Rachel surprised her family—and herself—when, just as they sat down to begin their Christmas Eve dinner, she announced her intention to go to church for the midnight service. Just seconds ago, she’d had no such intention—at least no conscious one. No one spoke. They were waiting for an explanation. So, shrugging her shoulders, she provided one: “To support Michael Woodward.” At the other end of the table, Bob cocked his head and raised his eyebrows.
“Well, he is our friend, isn’t he?” She resented his making her feel defensive. Why couldn’t a person want to do something without knowing why?
“Well, if you’re going, so am I,” he said. If either had been looking, they would have seen Sylvia trying to hide her shock behind a slightly bored expression, a teenager surrounded by adult talk. Tonight would be the perfect opportunity to ski to the lean-to, gather the stolen stuff, and sneak it back into the equipment shed in the protection of the dark!
“But it’s Christmas Eve,” Aunt M said. “His church will be crammed. Why would he need support from you?”
“Because we know his secret,” Bob said. “He doesn’t believe. At least not the resurrection part. Makes him feel like a hypocrite.”
“Oh, poor little boy,” Marian said. “Maybe he could just get over it.”
“Marian!” Rachel said.
“Or he could quit. Find some other way to make a living.”
“He’d never quit. He loves his flock too much,” Bob said. “He’s a great guy. He’s always there for them.”
“Well, I take it back then,” Marian said. She turned her head to look across the table at Sylvia. “We all need someone to be there for us, don’t we, Sylvia?”
The question came out of left field. For cover, Sylvia turned to her mother, and said, “Can we start? Everything is getting cold.”
“Especially when we’re hurting, right?” Aunt M persisted, still looking at Sylvia.
There was a pulse of silence. Then, from her dad: “Where you going with this, M?” There was an edge to his voice. “She doesn’t need a lecture.”
“Sorry.” Aunt M leaned back in her chair. She actually looked contrite!
“You coming with us, then?” her mom asked Aunt M.
“Yes.”
“You are?” Sylvia said.
“Why not. In Rome, do as the Romans.”
“Three guesses whether Sylvia will,” her dad said, smiling at her. “The first two don’t count.”
Sylvia reached and touched the back of his hand and left it there. “You go first.”
“You’re staying right here. You’ve got better things to do.”
Sylvia forced herself to look right at her dad. “That’s right. I haven’t finished wrapping presents.”
Her mom picked up her fork: the signal to begin.
“WHAT WERE YOU doing? Trying to get me to confess?” Sylvia whispered in the kitchen. Her parents were clearing the table, just out of earshot.
“No, just giving you an opening, if you wanted one,” Aunt M whispered back. “Your parents talking about being there for someone else? You might not ever get a more opportune time. Plus, it’s Christmas Eve. You were being served a forgiveness special.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t see what else it’s an opportune time for.”
“…Oh!”
“The minute my dad said he’d go too. We’ll never get a better one. You really didn’t see it?”
Aunt M shook her head. “I never said I was smarter than you, hon. Just older.”
Sylvia’s mom and dad were heading back to the kitchen now, laden with dishes. Aunt M dropped her voice even lower. “If they get bored and say they want to leave in the middle of the service, I’ll say I don’t want to leave. That will guarantee you enough time—if you really hurry.”
SYLVIA WAITED FOR the sound of her dad’s car leaving before she went to the garage. There, hung on a row of hooks on the wall, were three cross-country ski outfits, her mom’s on the left, hers in the middle, her dad’s on the right. She pulled her ski pants on over her skirt. Now the sight of the empty hook between her parents’ outfits stunned her, as if she herself had been between them, safely protected by their loving care. She went out through the side door of the garage.
The recent rain had turned into snow again and then had stopped, leaving several inches of new, powdery snow. There was no moon, the sky huge, entirely black between the million stars. Yellow light spilled from the windows of the Head’s House onto the snow. Across the campus, the row of dormitories in their white clapboard, the library with its steeple, the Administration Building where her mother worked, and the big copper beech tree her mother loved were almost invisible in the dark. Sylvia put on her skis and headed as fast as she could across the campus and athletic fields and onto the trail by the river, where she smelled the familiar musky smell. Did every river have its own smell?
