Q

by Christina Dalcher

  “I didn’t call you, lady,” the guard says. “Sit down.”

  I really hate being called “lady.” A lady is fine. That lady in the green coat is fine. May I please speak to the lady of the house is fine. But this fat slob isn’t fine calling me anything other than Dr. Fairchild.

  “How about you sit down,” I tell him, “since it seems that’s what you do all day anyway. And I’ll help this woman get off your bus. Sound good?”

  I’ve learned about bullies in my lifetime. Any teacher has. The taller they stand, the taller you have to stand. And, even without heels, I’ve already got a good six inches on Mr. Beer Belly here. He backs off, as if no one’s ever spoken back to him, as if no one has stood her ground.

  Good.

  But I wonder why this should be so surprising to him.

  The lady with the bent head is Mrs. Munson, she tells me. Mrs. Munson. What a name. Still, if her legs don’t work so well, her mouth makes up for it. “You tell him, honey.”

  Once Mrs. Munson’s on the ground, I climb back aboard and collect my briefcase and the snack bag. All that’s left in it are the packs of cookies I took out of the kitchen cupboard over the fridge and brought along for Freddie.

  Twenty-eight hours ago.

  It’s always interesting to think of yourself as a ghost, an invisible fly on the wall, an unseen observer.

  So I do that now, and picture myself in my own kitchen at four o’clock yesterday afternoon. Anne is home from school, backpack stuffed with books, stomach whining with the late-afternoon munchies. Teenagers are like hobbits: breakfast, second breakfast, that odd prelunch snack the Brits call elevenses, lunch, and so on. They’re all their own private little internal combustion engines.

  She’s in the door, having let herself in with the key Malcolm and I entrusted her with only last year. Shoulders slumped with the weight of books—more slumped with the weight of other, less tangible things—Anne unloads her books on the living room sofa, washes her hands in the kitchen sink like her father’s told her to do since she was six. Right now, at this moment, everything is normal. Nothing has changed.

  Her mother will be home in thirty minutes. A half hour at most. There will be banter and bickering and reminders that this house feels empty.

  Or not.

  Anne kicks off her shoes, shrugs out of her Harvard Crimson school jacket, goes to the fridge. She does this automatically, as she does every afternoon. At first, her mind is so intensely tracked on food she doesn’t see the note. Why would she, when yogurt or fruit salad or a slice of Swiss cheese calls to her like a wind-tossed plastic bag calls to a sight hound? It’s only when she goes back to forage for something else and put the wrapped hunk of cheese where it belongs that she closes the fridge door a second time and sees my note.

  For the next five minutes, she’ll read and reread my scribbled apology, the news of my leaving, in the same way a jilted GI rereads a Dear John letter from his stateside sweetheart. Confusion mixes with disbelief and denial. It can’t be. She’s not really gone. This is a dream, a nightmare, a lie.

  Mothers don’t just walk out.

  In my imagined fly-on-the-wall position, I can see her tapping numbers into her phone, screwing up the sequence, trying again when the first call is answered by a hair salon. Then, “Dad? Mom’s gone.” And again, the cycle of confusion and denial starts.

  Wives and mothers don’t just walk out.

  I want to materialize in my kitchen, take Anne in my arms, and tell her I’m not gone, not really, but then Ruby Jo tugs at my coat sleeve because it’s time to collect our suitcases from the belly of the bus and start the long walk from the double gates to the low redbrick building that says Administration on its facade.

  “I don’t have a good feeling about this place,” Ruby Jo says.

  And we walk on.

  Thirty-Eight

  The path leading up to the admin building might have been laid three-quarters of a century ago, and weeds older than that poke out through the crevices and cracks. Mrs. Munson nearly trips on a nasty tangle of withered vegetation, and I take her suitcase. It’s the nonrolling kind, the hard-backed Samsonite that went out of style in the seventies. And it must have bricks inside it.

  “Just a few books, dear,” Mrs. Munson says.

  Of course, the fat guard is back in his gatehouse now, probably watching crap TV and stuffing his face with corn chips. Every step I take with the heavy Samsonite makes the path seem longer.

