All day long, doors opened and closed to the dorms as girls returned from vacation. Classes would start tomorrow. The bleakest time of the school year was about to begin for the girls and for their teachers. Day after day they would get out of bed and trudge across the wintry campus to breakfast while it was still dark—and it would be dark again by four in the afternoon. It would be forever before spring arrived.
“You’ll talk to her tonight then?” Bob asked Rachel at five-thirty in the morning at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. The day before yesterday, New Year’s Day, Aunt M had gone home, her vacation over. In another minute, Rachel and Bob would say goodbye. He would get in his car and drive to New York, and because she was wide awake, unable to sleep, even if school were not about to start up again, she’d go to her office while she could still hear the sound of his car’s tires on the gravel driveway. In her mind, she was already walking across the campus in the dark.
By noon, Sylvia would be up. But Rachel wouldn’t talk to her then. She would wait until this evening, Sylvia’s last at home, just the two of them, together. Bob was right: whatever was going on with Sylvia had to do with school. It was a student’s problem, who just happened to be their daughter, and they weren’t about to treat Sylvia any differently. So it was Rachel’s duty to figure out. “Because otherwise Sylvia would have told us,” he had said. That would be too painful not to believe.
“I hope whatever it is, it doesn’t complicate your position too much,” Bob said. He glanced at his watch, gulped coffee, pushed his chair back, and started to stand.
“Well, if it does, I’ll give you a call,” she snapped.
He sat back down. “Yeah, I know.”
“Maybe we should have enrolled her in some other school where her mom’s not the head. You could have arranged an exchange of students with Miss Porter’s or Emma Willard, where someone on the staff had the same problem.”
“I could have?”
“Yes, you could have.”
“We didn’t even think about it. Why are you bringing it up now?”
“Because I was just thinking about it now. But I know. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”
“You should be. It’s lonely enough around here with you gone all the time.”
“That’s right,” he said, flushing. “When you can keep your daughter home where she belongs, why would anybody want to send her away to a fucking boarding school?” He threw his napkin down.
Just then, Sylvia came into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. She bent down and kissed him on the cheek. His scrambled eggs were still on his plate. “Aren’t you gonna eat, Dad?”
He shook his head. “Not hungry.”
“Yeah, it’s much too early.”
They sat at the table in silence while nobody ate until Bob said, “Syl, you want to walk me to my car?”
Sylvia nodded, still too sleepy for conversation. She got up from the table, picked up her dad’s suitcase, and disappeared with it through the door to the garage.
Bob looked at Rachel. How to say you’re sorry when you’re not? She shrugged and looked the other way. He got out of his chair so fast he almost knocked it over. Striding across the kitchen, he followed Sylvia out to the driveway through the garage.
Rachel stayed in her chair, rewinding the scene. This is how we end our vacations? She got up, cleared the table, scraped the uneaten scrambled eggs that she had cooked for Bob into the garbage disposal, and went out through the front door on the other side of the house, listening for the sound of his tires on the gravel as she headed in the dark across the campus to her office.
When she returned that evening, she found a note from Sylvia: Mom, I’m back in the dorms like everybody else. Below that line was a big drawing of a heart. “YOU DON’T HAVE to whisper, the door is closed,” Elizabeth said that evening when Sylvia started to tell her what had happened over the vacation. Sylvia agreed. No one had her ear to the door. No one suspected. Just the same, she couldn’t make herself talk any louder. She was paranoid about being overheard for the same reason she had come back to the dorm instead of spending the evening alone with her mom, who had had that look this morning that said, Can we talk? Sylvia was afraid she’d say yes and tell her everything. Because why shouldn’t she steal things for somebody who actually needed them? Elizabeth seemed to understand. She didn’t ask Sylvia to talk louder again. She just moved a little closer.
When Sylvia got to the part where she entered and lingered in Christopher’s lean-to, she found she couldn’t tell it. It was none of Elizabeth’s business. She explained about the backpack and the new lock. “First Auda e-mailed me to put the stuff back in the shed, then later she sent another email to just drop the stuff in front of the shed and run. I didn’t want to, but that’s what happened.”
