At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  “All right, ladies, listen up. We all know that school lets out for spring break tomorrow. I shouldn’t have to remind you that we open two weeks after you get back.” She held up the index and middle fingers of her right hand—a peace sign, a shadow-puppet rabbit. “So take your script. Read it on the plane. Read it in the car. Read it on the beach while you’re working on your tan. I don’t give a damn where you read it. The point is, don’t go forgetting everything we’ve practiced. You’ve worked too hard. I hope to have something exciting to announce when you return.”

  And then she did the most surprising thing: she smiled and clapped her hands and sent them on their way, not a single grievance aired. They were terrified by her good mood. As they filed out of the auditorium, bumping shoulders and pushing their arms into their coats, they speculated in nervous murmurs about the sinister nature of Coach Fink’s announcement—last-minute changes to the lineup? some kind of performance-enhancing fitness regimen?—but Lenore couldn’t help remembering Coach Fink’s yearbook picture, the bright mouthful of her dental work.

  The dinner bell was clanging when they emerged, girls already clumped on the paths or fanned out across the hill in their nightly migration toward the buffet line and the salad bar. There was something gilded about the night, lit windows glowing in the dining hall and the buildings around the quad. To Lenore the campus looked as dignified and cozy as a village in a movie with a happy ending. She always felt a little spellbound after rehearsal, a little outside herself. It was like being caught up in a trance, except the trance was somehow more real than her real life, as if some other, truer part of herself took control of her faculties and spoke Jenny’s lines—until Coach Fink shrilled her whistle and shouted, “Cut,” and Lenore blinked and looked around as if shaking off a dream.

  Over time footpaths had been worn into the grass, like the trails animals leave through woods and pastures, and as the rest of the cast wandered on toward the dining hall, Lenore peeled away and followed one of these paths in the direction of the library. She found Mrs. Booth at the circulation desk, her glasses hanging around her neck on a delicate silver chain. Mrs. Booth had replaced old Mrs. Pettaway at the beginning of the school year.

  “Excuse me,” Lenore said. “I was wondering where we keep old copies of the yearbook.”

  Mrs. Booth was sorting through a stack of checkout tickets and didn’t look up as she replied. “Past editions of The Green and White are archived in the basement.”

  “I mean the really old editions,” Lenore said. “The yearbooks in the basement stop at 1925.”

  Mrs. Booth lifted her glasses into place, her eyes suspicious behind the lenses. “Why do you ask?”

  “Research,” Lenore said.

  Mrs. Booth surveyed the room and then waved Lenore around behind the circulation desk and through a locked door into the small, softly lit chamber where the library housed record albums and videocassettes. In addition, Mrs. Booth explained, they also used this space to store printed matter—first editions, antique folios, documents willed to Briarwood by notable alumnae—too valuable or too delicate for public display.

  “What are you looking for exactly?” she said, and when Lenore told her, she said, “Ah, a fellow paranormalist, I see.” Without having to consider its location, she retrieved the 1917 edition of The Green and White from its shelf in a glass-front case. The yearbook was sheathed in some kind of clear plastic. Mrs. Booth opened it to the page and held it up for Lenore. “You may look but you may not touch.”

  And there she was, Elizabeth Archer, in her Briarwood uniform, hair done up in a French braid, head turned so that the photographer could capture her in three-quarter profile.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?” said Mrs. Booth, and Lenore agreed. Her face was too narrow but her eyes were big and dark, and her widow’s peak made her look dramatic. It wasn’t hard to believe that some boy had loved Elizabeth Archer, and that she had loved him back enough to do herself terrible, terrible harm in Thornton Hall.

  Memory is an unpredictable engine, making leaps and creating connections where none are immediately apparent, so there is no way to know for sure why Lenore recalled that night as she moved on through the airport, leaving her old coach behind, that night as opposed to hundreds of other encounters with Coach Fink or any other night, for that matter, in the whole rest of her life, but it occurred to her, as her flight was lifting off, that the last night before spring break marked the final hours of the girl she’d been, the girl she had imagined herself to be, the girl who would become this woman nursing a glass of chardonnay in her window seat and watching city lights fade to pinpricks down below.

