Henry the Headmaster. It split me open to hear his name spoken so plainly, so unknowingly, so hopefully, almost as if it were the very first time it had been said aloud. I pushed any thoughts of pumpkin pie and vomit as far from my mind as I could. My God, this poor woman, I thought. Where would I even begin?
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” I said.
“Let’s not start there then,” she said. She settled into her chair, placing her feet on a crocheted ottoman set before it. “Some people like the bad news first. Me, I prefer to ease into it.” At this point, she belched, articulating the chamber of her ribs. “I’ve just had some pork,” she explained, her hand to her mouth.
It endeared her to me that she was so comfortable around me, and that I’d been correct in my observation that she might recently have been eating.
“Where should we start, then?” I said.
“Tell me how your semester has been,” she said. “Are you excited for summer?”
“Well,” I started, but I didn’t know where to go from there. The impulse to spill the whole story, from start to finish, held my tongue in place. There was no other story to tell, none of consequence that occurred to me, and yet it didn’t feel entirely right to launch into the raw details in our very first moment together.
In truth, I couldn’t imagine a moment between us wherein it would feel entirely right to explain all that had happened. It seemed somehow wrong of me, as if I would be forcing her to endure it. Everything around us was designed to put her at ease, to bring her comfort and a sense of well-being, and I had a story that would act like a bucket of old fish, spilling into the room and ruining it for her for the foreseeable future. How could I do that to this poor elderly woman, who was now entirely on her own, with no one to care for her? I felt immense pity for her, and then, unexpectedly, for myself.
After all, this woman had had Henry the Headmaster for years. They had lived together, long and well, had made this home together, had supported and loved one another. I could tell from the minute I’d walked in: This was a loving home. And I’d never had anything of the sort, at any point in my life. No home to call my own. No relationship of any consequence. Every plan I’d made to connect with my cohort had failed. Every person who had reached out to me I’d pushed away—suspiciously, violently, cruelly, and desperately. If tonight had actually proven to be my final night on this earth, as it had seemed would be the case many times throughout, I would have died as I’d entered this world, alone and without having had any impact on it at all. It would be a death that did not register with a single living soul, other than those who might have found some comfort in bringing it to pass. I had not known the boys in the halls, and they had not known me. In a year, would any of them even be able to recall my face?
“Yes,” I said. “I am excited for summer.”
“Ashley,” she said, “it’s going to be okay, dear.”
She had closed her eyes, as if we were listening to music I could not hear. The fire clicked and the house went silent. I watched her for several minutes, waiting for anything more, but she seemed content to stay that way until the morning came for us. I wondered, though only for a second, if she would actually let me sit with her through the night. I might have liked it, though it was hard to say. But for a strange moment it did feel like we were alone together on the edge of the world, and that I was somehow both vulnerable and entirely safe.
There might have been a different way to say it. A different story to tell, and one that was far less urgent. After all, it was possible no one had actually murdered the Headmaster. However unlikely it was for his death to have been entirely independent of all the other deaths, that didn’t necessarily mean it was not so. And the same was true of each death, in fact. Their happening in close sequence to one another wasn’t hard evidence of their being linked in any way. I wondered, finally, and after all I’d been through, why I’d been so eager to assume one death had anything to do with the others. Why had I so aggressively forced a clean narrative onto a simple series of unfortunate events? If I’d never come across the body of Hannan, if Thomas and I had had better luck, or a better relationship, would it have been so hard to see the Headmaster’s death as not a murder at all but the desperate act of a man who’d simply had enough? Maybe he’d been miserable for months. Years. Maybe he was a man predisposed to misery. I hadn’t known him to make a joke. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a genuine smile on his face, nothing more than a grin. It followed that his wife might have known this all along, and might have seen it all coming. Murder seemed suddenly so far from probable, especially at the hands of a pack of boys, however malicious. His veins had been opened. His body left to be discovered in his office. It might have been his final gift to her, to have dispatched himself on campus rather than in the home they shared. Maybe even a practical decision, made with her in mind, or with her blessing. With his body in the office, far from their shared home, she could avoid the grisly scene altogether, and call in the state to clean it up.
I watched her face for any sign of what she knew and did not know. Of what she’d expected, or maybe seen and heard. She was peaceful. Simply peaceful. Comfortable with me, as if we were old friends. Here, now, she was without fear or anxiety. An enviable state. More than free, she wore the expression of those who have somehow glimpsed the depths of their experience, who have already toured the hell that they will one day occupy and long ago taken the necessary steps to prepare themselves to enjoy whatever time remained. I shook my head at how foolish I’d been. I’d known little more than fear and worry until now, even in my calmer moments. They had been my guiding lights. But here, by the fire, was something else.
I walked over to her and placed my hand on hers.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, opening her eyes for only a moment.
I stood with her, and we did not speak for some time. She might have been sleeping.
