Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  “Knives?”

  “He fell down the stairs.” I had said that, hadn’t I? Several times?

  “So a guy falls down the stairs and that makes this thing, this take-out cup—important how?”

  “The way he fell was odd—”

  “Police told you this? They asked you for this?”

  “No. They didn’t know—I didn’t know—”

  “But you—on your own—decided that cup might be important.” He didn’t actually laugh, but neither did he work hard to hide the vast, official derision that made his eyebrows rise till they formed an upside-down “V” over his nose.

  “There might be something in it.”

  “You said that already, and you’re right. There’s some kind of fancy tea in it.” He smiled and I knew what was coming next. I also knew why he probably hadn’t been promoted to something more intellectually challenging than filling space in this spot.

  “I don’t mean sugar,” I said. “The man’s cheekbone was broken, but he fell on the back of his head, and—you have it there. I wrote everything down.” I pointed at the lined paper sitting under the covered cup.

  He looked at my notes without interest, but I suppose he’d had enough of me by now. “Okay,” he said with the air of one dealing with the seriously learning impaired, “you’ve been a good citizen, and we appreciate it.”

  “You will contact Officer Edwards, won’t you?”

  “No problem,” he said soothingly.

  “And they’ll send it to forensics?”

  “You watch a lot of crime shows, do you?” He smiled.

  I bit at my top lip. Do not react, I told myself. Had quite a battle with myself over that and then, because I knew I was losing the war, I did react. I switched tactics from earnest to bully-ing. “You’ve got the name, right?” I asked. “Severin. Tomas Severin. Unconscious, maybe in a coma from his head wounds. And yes, he’s part of that Severin family, so odds are the family’s going to be more than a little upset and quite able to express it if you, I mean of course, if we—miss something as important as the idea that he was drugged.” It was difficult delivering my little speech with the passion due it, mostly because most likely there was nothing in that cup that didn’t belong there.

  The red-haired officer blinked and scowled, afraid to ask who that Severin family might be. “Edwards, right?”

  “Right,” I said, and he swiveled somewhat away from me and spoke into a phone, making hearing him as difficult as our limited space allowed. “Yeah,” I heard. “Yeah. Pepper. Right. Really?”

  “Wait a sec,” he said when he was finished with his conversation. “You can hand it to him yourself.”

  I was surprised, but pleased that at least Owen Edwards seemed to think the cup might be significant.

  Perhaps he did, but something else had propelled him down to where I was. He took the cup, thanked me, then said he’d walk me to my car.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but that’s not necessary. I’m—”

  “Right,” he said, continuing to walk with me.

  Once we were outside the building, he stopped walking. “A minute?” he asked. “About Tomas Severin?”

  I waited. I had the uncomfortable sense I was being studied.

  “He died.” He paused, watching me again, waiting for something.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was terrible, in the way all sudden, needless death is terrible. But Edwards obviously expected a response, a reaction. “I—I’m so sorry,” I said.

  A hint of a frown creased the skin between his brows. I had failed a secret test. “And you still say you didn’t know him, right?”

  I’d answered that question at least three times this afternoon. “That was the first time I saw the man.”

  “Yes, but did you know him?”

  If he hadn’t had a relationship with Mackenzie, I would have let the full force of my annoyance out. I’d been an exemplary citizen, bringing in possible evidence and this man behaved as if I’d lied about something as irrelevant and simple as having known the man who fell down the stairs.

  But he was Mackenzie’s friend, so I took a breath and simply said, “I did not know him.”

  “Had you perhaps spoken with him?”

  He wasn’t that close a friend of Mackenzie’s and I was losing my temper. “If I’d spoken with him, then I would have said I knew him. Or at least knew of him. The man at the bottom of the stairs was a total stranger.”

  He watched me with the intensity of someone trying to translate a new and mispronounced language. Then he looked away for a moment, stared at the traffic going by before turning back to me. “I know you’re good with words—they’re part of your profession, right? So I need to make this absolutely clear. You never met him, never spoke with him, but—did you in some way have contact with him, or with, perhaps a secretary of his?”

