by Dan Josefson
“But we could give him CPR, couldn’t we?”
“We need to tell Aubrey,” someone said.
“Yes, fine, but first call the ambulance. Has somebody gone to call? It’s important that we all remain calm.” A few feet from him, Ellie was crying, and children were already running from the room.
When Ellie got back to her apartment after speaking with the police, there were three messages waiting on her answering machine. She had the unsettling impression that they were all, impossibly, about William. Then she realized that it had been four days since she had been back to her room. She had spent the last two nights at Roger’s and before that had been on duty in the dorm. The red LED 3 flashed up at her again and again.
Things could not possibly be more fucked, Ellie thought as she sat down on the corner of her bed. The EMTs had taken William’s body away, and the officers had only taken some preliminary statements, but even those were a disaster. Ken had tried to suggest that the students helping with the session got a little out of hand, that he had tried to tell them not to be so rough. The officers didn’t question his account, and Ellie didn’t contradict him. They just asked for the names of all the students who had been at the session. Then they asked about the video camera in the back of the room.
Ellie stared at the answering machine for a moment, then pressed PLAY. “Hi, honey,” the tape played. “It’s Dad. I wanted you to know that Mom and I ran into Mr. Fonseca, the lawyer Uncle Carson recommended, when we were having dinner at the Grouper the other night, and he mentioned that you hadn’t called him.” Ellie balled the edge of her comforter in her fist as she listened. “He’d be happy to talk to you about the case, honey. He thinks you’re getting some very bad advice from the people up there.” The second message was also from her father, asking whether she had received the first. On the third he said simply, “Sweetie, we can’t help you if you don’t call us.”
It seemed like forever since Han Quek ran away. Ellie doubted any lawyer would want to help her now that she had also been present at the death of a student. She remembered thinking once, when she first got together with Roger, that her real life was waiting for her somewhere. Ellie had thought she would one day simply step back into it. The idea seemed worse than idiotic to her now. But she saw how someone who thought like that would have gotten herself where she was.
Ellie picked up the answering machine and slammed it down on the milk crate it rested on, then threw it on the floor. There was a soft pop when the phone plug tore out of the wall. She stomped on the machine until bits of plastic flew around the floor. Ellie pulled the minicassette tape out of the machine and ground it beneath her heel. Then she sat back down on her bed.
Later, Roger came in to see how she was. He turned on the light, which felt harsh, and made her sit up and drink some water. Ellie didn’t feel at all like talking, but she listened.
“You can’t blame yourself for this,” he said. “Ken was running a delicate therapeutic intervention, and it would have been dangerous for you to interrupt. You trusted him. There’s no way you could have known what would happen.”
He sat down on the bed next to her and put an arm around her. She noticed the freckles on his forehead and registered the concern in his voice. “The thing about these kids,” he said, “is, you have to remember, these are not healthy kids. William, if he had kept going the way he was at home, he would have ended up dead. One way or another. That’s the direction he was heading in, the stuff he was getting into. We’re trying to save these kids’ lives, Ellie. Don’t ever forget that. We’re trying to save their lives, and it doesn’t always work.”
Aaron spent the next day in his apartment. It wasn’t that he was afraid to go outside; the thought didn’t even occur to him. It was only when he realized that he’d been there all day that the thought of going out made him at all uncomfortable. There wasn’t really anywhere to go anyway. It was a Saturday, and they didn’t need him on campus. They’d told him to get some rest. Surprisingly, he’d been able to. He actually was embarrassed he’d slept so well last night. Today, he’d even taken a nap.
Aaron felt that if he didn’t force himself to remember that William was dead, he would be allowed to forget all about it. Maybe not forever—somewhere, he was sure papers were being filled out and shuffled that would drag him back to revisit what had happened. But right now William was just gone, and today wasn’t much different than Saturday last week. That was the worst part. No, he had to keep reminding himself. That wasn’t the worst part.
