The gray world around me felt ominous and harsh. The absence of anyone nearby—the homeless guys were half a block away and definitely not interested in my welfare— made the landscape desolate.
I didn’t know Adam. I wanted to believe in his innate nonviolent goodness, I wanted to defend him—but I didn’t truly know him at all, and I surely didn’t know who he was becoming. I’d been whistling in the dark, convincing myself he was harmless. That didn’t feel as much a given now with the two of us on a deserted street. I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and nodded. “I’m … I’m … you surprised me.”
“You took too long.” He lowered his voice to a point midway between a mutter and a growl.
“Long what? Screaming?”
“Leaving there.” He gestured toward the library, a distant pale looming mass through the trees, the dusk, and the rain.
“You’ve been waiting? Why?”
“I left.”
“I meant—where have you been? I’ve been worried. Everybody was. Is.”
He shrugged. “I don’t like that place anymore, understand? I don’t like it.”
“Where are you staying? Sleeping?”
His eyes were without expression or light. He faced me, but I couldn’t tell what he actually saw.
“You’re wet,” I said softly. “I don’t want you to get sick. You need warm clothing.” He swiveled his flat gaze to the bright banner announcing a special exhibit across the road at the Franklin Institute. He was wearing his customary black sweater and jeans, probably the same ones he’d been wearing yesterday, and a light windbreaker. God knew how long he’d been out in the rain. “Adam, where is your scarf? You always wore that long black scarf, and you could use it now. Where is it?”
He touched his neck as if to check, looked back in the direction of the library, up the parkway to the museum, then nodded overemphatically, his brow furrowed. “I need it. Wait—maybe—” He squatted down and opened a bright red backpack, pawing through its contents, shaking his head. His dark hair looked painted onto his forehead and cheeks.
He stood up again, lifted the open backpack off the ground, and handed it over to me, his missing scarf no longer on his mind. “No scarf.”
The bag said DAISY in large blue-tape block letters. She’d told the truth about her missing backpack.
“That pack doesn’t look anything like yours,” I said softly. “How’d you wind up with it?”
“I—I got mixed up, maybe. I thought … I don’t know, it was mine. I couldn’t find mine and I needed one to put stuff in.”
“What stuff?”
“Stuff! Whatever stuff! Backpack stuff!”
I didn’t know what to do about his increasing agitation except to back off, at least metaphorically. After a few seconds of silence, Adam’s temper gauge dropped noticeably.
“I don’t want it. Too dangerous. Give it back.” He had no apparent interest in whose backpack it actually was, whose belongings he’d just searched for his scarf. “I don’t want it on me. Used as evidence against.”
“Against what?”
“Me!” He shouted the word, then laughed.
“Evidence of what?”
Now he looked annoyed, as if my questions were unfair, as possibly they were. “I don’t know that!” he said sharply. “I don’t know them. Whatever they want. Against me. Evidence!”
“Adam,” I said, “do you know what happened yesterday at the library?”
“Yeah.” The voice that had just shouted, laughed, reflected agitation, now went flat. “A lot of things. We saw the departments, we had lunch. I read.”
“I mean about Ms. Fisher, our tour guide. What happened to her.”
“She hollered at me in the library and God smote her. Fisher-lady’s dead now.” His voice was low, vague, dissociated. I couldn’t figure out what was going on inside of him, what he felt, if anything.
“Why do you say that?”
“Isn’t she? Isn’t she dead? I saw.”
I nodded. “Did you see God smite her?” I kept my voice as soft as I could.
He stared blankly. He seemed so changed, as if the road he’d been on had suddenly grown steep and he was speeding on a downhill curve. Two days ago his disease had been subtle enough to debate with his parents. But now, partly because of the weather and a night, I suspected, spent out of doors, and drugs, perhaps, and whatever he had seen, or done, in the library—he was mentally jumbled, emotions and words fragmenting, coming out overemphatically or not at all.
“Do you remember what you saw?”