  That girl had already moved in with Melissa, her dresses and coats hanging in what had been Poppy’s closet, her mirror hanging on the wall. That girl remained a mystery to herself. She lay in the dark with her eyes open, headphones cocooning her in sound, images of her family’s trip to Disney World playing on the ceiling like home movies. A memory within a memory. She was eight years old. Her father would abandon them before too long. She remembered the garish cartoon elegance of Cinderella Castle, the rocket in Space Mountain careening toward a dead end before veering at the last second, that moment the very essence of relief. She remembered her mother’s tennis visor with the pink translucent brim, an accessory she would never admit to owning now. She remembered the sweat in her father’s sideburns and how he’d held her in his arms during the nightly fireworks display, despite the fact that she was too big, her toes tapping his shins. She remembered wishing she could live in a place like that forever, all color and music and genial exhaustion.

  Melissa was a still and quiet sleeper, hardly moving beneath her covers, hardly breathing, it seemed to Lenore. Removing her headphones and slipping her Walkman under her pillow, Lenore swung out of Poppy’s bed and leaned her ear close to Melissa’s mouth. She heard no sound, nothing at all like Juliet’s apneic rasp, though she could feel faint warm puffs of Melissa’s breath against her cheek.

  They would have a half day of school tomorrow, a useless day. Melissa’s parents lived in Foggy Bottom, and she would give Lenore a ride to DC. Her cover story: she was catching a flight home from Dulles. Once Melissa had dropped her at the airport, Lenore would grab a taxi to some hotel where she could hole up before and after.

  When she was certain that Melissa was asleep, she stepped out into the hall and headed up the stairs to her old room. She pushed the door open and stood there for a minute, listening to Juliet snore. As if sensing her presence, Juliet bolted up in bed and clutched her blankets to her throat.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want,” Lenore said, “to talk to the Ouija board.”

  Juliet stared at her, sagging a little, curious. Under the circumstances, anybody else would have told her to get lost, but Lenore knew that Juliet believed. She was counting on it. Juliet might have been the only girl at Briarwood who understood that sometimes a person needed answers the living couldn’t give.

  “Light the candle,” Juliet said, stretching.

  The flame made a luminescent bubble, nudging back the night. Juliet knelt and collected the Ouija board from under her bed. She hesitated, box resting on her thighs.

  “You’re really good. As Jenny. You can’t tell Thessaly I said that.”

  Lenore sat cross-legged between the beds.

  “I won’t.”

  “I just want the play to be great. I want people to remember it and not because we sucked.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s better with you as Jenny.”

  “Thank you,” Lenore said.

  Juliet unboxed the Ouija board, and they settled their fingers on the planchette, and right away the planchette began to drift, smooth as an air-hockey puck, up to the moon. Juliet stared at Lenore, tiny candle flames reflected in her eyes.

  “Looks like you’re not the only one who wants to talk.”

  “So what do we do?” Lenore said.

  “You came up here wi
th questions. Ask. And try to keep it simple. It’s better if the spirits can answer yes or no.”

  Lenore closed her eyes. She could feel her pulse jumping in her throat.

  “Are you happy?” she said.

  The planchette skidded smoothly up to no but paused only for a moment, like a rolling stop, before continuing on to yes.

  “I think that means the answer is unclear,” Juliet said, “like a maybe.”

  Lenore nodded. That sounded right.

  “Is happiness possible?” she asked the Ouija board, and the planchette repeated the same course—no, then yes.

  “Are you alone?”

  No, then yes.

  “Do you remember your life?”

  No, then yes.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  A simple yes this time.

  “Do you know why I wanted to talk to you?”

  Yes again.

  “Will I be happy?”