Elizabeth was surprised. “You wanted to put it all back in?”
“Yeah, I did,” Sylvia said. Then, as if she’d confessed to wrongdoing, she added, “But I just said it didn’t happen.”
“Everything back like we never stole it in the first place?”
“I suppose so. It’s hard to tell what I would have done, if I’d had the key.”
“But the security guy could have come right then!”
“I know.”
Silence. They both looked at each other, waiting for the other to say it.
Then Elizabeth said it: “Sometimes it feels to me like you don’t care whether you get kicked out or not.”
“Oh, I do!”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I do. But—”
“But what?” Elizabeth leaned forward.
“Not as much as you. You have more to lose. I’ve known that all along, I guess.”
“You probably have,” Elizabeth said, leaning back again. “I know I have.” She seemed more vulnerable to Sylvia than she ever had. Except sometimes when she didn’t know that Sylvia was looking—or when she was sleeping.
“How come we’ve never talked about this?” Sylvia asked.
“We didn’t need to,” Elizabeth said, brightening. “We’ve already gotten past bigger differences than that.”
“Yeah, and we don’t talk about them either—at least not much,” Sylvia said, feeling a rush of affection. “Maybe someday we will.”
“I suppose so,” Elizabeth said. Then, as if she’d forgot to ask: “But the Christmas Eve service was that short? Where my parents go to church it lasts forever.”
“This is New England,” Sylvia said. “We’re very businesslike.” Then she told the rest of the story, ending with Gloria’s insistence on having Christopher’s down jacket cleaned.
“Of course she would. I would too,” Elizabeth said. “Anyway, it’s over. I’m glad, but I loved it while it lasted. We did the right thing. We’re safe. And we can hope he is too.” She turned her desk lamp on and opened her notebook. “Now I have to study.”
“I might as well too,” Sylvia said, turning her desk light on. “Now that there’s nothing else to do.”
IN HIS UPTOWN apartment near the FDR Expressway for rapid getaways to Connecticut, Bob Perrine couldn’t sleep. Just the other day, in his office, after another sleepless night, he’d typed sleep problems into a search browser and was advised to get out of bed, read a book, take a little walk, or maybe look out the window—but whatever you do, don’t watch TV. The blue light from the screen signals Day Time, Wake Up!
But that’s what he wanted to do: watch TV. A talk show maybe, harmless blather in the middle of the night, a movie, even the stupid ads—anything to cure the buzzing in his brain that went on and on and on.
Obediently, he got out of bed and chose looking out the window from the options. He didn’t feel like reading because then he’d have to turn on a light, and even a little walk in a tiny apartment is unrewarding. He’d get to a wall in about four steps and would have to turn around. So he went to a window.
And discovered another option: just stare at the night screen over the window. Its fabric was darker than the night, the color of ink. Just stare at it, instead of rolling it up. Just stand here like a blindfolded man and let calmness come.
Maybe he should sneak into his wife’s office and install a nightshade like this one for those big sliding doors so every time she even begins to think it’s time for her to move on with her life, she can’t look out and see that big old copper beech and the campus beyond it and tell herself, No way.
Someday soon, he’ll say to her: Remember when I said let’s take a sabbatical, and you said no, and I never said it again?
And she’ll say, Yes. I do remember. And he’ll say, Because when I get up in the morning and think of what I’m going to do that day, I don’t rub my hands together anymore. And she’ll say, Like a man who can’t wait to get to work? And he’ll say, Yeah, that’s it, like a man who can’t wait to get to work, but I don’t do it anymore. And she’ll say, Do you know what that’s telling you? And he’ll say, Yes, I do.
He stared at the screen for another few seconds, and then he raised it up and looked down at the street. A man was walking his dog. Bob looked at his watch. It was two in the morning. Does that guy walk his dog every night?
There was no way to know.
But he did know he’d made a decision.
So he got back into bed and promptly fell asleep.
