I opened my eyes to view white dandelion pods scattering like snowflakes through the car’s headlights. No trace of coldness invaded my vehicle’s compartment, yet I shivered as if winds from a faraway landscape followed me through the cycles of sleep. After regaining my faculties, I checked the neon display on the dashboard. The duration of my episodes remained the same as before. Prior to the previous day, I couldn’t accurately predict the length of any particular spell. Before then, an occurrence lasted sixty to ninety seconds, but everything within the realm of my dreams seemed obstinately scripted now. I remembered more details than my earlier visions, too, which simultaneously enthralled and perplexed me.
Despite growing qualms about my sanity, I thwarted any self-diagnosis by merely returning to the day’s routine. Considering the randomness of each episode, maybe it wasn’t a sensible choice on my part to operate an automobile. But I salvaged some relief from this malady by functioning under a pretense that my disease was treatable through denial. I simply couldn’t permit myself to hunker into a chair and wait for the delivery of Dr. Pearson’s somber prognosis. Besides, it was only a ten-minute drive from my house to the parking lot at Ravendale High School. Before common sense dictated responsible action, I snapped my Volkswagen into first gear and coasted toward my destination.
But no moment within my life presently registered as uneventful. Before reaching the central road leading out of Willows Edge, my thoughts naturally revisited the complications associated with my wife. I began to torture myself with speculations that I had inadvertently sabotaged our marriage by not loving her in a manner she deemed satisfactory. When Rachel and I initially met nearly two decades ago, we were impetuous but not necessarily unseasoned in the customs of romance. Although the discourse between us didn’t often reveal the particulars of our prior relationships, I now recalled a fact that gave me pause when we first started dating.
Rachel never attempted any furtiveness about her engagement to another man about two years before we met. At the time it didn’t seem incredibly important to me. After all, I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that I owned sole bragging rights to the procurement of her affection. But Rachel never willingly supplied the specifics of the termination of this plan for marriage. I couldn’t fault her for skirting around the issue. Besides, I assumed she would’ve eventually imparted any relevant circumstances before our own status as a couple intensified.
Naturally, I harbored other reasons for not pursuing the nature of Rachel’s breakup with her former fiancée. I certainly didn’t wish to rouse suspicions of insecurity by badgering her for the minutiae. Furthermore, I felt no urgency to relate the tawdry facts associated with my own previous lovers. Perhaps it was a product of our immaturity that permitted us to overlook our past relations. Nevertheless, the potency of fresh love often eclipsed any commitment to logic.
Regardless of my neglect to address this situation thoroughly, I now had an ability to dissect moments in my life with unrivaled clarity. I suddenly remembered an incident where Rachel might have indirectly conveyed the reason for her unfulfilled engagement at a time when I was almost oblivious to her intimate feelings. One instance in particular wedged in the center of my mind.
Nearly ten years ago, during what I considered just another typical breakfast between Rachel and I, the first indications of sorrow emerged in her expression. As was our routine, we ate and conversed while perusing the daily newspaper’s headlines. Sometimes, as couples often do, we shared opinions on the weather or political climate alike, which provided a superficial dialogue in order to ward off any pregnant periods of silence. Ultimately, our feigned interest in random topics crossed over to the paper’s trivial fodder. This occasion wouldn’t have rated as memorable in my recollections had it not included Rachel’s reaction to one tragic tidbit of information buried on the bottom half of an obituary column.
After glancing at this page in the newspaper, my wife began to sob inconsolably. This unexpected display of emotion caused Rachel to abruptly excuse herself from the table. I, of course, wondered what news had provoked such a reaction, but she ignored my requests to explain. Curiosity then directed my eyes to a sheet of newsprint folded beside her half-empty coffee cup. I scanned the notices of death with the urgency of a man thrice my age. One portion of the newspaper was noticeably dampened by a spillage of coffee. All of the obituary’s listings held no significance in my mind, but one name struck me as peculiar simply because of the man’s age.
In this case, the deceased man was thirty-five-years-old. The paper included what appeared to be a recent photograph of him, where he looked in prime condition. His name was not familiar to me. As my eyes scanned over a mostly contrite and obligatory biography, I noticed that his cause of death was due to an enlarged heart. While prematurely dying from an undiagnosed condition was not unprecedented, it certainly merited further inspection on my part. I was already satisfied with an assumption that Rachel had known this fellow at an earlier time. The man’s hometown and choice of college matched my wife’s history as well. When Rachel returned to the kitchen’s table approximately fifteen minutes later, most of the teardrops had evaporated from her cheeks. But more conspicuously, she didn’t seem especially eager to divulge the motivation for her spell of anguish. If I ever hoped to establish any sense from this scenario, I needed to present my next question directly.