“Her. I saw the fisherlady. Not a fisherman, no. A fisherlady.”
I smiled, to show I got his wordplay, and I felt a moment’s painful sorrow for what was going to be wasted if Adam didn’t get help. Even if help had to be within a prison system. “You could help the police, if you saw anything. Or heard anything.”
He seemed to shrink within himself.
“I have the feeling you did,” I said softly. “And you were frightened and still are, maybe, and it makes me sad to think about you being frightened. I think I can help you if I know what you’re feeling. Did something mix you up, maybe make you run out of the library without telling anybody?” I waited between questions, watched his eyes dart off me, into space, up into the young green leaves of the trees. He didn’t blink against the misty rain the way he should have. He didn’t seem to feel the drops. “Did anything frighten you? Anybody? You could tell me. I’m not scary. It’s the same old me, Adam. The same old two of us.”
“No, no,” he said. “No police, no, no trouble for me, no evidence. I didn’t see anybody. Nothing.”
“Not … God? Smiting her?”
“The dead lady. The fisherlady. I saw that.”
“How did you find that out? That she was dead, I mean.”
“She was there. She was dead.”
“Where were you?”
He shrugged. “In where we … in the room up there where I was going to—the little clay things. The shepherds. The receipts.”
I remembered mentally joking with myself about the odds of anyone’s being interested in cuneiform tablets. Some joke.
“I went out to the balcony. I thought—I was going to go somewhere else I can’t remember, but I saw her. And I heard.”
“You were on the landing?”
His face went through a series of unrelated expressions, as if he were testing them. A frown, a quizzical look, an annoyed moue, almost a smile. “The balcony? Is that the same as the landing?”
I nodded, trying to hear what lay behind his words, trying to determine if that was what he’d decided was the best answer, or whether it was the truth. Or whether he could recognize what was true and what was not.
“I didn’t see anybody except the fisherlady. On the floor, all … dead. Just dead. And there was shouting.”
“You heard a shout?”
Adam looked at me intently. “I hear things. Other people are deaf. I hear it.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you make my head hurt.”
He looked battered from inside. He looked crazy. He looked two or three minutes away from being the next denizen of Logan Square, sitting on a bench, talking to himself.
“I heard something,” he said, “then I thought I should run away but the elevator didn’t come, then I thought I should hide but I didn’t know where, then I thought I should go look and I did and she was still on the floor, fisherlady.”
I nodded. She was already on the floor. Not by his hands or doing. Please let him be right, I thought. Let him have the chronology right, and keep him coherent enough so that other people believe him, too.
“Somebody shouted. Said ‘dead’ or ‘kill.’”
“That voice—was it a man’s or a woman’s?” And not in your head, Adam, please God.
“I don’t know—it was too loud.”
Not good. I had been hopeful for a while, but now …
“And then the siren.”
&nbs
p; The alarm.
“I was running.”
“You opened the big iron gate? Is that what started it?”
“Then ‘Adam! Adam!’”
“That was me.”
“Yes.”
“You knew it was me?”
He nodded.
So he’d been nearby when I called out. “I was looking for you. I heard the alarm, and I was frightened. I needed to know that nothing bad had happened to you. Where were you?”
He put his hands to his ears. “Running. I was running. Maybe the noise was inside me.”
“The person who said ‘kill’? Or ‘dead’?”
“No questions! No noise! My scarf!”
“Adam, let me take you—”
“No! Don’t touch me!” He backed away.
“Wait—” I took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and wrote my phone number on it. The least I could offer. “Here,” I said. “In case. For whatever. Call me anytime. I’ll help you, I promise.” I found two quarters and held them out, too.
He made no move to take any of it. “My scarf,” he said. “I need it!”
I shoved the paper and coins into his windbreaker pocket. “Don’t go!” I said. “Don’t—” But he was leaving for who knew where with long strides, and then a loping run. “Adam,” I whispered into the rain. “Adam.” He was gone. Lost.
