Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  “Anyone can learn to play chess,” he’d said. “But it takes a lot of dedication, more than most people have. You have to block out all distractions and concentrate like crazy on the board. You need an understanding of strategy in order to win. Not many players learn to win with any consistency. Not many get that far.”

  “What about you, Patrick?” Sophie had said. “Do you win with consistency?”

  He’d blushed, tossed his hair out of his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Mostly I do win.”

  After two weeks of lessons, Sophie said she was going to marry Patrick when she grew up.

  “Oh, is that so?” Annabel said coolly. “Patrick doesn’t even like you. He thinks you’re a stupid little kid. I’m older than you. I’m the one he likes.”

  “You don’t act older, dearest sister. You act like a moron. ‘Oh, Patrick, that was my queen. I can’t play without my darling queen.’”

  “Shut up, shut up,” Annabel hissed at her. She pinched Sophie’s arm and Sophie yanked at her hair.

  Patrick was slender, not tall, with light brown hair and brown eyes. Annabel had written a poem about him, in which she’d talked about his little monkey hands hovering over the chessboard. She’d meant dextrous, judicious, skilled, or something like that. She’d read the poem to Sophie.

  “That stinks,” Sophie had said. “It has no rhythm. It’s sentimental. And monkey hands. What kind of monkey? A howler monkey, or a marmoset? Dead monkey, live monkey? Monkey soup? Monkey brains? I think in a poem you have to be a little more precise than that.”

  “You don’t know anything about poetry,” Annabel said. “You have no imagination whatsoever.”

  Sophie lunged at her. She grabbed the poem and tore it up. “Monkey hands,” she sang. “Let me feel your monkey hands on mine, you little ape.”

  “Go ahead, tear it up,” Annabel said. “I memorized it, you little shit.”

  “You memorized it?” Sophie said. “What a supreme waste of time.”

  “I hate you,” Annabel said.

  “I hate you,” Sophie said.

  Now it seemed to Annabel that she and Sophie had both chosen Patrick. They had identified him as their likeliest means of rescue. Was that true? She didn’t know. When she got back from her walk she was tired and hot, but she went straight upstairs to Sophie’s bedroom and began looking for her sister’s journal. If she couldn’t ask Sophie outright, she could perhaps get at the truth by stealth. She pulled open dresser drawers. She looked under the mattress, in the closet. The journal was missing. Sophie must have hidden it outside, in the chicken coop, in the barn, in a hole in the ground. Maybe it was better not to find it. Did Annabel really want to read her sister’s private thoughts?

  She thought of Sophie running across the field in the dark, a flash of white like a flame or a falling star. She thought of Freddy and Jane and the actress, that vision of two susceptible individuals yearning toward a third. Whenever there were three, one was going to get left out. She, too, seemed to be in a fever of paranoia. Some things you knew before you could possibly know them.

  Nori was in the kitchen, cutting the cake Annabel had made. She cut a single slice and placed it carefully on a gold-rimmed china plate. She licked a crumb off her finger. “Too bad we don’t have any icing sugar,” she said. She garnished the plate with a sprig of cherries from a tree near the barn.

  “Come with me,” Nori said. Annabel followed her into the living room, where Nori assembled on the old Welsh dresser two candles in brass candlesticks, Mika’s wooden boat that had belonged to Nori when Nori was a child, a Japanese doll in an embroidered blue kimono, a battered copy of The Wind in the Willows, the plate of chocolate cake, a glass of milk.

  Nori gave her handiwork a critical look. “Ideally,” she said, “there should be red and white lanterns hanging from the roof of the house and in the trees. And there should be bonfires on the hillsides. In Osaka there were bonfires.”

  A small fire would do, she said. It would serve to guide lost spirits to the house. Once they got here, the cake would comfort and sustain them.

  “Is this about Randal?” Sophie said. She had just come in. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were bright. Annabel kept looking at her.

  “It might be,” Nori said. “I think it is, yes.”

  “I didn’t know you believed in stuff like this,” Sophie said.

