THE SMART THING TO DO, of course, would be to go to Ren Middleton or Sam Hodges, immediately, and show them what I’d found in the lava lamp. Then they could talk with Brian Schue, Terence’s roommate, to learn what he knew and find out who else was smoking or holding or dealing, and I would go back to my English essays and writer’s block.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way.
I did go to Ren’s office that morning, carrying the duffel and a box of Terence’s belongings, with the buds safely stowed in my pants pocket. My plan was to show Ren what I’d found, answer whatever questions he might have, and then leave the whole business in his capable hands. I’d just like the record to show that.
What happened instead was that, when I knocked on Ren’s office door in Stilwell, I heard Ren call, “Come in!” and I opened the door to find him sitting with Terence’s parents. They turned to look at me as I stood, gawking, in the doorway, a cardboard box in my hands and a duffel bag full of their dead son’s clothes slung over my shoulder. The Jarrars were Lebanese, with dark hair and pale olive complexions. Mrs. Jarrar was one of those women whose obvious grief simply made her more beautiful. She seemed far too young to have a teenage son. Mr. Jarrar was balding and wore a dark suit and, aside from a stiff nod and a weak handshake, did not look at me the rest of the brief time I was in Ren’s office; the tragedy of his son’s death had apparently struck him mute.
Ren murmured introductions, and I put the duffel and box down before greeting the Jarrars. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Jarrar clasped my hand firmly and looked me full in the face. Her tearful eyes were a deep amber, and they held me suspended, as if I were holding my breath. “Thank you for your kindness, Mr. Glass,” she said. “We appreciate all that you and the school have done for us.”
For a couple of seconds I was unable to speak. This woman had just lost her son, and she was thanking me for bringing his belongings to her. Lies are potent things—as I have come to know so well—but so is honesty, and this woman’s straightforward thanks nearly undid me. By contrast, Mr. Jarrar’s silence was almost worse than his wife’s sincere candor. He stared into some middle distance, and I could read in his face how he struggled to hide the deep, terrible grief that threatened to consume him. The idea of pulling Ren aside at that moment to let him know that I had found weed in Terence’s room was ludicrous. “Thank you,” I finally managed to say. “And I’m so sorry.” I glanced at Ren, who nodded at me, which was enough of a signal for me to retreat, leaving Terence’s things, his sadly smiling mother, and his grim, silent father behind.
SUNDAY WAS MISERABLE. IT would have been better, perhaps, for Terence’s death to have occurred during the week, because then students would have had classes and the regular school-day routine to see them through. I spent most of Sunday grading papers and rereading Beowulf, which I would start on Monday. I ate a quick lunch of rubbery chicken drumsticks with Gray and Porter. Gray and I murmured at each other about how we thought the boys were doing while Porter stared at his plate and pushed his food around with his fork.
The pot I had found in Terence’s room lay in its plastic bag in the top drawer of my dresser. I knew I needed to tell Ren about it, or Sam, but something kept me from going to talk to them. I’d like to say it was out of some misguided sense of respect for Terence or his family, but it was more that I wanted to avoid being a narc and getting involved in what would undoubtedly be a messy situation. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t just keep the pot. I even ridiculously considered smoking it just to get rid of it, which gave rise to all sorts of imagined scenarios with students, or Sam Hodges, or even Ren Middleton stumbling across me as I toked on a fatty. As absurd as that image was, it stirred up memories of my time in New York that I wanted to keep buried—Michele doing lines of cocaine on a bathroom counter and then handing me a silver coke straw—which may also be a reason why I was ambivalent about the pot. Even stashing the pot in my top drawer showed my ambivalence, not to mention a certain sense of paranoia or conspiracy-theory thinking; I didn’t want to leave it lying around in plain view, yet if someone searched my apartment and found it, I could claim that I wasn’t trying to hide it at all, because really, who hides three good buds of pot in an unlocked drawer next to his boxers? In the end, I decided to wait for Terence’s roommate, Brian, to return from his weekend out with his parents; when he came back, I would go talk to Ren, hand over the pot, and let him talk with Brian about whose pot it was and whether he had known about it. So I left the pot in the drawer.