He heard music coming from somewhere, but he couldn’t tell where. It wasn’t from Zbigniew’s room or anywhere close by. Aaron half stumbled out of his apartment, curious to find out if he was just hearing things or if it was real. It was lovely, whatever it was. He could only catch wisps of it, the melody intermittently drowned out by the rhythm. It was dark out, but the moon was bright enough that the tree trunks cast shadows on the grass. Aaron followed the sound across campus, up the hill toward the opposite side of the Mansion. The closer he got, the more brash the music seemed. By the time he got to the Cafetorium, where the music was coming from, it had resolved itself into shrill strings dutifully climbing up and down the scale. Aaron peered in. The students were having their square dance.
Aaron walked in and poured himself a cup of store-brand caffeine-free soda. He sat down next to Spencer, who patted him on the shoulder.
“How you doing?”
Aaron took some pretzels from a Styrofoam bowl. “What is this?”
“They had it planned weeks ago and forgot about it. These guys just showed up, so we figured we might as well. Weird being a chaperone, I’ll tell you that.”
Two lines of students skipped along parallel to one another, then peeled away and circled around to meet up again. Then the guy with the microphone started telling them to do something else. Aaron felt himself filled with a rage so intense that for a moment he couldn’t see. In that brief darkness he only knew that this was wrong, that it had to stop. He didn’t know quite what that meant, and he wasn’t going to do anything about it, but he knew it was so. Slowly, through pools of black, his sight returned, and Aaron was left with that knowledge. The man’s microphone was hooked up to an amp. There was a woman working a record player. It was amazing how much noise they were making.
I was back by the table with the sodas, eating chips and hating the whole scene. Tidbit caught my eye and came over. We spoke without looking at each other, slowly filling our plastic cups, me with cola, she with lemon-lime. “You want to get out of here?” she asked me.
“Hi, Tidbit.”
“Don’t fuck around. Do you?”
“Just like that. Walk out. Right now?”
“You want to hang out here, after what happened?”
“Why, what happened?” I asked, and we looked at each other. “Statistically, there’s less chance now that one of us will get smothered, since it just happened.” I couldn’t tell whether Tidbit was a bit shocked, but I hoped she was.
“Personally,” she said, “I’m less worried about getting suffocated than about having to listen to any more of this music.”
“I’m allowed to feel how I feel.”
“God, you’re a freak.” She crouched down behind the table, veiled by the paper tablecloth draped from it. “Come down here.” She tugged at the leg of my pants. It was stupid, but I ducked under the table. “See, we’ve done it.”
“We haven’t done anything.”
“Follow me.” She crawled to the back door and slipped out, me right behind.
Outside we stood up. “I want to grab some stuff from the Mansion,” I said.
“What for?”
“Just like a change of clothes. And I’ve still got some money hidden.”
“You want to run? I just meant let’s get out of the fucking square dance.”
I looked at her. “Well, yeah, I meant let’s run. Do you still want to stay here? After what happened?”
Tidbit wasn’t sure why I was making fu
n of her. I watched as she thought about it. I remembered how I had kept my eyes on her face the first time I had seen her, when she had walked into New Girls’ lounge naked and introduced herself.
Tidbit was aware of me watching. She always wanted to be simple, to think just one thing, but her mind was always too many things. “Meet me by the Farm in like five minutes, and we’ll talk about it,” she said. “I’ll get my cigarettes.”
“All right.” We circled around behind the Cafetorium and made our way to the back of the Mansion.
It was dark, but we could still see Napoleon and Elba back in the covered part of the pigpen. Elba lying down, Napoleon standing on her. “Do they stay like that all night?” Tidbit asked. She said she’d always assumed that Napoleon would climb down to sleep. The goat bent to scratch his nose against his leg. He lifted his head back up and flicked an ear. “Maybe he sleeps standing up,” she said.
“I really don’t want to argue,” I said. “If you want to stay, that’s fine, but I think I’m going to go.” I had brought my backpack.