This is what unity looked like, I decided. Not a swarm, but two peaceful bodies, quiet and still, before a warming fire. I longed for it, knowing full well this was something I might never find again outside of this moment, which I had to admit I’d stolen for myself while an old woman slept. I was a boy cast aside by society. More than cast aside, I was a boy society had never elected to touch. A boy without roots, without family. A boy in a sea of boys abandoned to be boys. What, after our time here was done, would I really have to offer?
“You look so serious, Ashley,” she said. She’d been watching me wipe my cheeks and stare at the fire. “Everything is of such dire importance with you, from one moment to the next. I can’t understand how you make it through the day without collapsing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, setting my other hand with the first one. I crouched before her like a knight. “But my name isn’t Ashley.”
“Oh?” she said, smiling, though tight-lipped. “What would you like me to call you?”
I thought on it and found no word. I was myself. The boy I had always been. But no specific title found its way into my thoughts or onto my tongue. Just images of myself in the Headmaster’s office, in the dormitory, bound and gagged, kicking toward the edge of the lake.
“Klot,” I said, as it was all I could think to say.
She set her other hand to the top of my head.
“I think it’s too nasty,” she said. “May I call you Ashley until we’ve come up with something better?”
It was very cold then, as if someone had opened a window and let in the night. I let her rub the top of my head as I wondered. My worry was back, but I didn’t know why.
“Why Ashley?” I said.
“It’s easier for me,” she said, “to call you by the name I’ve known for you.”
I struggled to understand what she meant but held my tongue. With every word we spoke, the peace I’d felt in our moment by the fire seemed further away, and I wanted only to sustain it for as long as I could.
“My memory isn’t what it once was,” she said, “as you know. Toward the end there is a limit to how much you can handle at once.”
I was listening, but the cold had grown more severe. I checked to confirm that the fire had not gone out and saw it was roughly the same size as it had been when I’d come in. There was no open window I could see, and besides, who would have opened it?
“Ashley is fine, then,” I said, taking away my hands to rub my arms. “May I put on another log?”
“Of course, Ashley,” she said.
The firewood was stacked by the hearth, and I set two logs at cross angles on the fire. It wrapped around them in an instant, scorching the moss on the bark. I sat back in the Headmaster’s chair with a shiver, happy to see the fire growing and that I had the Headmaster’s wife’s full attention. It felt like a position of some significance, to have her watching me. There was confidence in her expression that looked almost like friendly recognition. Or maybe it was peace. I honestly hadn’t known either well enough to hazard a guess, but that she might still be feeling what I’d failed to hold on to for more than a moment seemed understandable, given the discrepancies in our respective understanding of the situation at hand. Even so, I thought of the metal vase ringing out against the stone porch. The fire, and how easily the image had come to me before of these chairs and of this room. Of the enormous green shawl.
“Ma’am,” I said, matching her gaze, “why do you think you know who I am?”
She shrugged. “It’s one of the first things that goes,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “Short-term memory. There’s nothing on which the new experiences can hang. Older memories linger, at least for a while. But they fade too, like the light of a candle, as the circles we walk grow smaller and smaller.”
If I’d been cultivating poetic impulses before, it seemed the Headmaster’s wife had entertained the spirit for some time.
“Ashley,” she said. “About your bad news.” She had a cigarette in her hand that I did not remember her lighting. But it was blocking the smell of the pumpkin, so I was pleased by its sudden introduction. “Do you mind if I make a guess?”
It was in bad taste to let her try, but she spoke with such confidence that it was not unlike being placed under a spell. I knew the likelihood of her guessing correctly was slim to none, but it is a problem with most humans that they seek to draw you into their understanding of the world and force a fit, assuming your experiences and intentions must be similar to their own, and that they understand you simply because they too have lived a life. I’m not blameless in this regard, but at least I’ve been able to perceive it as a shortcoming, rather than a triumph of perception. If this was confidence, if this was peace, if she truly did not have a care in the world, maybe it was only because, either by choice or the steady deterioration of her body with age, she had worn down the edges of her life so that they fit neatly within a framework of her own creation, beyond which she could no longer see any distinction. It wasn’t so far from what Fry had been attempting, though perhaps with more malicious designs, in the dining hall. And it wasn’t so far from what I’d been doing either, in my earlier efforts to explain the corpses piling up at my feet. It was understandable, maybe even unavoidable. But that didn’t make it right.
Still, now that I’d seen some similarity between us, now that I understood we were of a kind, I was admittedly struck with a sick curiosity to hear what she might say. What she might imagine my bad news was, and how she had come to her particular conclusion.
“I don’t mind,” I said. Then I added, “Although it is truly bad news, and I don’t wish to make light of it.”
“Ms. Klein is dead,” she said, tapping her cigarette while watching for my reaction.
I stayed as calm as I could, but I felt a sinister presence in the room. Something that might have been there all along, but was only just beginning to reveal itself.
She stayed focused on me as I registered the shift, and I could have sworn I saw a grin creep across her face before she broke it to ask, “Am I right?”
Instinctively, I listened for the thunder. But none came. Even the storm had left me.