  “I don’t know if I do,” Nori said. “Fire for light, food for comfort, toys for — I don’t know, for amusement, I guess.”

  “Well, I have some news,” Sophie said. “I have a job.”

  Even before Sophie spoke, Annabel knew, or believed she did. If she’d found Sophie’s journal, this was what she would have learned: Sophie was always ahead of her. Sophie already knew how life worked, where to find the secret doors, what passwords to utter to get what she wanted. Sophie had a job. She danced around the room, her hair flowing around her like a scarf. She said she was starting work at the marina tomorrow. Patrick’s mother had hired her. She would wait on tables, wash dishes, scoop ice cream. She’d do everything, pretty much. She would be paid minimum wage, plus tips, she said.

  “You can have what I earn,” Sophie was saying to Nori. “You can have every single cent I make. It’ll help, won’t it?”

  Before going into the house on the beach, Annabel showed Patrick where to find the Summer Triangle. She started to tell him a tale Nori had told her, about a peasant boy who walked across the River of Heaven to reach his lover, a princess. He and the princess were so in love they neglected their duties, weaving silk into cloth and caring for a herd of cattle. This made God so angry he tore them apart and flung them to opposite ends of the sky. Now every year the peasant boy, in the form of the star Altair, had to retrace his journey across the River of Heaven to find the princess, the bright star Vega. And even then they were allowed only the briefest interlude in which to find happiness.

  “Just like us,” Annabel said.

  “Well, being a star is never easy,” said Patrick.

  The house smelled to Annabel like an apple slowly rotting from the inside. She and Patrick stood there in the darkness. There was no moon. The stars were shining with such brilliance. Annabel was wearing a long blue skirt and an embroidered blouse, gifts from her grandparents in Toronto. She’d brushed her hair until it gleamed.

  “I have an idea, Patrick,” she said. “When you go back to school next month, I’ll go with you. I’ll get a job and you can go to school. We can find somewhere cheap to live. I’ve thought about everything. I know it will work. I want to be with you.”

  Patrick was quiet. “Annabel,” he said. “I’m nineteen years old. And you’re seventeen. What are you talking about?”

  She moved away a little. “You think I’m too young?” she said. “After what we’ve been doing practically every night this summer, now you think I’m too young?”

  She had an urge to accuse Patrick, right now, this minute, of seeing Sophie, her younger sister, Sophie. She wanted to tell him that if he dared touch Sophie, she would kill him, not because she was jealous, but because she loved her sister. What was she to do? She loved her sister, but she loved Patrick more. “Why didn’t you tell me your mother wanted someone to work at the marina? Why did you let her give the job to Sophie?”

  “You’re mad because my mother hired Sophie? I didn’t know she was going to. Neither did she, I think. Sophie just happened to turn up when my mom was complaining about how she gets tennis elbow from scooping ice cream. She gets eczema from washing dishes. It’s not a plot or anything. Anyway, the job would bore you, believe me, Annabel.”

  “I never get bored,” Annabel said. If I got bored, she wanted to say, do you think I’d meet you here in this empty old house night after night? “I really didn’t come here to discuss your mother’s tennis elbow,” she said. “I wanted to know what you think about my plan, us living together, now, this fall.”

  “I think it’s too soon for plans like that, Annabel.”

  She
walked through the kitchen door into what must have been a living room. A family lived here, once. A woman sat by the window, reading a book, or sewing. A man lit a fire in the fireplace. There might have been a radio playing. There might have been a child asleep upstairs. It gave her a strange feeling, to think of normal life going on in a house that was slowly dissolving into the soil, its rotten-apple smell mingling with the salt air. She heard a little cacophony — rustling sounds, rats, maybe, but incessant, like the wind, or grains of sand drifting across the floor. “Listen,” she said, holding up a hand.

  “What is it?” Patrick said. He was standing in the doorway, as if afraid to get any closer. She went to him, leaned her head against his shoulder. If you leave, I will die, she said, inaudibly. Without you I would be nothing. The words made her feel bereft. She wasn’t sure if she’d spoken aloud or not. She didn’t even know if she meant what she’d said.

