He threw the Four Roses bottle against the wall. The sound of it shattering made me jump. I felt for the Maglite, which I’d let slip into the couch cushions. “There! There it is!” Ross shouted. “That’s what everyone will be saying. You take an interest in a student, mentor her—because she’s remarkable, because she reminds you of yourself when you started writing, when you had that fire in your belly—and everyone wants to make it into something ugly. Hell, Cressida Fucking Janowicz spent far more time with Leia than I did. She had Leia to her house for cozy dinners by her fireside. Why not suspect her of having an affair with Leia? Does anyone even know what Cressida’s orientation is?”
“I’m not sure she has one,” I said. I hadn’t meant to be funny—Cressida had once admitted to me that she simply didn’t have that much interest in sex—but Ross was suddenly laughing and so was I, as much from tension as anything else. And then I noticed that Ross’s laughter had turned to sobs.
“Hey,” I said, taking a tentative step forward and squeezing Ross’s arm. “I don’t think you were sleeping with Leia. I know you wouldn’t do that. And even if you were, you wouldn’t run her down and leave her for dead. Someone else must have taken your car—you leave the keys in an ashtray by your kitchen door, for Pete’s sake.”
He nodded and wiped his face with his cashmere scarf. “That’s right. Anyone at the party could have taken it. But how will I prove that? You see how quickly the vultures circle.” He pointed at the computer and I saw that the new forum discussing appropriate punishments for me had 263 comments. Even if the police were looking at a new suspect no one would know—unless someone leaked it. Ross must have guessed what I was thinking.
“You could have your friend McAffrey whisper a word in Kelsey Manning’s ear. I hear she’s gotten an internship at Gawker out of this—a girl who could barely string two sentences together without dangling a modifier! She hardly passed my British Lit class.”
“He’s not my friend,” I said. “You are. I’d never do that to you.” But he’s asking you to, a little voice said in my head. I shook it away and leaned over the desk, scrolling through the comments. Nancy Lewis is a washed-up has-been who killed Leia Dawson because she was jealous of her was one of the kinder ones. “Besides, I think it might be too late for me.”
Ross’s hand stole over mine. “Don’t say that, Nan. It’s not too late for you—and maybe it’s not too late for us either.”
He pulled me down into his lap, one arm circling my waist, the other cupping my face. He felt so warm after the chill of the floor that I wanted to lay my head against his chest and go to sleep, but then he drew my head down to his and found my mouth and I woke up. The taste of the expensive scotch he’d been drinking made me feel instantly drunk. I remembered that this is what it felt like to be with him—drunk, whether we were drinking or not, although usually we were. He deftly repositioned my legs so that I slid into the curve of his lap like a clasp sliding shut. I remembered how well our bodies had fit together in all those corny Catskill hotels—the Dew Drop Inn, the Ko-Z Kabins—and how he’d moved me into positions I hadn’t imagined. I remembered that I liked being moved because it meant I didn’t have to think and thinking was the last thing I wanted to do after Emmy. And with Ross, after a couple of drinks, I didn’t have to think. What I was having trouble remembering was why I had called things off. Because of my job? Well, hell, that wasn’t a problem anymore.
I slid one leg up and over and straddled him. His hands were under my T-shirt, stroking my breasts, and mine were pulling at his belt. The chair creaked beneath us, juddering an inch over the wood floor, the way it had that day I’d looked up from my desk when I heard the screech of tires on River Road—
Come back!
My hands froze on his belt buckle. I could hear the voice calling—as I had in my dream when I’d fallen asleep in the woods—only it didn’t sound like my voice—
“What’s wrong? Do you want to go upstairs?”
I looked into his eyes—why did they always seem so sad? I remembered the way he would plunge us down those dark roads, the way we lost ourselves at those divey Catskill hotels. I’d thought he was helping me to lose myself but I soon realized he was trying to get lost too. All that posing in front of his classes and sitting around the fireside charming his students with stories of his early successes, the famous writers he’d gone to Iowa with, the need to feel himself reflected in his students’ successes. Sometimes I think that if I’d had the balls to tough it out on my own without the safety net of an academic job I could have been a great writer, he once told me at one of those hotels. Now all I can hope for is that one of my protégés will be one.
