by Jill Malone
“I miss you too. And your espresso machine.”
“Harsh,” Drake laughed. “Have you started your next project?”
“Monday.”
“What will you do, Liv?” Bailey asked.
“Kitchen cabinets for some apartments downtown, and then I’m finishing a basement for a pregnant couple on the hill.”
“All done,” Simon said. He knelt on his chair now, and had finished his own crab, and taken the rest of Bailey’s as well.
“Have some potatoes,” Claire said.
“I don’t want potatoes. I want to play trains.”
“Two bites,” she said.
He crammed two forkfuls into his mouth, slipped under the table, and away.
“I get it,” Bailey said, “lavish presents after dinner.”
“That’s what you’ve learned?” Claire teased.
“I’m a quick study, Claire.”
“Oh,” Drake said, “that reminds me. I’m throwing a New Year’s Eve party, and I’d like Fresh Baked to cater it. What do you two think?”
“Won’t you be in Italy for New Year’s?” Liv asked.
“No, we’re back on the 30th,” Drake said. She looked at Claire and Bailey. “What do you think?”
“We’d planned to close the café for New Year’s Eve, and Day,” Claire said. “How about it, Bailey, are you interested?”
“We’d use your kitchen?” Bailey asked Drake.
“Whatever’s easiest. And we’d put everything out on the dining room table, so we wouldn’t need anyone to serve.”
“I like it,” Bailey said. “I’m all for it.”
Bailey and Liv cleared the table, and made coffee to have with dessert, while Claire showed Drake through the house. Drake, a professional appreciator, was a pleasure to guide.
“You’ve chosen startling colors,” Drake said, using her glasses as a pointer to emphasize the tour’s particular pleasures. “Remarkable.”
She stood in the bathroom Liv had remodeled, and ran her hand over the tile reverently. “Doesn’t he do the most marvelous work? Sometimes I stand in the attic bathroom and it’s like looking at a fresco, I’m just mesmerized by the detail, and the depth. He’s the most nondescript guy on the planet, but he can do this.”
“I fell in love with Liv because of the kitchen tile.”
“Do you know, I get that, I really do.”
When Bailey knelt beside Simon, her loose hair brushed against his back and shoulder. “I want to be Gordon,” she said. “Where’s Gordon?”
Simon hopped up, and sprinted to his room for Gordon and the coaches. “Here you go.” He set them on the track for her.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Bailey.”
They looped round and round the track, occasionally dangling one of the freight cars from the crane, or running a train off the collapsed bridge.
“This track is cool,” Bailey said.
“It’s a real good track,” he agreed.
“Dessert?” Liv asked, hefting a tray of bars and plates to the coffee table.
Drake and Claire followed with mugs of coffee. Seated, they waited for Simon to select his bar. “Hmm, I like this one.”
They each chose, and then bit into the bars. Delight, a contagion, they applauded him, causing the small boy to blush, and stare at the carpet.
“You,” Bailey said, “are the best of all boys.”
After a second bar, he lay on the ground, with his cheek on the carpet, and ran Edward back and forth along a stretch of track.
“Are you sleeping?” Bailey whispered.
“Time to take a nap,” he said.
“Will you let me tuck you in?”
“OK.”
She lifted him—the recycling cars gripped in his fists, his head tucked into her shoulder—and carried him to his room.
“Her go-to guy,” Claire laughed. “Liv, you and Simon can do all the cooking from now on.” She poured wine for them, and sat back to savor the myriad flavors.
“I needed a night like this,” Drake said, brushing her finger around the rim of her wineglass. “I feel like I’ve been adopted, like I’ve been taken into your family.”
“You’re telling them?” Bailey asked, returning to the room, and promptly curling around Drake on the sofa.
“I have had, this semester, the most brilliant student I’ve ever taught. She has the kind of mind that stuns you. She’ll say something during a lecture, and I’m literally incapable of response because I’m so moved by the way she’s articulated an idea, or a theory. She expresses things that I’ve never had more than the vaguest sense of, or perhaps never considered at all, and her observations are profound. She’s just phenomenally bright, this girl.”