“WAIT, YOUR LUNCH,” Aunt Adelaide said. Christopher was halfway out of her car, one foot on the sidewalk at the place where he’d catch the bus to Southern Connecticut State University. She leaned over to pluck the brown paper bag off the floor by the passenger seat where he’d left it and held it toward him. She’d got up early to make it for his first day of classes: a bacon, tomato, lettuce, and avocado on rye, two brownies, an orange, and a bottle of water. “You’re just excited,” she said. “That’s why you forgot.”
“Yeah, thanks for the ride,” he said. He closed the car door and stepped into the shelter. Several people were sitting on the bench. He stood apart from them in his new coat. With so much snow on the ground, she was glad he was wearing his hunting boots rather than the brown cordovans she’d purchased for him. She waved goodbye, remembering how hard it had been for him to fill out the university’s admission forms. But, she reassured herself, she wasn’t so good at that kind of thing either. It runs in the family.
IT WAS ORANGES that Christopher Triplett was so surprised to smell when he heard the word marketing and read it as it now appeared in capital letters on the screen in the front of the classroom. The professor, a tall man in a blue suit standing to one side, aimed a little red dot at the words: THE PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING. Unlike Christopher’s other classes which were spread out through two semesters, this one was intensely crammed into one semester, meeting five days a week.
Sitting in the first row so he wouldn’t miss a single concept, Christopher heard Uncle Ray say, like he did every Saturday: I’m going to the market today to get us some groceries.
Christopher would always blurt, Can I go with you? as if he needed to ask, and on the drive from Osgood Pond to Saranac, Uncle Ray would always say, It’s a crappy little store, but the owner is a friend of mine. So, Mr. Kin-I-go-Widja, that’s where we’re going today.
Even if they hadn’t run out of groceries. Kids like to know what’s going to happen next.
Inside the store, Uncle Ray would head straight for the oranges. One for Mr. Kin-I-go-widja, he would say, flipping an orange Larry Bird style behind his back in the general direction of Christopher who always caught it in the shopping basket. And one for me, he’d then say, this one a Magic Johnson jump hook. The next two were pure Uncle Ray: a zippereeno from underneath his armpit, and the finale, a weird underarm backward scoop over his head, from behind himself. That one always landed on the floor. Christopher would pick it up and put it in the basket with the other three. The four oranges, side by rounded orange side in his basket, were a sign to him that the world was right. The smell of orange would be on his hand the rest of the day.
“There are five marketing principles,” the professor announced. “They are easy to remember. Think of the word FOCUS with the U made into a V: FOCVS.”
The smell of the orange flooded out into the air from the brown paper bag on Christopher’s desk. The classroom was large and exactly square, its walls painted gray, with no pictures to adorn them. About thirty students, sat in rows facing forward.
“F for first in category,” the professor said. “O for being the opposite of the brand that is first in category—if yours can’t be first.”
Christopher reached into the brown paper bag and palmed the orange to stabilize himself. He’d come to this place to learn how to sell beloved things. He’d seen them in his head: canoe paddles made of ash, fly rods, binoculars, backpacks, tents. There wasn’t one item he hadn’t been able to see, arrayed in his imagined store. Now they were disappearing, melting away in the professor’s voice.
“C for category dominance, which is different from being first. V for visual hammer because words are great, but pictures are greater. And S for second brands, now that you’re a winner.”
Christopher looked around the classroom to find at least one person to keep him company, somebody else who’d come to the wrong place. All he saw was the sides of faces, people looking intently forward at the professor, or head down, taking notes. Not one person turned to him.
He tried hard to follow, taking notes, using his brain, a delicate instrument, concussed by an IED blast he had no memory of. Words went in, ideas, conclusions, but they didn’t assemble. The professor moved to the next concept in line while Christopher Triplett, the only person in that classroom who had killed a teenage girl, was still trying to find the words to write the note that condensed a concept the professor wasn’t talking about anymore because he’d already moved to the next. And then the next. And the next. After a while, Christopher put his pencil down and told himself to be calm. One concept at a time. Just listen. Just listen, he repeated, drowning out the professor.