“No,” I said, easing back. “I don’t think this is a good idea . . . we’re both not thinking.”
“I remember when you liked not thinking,” he said, stroking my face and drawing his thumb down my throat until it rested in the curve of my collarbone. As if he were taking my pulse. It made me feel exposed, even more than his hands on my breasts had. I saw Leia turning in the kitchen, her long white neck elegant and fragile. . . .
“I don’t think I can afford that kind of oblivion anymore.” I swung my leg over his and stood up. The floor felt cold against my bare feet. The draft from the window on the small of my back where his hand had warmed it was like ice. “If I hadn’t passed out in the woods that night—”
“Passed out?”
Too late I realized this wasn’t part of the story I’d told him. Perhaps because it made me sound like a drunk.
“Fell asleep. When I went looking for the deer I started thinking about Emmy. I sat down on a log and . . . it was so peaceful. Lovely, dark, and deep.” I smiled, knowing how much he liked Frost.
But he didn’t return my smile. “Do you know how long you were out?”
“No, why?”
“Wouldn’t you have heard the car that hit Leia? If someone did steal my car and hit her, that is.”
A screech of tires. A voice screaming, “Come back!”
“I think I did hear it, but it mingled with my dream and I kept sleeping. When I got to the road there wasn’t any car and I didn’t see Leia in the ditch so enough time had passed for the snow to cover her.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, looking skeptical. “If you saw the car you’d know who was driving it. Maybe you saw it driving away and you didn’t think anything of it.”
“There were no cars on the road. And the snow had covered Leia.”
“Maybe you’ll remember something,” he said, straightening the seam of his trousers and crossing his legs. “It would be helpful if you did—for you as well as me. My guess is that a student stole the car. Didn’t you tell Dottie that you saw some students hanging out by the barn?”
Of course Dottie had passed that on. “Yes, but—”
“Wasn’t one of them Troy Van Donk? Damn, I bet Troy knows how to hot-wire a car. He wouldn’t even need to steal the keys. And he was fighting with Leia—”
“Actually they were laughing when I saw them.”
“I saw them arguing earlier. In fact, I think that’s what Leia was about to tell me in the kitchen before you interrupted us. She was telling me about some ‘bar crawl’ in Poughkeepsie she’d gone on with Troy—an odyssey, she called it, nothing romantic. Then you burst in. But we can imagine the rest. Troy had misunderstood her and thought the ‘bar crawl’ was something more. He started getting possessive, following her. Maybe he decided to follow her home in my car and when she wouldn’t get in he drove her off the road in a fit of drug-induced rage.”
I stared at him. Sitting back in my desk chair, legs crossed, he looked as he did when he sat by his fireside regaling students with stories. That’s what he was doing now. I already couldn’t recall where the odyssey part Leia had told him ended and the part about Troy stalking her began. The story he was spinning about Troy had the compelling ring of truth, which, as I always told my students, had nothing to do with whether or not it really happened. All
Ross needed were a few corroborating stories. Dottie and Cressida could contribute the scene of Troy bursting out of Cressida’s office and giving Dottie the finger. If I just added my suddenly recovered memory of Troy driving Ross’s car, the story would gain heft and credence. I wouldn’t be a suspect anymore—I’d be a witness. I remembered the bitterness in Troy’s voice when he’d spoken about Leia yesterday.
“I saw Troy on the bus yesterday and he did sound very bitter about Leia. He said she played a role with him—that she lied to him.”
“You see!” Ross leaned forward eagerly. “Troy is the logical suspect. He even has a record. I do blame myself for not seeing it and for not paying more attention to what Leia was trying to tell me but then you came into the kitchen and you were so upset about the tenure decision.”
I winced. “That seems so petty now.”
“No, Nan, I shouldn’t have let that happen either. I told you I’d recommend a review and I meant it. Once this is all behind us—if I’m still chair, that is.”
“Why wouldn’t you be?”
