That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson

  It was the woman from the picture upstairs. I could tell, although she was older. Her face had changed. It continued to change as I stood there.

  “I’ll call the police,” she said.

  I was overwhelmed by pity. This woman was an adult, she probably owned the house, but seemed so scared. I knew I should run, but I was curious about this feeling. It wasn’t unpleasant. Somehow I felt okay as long as I kept her from entering the house, her house.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’ll just be a second.” I opened the door of the dryer, which blocked her from walking in. The woman gasped. I fished out my jeans and slowly pulled them on. “You’re the lady from the picture upstairs, right? With the Trans Am?”

  “Get out,” she said. Her voice had hooks in it, was real. “Just get out.”

  “Who was that guy? I mean, it’s a really nice car.”

  “Please.”

  Suddenly, I knew exactly what she meant. I looked back over my shoulder, at the steps that went upstairs. I grabbed my shirt from the dryer and kept my eyes on her as I buttoned it. “Sorry about all this,” I said, vaguely waving behind me. I pushed past her, and began to run.

  Upstairs, Tidbit was having a dream. She dreamed that she was in a movie theater and that it was crowded and something was wrong, she didn’t know what. She was trying to watch the movie, a movie about horses, but she couldn’t concentrate. It was full of close-up shots of horses running, lots of them, sprinting. Their legs were like ax handles and pounded the earth, moving so fast they blurred. Tidbit was tossing in her seat, upset, and then she remembered her own horse. Seeing the movie reminded her—she had completely forgotten she had a horse. Tidbit panicked. She tried to remember when she had last fed her horse and realized with a sickening certainty that she couldn’t remember ever feeding it. She never had, not once. She sat stuck in her seat in the theater in the dream, her horse starving somewhere and nothing she could do for it.

  Tidbit woke to see a woman’s face peering at her from under a sharp, blue hat. Officer Sotelo was as surprised when Tidbit opened her eyes as Tidbit was, and jumped back. Another policeman was standing in the doorway to the bedroom. “Sarah Lasker?” he said. “Come with us.”

  I wandered through the woods and tried to imagine what might be happening. Probably the woman would call the police, and they would find Tidbit. Or the woman would find Tidbit and then call the police. Either way, there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. I had my pants and shirt, but I was still walking around barefoot.

  The morning was cool and a mist from the lake drifted through the trees. I could move through the mist, I thought, because I was more dense than the mist. And the mist could move through the forest because it was more dense than the forest. But the mist couldn’t go through a tree. A tree could move through the mist, if a tree could move. If it were dense enough, I thought, a tree could move through me like I was a cloud.

  I had to go back to find Tidbit, I couldn’t just leave her, but I didn’t know if I should go back to the house or back to the school. Maybe she was still at the house. Maybe Tidbit had talked to the lady. Maybe the lady bought her a ticket to California.

  A birch tree lay on the ground, its wood all rotted out. But the bark was still there, wrapped around nothing like scrolls of parchment. The farther I walked from the house, the more it made sense to head back to the school, though I wasn’t sure exactly which way that was. I thought I could wander until I ended up somewhere that looked familiar and then just go back the way we had come. But then I remembered we had taken a boat and that the boat sank. So I would have to walk around the lake. At least that gave me a direction to move in, around the lake.

  I paced quickly through the trees and tried to avoid stepping on any twigs with my bare feet. This was the first of several times that I would find myself returning to Roaring Orchards. I stayed at the school for about three years, during which I ran away three or four more times, and I came back each time, voluntarily, except the last. There was always a sense that I’d miss out if I didn’t, that if I failed to return something would remain unfinished. But once I got back, I never had any idea what it was.