  “Did you touch my sister?” she said. She wanted to punch him. “Did you make her fall in love with you?”

  “No,” Patrick said. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did you bring her here? Tell me the truth.”

  “All right, yes, I met Sophie here once or twice. Yes, we talked. It was a game. You know what Sophie’s like. She thought it was fun, exciting. I would never hurt Sophie. How could you think I would? Sophie is just a child.”

  “Sophie is almost exactly the same age I was last summer. You remember last summer, don’t you Patrick?” She hit him on the arm.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “That didn’t hurt,” she said. “If you think that hurt, you just wait. I’ll find out the truth, you know I will. Anyway, why use Sophie’s age as an excuse? Why not say what you really mean?”

  “Because you’re twisting everything I say,” Patrick said. “I don’t want to fall out with you, Annabel. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Oh, Patrick,” she said wearily. Even in the dark, she saw the truth curled in his eyes like a snail and felt an urge to extract it with an ice pick. It was so cold in the house she could see her breath. She heard waves racing in along the shore. She thought: Imagine the house is a ship at sea, and the wind is singing in the rafters, or the sails. On deck, three passengers: Freddy and Jane and the famous actress, a triad, like the bright stars in the Summer Triangle. Freddy and Jane look just as she imagined they would. They’re having a little party, with drinks and trays of delicacies, smoked oysters and caviar. Jane wears a hat that shows off her perfect profile, her aquiline nose, her delicate chin. Freddy sits with her knees apart, her canvas skirt a hammock in which she rests her plump hands. “Let me get this straight, Annabel,” Freddy says. “Every night Patrick says he can’t see you, Sophie sneaks out at midnight and doesn’t return home until dawn.”

  “Compelling evidence, but circumstantial,” says the famous actress.

  “Oh, my poor darlings,” Jane says. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie.”

  Nori built a small fire on the gravel path in front of the house. She fed it with twigs she’d gathered from under the trees. She threw a dead cedar branch on it. Just a small branch, but it burned quickly. Sparks flew into the air and set new fires in the grass. Nori kept turning around and there was another fire, and another. Flames raced along the ground right up to the porch steps. It happened so quickly, she couldn’t do anything. She picked up a stick and prodded at the flames, trying to put the fire out. She saw Mika’s shocked face, her wide eyes. “Get out of the way,” she shouted at Mika. “Go,” she said, giving her a little push. She ran into the house and coaxed a trickle of water from the tap into a glass, then ran outside to throw the water on the flames. What was she doing? How could she extinguish the fires with half a glass of water?

  Sophie and Annabel were running around with buckets. Annabel said they should take water buckets to the salt marsh. Sophie said they should smother the fire with blankets.

  “Quiet,” Nori said. “Stop running around. Let me think.” Clearly she wasn’t using her head. She tried to remember her original intention. She remembered that distant August night, when her grandmother had taken her to put a lighted candle in a river that resembled the Milky Way, all those fallen stars. She’d wanted to summon a feeling of reverence, the same childish wonder and fear she had felt then. Instead, here was this ridiculous out-of-control fire mounting the steps of the house like an automated toy.

  She almost laughed when she saw Harold’s face as he drove up to the house in the truck. He leaped out and ran to the side of the house, where the garden hose was lying on the ground.

  “There isn’t enough water,” Nori called.

  Harold threw the hose down. He ran over to the shed and got a shovel. He shovelled dirt onto the flames. “I presume it wasn’t your intention to burn down our home?” he said.

  “No, no,” she said. “It was supposed to be just a little fire.” She measured a tiny space with her fingers. She and Harold stared at each other. The smell of bitter ashes seemed to originate in them, in their hearts. Resentment and discontent left smouldering too long, Nori thought. Yet Harold couldn’t keep from smiling. She found this, too, ominous. He took an envelope from his shirt pocket. He waved it in her face. “This,” he said, “is a letter from a man in Calgary. He wants a prospectus. He wants to enroll his son and his daughter for the fall term.”

  “You can’t have a school with two pupils,” Nori said.

