by Joy Callaway
“Perhaps because I had it sent to you,” James said, his voice was quieter now, his breathing heavier. “It was my pledge gift. I . . . I suppose I didn’t think there’d be consequences.”
I blinked through the trees, barely hearing James’s explanation. If Professor Helms took Grant down, he could return to campus. He couldn’t get away with what he’d done.
“Do you know what he’s done to your sister’s friend, Miss Johnston?” Grant asked. The sharp edge to his voice was gone, replaced by the hint of a sigh, as though he was exhausted. They were both just specks on the water yelling at each other. “Do you?” Grant yelled. “I’ll see you on the bank, Sanderson.”
I heard a faint grunt from James and then they both began swimming again.
I lifted my gaze to the crescent moon as though the way to prevent Professor Helms coming back would be spelled out in the wispy middle-of-the-night clouds. Surely Grant could find a solution. Professor Helms couldn’t keep coming after Lily, ruining her happiness.
Mary gasped. She was looking out at the water, and I glanced down to see Grant making his way back to us, but there was no sign of James.
“Where did he go? Beth, do you see him?” Her hand gripped my arm. Suddenly, Katherine’s words to her brother rang in my head, and my world stilled. You’re a terrible swimmer when you’re sober, let alone positively bashed.
“He can’t swim well. He can’t swim well, remember?” My voice rang in my ears, high-pitched and hysterical.
Mary’s face was blank. She’d been intoxicated that night at Mr. Everett’s, the night we’d asked James for help. The next day, she’d hardly remembered meeting at all, let alone an unimportant comment from Katherine to James.
Before I could explain, Mary ran from the trees. Grant emerged from the lake and turned toward the sound in time to see her dive into the water. I watched her black silk skirt disappear into the midnight depth, knowing I should move, but was unable. Rooted to the spot, my chest wrung tight with tension.
“What’re you doing here?” Grant’s questions went unanswered as Mary propelled toward James, her arms as steady as a sternwheeler’s paddle.
“Please, God. Please,” I whispered, but James didn’t appear on the surface of the water.
“I asked you a question,” Grant yelled. The demand seemed to shake me, force me from shock, and I ran toward the bank.
“Grant!”
“Beth, what—” His forehead wrinkled in confusion, but I turned away, my gaze fixed on Mary’s form.
“Save him . . . Mary’s trying to save him. James . . . James is a terrible swimmer.” My voice shook and goosebumps prickled my skin. Everything seemed to go silent then with Grant’s realization, and I heard a splash beside me as Grant dove in after them. I watched him hasten across the water after Mary, barely allowing myself the luxury of a blink. What if James wasn’t breathing? There’d been a diagram of the Silvester method in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences last year. It had been on the last page. I pinched my eyes shut, trying to conjure the image of it in my mind. The steps had been drawn in little squares. The first was a woman lifted at the shoulders, head dropped back. What was the second?
“Beth!” I heard my name shouted, a panic-stricken noise that shot a tremor up my backbone. Grant had stopped. I could see the outline of his white shirt idling in the water. “Beth!” He screamed again. “She’s not here either.” My knees buckled, threatening collapse. Without thinking, I ran into the water, barely feeling the chill of it or my skirts coiling around my ankles. I couldn’t swim. I’d never had lessons because I’d never needed them. The closest I’d been to swimming was wading calf-deep in Lake Michigan. But I couldn’t let them drown.
“Stay there,” Grant yelled. “Stay!” he said again. His shirt disappeared as he dove under. I stared at the spot where I’d last seen him, my vision fraying at the edges. Everything—the trees, the sky, the water, seemed to close in around me. One, two, three, four, five. I counted how long Grant had been down, and then he broke the surface. Nothing. He disappeared again and my mind flashed back to the Silvester method. I had to remember. Lift, then what? Cross. I took a breath, trying to focus, inhaling a puff of the crisp air laden with decaying algae. Cross the wrists over the lower chest.
