The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  For the first time in what Madeline suspected was a while, Sarah laughed. “And maybe that’s exactly what we need, Madeline. Someone who doesn’t take everything we do entirely seriously, who remembers that what we’re supposed to do is keep teaching.”

  Madeline looked at the assistant head’s clear eyes. Her fierce expression and her taut posture. She was committed to her work, no matter what happened. She was committed to her school, no matter its blemishes. She was committed to trying to understand students, even when they engaged in activities she didn’t countenance. Her lack of sure footing didn’t steer her away from her appointed tasks. Suddenly, Madeline wanted badly to be someone like Sarah, someone that confident and poised. But just then, her hair still dripping, her brain still grappling with what Kate had told her and the pictures of the girls, she knew she couldn’t yet give a definitive answer. She thought about the cramped Boston apartment that otherwise awaited her. The afternoons in rich kids’ homes, stuffing them full of ways to ace the SAT. Armitage, even in its current state, was certainly a more appealing option, even if it did leave you a spinster stranded in the middle of woody Massachusetts. But still, she had to think about the offer more coherently and make sure she wasn’t leaving her roommates or employer in the lurch. “Sarah, I want to say yes. But I want to be sure that yes is a real one. Can I take a day to think about it and then can we talk?”

  “Absolutely,” Sarah said and started to rise.

  “But one thing is for sure,” Madeline added hastily. “If I stay, can I switch dorms? I’d love a slightly bigger place.”

  Sarah said she was certain they could work something out. Madeline saw her to the door and said she’d call her office to make an official appointment early next week. “Thank you, Madeline,” Sarah said, and Madeline said, “Actually, it’s you I have to thank, for thinking I might be good at something.”

  Madeline liked Sarah, genuinely liked her. But she realized, as she stood at the door, she hadn’t said a word about Claire being up in Maine when Porter was. Was it that she didn’t trust Sarah with the information? she wondered, as she saw the upright woman make her way across the Quad and past James Armitage’s resolute bronze presence. No, Madeline thought, it’s because I don’t want to believe something like that is true. She knew she had to tell Matt, and she knew she’d call him in a few minutes, but all she could do for that moment was stand there at the threshold and breathe the clean, rich air, what she needed after these encounters with Kate and Sarah.

  And after all the endless meetings that had crammed the week. Nothing like a crisis to bring out the administrators and their shuffling stacks of papers. At one yesterday, the head of admissions had announced that almost half of the new students had reneged on their decision to attend Armitage next year. No one wanted to come to a school where a desperate scandal had struck so decisively. With almost languid fatigue, the dean had also said that it wasn’t really a problem; he could make a trip to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Taipei, and fill the dorms to bursting with kids whose parents were more practical about this sort of thing. Armitage was still Armitage, and soon enough its domestic audience would remember its reputation. A couple of years from now, one of its diplomas would still have its strangely powerful currency. Thinking about this, Madeline felt a renewal of her vigor. She wasn’t going to abandon this place because it was injured, because its name was sullied. Her intention was to stay. You could almost turn Armitage into an underdog at this moment in its history; Madeline had never felt as good rooting for the Red Sox since their two World Series wins finally shifted their long, sad streak of ill fortune. Her sympathies had covertly turned toward Chicago, though she hadn’t admitted that yet to Fred.

  She was going to need some coffee to stay awake enough for Last Tea. The machine gurgled and released a comforting scent into her kitchen, a generous term for the compact space. If she got enough of a raise, she might be able to afford an actual sofa and not merely her sister’s cast-off futon. She slumped on a tall stool and looked out the window. It was shockingly sunny at the moment, but the clouds lay in a low pad over the river, a sure sign of more bad weather. The Quad was deserted. There were about four events and one more day of classes to limp through until Madeline was released for the summer for good.

