A Hole in Juan

by Gillian Roberts

  The poisonous glances about the exam. Was that it?

  I cleared my throat. “Why would you—?”

  “Don’t report it, please.” Wilson rasped out his words, as if his throat had been hurt as well. “We’ll be suspended.”

  This was a particularly damning time in his life for that. If you needed to punch somebody out, a testosterone-based need I couldn’t fathom, best to not let it go until first semester of your senior year, when everything mattered too much.

  With a bloody fight fresh on their minds, teachers and counselors writing recommendations were going to have questions and reservations. Plus, you couldn’t take exams or quizzes while suspended, and you were graded as if you’d failed whatever you’d missed, so the all-important semester’s grades would be lowered.

  It surprised me to realize that I’d never had to cope with the aftermath of this kind of fight before. If there’d been a brawl, and surely there had, it had been spotted, and stopped by someone else, and necessary disciplinary action and medical attention had been taken care of before I knew about it. I had never been the first line of defense.

  I therefore relied, possibly to my shame, on old movies I’d seen where the benign figure—always male—looks on the combatants sorrowfully, gives a brief moral talk, and then says, as I now did, “It’s time to shake hands and apologize.” That apparently was the manly thing to do, even while the men dripped blood onto the shaking hands.

  Maybe fighting was a necessary male rite of passage. I’d have to ask Mackenzie. I knew he was strong and capable of doing physical harm, but I couldn’t envision him willingly doing so. I tried to imagine him young, skinny, hair dark brown with not a strand of gray, beating up a friend. I was glad to be unable to formulate the image.

  But maybe I was simply behaving like the skittery women-folk in those same old movies.

  Seth shook his head and Wilson, one beat later, did the same. “I have nothing to apologize for,” Seth said. “I’m not to blame, and I’m not sorry, and I’m still angry.” As sore as his face must have felt, he pushed it forward in a classic position of belligerence. His lip was split; each syllable was fuzzed around the edges and must have been painful to utter, but he stood his ground. “I’m. Not. Sorry,” he repeated, as if I’d challenged him.

  “Well, I’m sure not,” Wilson rasped out.

  “You need medical attention,” I said.

  They shook their heads, both wincing as if it hurt to do so. “S’nothing,” they said as one.

  I walked them out into the hall and looked at them again. A black eye, a bloody nose, a bruised cheek, and who knew what else that I couldn’t easily see. Seth’s cheek looked raw, as if it had skimmed over cement.

  They must have battled behind the school where nobody spotted them except the silent seniors who, I suspected, had watched the whole thing.

  “What’s going on?” I asked in the lowest possible voice.

  “Ask him.” Seth sounded sullen, foreign to me. But of late, everything about him was unlike my mental construct of him, so why not his tone as well.

  “Wilson?” I asked.

  Wilson continued to stare at the ground, shaking his head, as if he hadn’t an idea in the world what or why this had happened.

  “Some things get broken.” Wilson looked at me with his one good eye. “They can’t get fixed.”

  Seth glared.

  “Nobody wants to fix them, either,” Wilson added.

  I looked back into the now softly buzzing classroom, and finally understood that every member of the class except for me knew what had happened. They might even know why.

  We weren’t a class. My role and relationship wasn’t what I’d thought. We had somehow become antagonists.

  “A person needs to believe in something,” Wilson said, speaking to me more than he had ever chosen to before. “Like right and wrong.”

  Seth made a choking noise. “How would you know?” His voice was muffled through the cloth held to his nose. “You’re the one afraid somebody—”

  I caught Wilson’s fist in midswing and held on. “You have to—both of you—you have to stop this right now.”

  When they finally and reluctantly agreed to see the nurse, I returned to the classroom, feeling as shaken and battered as the two combatants must have, and no closer to the truth of this thing that had fallen on the school and injured everything it touched.