At the break, most of the students got out of their chairs and left the room. Christopher stayed in his. If he sat perfectly still, thinking hard enough, maybe he could retrieve the lecture.
The professor left the screen and approached the front row where Christopher was sitting. Christopher hoped he was heading for the exit, to go to the men’s room, but no, he kept right on coming. He’s going to kick me out of his class, Christopher thought.
The professor stood in front of Christopher’s chair, leaning down. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just haven’t studied for a while.”
The professor nodded, radiating sympathy. “It is a difficult transition from where you’ve been, Mr. Triplett.”
Christopher didn’t answer. This was worse than getting kicked out of class.
“I’m right, aren’t I? You’re going through a difficult time?”
“Yeah, I am,” Christopher admitted. Now maybe the professor would leave him alone.
The professor glanced at his wristwatch. “It’ll just take time, Mr. Triplett. See me after class. We’ll set a time for an appointment.” At last, he headed for the exit.
Christopher needed to go to the men’s room. He’d drunk a lot of water. But he guessed that’s where the professor was headed, so he stayed in his seat.
AFTER THE BREAK, Christopher focused so hard on each of the professor’s words he was surprised his brain didn’t hurt, but those words were disembodied sounds going out into the classroom over Christopher’s head. He understood they were figuratively over his head as well. I can’t understand a lecture, but I can think in metaphor?
He began to get angry, which showed just how crazy he really was. The professor wasn’t some asshole in a camo suit. Still, Christopher wanted to jump up from the chair, charge the professor, knock him down to make him shut up. Afraid that he would actually do this, Christopher got out of his chair, grabbed his coat, and went out into the hall, right while the professor was still talking.
Now what was he supposed to do?
He’d go to the restroom first. Finally. Then he’d eat lunch. That’s what he would do. It would be embarrassing to go back into the lecture room to retrieve his lunch and briefcase. He’d get them after everybody was gone. So after the men’s room he went outside and wandered around the campus until he found a place to eat and ordered a vanilla milkshake and a hamburger.
“We don’t serve milkshakes here,” the waiter said, his hair dyed red.
“Start now,” Christopher said, crazy again.
The waiter went pale.
Christopher held up two fingers. “Two scoops of vanilla.”
“Sir! We don’t even serve ice cream.”
“Make it three scoops then.”
The waiter looked both frightened and disgusted. “I’ll get the manager. You can talk to her.” He crossed to the front of the café and whispered to an almost elderly woman in a blue serge pantsuit. She stared at him over the waiter’s shoulder. Christopher was flooded with shame. He fled.
Outside in the cold sunshine, the campus seemed bigger than when he’d arrived. Across from him was the Elihu Burritt Library. He’d go in there and read. He couldn’t make himself go to his afternoon class. The same thing might happen again, and it was too early to return to his aunt’s house. She’d want to know why he wasn’t still at the school. Tomorrow he’d explain to both professors: All of a sudden, I began to feel sick.
The reading room in the library was too warm. The air was dead. Someone had sucked the oxygen out. It was crowded with students. Their germs floated around in the air, spewing corruption. Every time someone coughed, he held his breath. He spent the hours reading back copies of Field and Stream and Wooden Boat and Fly Fisherman.
Around four in the afternoon, while reading an article about fishing for pike with an old-fashioned casting rod and reel like the one his Uncle Ray used, he looked up from the magazine, suddenly remembering reminiscing with his Uncle Ray, not long before he died. Hey, Uncle Ray, remember that time you got really mad at me, really really mad? It was the only time. You caught that great big pike, remember? And put him in the bottom of the Adirondack guide boat, and I thought it had died so I picked it up and held it with both hands in the water. ‘Look, Uncle Ray, I’m going to teach him how to swim,’ I said, because I wanted to hear your laugh. ‘Don’t,’ you said. ‘Why not?’ I said, and the fish twitched out of my hands and swam away. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘That’s why.’ Remember? He looked around for Uncle Ray.
