The Twisted Thread

by Charlotte Bacon

  They were besieged right now, he said to Matt, but that was still no excuse for not trying to do your best. “I’m most worried about Lucinda, who is treating all this like a war, girding herself for some ultimate battle.” But Miles concerned him, too. He was spending too much time in his room. He refused to be coaxed out.

  “What about you?” Matt asked him.

  Porter shrugged. “I watch birds. I am trying to write. I’m reading or rereading. Thoreau, Emerson, Melville. Dostoevsky. I don’t think more hours spent poring over testimony and being coached by lawyers will ultimately make much difference.” Those weren’t the lessons he was prepared to draw from what had happened. Literature was a more useful guide. “I should go now,” he told Matt. “But I am glad to see you. It gives me a chance to say thank you for helping us at a critical moment.”

  Matt could say nothing in response. That he’d been young once would sound callow. That he wanted to help preserve what he could of what had been an honorable man was even worse. He took Porter’s offered hand and remembered that one of the comments people had always made about Porter McLellan was that he was very good at remembering to offer gratitude. And although the trip back to Massachusetts would take another eight hours, Matt sat in his car for a long time and looked at the storm preparing to blow into the small harbor.

  BY THE END OF AUGUST, the green of Armitage’s maples had dulled to a color that looked better on old lizards than on trees, Madeline thought. She was sitting on a lawn chair outside her dorm collecting herself with a tall glass of ice water. She had just moved into her new apartment, and it was a vast improvement over her original digs. With the futon foisted on an old friend, she had bought herself a small sofa with a brown velvet cover, which now sat looking rather natty in the middle of her living room. She had some sharp new clothes in her closet, a haircut she liked, and a mind bustling with new tricks to try in the classroom. Sarah had called her in late June to ask if she wanted to attend a new-teacher institute, and it had been excellent.

  Even so, she was hot, dusty, and a little confused by the welter of feelings that returning to Armitage was calling up in her. A sudden breeze ruffled the canopy of trees around the Quad, and abruptly, the leaves flipped to reveal the chalky gray of their undersides. She had seen Sarah as she’d driven her U-Haul onto campus, and the poor woman had looked even more tired than she had at the end of May. As expected, she had been appointed interim head, and she’d probably earned her salary twice over given the summer she’d had. The scandal had been splashed about the media, parents were in an uproar. Rumors were flying about a huge suit the Harknesses had filed, and she’d had even more faculty departures to contend with. Stunningly, Harvey Fuller had resigned. That, at least, had meant that Betsy Lowery could return to the biology department, a development that spread relief throughout the school. But still, the endowment was down, and even the cynical assessment of the head of admissions had not quite translated into full dormitories. Everyone was giving Armitage a year or so to tend itself, and then they’d see if the wounded beast might be worth the investment again.

  Madeline sipped more water and held her hand to the breeze. Sarah’s job was a bit like galvanizing war-weary troops, though of course what teachers did was not even remotely as dangerous as soldiering. Most of the time, Madeline amended. She was glad that all the members of the Reign would be gone this year and that Sarah had begun her tenure by announcing that the old traditions would all be ending. Armitage was facing a new era; it did not have time or place for activities that didn’t promote the well-being of every student. She’d appointed Madeline to the committee, though Madeline knew it would take more than that to root out something as powerful as the Reign.

  Madeline’s stomach grumbled, and she realized she’d only had coffee for breakfast. But she was too engrossed thinking about a conversation she and Fred had recently had to deal with finding food. He had heard nothing from Malcolm Smith, the man to whom he’d sent all those incriminating files. “It’s freaky,” he said. “I was so sure there would be this earthquake, and instead, there’s utter silence. Which is more disturbing. He might be hatching some vengeful plot, but I’ve got no idea about it.” Since you can’t control it, Madeline had said, the best thing to do is to put it aside. Get lost in what you’re doing. If it comes up again, it comes up. He knows how to find you. Fred had smiled and said he was glad he had his painting to devote himself to. He had not said how glad he was that Madeline might provide distraction.