“How did you know about Ms. Klein?” I said.
She smiled again, opening her mouth this time to reveal with grim pleasure the rotten landscape of her gums. They held only four front teeth, and the rest was a fleshy mess. A softly lit wound. The smell in the room worsened.
“I shouldn’t enjoy being right about it,” she said. “But there is something satisfying in a well-executed guess, regardless of the circumstances.”
I’d heard of medical practices in which the teeth were removed due to a belief that insanity breeds in the bacteria born along the gum line, entering our nervous systems through the roots. It had only been a story before, nothing more, but here now sat the Headmaster’s wife, grinning at me like an eel.
It was with great sadness and disappointment that I finally began to understand her confidence for what it was. Her air of detachment. It wasn’t peace at all, but another piece of the puzzle, as it wasn’t the Headmaster who was mad, nor any of the boys in his charge: It was his wife. It made sense now, that, though she lived just down the hill, we never saw her. She’d been locked away at the foot of our campus by the Headmaster, her husband, who, it stood to reason, would have done so out of fear for what she was capable of.
I could see now a scenario wherein the Headmaster’s wife had grown tired of her dank prison, which smelled horrifically of pumpkin, and had executed an escape. With her newfound freedom she might have wandered the campus, its dark corridors and hidden areas, where she might have discovered Ms. Klein and the Headmaster—perhaps in the middle of their treacherous act, or by way of some hardly hidden piece of evidence, such as the drawings—in either case now faced with the reality of her husband, for more years than I had life, carrying on with his employee behind her back. If the Headmaster’s wife had done and seen all that, might she have been mad enough to murder Ms. Klein and bury her body in the garden? Certainly the tilled earth would have made the work of digging a grave that much easier, and she was an older woman, and possibly grateful for the reprieve. It fit with the idea that I’d discovered the corpse by chance, bad timing on the Headmaster’s part, who was dealing with the problem of too many boys and not enough work to go around, perhaps, and who had decided, just as summer began, that the solution was to turn back to the garden, thereby restoring to us the small pleasures it had once provided. In simpler times. It was a kindness of which I’d once assumed him incapable, but its impact lingered long after his death—though perhaps not in the way he might have hoped.
Thomas’s death, then, was nothing but the unfortunate result of a bad situation gone worse. If I could have controlled my anger and my need to take the lead, Thomas might still be around to speak to our discovery and my innocence. But then, what of Hannan? Had he seen me unearth the corpse and murder Thomas, then dispose of the bodies in the lake? If Hannan had been watching me, he would have known I was innocent of the murder of Ms. Klein, and that Thomas’s death was purely an accident. A terrible accident, yes, but not a malicious act. Hannan might even have been about to approach me when he was seized from behind by the Headmaster’s wife, who could easily have been watching him watch me all along. No doubt, if she had escaped once she could do it again, and where there is an unresolved crime, I’ve been told, the nervous criminal often circles back to ensure his or her safety. Obsessively, it’s said, will the criminal return, so it seemed entirely within the realm of possibility that the Headmaster’s wife had been circling that same spot at the very moment when I arrived with Thomas, and had seen too that Hannan was making his way down, and had gone into hiding upon our discovery of Ms. Klein’s corpse, remaining there through the consequent but accidental murder of Thomas. The Headmaster’s wife would have watched Hannan as he watched me dispose of the bodies and, knowing that Hannan was m
y only resource for making a believable case for my innocence, as he was the only one left who might be willing to testify that what I was saying was in fact true, that the shadows of guilt in which I’d cast my alibi by disposing of the bodies were in fact only an illusion and that disposing of them had been an act of panic and fear, not a confirmation of malicious intent, she would have been able to defend to herself one more murder to help resolve these unexpected developments, and might then have taken Hannan into her home, poisoned him (which would explain the absence of wounds), and set him in my closet to further darken my good name and render questionable any claims I made toward innocence.
I saw again, in the ghastly smile this madwoman wore as she watched me struggle to understand what she’d presented, the tragedy of our shared situation on this earth: that most truths are inconceivable to us, as they sit just beyond the limits of our ability to comprehend them. I could never have guessed what I would find in this house, not without visiting it, which I’d only done because I’d become invested in an idea that was wholly false. It was only through this potentially fatal error that I’d come to understand what was right and what might have saved me. If I’d been able to perceive the truth of the matter on my own, as I’d been trying to do for so long now, I might have stayed out of harm’s way. And yet, it was only in harm’s way that I could see it for what it was.
If I was in danger, I was not lost. The night was far from over, and the decisions I would make in the coming moments would determine which of us actually controlled the fate of the other, as well as of the boys now gathered at the top of the hill. Something would have to be done, here and now, but what it was I did not yet know. I watched her, and I waited for the plan to present itself.
“In a private moment between us,” she said, “Ms. Klein communicated a belief that committing such an act might improve our situation at the facility, and through my many years on this earth I’ve learned that where there is that particular will, there is always and without fail a way.”
The Job of the Wasp Page 14