  “Officer Edwards . . .” I was pretty sure we’d been on an Amanda and Owen basis earlier in the day, but that was now ancient history. “I don’t know how to make it any clearer. He was a total stranger. I never spoke to him. I never spoke to a secretary of his. Not to his mother or father or cousins. I don’t have any idea why you’re asking me these questions, either. I tried to do a good deed—dropping off the cup. What is this about?”

  Once again, he did the overlong stare thing, then the look to the side; then he pulled a small piece of memo-pad-sized paper out of his pocket. “Because of this,” he said. “Or, actually, because of the paper this is copied from.” He passed the paper to me.

  It read: Calls—Amanda Pepper—Philly Prep. There was also a small doodle that looked like a smile, and a 7 or it could have been a boat. I didn’t think that was the part agitating the officer.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I finally said. “And where’s it from?”

  “It was in a notebook he had in his back pocket. We didn’t find it till he was at the hospital.”

  I wanted him to stop looking at me that way, searching for a crack in my hardened-criminal armor. All I did was shrug and pass the paper back to him. “It doesn’t even read properly,” I said. “Shouldn’t it be call me? Not calls?”

  He wasn’t interested in its grammar. “You wouldn’t mind going over your exact whereabouts this afternoon, would you?” he asked. “From, say, the time you led your class to assembly to our arrival?”

  “Oh, please! You can’t for an instant believe I had anything—”

  “Of course not,” he answered politely. “Now, if you could begin with your class going into the assembly . . .”

  * * *

  Three

  * * *

  * * *

  BY the time I got home, I’d simmered down. I was fairly certain I wasn’t about to be taken away in leg irons. Nobody had even said Tomas Severin’s death was anything but accidental. And, as I told myself several times, Edwards was only doing his duty. Still, I admit I was shaken by the existence of that note. Perhaps it explained why Severin had been in my room, but not really because it made no sense. It was all I could think about.

  I realized I could either drive myself crazy or busy myself with something else. Being an English teacher means never having to worry whether or not there’s work to be done. There always is.

  I thumbed through the seniors’ essays. The novel had definitely touched them, and some papers were amazingly and painfully honest. It always shocks me when the generally guarded, self-protective teens allow a glimpse of their most personal selves, and it reminds me of how much so many of them need a confidante and friend, or simply a listener. Sometimes, an English class essay subs for a shrink.

  From Cara: “My grandmother is like their father. She’s always angry, and she told me I was born bad. I don’t think that’s fair, but if she’s so sure I’m that way, then I don’t care if I am that way . . .”

  From John: “What does Steinbeck mean? Kathy seems doomed by something inside her. Her parents don’t think she’s bad, didn’t tell her she was bad, and didn’t favo
r somebody else the way Adam Trask is with his boys—so does this mean people really can be born evil?”

  From Zachary: “When your parent doesn’t like you, it hurts all the time and then it makes you mad because it shouldn’t matter if your parents are divorced. They shouldn’t be divorced from you, too.”

  From Amelia: “Parents can say the other child isn’t the favorite, but maybe they don’t even realize it, but the favorite child knows, and so does the one who isn’t the favorite. When I’m a parent, no matter how I feel inside, I will never let my children think I love one more than the other.”

  Some of it might be adolescent hormones speaking, based on nothing, but I knew that most of it was honest evidence of a deep well of sorrow. And it was always there, ready to be tapped. I have a project I’d love to develop, a play called Listen! We’d use the actual words of these essays and others like them, though we wouldn’t use any real names, and we wouldn’t have any child reciting his own words. We’d invite the parents—maybe we could commandeer them. Order them to attend. Maybe it would make a difference if they really listened, and really heard. Or am I too much of an optimist?

