A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  The sky had darkened overhead, a light rain falling, and in the distance a storm was moving in the direction of the campus.

  “Well, in my daydream you were about to take me swimming in the ocean with you.”

  “Oh, Claire,” Steven laughed. “I should have taken you swimming whether you liked to swim or not.”

  For a moment we stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up at the campus—rush-hour traffic at a standstill, umbrellas weaving like the colored circles of a kaleidoscope above the streets lined with brown-stone row houses and concrete buildings built in the seventies and dark brick blocks of classroom buildings—a sour smell of late afternoon in the rain, the sound of a helicopter overhead reporting on traffic.

  I was scrambling around in the bottom of my book bag, searching under my books for an umbrella, Steven walking up the steps ahead of me, talking to an acquaintance about an assignment for class. The steps were full of students going to the library to study after their classes or leaving for night classes or home, racing to beat the inclement weather. A large crowd was milling on the steps and on the sidewalk above.

  I finally found the folded red umbrella at the bottom of my bag, pulled it out and was starting to open it when I heard a sound somewhere close at hand—then Steven’s voice—something like “Oh” or “No” was what he said.

  I turned in his direction, and as I did, he seemed to fall slow-motion into open space and stunned as if to death, I watched him pitch backward—like a duffel bag the way he rolled toward me, falling and falling down the library steps, his body gathering speed, until finally, time like an accordion folded in on itself, he landed facedown next to where I was standing his arms splayed in a T on the cement at the bottom of the stairs.

  THE LIFEGUARD CHAIR

  My caterpillar died this morning of my ninth birthday in the grassy shoe box I had made for her. In sorrow and shame, I have put her on a piece of blue silk as an apology, because under my care she failed to become a butterfly.

  I became a biologist when I was six, waiting for my father at his office across the hall from a lab where the students were dissecting cats. The cats had been cut open straight down the middle, their flat, furry skin pulled tight, secured with pins on the table so the students could examine their organs.

  I crossed the hall, climbed up on a stool next to the professor to watch the cat spread out in front of me, pregnant with full-term kittens that one of the students took out of her belly and laid on the table for closer examination.

  “I’d like to take one home,” I said to the professor, overcome with longing for a fetus.

  “What will you do with it, Claire?” the professor asked.

  “I’ll look at it,” I said.

  “But it’s not going to grow any bigger, you understand that.”

  “It’s a dead kitten,” I replied matter-of-factly.

  And so it happened that one of the dead kittens, gray with a splash of white on her face, was put in a clear jar filled with formaldehyde and given to me.

  Much of the story of what got said in the biology lab that afternoon was my father’s, who wasn’t there. What I do remember was my pure desire for that perfect kitten, which sits in its jar on my bureau dresser along with the skeleton of a spider monkey I was given and the head of a cobra and now my poor caterpillar on her piece of blue silk.

  C.F., age 9

  Dead caterpillar with butterfly wings

  III.

  APRIL 5: MUTATIONS

  Five o’clock in the morning, and the lamb stew still sitting on a low flame had shrunken to a black rock at the bottom of the pot. No one noticed the smell of burning.

  In the kitchen Faith leaned against the wall next to the telephone, fielding the calls that had been coming in all night. Lisha Berg was sitting next to Milo, her hands folded in her lap. No tears. I wanted her to sob, to fall on the floor and scream and shout his name. Eva had called Lisha from the hospital, but by the time she arrived through the swinging doors of the emergency room, the doctors were telling us that Steven was dead.

  I have no memory from the time Steven was shot until the doctors told us that he had died. And then, for hours until fear overtook me with a kind of centripetal force taking me with it body and soul, I remember everything as if it were permanently stored in my brain between the pages of a pop-up book.

  I moved my chair away from the kitchen table so I wasn’t sitting beside Bernard, whose high-pitched voice jarred my nerves, but I could hear his whispered conversation with Milo.

  “What’re we going to do, Milo?” he was asking.

  “Nothing. We are going to do nothing,” Milo said. “Rest and get ready.”

  “Get ready for what?”

  “For people. They’ll be arriving as soon as it gets to be morning.”

  “People.” Bernard rested his head on his folded arms. “What kinds of people? Friends?”

  “Bernard?” Milo said.

  “Yes, Uncle Milo?”

  “You know how you said ‘I can’t believe it’ over and over again when you heard about Steven?”

  “I meant it,” Bernard said, lifting his head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, don’t say it anymore.”

  Sometime in the middle of the night, my father went to the hangar, leaving the rest of us in the kitchen waiting for daylight, waiting for the neighbors and friends and colleagues who would begin to arrive at dawn with food.

  My father left because he couldn’t bear to listen to Julia’s grief.

  Initially her response took the form of questions about the last hour of Steven’s life. How had he looked that afternoon, what had his mood been, his tone of voice. She asked me to repeat exactly what had happened, what had been said between us, as if in the retelling a language might be discovered that could bring him back to life.