But he was in the library again. Surrounded by people staring at him. They’d been reading his mind? Or had he thought out loud? “So I’m crazy. Fuck you if you don’t like it,” he said under his breath, in his most matter-of-fact tone, standing up, putting his coat on calmly to show how sane he was. He walked slowly out of the library. He knew how funny this could be—from another perspective. Another sign that he was sane.
He could go home now. It was late enough that his aunt wouldn’t know he had not attended his afternoon class. He’d go back to the lecture hall to retrieve his briefcase and uneaten lunch, and then get on the bus. He started to walk across the campus in what he thought was the right direction toward the lecture hall. It was getting dark. The buildings loomed. People he passed didn’t even look at him. Berms of dirty snow lined the paths. A few minutes later, he realized he didn’t remember the way. But sometimes he’d lost his way in big institutional places like this before he’d gone to Iraq, so that meant he wasn’t really crazy, and he did remember the name of the building. That was important. And he was still able to read a map. That was really important.
Because there was a map of the campus posted near where he was standing.
It told him he’d been walking in the opposite direction. Ten minutes later, he was in the academic building, walking toward the big closed doors of the lecture hall, already sure they were locked. And even if they weren’t, someone would have stolen the briefcase by now or turned it in to Lost and Found. Where was Lost and Found? Or maybe given it to the professor. Have you got my briefcase? he’d ask the professor tomorrow. My aunt gave it to me for Christmas.
There was a note taped to one of the big doors to the lecture hall: Mr. Triplett, I have your briefcase. I’ll be in my office until 4 pm. Take the stairs at the end of the hall, up one floor. Then turn right. Three doors down the hall on your left. Room 205. It wasn’t four o’clock anymore, but Christopher climbed the stairs anyway. Just in case the professor didn’t leave at four. Just in case. Just in case.
I had to go home, the note on door 205 said. I will bring your briefcase to class tomorrow… and now the professor is standing in the front hall of a big house, a big, hairy dog bouncing toward him and shoving his nose into his crotch, followed by a boy and a girl the same age as Christopher was when Uncle Ray adopted him. Waiting for their hug. Then suddenly Christopher is in the doorway and the professor is the one watching. The wife waits demurely behind the children, waiting for her hug in a red wool sweater and tight jeans. She’s got big breasts and is almost chubby, like those old paintings in museums, and he’s trying to decide whether she is beautiful or not, but he could tell by the look on her face, not demure anymore, that she would rush him into bed and make love to him as soon as they read the kids to sleep. But Christopher, she says, where’your briefcase, we can’t without your briefcase…. and now he was standing at the office door again, reading the note.
Outside he ran for the bus, waving at it to stop, but it kept on going, spewing exhaust at him. It was his punishment for missing it, not being on time. He took the next one, an hour later.
Aunt Adelaide met him, as planned, at the bus stop where she’d left him off. He could tell she was working hard to pretend she hadn’t been worried. She drove faster than her usual nice-old-lady pace back home, and when they opened the front door greasy smoke billowed out, smelling like burnt meat. The smoke alarm was screaming. Now he knew why she’d driven home so fast.
They rushed into the kitchen. He reached up and yanked the smoke alarm from the ceiling. “Oh Christopher, I wanted so much for you to have this dinner,” she said in the sudden silence. The smoke hurt his eyes. The whole downstairs would smell like burnt grease for days.
Aunt Adelaide put on big oven mitts and pulled the oven door open, and another cloud of greasy smoke billowed out. She dragged out the roasting pan, a little tiny blackened chunk of meat in it, and rushed it to the sink and stuffed it down the sink disposal and turned it on. The grinder roared, filling the house with a sound like a broken outboard motor, while they rushed around opening all the windows and doors. The smoke oozed out the windows and the cold winter air rushed in.
Christopher ran away upstairs to the attic, too cowardly to stay and apologize. He’d have to explain why he was late. She called after him, “Let me at least make you a sandwich.” He didn’t answer.
