At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  “I’ll be damned,” he said out loud, just as Regina was swinging over with his food.

  “What for?”

  He told her about the letter, the article. “Eugenia Marsh hasn’t spoken to the press in fifteen years.”

  “Eugenia who?”

  “She’s a playwright. Or she was. She went to Briarwood. She won the Pulitzer Prize back in the seventies.”

  Regina set his plate on the table and refilled his coffee from a pot. She huffed the bangs out of her eyes.

  “You work up there, right?”

  “I teach history.”

  He could almost see the curiosity draining out of her.

  “Let me ask you something,” Bishop said, delaying her a moment longer. “What do you think about this Disney stuff? You think it’s a good idea?”

  Regina shrugged and switched the pot to her other hand.

  “Once the park is up and running, maybe this place will do enough business that I won’t have to drive my ex’s custom van.”

  Bishop poured syrup on his pancakes and stared at the photograph of Eugenia Marsh. He stared long enough to register the small details—the pearl cuff links in her shirt, the tortoiseshell cigarette holder, the way the heel of her hand mashed faint dimples into her chin.

  After a while, Regina returned with his check.

  “That your dog?” she said, pointing.

  Pickett had moved over into the driver’s seat. He was resting one paw on the wheel like he was steering, his expression serious, his gaze focused through the window on Bishop in his booth. The image was charming, the kind of thing you might find on a greeting card.

  “That’s him.”

  “I wonder where he thinks he’s going,” Regina said.

  They passed the train station and crossed the tracks, the heater slow to warm the car. Bishop had been out to the Disney site once before, not long after the announcement. He’d just wanted to see it, he supposed, wanted to know what would be lost. Pickett whined and scratched the window, and Bishop said, “It’s too cold, buddy. You want some music? How about a little music?” He turned on the radio, spun the dial—religion, sports, country, top 40, religion, top 40, talk, country, sports—then turned it off. His cassette player was busted, a French-language instructional tape jammed in its gears, left over from a time when he had plotted a course toward self-improvement. He’d quit drinking on weeknights. Bought a pair of hand weights, did curls and overhead presses while watching TV. The French was meant to broaden his horizons, but when the cassette player broke, the rest of the plan fell by the wayside.

  He kept driving until woods pressed in along the road, beer cans and fast-food bags littering the drainage ditches. When he spotted surveyor’s tape banded to the trunks of occasional trees, he pulled onto the shoulder, cut the engine. Pickett turned an excited circle in his seat.

  “Hold your horses,” Bishop said.

  He stepped out and checked the road for traffic before turning Pickett loose. The dog sprinted in a wide arc, running the kinks out. They set off into the woods, moving in a straight line from the car, no destination in mind. Pickett trotted up with a branch in his mouth, too big for throwing, so Bishop broke it on his knee and launched a piece as far as he could. Pickett brought it back a moment later, and Bishop wondered at the aptitude required to locate a particular fallen branch in a universe of fallen branches. He’d read that Disney had bought these woods from Exxon, more than two thousand acres of them, though he had no idea what an oil company would be doing in possession of undeveloped woods in this part of Virginia. He had to admit the site was perfect. This was not old growth. The land had once been cleared, then let go to seed, spindly oaks and pines creeping back in over whatever had been here before. Nobody would care much when they were cut. Most people would be happy for the work. He stopped and looked around, tried to imagine the swarms of tourists, the midways and the rides, a Technicolor simulacrum of American history. He thought of Eugenia Marsh breaking her long silence to write that letter. Some things were worth preserving. He believed that. So what was the harm in dressing the history up a little, making it shine, remembering the good more than the bad?

  He turned and walked back the way they’d come, chucking the branch for Pickett again and again until they reached the road. They emerged a few hundred yards from the car, and Bishop patted his hip, setting the dog to heel. As they drew closer, he saw a man peering into the window of the Subaru. He noted the uniform, the idling cruiser.

  He called hello, and the deputy hooked his thumbs into his belt. Bishop recognized him from the diner. His partner was in the cruiser, mouthing into the radio.

