A Circumstance of Blood

by Jeannette Batz Cooperman

  “My. This is monastic,” she drawled. Beyond the bedroom was a larger room − probably the original bedroom, but he’d saved it for his study. She saw bookshelves, a fireplace and the hideous red plaid armchair Colin dragged everywhere he lived.

  “Here’s the best part,” he said, drawing her toward a spiral staircase. He led the way up the iron steps, and the next minute they were both out on the flat part of the roof, protected from the edge by an intricate wrought-iron railing.

  The cold front had moved through, and the air had cleared. Above their heads, the stars were jagged and bright, like tin-lantern cutouts. Taking hold of the railing, she leaned back, letting the vast black sky absorb the last of the drive’s tension.

  “It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “It feels a thousand miles from the city.” They stood for several minutes, not needing to speak.

  Two sharp barks cut the silence. “Whoops,” she said. “Simon.”

  He’d followed them upstairs and was standing at the foot of the spiral staircase, one paw on the first step. “Come on up,” she coaxed, crouching and patting the top step. He backed away. Too narrow, too wobbly, no visible destination.

  “We’d better go down anyway and get you settled,” Colin said, brisk again. “Adults can’t stay in the dorm; it’s against the archdiocesan child-safety policy. So we renovated the milkhouse for guests.”

  “I’m sleeping in a milkhouse?”

  “The dorm’s the old dairy barn. We did a gut rehab and built two more floors on top. There’s a separate door to the milkhouse and it’s got thick walls and extra insulation, so you’ll have a buffer from the boys’ clatter.”

  “Mmm. A buffer.”

  They crossed the lawn to the dorm. “That’s where you’ll be,” Colin said, pointing to a round, turret-like building stuck to the side of the old stone barn. “But first let me show you the dining hall. It’s on the first floor of the dorm − it’s fine to go in that far. Just stay away from the actual dormitory floors, okay?”

  She shot him a look of reproach.

  “Right.”

  There was a community bulletin board outside the dining hall, and she paused to read the comments scrawled on the flyers. “Smoking in an indoor public space is a dick move.” “Who stole my Fireball?” “Lighten up, dude. U drank it.” Upstairs a TV sports announcer yelled something triumphant. Over loud clapping, one of the boys roared, “Fuckin’ A!”

  “Do they know yet, that I’m staying here?” she whispered.

  Colin looked amused. “I’ve never seen you shy before.”

  “Boys this age terrify me.”

  “Even when they’re not sociopaths?”

  “Absolutely. I never had brothers. I went to an all-girls high school. I don’t even know how to talk to them.”

  “You’ll be fine. Come on, I’ll show you your room. And tomorrow I’ll introduce you to Graham, okay?”

  She stopped on the flagstone path. “Why is it that whenever my life is just on the edge of overwhelming me, you manage to tilt it completely out of control?”

  Grinning, he pushed open the door to the milkhouse. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  *

  The sun had barely risen when Sarah heard a faint tap at the milkhouse door, followed by a second just a bit louder. Fumbling to close a few more buttons on her flannel nightshirt, she clumped down the narrow loft stairs and opened the door.

  On the stoop stood a boy, his hair bed rumpled, a Mumford & Sons sweatshirt over his regulation oxford button down. If faces told anything, he couldn’t be Graham. This was a wide-open countenance, and the muscles around his mouth and eyes were relaxed, not tensed to hide secrets.

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” he asked, brow furrowed. “Father McAvoy said to see if you wanted me to walk your dog.”

  “Oh, gosh, no, I’m fine. I thought he was kidding. I’ll just take Simon wherever. Unless there’s anyplace I shouldn’t?”

  “You can let him run wherever he wants − there aren’t any other dogs up here. But there’s a path I could show you, if you want.”

  “Um . . . sure. Just give me a second to get dressed.”

  Pulling on jeans and a fleece hoodie, she wondered how long she could maintain all this cheery politeness without coffee. When she opened the door again, Simon tore out in front of her.

  “I’m Max,” the boy said. “Max Beckholdt.”

  “Sarah Markham. And what did you do to deserve this early-morning punishment?”