  That thought was irritating enough that she rose from her chair and went to get her keys and wallet. It would be good to give herself the treat of a trip to Ali’s, to see how his summer had been and to stuff herself with falafel before attacking the files that had to be unpacked and arranged. Activities that would also safely usher Fred away from the front of her mind. She was teaching two classes she had never taught before—The Contemporary Short Story and American Drama—and she had spent the last two weeks on the beach elbow-deep in copies of True West and George Saunders collections, and now they were sitting sandy and water-stained in unstable piles around her desk. She had looked at them and thought, This is what teachers do. Carry around dog-eared copies of books they love, underlined and scrawled in as if they held all the meaning in the world. Then we try to shake out whatever is magical or wondrous in them and deposit it like pirate gold in front of all those minds around the table. It was curious stuff, teaching. Who knew why it worked when it did and how exactly you could measure its success? But it was fruitful to think about, and best of all it made Madeline feel purposeful. It was a feeling she was growing to like.

  Ali’s had moved from the laundromat to its own stand-alone place next to a beauty parlor. It was certainly an improvement, though Madeline missed the scruffiness of the old restaurant. Not Ali. “Customers are all complaining the new joint doesn’t have atmosphere,” he said when he saw Madeline. “But who wants the atmosphere of a laundromat? All that fabric softener was driving me nuts.” Madeline took his point, told him she was glad he was happy and business was going well, and went outside to bask in the sun in an orange plastic chair, another addition to the new ambience.

  She closed her eyes and stretched out her legs. She had been running a lot, not exactly longer distances, but trying to run a little faster, to get stronger, and she could feel the results in her tightened muscles. It had been hard work in the heavy heat of the Cape, but there was something about surviving that horrid spring that had made her a bit more able to tolerate difficulty. Everyone had noticed it. Isabelle had said, in a tone that combined both disapproval and grudging respect, that Madeline wasn’t quite such a pushover as she used to be. When had she gone and developed a backbone? And Kate, too, hadn’t been able to reduce her instantly to vassal status. Madeline had agreed to look after Tadeo only during certain hours and not on weekends and said that she was off to her institute for two weeks in July and apologized to no one, a real first. “Why do you need your weekends free?” Kate had had the gall to ask. “To see friends,” Madeline had answered, for once, evasively. To go to see Fred in New York from time to time, trips about which she kept quite silent, except that Kate said pointedly, “You go away for the weekend and have sex and I want to know who with,” which so mortified Madeline she finally confessed to what was going on. But she still said less than she might have, and that too marked the start of a new confidence, a new continence that stemmed from that week at the end of the year. All summer long, people had invited lurid confessions and speculation about Armitage and what had happened, and she had soon decided that the best course of action was to say as little as possible. If you hadn’t lived through it, you couldn’t possibly understand it. A girl had died, a stupid and pointless death, and turning it into an item to gossip about just made her feel queasy. Madeline had rarely chosen silence over conversation, but in this instance she felt quite sure she was right to do so.

  Ali called her name, and she went inside to retrieve her falafel. She smiled
at the tall man and announced, “Shokran,” “thank you” in Arabic, which she had looked up on the computer to be able to say to him. He smiled and said, “Nice accent.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask him for years how to say that,” someone said behind her. She spun around and saw the detective. Dressed not as she had seen him last, in khaki pants and navy blue blazer, but wearing something he might have worn to the beach: a T-shirt and shorts and scuffed sneakers. He looked young and, Madeline thought, disturbingly good.

  “Are you on duty?” she asked and fetched a lemonade from the cooler as Matt ordered his meal.

  “Thankfully, no,” he said. “I’ve been on vacation and just got back. It all starts tomorrow.”

  “I know,” she said, “me, too, and I’m excited and kind of terrified at once. It’s like Labor Day’s about to hit and all of a sudden there’s all this school rushing at you like an enormous train.”