  Early this evening was Last Tea. On Sunday, they were holding Claire’s memorial service, which in spite of everything, the parents were insisting on. Grace had said that it was because they couldn’t agree on an alternate venue and that, charged as it was, Armitage was the best available compromise. Madeline shivered a little thinking about that; only students, the family, and faculty would attend, but it was still going to be dreadful. Why couldn’t they wait? Because, Madeline knew, it was a way to appease the grieving parents, to stave off or at least delay the filing of the inevitable lawsuit for wrongful death, because Claire’s class was a captive audience here, because Porter had said it was the right thing to do. It was hard, but they had to face it.

  Porter. He had pared down everything. There would be no baccalaureate service, a quasi-awards ceremony at which prizes for everything from best Latin essay to finest moral fiber were given away. No hokey, jokey dinner before graduation, and then a very modest ceremony itself. Reunion had been canceled altogether. Even the development people, normally willing to forgo all matters of etiquette when it came to money, had agreed that this was not the year to wring the alumni dry. The coffee was ready. Madeline poured in a lot of cream and sat down again to drink it.

  She had been counting on Fred to guide her through this last series of obligations. Her heart thumped a little painfully as she thought about him. He had been such a good counselor across the highly coded terrain of Armitage. But equally strong was her recognition that this was a potential relationship with few prospects; he was launching himself into another world. She knew better than to let her hopes run away with her. This was what it meant to be grown up, to see things within their correct proportions. It was sobering, it was sad. She really liked Fred, but she was almost positive he was heading out of her range, off to New York, following the scent of his ambitions. What do I believe in that is larger than love? Madeline thought, absently polishing the counter. Is there anything? Teaching might exert that kind of gravity for her. She hadn’t, after all, offered to visit Fred in New York or followed Owen to North Carolina. She had, however reluctantly, been responsible only to her own sloppy self, her own future, which was, oddly, resolving itself at her sister’s alma mater, this place where something truly unsettling had happened and where students led lives that the adults around them could not fathom. As she sat there, Madeline realized it was Porter she was thinking about. His ability to ride through unbearable events with grace and humanity intact.

  None of it made sense. Even now, sitting in her kitchen, hands wrapped around her favorite coffee mug—commemorating Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding, salvaged from a Somerville stoop—she couldn’t weave the events into a coherent narrative. Narrative had to make some kind of sense; that’s what she had spent the bulk of the year trying to teach her students. There was such a thing as a fictional or poetic truth, but this story was resisting that. It didn’t have any kind of logic, intuitive or otherwise, and stories had to, they had to have motive, underpinning, their own peculiar patterning. She couldn’t for the life of her see the whole. At that moment, she burned her lip on her hot drink and blotted the pain away with a napkin. A beautiful, rich girl dead, her baby missing. Her former boyfriend questioned and released, several times. Her former boyfriend who refused to leave.

  There was something important in Scotty’s determination to stick through his time at Armitage. She had seen him yesterday walking across the Quad and been struck by his affect. He had looked older, his shoulders hunched. He’d looked like a man with many cares. He’d looked, she thought, like he had been working hard, and he never looked that way.

  Madeline picked up her mug and wandered to her computer and opened her Armitage ac
count. An e-mail marked urgent told her that Tamsin Lovell had been arrested for the assault of Jim French. Tamsin? Jim? What did they have to do with each other? Madeline stared at the note on her screen and felt energy siphon from her body. Right now, there was no digesting that news. Thank God she hadn’t gone to lunch, where she would have been caught in a swirl of rabid chatter: faculty would have been tearing through that bit of news like a ravenous dog at a roast chicken. She was going to stay focused on her own worry, Madeline decided, and she logged in then to student records.

  A few years ago, Porter had put student files online, and as usual, Fred had said, the old guard had protested. Privacy issues; hacking; why did every last thing have to be computerized? Fred remembered some of them had used the debate to chew on their worry that they would have to stop writing comments by hand and start typing them. But Porter had prevailed, arguing that greater access, carefully protected, increased awareness about students and provided teachers with highly useful information.