“I’ve . . . I’ve got him,” Grant said. Even from this distance, I could tell that James had lost consciousness. His body was limp against Grant’s.
“Mary,” I said. I took another step into the water, searching the darkness. How long had she been under? A minute? Five? There was no way to calculate how long I’d been waiting on the shore. Speckled dots clouded my eyes and my body chilled. I swayed in the ankle-deep water, knowing I couldn’t save her. At best, I’d kill myself trying.
“Save him.” Grant’s words forced me from the brink of fainting. His breath was labored as he pulled James’s body to the bank.
“Mary,” I whispered, the only sound I could muster, but Grant had already disappeared back into the water.
I dropped to my knees in front of James.
His mouth was open as though he’d been frantically trying to draw a breath, lips blue with cold. I pressed my fingers to his neck, felt a whisper of a pulse, and jerked his shoulders up with all the strength I possessed. I yanked his wrists toward me and crossed them over his chest. Press. I rocked forward, bearing into him. His head tossed to the side and I closed my eyes, feeling the dampness from his saturated clothing seeping through my skirts.
“Please, God.” Stretch. The remaining squares of the Silvester method materialized in my mind and I stretched his arms outward and up. “Breathe.” I repeated the steps, pushing his wrists as hard as I could into his chest. He wasn’t breathing. I did it again, pausing to wait for a gasp, but nothing came. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t be dead. I wrenched his arms away from his chest, stretching them out as far as I could. Staring at him, I envisioned his chest cavity opening and oxygen entering. I thrust his wrists into his chest again.
I heard a dull thud beside me and saw a swath of black out of the corner of my eye, tangled around pale limbs. When I forced James’s arms open again, something gurgled in his throat. I swallowed, forcing myself to ignore the urge to abandon him for Mary. I shoved James’s wrists into his chest another desperate time.
“Breathe, breathe,” Grant said. His voice rattled through me and my attention jerked to Mary. I caught a glint of glass jewels as Grant untangled the end of her train from her arms and pulled her shoulders up from the muddy bank. Grant copied my movements, propelling her wrists into her chest as hard as he could. I stretched James’s arms out for the sixth time and heaved them down again. Water trickled from his nostrils.
“Is she breathing?” I called, amazed at how calm I sounded.
“No,” Grant grunted. A knot settled in my throat. James’s body twitched toward me and he coughed.
“Grant, he’s coming back. Let me see Mary.” Grant moved out of my way and I heard him muttering something to James as I extended Mary’s arms, hand gripped to the saturated black lace at her wrist. I thrust her wrists down, but her body rocked limply beneath me, and my skin prickled. Grant hadn’t known to check her pulse. I lifted my fingers to her neck. Nothing. My palm pressed against her chest, while my fingers frantically moved over her temple.
“Where’s your heartbeat? Where is it?” I stared into her face, praying her eyes would open. “Mary! Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
I shook her, fingers clawing into her back, and at once, my mind flashed to my mother. The same blank face, the same limp body, the same hysterical sound of my voice. “No. No, no, no, no.” Darkness rimmed my vision as cold drifted up from my hands, permeating my heart, stealing the last bit of my strength.
“Beth!” Will’s shout echoed down Hideaway Hill before everything went black.
21
There were white flowers everywhere—tied along the ends of the simple oak pews, entwined in the boxwood wreaths hanging from the windows, propped in cr
ystal vases sitting atop the closed black coffin. The college had decorated the chapel as though a child had died. Mary would have hated it.
“Why did you have to go after him?” I whispered before a sob burst from my lips, echoing through the vacant church. I sniffed, trying to compose myself, but my chest was wrung tight with grief. My shoulders heaved, and I turned away from the early morning sunlight coming through the windows, shielding my swollen eyes. I knew why she’d done it. The answer settled in my heart as though she’d been there to remind me. She loved James. She’d saved him—and could have saved herself too if she’d been wearing a swimming suit. Instead, her skirts had killed her, snarling around her limbs like a net.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The last moments of her life played over and over in my head, like a phonograph record skipping forward and back over the same notes. I felt the cool water seeping into my boots, heard Grant’s frantic shouts. I’d stood on the bank as she died, doing nothing.
