by Olivia Dade
Dammit. He understood that too.
He needed a minute before entering the meeting, despite his increasing tardiness. So he went to the men’s faculty bathroom. Splashed water on his face. Dried himself with a paper towel. Pushed an overlong hank of hair behind his ear and studied his own damp reflection.
How long since he’d last cut his hair or groomed his growing beard?
How long since he’d seen himself without those dark pits beneath his eyes?
Gripping the sink with both hands, his knuckles nearly as white as the chipped porcelain, he acknowledged another unwelcome truth, asked himself another agonizing question.
How long since his own grayness had disappeared? Because he might be unkempt, but Candy’s particular stage of numb, half-dead sadness had passed at some point.
Part of his brain kept insisting he should be ashamed of that.
Marianne wouldn’t have wanted him to mire himself in his grief forever, though. It was a cliché, but also the hard, hard, truth.
Now he had to decide what he wanted for himself.
And as he met his own gaze clearly for the first time in—
Well, he didn’t know how long.
But he noted, as if viewing a stranger, that he had green eyes. Weary, complete with bursts of lines at their corners, but green nevertheless.
Forest green, one might say.
At some point, he was going to have to look at that bit of subtext. Decipher it. Then decide whether he wanted to make it text instead. Clear. Undeniable.
Loud as life.
Three
“I think we have the poetry slam mostly planned out. So that brings us to our next task: the morning announcements.” Candy hooked a finger in her pearl necklace, rotating one of the milky spheres idly as she frowned at her notebook. “Which poems do you propose to include? Either they have to be short, or we have to choose brief selections from longer poems.”
To Griff’s relief, Candy had resumed her schoolmarm cosplay when the official report day for teachers arrived. Other than the bun and her cast, everything remained the same from last year. Her eyebrow-length bangs swept diagonally across her high forehead, the rest of her hair tamed by a wide headband. Her pearl necklace nestled just above the collar of her blouse, while her cardigan and long skirt covered almost every inch of her sturdy frame.
He considered that bit of reclaimed normality a good sign, even though she didn’t quite seem herself yet. That, of course, would take time. Months. Maybe years.
To his surprise, he kind of missed some aspects of her more casual clothing. The way those stretchy pants clung to her long, dimpled thighs. The squeak of her sneakers, and the wide scoop of her necklines. How her t-shirts cupped her bottom, much as he’d tried not to notice.
These days, that small triangle of bare flesh at the base of her throat, where her collar gaped open, drew his eye again and again. So did the pale stretch of her neck, and the peek of vulnerability at her nape.
Those glimpses distracted him during conversations with Candy, and he sometimes missed questions and cues to speak. Luckily, she didn’t get impatient, most likely because she blamed his slow reactions on his hearing loss. A convenient excuse, he had to admit.
“Griff?”
Especially at times like these. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to remember my list of poems.”
“Why are you trying to remember it?” Behind her bangs, he could just barely spot the wrinkle of her brow. “Didn’t you write it down?”
“Oh. Yes.” Hurriedly, he flipped open his notebook. “Yes, of course I did.”
Now she was definitely side-eyeing him, and he couldn’t blame her.
“Okay,” she said, drawing out the word. “So tell me one of the poems you chose.”
Dammit, he needed to be a professional, not a man absurdly fixated on a patch of creamy skin he couldn’t—wouldn’t—touch. “A few of my favorites weren’t appropriate for the morning announcements. Notably, Philip Larkin’s—”
“‘This Be the Verse.’” She tilted her head, expectant. “Did I guess right?”
He laughed, absurdly happy that she somehow knew the exact poem he’d been poised to name. “Students would love it. Love it. But we’d also get fired, and I enjoy eating.”
“As do I.” She grinned at him. “It’s a shame, though.”
He thought for a moment. “‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden is a worthy alternative. Or ‘Good Bones’ by Maggie Smith.”