He tilted his chin toward my computer. I glanced back at the screen and saw that the tally of comments had gone up. “While we’re sitting here the cyber-scavengers are pecking over your reputation. That’s what they’ll be doing to me if it gets out that my car was involved . . . unless the police focus on another suspect first. Then all this will go away.” He leaned forward and shut my computer. His arm brushed against my leg but I no longer felt any desire for him. Instead I felt a wariness creeping up from the cold floorboards. Had Ross just suggested that if I incriminated Troy he’d see to it that I’d get tenure?
“I can’t say that I saw Troy in the car if I didn’t.”
“Of course not,” Ross said, getting to his feet and standing over me. “I’d never ask you to. But you may remember more as you think about that night. You were upset, you’d had a few drinks, then you had the police grilling you. Details might come back to you now that you’re not so afraid.” He stroked the side of my face with the back of his hand. “That’s the main reason I came here tonight. So you wouldn’t feel afraid anymore. So you would feel safe.” He looked down at me, his eyes full of regret. For what? I wondered. Because I’d rejected his advance? But I already had the feeling that his attempted seduction had been as much an act as the one he put on in the classroom. That he was more interested in my getting him off the hook than in my getting into bed with him. And that if I didn’t—
“Be careful driving home,” I said, trying not to show him how afraid I suddenly felt.
He leaned down and brushed his lips against my cheek. “I will,” he said, his breath warm on my face. “You be careful too.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
After Ross left I noticed that he’d left the bottle of Glenlivet behind. It glowed in the light of my laptop like those Catskill sunsets Ross and I had driven toward that summer. The smoky taste of the scotch was on my lips from Ross’s kiss. It was the taste of forgetting, of oblivion.
I don’t think I can afford that kind of oblivion anymore, I’d just told Ross. But sitting here alone in my cold, empty house I wondered if I had the courage to do without it. What if the truth was that while I lay asleep—passed out—in the woods someone had killed Leia? Come back! I’d heard in my dream. Only, what if it hadn’t been a dream? What if someone had been shouting for Leia to come back and when she didn’t he—or she—ran her down and killed her? If I hadn’t been asleep—passed out drunk—I could have helped her. Would I be able to live with that?
Without realizing it I noticed that I’d moved closer to the bottle and was hovering over it as if it were a flame I was huddling over for warmth. Or as if instead of oblivion it promised memory—like Proust’s madeleine—one taste and the whole episode in the woods would come clear. You were drunk then so maybe being drunk now—
I opened the bottle and poured an inch into Ross’s glass before another voice, sounding suspiciously like Sergeant McAffrey’s, added: I thought you said you weren’t drunk that night. I thought you said you’d only had two glasses—
Shut up, I told the McAffrey voice, taking a sip of the scotch. It burned my tongue as if the bottle really did contain liquid flame. I’m trying to remember.
I took the glass upstairs. I tried lying down in my room but just as I was falling asleep I heard the train whistle coming from the tracks near the river. It was a lonesome sound that seemed romantic when we first moved here but over the years had come to sound like the keening of a child. I got up and moved to Emmy’s room, on the side of the house farthest from the tracks, where the whistle didn’t carry, and lay down in her bed. I looked up at the painted stars on the ceiling, trying to remember looking up at the night sky through the tangle of branches. I remembered there’d been a glimpse of moon despite the snow, so bright I’d closed my eyes against it—
Come back!
I heard it now, as clear as if someone had spoken it out loud. I opened my eyes to the stars on Emmy’s ceiling, only they weren’t Emmy’s stars, they were snowflakes, each one lit up like one of the candles at Leia’s vigil. They were drifting down from the sky and gathering on the blond hair and blue dress of a little girl.
Emmy. She was standing in front of me, dressed in the Blue Fairy costume she’d worn for Halloween the year she was four—her last Halloween—and the pink leggings and long-sleeved shirt I’d made her wear under the costume because it had been cold that night and she had refused to wear a coat—because fairies didn’t wear coats. On her feet were the light-up Skechers that Evan had bought her so she’d stand out trick-or-treating in the village. So she wouldn’t be run over. She had a smudge of chocolate on her mouth from the Reese’s Pieces she’d sneaked from her goody bag. Each detail was so vivid that even though I knew she was dead I believed she was standing there in front of me.