Drake swallowed wine, her hand squeezing down Bailey’s arm as though she were testing for a break. “But she’s mean too. Vicious. She takes pleasure in cruelty, to the other students, to me. The kind of kid who crushed kittens.”
Claire shivered, drew closer to Liv as though Drake’s description were a draft in the room.
“This morning, I had a phone call from my department head. This girl had attacked her roommate, and her roommate’s boyfriend while they were sleeping, with scissors. She was in custody.
“I’ve met a lot of gifted people—as a student, as a teacher, as an appreciator—but I’ve never met someone I’d name a genius, until I met this girl. And now she’s done this horrible thing—and I’m not shocked, I can see how she would come to do a horrible thing—I’m just sick with it. Sick with disappointment. Sick at heart.”
“And the roommate, and boyfriend?” Liv asked.
“The boyfriend’s wounds were superficial, but the girl’s under observation. She had deep punctures in her chest and throat.”
“Deranged, do you think?” Claire asked. “I mean, do you believe in derangement as a defense for what she’s done?”
“No,” Drake said. “She’s sadistic. I think she’s a sociopath. She was always calculated in her cruelty.”
“That’s tragic, Drake,” Liv said. “For all of them.”
“Yes, it is tragic, and, I can’t help thinking, worse as well. Worse than some AP headline. She had so much promise. She might have been one of the great minds.”
“A customer,” Bailey said, “recently told me that we’d never have another great mind because we’d medicated all the genius out of people.”
“Was this girl on meds?” Liv asked.
“I have no idea,” Drake said, “but I would guess not. She had no subtlety. If she were medicated, I think she’d have announced it to the class.”
“Finish the story,” Bailey said.
“My god,” Claire said. “There’s more?”
“My department head called me this morning, and this afternoon, the girl’s mother phoned me. She began by telling me how we had failed her daughter—we, meaning the university, her professors, her friends, fate—and went on to say that she understood why her daughter had done what she’d done. How it was justified.
“I felt ill, speaking to this woman. I felt diseased.” Drake’s voice trembled, and she paused, before carrying on. “For some inexplicable reason, I argued with her. Tried to reason with her. Can you imagine? Then, I said,‘I hope prison inspires your daughter, since college couldn’t. Oh, and fuck you too.’ And I hung up on her.” Drake stopped again, leaned backwards, seemed to collapse into Bailey.
“Why would I say that?” She looked at Liv. “Why?”
“Why would I carve a star into my arm with a knife?” Liv said. “You were distraught.”
Claire and Bailey flinched. Quietly then, Bailey said, “You carved that into your arm with a knife?”
“Yes.”
“I thought,” Bailey said, “it was a brand. I don’t know why this seems worse.”
“Because with a knife,” Claire said, “it wasn’t over all at once.”
Liv exhaled, and said to Drake, “You’ve decided something.”
“I think I’m done.”
“Teaching?”
“I think so.”
“What?” Bailey said. Claire felt it too, that Liv and Drake had a subtext not readily apparent. She’d found herself imagining Liv with a knife plunged into her arm, and in the conversation now, lagged behind.
“You didn’t fail this girl,” Liv said.
“I know what you mean,” Drake said. “And, to some extent, I believe you. But there was failure here. Not all mine, and not all the university’s, and not all her parents, or even hers. I don’t know how to say that I have a responsibility for these kids. Like that girl with the passport, it would have been unthinkable to leave her in Paris unchaperoned. I would have done it because I had a responsibility to the rest of the group too, but it would have cost me something to board that plane without her.”
“No,” Liv said.
“No?” Drake sat up.
“No.”
“I don’t understand you,” Drake said.
“The incidents aren’t analogous. The girl with the passport didn’t do anything criminal. She didn’t injure anyone. I understand that you feel guilty. But you’re talking about apples and rocks. And grief. You have lost something, and that’s huge. But it isn’t everything. To quit teaching because of this girl is to devalue what you do.”