  He laughed, and they went outside and sat in the plastic chairs. “Last time I saw you eating falafel, it was pouring.”

  “As I recall, you were interrogating me and we met here because you were hungry,” Madeline said and tore into her sandwich. Her tone was light, but mentioning that deadly week brought some of the feeling back: the constant damp, the frightened students, and the amazement that something so definitively drastic could happen at Armitage.

  “That’s right. I know cops are only semihuman, but we have to eat sometimes, too. So how was your summer?”

  It was surprisingly easy to talk to him now that he wasn’t watching all of Armitage with such strict attention. Madeline found herself telling him about her mother and her absurd, show-offy kitchen. Kate’s difficulty in adapting to life as a working mother. “Honestly, my sister’s better at the ‘working’ part of that job title,” Madeline said. Her own enjoyment in thinking about teaching, about how to get kids to grapple with ideas and make them better writers and not just cynical spinners of tales good enough to earn them entrance to Harvard. Maybe it was a fool’s errand, but she was going to try it anyway.

  He listened as he had when he was taking notes, with an intensity and focus that might have been unnerving if he hadn’t been genuinely interested. He was following, asking questions, responding with pleasure. They were done with their sandwiches, and it would have been easy to crumple the tinfoil in little silver packets and walk off, but neither of them felt like doing that and instead they slowly sipped their drinks, making them last. She thought, He’s someone I can talk about it with. He lived through it, too.

  She asked him about his summer and what it had been like after everything wound up at the school. He talked about his sister, Barbara, and visiting her and her girlfriend. About his week in Acadia, without phone or radio or news, and how peaceful it had felt. He talked about his father, Joseph, getting crankier by the minute. “At work it was low-key, criminally speaking, almost too much so. Full of lawyers and delays for the stuff that happened in the spring. Lots of technicalities.” He looked at her then to see if she minded talking about it. She was grateful. All summer long, people had just plowed ahead, as if the story were theirs to seize.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “I don’t mind. It’s sort of a relief to actually discuss it with someone who was there.”

  So he kept talking, about the motions for change in venue, about the countercharges. And there’s this, too, he said. He and his colleagues had missed things. It was galling to feel so less than perfect. That whole crowd was looking only for mistakes. She watched him as he spoke and then said, more in the style of the old Madeline than in that of the new, more circumspect version, “Well, I think two things. We all missed things, and we’ll never forgive ourselves at the academy because we were supposed to care for her. Imagine how Claire’s parents feel. But the other issue, this interest in perfection. It’s because they’re so rich. They can afford all that help, all that pursuit of exactness. My father’s a lawyer, and he always says justice comes at the same price as the hourly of your attorney.”

  Matt turned to her and said, “This is an interesting topic, and it’s getting hot here. Want to walk by the river?” Which seemed an incredibly nice and natural way to continue the conversation.

  The path by the Bluestone wound under oak trees and willows, and although it was less than ten minutes from campus, Madeline hadn’t even known the path existed, much less walked along it. In the shade of the dusty trees, Matt prompted, “So you think it’s money. You think that’s what protects them.”

  Watching the sluggish roll of the river and remembering the way the note she’d tossed in the high froth last spring had disappeared, Madeline said, “Not precisely. It’s the habit of money. The taking for granted you can do what you want. The money and the confidence and the clothing and the vacations and the schools all get blurred together in this stew of feeling better than other people. Special. As if gravity doesn’t apply to you. Some of them wake up. And a lot of them don’t. Some of them have parents who seem ready to protect them their entire lives.” She had picked up a willow switch and was drawing a pattern in the gray water with it.

  “And then, just when you least expect it, they’re responsible or generous or open in a way that is mind-blowing because there’s been no precedent for it at all. I still think there was something weirdly noble in Claire keeping that baby, even if all she wanted to do was humiliate everyone around her. She could have so easily done something else.”