  “We would have five pupils. We already have Annabel and Sophie and Mika. It’s a start, isn’t it?”

  Couchin. She remembered: couchin was Japanese for paper lantern.

  That night in March, nearly twenty years ago, in Cupertino. If Harold had arrived at her second floor dressing room door on any other evening, she might have been impervious to his charms, his good looks. But earlier that day she’d made an important decision. She’d decided she was a good pianist — she had performed Schumann’s Arabesque in C Major, Opus 18 and Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy nearly flawlessly that night — but she wasn’t good enough. Or she didn’t have enough ambition. Did she want to spend her life in hotel rooms, suffering debilitating bouts of nerves before every performance? Did she want to be judged by strangers? Worse, did she want to perform with her parents in the audience, listening and jotting down a list of her mistakes — a messily executed arpeggio, an overly controlled passage that would have benefited from more spontaneity?

  That night, for luck, she was wearing a gift from her father, a diamond heart on a platinum chain, and this was the luck it had brought her: this handsome, crazy man who looked at her as if she were a saint, an angel, a rare butterfly he could ensnare, not understanding that the butterfly would die in captivity. She hadn’t exactly died, though, had she? In fact, she’d flourished, she had to admit. She’d turned out to be Harold’s perfect co-conspirator. She’d agreed to marry him even though she knew he was an underpaid, over-qualified teacher at a private school in San Jose. He was thirty-five; she was twenty. She had never tried very hard to dissuade him from his dreams of having his own school. She’d agreed to home-school their children. She’d agreed to move from San Jose to Berkeley, then to Portland, to Seattle, to Victoria, and then here, to this remote island.

  She had loved Randal. She thought of the scarf he’d knitted, its flame-like colours, the way he’d carried it everywhere with him. The scarf was the first thing Harold had found, when he’d gone in search of Randal that terrible morning.

  If she could help Randal to find his way home. Come into the house, she wanted to say. Here is some cake. Here is a doll for company, a boat to play with. Here is the piano, waiting for you. Here is the music.

  “Mom, what were you doing? You almost burned the house down,” Sophie said. She stared at the smouldering ashes on the porch steps. She was shaking. Nori put her arm around her and guided her into the house. “It’s okay,” she said. “It was just a little wild-fire, nothing serious. You’ll be fine, Sophie.” She went into the house. Even in the kitchen s
he could smell the smoke. It was bitter, yet strangely bracing. She’d made something happen, and out of that small action, something else would happen. She made tea and served it with the remains of Annabel’s chocolate cake. Her plans had gone awry, but still, this was a small celebration, in honour perhaps of some small triumph she couldn’t yet identify.

  Harold talked about giving the schoolhouse a fresh coat of paint. He intended to caulk the windows and replace the weather-stripping, render everything ship-shape, he said, before September. He’d hired some local people to begin work on the fence. Nori was mending sheets, sewing pillowcases. Two more pupils had registered, and then another two. Annabel and Sophie had swept and dusted in the dormitories. Of course, it was just a beginning. In some ways the school remained a dream, Harold said. He knew that. It was makeshift, provisional, like one of those airy constructs that formed in cumulonimbus clouds just before a thunderstorm: a castle, a sailing ship, an entire continent, and then a moment later there was nothing but sky. He paused. “Well, anyway, we’ll hope for the best, and see what transpires,” he said.

  Annabel sat near the fireplace, across the room from Patrick, listening to him and Harold talking. Her mind wandered, and then she would catch a few words about artificial intelligence, or genetic sequencing, or the merits of homeopathy. At one point Harold got up and threw a few charred sticks of wood on the fire, remnants from Nori’s bonfire. Nori had gone upstairs to put Mika to bed and when she came back she went to the piano. It was a Heintzman upright, its walnut case a dusky, bruised-looking purple, like the skin of an Italian plum. Sophie came into the living room in a robe patterned with peonies. She’d washed her hair and wrapped a towel around her head. Her eyes glittered in the firelight. Annabel thought she looked like one of the dolls her grandfather had brought back from Japan for her and Sophie.