I hoped he really did have a safe haven. I wanted him stored in a clean, dry place until some of this became clearer.
I walked slowly back to the school and my car, dredging for nuggets of fact within our bizarre, brief conversation. Had he been hearing voices or had he heard a voice? And how much of whatever it was should I relate to Mackenzie?
I saw a gopherlike image of Adam, brain aching from the scrambled bombardment of life, peeping out of the hole in the earth into which he’d fallen, searching for safety. And along I came, the great protector, taking whatever he gave me, forging it into a mallet, then hammering it directly onto his head, pounding him farther and farther into the pit. Protecting him from himself.
No wonder there are no parables about my ancestors, the Unwittingly Horrible Samaritans.
Twelve
I WAS BEYOND TIRED. MY MARROW HAD DISSOLVED. I WANTED to be waited upon. Needed to be served. Yearned to be doted upon.
I wanted a mommy—a theoretical one, not my assigned one, because the latter would want answers, and currently, all her surprising largesse had done was raise more questions. I wanted a mommy who also knew massage.
I trudged toward the loft from the spot I’d finally found for my car—which, incidentally, was in as bad shape as I was, on its last legs, or bearings, but I couldn’t think about that issue now.
As I turned the key I heard the faint sounds of the TV, slightly surprising, but it meant C.K. was home, so I entered, playing for my audience for all it was worth, posture slumped, head bowed forward. The picture of somebody the world had mistreated. Somebody who needed all the TLC in the world.
“Hey, hon.” He waved casually from the sofa, his eyes never leaving the TV Sprawled on a couch watching the tube in broad daylight—or at least narrow daylight, as night approached. All he lacked was the pink satin kimono, fluffy mules, and a box of bonbons.
I held the pity-me pose. He’d notice. My muscles spasmed. What was he doing staring at the tube like nobody I’d want to know?
He’s tired, my inner nice person suggested. I told her to shut up. I knew he was. He’d worked all night. But in that case he should be in bed, sleeping. And if he was too wired to sleep, which happened, he should be doing something kind. Whipping up dinner or—bare minimum—turning his head away from the TV and asking me how my day had been. Being civil. In fact, he shouldn’t even need to ask the question; one look at me should have summoned forth his emotional-paramedic techniques. Instantly. Had he given me one look.
I dropped the posturing—if a woman poses in the forest and nobody watches, is she still pitiable?—and dragged myself into the loft, just about commando-style, elbows propelling me across the loft floor. I might as well actually have done it for all the New Age–sensitive guyness my significant other demonstrated.
“Good flick,” he said out loud, presumably to himself. “I like it every time.” He noticed me staggering across the loft. “Come sit.” He patted the square inch of couch he wasn’t covering, ignoring the fumes coming out of my ears.
The cat, snuggled behind Mackenzie’s knees, looked up balefully. I’d become not only irrelevant but a potential intruder. I ignored both of them and walked behind the couch to check the table where we tossed mail. Not that I expected anything beyond bills and circulars, and not that I was wrong.
It was a fairly good position from which to wring the man’s neck. Which thought, of course, reminded me of Emily Fisher. How had somebody done that to her? From behind? From where?
Better to think about make-believe. I checked out the TV. North by Northwest. I guess I should have felt relieved he wasn’t hooked on a soap opera.
“Reminds me of my childhood,” he said. “’Cept, of course, they didn’t have so many movies on TV then. No videos. No VCR. We went to the theater to see them, or my mother did. She adores Cary Grant. Not even his death has weakened that love. The household gods, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Anything they were in, together or apart, she’d go see and see and see. Wanted her boys to be like him, her girls to be like the great Katharine. Had an arrangement with the local theater—they did revival movies every so often— that she could have any posters that survived the showing. I remember …”
My world was decomposing and he was nattering about his mother’s viewing habits?
“Look,” he said, “here it comes—the crop-duster scene.”