She found the lean-to bowed down under the weight of snow. Soon it would collapse. The pile of stolen stuff in the doorway was sugared by the snow that had drifted in. The note was not there. It must have blown away. Somebody would come across it someday and wonder what it meant. She wished she and Aunt M had put the pine bough door back in the opening. It was the least they could have done. She filled the backpack with the stuff she and Elizabeth had stolen, stuffing the down jacket in last, and looked at her wristwatch. The opening into the lean-to beckoned. What was it like to live in there? No, she didn’t have time.
She picked up the backpack, heaving it shoulder high to put her arms through the straps. Then she dropped it on the snow and crawled into the lean-to. She would stay only a minute.
In the center of the lean-to, she turned around and sat facing the open door, wishing that she could close it as Christopher must have closed it in the wintertime, to make it almost cozy. It smelled of dying pine needles in there, and smoke from his cooking fire that had drifted in, and maybe his sweat, his clothes, maybe even his bug repellent, lingering from the summer. She lay down, closed her eyes, and tried to call up the sounds and the sights and smells of his war that he must have relived while he tried to sleep. Minutes went by, and by, and by, while nothing came but dim replicas of black-and-white photographs she’d seen in the New York Times. “Tell me,” she said, closing her eyes. And waited. There was no answer. She opened her eyes. There was nobody beside her, of course. She felt empty and sad, and angry at him for not being there, and embarrassed at her own foolishness—because now she was panicking over the lost time. She crawled outside, clipped her skis back on, and as she hefted the backpack up she noticed the little berms of snow that lay on top of the rungs of the grill over the firepit. Long after Christopher’s lean-to fell and rotted away, the grill would still be there, waiting for someone to come along and use it.
A half hour later, breathing hard, pouring sweat, she headed across the campus toward the bright pool of light that bathed the outdoor equipment shed. Almost there, she realized she didn’t have the time to take off her skis, sneak across the lighted parking lot, open the padlock, unpack the backpack into the shed, and get home before her parents returned. Why did she even go into the lean-to, let alone stay there for so long? She turned around and skied home. In the garage, she hurried out of her skiing clothes as she heard her dad’s car in the driveway and carried the backpack up the backstairs just as she heard her mother and dad and Aunt M enter the house through the front door. In her room, she hid the backpack under some spare blankets in her closet. Then she counted to ten and went downstairs.
Her father was already pouring eggnog. “Sylvia! You’re up.” He handed her a mug. Her mother nodded her approval. After all, it was Christmas Eve. He handed a mug to Aunt M, but she shook her head. “Oh that’s right, you’ve given up drinking,” he said, sounding a touch disappointed. He handed the mug to Sylvia’s mother.
“How was church?” Sylvia asked.
“It was nice,” her mother said, and went on to name the carols they’d sung. Sylvia only half-listened. It had just occurred to her that her mom might feel like trading clothes with her tomorrow morning. Ever since Sylvia had grown as tall as her mom, it had been happening whenever either one of them felt the impulse to wear the other’s clothes. Her mom would open the closet door to make her choice. And guess what she would find?
Sylvia knew it was ridiculous, but the feeling still wouldn’t go away that her parents and Aunt M were staying up late, talking just to make sure she wouldn’t have time before the sun came up to sneak the backpack in her closet back into the outdoor equipment shed.
At last, all the eggnog was gone. “Isn’t anybody getting sleepy?” Aunt M said. Everybody decided they were and went upstairs to bed.