“Agreed.” Letting go of her necklace, she put a check next to something on her paper. “I had those poems in mind as possibilities too.”
He nodded toward her notebook. “Why don’t you tell me about your choices? I’ll fill in any gaps, as necessary.”
Given his dubious attention span, better for her to spearhead the discussion as much as possible. Besides, he was curious about her selections and what they said about her, and about the way her mind worked, free of possible cross-contamination from his own choices.
Clicking her pen open and shut a few times, she frowned down at her list. “I had trouble narrowing the field of contenders, frankly. There are the usual suspects. Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christopher Marlowe, Phillis Wheatley, etc. Poems and poets who are part of any standard English curriculum.”
He’d been afraid of this. Worried her sometimes-rigid notions about literature would leave her stranded in the classics from now-distant centuries. They were classics for a reason, of course, but sometimes not the most immediately engaging choices for students, especially at seven-thirty in the morning.
“Honestly, though, I think modern poetry more often connects with high schoolers, and standardized testing ensures they’ll encounter the older classics at some point anyway.” With a little shrug, she dismissed her obligation to those poems. “So the majority of my suggestions are from the past century. Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise.’ ‘I Am Offering this Poem’ by Jimmy Santiago Baca. ‘Who Said It Was Simple’ by Audre Lorde, and ‘[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]’ by Cummings. ‘I, Too’ by Langston Hughes. ‘Love is Not All’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay. ‘The friend’ by Marge Piercy.”
She went on for another minute or two, listing authors and poems he hadn’t realized she’d know, or hadn’t realized she’d appreciate. Lyrical poems, rage-filled poems, lovestruck poems, poems about marginalization and identity and humanity.
His favorites. So many of his favorites.
Oh, this was undiluted pleasure. To share a common language, to exult together in a searing turn of phrase, to find a kindred soul in poetry.
Still, he tried to hide his foolish giddiness and remain somber. Collegial.
“You’ve, uh, covered most of my suggestions already.” He checked his own list again. “I’d add ‘The Changeling's Lament’ by Shira Lipkin and ‘Instructions on Not Giving Up’ by Ada Limón.”
“Those are new to me.” With a few taps of her screen, she brought the poems up on her cell and read them, eyes intent on the words. “They’re important additions. Thank you, Griff. I’m bookmarking them.”
Which left only the last batch of poems he’d earmarked for possible use.
“There are a few…” He licked his dry lips and looked down at the scrawled titles on his paper, formulating what he would say. Hoping he didn’t injure her further. “I don’t know how comfortable you’d be with Mary Oliver’s ‘In Blackwater Woods,’ Sharon Olds’s ‘Cambridge Elegy,’ or possibly ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop. Maybe ‘The Watch’ by Danusha Laméris.”
All poems about loss and grief and death. Gorgeous poems. Heartrending poems.
She was silent.
“It’s just…” He tapped his pen against his notebook. “Students respond well to those particular poems, because mortality, the reality of death, is becoming so much clearer to them by high school. And for kids who’ve experienced loss, poetry can help them work through their emotions and maybe find comfort.”
Maybe you’d find comfort in those poems too, however fleeting, he carefully didn’t say. Just as I have.
At the time he’d jotted them on the paper, he hadn’t been sure Candy would know them. Now he was certain she did, but whether she’d turned to them or not, he couldn’t say.
“I reread—” She hesitated. “I reread Mary Oliver all the time. ‘Wild Geese’ and ‘In Blackwater Woods’ especially. They’re…important to me.” Her mouth trembled, but she pressed her lips tight and took a deep breath. “Those are great choices. Let’s add ‘To a Sad Daughter’ by Michael Ondaatje too.”
“I don’t think I’ve read that.” He stole her phone to look it up, then wrote himself a reminder to savor it more thoroughly later. “It’ll end up in this year’s curriculum, I think.”
Once he returned her cell, she claimed it. She stared down at the screen, where the Ondaatje poem remained on display, but he didn’t think she was reading it.