  What it meant was that, with special passwords, teachers could open current student records and schedules. It was indeed helpful, Madeline had discovered through the year, to find out how kids had done in other classes, who their advisers were, and other pertinent information. You couldn’t change grades or alter pages, but you could quite easily view a student’s entire history at the school. What was Scotty studying this semester that had so taxed him? Madeline wondered. A bio class with Harvey—ugh, she thought; calculus with sweet old Alice; an English class; and Special Topics in Physics. Madeline looked at what that array of courses boiled down to, and it was almost immediately transparent why he’d chosen them. Nothing started before 9:30, and he was almost always done by 1:30, a senior’s crafty use of timing to determine academic load. Something jiggled in Madeline’s memory as she looked at Scotty’s last class of the week. The science course. What was it? Where had she recently seen that course mentioned? None of her advisees was taking it; only seniors could enroll. Then she remembered. Claire had been enrolled in it, too. Special Topics in Physics, taught by the myopic Bruce Benton. Maybe that’s why Claire had selected it; Mr. Benton was renowned for his gentle spaciness, though he was as hard a grader as anyone. Still, he would have been unlikely to notice Claire’s condition, apparently having chosen some astral realm over the earthly many years ago. And what was the class’s special topic? That would take a moment to find, but again, because of Porter’s innovation, it was possible. The entire curriculum was online, for the perusal of prospective students, parents, other teachers. A way of maintaining transparency and encouraging high standards.

  The computer flashed away, and then the page she wanted appeared on the screen. Optics. Claire and Scotty and a handful of other seniors had chosen to spend their last semester studying the properties of sight. From fibers to satellites, but starting, Bruce wrote on his rather short but elegant syllabus, with the simplest form of twisting light, which involved mirrors.

  Madeline moved so quickly she knocked Charles and Diana to the floor, where the mug promptly broke into several jagged pieces. Well, it had ended that way for them, hadn’t it? she thought rather sadly. But she was in so much of a rush that she didn’t even bother to clean up the pieces or stop the flow of coffee. What she did, after jamming flip-flops on her feet, was rush at a breakneck pace to Claire’s room.

  She hadn’t been there since the girl’s parents had visited. The entire dorm felt hushed and empty as she stormed up the staircase, but that was, Madeline thought, because it was. It even felt dusty, though the custodians came through all the time, mopping, cleaning, putting small details to rights. All the doors along the corridors, usually festive and bristling with decorations and pronouncements of individuality, were empty, blond rectangles of wood. Her running feet echoed hugely down the halls. Finally, Madeline slowed as she reached the third floor and opened Claire’s door.

  On its back was the mirror that had triggered her memory. A full-length mirror, not standard issue for the rooms—no one wanted to encourage teenagers to look at themselves more than they already did—but easily and often bought at the Wal-Mart in Greenville. It had been off the door when Madeline first saw Claire’s room, propped near the window. She had come back later that day, she recalled, to see if it was still there, and it hadn’t been. A custodian, she’d assumed then, or the person dispatched by the family to pack Claire’s belongings had returned it to its proper place. But what if someone else had wanted it returned to its usual spot?

  Madeline lifted the mirror off the back of the door and, in her mind’s eye, tried to remember where she had seen it. She stuck it by the window now, to the right of the net curtain hanging in front of the sash, and then she lifted the curtain and angled it closer to the glass. No, that still wasn’t right. She moved it to the left side and angled it again and looked out. What she saw astonished her. Even though the day was starting to cloud over, the flash of light that traveled from the mirror’s surface across the Quad was as vivid as lightning. It had channeled the refraction from another reflective surface, in a window on the third floor of a building across the lawn. Greaves, Scotty Johnston’s dorm. The corresponding mirror was still there to answer a signal sent from Portland. And although Madeline wasn’t sure, she could guess that the room across the Quad belonged to Scotty.

  Shaking slightly, trying to get this new piece of data to fit inside the jumbled story, Madeline moved to rehang Claire’s mirror on the door. As she carried the heavy object back, she could glimpse her own face working in its surface and knew that what she saw there was sheer adult worry. But she hadn’t needed a mirror to determine that.

