A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  I lay on my side on the bed, my back to the window, my eyes closed, a film in my brain fast-forwarding from the table at the library with Steven to the moment rummaging in my backpack for the red umbrella and then to Steven’s voice registering surprise and the image of him falling and falling.

  I didn’t want to feed the animals any longer.

  I wanted them gone.

  I got out of bed, tilted the lampshade on my desk in the direction of the cages, going first to the mouse cage with three fat gray field mice that in any case belonged outside. I should never have brought them in. I picked up the cage and walked over to the door, which led from my room to the yard, walked down the steps onto the small patch of grass, which remained between the house and the hangar, and dumped the mice in the grass.

  The milk snake, a strange, mellow green color with diamonds on his back, had been a gift from my mother when I was studying reptiles as an undergraduate. He slid through my fingers, lacing himself in S’s until I put him in the grass and he slithered away into the darkness.

  Then I went to Olivia’s cage. She was a small white rat I had rescued from the biology lab when the cancer with which she had been infected turned out not to be fatal. I went into the middle of the yard and set her down.

  Back in my room, I put the empty cages in my closet.

  Only the one-winged finch and the praying mantis remained.

  From the top of my closet, I got some empty book boxes and packed the spider monkey skeleton and the caterpillar and the cobra’s head, the kitten fetus lounging all these years in formaldehyde and the pallid bat my mother had brought home just yesterday morning. I put the boxes of treasures back on the shelf, closed the door and turned off my bedroom light.

  Passing the large window on my way to the kitchen, my room dark, I could see Olivia shimmering white in the shaft of light coming from the hangar. She had moved farther away from the house—sitting on her haunches, her neck arched, looking around the new and dangerous world.

  I shut the door to my bedroom, went through the kitchen, where Faith was just putting away the last of the pots, and opened the door to Steven’s room.

  “I’m sleeping here,” I said, “in case my father asks you where I am.”

  THE LIFEGUARD CHAIR

  Steven ordered dragonflies and damselflies for my twelfth birthday, and they were delivered as babies, many of them dead on arrival. In seventh-grade science, we were going to study metamorphosis and incomplete metamorphosis, and it was my job to watch the dragonflies grow up. They are examples of incomplete metamorphosis, which means they look the same when they’re adults as they did as babies, only bigger. I knew this information from my biology book, but since most of my dragonflies were already dead, I arranged them on a clear glass plate and put them in the natural-history collection in my room.

  What I love about the sanctuary I’ve assembled is its predictable order. It gives me pleasure to walk into my room knowing that everything will be exactly as I left it—the caterpillar on a blue silk cloth, the skeleton of a spider monkey, the fetus of a kitten in a jar of formaldehyde, the dried skin of a milk snake, a swallow reduced by time to feathers arranged in a fan on my bureau.

  Now, after the arrival of Steven’s birthday gift, I have a plate of leftover dragonflies.

  I also have a living milk snake and a yellow finch and a few white mice. But I prefer my collection of the dead to the living creatures.

  Change disturbs me. If I had been given a choice for changing from a baby to a grown-up, which I was not, I would have chosen without a doubt an incomplete metamorphosis over a complete one.

  That way I would always be recognized as myself.

  C.F., age 12

  An example of incomplete metamorphosis

  IV.

  MAY 3: INCOMPLETE METAMORPHOSIS

  1

  On the morning of May 3, the day I met the man I would come to know as Victor Duarte—or V, as he asked me to call him—I returned to George Washington University for final exams. I had been at home living in Steven’s room for a month.

  April had been cold and wet. Dampness settled in the clothes and sheets and towels, crept deep into the bones. Even the kitchen with the stove on and filled with family felt subterranean.

  The news of Steven’s death went out on the UPI and AP wires, and there were stories all over the country, including several major ones and a long piece in the New York Times Magazine as well as a feature in the Washington Post titled “The Outsider,” which quoted the dean of the law school as saying that Steven had “the lonely courage of the outsider.”

  My father refused to read the news stories, but I read them and so did Julia, collecting the clips from out of town, spread out on the coffee table in the living room for anyone to see.

  “ ‘Lonely courage,’ ” Julia read aloud.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, where we all were in the first few days, picking at casseroles and sweets and roasted turkeys sent by friends, sticking close together.

  “Decency never wins—don’t you think that’s true?” she said to no one in particular. “The losers are the courageous ones, in my opinion.”

  My father was sitting at the table, his chair angled toward a window that overlooked the hangar. For weeks he didn’t initiate conversation, although he’d answer if one of us spoke to him.

  “ ‘Lonely courage’ is a good description of Steven, isn’t it, David?”

  “I don’t think so,” my father replied.

  “Well, I like it, and so does Claire,” my mother said, although I hadn’t mentioned anything about the article. But I knew, and so did Julia, that Steven would have hated the word “courage” assigned to his name.