  My most recent return was just a few months ago, when I ended up sitting on the floor of the Teachers’ Lounge and began to write this recollection. Aubrey had long since passed, and the school itself been shuttered. Due to numerous complaints and violations, Roaring Orchards had been forbidden by the Office of Children and Family Services from accepting new students until a series of improvements was implemented. Because the usual number of students were still running away or being withdrawn by their parents, the population dwindled until the handful of children and faculty members left on campus could no longer afford to stay. I followed the story in the Mohawk County Gazette, which covered the legal case against the school and its fallout, and whose archives I would occasionally read online. I could never find out what happened to the last few people living at Roaring Orchards; they seemed to just disappear.

  I did once come across a picture of Pudding, though, or at least I thought I did. There was an article about a new men’s shelter that had opened not far from where the school was, and the article was accompanied by a photograph of a man reclining across a bed, watching television. He looked just like Pudding and seemed to be the right age. But when I wrote a letter, addressed to Andrew Pudding, care of the men’s shelter mentioned in the article, I heard nothing back.

  My last visit to the school was occasioned by something I saw in the Gazette. A place named the West Glen Country School, which was waiting to buy the property, had withdrawn its offer because the physical plant was in such disrepair. At that point, the campus had been empty for two and a half years. After the last students from Roaring Orchards left, to wherever it was they went, it was discovered that tanks beneath the Mansion had been leaking heating oil, for how long no one knew. It was Roaring Orchards’ responsibility, or the responsibility of whoever now represented Roaring Orchards, or what was left of it, to pay for the cleanup before the property was sold. While they raised the money or fought the decision or decided what to do, the buildings began to fall apart, and the West Glen Country School decided it would be impossible to move their operations to the campus in Webituck.

  I took a train up through the Hudson River valley, past Golden’s Bridge and Tenmile River, and got off at the old stone station in Bilston. The train was noisy and crowded at first, but the farther north we went, the fewer passengers remained. The last part of the trip I shared with only a few souls who sat quietly on the cracked leather seats as the train rolled past marshes or followed along the thruway, and whose silence and distant politeness, by the time I disembarked, made me feel like I’d known them my entire life. I walked the eight miles to the campus unsure of what I would find.

  When I first passed through the gates, neither the Mansion in the distance nor the other buildings I could see appeared to have changed much. The driveway buckled at points, cracked by the roots of the trees growing on either side, and the grass on the hill had gone wild. But that seemed to be the worst of it. Only as I got closer did I recognize the extent of the devastation. The porch that wrapped around the Mansion had collapsed, and ferns and weeds grew all the way to the front steps. The gingerbreading above the entrance had begun to rot and was augmented by a vast expanse of cobwebs. When I stepped inside, the smell hit me before anything else—the walls and ceiling were in the process of being devoured by mold. All that was left in the Office were filing cabinets, their empty drawers lying open. Trash had collected in the corners. Phone jacks sprouted cords that lay coiled or stretched across the hardwood floor. I passed into the Great Hall, which, emptied of its furniture, seemed immense. The marble mantle of the fireplace had cracked, and in the fireplace itself lay a dead animal that I didn’t look at closely enough to identify. Part of the Great Hall’s ceiling had fallen, and through the hole I could see the wooden beams that supported the floor above. Tufts of dirty pink insulation hu
ng down. The wide stairway that twisted its way up to the higher floors was covered in small, desiccated animal droppings. I only made it halfway to the second floor before I had to turn around—the stairs became soft and the banister wobbled when I touched it. In one of the bedrooms on the first floor, a suitcase lay open on a bed, dusty men’s clothing piled high inside it.

  The enormous windows in the Cafetorium were broken, and the carpeting was ruined by weather and scattered with dead leaves. In the Cottage, the kitchen fixtures were covered in rust. Part of the carpet was torn up—by what, I can only imagine—and spread across the walls were hundreds of small black and larger gray mold spots, with occasional fuzzy patches of dark blue and blurred orange rings. I leaned in to look at the little bathroom, which was much as I remembered it, and at the bedroom I once shared, where the mattresses still lay on the bunk beds, sagging in their frames. The walls of the Classroom Building were cracked down to their foundations, and the rooms scattered with fallen acoustic tiles; the ceiling’s grid of aluminum beams held only fire alarms whose frayed wires wound into space. The linoleum floor tiles in the atrium were warped and uneven. And among the yellowed paperbacks and brittle hardcover books in the Teachers’ Lounge, I found that strange notebook with the teachers’ speculations about which of us might grow up to be killers.