  “This is my car,” Bishop said. “Is there a problem?”

  “You can’t park here.”

  “I’m sorry, Officer. I just wanted to look around.”

  “You’re lucky I haven’t already had you towed. Also, that dog is not on a leash. There are ordinances in this county.”

  “We’ll just get out of your way,” Bishop said.

  He opened the door, and Picket hopped into the back seat.

  “Easy now,” the deputy said, tensing as if he thought Bishop was about to make a run for it. “I need to see your license and registration.”

  Bishop protested, but the deputy would not be moved, so he produced the documents and waited in the car while the deputy conferred with his partner. Pickett curled up with his tail over his nose. After a few minutes, the deputy returned with a pair of citations, one for illegal parking, the other for walking Pickett without a leash. He explained how Bishop could pay the fines if he wished to avoid a court appearance. Then he rested his forearms on the door and gave Bishop a hard look.

  “Do I know you?” he said.

  “I saw you at the Depot. I was just there.”

  The deputy shook his head.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” he said.

  He banged on the roof, twice, with the flat of his hand, making Pickett jump up and look around, tail slapping the seats. Bishop watched him walk away in the rearview mirror. For what seemed like a long time, the two cars sat there idling on the shoulder. Bishop didn’t want to be the first to leave, but the cruiser flicked its headlights, so he dropped the Subaru into gear and motored off, shadows brushing down through the trees.

  VI

  For more than a week now, Coach Fink had been plagued by versions of the same bad dream. It wasn’t a nightmare exactly, but it woke her breathless and disoriented and left her groggy for the rest of the day. In these dreams she was waiting for a letter, sometimes here at Briarwood but more often in a small clapboard house at the end of a gravel lane. The land around the house was worn out and dusty, a cornfield recently harvested. She’d never seen this house before. She walked from the porch to the mailbox at the end of the lane, back and forth and back and forth, but the letter never came.

  The dream would not have troubled her but for the side effects. Coach Fink had always been an avid dreamer, especially around times of significant real-life events. Back in school, for example, on the nights before a game, she’d often dreamed that she was having sex with someone famous—Sean Connery or Clint Eastwood, usually, but once with Raquel Welch. Before an exam, she sometimes dreamed she was in a canoe rushing toward a waterfall or that her hair was on fire and she couldn’t put it out. Grogginess, however, she could not abide. She had no time for grogginess.

  She decided to raise the subject with the riding instructor, Lucille Pinn. Lucille was the nearest thing she had to friend among her peers, though in many ways she was Coach Fink’s opposite. She addressed her equestrians in a quiet, measured voice, ate her cheese sandwiches in tiny, measured bites, crossed the quad in measured, nimble steps. On horseback, Lucille was all elegance and precision, urging her mount toward a rail, hands and knees communicating her desire, then suddenly up and over and gliding together through the landing, coiling together for the next jump. She was, however, a regular at basketball games and field hockey matches, and Coach F
ink had never been much good at making friends.

  She tracked Lucille down at the stables before basketball practice. Lucille was oiling bridles in the tack room, the walls hung with reins and saddles and photographs of past Briarwood equestrians leaping horses over hedgerows or posed atop their mounts with blue ribbons pinned to their lapels.

  “That’s an easy one,” Lucille said. “The letter represents a message from your subconscious.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Everybody knows that. You might also consider the possibility that the letter is a pun on ‘let her.’”

  A symptom of Coach Fink’s grogginess: delayed reaction. She was aware of Lucille’s words rattling around in her head, but it took them a few seconds to settle for sorting and processing. It was a bit like having someone throw a ball in your direction, recognizing the ball for what it was, anticipating its trajectory, understanding that you were meant to catch it, but finding your hands still hanging at your sides when the ball hit you in the chest.

  “I don’t know how that helps me,” Coach Fink said.

  Before Lucille could reply, a student named Grace LaPointe poked her head into the tack room, dirt smudged on her chin. She’d tried out for field hockey last season but failed to make the team. Coach Fink couldn’t remember why she’d cut her.