Drake shook her head. “I’m not explaining right.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” Liv said.
Drake’s voice hardened perceptibly, when she said, “What, in your estimation, is the problem?”
Claire’s hand tightened on Liv’s arm, a warning, and a defensive gesture.
“The problem,” Liv said, “is a Christ complex.”
“Is it?” Drake said.
“You’re going to martyr yourself to an ideal you’ve created—the notion that this girl might have been great.”
Drake gave a painful, mirthless laugh, and pressed against Bailey. “Oh, Liv, you’re so fucking perceptive.”
Bailey moved slightly on the sofa, so that she could look at Drake.
“You too?” Drake said, and laughed again.
“Dinner was lovely,” Bailey said, standing.
“We can’t go yet,” Drake said. “Not when there’s still so much to analyze. So much insight to glean.” She smiled at Liv and Claire and Bailey. “Maybe I’m with the great minds now, in this very room.”
“She went after kids with scissors, Julia,” Claire said. “If it seems reasonable to give up teaching, then give up teaching.”
Drake opened her mouth, but Claire went on, “I don’t think you want to say anything more just now.” For some reason, maybe the authority of Claire’s mother-voice, Drake sat back on the sofa, and closed her eyes.
“Those really were good seven-layer bars,” Bailey said, clearing the empty wine glasses from the coffee table.
“I know,” Claire said. “He is your apprentice.”
Liv had a cigarette in her hand, and rose beside Claire. Brighter, the fire climbed and dipped. Outside, the snow fell heavily, cloaking the landscape.
“Who drove?” Liv asked.
“I did,” Bailey said.
“Have you looked outside?”
Bailey came to the window. “It’s like eight inches.”
Liv murmured, “Should you stay, do you think?”
Bailey glanced over her shoulder at Drake. “I don’t know.”
Drake had lain back on the sofa, her arms crossed on her chest.
“Let me grab blankets,” Liv said. “Or you could sleep in the spare room?”
“Here’s fine,” Bailey said. “I’ll help you.”
They passed Claire coming from the bathroom.
“They’re going to stay,” Liv said.
Claire nodded, patted Bailey’s back. “I’ll get some pillows.”
At the cupboard, Liv handed Bailey several large blankets, and grabbed two comforters.
“I don’t know what to say,” Bailey said.
“She’s had a rough time,” Liv said. “It happens. And I went after her, a little.”
“Still,” Bailey said. In the dark of the hallway, she held Liv, the blankets and comforters like another person between them.
Twenty-nine
Simon’s kitchen of civilized people
Simon woke to a buzz in the air, electric, and knew it was snowing. At the window, he saw white in every direction. The fir and pine branches crushed beneath it. Next door in his mother’s room, they slept. He grabbed his slippers, and his fleece pullover, and ventured down the hall.
In the living room, he stood next to his new track, reveling in the fact of it, the sleek newness. He had dreamed of Cranky lifting recycling cars. He had dreamed of Bailey bossing Gordon. Before he knelt down, he noticed a pair of bare feet sticking over the arm of the couch. Slowly, he backed toward the kitchen.
At first, he didn’t recognize the woman at the table, drinking from a coffee mug, her hand in her hair, her head tipped forward. She shuddered, and looked up at him.
“Oh, Simon,” Drake said. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” he said, and went to the fridge for milk.
“Last night it snowed and snowed,” she said. “So we stayed here.”
He climbed the step stool, and grabbed cereal and a bowl. Behind him, she went on talking, as though he needed explanations. All he wanted was to play with the new track, to go round and round in that comforting way, the noise of the magnets, and the wheels on the wood.
“Three glasses of wine,” Drake was saying. “Not so much really. Just enough for me to wake at 4 a.m. discomfited.”
She drained her coffee, and stood for another cup. She’d wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and another around her body like a towel. Her voice, like the river, seemed to snag at the edges.