Later that afternoon, as I ironed a dress shirt for the formal sit-down dinner and the following chapel service, I realized with forehead-smacking clarity that Chaplain Joyner would undoubtedly turn chapel into a memorial service for Terence. The idea of this made me pause, hot iron in hand, and close my eyes. Chapel service was mandatory for all faculty and students, but at that moment I would rather have eaten a handful of cigarette butts than attend. I could picture it quite clearly: the solemn hymns, the pious dogma about Terence having gone to a better place, the personal testimonies and vignettes about Terence on dorm or in the classroom. It would be ripping a barely formed scab off a recent wound. Jim Joyner was a good-enough guy, and his sermons were usually short and occasionally relevant or even faintly amusing, but he was one of those people who blink with surprise at the evils of the world and fall back on oft-repeated bromides that a teenager would dismiss out of hand. Looking back, I realize that the students might actually have appreciated some sort of formal ceremony for Terence that could give them a kind of closure.
Dinner was a forced, awkward affair in which everything, even the clash of the serving trays, was muted. The boys were tense; when Hal Starr in an overly loud voice asked Paul Simmons to pass the biscuits, Paul literally jumped in his seat, knocking over his water glass. Stephen Watterson’s halfhearted teasing of Paul, who dabbed at the spilled water with his napkin, seemed worse than if the entire table had roared with laughter. As I helped Paul wipe up the spilled water, I glanced down Graveyard Alley at Porter Deems. He was gesticulating at his advisees as he told a story, as if trying to animate them like some sort of demented puppeteer. His advisees looked blankly at him, an unappreciative audience.
After dinner, walking out of Stilwell with the students to chapel, I moved to catch up with Porter. “Nice story you were telling to your table,” I said. “You looked like you were conjuring something.”
“Ungrateful bastards,” he said. “I’m telling them about climbing Grand Teton and rescuing this gorgeous girl and her dumbass boyfriend—they had the wrong gear, started too late up the mountain, all sorts of idiotic shit. I mean this is a great fucking story. And they just stare at me like a bunch of goddamn cows looking at a new gate.”
I was relieved. Porter sounded more like his profane, funny self. “They’re just thinking about chapel, probably,” I said. “Terence and everything.”
Porter stopped in his tracks. A pair of students behind us bumped into him and apologized as they stepped around. He didn’t even notice. “Oh God,” Porter said. He looked stunned. “I didn’t even . . . aw, shit.”
Guilt washed greasily over me. “Hell, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think about it until just before dinner.” I paused. Porter’s face—it was hard to tell in the dimming light—looked pale and drawn. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head, more like shaking off an irritating thought than saying no, and then looked directly at me. “Look, you didn’t do anything wrong that day,” he said. “You know that, right?”
I stared at him. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
He nodded and clapped me on the shoulder, and then hurried on across the Lawn toward the chapel. I stood for a moment, pondering his words. Why would he tell me that? I knew Ren had been upset with me, but I’d put that down to frayed nerves at the end of a horrible day. Was Porter trying to give me some sort of support in advance of trouble? Were other people talking about me, affixing blame? I brooded over this until, with a s
tart, I realized that almost all the students had entered the chapel, and I hurried in to get a seat before the service started.
My advisory group sat in a pew near the back, and my advisees had all preceded me into the chapel, so they scooted over to let me in at the aisle seat next to Stephen Watterson just as the organ music started. Slowly and with dignity, the crucifer, acolyte, and Bible bearer, all followed by Chaplain Joyner, processed down the aisle to the strains of “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
The service, as I had feared, addressed Terence’s death. My face grew hot as I sat through the readings—a passage from Isaiah about how the ransomed of the Lord shall return and sorrow and sighing shall flee away, followed by a reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. At Paul’s reference to how we face death all day long and are as sheep to be slaughtered, I looked at the altar and thought of Ben Sipple, pulling the altar cloth off in a rage. I wasn’t sure he would be able to make it the rest of the year and wondered where he would go, to his mother in Miami or his father in Boston. Or maybe just a different boarding school. Another lost soul, I thought.
