Arcadia Falls

by Carol Goodman

  “You mean your husband?” Shelley laughs. “That’s not the same thing at all. You didn’t grow up with your mother in an insane asylum. You can’t tell me you know how that feels.” Shelley tightens her grip on Sally’s shoulder and I see Sally wince.

  “No,” I say holding up my hands, palms out. Out of the corner of my eye I spy Callum at the edge of the woods, hidden in the shadows. He makes a circular motion with his hand: Keep her talking. “I don’t. Tell me about it.”

  Shelley smiles. In the glow of the candle Sally holds it’s a ghastly grimace, like that of a crazed jack-o’-lantern. “My mother grew up feeling like a stranger in her own home. She always suspected that she was adopted, and then she read Lily’s journal and she knew that she’d finally found her real mother, only to lose her again. And then after Lily’s death no one would believe my mother because she had no proof.”

  “But you told me Lily was Ivy’s mother!” Chloe’s voice comes from behind me. I’d almost forgotten that she and Haruko are there. Without looking around—I couldn’t take my eyes off Sally if I tried—I put my arm out to stop her from coming any closer. My hand brushes the silky nylon of her down parka.

  “Yes, so you would tell our revered dean,” Shelley says. “I knew that if Ivy thought she had killed her own mother it would drive her over the edge.” Shelley laughs. “And it did—literally!”

  Damn. Although I wanted Shelley to talk, I don’t want her to say so much she’s got nothing to lose.

  “That was her decision,” I say, “not yours. Ivy must have been haunted by Lily’s murder all her life. Anyone would have been. But you don’t have to be. Come away from the edge.” I hold out my hand, palm up, as I would offer it to a strange dog. “Both of you.”

  Fear springs up in Sally’s eyes. Although I’ve chosen my words carefully so as not to sound like my only concern is her safety, she’s realized for the first time why Shelley is holding her there at the edge of the cliff. The candle in her hands shakes, the melted wax sloshing against the sides of the glass.

  “So you and your police officer friend can accuse me of killing Isabel?”

  I shrug, desperately trying to make the gesture look casual even though I can feel the muscles in my neck and back spasm with bottled-up tension. “Why would we do that when Chloe and I saw Ivy take her own life?”

  “That’s right,” Shelley replies, grinning smugly. “And after all, it was Chloe here who goaded our poor dean into doing it.” Shelley turns her jack-o’-lantern grin on Chloe and I feel her stiffen under her parka.

  “But you were the one who told me Lily was Ivy’s mother,” she cries. “You made me accuse her!”

  “Oh, Chloe,” Shelley says, clucking her tongue. “Can anyone really make a person do something they don’t want to? Are you going to blame me for the trick you played on Isabel, too? You should have seen her face when that dress came hurtling out of the tree at her! And then when I told her that you were the one who played the trick on her she was furious at you. She was most eager when I offered her a chance to get back at you.”

  Shelley switches her gaze from Chloe to me. “I got the idea from Lily’s journal, from the trick she planned to play on the girls. I helped her rip a piece of her dress and leave it on the roots of the fallen tree, then we went up to the head of the falls to see the view—”

  “You killed Isabel!” Chloe surges forward. I grab a handful of her parka to keep her back. Shelley takes a step backward toward the edge, pulling Sally with her. Why is she doing this? The question screams inside my head. I’ve tried to give her a way out, but she’s deliberately teasing Chloe into accusing her of Isabel’s murder. Then I understand. On some level, Shelley wants to die—dying as Lily died after avenging her murder.

  I risk a glance in Callum’s direction. He’s managed to inch within a few feet of Sally. He’s crouched, poised to spring, but will he be able to save Sally if Shelley tries to drag her over the cliff with her?

  I can pray that he will, but I can’t count on it. I have to offer something else to Shelley to give her a reason to live.

  “You said no one believed Fleur when she said Lily was her mother because she didn’t have proof. I have that proof.”

  The cold gleam in Shelley’s eyes turns warm. She takes a step forward, jostling Sally with her. I take an answering step forward—I can’t help it!—and Shelley stops.

  “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  I take out the birth certificate that Beatrice gave me. “I could show it to you or—” I turn to Chloe, the strain of letting my eyes off Sally physically painful, and hold the page above her candle. “Or I could burn it. What do you think, Chloe? Shall we burn it? The only record of who was really Lily Eberhardt’s daughter?”

  I hold the old document close enough to the candle so that the edges begin to crisp. The pine glade immediately fills with the scent of charred paper. Later, I’ll think it was the scent that galvanized Shelley. She moves forward so quickly that Sally is knocked over. Callum springs toward Sally. Dodging Shelley’s attack, I follow him, letting the paper fall from my hand. It’s only chance that at that moment a wind blows through the glade. It seems to come from the trees, a breath of snow crystals and pine-scented air that snatches the paper and tosses it high in the air. Shoosh, the trees whisper. Be quiet, don’t tell.