“Oh, of course!” I said. “It’s Cary!”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Not him—you! Your mother loved Cary Grant, wanted her boys to be like him—so of course—C for Cary!”
“Wrong.”
I walked around the sofa and clicked off the set.
“Hey!” he said, sitting up. “Why’d you do that?” Macavity leaped to the floor, resettling in a hostile puff of dust-colored fur.
I folded my hands over my chest—primo teacher position. “Only way to get your attention, unless I get murdered.”
“Dear God,” he murmured.
That sort of male conciliatory behavior makes me crazier still. Conversing with the Lord about me, as if my behavior— or expected behavior—deserved divine sympathy.
“Look,” he said, “I’m real sorry, but I’ve had a long, long time of it. I have three cases driving me silly, and I’m too wired to fall asleep, so—what’s the harm in it? My favorite scene, too!”
“That’s everybody’s favorite scene. You’re supposed to be different. Special. I’d think you’d be creative. Original.” I had reached the refrigerator—the loft is spacious, but the living-dining-cooking area is all in one portion of it. “You’re becoming a household cliché. Ordinary.” I slammed the refrigerator door shut.
“Ordinary?” he echoed in a voice so low and soothing it alarmed me. That was the way you spoke to madmen. “Ordinary? Maybe I am, after all. But you surely are not, because ordinary would be now and then civil, compassionate, to her long-suffering man.”
I was sorry I’d already slammed the refrigerator door. Opening it again in order to repeat the action seemed silly. So instead I snapped, “There’s no dinner. I forgot to buy food and we’re out of anything coherent and I don’t care! I’m going to bed.”
“Hey,” he said mildly. “Whoa. What’s wrong? Have a bad day?”
“A bad day? Bad? What is the meaning of ‘bad’? How about a pukey day? A heinous day. A malevolent day. An atrocious day. A day that makes you not want to have any more days. A—”
He took a deep breath. “What happened?”
I struggled between the twin desires to keep sputtering and to move us on now that he was listening. To get sympathy at long last. This was my
last port in the storm.
“First of all, I’m being fired.”
Mackenzie raised an eyebrow, tilted his head, and shrugged mildly. “This isn’t the first time.”
“It’s different now. Havermeyer told me as much. End of semester, end of me. And I’m not sure I care. I think maybe … maybe it’s time for a change.”
Of what, he should by all rights ask. Of scene? Of men? Or just of job?
Luckily, he didn’t, because I wasn’t sure about that, either.
“And they’re still threatening to sue me. For battery. All part of their conviction that I’m after him.”
Mackenzie looked oddly troubled by that—conflicted. Maybe even ready to react and say something, but I plowed on, not wanting to hear whatever it was. I didn’t need more of his mulish attitude about Adam. That wasn’t the issue at hand, and I didn’t need to justify my actions with the man I lived with, of all people.
“And then two of my tenth graders overheard something at a tennis club and now—not that they’re wrong, but they wrote an article for the paper about a major, major scandal at the school. A business selling substitute SAT exam takers, fake transcripts, fake letters of recommendation. They came to me because of the paper. It’s just going to cap it all for Havermeyer.”
“If you’re already fired, why worry?”
That was not the correct response. I had said I was definitely fired, but I didn’t 100 percent know that. And I didn’t want to be—if I left, I wanted it to be on my terms. I wanted to call the shots. Jill and Nancy’s discovery made the odds of that happening still worse. Mackenzie wasn’t getting it.
“And then,” I said, “I had to go back to the library. I left Lia’s book there yesterday. The one she’d annotated and underlined, and they couldn’t find it. Somebody must have taken it, and the kid’s going to be heartsick. Understandably. I already am.
“And then, when I left, Adam was outside the library, waiting for me. Is that list sufficient to qualify me as having had a bad day?”
“Adam Evans.”
I nodded. “He had somebody else’s book bag yesterday. Wanted to return it.” It was incredible how rational that made his actions sound, though they’d felt anything but.
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