When Chaplain Joyner ascended to the modest pulpit and began speaking about Terence Jarrar, about his life at Blackburne and the horrible pain we felt at his being taken away, I shut my eyes. His words echoed some of the platitudes served up after Fritz’s disappearance. Mr. Hollis, the chaplain when I was a student, had been a rather meek and unassuming man who had often seemed perplexed at finding himself chaplain to nearly four hundred boys, but he had been a good guy. At the first chapel service after Fritz had disappeared, Hollis had done his best to comfort us. His best efforts had been lost on me at the time—I had sat in the pew, despising Hollis and seething as if he had caused Fritz to vanish. I had wanted him to stop talking in his easy, prayerful voice, to be struck dumb, to have a stroke. Now, I found myself sitting again in Saint Matthew’s, the school having experienced another shocking loss, and I could see, at a remove, how my own pain and bitterness and anger had seeped out of me like radioactive waste, contaminating everything around me. I had suffered, true, but I had wrapped myself in my own suffering, displaying it like a flag worn by a patriot. I had cut everyone off and chosen to suffer alone. I looked now at the rows of blazered boys around me, their faces blank or sad or stunned, but they were together, joined by a bond made evident by their grief but stronger for it. And with a kind of shock, I realized that I was one of them, too.
A low, wet gasp caused me to glance at Stephen Watterson next to me. He was crying, his face red and shoulders hunched forward as he tried to hold in his grief. On his other side, Paul Simmons stared at the far wall, oblivious to his classmate. Stephen looked as if he were trying to silently give birth, his mouth open and his nose and forehead contorted, eyes screwed shut to deny his tears. For a second I just stared at him, unable to do anything. Then Stephen took in another quiet, shuddering breath and opened his eyes, looking directly at me. The pain and the loss and the sheer need in his look were so bald that I flinched. He looked as if he had just witnessed an atrocity. Dimly I realized that, in fact, he had. I fumbled in my jacket pocket and found a single tissue, which I handed to Stephen. He took it and tried to mop up his face. I hesitated—I didn’t know how to do this, how to be the adult. Part of me wanted to run out of the chapel and hide in the dark. But then, with just a bit of awkwardness, I reached out and put my arm over his shoulders so he could lean into me. He did, uttering a few more strangled gasps. Chaplain Joyner continued to speak from the pulpit, handling his words as if they would be offended by being spoken too loudly.
“I don’t understand,” Stephen said. He was still leaning against me and wiping his eyes, but he seemed to be under more control.
“I know,” I murmured.
“It sucks,” he said, sniffling. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I lost a classmate, too. When I was here. It still sucks.”
“Yeah,” he said, and then we both wept silently as Chaplain Joyner began reading the Prayers of the People and the congregation responded, “Hear our prayer,” the words rolling over us like a white summer fog.
I WALKED STEPHEN BACK from chapel to his room before study period. His roommate, Rusty Scarwood, didn’t ask anything when we walked through the door. Stephen’s eyes were still red and swollen, and that said enough. But when I left the room, Rusty reached out to put a hand on Stephen’s back, a gesture so simple and heartfelt, I fought the urge to start crying again.
After study period, I wandered the dorm to check in with my boys. Many were listening to music, though at low volume, and they greeted me easily enough. Nevertheless, I could see a new wariness in their eyes, an uncertainty that had not been there before. I found several students in the commons watching a rerun of Jurassic Park on TV. They eyed me as I came in, and I nearly left, feeling I might be intruding. But Hal Starr and Mack Arnold spotted me and waved me over to their seats at the back of the room, where we immediately began a half-whispered conversation about our favorite movies, arguing agreeably about the old Star Wars films versus the prequels. After the T. rex in Jurassic Park made its appearance and devoured the lawyer on the toilet to a chorus of cheers from the boys, I turned to Hal and Mack. “You guys doing okay?” I asked.
