— a real testing, the day before Christmas? The announcer proclaimed the wind-chill factor, and that almost did it, except I had mentally uttered the word “Christmas,” and that yanked back the night before and Laura. I had to talk with her.

I pulled on my moral cloak along with a boot and spoke sternly to Mackenzie, or myself. “No morning games. I have to leave.”

“Shhh,” he said.

“If our situation were reversed,” I explained, “you wouldn’t like it if I—”

He pointed at the radio. “Clausen.”

“Another commercial?” I frowned.

Mackenzie shook his head, and the way he did it made my pulse skyrocket all over again.

“—flamboyant business style, then for his involvement in the city’s welfare and development, a prominent philanthropist, the prime mover behind the massive Liberty Harbor project, and widely held to be the front-runner for the office of mayor, Mr. Clausen had hosted a Christmas party for over seventy needy Philadelphians in his home hours before his death. He was still in a Santa Claus costume.”

I sat down hard on the bed, still holding a boot. “What do they mean, ‘still’? What happened?”

“A fire,” Mackenzie said. “Clausen died in a fire.”

Fire. I saw Santa’s ruddy cheeks, white beard and red outfit, all charred.

“—cause of the conflagration remains undetermined and is held at this time to be accidental. However, officials stressed that the matter is still under investigation.”

What did that mean? And what happened to the rest of the family? Alice Clausen—passed out somewhere? And Laura—had she left with Peter? I hoped she had—I hoped it desperately.

“Mr. Clausen’s wife and daughter as well as a houseguest were alerted by a smoke alarm and escaped to safety.”

I felt both relief and fear. Laura was safe. But she’d been in the house during the fire. Laura. Fire.

“Feelin’ guilty, right?” Mackenzie yawned and stretched. “No cause, Mandy.”

“I knew…”

The newscast droned on, listing Clausen’s charitable works. If only he were still alive, he’d be ecstatic over the amount of airtime he was getting.

“What? What did you know?” He sat up straight and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s sad, that’s all.”

It was more than that. I got up and hobbled downstairs, one boot on, one stocking foot, to my stack of marked papers.

And there it was. “Instead of protecting his child,” she had written, “…he sent him too close to the fire.”

Icarus flew too close to the sun, Laura. Not to a fire. Why didn’t you say it the way everybody else would? I stared at the phrase, at the paper, reading it for what I had always known it was—an indictment of more than Icarus’ father, an indictment of all of us for not caring, not saving him. Or her.

I thought of her burn-scarred arm, of the stories about her, of other papers about destructive dreams. “Purgings,” she’d called those fantasies. And “safe murders.” And there’d been fire in them, images of burned zones and sooty remains, fire storms and wildfires. And she’d written about Joan of Arc, about a martyrdom that burned everything but the truth of her away. Of course, she’d also written innocuous papers, lyrical, soft, meditative and gentle papers, but right now, they seemed only rest notes, quiet spaces inside her true song.

“What’re you doin’?” Mackenzie asked a few minutes later as he, too, came downstairs.

I bit my lip and said nothing, Laura’s paper in one hand, my suede boot in the other.

“I don’t think that composition’s what they’ll want from you,” he said. “Fellow on the news says they’re searchin’ for a guest list. You have it?”

The guests! I hadn’t thought of them. But then, why should I have? Why should the police? Except that it felt so good—almost wholesome compared to the alternatives. A stranger, an unknown, not a wide-eyed fourteen-year-old girl who looked twelve. And the guests hadn’t comprised the most stable group. Muttering, frowning. Pulled in from the fringes for one night only—angry, perhaps? Envious, enraged? The man who’d wanted a free car had sounded close to the edge. And what about the spitting ’Nam vet? They were floaters, drifters, disenfranchised unknowns. Anyone of them could have had a secret agenda, could have wanted something badly enough to kill for it if refused. They might not even have known they wanted it until they saw it in Clausen’s opulent house, heard it in Clausen’s jolly laugh.

There were sixty-five possibilities. Strangers. I felt relieved.

Except that I had no idea who they were, and I told Mackenzie so.

He pointed his thumb up the stairs, to the radio. “Accordin’ to one Dr. Maurice Havermeyer, it was your party.”

“So I can cry if I want to? Damn. Why would they want the guest list, anyway?”

“That’s not a real question, now, is it?” he said, almost sadly. He took Laura’s composition out of my hand. “’Cept we know the list isn’t where they should look. Pity. A good mind, all messed up.”

“Don’t even think that.”

“Radio just said there was a fire in that house last year.” He stretched the word fire into “fahr,” somehow softer, more bearable. “You know about that?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Remember that paper you showed me about Joan of Arc? How fire cleansed her?” He shook his head.

“Imaginative writing. You said so yourself. Besides, she wrote others that were as ordinary as can be.”

“And a big fight between the two of them at the party.” He was almost musing to himself. “Front of everybody. Doesn’t look too great.”

“If you met her, knew anything about her, you’d know she couldn’t possibly—”

“I hope you’re right. Listen, I know this hurts, Mandy, that you care a lot about those kids, even if you won’t always admit it, and she’s real special. Nevertheless, you have to consider the possibility that—”

“She isn’t the kind of person who’d—”

“You’re a teacher, not a wizard. You can’t save the world. It’s hard when somebody you’re fond of—”

“Listen, Mackenzie, it was in the papers, that first…lots of people knew about that other…about the…”I couldn’t say it.

“Fire?”

I nodded. “Anybody could have set her up.”

“A motive would be nice. You suggestin’ that one of the homeless, sleeping in his newspaper found the story, got himself invited to her house a year later and torched the place?”

I felt ill. Save me, her eyes had begged. She’d let more of herself show in her papers than was safe because she trusted me. And I’d shown her secrets to a gentleman caller who happened to be a homicide detective. I’d given him ammunition with which he could now prejudge and damn her.

My sick guilt increased. Maybe I couldn’t have stopped anything from happening, but I could have taken some action, called for help when I heard that silent scream. I could have tried to do something, and I hadn’t. The most guilty sort of innocence—sitting on the sidelines.

I realized that although I denied Laura’s possible guilt to Mackenzie, I was privately assuming it. Otherwise, why was I thinking about what I could have prevented?

“Another suggestion,” Mackenzie said. “After you find that guest list, back off. Laura can make you sad, break your heart even, but the fact is, if she becomes police work, she doesn’t concern you.”

“Of course she concerns me! I’m very concerned!”

“I’m not playin’ word games. I’m givin’ you sound advice. She is not your job.”

“I know what the C in your name stands for, Mackenzie. For callous. Or is it cruel? Or maybe creep!” I pulled on the other boot and stormed to the closet.

“Where you goin’?”

“To my job!”

Let him take that any way he liked.