We were leaning against the fence. Tidbit didn’t say anything. She knew it wasn’t that big a decision. I’d be gone a few days and then I’d be back, probably.
She dragged on her cigarette. “Where do you think you’re gonna go?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I wasn’t planning on running until you said something.”
“You should go down to January Lake. It’s nice around there.”
I nodded. I asked Tidbit for a cigarette. When she struck the match for me, it threw uneven light across the planes of her face. “So, which way is January Lake?” I asked.
Tidbit probably assumed I knew and was just playing stupid but she told me the way to go. I asked what she did for food when she had run.
“It depends. Once I made it to the Alexander Academy in Bilston and hid in these guys’ dorm room, and they brought me food. And one time I ended up in this cornfield and just ate ears of corn, but it’s too early for that now. But you said you’ve got money, right?”
“And I took Spencer’s ID.”
“Really?”
“Yup.” I patted the backpack that hung from my right shoulder.
“Well, I was going to say,” Tidbit said. She couldn’t help laughing.
“What?”
“You could just get food at the mini-mart on the way to the lake. You can get booze there, too.”
I nodded. “Yeah, well, bye, Tidbit,” I said. But I didn’t go anywhere. I flicked my cigarette into the pigpen, where it landed in the loose pile of hay. A few bits of hay flared up. We watched to see what would happen. The embers shifted some. In the dark, I could just barely make out a thin, twisting line of smoke. There were no more flames, though the pile of hay shifted and shifted again. Then one of the stray cats shot out from under the hay, burning embers caught in her coat. She tumbled and turned, skidding and rolling over her shoulders in the dirt until she knocked over the can of turpentine and went up like a torch.
Tidbit backed away from the pen. The cat was running straight into the wall of the shed, over and over, as the burning turpentine spilled across the pen and the wooden wall caught fire. I was just saying, “Oh, oh, oh.” She took my hand and pulled me toward the woods, though I continued to look over my shoulder to watch the fire burn. Then I turned and ran, too.
The goat looked up briefly at the rising flames. It shifted its feet slightly on the pig’s side and shook its coat. Lying on the ground, the pig stretched its neck to look, too. As the heat increased and smoke rolled around it, the goat kneeled and laid its head down on its front legs. Neither the pig nor the goat moved or seemed to particularly notice the fire, other than to blink in the heat and flinch as parts of the burning roof fell down.
10
We ran alongside a ditch scattered with stones, weeds, and bits of litter. No one from the school would chase us, but the police would be notified, and they might actually try to track us down. Especially, Tidbit said, if they were told there was a pair of arsonists on the loose. I breathed deeply and took large strides, holding her hand, terrified of what I’d done. Tidbit pulled her hand from my grip, hurrying to get away from the school. She kicked me in the leg.
“Come on,” she said.
We followed Route 294 until we saw the twenty-four-hour mini-mart. Tidbit stopped under some trees across the street, and we both sat down to catch our breath. Tidbit let her hair down and then fixed it again in a purple rubber band.
“How much’ve you got?” she asked.
“Eighteen, I think.” I rifled through my stash. My bag was packed tightly, and it took a minute to find the money.
“What’s that?” Tidbit asked, pointing.
“What’s what? That? Oh, that’s a bottle of fabric softener.” The answer didn’t seem to satisfy her. “Pure ’n’ Gentle. I get a rash if I use any other brand. So I thought I should bring it.”
“Where do you think you’ll use it?”
“I don’t know. Where do you wash your clothes when you run away?”
“I don’t think I washed my clothes any of the times I’ve run away.” She looked at the blue bottle for a long moment. “You’ve got the money?”
“Yeah, eighteen dollars. And Spencer’s ID. What should I get?”
“Cigarettes, booze, and, like, some apples. And some water.”
“And I’ll get peanut butter.”
“Okay.”