  He flushed, just a little. “I don’t mind. I miss our Aussies. My dad’s a sheep farmer. And Father Mac knows I want to be a vet, so I guess he figures anything’s practice.”

  Another thank you seemed extraneous − Simon had already circled behind them and ducked his head under Max’s big palm, flipping it up to coax a pet. When Max threw a stick downhill, Simon raced after it and galloped back up, his eyes scrunched tight with pleasure, ears straight out in the cold wind.

  They took a path that wound along limestone bluffs streaked with shale. Pine trees lined the bluff side, their scent clear and sharp as a taxicab whistle. She started to say something inane about how clean the air was, then broke off. Stick with the standard questions, she told herself. This kid’s used to fresh air.

  Max was a junior, his favourite subject was biology, and he was flunking philosophy. He told her about his dad’s farm, how they’d be lambing in the spring. When they came to a hut of rough, blackened logs, the cracks chinked with small blocks of wood and daubed with mud, she paused. “How old?”

  “Probably 1700s,” he told her. “There was a village here then, down where Main Street is now.”

  By the time they reached the overlook she’d relaxed into his company. They stood looking across the river at the dark treetops, ragged as old lace against the shell-pink sky.

  “I hear you’ve got a new kid in your class,” she said. “His name’s Graham?”

  “Yeah. He just transferred in.” Max tossed the stick Simon kept nudging against his thigh.

  “What’s he like? Will it be hard for him to make friends halfway through the year?”

  A shrug. “Everybody here’s fairly cool about that kind of thing. We were all new just this fall. But Graham’s a bit . . .”

  “Shy?” she suggested, figuring he wouldn’t be able to resist correcting an adjective that wrong.

  “More like arrogant.” Max’s eyes, a clear cornflower blue, looked troubled. “He seems pretty unbothered. Doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.”

  “Maybe it’s just cover; maybe he’s . . .”

  “Really insecure. I know. That’s what my mom always told us when we got teased in grade school.”

  “But Graham wouldn’t fit her profile?”

  Max picked up another stick and rubbed off all the loose bits of bark and mud. “No,” he said finally, “I don’t think he would.”

  They headed back, the smell of maple sausage pulling them toward the dorm. Sarah shooed Simon into the milkhouse, tossing him a peanut-butter treat as consolation.

  Breakfast was quiet, the boys still bleary eyed as they passed the serving bowls back and forth. Sarah took three sausage links and quickly folded two into a paper napkin. She was congratulating herself on her subtlety when Max reached over and added one of his.

  “He’s a cool dog. Is he named for Simon Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent?”

  She burst out laughing. “Just the opposite. Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist who studies empathy. At the slightest hint of upset, Simon came undone, so my mom kicked him out of her training programme. She said he had too much empathy.”

  Colin reached their table in time to hear the last of this exchange. “He might be more useful than you,” he murmured in her ear as he swung a leg over the bench. In normal tones, he asked Max what he made of the shadows in Plato’s cave. The boy paled.

  “Colin, he got up early to walk my dog,” Sarah pr
otested. “Let him eat his breakfast in peace!”

  A basket of hot, crumbly buttermilk biscuits came around, followed by butter and black raspberry jam. “Coffee?” she mouthed, and Colin shook his head. “Think of the children.”

  “Think of my fogged brain.”

  “You need to cut back anyway.” He raised a hand halfway into the air. “Graham! Can I have a word?”

  A young man veered toward them, backpack slung over his shoulder. Hair black and curly, the cut artless, like a girlfriend had just mussed it. A rower’s wide shoulders, but lean; no baby fat softened the hollows beneath his high cheekbones. Sarah caught herself looping a strand of chestnut hair behind her ear like a schoolgirl and quickly did the math. Yep, she could be his mother.

  “This is Sarah Markham,” Colin said. “She’s a friend of mine. I was hoping you two could meet later and talk for a while.”

  Graham stared just long enough to make her uncomfortable. “Shrink or cop?”

  “Journalist, working on a book. I could use your help.”

  He shrugged. “I’m around after English lit.”

  “That’s your first class? What about later in the day, maybe two?”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Colin frown; he’d no doubt expected her to grab the first opening. But she wanted to set the terms of this meeting.