Upstairs, surrounded by the horse and carriage and big house times a million on the wallpaper, he sat down at his desk and, to reassure himself that he was at least a little bit sane, tried to retrieve the professor’s first lecture. This time the whole string of capital letters the professor had hung his concepts on reappeared in his brain along with a dim understanding. So what if it was maybe the rush of adrenaline from wading through the smoke? His spirits rose. He had some hope.
In the morning, when he came downstairs the stench of burnt meat carried also the smell of coffee, like a layer of snow covering the ice on Osgood Pond in the wintertime. Aunt Adelaide turned to him from the stove, attempting her Good Morning smile. She had opened all the windows again to let out the smell and was wearing a heavy woolen green sweater. He saw her for an instant as a little girl in a puffy green snowsuit, about to go out and play in the snow.
“Sit down, dear,” she said, gesturing to his place at the table.
He sat down, more careful than ever not to glance at the picture of the girl on the wall. Aunt Adelaide brought him an omelet and thin slices of ham and four pieces of toast made with the raisin bread she’s got up early to bake. “Your grandmother taught me how to make it,” she said. “In this very house.” He took a bite. It was delicious.
“But you’re supposed to put the marmalade on,” she said, reaching to touch his hand, stopping him from eating any more until he did. “It’s fancy, from Scotland. I send away for it.” She pointed to the center of the table where, on a shiny silver platter, next to the bowl of sugar with its special spoon and the breakfast salt and pepper shakers, stood the white crockery Dundee Marmalade jar. He picked it up and read James Keiler & Sons DUNDEE MARMALADE, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, like an ancient Grecian victory crown. Under it in smaller, more modest letters: First Prize Medal for Marmalade London 1862.
“The jars are so beautiful, I can’t make myself throw them away,” she said. “I have hundreds of them on a shelf down in the cellar.” He slathered some marmalade on his partially eaten slice of raisin bread toast and took a bite. It was even more delicious than the bread without it. He actually had to chew the orange rinds. “Don’t put too much on, it ruins the taste,” she said. He ate the omelet, two thin slices of toast, lightly rimed with the butter she’d warmed, and looked at the clock on the wall opposite to the picture of the girl. It was time to go, not enough time for her to make another two slices for him. She picked up her own spoon, not yet touched, spooned a bit of marmalade out of the beautiful white crockery jar, held it toward him. He opened his mouth leaning toward her and she fed him the marmalade, like a mom giving medicine to her little boy. It had happened in an instant, without any thought, just an impulse which flooded him with affection and embarrassed them both.
She drove him to the bus. Just as he opened the door to get out of the car, she said, “Where’s your briefcase?” It was not clear whether she had just noticed he didn’t have it or had been getting up the nerve to ask.
“I left it at the school on purpose. I didn’t need it,” he said, and tried to prove it by telling her how he sat at his desk last night and retrieved the whole lecture, and how the professor said that’s the way to do it, to secure the knowledge.
She looked like she was about to cry. “Please don’t lie to me, Chris. You don’t need to. I’m on your side.” Then she pushed the button to roll up the window so he couldn’t tell her any more lies and drove away.
He walked into the lecture room along with several others. The class was about to start. Up front at the lectern, the professor saw him entering. He leaned down behind the lectern, picked up Christopher’s briefcase with yesterday’s lunch still in it, and showed it to him. Christopher went there to get it. Before he could think of how to explain, actually make an excuse for leaving it behind, the professor said, “You don’t have to explain, I understand.” Then, in a commanding tone. “See me in my office right after class. I can help.”
The professor’s lecture this time was understandable for Christopher: a straightforward statement, backed up by statistics and percentages, that business organizations, especially small ones, like family-owned stores, don’t spend enough on marketing, getting known, creating a brand, because they get too wrapped up in operations.
After class, Christopher walked beside the professor, climbing the stairs to his office. On the way, several students and some colleagues waved to the professor or paused to say hello, and Christopher felt the professor’s ease in the community—and his own foreignness.