  * * *

  Fifteen

  * * *

  * * *

  It felt next to impossible, but when this most miserable day was over, and much as I wanted to crawl into bed with several layers of covers over my head, I had to switch gears instead and once again don my other virtual hat and pay attention to Berta Polley, the imaginary invalid.

  Amanda Pepper, semi-private-eye.

  First, still in my teacher and good citizen role, I phoned the police about the possibility the explosive substance was sodium. I did not choose to share the information that bits of that substance had been missing from Juan Reyes’s room because I could not remember what he’d said was back in place and what wasn’t. “No,” I said. “I don’t know who placed it there.”

  The official response was as patronizing and bored as I’d anticipated, but I’d done my civic duty.

  I’d give Mrs. Polley two hours. I had The Long Goodbye on tape. I thought listening to a real down-these-mean-streets detective’s adventures would help pass the time and inspire me, but of course Philip Marlowe was never reduced to staring at a row house, watching nothing, and if he had been, someone would have come along and overturned his car, or taken a shot at him. Not that I wished such events upon my own sleuth self, but there had to be a midground somewhere.

  At least today, or tonight, was the last of the surveillance. The funds to pay us allowed only so many hours.

  I settled in across the street from her house. Two hours of this, then the market, then dinner, then papers to mark, then . . .

  I can’t say I felt overwhelmed by the prospects, but I definitely felt whelmed.

  I called home, but nobody answered. Good. Pip was out exploring the city. I punched in the answering service numbers, and listened to my messages. I did this more readily than in the past, because as soon as I’d said “I do,” my mother found herself at a loss for words, and both the number of maternal messages and their annoyance potential had gone into serious decline.

  The only message was from Pip. “I’ll be late. You were right. The Constitution Center is radical and I met somebody and we’re hanging for a while so . . . See you!”

  Judging by his vocal buoyancy, the met one was female. You had to admire how quickly he could pick up the pieces of his broken heart and pat them back into perfect shape. Farewell Bunny Brookings, life was worthwhile again. Of course, I could be completely off base, and Pip might have met a charismatic cult leader.

  The weather was changing, with more and more hints that winter was huffing around the corner. My suede-cloth shirt-jacket didn’t make enough of a difference over my sweater for the damp, chilly inside of the VW. Rain was imminent, and I yearned to be home and warm.

  I thought I was listening to Raymond Chandler’s brilliant words, to adventures infinitely more thrilling than mine, but then I realized that the narrator had become white noise while I mentally gnawed at the confusing happenings at the day job. I had not, apparently, done a thorough job of changing hats.

  I tried to arrange the series of events, looking for their cause; I got nowhere. I took out paper and made a list. It added up to nothing. My missing roll book hadn’t been part of a greater scheme. Maybe I was working too hard to tie the rest together.

  Or not.

  I was getting nowhere and was beyond bored watching nothing. At least I could take care of something doable—ask for another conference with Serenity Wilson, and one with Seth’s parents as well. I did not want to get the boys in trouble if I could help it, did not want to take my worries to the administration. I didn’t know how Havermeye
r would react, but I was willing to wager that it would be inappropriately. I didn’t want permanent records besmirched unnecessarily at this point, but I did want to understand what was involved. Personalities don’t change overnight unless something—life or drugs—is pressing them out of shape.

  I was dialing Seth’s home number when I heard two toots of a horn. I looked up and realized I’d almost missed the crucial moment I’d been waiting for.

  I slammed my cell shut and watched Berta Polley appear at her door in fuchsia sweats, shouting obscenities at the departing delivery truck.

  She was not using a walker or a cane as she stepped out onto her cement patio and stared down at the large carton that had been left on her front pavement.

  The car’s roof suddenly clattered as the rain that had threatened became an actuality. Fat drops fell straight down, as if the rain were fake, a badly engineered special effect from a hose held right above us.

  Do not let the rain drive you away before I get your picture, I muttered. Do not.

  Berta Polley looked up at the sky with the first drops, then down to the pavement and her package, frowning as she watched the water splat it. Then she looked left and right, saw no neighbors, I assumed, and took a deep breath. Her chest rose and fell, like a bellows being inflated, while I positioned the camera.