  “So you were sitting at one of the tables on the second-floor reading room of the library.”

  I nodded.

  “How was it? Were you sitting side by side?”

  “Steven was at the end of the long table and I was beside him,” I said.

  “Who else was there?” Julia asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Graduate students? People you knew?”

  “I didn’t notice. We weren’t alone. I know that. I didn’t recognize any of the other students, or I would have said hello.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I was studying for my entomology exam and got sleepy and fell asleep on my arms and had a dream about the Jersey shore and going swimming with Steven.”

  “You never went into the water on the Jersey shore,” Julia said.

  Faith threw her head against the wall and covered her eyes. “Please, Julia.”

  “I won’t shut up, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” my mother said.

  “Swimming was a dream,” I said patiently.

  Julia’s eyes were wide and dark and unblinking, and I must have thought I had to do exactly what she asked of me or she could fall apart.

  “So then you got your books together and went through security to have them checked, and you left the library by the main door and were standing at the bottom of the steps.” She didn’t take a breath.

  “Yes.”

  It was the third time I had repeated the whole story, and it had come to seem necessary for me to hear my own voice like an incantation, repeating and repeating until the events of that night thinned to a bearable weight inside us.

  “Then Steven walked to the top of the steps at the main entrance to the library, and there were many people, mostly students, no friends that I remember.” I was whispering. “And the weather was getting stormy, and I stopped to find my red umbrella, which was in the bottom of my book bag under the books, and then I heard a noise, maybe a kind of pop, but not loud, and Steven said something like ‘Oh’ or ‘No,’ as if he’d had a surprise.”

  “And then?” she asked.

  “He fell.”

&nb
sp; “Straight down the steps?”

  “He rolled.” I was chewing on the end of my index finger and must have bitten through the skin, a salty taste on my tongue. “I don’t remember any more. Not the ambulance or the hospital or Eva telling me what had happened or Lisha coming or you and Daddy arriving in separate cars. Nothing until the doctors came in to tell us.”

  “Other people saw what happened, Julia,” Faith said gently. “We’ll find out more today.”

  “Someone said that Steven fell onto his stomach and the blood from his head or nose or wherever it was coming from left an imprint on the asphalt in the shape of a palm. That’s what I was told in the hospital. It should still be there.”

  Lisha put her fingers in her ears.

  From the bedroom to which he’d escaped while my mother was grilling me, Milo called out that something was burning. He could smell it, and it was making him sick.

  “Burning?” Julia asked. “Why is something burning?”

  Faith crossed the room, turned off the burner, lifted the top of the pot and looked in.

  “Dinner,” she said.

  The politely insistent reporters were turned away until morning, and so were the police, with whom we had already spoken briefly at the hospital and would speak to for many more hours in the weeks ahead.

  A small film crew from a local television station arrived in the dark. I didn’t look out the window to see them, but Milo said they had stationed themselves on the other side of the street and were filming people as they arrived. Reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times came at daybreak, but none of us had the heart to speak to them.

  Mr. Denver stood in the garden of his blue ranch house and took on the role of informer for the neighborhood, with what my father later described as excessive enthusiasm.

  My father’s medical colleagues arrived at dawn. The dean of the law school came with several other professors, students from Steven’s classes, some of whom I knew, friends of Steven’s, friends from high school kept arriving. There were many strangers. The story of the Department of Justice flag spilled through the room with gathering momentum. There was muffled conversation about the op-ed piece in the morning paper. A reporter asked my father if he could see the flag, but by morning the FBI, called in because of the possibility that Steven had been assassinated, had taken the flag away as evidence.

  Julia stood at the kitchen sink—a dish towel hanging off her shoulder—retelling the story of the last hour of Steven’s life for her friends or friends of Steven’s or his professors, anyone else willing to listen.

  By six in the morning, the house was full of people—food piling up on the kitchen table, the smell of coffee and honey cakes. The house trembled with soft conversation floating through the rooms.

  At some point Lisha got up from the table and went down the hall to Steven’s bedroom, and I followed her, slipping across the kitchen and into my own room.

  The room was hot. It had been closed all day and was heavy with the smell of animals, the musty odor of fowl, the putrid stench of mice. I had never noticed the smell before—nor the squeaking and chirping and scratching of their hunger. Now the familiar room that I had created out of the longings of my childhood was unbearable.

  I lay down on my back, crossed my ankles, folded my hands across my stomach and closed my eyes against the complaints of the pushy white rat, the bird cries, the squeaking of the hungry mice, my mother’s unstoppable talking rising over the sounds of sympathetic voices. And from the kitchen, even with coffee brewing, the burned smell of last night’s dinner.

  When my father came in and sat down on my bed, lunch was being served by the neighbors.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Noon,” he said.

  Hours and hours had passed. It ought to be tomorrow, I thought. Years from now. Time had a laborious way of moving and stopping like an old bus stuck in traffic. I wished I could suddenly age.