  Shelley reaches for the paper but it slips from her grasp, climbs higher, and gusts toward the edge of the cliff. She follows it, like a child trying to catch a balloon, her eyes on it, not the edge of the cliff she’s approaching.

  I try to stop her but a hand pulls me back. Shelley goes right past me—arms out, face aglow, as if heading into a mother’s embrace—and over the edge of the cliff.

  There’s no scream, no cry of terror, only a sickening thud as her body hits the bottom of the icy ravine and then a final movement of snow sliding off the trees to cover up the sound. Shoosh, the trees say. Be quiet. It’s done.

  Sally and I spend Christmas morning on a Jet Blue flight to Fort Lauderdale, eating blue corn chips and watching a Will Ferrell movie called Stranger Than Fiction that turns out to be ten times better than I’d expected. Sally and I both cry buckets at the end, upsetting the stewardess and the elderly woman sitting next to us. I could tell them we’re crying for much more than Will Ferrell’s fate, but I realize that if I tried to account for all we’ve been through it would be less believable than the fanciful events of the movie.

  Even getting these last-minute tickets seems highly improbable, but when I called Max and Sylvia Rosenthal and asked if we could spend the holidays with them, the e-mail confirmation for the tickets arrived in my inbox twenty minutes later. I hated to think what they cost, so I didn’t think about it.

  The atmosphere at Boca West proves conducive to not thinking. The neon-colored impatiens that grow waist high and hibiscus blooms the size of dinner plates make the whole place look like a Disney cartoon. Sally and I spend our days at the pool with Max or shopping in the air-conditioned malls with Sylvia. We eat out every night at a cheerful array of chain restaurants. It’s hard to believe, in this mild climate, that places like Arcadia Falls even exist.

  But I know that this particular paradise comes with a price. On our last day, Sylvia suggests she take Sally school shopping alone while I have a chat with Max. I grimly sit down at the poolside table usually reserved for Max’s cronies from his days working on Wall Street. The guys are absent today, no doubt alerted to the conference Max and I are to have.

  I’ve always admired Max. He put himself through college on the GI Bill and rose through the ranks of Morgan Stanley on the strength of his uncanny math abilities and chutzpah. He’s as slim as he was the day he got out of the army and has a full head of white hair. He still plays a round of golf every day to keep fit and a game of bridge to keep his mind sharp. When I look at him, I see how Jude might have aged.

  “You should have told us that Jude left you with so little. We had no idea. Sylvia thought you sold up in
Great Neck because you never liked it there.”

  “I didn’t want you to think badly of Jude,” I tell him. “He would have hated for you to know that he mismanaged the money.”

  Max nods, his shrewd brown eyes acknowledging the truth of what I’ve said, but then he raises one finger and shakes it at me. “Still, he would have hated more to see you and Sally going without.”

  “We haven’t been starving,” I say. Feeling the first prickles of anger needling my skin, I take a deep breath. “We had enough after I sold the house to move upstate, and I want to teach—”

  “Sure, teaching’s fine, but let’s face it, you coulda picked a better place to do it. Three deaths in the first semester. I went to some rough schools growing up in the Bronx, but that’s meshuga. Anyways—” He waves a bronzed hand, his Columbia University ring glinting in the bright sunlight. “That’s all over now, thank God. Sylvia and I would like to give you the money to move back to Great Neck. Let Sally finish out high school there. I’m sure you can find someplace to teach on Long Island, if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Max, but I have to finish out the year,” I surprise myself by saying. I hadn’t realized until this moment that I need to go back—at least for the next semester. “I have a contract,” I add.

  “Of course, that’s the honorable thing to do. But after that. And, of course, we’ve got a college fund for Sally. She’s a bright kid. With her art skills, she could work in advertising.”

  I bite back the urge to say, Or she could be an artist. Conceding that advertising is a worthwhile career is a big step for Max Rosenthal.

  “Is it all right if I take the semester to think about it?” I ask, smiling with as much charm as I can muster. “I have to talk to Sally.”

  “Of course, sweetheart.” He leans forward and pats my knee. “But if I know my granddaughter, she’ll be happy to be back in the vicinity of a good mall.”

  Sally does seem to enjoy being cosseted and fawned over by her grandparents. We arrive back in upstate New York with two more suitcases than we took with us. I don’t mention right away the offer of moving back to Great Neck. I’d like her to finish off the year at Arcadia with as much commitment as possible. If she knows she’s leaving I’m afraid she won’t take her classes seriously enough.

  She does, though. The new drawing teacher, Emanuel Ruiz, a young graduate of The School of Visual Arts, is rigorous, talented, and incredibly good looking. At first I think Sally’s devotion to the class is due to his looks, but soon I realize that he challenges her in ways she’s never been before. Her figure drawings transform from cartoons to lifelike portraits and she branches out into landscape, an area she’s always avoided.

  “That was a brilliant hire,” I tell Toby Potter, our new interim dean, over tea one day in March.