I started toward the store, but Tidbit grabbed my arm. “No, wait. It’ll look strange if you just walk in there this late without a car having pulled up. The guy’ll know. Let’s just wait for someone to pull in, so it’ll look like you’re with them.”
We sat back in the sparse woods and watched the gas station. Strings of colorful plastic flags hanging in front of the store window popped loudly in the wind. Sitting on the ridge of a small hill, I could see behind the gas station to January Lake, although it was late enough that all I really saw were the lights of the houses around it reflected across the dark water. I listened for sirens heading toward the school; I didn’t hear any.
I was scraping bits of bark from a stick I’d found when Tidbit let out a little laugh. She rested her head on my shoulder. “At least you didn’t bring a washing machine.” I liked her leaning against me like that and did my best not to move. The shoulder she was leaning on began to shake slightly but uncontrollably. An old mint-green Cadillac pulled into the gas station. Tidbit leaned back in the pine needles, and we watched and waited.
A woman got out of the passenger seat, stood up and stretched in the wind. She was old, and thin, and was wearing a summer dress and sandals. The driver’s-side door opened, and an old man sitting there turned so that his legs pointed out of the car. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and took a white sporting cap off his head. They seemed to have been driving for a long time. The old man got out of his car to pump gas. His wife dabbed at the windshield with a squeegee. The man looked at the Cadillac and called out, “Margaret, did you do this? When did this happen, Margaret?”
“What?” she said.
“The back fender, what happened to the back fender?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing. I’m not blind, I can see that something happened to the fender.” The old man had his cap in his hand and was peering down at his car.
The woman sighed. She turned to her husband and said sharply, “Well, if you’re not blind, you can see what happened to the fender.”
Tidbit tapped my arm and nodded for me to go to the store. I crossed the street, and the couple looked at me as I passed through the parking lot. Drops of soapy water dripped from the squeegee in the woman’s hand. The scene reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite place it. I headed into the mini-mart, hands in my pockets.
“Whadja get?” Tidbit asked when I returned to the woods.
I poked around in the bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “These,” I said, handing them to her. “And this.” I pulled out a
flask-sized bottle.
“Blackberry brandy?”
“It sounded good, and I thought it would keep us warm. I didn’t really know what to get.”
Tidbit shrugged. She lit one of her cigarettes. “They didn’t give you a problem about the ID?”
“They didn’t even check it. I also got apples and peanut butter some water and these.” I removed a clear plastic bag of chocolates, each wrapped in colored foil. “They were on sale. My bag’s kinda full. Could you take some of this?”
“No.”
I looked at her a second, then shrugged and pulled the bottle of Pure ’n’ Gentle out of my bag to make room for the groceries.
“At least take these then,” I said, handing Tidbit the brandy and chocolates. The rest fit snugly in my bag. I swung the bag onto my shoulders, grabbed my fabric softener, and followed Tidbit back to the road. We passed the chocolates and the bottle of brandy back and forth, dropping the pastel foil wrappers behind us.
Tidbit stopped suddenly. “Look at that,” she whispered, pointing up. Under a streetlight, I saw shadows flickering in midair, shifting blocks of darkness cut from the night sky and shooting back and forth erratically. It took me a moment to focus my eyes before I realized that there were two bats flying high above us.
“Watch this,” Tidbit said. She grabbed a small stone from the ground and tossed it into the air. Both bats swooped at it and veered away just before touching it. “They think it’s a bug to eat until they get close,” she said. She tossed another stone up so that the top of its arc was just a few feet above our heads. The bats’ bodies were larger than I would have thought. The brandy was quickly going to my head. Tidbit threw another stone that would have hit me if I hadn’t ducked.
“Hey,” I said, but she was already heading down the road. I knew she was angry about the fire and about having to run when she hadn’t wanted to. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my fault, but it was my fault. Maybe the brandy was getting to her, too. I looked up at the bats one last time before following her. Their wings were shaped like oak leaves.