She was fidgeting in her chair, free hand clenched. Then she nodded, seemingly to herself, and made direct eye contact with him. “Yesterday, a parent came to school for a meeting with Principal Dunn.”
She paused for a moment, mouth white around the edges.
“From behind, I thought she looked like Dee. My sister. When I saw her, my heart…” She placed a palm over her chest. “It felt like being electrocuted. I called out to her, but she turned, and it wasn’t—It wasn’t her. The woman was a total stranger. Face to face, she didn’t look anything like my sister. I barely got to the bathroom before I started crying. And it was—”
Her jaw worked, and she stared up at the ceiling for a moment.
“It was horrible,” she finally said. “Humiliating and…”
This time, he filled in the word, so she didn’t have to. “Heartbreaking.”
Another nod.
He sank into his own chair, stunned by her unprompted admission. By the way she’d just tilted up her chin, bared that pale neck to him, and waited to find out whether he’d cut it.
This wasn’t an iteration of Candy he’d met before.
This was the river beneath her boulders. Swift and deep. Full of beauty. Teeming with terrors.
Deliberately, he leaned forward from across Candy’s desk and laid his hands flat between them. “Did it make you wonder whether you were losing your grip on reality?”
She cringed away from him, and it was unbearable. He hated it. Hated it.
He would never mock her. Never use such an intimate, painful confession against her. She didn’t know that yet, but she would. He would make certain of it, starting now.
“My wife, Marianne, died three years ago,” he said.
Candy swayed in his direction once more, her stricken wince gone. Instead, her expression had become as open and unguarded as he’d ever seen it. Sad again, this time for his sake.
“Oh, Griff.” She spoke so softly, he had to read her lips.
“Brain aneurysm. Totally unexpected.” The words were abrupt and hoarse, but he couldn’t help that. He didn’t talk about his grief to anyone who didn’t already share it. Marianne’s family, mostly. Maybe if he did, he could discuss it more easily.
Instead, the story clawed at his throat, unwilling to emerge. He forced it out anyway.
“She had a terrible headache all day, but we thought it was just the stress of the holidays.” One final opportunity for intervention—for life—lost, though neither of them had known it. “She died sometime during the night. When I woke up the next morning, she was already gone.”
The horror of that awakening, Candy didn’t need to hear about. Not now, anyway. Sharing that particular experience wasn’t the point of his revelation.
“For months afterward, I saw her everywhere.” This was the point. The reassurance that Candy wasn’t experiencing anything unusual, anything that should embarrass her, anything that indicated acute mental instability, at least not by itself. “At gas stations. In the cars ahead of me at drive-throughs. At school. In malls and doctors’ offices and sometimes even in our house. In our bed.”
Candy’s utter stillness, her sympathetic silence, allowed him to keep going, keep baring himself in the hopes she might recognize herself in his nakedness.
“It felt like being haunted. I thought I might be, uh, losing my faculties.” When he forced out a dry, strangled sort of laugh, Candy’s good hand covered his. Broad, strong, sheltering. “But the grief counselor said it was common. That for most people, those moments would eventually diminish, and then disappear entirely.”
Her deep green cast seemed to absorb the sunlight beaming through her classroom windows, the color as warm and comforting as her hand on his. And beneath that fiberglass, her broken ulna was healing. Quickly, he hoped.
The clean fracture they’d both seen on the emergency room x-ray would cease to exist at some point. Maybe evidence of the damage would appear on future x-rays, or in a marrow-deep ache on rainy days, but maybe not. Her acute pain would become a mere memory, and they’d both welcome its retreat into the past. He certainly didn’t want her to hurt any longer than necessary.
He didn’t want her to hurt at all, but that wasn’t an option.
Why couldn’t he seem to feel the same about his own fracture, his own pain? Why couldn’t he greet his own healing with uncomplicated relief?
Her voice was loud enough for him to hear, but gentle. So gentle. “Did you stop seeing your wife at some point?”