  My father put his hand against my cheek. “Claire?”

  “I’m not talking,” I said.

  In the lamp glare, he looked terrible. His face, ashen and soft with folded flesh, had fallen in on itself. In only a matter of time, he, too, would be dead. And my mother. This flimsy house demolished by new owners wanting a more elaborate place, building one from scratch.

  In a short time, only a bus stop away, it would be as if our family had never occupied this space or any place on earth. A vanished tribe. Not even our bones would remain.

  “I won’t be coming out of my bedroom.” I pulled my covers up under my chin. “And don’t send Julia in to talk to me.”

  Eva came instead. Eva had learned something about death, being a Catholic. She lay down on the bed beside me, her head on the same pillow, lining her tiny body up next to mine so we were touching shoulder to shoulder, wrist to wrist.

  “Do you want to know what I know?” she asked. “It’s factual, about how Steven died and when and what he knew about the shooting.”

  “I only want to know the facts.” I was carelessly assembled, as if the slightest movement of my body would destroy me.

  “Just tell me to stop if it’s not what you want to hear.” She turned on her side, balancing on her elbow, facing me. “At about seven-fifteen last night, Steven was standing on the top step of the main entrance to the Gelman Library and someone—maybe in an academic building across the street from the library or just behind the construction of a new addition—someone at close range, with what the police believe might have been a Beretta nine-millimeter with a silencer, shot him in the head.”

  Eva took a breath, checking my response.

  “And then what?”

  “He felt something for a millisecond, as if a pebble had hit him in the temple, but by the time he reacted—sort of an ‘ouch’ is probably how it felt—he was gone.”

  “Dead?”

  “No. Gone to the world. Unconscious. He died at eight-fifteen on the operating table, almost as soon as the doctors had scrubbed and were about to start surgery to alleviate the swelling on his brain.”

  The ambulance had come quickly, Eva told me. The medics were excellent. Steven was on the operating table in less than thirty minutes.

  “No chance, Claire,” Eva said, her voice solid and without softness, for which I was grateful.

  “So it was bad luck.”

  Eva hesitated. “Yes, bad luck,” she said.

  Eventually, after Eva went home, I left the bedroom, wandering through the kitchen and the living room and the long hall, so crowded I had to weave through groups of people assessing me, touching my face, their arms around me, their voices in my ear. I was amazed that I was capable of speaking in a voice I recognized as my own.

  At one point Professor Raab came over and introduced himself as Steven’s professor in constitutional law. He didn’t mention the op-ed piece, but he asked about the flag. I told him I didn’t know anything about the flag, and he didn’t press me, filling the silence with talk of Steven as “remarkable,” a “natural leader,” “a person of integrity,” things I imagined he had committed to memory on his drive to our house. He was an uncomfortable man.

  My father said we were to say nothing about the flag or the op-ed piece and particularly we were not to mention the fact that Faith had been fired.

  Faith glided through the room on her long, slender legs with ghostly grace, serving plates of chicken and pasta and baked fish and salad, speaking in confidential whispers to people who were strangers to her. I found the intimacy of her manner odd and wondered if she were as drunk as Milo was. By late afternoon Milo had slipped into a living room chair, falling in and out of sleep.

  Only Bernard had the drawn face of long weeping.

  “His stump hurts,” Milo said crossly about Bernard’s tears. I let the remark pass, because I knew that it wasn’t Bernard’s stump.

  People never seemed to leave. They came and came at lunch and dinner and after dinner, into the night. Several visitors were still in the li
ving room when my mother finally excused herself and went to her bedroom.

  I followed her, sitting on the end of the bed watching her pace the room, her arms held tight across her chest.

  “I’m angry,” she said, as if the hysteria of the last hours had been spent and in its place came a hollow tunnel of sound. “I’m angry that Steven wrote the op-ed piece, but it was like him to write it, and he never would have imagined the price he’d finally pay for speaking out.”

  She lay down on the bed.

  “We don’t know why he was killed,” I said feebly.

  “We don’t know and may never know, and how can I be angry at Steven for being himself, who I admired and loved beyond any life?” She turned the light on beside her bed, and in its glare her deep golden skin was painted with a thin green glaze.

  “I want to kill the person who did it.” She looked over at me dry-eyed. “It’s normal, you understand. The way I feel is normal.”

  By two-thirty in the morning, the last of the visitors had gone. Faith was cleaning up the dishes, and Milo was dead asleep in the living room. From the kitchen window, I could see a light in the hangar and knew my father was there.

  “David wants the door to Steven’s room kept shut, Claire,” Faith said wearily. “He asked me to tell you.”

  I drank the rest of a glass of red wine someone had left on the kitchen table.

  “I wasn’t planning on opening it,” I said.

  The light on my desk was on, not enough voltage to illuminate the room, and I stood watching the shapes in the room take form in the darkness. The rodents were complaining, the damaged bird chirped in weak captivity, everybody hungry, and I clapped my hands over my ears.