  Matt tossed a stone to the center of the river and weighed another in his hand. A light wind was blowing clouds over the sun, and the day was at last cooling. “You might be right, Madeline.” She liked the way he said her name, with a softness to it when most people made the i hard and firm. Some kids whizzed by on bikes. In the middle of the river, a fish arced and flipped its silver skin through the hot sky.

  “I saw Porter,” Matt said. “On the way back from Acadia, I realized I was close to Castine. So I drove through and tried to get a sense of what it was like there. Have you ever been?”

  Madeline said no. Her sister went, attracted, she said, like a salmon drawn to the stream where it was spawned, except that prestige and houses were what pulled Kate, not instinct.

  Matt smiled and said it was true that that was what was there. But it also had this beautiful harbor, and he’d been standing there, looking at the boats he’d never know how to sail, when he bumped into Porter.

  “How is he?” Madeline hadn’t quite understood until now that part of her reluctance in returning to Armitage was about working at a place that didn’t have Porter in it. They were walking in the direction of Armitage, toward the bridge that marked the outer limits of the crew course where the trees grew more densely.

  Matt considered his response. “He’s reading, watching birds, though I got this sense that he was smaller. But he seems prepared to do what’s necessary.” He threw the second stone in the river.

  “Necessary. It’s such a stark word,” Madeline mused. “What does that mean in his case?”

  Matt shrugged and said, “Tell the truth as best he can, I think. Atone. If possible.”

  “It’s biblical,” said Madeline with a shiver.

  “You make that sound like a disease,” Matt teased her, and she said, “No, no, it’s not that. It’s just that most people shirk what they’ve done. They don’t admit to it. They find a thousand ways to make it not their fault. So what Porter is doing feels rare. It feels valuable.”

  They stood there in silence for a minute. A great blue heron winged past, and the wind gathered some force. The day might resolve in a thunderstorm, though none were forecast. “Madeline,” Matt asked, hands free of stones, face aimed at the sky, “are you seeing anyone?”

  “That is very funny,” she said, “because I was wondering the same thing about you, but I didn’t have the courage to ask and was feeling stupid after thinking about Porter being so brave.” She felt herself turning pinker. “And the honest answer from my perspective is sort of yes, sort of no.�
� She had just returned from seeing Fred, and it had been clear to her that his paintings had already swallowed him whole. They’d made no plans for a next meeting, and she sensed that, despite their mutual delight, they might be returning to an ambiguous state of friendship. They had even agreed that there wasn’t anything exclusive about their time together, though Madeline sensed it was less an Ilsa or a Vanessa who would claim Fred than sheer hunger to be painting as much as possible. It was actually a lot harder to compete with an intellectual passion than with a womanly one. People always tripped up, revealed themselves, made themselves rather easily unlovable.

  “And the doubly honest answer is no, I am not committed to anyone, but I go to see a friend from Armitage in New York once in a while. I don’t think that means I can’t ask you for a falafel. But I would have to tell him first.”

  Matt laughed and looked at her and said, “Could we make it dinner on a Friday night somewhere not in Armitage? After, of course, you’ve told your friend,” and she found herself surprised at how delighted the prospect of a long meal with the detective made her.

  They walked back along the river to Ali’s, where both of them had parked. “I miss the laundromat,” he said. “It had a je ne sais quoi of lint to it that just changed everything.”

  “Me, too,” Madeline said, and they agreed that, once school settled down and he got back to work, they’d meet for a meal somewhere definitively out of town, maybe even all the way in Boston. She drove back to the school, through the iron gates, parked her scruffy car, and spent an incredibly productive afternoon and evening pulling together syllabi. Something changed as she was writing those course descriptions. She was concerned, she realized, not so much with making her students smarter as making them more scrupulously honest with the tools they had at hand, with the words and stories with which they surrounded themselves. It could matter what you did with language: it could help to turn you into someone real.