  We pass a small parking lot to the left, partially hidden by a line of scrubby hedges in need of a serious trim. On our right is a dense row of conifers masking what used to be a playground, but when I look closer, it’s overgrown, a jungle of sagging tire swings and rusted monkey bars. Not a single kid plays in it, even though the school day must have ended at least a couple of hours ago. I find it eerie.

  “Maybe there’s a new one out back,” I say, not really believing it.

  “You reckon?” Ruby Jo says. “Get a look at this place.” Then, under her breath, “Just like Granny said.”

  “You keep saying that. Why?”

  “Tell you later.” She points a freckled chin, scrunched with worry now, toward a spot in the path ahead of us.

  I don’t know who I was expecting. Maybe another fat guard; maybe Mrs. Martha Underwood, the headmistress; maybe even Malcolm. He could have taken a last-minute flight from Washington Reagan to Kansas City and waited for me.

  All the possibilities tumble around in my mind: Malcolm calling my school—my former school. Malcolm snooping around the teacher database for clues. Malcolm pissed off as he sits on a cramped plane. Malcolm driving out here to pick me up and take me back home before I get the chance to see Freddie.

  “Rules are rules, Elena,” he would say.

  But the figure walking toward us isn’t fat, isn’t a woman, and isn’t my husband. His long, easy strides, not rushed but not slow either, belong to someone else I know.

  Next to me on the path, Mrs. Munson draws in a sharp breath. “Wow,” she says when she recovers. Ruby Jo seems not to notice the man as he reaches forward for the Samsonite, his fingers brushing mine as he takes it from me.

  “Thanks,” I say, though I groan a little on the inside.

  I’m not a weak woman. I work out, running treadmills and hefting free weights a few times a week. I don’t need a man to carry my luggage or put me on a pedestal or worry over whether I might break a nail. But man, that fucker was one heavy suitcase. I’m glad to see it go, less glad to see the face of the person who takes it from me.

  “No problem,” he says. Hanging from one tanned and tennis-muscled arm, the Samsonite might as well be stuffed with feathers. “This is yours?”

  “No. It’s Mrs. Munson’s,” I say, pointing to the older woman, who hasn’t closed her mouth since the man showed up. “I didn’t expect to see a familiar face here.”

  Alexander Cartmill is one of those men who is handsome and knows it. I spent Sunday at breakfast watching him preen himself between sips of decaffeinated cappuccino while Malcolm bragged over last week’s tennis scores.

  “I’m out here doing some doctor business for the week,” he says, extending his free hand to Mrs. Munson.

  The three of us follow him through lengthening shadows cast by the admin building. He could be forty, I think. Or fifty or thirty-something—it’s always so goddamned hard to tell with men. They don’t change like we do, don’t go through the same desexing hormonal flips and flops, don’t grow hair where they shouldn’t and watch their waists thicken into nonexistence. He offers help taking the rest of the bags up the steps, but I hold on to mine, as does Ruby Jo.

  She falls back a few feet and whispers to me, “I don’t think I like him, Elena.”

  “Neither do I.”

  And I didn’t like the absence of surprise on his face when he recognized me.

  Thirty-Nine

  Alex leaves us in the hallway with a brief I know I’m hot smile and the same suddenness with which
he appeared on the weed-choked path outside. It’s a warm room the three of us step into, wide and deep but decorated to minimize its size, to make visitors feel cozy. Chintz-upholstered wing chairs and polished wooden tables bring the walls closer, and the bulbs in their sconces are incandescent, yellowish, not that hard blue-white of modern LED lighting that washes out its subjects until they look like week-old corpses. Refinished oak doors lead off the hall, presumably to staff offices. The entire room smells of lemon oil and potpourri.

  If I weren’t tired as hell and wearing permanently wrinkled clothing from a twenty-eight-hour bus ride, I’d think I was back in the stately women’s club–turned–high school just off Dupont Circle. Still, the hall doesn’t match the untrimmed hedges or the abandoned playground we passed on our way from the gate.