  When I put down my pencil and went outside again, the sunset was an orange pall that traced the silhouettes of the trees. In the half-light, the garden behind the Mansion was barely recognizable. I had trouble finding the path that led to the fountain, it was so overgrown with weeds and with the box bushes that I had once helped to keep trimmed. The small gazebo to the side of the garden looked as if it had been built in a wilderness. As I rounded the Mansion I saw a fallen window box, sitting upright, in which rainwater had collected. A waterbug dimpled the surface of the water as it swam endlessly back and forth from one side to the other and back again, and I felt a shiver from my spine to the very roots of my hair. Crows called from the ancient beeches.

  On the day I abandoned Tidbit and circled the lake to return to Roaring Orchards for the first time, it occurred to me that if there were anything inside of me, it would have to be denser than I was; if a self or soul were a gauzy, misty thing, I would just pass right through it. When I thought I had gotten close to the school, I was amazed to see another fallen birch trunk, perfectly hollowed out just like the one I had seen on the other side of the lake. I was afraid that maybe I had somehow walked in a circle.

  But it was only a corrugated metal pipe, half buried in the dirt.

  The school-wide restriction had been Ken’s decision. After what happened to William, and then the fire and the runaways, he must have been scared of things spinning any further out of control. When the students argued that they were being punished for things they hadn’t even done, Ken ordered that all the students, every one of them, be sheeted. At first they thought this was funny, but then their clothes were locked away and the students realized the other faculty members weren’t going to stop him. Resentment grew. They began talking and laughing too loudly as they passed through the Mansion in underwear and bedsheets, shouting as they chased one another up the stairs.

  On the way to drop off Ross Salazar at therapy, New Boys ran in circles around the big field in front of the Mansion and, despite Jodi’s entreaties, didn’t stop until they felt like it. Alternative Girls refused to go to classes that morning and just sat around their lounge reading magazines. When Ellie was leading Alternative Boys back from picking up their breakfast, they hadn’t even pretended to avert their eyes when they passed New Girls dressed in sheets. The few students who could usually be relied on to police the others kept quiet.

  Ken called an emergency faculty meeting in Doris’s old office. He sprawled, exhausted, in a rolling armchair while the rest of the faculty crowded on the other side of the huge oak desk. No one knew why he was having the meeting there, whether he didn’t realize that emergency meetings generally took place in the Campus Community room or if he was showing that things would be done differently now. Ken sat upright and stroked his white beard. He said that no New or Alternative kids were to leave their dorms for any reason. Classes were canceled so that teachers could help out the dorm parents. Therapists would go to the dorms and meet with students in their bedrooms; meals would be delivered by Regular Kids and eaten in the lounges. This was a crisis, Ken said, the first of what he assumed would be many challenges that they would face together. For Aubrey’s sake and for the sake of the students, he was confident that they could weather the storm. Ken’s insistence on their shared future made the faculty assume he was thinking about leaving. But no one asked. Ellie had been sent to inform the cooks of the changes.

  She didn’t know their names. The head cook ran a dish towel through his hand again and again as she explained things to him. The emergency had imbued her with a clarity and purpose she hadn’t felt before. The students were in danger, and there was no one but the faculty to take charge. She was willing to be honest and forceful and clear. A cold fire had burned away all her doubts. She knew packing up the meals would mean more work for the cooks. She tried to be understanding, but she did not apologize.

  When Ellie left the Cafetorium, the sight of a police cruiser parked outside the Mansion brought her up short, but only for a moment. Whatever the police were here for, she would handle it. She would try to keep them in the Office. If they wanted to interview more people about what happened to William, she would tell them this wasn’t a good time. They could call tomorrow and schedule a meeting. She just hoped she wouldn’t be interrupted by any students dressed in sheets.