I held my arms open wide, but she shook her head, blond braids swinging. “No, Mama, you come on. We have to go!” She turned on her heel and ran into the woods.
“Emmy!” I cried. “Come back!”
But she only laughed and kept running. I ran after her, following the flashing lights of her sneakers. She was running up the hill, through the old orchard, dancing behind the gnarled old trees, playing hide-and-seek. My heart stuttered every time she vanished behind a tree.
“Come back!” I cried.
“I’ll catch up with you at the party!” she screamed and then ducked behind a thick trunk. When she came out she wasn’t Emmy anymore; she was Leia.
“No!” I cried.
Leia looked back at me over her shoulder. She was wearing her red jacket, the old cracked leather peeling like bark, and her red cowboy boots, but they still lit up like Emmy’s sneakers when she turned and ran. “Come on, Prof, you said you would catch up, so catch up!”
She ran through the snow, flakes of her jacket peeling off in the wind like red leaves, and leapt over the crest of the hill—
When she hit the ground she had become a deer. I followed her, sure that the deer was still somehow Emmy and Leia and that it would lead me to what they had wanted to show me. Even when the deer leapt into the river I leapt after her, into the icy water—
I woke up, gasping for breath, slick with sweat that had chilled in the draft from the open window. My head felt as heavy and clouded as the sky outside, as if I had fallen into the river and gotten sealed under the ice. For a moment I wished I had. If that was where Emmy had been leading me that’s where I ought to be. Maybe the dream meant that I was supposed to throw myself in the river and drown myself. Then I’d be with Emmy again—and Leia and Shawna Williams. I felt the weight of the dead tipping me toward them, as if I were standing on one end of an ice floe and they were standing on the other, weighting the balance so I would slide down into the icy water—
Or I’d had the dream because Ross had asked me to remember what happened in the woods the night Leia died.
I walked downstairs. My laptop was still open on my desk, the bottle of Glen
livet standing next to it, a sad tableau that reminded me of a happier one of a plate of half-eaten reindeer cookies, a half-finished glass of milk, and a thank-you note in Evan’s spiky handwriting from Santa to Emmy. As I stood on the stairs I imagined the tree we had cut down at the Christmas tree farm on the old Stanfordville Road, trimmed with the ornaments of farm animals and deer and tiny gray mice tucked inside walnut shells that Evan had made. I remembered Emmy running downstairs in her fleecy red pajamas to see if Santa Claus had eaten the cookies we’d left for him. I could feel the weight of her warm, eager body tilting the balance of that ice floe—
I’d go out. Not to town or the college or anywhere I’d meet anyone. I’d go back to the woods where it all started and then I’d follow the path Emmy had shown me last night in my dream. I’d see where it led me. After all, it was Christmas morning, when the past came back to haunt us. Besides, what else did I have to do with the day?
* * *
I made myself tea and instant oatmeal, which I had to eat plain because the milk had gone bad, and dressed myself warmly in long underwear and fleece and down. I felt like I was feeding and dressing a child, coaxing myself to complete these burdensome tasks in anticipation of some future treat—
Just one more bite of your peas and then you can have dessert!
You can play in the snow if you put on your mittens!
When I was dressed I washed my mug and bowl and left them to dry in the drain rack by the sink. I put the Glenlivet away in the cupboard next to the vitamins and Tylenol. I straightened out the pillows on the couch, cleared all recent searches on the computer, and closed it. I stuck the Acheron Gazette in the recycle bin. I put the Beauty and the Beast tickets in an envelope, stamped and addressed it to Amanda, and put the envelope in the mailbox.
When I opened the door Oolong tried to run out and I had to push her back in with my foot. I had the feeling she was trying to flee a sinking ship. Or that she was trying to get to something. I looked around the yard, then toward the orchard, searching the trees for something stirring, but there was only the sift of ice spray over the snowdrifts. Still, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was being watched as I waded through the untouched snow to the barn.
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