  “Fancy,” Mrs. Munson says, taking it all in. Ruby Jo emits a skeptical little hum, same as she did with Alex. It’s hard to tell which is the sixty-five-year-old and which is the girl who’s a year out of her master’s program.

  The door closest to us swings open, and a small woman comes out. Her dress is the first clue something is wrong; the mountain of a woman seated behind a credenza inside the office is the second.

  Both of them wear the gray skirt-and-jacket combos I’ve seen on the Fitter Family’s child welfare representatives and, only yesterday morning, on Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Parks. Neither uniform fits the body inside it. The greeter’s hangs on her like a sack, turning her dark complexion sallow; the desk woman’s strains at her ample breasts and makes her pale face look as if she’s a candidate for rosacea meds. They’re unhappy outfits for unhappy-looking women.

  “I’m Miss Gray,” the greeter says, not greeting any of us. Of course you are, I think. “You can leave your bags here while you’re processed.” Processed. Like tuna.

  One by one, we’re called in. Mrs. Munson goes first, and stays inside the office for ten minutes before she emerges with a bundle of gray fabric over one arm and a mask of incredulity on her face. She’s told to wait while Ruby Jo takes a turn.

  “What’s that?” I nod to the dishwater-colored material.

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” she says softly, and her eyes move toward the diminutive Miss Gray, who is standing watch at the oak door.

  So we pass the next ten minutes in silence until Ruby Jo slips out with another armful and a look in her eyes like she’s seen this all before, and Miss Gray reads my name off her clipboard.

  My turn with the headmistress.

  The meeting takes longer than ten minutes, maybe because of the ring on my left fourth finger, maybe because Mrs. Underwood can’t conceive how I’ll be useful here, maybe because I ask her about my daughter.

  “You’re married,” she says. It isn’t a question, but I suspect her voice is as flat as the Kansas plains even when she’s excited. And I have serious doubts Martha Underwood, M.Ed., has set any records for excitedness in her career.

  She sits back in her chair, which barely helps to narrow the gap between her bosom and the edge of the desk. Her hands stay folded over her stomach, flaccid and unmoving. They’re man’s hands—thick, ringless, and unmanicured. If she hadn’t spoken, I’d think she was a mannequin, a mute statue.

  “Yes,” I say. Or I was twenty-four hours ago. Who knows what Malcolm might do after discovering I’ve done a runner?

  “Mm-hmm.” Her eyes, but not any other part of her, slide to the computer screen that’s hidden from me. “And you teach science?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mrs. Underwood’s eyes slide back to me, narrowed. “Which field?”

  “Biology, anatomy, genetics. I can also teach art.”

  The eyes widen. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. It’s what I did before. Like a lot of people.”

  From the look in her eyes, I can tell she’s thinking the same thing Malcolm did while I was working my ass off in college, poring over thick volumes of color plates. She’s thinking the student of art history has about as much chance of earning a living as a buggy whip maker in the twenty-first century. Less than that, maybe.

  Mrs. Underwood moves her hands and starts typing. “Basic horticulture and language arts,” she says, tapping away at the keyboard. “See if you can at least teach them to grow vegetables and write in paragraph-long chunks.”

  “When can I see my daughter?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘When can I see my daughter?’ Frederica Fairchild.”

  She finishes whatever she’s typing and stiffens. “Mrs. Fairchild—”

  “Dr. Fairchild,” I say, meeting her eyes above the thick lenses that have been creeping down her nose since I walked in.

  “Right.” She doesn’t bother correcting herself. “Let’s get a few things straight. You’re staff here. I’m the headmistress. I’ve got dozens of students, twenty teachers who hate that this is the only teaching job they can get, and five former school principals already lined up to take over if I don’t run this place like Washington tells me to. I don’t know how a parent and child ended up in the same school, but I can’t make exceptions. So you do your job and let me do mine.” She stands up, signaling the end of the conversation.

  At the door, I turn back. “Do you actually like your job?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she says.

