Christopher Triplett willed the woman to turn around. Come back, come back, don’t fly away.
The same will which had enabled him to stay alive, to not shoot himself, instead to build a shelter of pine boughs against the cold and suffer contempt—his own as well as that of others’—for begging for his livelihood on haughty streets. When she had disappeared around the bend and he could not hear the swish of her skis on the snow anymore and knew she would not return, he put his hand in his shirt pocket, fingering the cell phone there as a person might a cross or a rosary, and willed himself to believe that revelations arrive in instants. They come and go in one beat of the heart. That’s the mark of their truths. If he were a churchgoer like his aunt, a singer of hymns, he would know because the Bible told him so.
The revelation was the mercy he’d seen in her eyes, the worry there about how cold he was living outdoors. How could she know that he always kept the topcoat his aunt had bought for him in the lean-to, away from the cooking fire, so it wouldn’t smell like smoke?
It took a powerful will for him not to believe it was his concussive brain damage bringing him an apparition: the mother of the thin girl named Sylvia and the mother of the girl he’d killed becoming the same. Others would call it faith, not will. Whichever, he was glad for it for saving him. If the woman had turned around and come back, he would have knelt in the snow and put his arms around her legs and thanked her for forgiving him.
He ducked inside the lean-to to get the coat his aunt had bought for him, which lay on his pine bough bed as a blanket, came outside again and put it on, and, placing his feet in the holes his prior steps had made in the knee-deep snow, made his way to his bathing place in the river. It was too cold there, away from the fire, to take off his clothes, to bathe all of himself and get clean, really clean, like he had in the summer when Sylvia had seen him here and he’d had nothing to hide any part of himself, nothing at all. He knelt by the edge of the river, made a cup out of his hands in it, and washed his face. It was sufficient ceremony, given the conditions. He went back to the fire and ate the rest of his breakfast.
RUSHING AWAY FROM the man through the woods, Rachel felt those hollowed eyes on her back, exactly between her shoulder blades. Not pushing her away. Just staring. Maybe even trying to pull her back. If she turned around, he would still be there. And the next day, and the next. Until whatever Sylvia and Elizabeth were going to cause to happen came to pass. What would she say to him, who would speak first, if she turned around? But of course she couldn’t. That would make her complicit. She would have to resign.
There was no proof. That’s why she could pretend she didn’t know—that she hadn’t half-known when he was panhandling in the parking lot the day before Thanksgiving and she’d seen the look on Sylvia’s and Elizabeth’s faces in the rearview mirror, and three-quarters known later when he was standing in front of Rose’s Creamery and Elizabeth said no, he’s not the one and Sylvia said he was. Sylvia had trusted her mother with that news: He was. Now it was time to return the trust. It would all come out in the end, but because Sylvia and Elizabeth caused it to, not Rachel. She wouldn’t take that away from them.
The feeling between her shoulder blades didn’t diminish until she was almost home, passing the edge of the woods into the shadow they cast on the athletic fields. When she was past that shadow into the glare, her own shadow slid on the snow in front of her. Elongated, ten feet tall at least, heading toward the campus. Now the feeling was on her chest, pushing against her to slow her progress. She wished for some other place to return to and tell Bob what she had just learned, a home of their own that had nothing to do with Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.
But why in the world did Sylvia and Elizabeth take the stuff back? Couldn’t they understand how cold he was without it? She had half a mind to go into the shed while no one was looking and grab a down jacket, and ski pants, and some gloves that stayed there unused ninety-nine percent of the time like yachts at their docks, and ski out to him with them.
She put her skis away in the garage, next to Sylvia’s, and went into the house. Bob would be up. Making a mess in the kitchen.
HE WAS IN his bathrobe and slippers. “Good morning,” he said. “I missed you.”
“I’m sorry. I should have left you a note.” She was right. A terrible mess. Pancake batter all over the stove.
“I thought you’d be hungry.” He bent over to open the oven door.
“I’m famished. I’ve been skiing.”
“I figured.” He took a platter of pancakes out of the oven. Their smell filled the room. He put the platter down on the kitchen table and pulled out a chair for her, and when she sat down, he leaned over her, pressed his hands lightly on her shoulders, and kissed the back of her neck. “Monday morning with Rach,” he said. “Yum yum.”
She held onto one of his hands. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Wait a minute, I forgot the syrup.”
She let go of his hand. He moved to the refrigerator, peered in. The New Yorker cartoon she’d taped to the refrigerator a year ago was still there: a husband peering into a refrigerator loaded with nothing but boxes marked BUTTER, asking “Honey, where’s the butter?” He’d laughed the first time he saw it.
“Not there. It’s in the cabinet above the stove, where it always is.”
He shrugged, moved to the cabinet, opened the door, moved things around while her mild irritation, boring because habitual, turned into a strange comfort for the same reason. He was still the same old Bob who couldn’t ever see things right in front of his face, and she was still the same old Rachel who allowed herself to get pissed off because he couldn’t ever see things right in front of his face.
At last, he found the bottle of maple syrup and poured some into a bowl and put it in the microwave.
She said, “I ran into the homeless man again.”
He turned his head from the microwave. “You did?”