  “Two’s fine,” Graham said. “Meet you in the common room?”

  “You can use my office,” Colin said quickly.

  “Cosy,” Graham drawled.

  When he’d gone Sarah glanced over at Max, who’d frozen, toast in hand, for the entire exchange. He gave her a see-what-I-mean look, then mumbled something about getting to class and said he’d check on Simon later if she liked.

  “Great,” she said. “I’ll make sure to leave the door unlocked.”

  “None of our rooms lock,” Colin said.

  The tightening started at her tailbone and crept up like a snake, winding around her over-full stomach. “Lock this up with your laptop,” Colin had said the night before, handing her a copy of Graham’s admissions file. She’d been so proud of him for breaking the confidentiality rules; he could be a prig.

  And she could be an idiot. She’d left the folder out on the table.

  *

  Near the rusting Dumpsters at the back of the parking lot were a few yellow-lined spaces, half covered by an overhang of pine branches. Story Monhart steered her mother’s silver Audi allroad into one of them, branches crunching against the side. The car was totes boring, but somebody still might notice it, and if they caught her again they’d send her back to fucking Briarcliff. She’d been on that grind before.

  First you had to be angry in small-group, yell about how fucked up your parents were, tell the therapist she was stupid and she didn’t understand. The next day you admitted you felt depressed . . . and sometimes . . . you let it trail off, looking down at your hands. Then you said, with a little tremble in your voice, that you cut yourself sometimes, just to be sure you were still alive, and when the therapist leaned forward you fed her some emo crap you swore you’d never told anyone.

  After that, all you had to do was pretend she’d convinced you her dead boring version of life was worth living and give it another day or two before you washed your hair, put on earrings, and start talking about college. The shrink called your parents with the good news and, when they came to pick you up, you saw the shame of relief in their eyes because their insurance was just about to run out.

  Her parents weren’t fucked up, just dreary rule-dweebs whose lives had gone flat as cardboard. Pulling down the rear-view mirror, she slicked on lip gloss. Maybe Philip was bi. He’d never drive an Audi wagon, that was for sure.

  Her phone said 7:35 − they were all probably still at breakfast. She grabbed the Jason Wu tote bag she’d snagged from her mother’s closet, made sure the inside compartment was zipped shut, and made a dash for the dorm.

  *

  The first thing Sarah saw when she stepped inside the milkhouse was Graham Dennison’s file on the cabbage-rose sofa. She pounced on it and locked it inside her sleek white laptop case. Humbled by the screw up, she sat down to what she’d been postponing for days: her voicemail at Gateway.

  ‘Out of the country’ had worked. She only needed to follow up on one message. “Markham? O’Rourke. Got a story for you. A bent cop. This one’s juicy. You back yet?”

  A legendary private eye, Mike O’Rourke had retired after a quadruple bypass. He missed the adrenaline so badly, he called every few weeks with a hot tip. Most of them panned out.

  When she punched in his number the machine answered. “O’Rourke? Markham,” she said, imitating his terse style. “I’m back.”

  Next she called Gateway’s main number and keyed an extension.

  “Demetrios,” a voice answered, its musical inflection nothing like O’Rourke’s bark. The one-word name was Katina’s only affectation. For years, people had mispronounced her first name. “Ka-TEE-nuh, how hard can this be?” she snapped at one unfortunate publicist. “It does not rhyme with vagina!” Finally, she’d simply dropped her first name from her photo credits. It had turned out to be brilliant marketing − people spoke reverently of a Demetrios photograph.

  “Kat! I’m back. But I’m not − I’m at my friend Colin’s school. He needed an outside perspective on something.”

  “Is that the guy who went off to England?”

  “Scotland.”

  “And he’s a priest, right? So what are you doing there? You’re supposed to be home writing.”

  “I am writing. In a milkhouse. Next to a dorm full of teenage boys.”

  “Theomu. What’s your deadline?”

  “End of January. I’ll be back at work February 3.”

  “Casper’s going crazy without you.”

  They’d nicknamed their editor-in-chief, John Kasprzyk, for the old cartoon ghost because he always managed to float just out of reach. “Casper’s in the office?”