THAT NIGHT RACHEL lay waiting, well after two, for Bob to finish his shower and join her in the big king size bed in the master bedroom—that other country she was a citizen of when he was home. He would have left the shower stall door open, as usual. Water would be flying all over the bathroom floor. It had been going on for twenty-five years. She would be disappointed if it ever stopped. “You grew up in a barn?” she’d joked the first morning of their wedded life, standing in the water he’d left on the floor, naked beside him, watching him spray toothpaste on the mirror which he was gazing lustfully at, her reflected breasts prominent there. The night before he’d said, “Yum yum, chocolate nipples. So much better tasting than strawberry ones,” and she, who would still be a virgin for another few seconds, had wanted to ask How do you know, but didn’t. “I’ll mop it up, but first a little more of this,” he had said, patting her ass with the hand that wasn’t brushing his teeth.
Usually the sound of his shower while she lay waiting was a foreplay all its own: she was the queen of Sheba, he the adoring, glistening prince adorning himself with cleanliness so as to come unto her. But never on Christmas Eve. She thought of it as a family tradition: Christmas Eve was for thinking of the Christmas story—which, she promised herself, she would learn to believe someday. It wasn’t passion she craved, nor excitement; it was serenity. Everybody deserves a little serenity on Christmas Eve. That’s the real reason she’d suddenly decided to go to church.
The absence of serenity. She’d been trying to ignore it since even before September when, at the end of the weekend, just before he left again, she’d dropped the news that something was missing and he’d wondered aloud if it was maybe time to think about some other kind of work, and she’d said No! and he’d said Well then?
That question had been in the air every weekend since then, but he had never brought it up, the subject too fraught for such small pulses of time. Guaranteed not to be resolved. Better to focus entirely on the pleasure of each other’s company than on heavy considerations. It was the same with the copper beech: she could call an arborist to tell her if the tree was sick. Instead, she’d wait for spring when, like Margaret said, either the new leaves would replace the dry old shriven ones, or they wouldn’t. But now, more than ever before, she felt that something scary was going to happen if she didn’t resolve Bob’s question soon.
When you can choose the work you do, then what you do becomes who you are. She was the one who had said that. Or was it her sister? Either way, it was true. She couldn’t imagine herself as any other person than the Head of Miss O’s, but she’d begun to think of the school as a person who would stay young forever. As if there was nothing remaining for it to become—while what she wanted was change, even if that meant getting old and wrinkled and finally dead.
The shhhsss sound of the shower stopped. She listened intently. The sound of his electric toothbrush. Like a little bee. It would last exactly two minutes. What did he think about all that time? It stopped at last, and she heard the water running. Rinsing his toothbrush. Now he was flossing. Naked, watching the mirror. Now he was putting on his pajamas. She knew because putting on pajamas didn’t make any sound. Is this what it was like to get old: shivering in anticipation of a cuddle? Was he an artifact in her life and she in his? Could you really love someone as ardently and faithfully as they both believed they loved each other and that someone not be the center, pushed to the periphery by work?
The bathroom door opened. He was framed in the doorway by the light behind him. The light went out and he padded in the dark across the carpet. The mattress sagged down on his side of the bed and he lifted the covers. She turned away from him so he could press himself against her back, like two spoons cradled, his arms around her. He kissed her ear, then nuzzled his lips into the back of her neck. She felt his breath. It was safe now; he could ask that question again: Well then? He’d even help her answer.
“Something’s going on with Sylvia,” he said.
She was too disappointed to answer.
“I hope you’ll talk to her.”
“Not you?” she managed. “Not both of us?”
“It’s about something that’s going on at the school. Something you need to know. If not you, then Eudora.”
“How do you know?”
“Because otherwise she’d tell us.”
“You sure?”
“I’m a whole lot less sure of almost everything than I used to be. But we have to base our decisions about what to do and what not to do on one assumption or another.”
“All right then, I’ll talk to her.”
“When school starts up again, right? Like for the other girls? They don’t have to deal with the head of school when they’re on vacation.”
“If you say so.” She rolled over on her back, put her hand on his chest, and pushed him gently away.
Nothing to do now but try to fall asleep.