  No, then yes, and through all this Juliet was quiet, her fingers along for the ride as the planchette skated across the board. And all those years later, sleep settling over her on the plane, Lenore could not be certain if every detail of her memory was accurate, but the images flashing through her mind seemed real enough, and the spirits hadn’t told her anything she hadn’t already understood—there were no easy answers. Finally, as Lenore was winding down, Juliet said, “I’ve got a question. Does Coach Fink know it was me who left the envelope on her doorstep?”

  Lenore had no idea what she was talking about but the spirits did.

  No, then yes.

  XV

  Coach Fink insisted on driving. She had her reasons. She told herself that Bishop’s car was in sorry shape, the windshield fractured by a long, diagonal crack, the tires half bald, the engine rattling like pebbles in a can. You could hear him coming from all the way down at the gatehouse. Lord knows how long it had been since he’d changed his oil or his antifreeze. Coach Fink, on the other hand, was meticulous about her fluids and had her tires rotated every three thousand miles. On top of that, Bishop refused to leave his dog behind. Coach Fink liked dogs just fine, but she had no desire to be cooped up for six hours round-trip with Pickett’s hot breath on her neck. Dogs belonged in the backs of pickup trucks. That’s another thing she told herself. And these reasons were not false, not really, but there was more to her insistence than she was willing to admit. From the moment Bishop appeared on her doorstep with Eugenia Marsh’s address in his breast pocket, Coach Fink had allowed herself to be swept along on the wave of his enthusiasm, uncharacteristic to say the least and grounds enough for hesitation. His interest puzzled her, but she was touched by his concern and grateful for his help, even if she was beginning to have her doubts about his plan. Say they managed to find Eugenia Marsh and say they somehow convinced her to show up for opening night—would the prospect of her presence render the cast more talented? Grant Coach Fink new insight into the production? The closer they got to the hour of departure, the more she worried that courting Eugenia Marsh was less an opportunity to shine than a recipe for public humiliation. Driving was a means of reasserting her control.

  Despite her questions and her misgivings, she steered them south on Lee Highway, a vein of optimism still pulsing through her. She wanted to believe that Bishop was right, that something positive might come of this. She’d nearly tipped her hand to the cast at their last rehearsal, but she’d restrained herself and she was glad. Odds were Eugenia Marsh would send them packing, but as the road unspooled beneath them, a smudge of daytime moon visible above the trees, Coach Fink couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been rushing toward this morning ever since Headmistress Mackey assigned her to the Drama Club.

  Lee Highway was mostly four-lane, rural, paralleled by power lines, but periodically it narrowed as they navigated some small town—Warrenton, Bealeton, Culpeper. Fast-food franchises and bank branches. Tanning salons everywhere.

  Bishop sighed and cleared his throat.

  “The biggest cavalry battle in American history took place just up the road. The Battle of Brandy Station. Seventeen thousand mounted soldiers. All those sabers in the morning light and the sound of all those charging horses. Can you imagine? It must have been incredible.”

  Pickett had never ridden in the back of a truck, so as a precaution Bishop had clipped a leash to the dog’s collar and run it through the sliding window into the cab, the other end looped around his wrist. As Pickett wandered in the bed, the leash occasionally lifted Bishop’s arm and lowered it again like a puppet’s, and Coach Fink had to grit her teeth to keep from pointing out the idiocy of this arrangement.

  “Who won?” she said.

  “Depends on who you ask. The actual fighting was back and forth, and technically the Federals withdrew, but the battle marked the end of the Confederate cavalry’s dominance in the East. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick a winner, I’d have to go with Jeb Stuart and the rebs, but it was a moral victory for the Union.”

  “I don’t put much stock in moral victories.”