  “We’re finished,” Grace said.

  “The horses have been brushed?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You swept the barn?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, here,” Lucille said, offering Grace the bridle in her hands. Several more waited on a hook. “Oil the rest of these, and then you may be excused.”

  Another thing Coach Fink admired about Lucille, she didn’t coddle the girls. If they wanted to be on the riding team, they were required to scrape hooves and muck stalls and so forth, even at a place like Briarwood.

  The dreams had started around the same time the Drama Club began rehearsing The Phantom of Thornton Hall. This connection was not lost on Coach Fink, but she tried not to think about it as she put the cast through their paces later that evening. She crouched a few feet from the actors, just left of center stage, hands on her knees, a whistle on a string dangling from her neck.

  “I remember it snowed for three days straight,” Juliet Demarinis was saying in the role of Eleanor Bowman’s ghost. She laughed. Too loud, Coach Fink thought. Demarinis compensated for her lack of talent with enthusiasm. “We made a snowman and named him Zacharias after the prophet in the Bible.”

  “I wish it would snow right now,” Thessaly Roebuck replied as Jenny March. Coach Fink had let her have the part because she was the only one who wanted it, but she was already regretting her decision. The girl acted as if she was reciting from an instruction manual. “I’d lie down to sleep and let the snow cover me up and no one would find me until the spring.”

  Of the three actors in the scene, the only one who struck Coach Fink as reasonably convincing was Littlefield, playing Bridget, and all she had to do was pretend to be asleep. The set was simple—a brass lamp on a nightstand, a pair of old beds they’d found in storage. Eventually they would hang a window frame in the background. All according to directions in the script. Littlefield curled on her side with her knees drawn up, her back to the actors, her lips just slightly parted. Jenny and Eleanor had these weird and rambling late-night conversations, but somehow Bridget was never disturbed. That didn’t make a lot of sense to Coach Fink, but what did she know about the rules of stagecraft or the mechanics of conversing with the dead?

  She blew a long note on her whistle and shouted, “Cut,” her favorite part so far about directing a play. She pointed at a sign hanging in the wings.

  To Roebuck, she said, “Read that.”

  “The sign?”

  “Read it,” Coach Fink said.

  Roebuck fixed her eyes on the sign for a few seconds before returning her attention to Coach Fink. Another symptom of Coach Fink’s grogginess: irritability. Even more sudden and intense than usual. She could feel herself heading toward a boil.

  “I mean,” she said, “out loud.”

  “Cast and crew only backstage.”

  “Do you hear yourself?”

  Roebuck blinked and crossed her arms, and Coach Fink could tell that she was on the verge of tears.

  “I guess so.”

  “That right there, that’s how you sound saying your lines.”

  Only the stage was lit, the rest of the auditorium draped in shadow. The girls not currently in the scene gawked from the front row, the lot of them exuding a taut, anticipatory silence. Demarinis pushed up from the bed and put her hand on Roebuck’s shoulder.

  “It’s a metaphor.”

  “What are you talking about?” Coach Fink said.

  “The snow,” she said, “it’s a metaphor for death. I was just trying to give Thessaly a context for the scene.”

  If this had been field hockey or basketball practice, Coach Fink would have sent them both off running laps. Through all this Littlefield had stayed in character. Her breathing was shallow, her forehead smooth. She looked so peaceful that, without thinking, Coach Fink reached out and touched her hip. Littlefield rolled onto her back, throwing one arm over her head. Her eyelids fluttered. After a moment, she pushed up on her elbows.

  “Did I miss my cue?” she said.

  My Lord, Coach Fink thought, she really was asleep. This should have induced a tirade but instead it filled her up with envy. It sounded so pleasant to stretch out on one of those old beds and give in to her grogginess, leave the world behind. She doubted very much that Littlefield was nagged by dream messages from her subconscious. She covered her eyes with her left hand and pictured Roebuck and Demarinis running laps around the auditorium. There would be no more talk of metaphor with those two out there huffing in the cold. This idea calmed her. She could feel her pulse winding down. The muscles in her jaw relaxed.