IN HER OWN room, Sylvia got under the covers with her clothes still on and waited. She cared less whether her aunt was asleep than her parents—though she would hate to have her aunt know the reason she had failed to get the stuff back on time was her lingering in Christopher’s lean-to. She’d keep that a secret forever.
When she was sure they were asleep, she got up, leaving the light off, picked the backpack up off the floor of her closet where it rested below the ankle-length green dress on its hanger that she was sure her mother would choose to wear in the morning, and tiptoed toward the door of her bedroom.
Out in the hall, Sylvia stopped. Was this one of the nights her dad couldn’t sleep? But all she heard was the wheezing of the grandfather clock getting ready to ring the hour, then the tinny ring three times. She tiptoed down the stairs, across the hall, and out the front door. It was the farthest door away from her parent’s room on the other side of the house.
Outside, the cold hit her immediately and she sucked in her breath. She carried the backpack in her hand so she could toss it away, out of sight if the security guy appeared. It was hard to carry that way, making her feel lopsided. She had to put it down and rest twice. She was breathing hard by the time she came around the gym, key out in her hand already. She was going to put everything back. Christopher had gone away; so make the crime go away too. She hurried across the wash of glaring light. It glinted on the padlock.
Which was a different one.
Of course they would have changed it! Why hadn’t she thought of that? She tried to stuff her key in anyway. It didn’t go. She leaned the backpack against the door and started to run home. The stuff was returned, that’s what counted. It didn’t make any difference whether it was inside or not when it was found.
She was almost all the way home when she remembered the backpack was hers, not the school’s. But this isn’t ours, Gloria would say, pointing to the backpack in her mom’s office. Her mom would already know. She’d given it to Sylvia for her birthday.
Sylvia ran back into the glare of the light again and pulled everything out of the main section of the backpack, piling it on the ground, all the while listening for the security guy’s car. Next she tried to extricate the first-aid kit out of the small side pocket into which she had crammed it into at Christopher’s lean-to, but she could get only the tip of her fingers and thumb around the top edge of it and they kept slipping off. The kit was labeled Property of Miss Oliver’s—she knew because she was the one who had done the labeling—and it wouldn’t budge. She turned the backpack upside down and pushed hard against the bottom of the side pocket. The kit popped out, landing on the hard pavement, spilling its contents out in a fan. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide, glistening in the light, rolled away, making a hard brittle sound. In a rage of panic, she ran after it and picked it up and stuffed it with the rest of the contents back into the kit and pushed the lid shut, but it wouldn’t close. She would have to take everything out and repack it all neatly, each item in its specified place. Instead, she plucked the bottle of hydrogen peroxide out and threw it across the parking lot, out of the light. She closed the first-aid kit and left it next to everything else. She laid the down jacket over the top of the pile as if to keep it warm. Then she picked up her empty backpack and ran.
Home again, she entered through the side door of the garage and returned the backpack to its place, and then, repeating the steps she’d taken earlier, went up the backstairs and to her room. The grandfather clock wheezed the half hour. Only thirty minutes? That’s all it took?
Soon she was snug and warm, under a thick comforter in her bed, on the delicious downward slope toward sleep. She wouldn’t reenter the world until noon, at least.
But why hadn’t they told her they’d changed the lock? She was wide awake again. Wouldn’t the first person they told be the president of the club? And who were they? Gloria Buchanan? Mabel Walters, the business manager? The head of maintenance? The security guy? Did they just forget—or did they suspect her? Why hadn’t she suggested they change the lock? Maybe when she didn’t, they began to suspect her.
And if Christopher had just taken the stuff with him, wherever he went, wearing the down jacket to keep himself warm, she wouldn’t have had to sneak it back. Why did he think he had to give it all back? After a while, the questions, endlessly repeating, were more boring than frightening. She fell asleep.
She woke briefly in the daylight. Her mother was tiptoeing out of the room with the ankle-length green dress. Sylvia turned on her side and went back to sleep.