“It should have been me.” It felt good to say it out loud. Mary had been so full of life, so sure of the difference that she knew she could make, that we all could. In contrast, all I’d done was fold under pressure the moment it had been applied. I’d been so quick to abandon the collective good for my own. She’d brought me back to the fraternity, reminding me that we were doing something greater. Without her prodding, I would have abandoned my sisters and the women that would come after us. I would have been alone. I exhaled, letting my shoulders sag. Involving Mary in the fraternity was the ultimate cause of her death. That was my doing. Without it, she’d still be here.
I ran my black-gloved hand along the back of the oak pew in front of me. In three hours this place would be teeming with mourners. People would pretend that they knew her, that they’d actually cared, but except for a handful of us, they’d be lying. That’s how it always was when someone passed before their time. It was a tragedy, and humans flocked to misfortune like a moth to flame.
The bell gonged overhead. The notes of the Westminster chime bellowed through the chapel, ending in seven steady beats. I glanced at the grandfather clock at the base of the pulpit. It was set to four-fifteen. Four-fifteen in the morning, the approximate time of her death.
The last thing I recalled from that night was my skin prickling cold, Will’s voice shouting my name, and the flash of black as I’d fainted. It all seemed like a blur now. Will had told me how he’d found us—that several of the pledges had escaped the basement and come into the house, alarmed at Grant’s demeanor. The minute they’d mentioned that Grant had taken James outside, Will knew where. Grant had taken Will to the lake upon his initiation, too.
Will told me later that he’d tried to wake me when he’d reached me, but hadn’t been able to. Having no idea where to go, he’d taken me to Everett Hall, somehow carrying me past Miss Zephaniah’s room. I’d woken a few hours later in my bed next to Lily, sure I’d dreamt it all. The sun had just come up, filtering through our window in pink-yellow streams. A knock on our door had come shortly thereafter, and the moment I opened it, I knew it was real. Will was there, standing next to Miss Zephaniah. His face was gaunt, the knees of his suit saturated with silt from the bank.
No one had seen Grant since. I pinched my eyes shut, trying to force the image of him out of my mind, but couldn’t. The vision of him pushing Mary’s wrists into her chest, face gripped with panic, white shirt dripping streams of water into the mud, had haunted me for days. It had been rumored that he’d quit the college after the board had refused to have him arrested, after they’d refused to dissolve Iota Gamma. They’d tried their best to make her death seem like no one was at fault, like it had been a complete and utter accident, as though it hadn’t been preceded by the imposition of an initiation ritual—the reason they’d banned Greek fraternities in the first place. They still wanted Grant’s money, after all.
I pinched the edge of the white ribbon tied to the pew next to me. I was burning with anger, but felt nothing when I thought of him. Only horror and pain and guilt. For as much as I blamed him and wanted to hate him, he hadn’t intended for anyone to die. I knew that. James had provoked him, challenged him to a competition, and he’d foolishly accepted, his pride getting in the way. Even in the fire of his fury, he wasn’t a murderer.
“How long have you been here?” The heavy hinge of the chapel door clicked back into place, and Katherine rushed toward me, fingering the emerald stitching on the cuffs of her black mourning dress. Her eyes were red, a spiderweb of veins overtaking the white. I hadn’t seen her for days. She’d been watching over James at Mercy Hospital in Chicago.
“I got here at four,” I told her. Since Mary’s death, I’d woken each morning at nearly four-fifteen to the mark anyway, as though my body felt compelled to remind me of the exact time she’d died. Sometimes I’d wake screaming, jolting Lily awake. This morning I’d been calm. I’d left the room as quietly as I could, hoping to let Lily sleep. I knew that Will had volunteered to watch over Mary’s body from midnight until five, so I went to relieve him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. I scooted down the pew and Katherine sat down next to me. She lifted her hand to her hair, adjusting the black filigree comb.