  “Do you know Jenny’s lines?” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” Littlefield said. “Not by heart.”

  Coach Fink squatted down beside the bed.

  “If I, as Eleanor’s ghost, was to say to you, as Jenny, ‘Be wary when you wish for sleep,’ what would you say in reply?”

  “I’d say, ‘I have never been a wary girl.’”

  “Two points,” Coach Fink said.

  In addition to everything else, the loss to Saint Mary’s of the Green meant that her basketball Vixens—a mascot that had probably seemed innocent enough in the first half of the century but that the students wore these days with a kind of tawdry, ironic pride—had finished the regular season 12–12, barely making the playoffs. They were slated to tip off against the number-two seed, Port Royal Country Day, and if they didn’t tighten up their zone in a hurry, they’d get their butts whipped. So, after rehearsal, Coach Fink jogged Shady Dell Loop—eight laps or 6.4 miles; she’d measured it with the odometer on her pickup—showered, retrieved a bottle of peppermint schnapps from the freezer, and sipped it on the couch while watching a videotape of Port Royal dismantling Belle Meade Academy. Usually she broke down game film in her office—she had a TV and a VCR set up on a trolley for just that purpose—but it was lonely in the gym at night. She slugged the schnapps. She hoped a few shots might dull her mind enough to keep the dream from coming back. She was on her third pull from the bottle when the doorbell rang. She paused the tape, cinched her robe.

  Two surprises met her on the stoop: first, no one was there, and second, it was snowing, big wet flakes sifting out of the night and spinning illuminated past the streetlamps. Like most athletes, Coach Fink was deeply superstitious, inclined to read the weather as a portent. She stepped into the yard and spread her arms and tipped her chin up, snow brushing her wrists, her cheeks. Seen from that angle, the snow appeared to be plummeting straight out of the universe, and she felt oddly but not unpleasantly removed from the laws of time and space. Even as the flakes caught in her lashes she remembered t
he sensation of snow catching in her lashes, and even as the flakes melted on her tongue she remembered the sensation of snow melting on her tongue. Faintly, as if from memory, she heard students laughing and calling across the quad, discovering the snow. Not much accumulation yet beyond a dusting on the blacktop. Her feet were getting cold.

  On her way back inside, she noticed an envelope on the doormat, a third surprise. She’d missed it before, distracted by the snow, and she carried it back to the couch and slipped a thumbnail under the flap and removed a folded sheet of loose-leaf paper scrawled with the words Your breath stinks of LL’s pussy. Purple ink. There was something else—insect legs of hair nested in one corner of the envelope. Pubic, she assumed. Coach Fink remembered this feeling as well, an interval of stunned emptiness before the hurt seeped in. Not hard to guess the culprit. Thessaly Roebuck had fled the auditorium in tears when Coach Fink replaced her. She doubted Roebuck had the guts all by herself, but surely someone in the Drama Club was responsible. She brought the bottle up, the schnapps sweet on her tongue, harsh in her throat. On TV, paused in time, Port Royal was unleashing a full-court press, and Coach Fink marveled at their spacing.

  After a while, she dozed off tipsy on the couch, and the videotape played itself out, fading to static, and the dream returned in altered form. In this version, the letter had arrived. It was waiting in the mailbox, but the gravel lane was so long that Coach Fink walked and walked and never reached the end. And outside, while Coach Fink dreamed, the snow kept drifting down, late in the season for this part of Virginia but not so unusual that anyone was particularly concerned.

  VII

  After Mr. Bishop’s class, when the corridors were jammed and buzzing and everyone was hurrying to lunch, Lenore told Poppy and Melissa that she needed to retrieve a chemistry assignment from her room before fifth period, then slipped across the snowy quad and up the hill to Thornton Hall, nobody the wiser about her lie. The common room was deserted at this hour. No voices. No footsteps. No music drifting under doors.