  “Had to be. Rob was filing 9,000-word first-person stories about the human tragedy.”

  “That’s our Rob.”

  Sarah clicked off, still smiling. She unlocked the laptop case and slid out Graham’s file. As she scanned the first few pages, she shivered. The furnace had kicked off, and a damp chill seeped through the milkhouse’s stone walls. At least Colin had put in windows − a band of eight ribbon-thin, tall strips of glass set along the curve of the exterior wall. She dragged the couch into the slants of sunlight and curled up under a throw.

  At age seven, Graham had knocked over the wheelchair of a boy with cerebral palsy. A little girl heard Graham ask, right before tipping the chair, “Do you wish you were dead?”

  Sarah kept reading.

  *

  She skipped lunch and dug a bag of cashews out of her duffel bag and ate them one by one, vaguely conscious of crunch and salt. When she’d reached the file’s end, she reread every word. Beside her Simon snored, rolled on his back with a whore’s abandon.

  At 1:45 she eased his head off her lap, changed into a charcoal wool skirt and a turtleneck, zipped on boots and headed for Colin’s office.

  Jimmy was coming down the staircase as she started up, and they met on the wide landing with a big hug. “Hey, you,” she said, kissing his cheek. Still the sockless loafers, even in winter; still the khaki pants and blue oxford shirt uniform prescribed by a family with more money than imagination. Time had etched a few lines in his forehead, made half an asterisk at the corner of his bright blue eyes. But they held the same mischief.

  “Ah, Jimmy, why haven’t I seen you more often?”

  When Colin was in Scotland and let three of her emails go unanswered, she’d called, knowing Jimmy could tap the Jesuit network. Colin was okay, just melancholy, he assured her. “We should get together,” they both said, but it rang hollow. They’d both been closer to Colin than to each other.

  “I was sorry to hear about your arch
itect,” Jimmy said now. “What happened? Last time we all had dinner, you two were headed for the altar.”

  “We reached it.” She caught herself staring at the scuffed tips of her boots and forced herself to raise her eyes. “Four years later I came to my senses. He wanted me to wear black all the time and go to gallery openings and lose fifteen pounds and stop drinking flavoured coffee, and did I mention worship him?”

  “Arrogant bastard,” Jimmy said mildly.

  She shrugged. “How else do you draw a skyscraper and force the world to live with it for the next hundred years? Arrogance is an occupational hazard.”

  “In that case I’m in real trouble.”

  “Nah, you’re not the preachy type.”

  “Can’t afford to be.” That grin, half altar-boy, half rogue, had won him an entirely undeserved ‘A’ in their Chaucer seminar. “I made sure to take the vow of obedience after the vows of chastity and poverty, not before.”

  The implication hit, and her laugh came out as a snort. Quintessential Jimmy, the mischief all in the words.

  “So how was Haiti?” he asked. “Did you hear any mizic rasin? Their roots music?”

  “I heard more retching than music. Tell you about it later − I’m supposed to meet somebody in Colin’s office.”

  “Our new student.” Jimmy’s lips made a squiggly line, like he’d eaten something rancid and couldn’t find a place to spit it out.

  “You don’t seem enamoured.”

  “He could ruin this school just by being here. And Colin refuses to see it.” Jimmy shook his head like a disappointed older brother, a role reversal that made Sarah’s lips twitch.

  “See you at dinner,” she said, and ran up the stairs. No time for nerves now − Graham was already waiting in the outer office. Connie’s cheerful round face looked pinched, and frown lines slashed a deep V between her brows. She hurried to unlock Colin’s door, and as Graham passed through, she reached up to give his shoulder a reassuring pat. He ignored her.

  Pulling the door shut, Sarah took Colin’s chair and felt a rush of borrowed power. This kid couldn’t hurt her. “First, I want you to know I have no authority here, no connection to the school. This isn’t a command performance. But I’d be grateful for your help. I’m starting a book about kids who’ve been labelled with various behaviour problems.” She expected him to bristle at the phrase, but his expression remained impassive. “Colin said you might have a story you’d be willing to tell.”