  In the last weeks, I had turned into a skeleton draped with loose, transparent skin like silk. I was frightened all the time, sitting very still as if any movement could shatter my bones. I’d scrutinize my parents, examining them for cracks.

  I began to notice that my father could no longer look at my mother. Even sitting next to her, he’d talk to a ghost of a person just beyond.

  My mother wanted conversation. She’d sit on the edge of a ladder-back chair in the kitchen, lean into my father, her eyes locked on his face, her hand on his arm.

  “Are you listening to me, David?” she’d ask.

  “Of course, I am,” he’d say, closing his eyes.

  Feelings between them gathered in the dampness like mold.

  In the lead of the first news story printed the second day after Steven was killed, Professor Raab was interviewed about the flag. “Just a coincidence,” he was reported as saying. “Probably a prank, the work of some kids, perhaps. Someone in the neighborhood might have had a Justice Department flag.”

  My father supposed that neighbors, made significant by their proximity to our tragedy, could not keep themselves from speculating.

  The op-ed piece was quoted, but the reporter, alerted by the FBI, said there was no evidence that Steven’s death was related to that op-ed or any other he had written in the past. The story made no mention of Faith’s termination from the Justice Department. Steven’s death had overcome what happened to Faith, her firing a subject for silence in our family.

  According to the reporter, Steven’s death was more than likely a random killing, possibly accidental, unlikely political, too soon to speculate. There wasn’t enough information to make a comment.

  At the time of the shooting, there had been pandemonium. Students fled for safety into the buildings or rushed to Steven’s aid, called for an ambulance and police, screamed, although I don’t remember hearing anything.

  There were no reliable witnesses as to the source of the gunshot, and though word went out on the radio and television stations, there was no trace of a gunman or a gun, no particular reason to conclude that Steven had been an intentional target.

  The last major story about Steven’s death, which wouldn’t be written for some time, was the true one.

  The FBI came often i
n the first week. They wanted us to give them lists of the people Steven knew, his present friends, old friends from elementary school and high school and university. Friends from the neighborhood. Anyone who might have taken issue with Steven. Anyone with an agenda, particularly people in authority who could hold a grudge.

  We sat at the kitchen table making lists. We told the FBI about Faith and Charles Reed; about the dean of George Washington Law School, who had warned Steven to keep a low profile; about a friend of Steven’s who was murdered in a hate killing for his homosexuality.

  “What about your own friends?” they asked us. “Anyone among them who might take exception to Steven?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Trust your instincts,” they said. “Instincts can be helpful to us.”

  Steven had had enemies, especially in high school, and I made a list of them. Julia brought up her suspicion that he might have belonged to a left-wing political organization that we didn’t know about. My father remembered a serious run-in Steven had had with the principal of the junior high, who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized.

  The FBI took an interest in that story.

  They asked my father if any of his patients who’d died had families that might have had a reason to be angry.

  “I lost a lot of patients when I was at NIH,” he said. “It’s a research institute, and we work primarily with the gravely ill.”

  “There was that boy of the woman who died of ALS the second year we lived here. Remember, David? It was right before you left NIH,” Julia said.

  “It was why I left NIH.”

  “You left because your patients didn’t get better,” Julia said. “That’s what you always used to tell me.”

  “I left because they died,” my father said.

  “But the boy whose mother died wanted you to adopt him. I don’t recall his name.”

  My father stiffened.

  “Of course I couldn’t adopt him,” he said, defensive in a way I’d not ever seen him be—a wry, confident, interior man with an occasional burst of temper. It was as though the FBI were questioning his humanity.

  I gave them a list of Steven’s girlfriends.

  “Steven was always the one who broke up first,” I said, a matter of pride.

  Julia remembered a particular boy at Walter Johnson High School who kept losing in debate matches to Steven. At the last debate in senior year, the boy lit a cherry bomb and threw it out the window of the high school after the match.

  “We need as many names as you can think of,” the FBI said. “We’ll check these out and keep looking, and you keep remembering.”

  I had moved permanently to Steven’s room after the FBI spent two days going through his things, finding nothing of particular interest, nothing private or suggestive, except love letters from various women.

  If I slept at all, I’d come to consciousness in a cold sweat. I was always afraid. For weeks I couldn’t drive or leave the house or talk on the telephone or read or sit at the kitchen table for dinner, and finally, by the end of the second week, I didn’t leave Steven’s room.

  What I did was cut out pictures from my biology books. I cut out a brightly colored glossy picture of a gossamer lacewing taking off in flight from a leaf and taped it to the lampshade on Steven’s desk. I cut out a series of pictures from the section on incomplete metamorphosis describing the way a young insect ages by molting over and over into adulthood.

  On the wall beside Steven’s desk, I tacked a photograph of the yellow striped Nomadidae bee, a species that assumes the defenses of a yellow jacket although he has no stinger, and another color photograph of the nonstinging syrphid fly, which resembles a stinging honeybee. I must have found some larval-stage defense system in these glossy pictures of benign species of insects imitating the appearance of stinging ones.