The walls in the professor’s office were lined with books. The professor noticed him noticing them. “Most of them are bullshit,” he said. “They’re just for show.” Christopher wanted to know whether the professor was joking or serious. Because it was very important. But he didn’t dare ask. The professor pulled his chair from behind his desk to prove how friendly he was and sat down in it, gesturing to a chair facing him just a few feet away. Christopher sat down. So he wouldn’t run away. He was sure the professor was about to try to teach him stuff he’d never understand.
The professor cleared his throat, preparing to begin. Christopher leaned in. “That war was stupid,” the professor said. “Which makes it all the more morally important that the people who had to fight in it deserve reward.”
“Please don’t tell me how you feel about the war,” Christopher said mildly, politely, to this person who he was sure never had to fight in one, proving to himself once again that he was sane.
The professor looked disappointed. “I understand,” he said, proving that he didn’t, and Christopher felt a sudden rush of what he knew was a totally unreasonable surge of hope.
Then the professor, still looking apologetic, asked Christopher a lot of easy questions about the lecture, little softballs to make him happy, and Christopher answered every one.
“That’s all for today,” the professor said, sounding like the shrink who Christopher had wanted to kill. “We’ll do some more tomorrow.” Christopher’s hope rose still more as he stood up to leave. But standing up, he was able to see past the computer and the mess on the professor’s desk a framed photograph of the professor surrounded by his family, a dog, two kids, and a wife. They didn’t look at all like the people he had seen when he’d been the professor standing in the doorway with the dog’s nose in his crotch waiting for hugs from his kids, looking forward to making love to his wife.
“Goodbye and thanks,” Christopher said, mildly and politely, hiding his relief that he was seeing what was really there.
He rushed to his next class, Financial Planning and Strategy. He managed not to be offended that the professor, a very small woman who had to stand beside the lectern because it was too tall for her, didn’t notice his presence, which meant she didn’t even know he was absent the day before. He understood her lecture, and she didn’t look anything like the girl he killed.
The next several days went quite well. He managed to understand almost everything in both professor’s classes. He came home each night to a sumptuous meal which his aunt had taken great satisfaction in preparing for him in her kitchen. It smelled only a little bit like burnt grease now. The first night was a pork roast—to make up for the one he’d ruined by missing a bus. Mashed potatoes, with a hint of cheese. String beans she’d frozen last summer about two minutes after she bought them from a local farmer. And for dessert: a cherry cobbler, still warm enough to melt the vanilla ice cream, her special kind from Philadelphia—“because you can see the little vanilla beans, that’s how you know.” The next night, two small roast chickens. She’d put a whole lemon inside each one, and little red potatoes roasted in the drippings—“which doesn’t clog your heart, no matter what they say, because how could it when it makes you happy? Right, Chris?” Only one glass of wine because he had homework to do. “So I will only drink one too.” (Not counting the ones she drank while she was cooking before he came home.) The third night, homemade pasta topped by her homemade tomato sauce, also frozen after being made right after she bought the tomatoes from the local farmer. But the ground beef and pork and little bits of sausage that were in it? “I bought those this morning right after I dropped you off at the bus.”
The next morning, he went off to school full of energy and hope. The marketing professor must have sensed his growing confidence. He stopped his lecture and asked Christopher to explain his point by saying it in a slightly different way. It was no surprise to anybody in that class. He’d done the same thing to other students the day before and the day before that. But Christopher couldn’t explain. The concept was there. But the words were not. Or maybe it was the other way around? The professor quickly moved on to save face for this student of his he felt so sorry for. That’s what enraged Christopher. That pity.
All of a sudden, he is standing up and walking toward the professor. Open your mouth! he commands. The professor doesn’t. So Christopher shoves the end of his rifle right through the closed lips, breaking teeth on the way to where the professor’s words at him emerged. He stops before he pulls the trigger, though. He doesn’t want to see the professor’s head exploding.