  I hoped the other set of papers would be less depressing. The ninth graders had been asked to write a page explaining an activity they knew well—anything they knew well—so that someone who didn’t know the topic would now understand it.

  I felt the cat eyeing me, and then he jumped onto the table and settled on the pages. “Share,” I said, and with a green-eyed stare, Macavity allowed me to pull a few pages from under him while he shed on the rest.

  I flipped through the ones I’d extracted. The first few eased my fear that they’d all have picked obscene or otherwise objectionable topics. There were some things my students knew well that I had no desire to know about. But they’d written about making cookies, playing soccer, babysitting, daydreaming, watching TV, bathing the family dog, and playing tennis. I silently apologized for doubting their integrity and sincerity, and thanked their desire to pass English.

  I had not overestimated their ability to write, however. “To make a delicious cookie you need a lot of things, including flour and butter and sugar, many times lots of sugar. And an oven. Some of the cookies I like to eat I don’t know how to make, like Fig Newtons, but I could probably learn, and at Christmas time, I like to make the ones with the sprinkles—red and green, the ones when I was a little kid my mother left out for Santa, which is when I asked the first time if I could make cookies, too, with her. So you start the oven, and—”

  Happily, the young woman had never expressed a desire to become a cookbook writer.

  Unhappily, composition is a reflection of the writer’s thought processes. After years of attempting to unsnarl student sentences, I’m not sure it’s possible to teach clear, communicative thinking without first doing a pedagogical brainwash. If we could get in their heads and clear the underbrush and put up road signs pointing straight ahead, teaching composition, i.e., teaching thinking, would be a cinch.

  I spent too much time trying to restructure—and to explain why that was necessary—sentences such as: “It is important that you smell a lot, too, especially for burning.” I was therefore relieved when the phone rang and I had a legitimate excuse to take a break.

  Mackenzie said he needed to be at the library awhile longer, so he’d be a little late. That worked for me, too—those papers took hours to grade. He paused, then asked, rather delicately, “Was the tea still in your room?”

  I explained its adventures, the redheaded jerk at the desk, the cryptic note, and Owen Edwards’ suspicion of me. I don’t know why I bothered. I knew what he’d say—the truth, the obvious, the thing I already knew. “He’s only bein’ a good cop and checkin’ it out. You’d do the same. That’s a weird thing to find in his back pocket.”

  I knew that. That didn’t make me feel better.

  I said we’d eat whenever he arrived, pledged my eternal devotion in the usual manner, as did he, and we hung up.

  I put the phone back in its cradle and saw, to my dismay, the word message in the little box. I had no idea how long it had been silently trying to alert me, but I regarded the time of not knowing as the lost Eden. A day that had already included a full complement of adolescents, one dead man, and a cop who thought I was involved in the death had satisfied my daily anxiety requirements. I didn’t need what I suspected was behind that word message.

  We no longer have a machine that blinks and does everything but shout out the news that somebody phoned. Now, I have to lift the receiver and listen for an annoying sound or bend over and look at the tiny window on the message box. I therefore consider the process optional and I ignore the phone’s environs for as long as possible, especially these days, when things have reached a point where I’m relieved when messages turn out to be from telemarketers.

  But I’d looked at the little box. I knew I had four messages. Now I was culpable.

  Every muscle in my body tightened to near spasm. I knew what was ahead. Four variations on a theme—arias from a very limited repertoire—the opera-in-progress called “Amanda’s Wedding.” We were ten weeks away from W-Day, with nothing resolved, and that seemed to unhinge my mother, my future mother-in-law, and my sister, Beth, now referred to as the Wedding Witches, the Marriage Mafiosa, the Bridal Bullies, the Nuptial Nags—you get the idea. Their questions and worries were endless, to the point where I often wondered how they’d filled their days before I’d rashly announced a date.

  Macavity yawned mightily from atop the essays. “There’s a definite advantage to being a neutered male and ineligible for any sort of wedding,” I told him. “Also, in no longer knowing your mother.”