“After a few months.”
At first, he went a few days in between sightings. Then weeks.
Then, without him noticing, she’d slipped away entirely. Again.
“Was that a good thing? Or—” Candy bit her lip and thought for a moment. “Or did you miss that moment of possibility? The sense that she might be close, despite everything?”
So incisive. Like a surgeon, she’d sliced directly to his heart, bound in scars but frantically beating despite the damage.
“Those moments wrecked me.” The bright burst of hope was never, ever worth the darkness afterward. “But when they were gone, when I didn’t see her anywhere outside memories and photos anymore, I—”
When he didn’t finish, she tilted her head, a line scored deep between her brows. “It felt like another loss?”
“Yes, but not just that. The guilt…” He forced himself to slide his hand out from beneath hers, and his arms immediately prickled with cold. The damn school kept its air conditioning way too chilly. “It gutted me.”
At that, she sat back and sighed. “Ah, guilt. My newfound, constant companion.”
The contours of his own guilt, he understood—the way his love of and loyalty to Marianne, his sense of who he was as a husband and a man, became fraught and disorienting as her death steadily receded into the past. But what possible reason could Candy have for feeling guilty about her sister’s death?
“Why do you—” he began to say.
The speaker over the whiteboard abruptly crackled to life, the voice of their principal coming through loud and clear. “To all faculty and staff, this is a reminder that our meeting begins in ten minutes in the cafeteria. As promised, we’re providing sandwiches, fresh veggies, and brownies. I’m not saying you should hurry, but I am saying swarms of locusts are slower and less comprehensive in their consumption of available foodstuffs than you are. Again, you have ten minutes. Then the floodgates open, and no sandwich is safe. Also, someone better save me a brownie, or you’re going to have a very cranky principal for the rest of the week. You’ve been warned.”
The speaker went silent, and Candy snorted.
“She’s funny,” he said, “and a vast improvement over my previous principal.”
“Before she was a great principal, she was a great teacher.” Candy’s brow compressed. “I need to run a couple of errands before the faculty meeting starts. I don’t mean to cut off our conversation, but—”
He heaved himself to his feet, suddenly tired enough to sleep right there, sprawled over h
er desk. “No worries. I have a few things I should do before then too. And as Tess noted, lateness is not a good strategy for this particular meeting, not if we want free lunch.”
“Which we do.” Her pale lips curved. “Even though we’ll only bitch about its inferior quality and quantity afterward.”
Somehow, despite his exhaustion, despite having dredged up and shared memories of Marianne, he discovered he was grinning too. “As mandated by teacherly tradition, hallowed and ancient.”
“I’m sure Mildred was there when they carved the appropriate runes.” She gathered her purse and notebook. “As one of the village elders, naturally.”
Somehow, he’d never suspected Candy might contain this brand of humor. He should have, though, given that ringing, wholehearted laugh of hers.
Shoving his hair back from his face—dammit, he really did need a cut—he huffed out an amused breath and followed her out the door. “It’s a wonder she didn’t clarify the Frankenstein issue with Mary Shelley herself.”
“They didn’t frequent the same social circles.” She produced her room key and locked the door behind them. “Shelley was too young and vibrant, and”—getting up on tiptoe, she whispered into his left ear—“Mildred didn’t approve of that whippersnapper Byron.”
She’d remembered. Remembered and spoken so he could hear her, her rush of breath against his skin minty and damp and rippling through his body in a shockwave.
When he bent and leaned close to whisper in her own ear, her fine, soft hair caught on his beard. “I hate to tell you this, but I think you just made Mildred the hero of this particular tale.”
Apple. Her hair smelled like an apple, surprisingly sweet and clean.
He could have stood there and inhaled that scent all day.
“Dammit.” With that murmur, her lips must have been a hairsbreadth away from his skin, and he squeezed his eyes shut at the bolt of sensation down his spine. “Byron was a complete dick. I guess Mildred got it right. For once.”