  I get the whole high school principal persona. Or the state school headmistress persona. When you’re dealing with hundreds of hormonal adolescents on a daily basis, you need to put on your hard-ass mask and let the world know you won’t take any shit from it. Personally, I’ve always suspected there’s a course in education programs the rest of us don’t know about. Something titled How to Be a Bitch and Still Keep Your Job 101.

  Martha Underwood, M.Ed., seems to have elected to retake that course ad infinitum.

  With nothing else to say to her after a second try at inquiring about Freddie, I leave the office with my own bundle of coarse gray fabric and explicit instructions that uniforms will be washed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

  “We’re not running a fashion show here. It’s a working farm,” Mrs. Underwood says as I close the door to her office. No kidding, I think, taking a last look at her. I’m not sure what I feel for the woman inside. Maybe hatred, maybe pity. Maybe a bit of both.

  Forty

  Outside in the hall, Ruby Jo and Mrs. Munson shake their heads at me.

  Yeah. She’s a bitch, I say silently to them. But I’ve missed the point.

  “Do you have a mobile phone?” Miss Gray says. “Or a laptop?”

  Stupid me takes out my phone, waiting for a Wi-Fi log-in and password.

  It takes all of five seconds for me to regret what I’ve done.

  “You won’t get reception out here,” Miss Gray says, plucking the phone from my hand.

  My connection with the outside world takes its place behind another closed door off the hallway, presumably next to Ruby Jo’s phone. I don’t know whether Mrs. Munson is plugged into the world of portable electronics. She doesn’t look the type.

  “She took mine, too,” Mrs. Munson whispers as we follow Gray through the hall toward the rear door of the admin building. “Brandnew iPhone. One terabyte of storage. My entire Johnny Cash collection, including the live concerts. And all my movies. I’m Melissa. Lissa for short,” she says, extending her hand and pumping mine with a firm grip. Seeing the look on my face, Lissa adds, “What did you expect? Agnes or Mildred?”

  Alex is waiting outside to take Lissa’s bag. Once again, he reaches for mine.

  “I’m okay,” I say. And we start walking as Miss Gray escorts us to, as she puts it, “our quarters.”

  Even though we’ve only been inside for half an hour, the open space beyond the building’s back door is now shrouded in darkness. I can’t pick trees out by looking ahead of me; only moon-silhouetted shadows over my head hint that some form of vegetation grows in the empty space among the state school bu
ildings. Ahead of us, if I’m right about the placement of its corners against the night sky, stands a structure of monstrous proportions, a goliath of stone and mortar if the rest of it matches the granite blocks at its base. In the light of a freestanding lamppost, the cornerstone reads 1895.

  “This is the main education building,” Miss Gray tells us. The information, if not her bored drawl, reminds me of my sister’s first college tour. I was gobsmacked by the buildings, one for every subject I knew of, and way more than that. An entire city devoted to teaching and learning, with windows lit up even late into the evening and heads bent to serious work, as we saw when we took a stroll through the campus.

  Universities are like beehives, I thought at the time.

  We pass two smaller buildings, twin brick blocks with light glowing through their windows. Inside, most of the walls are bare white, no posters, no decorations, nothing to say Hey, kid, this is your room. All yours.

  And the light makes the vertical bars outside each window all the more obvious.

  “Jesus,” Ruby Jo says. “Granny was right.”

  “Dormitories.” Miss Gray waves an arm toward one building and then the other. In my head, I hear a game show host shouting, Fail your test, and you can win one of these! “Boys to your right; girls to your left,” she says as we walk between them.

  “Look more like cells to my eyes,” Lissa whispers.

  I turn to squint at the buildings.

  They can’t be bars, not really. Or if they are, it’s only because they were built that way back in 1895. By now, the iron will be rusted through, porous and easily breakable, nothing more than an architectural artifact, a historical remnant that preservationists in some other brick building decided to keep in place.

  The things we make ourselves believe.

  Our little parade of five plods on for another hundred yards or so. Smaller buildings of the same style as the dormitories wait ahead of us. Miss Gray, still in tour guide mode, points out the dining hall to our left and the faculty residences to our right.