“She wouldn’t have wanted this, you know,” Katherine said quietly. Her eyes were fixed on the coffin. “She was the most alive person I’ve ever known. Imagine what she’d say to us if she were here.”
“I’ve grown so tired of watching you grieve,” I said, trying my best to imitate Mary’s high-pitched tone and sharp enunciation.
“Do away with these flowers. I spent my life in symbolic mourning and don’t plan to give it up now,” Katherine said, lips turning up in a smile. “I can’t come to grips with it. That she’s gone.”
Her voice suddenly lowered, as though if she spoke the words too loudly, it meant they were true. “We didn’t even like each other at the start,” she continued. “We barely spoke the first few weeks. I thought she was a bit odd with the black costumes and she undoubtedly thought I carried the torch for the Confederacy. Thank goodness that neither of us could tolerate silence. Eventually we talked to each other anyway.”
I took a breath, inhaling the gummy, ancient scent of old pine planking and the light aroma from the flowers. It smelled like death.
“I know she wouldn’t want it to be this way, but every time I think of her, all I can see is her limp body, her blank face,” I said. “I can still feel the clammy damp of her skin under my hands and the way her head bobbed when I tried to bring her back. I didn’t save her. How could I have ever thought I’d make a good physician?” I balled my fingers into fists. “I’m just thankful that James is alive, I—”
“That’s a big load you’re preparing to carry,” Katherine said. She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “James is alive because of you, you know. You’re still learning, Beth. That’s why you’re here. You did the best you could.”
A tear fell, warm and quick. I wiped it away.
“And Mary knows that,” she continued. I glanced at the casket, knowing Katherine was right. I wasn’t a physician, not yet, and without my unassigned study of the medical journals I wouldn’t have known the Silvester method. James would have died too.
“Is James going to be all right?”
“They believe so, yes. He’ll likely be released next week. They’re only monitoring his kidneys. But . . . he insists that all of this . . . that Mary’s death was his fault alone. He knows he should’ve never challenged Grant. He keeps saying it over and over. I don’t know if he’ll ever overcome the grief . . . if I’ll ever overcome the guilt.” Katherine ran her hands back and forth along the pew as her eyes filled. “If I hadn’t forced him to rush, he wouldn’t have been in that lake. Mary wouldn’t have been there either.”
“All of us asked him to do it, Mary included. She would have given anything for our fraternity.”
“Even her life?”
Katherine’s question settled like a yoke across my shoulders.
“He does,” Katherine said. I turned toward her, sure she’d misspoken. She looked down at her hands. “He came to see James yesterday. He looked horrible, gray, as though he’d perished too. He kept saying over and over that he wanted to die, that Mary’s death was his doing, and then James would dispute him to take the blame himself. It was horrible.”
“It was Grant’s doing,” I hissed. The chains of grief that had harnessed my fury suddenly snapped. I was stunned that he’d had the nerve to show his face at the hospital.
“No.” Katherine’s response countered my fury. Was she defending him? “It wasn’t. I blame him in part for what’s happened to James, for the pain my brother will endure knowing the woman he loved died trying to save him, for the fact that he nearly drowned, but Mr. Richardson didn’t kill Mary . . . and neither did we.”
It was easier to blame Grant. He’d been the reason we’d gone down to the lake, after all, but I burned with guilt all my own. If I hadn’t insisted that we follow James, we wouldn’t have been at the Iota house in the middle of the night—or at the lake. We would have eventually gone home to our beds to rest before another day of mundane classes, another day of instruction from professors who would do their best to make us feel as though we hadn’t a place here. But James would have died.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said.
“I’ve had to remind James of that over and over. I told Mr. Richardson the same,” she said. “But regardless of what I say, we’ll all live with the guilt of it for the rest of our lives.” Wind whistled through the window pane next to us, disrupting the steady ticking of the chapel clock. Katherine wrapped her arm around my shoulders.