  I managed five shots of Ms. Polley not only scampering down the three steps without so much as a limp and on her own, but then hoisting the heavy-looking package with no apparent strain and carrying it up the three steps, across the small patio, and into her house.

  So much for the disability claim. I blessed digital cameras that showed me I’d gotten precisely what I wanted. I’d cracked a case even though it had involved nothing more than staring and taking snapshots.

  These days, I took my triumphs where I found them.

  But now, sleuth extraordinaire had to go to the market even though Nora Charles never had to grocery shop.

  And once home, again unlike Nora, I had to phone those parents about their children’s aberrant behavior. I gazed at the Thin Man poster while I waited for someone to answer at Seth’s house. Nora would simply have had another martini at this point—and after the way my conversation went with Seth’s mother, she’d have had still one more.

  The woman nearly burst into tears at the idea of a school conference. Her husband was out of town on business, she herself was trying to work from home because Seth’s younger sister had broken her leg and arm in a horseback-riding fall; the housekeeper was home sick with the flu and—her voice continued to rise—yes, Seth had come home bloody and a mess and what was going on?

  The bottom line was that she could not come to the school any time in the foreseeable future. There was a doctor’s appointment the next morning, probably a long wait at the office . . . and on and on. Poor frazzled woman. I decided that if I was going to add to her woes by being the bearer of bad news, I might as well do it literally, and carry it to where she was.

  We made an appointment at her home for that evening.

  Pip appeared, dripping wet, about five minutes after we’d given up waiting and had dinner on the table. Once again, I understood why nature didn’t start parents out with teenagers but instead softened them up with years of cuddly bundles first.

  Once Pip had taken a shower to warm up and put on dry clothes, Mackenzie did the obligatory parental number about being home on time for dinner, which I am sure Pip heard as white noise, but politely so.

  While we ate our pork chops, salad, and mashed potatoes, talk moved from my Berta Polley triumph, duly hailed, to guy-talk about the Phillies. C.K. and Pip energetically debated a rookie’s potential for next year, but to me, it was a mere time-filler until we could get to the important stuff: Whom had Pip met?

  Mackenzie finally broke the ice. “And how was your day, Pip?” I was grateful, because I knew that had I asked, even in precisely the same manner, it would have been interpreted as prying. With C.K., it was gracious southern cordiality.

  “Great!” Pip nodded with such animation that I feared his encounter had been with crime. The only other time I’d seen him light up this way was when Mackenzie touched on things forensic. “I know you said the center was good, but I thought . . .”

  “You thought it would be—”

  “Educational,” he said. “You know?”

  It made me sad, but . . . I knew.

  “But it wasn’t.” He still sounded surprised. “And I learned a lot of stuff!”

  I was proud of keeping still, not asking how “learning stuff” was great while being “educational” was boring. Mackenzie, out of his nephew’s sight line, first rolled his beautiful blue eyes, then crossed them.

  Pip ate a bite of pork chop. “This is good,” he said, “all of it. My mother’s mashed potatoes, well . . .”

  “Lutie’s talents never seemed to lie in the kitchen,” Mackenzie said.

  It was turning into a good day, as long I didn’t count the bad parts. I’d caught out Berta Polley, Pip had dropped his hangdog look, and even Macavity was purring in anticipation of yummy table scraps.

  “The show was interesting. The guy called the Constitution an ongoing experiment. Like it keeps growing and changing, like when girls couldn’t vote, or black people, or when you had to be twenty-one. I never thought about that. That it still could change.”

  “Sounds like you picked up a lot,” Mackenzie said.

  Pip’s eyes and mouth opened. He looked from one of us to the other, but said nothing.

  “I meant information,” Mackenzie said. “But judging by your reaction—do I understand you met somebody?”