“Yes. It’s the same guy. We recognized each other.”
“While you were skiing?”
“Yes. By the river. He’s made himself a kind of shack. Out of pine boughs. It’s pitiful. You should see it. I’m afraid he won’t survive the winter.”
“Really? He’s living in it? By the river?”
She nodded three times.
“Poor guy!” The microwave timer buzzed. He took the syrup out and put it by her plate and sat across from her. She forked three pancakes from the platter. Poured some syrup on. And found she couldn’t eat.
“Are they warm enough?”
She forced herself to take one bite. “Yes. Thanks. They’re lovely.”
“So are you.” He put three on his plate, poured the syrup. Sun streamed through the windows, flooding the kitchen, and a steady drip of melting snow on the roof tapped a rhythm outside the windows.
“So what are you going to do about him?” he asked, putting down his fork.
“What am I going to do? I told you, this is the same guy who Sylvia couldn’t even talk about. She’s your daughter too.”
“I know. And I’m just as sorry for him as Sylvia is, Rach, but what if he’s on school property? The school’s land extends for miles beyond the campus, doesn’t it? Won’t you have to have him removed?” Bob’s shoulders slouched. He sounded regretful.
Rachel was stunned. “Did you hear yourself, Bob? Have him removed. That’s like collateral damage.”
“I know,” he said, shaking his head. “He’ll be dragged off. It’s awful. But what other alternative is there?”
She looked away, out the window.
“How would you get him off? The police?”
She snapped her head back around. “How else?”
“Well, let’s hope they can get him into a shelter.”
She heard the sincerity in his tone, that he really did want Sylvia’s homeless man—that’s how she insisted on thinking of him, now more than ever—to be safe and warm in a shelter. But that didn’t stop a bitterness from rising into her throat. “Right,” she said, “I’ll call Mo Comeau and tell him to have his cops drag him away in the middle of the night so the girls won’t know what lengths their school will go to keep the real world away.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Rach. You didn’t make him homeless. And you can always pretend he’s not there.”
“Is that what you would do?”
“I might. I know I’d have to think twice before I pushed him out into the cold. But if I were you? I don’t know.”
He seemed so thoughtful sitting there across the table, watching her eyes and nodding his head. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Right now, I’m tired. I’m going upstairs to take a nap.” She didn’t really need a nap. She needed to be by herself to think.
“From skiing?”
“No, skiing doesn’t make me tired,” she said, standing up. “But you should have seen him, Bob. I wish you’d been there with me. Think how cold he must be. How lonely.”
“Well, next time invite me. That is, if you don’t have him removed. We’ll bring him some warm clothes.”
“Like a down jacket?”
“Exactly,” he said, looking straight in her eyes. “Just like the one that was stolen.”
She took in a breath and held it.
“Now, while I clean up this mess, why don’t you go upstairs and take that nap?”
She let out the breath. “Will you come up when you finish? I could use a snuggle.”
“Soon as I’m finished.”
She turned to leave.
“I just thought of something.”
She turned back.
He shrugged. “For whatever it’s worth…”
“Go ahead, say it.”
“You wouldn’t have to apologize to Syl and Elizabeth if you don’t have him removed.”
“I know. I already thought of that.”
UPSTAIRS, SHE LAY down on her side of the bed on top of the covers. A few minutes later, Bob came into the room. “You’ll freeze,” he said. He took a down comforter out of the closet, put it over her, and got under it with her. “Remember when Gloria told us that the stolen stuff was returned how surprised I was that Sylvia hadn’t told me it was stolen in the first place? That struck me as very strange. I thought then maybe Elizabeth and Sylvia stole it and gave it to that homeless man that Sylvia was worried about. Just maybe, of course. There was no real reason, it was just a passing thought. But then I asked myself, why would they take it back? They’re too kind to take a down jacket and other warm clothes away from him when winter’s coming, even if he would let them. Then I knew it wasn’t true. Actually, that was a little disappointing. I liked thinking of them as latter-day Robin Hoods.”
Rachel rolled on her side and put her arms around him. “I had exactly the same thought this morning when I saw him in that shack. Why would they take it back? Especially when I had made it very clear to the whole school that bringing back the stolen things would redeem nothing, that the consequence for stealing was expulsion regardless of the motivation.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. But wouldn’t you have to recuse yourself?”
“Of course I would.”
“Well, why don’t you start recusing yourself right now?”
“You think I should?”
“I do.”
“But suppose—”
He put his hand gently over her mouth. “Shh. Time to sleep.”
She pretended to drift to sleep, knowing that he was pretending too. Yes, she would be disappointed too to know that her own daughter didn’t care enough about that man to try to keep him warm. And yes, she would recuse herself.
Or maybe she wasn’t recusing. Maybe, like all good leaders, she was delegating a responsibility to people she could trust—in this case, Sylvia and Elizabeth—to determine, and self-administer, what consequence justice required of them.
Would she delegate that responsibility to any student who wasn’t also her daughter and her daughter’s best friend? That she didn’t think so was an almost unbearable weight.
Well, she would just have to bear it.
One thing she did know: she and Bob would find out soon enough why Sylvia and Elizabeth returned everything.