  Ellie entered the Mansion and saw Tidbit and two officers standing in the Office. She ran to give Tidbit a hug. Ellie was genuinely thankful to see her; she had completely forgotten about her. She brushed the hair out of Tidbit’s eyes and asked, “Are you all right? Where’s Benjamin?”

  “I don’t know,” Tidbit said.

  “He ran from the house they had broken into when the home owner returned,” one of the officers said. Ellie looked up to see Officer Sotelo, the woman who had charged her with assault and reckless endangerment when Han Quek had run away. She felt a thrill that she couldn’t quite account for.

  Ellie stood up straight and shook Officer Sotelo’s hand. “Thank you for bringing her back.”

  “Well, we’re required to. The young man, Benjamin, hasn’t returned?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’d appreciate if you’d let us know if he does.” The officer looked down at Tidbit and then asked Ellie, “Could I speak to you alone for a minute?”

  Ellie nodded and gestured toward the Great Hall. She felt equal to this woman in a way she hadn’t all those months ago. She wondered if Officer Sotelo even recognized her. They left Tidbit with the other officer.

  “Sarah told me that she was a little worried about the other students yelling at her,” Officer Sotelo began. “She mentioned something about being made to stay in a corner while her dorm mates screamed things.”

  “That’s a bit of an exaggeration. We’ll have a meeting with the dorm, and the students will be encouraged to be honest about how they felt when Ti—, when Sarah ran away. Also, there were some animals that died, which has been very upsetting. But there’s no need for anyone to yell at her, and certainly no one will say anything mean or abusive.”

  “But she’ll be left in a corner?”

  Ellie looked the officer in the eye. “Usually after a student’s been on the road, we’ll keep them separate from the dorm for a bit, to get readjusted. And also to make sure that any drugs or alcohol they might have taken are out of their system. Tidbit knew that was the procedure when she decided to run away.”

  “So, what, she just stands there, facing a corner?”

  “Well, we give her a chair, but, yes, basically, that’s the idea. If it’s something you’re concerned about, I could ask her to come in here, and we could talk about it.”

  “
No, I guess that’s all right.” Officer Sotelo and Ellie both knew there was very little the police could do about what took place on campus, even now. “If we find the boy, we’ll bring him by.”

  As the police were leaving, Officer Sotelo turned and told Ellie, “The lady’s okay, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The woman whose house they broke into, who found them. She’s fine, in case you were wondering.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Ellie said.

  When they were gone, she called Aubrey to let him know Tidbit was back. He asked for her to be sent up to his rooms. Ellie took her upstairs and stopped at the threshold to Aubrey’s apartment. She had to give Tidbit a little push, then closed the door behind her.

  On her way across the Mansion to return to her boys, Ellie found Roger outside of Alternative Girls’ dorm, sitting on the floor and crying.

  “God, honey, what happened? Are you okay?” She sat down beside him.

  “No,” Roger said, and leaned his head against her shoulder for a moment before sitting up suddenly. Above his ginger beard, his cheeks and eyes were red. “Well first, I find out Aaron’s leaving,” he said. “On my way up here I saw him packing up, and he wouldn’t say a word to me. I ended up yelling at him like a crazy person.” More tears rolled down his face.

  “Are you serious? That son of a bitch. He was at our meeting and didn’t say a thing.” Ellie rubbed Roger’s back. “But you’re sad that he’s leaving? That’s very sweet.”

  “No, I’m furious that he’s leaving! I’m crying because after that I came up here, and Alt Girls were totally tearing up their lounge. A couple of girls, Claire and Bridget and someone, came at me swinging socks with bars of soap or something in them, but before they even hit me, I just collapsed on the floor crying. I was so upset and scared and disappointed. They laughed and left me alone, and I crawled out here onto the landing.”