I waited a few minutes to gauge Rachel’s reaction. She remained strangely mute, sipping at her vanilla-flavored brew in sequence with a series of delicate breaths. Perhaps Rachel assumed that her actions already clearly indicated her feelings, and offering anything more significant would’ve been unkind or awkward. Either way, I suddenly relinquished my intention to delve deeper into this matter. In hindsight, I most likely prolonged a foreseeable consequence. Rachel had obviously experienced an acute reaction in response to this young man’s death. I surmised that they must’ve been quite friendly at one time. It didn’t require any grand suspension of belief to conclude that this man was the one she hoped to marry before I knew her. Until this moment, I hadn’t properly devoted credence to a possibility that my wife had ever truly stopped loving this person.
As usual, I pulled my vehicle into the high school’s parking lot before most of the other faculty and students arrived. Living within ten minutes of the school had its perks. I found the morning hours to be my most productive as an educator. Over the years, I practiced getting most of my grading done before school started rather than piling pyramids of paperwork on my dining room table every evening. Of course, as I matured with my job, I realized that the gist of my instruction was measurable through classroom interaction. As a result, I stopped assigning homework on a regular basis. My twelfth-grade students didn’t squawk at my strategy, but the mode of operation was really for their overall benefit. The whole point of teaching a class in literature was to create an environment where the students wanted to discover the classics on their own. Forcing them to regurgitate facts for my satisfaction served no productive function.
The faculty at Ravendale High School presently provided a public education to over nine hundred pupils. In terms of size, the three-story structure was designed to house at least another two hundred students, but a recent outcry for charter schools in the surrounding region gradually thinned the herd, and by extension, our staff was not immune to unemployment lines. When I first started working in this district nineteen years ago, most of the teachers and administrators were as antiquated as the building’s cornerstone. But time and the inevitability of change had its way of whittling through the most entrenched pedagogues among us. At present, I knew of only one other teacher in the English Department who was older than me.
In truth, and contrary to the aspirations of a majority of my present and former colleagues, I never intended to stay an educator for more than five years. My lifelong dream of writing fiction for a living once seemed attainable within this timeframe. Needless to say, my projections misfired more often than a folder full of lesson plans. Of cour
se, I wasn’t the first teacher to awaken one day after nearly two decades of service to recognize that time had sifted away from me like grains of sand on a storm struck beach. I presently resembled little more than a middle-aged relic reciting poems and passages to those who dismissed the art of literature as a superfluous exercise long before graduating from high school.
Since I routinely arrived at school forty-five minutes before the bell to first period, I entered the building through a side entrance with a key I finagled from the main office’s secretary. This route provided a shortcut to my classroom, while conveniently bypassing the central hallway where other early birds congregated like crows in a cornfield. Over the past few years, I avoided our chatty faculty rooms and other nooks where one teacher’s gripes became an entire department’s nausea. I, of course, was still young enough to remember that the newest teachers among us were often the most discombobulated. My solution for longevity in this or any career was quite basic. Whenever remotely possible, or even when it was seemingly impossible, the best practice for self-preservation was to become invisible.
In the fickle climate of today’s schools it was not uncommon to find the majority of faculty members untenured in their positions. I tried to instill wisdom into some of my fledgling colleagues by insisting that they withhold their opinions unless specifically asked to respond. In theory and practice, my strategy for a covert existence was almost foolproof, but I realized that new teachers suffered from the same blight as seasoned veterans: we cared too much about the injustices continually thrust upon us. Furthermore, young upstarts often asserted that they needed to voice innovative tactics that they assumed hadn’t been uttered before their arrival. As a result, this was no longer a profession where its certified associates spent two or three decades refining their crafts. In truth, most teachers didn’t last for more than five years behind the classroom’s biggest desk.
The hallways of Ravendale High School currently resembled the avenues of an old town born anew. Most of those who once perched complacently behind their desks for more than a generation had departed. I had only maintained a status as a casual acquaintance with the present staff. For this and other reasons I regularly retreated to my classroom and hibernated like a nocturnal critter waiting for dusk. It was only a matter of time before rumors of my own pending departure circulated among the gossipers. In reality, in terms of a career, I had few other practical options to consider. I couldn’t even claim to embrace the same optimism that I had for teaching a decade earlier, which saddened me at some indescribable level.
If I decided to leave teaching now, I certainly had other interests to hit upon. Yet the students who sat before me often supplanted my dreams. As it now stood, my own quest for stardom and excellence seemed secondary. Just when I thought I couldn’t endure another day of apathy and abuse among those who I unselfishly pledged to educate, a wide-eyed teen unexpectedly renewed my hope in the forthcoming generation. If only one student heard my voice and I impacted his life in some minuscule way, wasn’t that the reward any teacher worth his salt cared about? Perhaps it was the nature of every respectable teacher to help those who genuinely sought advice. I wanted to believe that I still had something worthwhile left to offer those who referred to me as Mr. Cobbs.
Chapter 10
6:47 A.M.
The Classic Crusade of Corbin Cobbs Page 9