  She ran as fast as she could back to her apartment and paused to throw a dish towel on the tan puddle that her coffee had created. Her hands were shaking as she pounded on Matt Corelli’s highlighted name on her cell. He answered on the first ring and said immediately and with concern that he couldn’t or didn’t mask and that she heard, as directly as that beam of light that had traveled between the two mirrors, “Madeline? What’s wrong?”

  He was on campus, near Greaves as it happened, and Madeline watched him walk with quick, sure steps across the lawn, his hair tossing in the wind. She had just managed to put the pieces of the broken mug in the trash when he knocked on her door, but her hands were still covered in coffee.

  “Sit down,” he told her and helped her to the futon. “Tell me everything,” and she did. She told him about Kate seeing Claire at Porter’s in Maine in August. She told him about the flash of light traveling between Claire’s and Scotty’s rooms. He listened, made a brief phone call, and within minutes, he had men in Scotty’s room. Moments after that, yet more of them led Scotty back to the station.

  Matt had left as soon as Madeline finished speaking. When he was gone, she gathered the bits of broken ceramic from the trash. Although it seemed unlikely, she was going to be able to repair Charles and Diana. It would be a bit dinged, but it would be whole again. Her fingertips sticky with epoxy, she remembered watching the tall boy getting crammed into a squad car. He was shaking his head and smiling, with a kind of fierce irony, an expression of contempt. A look that even at a distance said nothing other than You just don’t get it, do you?

  “No,” Madeline said softly, gluing in the last large chip and staring at the cracks that warped their way now through the handle. “No, I don’t.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Saturday morning, Fred walked into his sun-spangled studio to greet his first-period class. These were the same students Malcolm Smith had visited, and Fred reflected that they had made a lot of progress since that foggy day in April. He had brought with him the file, his letter, and a wide envelope, and placed them on a canvas-covered table marked with the ghosts of hundreds of hand-pinched clay pots and vases. When he was through with teaching, he would head to the post office and send the whole ugly package off. Quinn Foster peered at him and said, “You look rocky, Mr. Naylor. Are you all right?”

  “Just a tough night
, Quinn,” he said, “nothing to worry about.”

  The girl settled back at her easel, clearly not reassured, and Fred turned around to see what the rest of the students were doing. They had thrown themselves into their work with energy, and their wobbly drawings of the chapel and the Armitage statue and one another had grown steadily surer and more competent. Only one or two of them had a real feel for the materials and process of making art, but all of them had improved at rendering the world around them more convincingly. They had had fun. They had learned something. They had functioned well as a group. And he saw now that they, too, were tired and frightened, listless and ready to end the horrible year. He had lost three kids from this class since Claire died, but the twelve left were some of the kindest and best adjusted he had taught in a while.

  He watched Quinn struggling with her pastels and thought for a moment about how much he would miss his students’ serious expressions and steady industry next year. He liked teaching. He liked feeling that he had a role, a reason to occupy the earth. It had been one of Llewellan’s grand themes. To find work that sustained an individual but provided the world with something useful. Fred knew that his grandfather had looked askance at the making of art—he wondered now if Llewellan had considered it the province of “nancy boys”—but that Fred’s choice to teach, and at Armitage, had been deeply reassuring to the old man. Fred had to admit, as he started to wander the studio and examine what the kids were shaping on the pads in front of them, he had done it for Llewellan’s grudging approval, for his love. Which made it all the more important to take this break, to test himself against his own judgments.

  None of the students was making any headway today. Llewellan had always encouraged steeling oneself against self-indulgence, and given his own son’s terrific propensity for just that—Harrison drank, talked, and spent too much—this attitude, though palpably Victorian, had appealed to Fred. But today, he stood in the middle of the studio, the place he had first felt paint come alive in his hands, and said, “Stop, everyone. Just stop for a minute.” They all looked up at him.