  History held no interest for Coach Fink. She did not like to consider other people’s lives any more than she liked to think about her own. This was one of the reasons she appreciated sports. Whereas many coaches taught sports as a metaphor for life, Coach Fink admired the beauty of their limited application. You subjugated yourself to the team and dedicated yourself to a single game, a single moment, even—this free throw or that sideline hit—and when it was over you put the game or the moment behind you because the next one was already bearing down. Yes, it was important to learn from past mistakes, but it was equally important not to dwell on them.

  In Charlottesville, they merged onto I-64, which carried them over Afton Mountain, with its scenic-view pull-offs, and then down through Waynesboro behind a yellow Porsche with a vanity license plate, LASTTOY. Stray white houses dotted the landscape, TV antennae snagging signals from the air. Pale light shone on the trees and the fences and the horses grazing in the fields. Bishop’s arm went up on the end of the leash and hung there like a conductor paused in that moment before he gestured the orchestra to begin. Coach Fink couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “What do you think will happen if he jumps?” she said.

  “I don’t think he will,” Bishop said. “Are you trying to freak me out?”

  “If he jumps, that leash will break your arm and his neck both.”

  Bishop hesitated before reeling Pickett in and unclipping the hook from his collar. Pickett tried to poke his head into the cab, but Coach Fink nudged him back with her elbow and slid the window shut. She worried she’d hurt Bishop’s feelings about the leash. He kept swiveling around to check on Pickett, but the dog was fine. She could see him in the rearview, ears flapping in the wind.

  “You know these are my old stomping grounds,” she said, steering them onto the I-81 ramp and merging into a new stream of traffic, nothing but long-haul trucks all of a sudden—freezer trucks and tankers and flatbeds bearing big pieces of machinery and livestock trailers with vented sides and plenty of your standard eighteen-wheelers—everything a country might want en route through Virginia. “My parents ran a summer camp near Clifton Forge.”

  “How’d you wind up at Briarwood?”

  “The camp was all boys.” Coach Fink shrugged. “And I have three older brothers. My folks thought I needed a more feminine influence.”

  “I can picture it,” Bishop said. “You shooting hoops and playing baseball with the boys. Archery and horseback riding. Canoeing. What else do they have at summer camp?”

  “That’s about it. There was a pool, I guess.”

  “Maybe we could stop by on the way back. I’d like to see it.”

  “They went belly-up in ’83. My dad put a shotgun in his mouth. My mom remarried and moved to Hershey, Pennsylvania.”

  “Jesus,” Bishop said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s just what happened,” Coach Fink said. “After Briarwood, I attended the University
of Delaware on a basketball scholarship.”

  They arrived in Rockbridge County just shy of one o’clock. Bishop had a map of Virginia open on his lap. This got them as far as the exit but no farther. He wanted to stop for directions at the first gas station they passed, but Coach Fink pressed on. Same at the second gas station. She did not explain herself. She was trusting some inner compass. She kept driving like she knew where she was going. Finally, maybe ten miles from the interstate, they arrived at Mother’s Best Country Store, and she pulled into the lot. The store looked more like a small house with a tin roof and a front porch than a place of business. Coach Fink planted her sneakers on the ground and twisted her hips from side to side.

  “I feel like I’ve been here before,” she said.

  While Bishop walked Pickett off into the grass, Coach Fink went inside behind the jangling of a bell. There was no one at the counter, but there were jars of pickled eggs and pickled pigs’ feet and a bubbling Crock-Pot filled with cocktail sausages. The air smelled of vinegar and dust. Under the windows hunched a waist-high antique Royal Crown cooler with a black cat perched upon the lid.

  “Hello?” Coach Fink said.

  After a minute, a door opened at the back of the store, and an old woman poked her head in, her arms filled with laundry. “Give me a sec. I couldn’t hear the bell over the washing machine.”

  She ducked out of sight again, and Coach Fink perused the merchandise on the rows of shelves—sacks of white bread and cans of tomato soup and tins of deviled ham. Everything looked like it had been there for a while. The woman returned and took her place on a stool behind the register. She was wearing a faded pink housedress, her long gray hair caught up in a frazzled bun.