Both of them nodded, their faces a faint blue from the light on the TV screen. “Yeah, we’re okay,” Hal said, brushing the hair out of his eyes. “Thanks, Mr. Glass.” He smiled at me, more a genuine smile than a polite one.
At that moment, my cell phone vibrated. I thought it might be Sam Hodges or Ren Middleton, so I gave Hal and Mack a thumbs-up and walked out of the commons, pushing through the glass doors and out into the cool evening air. In fact, I took a deep breath like a diver surfacing before I looked at my cell. The number had a local area code, but I didn’t recognize it. I answered. “Hello?”
“Mr. Glass?” the caller said. It was a deep voice, male. “This is Lester Briggs. I . . .” He hesitated. “I used to work in the sheriff’s office. We met your senior year of high school?”
“Deputy Briggs,” I said. “Uh, yeah, sure. Yes, I remember you. Uh-huh.”
“I’m sorry it’s late. Am I calling you at a bad time?”
I glanced back through the commons window. Hal and Mack were watching the movie, leaning back in their chairs. “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I, ah . . . How did you get my number?”
“Jimmy Smalls gave it to me. The deputy you spoke with during . . .” He paused again, and then continued. “During the incident yesterday. I’m terribly sorry for you all.”
“Thank you,” I managed. I moved away from the dorm and paced in a circle underneath the spreading branches of an oak. The leaves rustled in the near darkness above me.
Briggs’s voice still sounded like honeyed-over gravel. “I’d like to meet with you, Mr. Glass,” he said, no hesitation in his voice now. “I have some information I’d like to share.”
I stopped pacing. “Information?”
I could almost hear him nod. “Information about Fritz Davenport. About the investigation into his disappearance. I don’t know where he is or anything like that, but—”
“Yes,” I said. Something shot through me, bright and red and pulsating. My nerves lit up like a dashboard’s warning lights. “Yes. Let’s meet. Where would you—?”
“I’d rather not meet out at the school, if you can get away.”
I looked up at the tree, its branches dark against the deepening sky above, and willed myself to be still despite the hope and expectation and fear rising in me. “How about tomorrow night? Around eight?”
“There’s a diner on Route Eleven just south of Staunton, the Fir Tree.”
“I know it.”
“All right. I’ll see you there tomorrow night at eight, Mr. Glass.” Briggs hung up.
I pocketed my cell and leaned back against the oak for support, trying to calm my heart. I was still there when the first bell rang for lights-out and the students in the commons stood, someone switchin
g off the TV. I waited a few beats and then stepped inside as the boys came out of the commons. The solemn, set faces around me brought me back to where I was, and why. Lester Briggs could wait until tomorrow. For now, as the boys trudged back to their rooms like wounded veterans of an unwanted war, I wondered how I could possibly provide them any comfort.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Monday’s classes were not disastrous, which was about the best thing I could say about them. I had been worried about how the class would go as I was starting a unit on Beowulf, which is among many other things a violent work in which death seems to lurk just outside the brightly lit mead halls. I had been concerned that the topic might be disturbing, given Terence’s death, but in the end it didn’t matter. My students were listless, and many obviously hadn’t slept very well. Stephen Watterson, to his credit, dutifully responded to my lame attempts to start a discussion on the monster Grendel and medieval Christianity, but our words sank to the floor like so many dying balloons. I think I was more relieved than the students when the bell rang and they filed out. I endured the rest of the day impatiently, hurried through dinner, and then drove off campus to meet Lester Briggs.
The Fir Tree was a piece of 1950s Americana, down to the mint-green vinyl booths and chrome-banded countertops. I’d been only once before—my parents had taken me there one weekend when I was a student—but I remembered the pecan pie was to die for. Now, I could barely manage a cup of coffee as I sat in a booth, waiting for Lester Briggs to arrive. Gray Smith once again agreed to cover my dorm duty that night, although I’d had to promise to cover him for the rest of the week while he caught up on his lab grades.
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