  I developed simple routines to get through the day to darkness. A time for this and a time for that, so my calendar would have in its reliable pattern a satisfactory constancy, as long as I didn’t leave Steven’s bedroom.

  At night I’d climb under the covers knowing I couldn’t sleep and open what was left of my cut-up biology book to the section on metamorphosis, looking at a string of photographs—a caterpillar larva encased in a cocoon traveling from pupa to butterfly.

  Metamorphosis was as close to a system of belief as any that I knew.

  I tried not to think of Steven dead. But my mind would wander to his ashes in a celadon vase in the bookcase in my parents’ bedroom.

  Sometime, my mother told me, we’d scatter the ashes, and I believed that what remained of Steven’s body would have the power to alter the landscape.

  On my first day back at George Washington, Uncle Milo drove me to school.

  “Milo can take you when he goes on his futile piano trip,” my father said.

  Milo was looking for a piano.

  “There’s no space in the living room for a piano,” my father had said.

  “I’m looking at uprights.”

  “There’s no room for an upright.”

  “There is, David. I’ve measured. If we move the gray couch just a bit to the right toward the front door, there’s room for a piano between the two windows facing south.”

  “I don’t want a piano in the house,” my father said.

  “It’s necessary,” Milo said quietly. “I’ve come to believe that a piano is necessary.”

  We pulled up to the Gelman Library, and Milo stopped the car.

  “Secondhand uprights. I check the newspaper,” he said, touching my hand as I started to get out. “I’ll pick you up at six tonight.”

  I pulled the sun visor down and checked the mirror.

  “Do I look blue to you?” I asked.

  “Why blue?”

  “From lack of oxygen. When I leave the house, I have trouble breathing.”

  “Oh, Claire.” He reached down and took my hand, surprising in Milo, who was awkward with intimacy.

  But he had changed with Steven’s death. He had responsibilities.

  “You’re not blue. Red or pink or whatever color a girl your age is supposed to be—that is the color you are.”

  2

  My breath was high in my chest as I climbed out of the car, hardly enough air to go in the handicapped entrance to the library so I wouldn’t have to see the steps where Steven had fallen. My plan—I was careful to fill the time I’d be away from Steven’s room with arrangements so I wouldn’t panic—was to go to the library until class. I’d spend no more than half an hour in the library going over my biology notes, then class, then my father’s office so I could eat lunch in solitude, then lab, then a chemistry lecture and only half an hour before Milo would be back to pick me up.

  The reading room where I always studied with Steven was half full, and I stood at the main door, checking to see if anyone familiar was there, not wishing yet to speak to someone I knew. Of my friends I had only been willing to see Eva.

  I slipped off my jean jacket and hung it on a chair, opened my book bag, took out pencils and a notebook and my entomology text, aware that people at the long reading table were taking me into account.

  A young woman with a bad cough was underlining in a book, which I recognized from Steven’s bookcase as constitutional law. Maybe this woman had known him. Maybe she recognized me. There was a man in his early twenties, perhaps Egyptian or Ethiopian by the sharpness of his features, slouched in the chair, still in his coat and sleeping.

  At the end of the table, Victor Duarte was sitting with a stack of books in front of him. Behind him a bank of windows facing east opened to a large vacant building in the process of being disassembled, and light from the dusty noonday sun fell across Victor’s face, splitting it in half, spreading over the table where we were sitting.

  Victor didn’t look at me directly, but I could feel his attention.

  He knows who I am, I thought, and he’s curious about a young woman who has suffered violence and loss.
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  I moved my chair so it faced away from him, put my feet up on the next chair and rested a book in the bowl of my lap.

  In a glance I had noticed things. That he was dark with strong features, large-boned, straight black hair long over the denim collar of his work shirt. Something surprising about him. I remember thinking at the time that it was his hands that caught my attention.

  Perhaps the way he rested them on either side of the open book, his fingers broad and thick, crusted with dirt. Rough, working-class hands, not the hands of a student.

  He leaned across the table.

  “I think I know who you are.” His face was close to mine, and I drew back. “Claire Frayn?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew your brother.”

  My skin went suddenly clammy.

  “I’m so very sorry,” he said softly. “Such a terrible thing to happen!”

  What I heard in the intensity of his voice—as if a lump were caught low in his throat—was the sound of grief.

  “You knew him?”

  “Steven was the person I wanted to be.” He rested his chin on his fists. “I’m lucky he was my friend.”

  I didn’t question what Victor said, not then and not for a long time, but I remembered it. Such a curious turn of sentence, and I must have had an odd expression on my face, because he shook his head.

  “What I mean to say is, Steven and I had common interests,” he said.

  “In law school, you met him?” I asked.

  “I’m not in law school,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I’m an engineer.”

  I noticed every detail that morning, not just about Victor Duarte but everything, my first time in public since Steven’s death, charting a new geography.

  I must have seemed anxious, because he touched my arm, just a glance, a sympathetic gesture, but I pulled away.