“I was belligerent,” she said, “and deliberately hurtful. And if you’d seen the look on their faces, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
He poured milk into his bowl, climbed down from his chair, and returned the milk to the fridge. From the drawer, he grabbed a spoon, and climbed back onto the chair, poised to enjoy his breakfast.
“It’s like I was raised by wolves or something. Is this what comes of being so often alone?”
The cereal crunched in his mouth in a gush of milk. Like bones, he thought, like little skulls. He might have been devouring his enemies.
“You know the funniest thing,” Drake said. “It never even occurred to me to quit teaching. Not until the moment I said it last night. And then I had to run with it. I’d fumbled, and I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say I was graceless.” She reached across the table. “But I can tell you, Simon. I can tell you, she surprised me. Liv’s like a comet. Her intensity is that bold.”
Footsteps behind him, and then an arm snaked around Simon’s torso, a python squeeze, as Bailey nuzzled his face and set him giggling. “I wish I had a fleece pullover,” she said. She held him a moment, and then poured herself a cup of coffee.
Simon had jumped off the chair, and run into the mudroom. He returned with two fleece coats, and two knitted caps. Each woman took her share, and thanked him gratuitously.
“How’d you sleep?” Bailey asked Drake.
“Really well until 4.”
“The snow maybe.”
“And the wine.”
“I’ll make breakfast,” Bailey offered. Simon perked at this. “If Simon will help me.”
“I’ll help,” Simon said, and stood beside his chair, keen to begin.
“Finish your cereal,” Bailey said. “I have to pee.”
She returned with sweatpants for herself and Drake—on Bailey they were nearly Capri’s they were so short—and wool socks, and Henley shirts. Simon thought they could wear those outfits camping, or robbing banks. Drake went and stoked the fire. They commented several times that the kitchen needed a wood stove.
Soon the oven warmed the room. Bailey let Simon season the potatoes before she spread the
m onto the baking sheet. “We’ll have waffles, I think. Sausage and bacon, and potatoes, and some kind of marmalade—tell me this house has a stockpile of marmalade. Where’s the jelly, Simon?”
“Down here,” he said, and pointed to the basement door.
“Lovely,” Bailey purred, and sent Drake to reconnoiter.
Liv woke to Claire’s brown eyes. After blinking a moment, Liv smiled, and curling her knees up, pressed them into Claire’s belly.
“Why are you awake?” she asked, noticing again, Claire’s remarkable warmth, like a furnace, the burn of it.
“I don’t know,” Claire said, yawning.
“Is everyone up?”
“Probably. Bailey certainly is. I’ve heard her rummaging in the cupboards.”
“She’s probably freezing. Girls wearing skirts in a snowstorm.”
Claire pressed two fingers against Liv’s star scar, felt Liv stiffen. “Does it hurt?”
“No. It feels weird, is all, the skin tingles.”
“You did this with a knife?”
“Yes.”
“Over a girl?”
“Yes.”
“All at once?” Claire asked.
Liv hesitated, raised her head.
“Did you cut your arm all at once?”
“Yes.” Liv, fully awake, dropped her legs, their bodies entwined. The bedroom was cold, improbably tidy (in preparation for their dinner guests), and too light for sleeping.
“Are you ashamed of it—the scar—now?”
“Ashamed of people’s reaction more than anything.”
“We do suck at this,” Claire laughed.
“Yes.”
“I thought you might sleep with Julia,” Claire said, her palm on Liv’s jaw, each scrutinizing the other. Their faces shiny with sleep. “I worried about it.”
“Nothing there. I like her fine, except her arrogance—those little flickers she can’t quite smother—burns me just here.” She pointed at her throat.
“Here?” Claire kissed her neck.
“No.”
“Here?”
“Lower,” Liv said.
The house smelled of sausage and bacon. Simon held the egg timer in his hands, and appeared to be vibrating in his chair. Drake toasted bread, beside the renewed pot of coffee. And Bailey turned from the stove with another plate of waffles, and had to clear space on the kitchen table. Liv and Claire came in together, like guests, neither wearing hats.