  Pip focused on his remaining salad for a moment. “Yeah,” he said in a lower voice. “I met this girl. She’s pretty cool. She was, like, doing research.” He sounded surprised by this, too, by, perhaps, the idea of a cool female scholar.

  “Is she from around here?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know the neighborhoods.”

  “I meant from Philadelphia, not a tourist,” I said.

  Mackenzie was watching him quizzically, perhaps even critically.

  “Oh. That. Yeah. I got her phone number,” Pip said.

  Mackenzie nodded approval, and the two of them actually did a high-five.

  “You know, Bunny . . . well, she’d have hated the place,” he said. “She’s really, like, small-town. Not that smart or interested in stuff.”

  Bye-bye, Brookings. You’ve been supplanted.

  “It happens, you know,” Mackenzie said to his nephew. “Your eyes open up and the girl looks entirely different, suddenly wrong for you. Then you meet the one someday and that doesn’t happen and that’s how you know.”

  “Guy talk,” I said. “So enjoy yourselves—and the dishes. I’ve got to run.”

  “On the other hand,” Mackenzie said, “sometimes you think she’s the one and then she leaves you with the dishes to do and . . .”

  A joke, I was almost sure.

  * * *

  Sixteen

  * * *

  * * *

  Seth Fremont lived in one of the rare brownstones in Philadelphia, a city that favors bricks. The houses on this strip of Spruce Street had been built around the same time as Philly Prep—the late nineteenth century—and I suppose someone had been in a New York kind of mood. It isn’t easy living in the oversized shadow of the Big Apple, so someone decided that if Manhattan had brownstones, so would we. But we only have a sampler, to show that we could have them if we really wanted to.

  I walked up the marble entry stairs and pressed the bell. The brass door-knocker was otherwise occupied with a dangling wooden scarecrow, and an orange-and-black flag hung between the door and the large front window.

  I’d been told the mansard-style roofs and round-headed windows meant these were Second Empire–influenced, but as I was never certain what or where the Second—or for that matter, the First—Empire was, I merely admired the solid and spacious-looking homes for what they were. Ha
d I not been increasingly uncomfortable about this visit and what it could possibly do to help the situation, I’d have been more excited about finally being inside one of these homes.

  The shift of relocating our meeting from school, where it would have felt less urgent, to home, from school hours to this evening, shouldn’t have meant that much, but it definitely seemed to. I felt like an intruder, and the problem with Seth, now that it was outside its normal schoolhouse confines, appeared larger than I’d have wanted it to. Plus, I knew I was adding to a harried woman’s woes when there was no absolute necessity, only vague suspicions.

  Laurel Fremont was on the defensive, anxiously and sadly, from the moment she opened the door. “Has he done something wrong?” she asked repeatedly. “Besides getting into a brawl. I know that was wrong, but it happens.”

  I reassured her that I didn’t know of anything he’d done wrong. I was once again balanced on the fine edge of the truth. I didn’t know that he’d stolen my exam. I didn’t know that he’d set off a false alarm. I didn’t know that he had something to do with Juan Reyes’s accident, and I didn’t know why he was involved in a bloody fight with Wilson. I had my suspicions, my unhappy theories—but I honestly didn’t know.

  “I thought, since he’s home, Seth could be a part of the meeting, but he said he’d rather not. That he didn’t have anything to say, and that this was—whatever this was—between you and me and you hadn’t invited him,” she said.

  “But it would be fine if he—”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on with that boy. At home, he seems fine, and he’s been such a help with Lucy. It’s her bedtime soon. I’m letting her watch cartoons, a video. I don’t usually allow that, but . . .”

  I wanted to hug her, to pat her back, to tell her that things were all right, that she needn’t be this worried, or explain herself to me this way. But she had a son whose behavior had changed dramatically, and who’d been close to a series of mishaps, pranks, or actual violations too often, and who’d now come into my class bloodied and defiant. So I murmured about how difficult sick children could be, and how I remembered being allowed to watch soap operas when I was ill, and that seemed to relax her.