  He blinked and went back to sleep.

  Yesterday, my mother had informed me about what she called the “blitz-diet”—guaranteed to get me into sylphlike perfection for my wedding day. She was on it, as was Beth, and therefore, so should I be. Until then, I was feeling fine about my size. I forget what it was she said I had to eat, but the call made me so anxious, I wound up devouring all the ice cream in the freezer, and I don’t think that was the magic fat-dissolving food.

  This go-round, my mother wanted to know precisely how many people would be on the guest list, what proportion of that number would be allocated to the parents of the couple, and was there some ratio between relatives and friends of the parents of the couple? This was a small dig at the size of the Mackenzie contingent—eight siblings and assorted step and foster siblings, all married, and who knew how many aunts and uncles.

  She reminded me as well that my folks were now Florida residents. They therefore had many friends down South, including the entire condo association, of which she was secretary, an elected office. True, I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me, but “a wedding is a bringing together of communities,” my mother patiently reminded me.

  Until recent days and the endless phone calls, I’d been blissfully unaware of the big picture, of the now-obvious fact that my private life was of enormous import to the greater world and that my nuptial decisions had major meaning and possible reverberations. “Not that the condo people would come—leaving Florida for Philadelphia in December is insane,” my mother continued. “But all the same—”

  We could create an invitation that said “If you promise not to attend, you’re cordially invited,” and drop them from a helicopter on all of Florida. I was afraid to even joke about that. My mother was too likely to think it was an efficient way to handle the problem she was creating.

  She explained her many Floridian contacts and reminded me of cousins-of-cousins, and third cousins five times removed who were closer to home, and therefore more likely to attend. “Of course I’ll see you next week, but if we can take care of this beforehand, it will be much better because—” I fast-forwarded to the next message, skipping her inevitable closing line, “After all, you only get married once.”

  My sister Beth was next. She, at least, hadn’t suggested that I needed to
lose weight before the wedding, only that she did. Her calls generally included progress reports or laments over no progress on her scale. “Listen,” she now said, “I have a lead on a place with a spectacular room—all stone and a huge fireplace and it would look stunning in December with evergreens and lights, and the only reason it’s available is that somebody had it reserved, but they haven’t confirmed, and the deadline’s approaching, so they apparently aren’t taking it. It’d be gorgeous. A little pricey, but absolutely stunning, and after all, you only get married—”

  I skipped ahead again. The trio’s messages always gave me a headache and further confused me with urgent, urgent decisions to be made, none of which made particular sense. I envisioned them cackling over who’d bombard me with what question next as they stirred the cauldron in which they were boiling me.

  The third message was from my future mother-in-law, a self-declared honest-to-goodness witch. The good news was that she wasn’t interested in dieting. Other than that, there wasn’t so much good news. Although she’d married off a small army of people already, and I’d have thought she’d be blasé about the event, she seemed at a fever pitch of excitement about marrying off her lone bachelor son. I think she also said that she’d see me next week at the shower, but I wasn’t sure. When she’s sufficiently animated, I can barely understand what she’s saying.

  She’d told me that the mothers of grooms were supposed to do only two things before the wedding: keep their mouths shut and wear beige. At the time, she’d laughed loudly at the very beigeness of the idea, as she was fond of the pulsating hot color combos last featured in the acid dreams of the sixties.

  She hadn’t even bothered to laugh at the other supposed obligation, that of keeping the mouth shut. She simply ignored it. And with her delicious, barely intelligible Louisiana accent, and her sweet Southern ways of being bossy in the most oblique manner possible, she was having a high old time planning my wedding. “Sweetie,” she now said. That was a sign I was considered part of the family. She had mothered so many children that remembering their names all the time was too time consuming, so everybody’s basic name was Sweetie Mackenzie. “Sweetie, I do hope you take this in just the best possible way, as an idea that maybe hasn’t crossed your mind quite yet.”