Appalled by what he was capable of imaging, Christopher got up from his chair, sadly waved goodbye to the professor, and exited the classroom. First he took the same bus he would have taken if he were returning to his aunt’s house. He arrived an hour before she would come to meet him. He waited another forty-five minutes for another bus to Bradley Field, getting away just in time. How long would she wait for him before she gave up and went home? Would she eat alone the dinner she’d cooked just for him? Or throw it away? Would she call the police?
At Bradley Field, he bought a postcard showing how it looked when he was just a little kid, and some stamps. I can’t do it, I tried hard. I’m not ready, he wrote. I’m going back to where I was until I am. Please don’t worry. Thanks and Love, Christopher.
He didn’t say what else he was thinking: that he couldn’t hang around her house until he was ready. She’d learn to hate him if he did. He might fly into one of his rages and hurt her. He simply mailed the card, comforting himself: this was an improvement. The last time he’d left her without even a note.
Looking like just one more tired and haggard business traveler in tasteful, if somewhat preppy, clothes, he took a SuperShuttle to the Fieldington Inn. From there, he headed on foot for his lean-to.
At the edge of the town, the sidewalks ended and the road narrowed. He was afraid drivers would not see him in his dark coat, so he walked on the left side of the road facing traffic, and each time a car came toward him, blinding him with its headlights, he stepped up onto the rim of plowed snow beside the road, sinking almost up to his knees to get out of the way. The light from the front windows of nearby houses helped him see where he was going, but the distance between them grew longer, until he came to a stretch where there were no houses and the only lights he saw were coming from the campus of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls a quarter of a mile or so ahead.
On his trips from the village to his lean-to, he’d always walked past the campus, sticking to the woods on the other side of the road from the school. It was best to stay out of sight. As soon as he was around a curve in the road and could not be seen by anyone on campus, he crossed the road and cut directly through the woods to his lean-to. But now it occurred to him that, dressed as he was, no one would recognize him as the man who begged near the ice cream shop—the kind of person who would stir alarms in an all-girls boarding school, on guard against deviant intruders. If anyone saw him, dressed as he was, they’d think he belonged.
And anyway, no one would see him in the dark. Besides, this was a shorter route and he was exhausted. The driveway into the campus was now just yards away.
A car came around the corner, hugging the side of the road, blinding him again. It kept coming right at him, still tight to the side of the road. All the other cars had swerved toward the middle of the road, but Christopher had climbed up the rim of piled snow anyway to be sure to avoid being hit. Not this time. He stood still right where he was. The fucker behind the wheel was going to be the first to move. But the car kept on coming, still tight to the side of the road. Christopher took a step sideways to his right to get further out into the road and make the driver swerve so hard the car would go out of control and plow head on into a tree on the other side of the road. He could almost hear the sound of the car hitting the tree, the noise of the horn stuck on, and could see the front of the car accordion back into the driver’s chest, blood erupting in a red flow from the nostrils. Instead, he watched the car turn into the school’s driveway.
Christopher stood in the dark almost in the center of the road, watching the car’s red taillights move up the long driveway. The rage that had filled him drained away. He was a crazy man for sure, frightened of himself, doubly sure now he had been right not to return to his aunt’s house. She wouldn’t be safe with him around.
He walked up the long driveway, his brain flickering with the notion that maybe he wanted the car to hit him, but then he came upon the white clapboard buildings of the campus. They were arranged in an arc, embracing an expanse of snow-covered lawn. No one was about. Everyone was tucked into one of these buildings. Their comely Puritan shapes were satisfying to him against the night. Lights from their big windows made squares of warmth upon the snow. Then voices. Girls’ singing voices, floating into the dark:
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is,
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My countries skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
He didn’t know that he was standing next to the music building where the Glee Club was rehearsing Finlandia for their participation in the Round Square Conference, an international league of schools, devoted to service, founded simultaneously in England and Germany soon after World War II. But he did know that he wished he could linger in this well-ordered place where young women sang songs of forgiveness. Reluctantly, he left it, the girls’ voices, as they perfected their hymn, following him, softer and softer, as he headed under bright stars across the athletic fields into the woods.
Soon he would hear the river.