  “I saw his work at the SVA Student Art Show last year. We were lucky to get him. I had to tell the board they could use my salary to pay him to be able to offer enough to get him here.”

  “That was gallant of you,” I say.

  “Not really. I knew they’d be too embarrassed to cut my salary, so I demanded raises for everyone else while I was at it.”

  “Thanks for that,” I say, sipping my cup of Arcadia blend tea. “It’s come in handy.”

  I’ve used the money to enroll Sally in a summer arts program at Parsons in Manhattan, my way of making up to her the months of rural shopping deprivation. I didn’t tell her—and I don’t tell Toby Potter—that I’ve got applications in at a dozen high schools on Long Island and in New York City. I feel disloyal thinking about leaving after all he’s done to rescue the Arcadia School, but I have to do what’s best for Sally.

  Because even though Sally’s thriving in Emanuel Ruiz’s drawing class and doing well in most of her other classes, I’m afraid that the atmosphere at Arcadia is unhealthy. I feel it most at night alone in the cottage, reading through the notebooks Vera Beecher kept in her final years. Her dry accounts of students and teachers, supplies and projects, give me plenty of facts to supplement my thesis, but they’re not exactly inspiring. Although she strove to keep the school alive, her heart went out of it once Lily was gone. Late at night I sometimes go downstairs and sit in front of the fireplace, looking up at the shattered lilies on the tiled hearth. I think of how it hurts to find that the person you loved wasn’t who you thought they were and how that grief—the loss of the person you thought you loved—can be worse than death. I realize now that if Jude had lived I probably would have been furious at him for gambling all we had to start the hedge fund. We would have fought, but I like to think our marriage would have survived. But we never had a chance to find out. If Lily had lived, would Vera have forgiven her for her infidelity and for the child she had in secret? I would like to think that forgiveness would have allowed Vera to become a greater artist. Instead, she spent her life fossilized in that last moment of betrayal and anger.

  It’s a fate I want to avoid for myself.

  I try to hold on to the forgiveness I felt for Jude in the clove, but it comes and goes, mingled with regret and pain, as transient as the first signs of spring in this cold climate. I can see that Sally is struggling with the same feelings and that a great deal of her anger toward me is displaced anger toward Jude. Instead of making me feel better, though, it makes me sad that she doesn’t have a purer memory of her father.

  At least that’s how I feel until the spring art show. It’s on a day in late April full of cold sunshine that coaxes the first green buds from the sycamores and snowdrops from the forest floor. The show is held in the parlor of Briar Lodge. The student work hangs on foam board partitions, Lily Eberhardt’s painted images looking out over the watercolors and pastels. I imagine she would be proud of the school she and Vera founded. She might smile at some of the more pretentious efforts, like Tori Pratt’s portrait of a headless mannequin standing in front of a rain-slicked window entitled Soliloquy in Blue, but I think she’d laugh at Hannah Weiss’s portrait of herself as the evil stepmother from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  “Last semester, Ms. Drake assigned us two self-portraits,” Hannah explains to me when I compliment her on the painting. “One showing how others see us, and one of how we see ourselves.”

  “And this one is how other people see you?” I asked.

  “That’s what I thought at first, because I thought my mother and stepfather saw me as selfish and ugly because I’m not patient enough with my little brothers. But then I realized it was really how I saw myself. This one is how I think they see me.” She points to the next painting on the wall. It’s a brightly colored cartoon of herself as Snow White surrounded by birds and forest creatures. After a minute I realize that all the characters in the picture—the deer, the rabbits, the robins and bluebirds—all have Hannah’s features.

  “I like that,” I tell Hannah, laughing, “but I’d rather you saw yourself as Snow White than as a witch.”

  “Oh no,” Hannah cries. “The witch is much, much cooler. Besides, Ms. Drake said not to be surprised if you kept changing your mind about which portrait is which. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between how you see yourself and how you think other people see you.”

  Maybe that was Shelley’s problem, I think, leaving Hannah to look at the rest of the show. She worried so much that people would see her as the child of a crazy woman that she became crazy. I have to admit, though, that her assignment produced some interesting results. Clyde’s two portraits show him as a pasty computer geek eating Twinkies in the glow of a video game and then as Mr. Spock from the Star Trek series. The headless mannequin of Tori Pratt’s painting is her “how other people see me.” Her “how I see myself” is the same setting without the mannequin, just a pile of discarded clothes lying on the floor. Chloe has done a single painting of herself looking into a mirror. The twin images are identical except that the one in the mirror has aged about fifty years. I can’t blame Chloe for feeling older than she looks
after the year she’s been through.

  I’m almost afraid to look at Sally’s painting. This is the project, I surmise, that she’s been hiding from me all year long. Is there something about how she sees herself that she thinks will upset me?

  I see her standing in front of her paintings laughing at something with Haruko. Their heads block Sally’s portraits as I approach, but then Sally moves and I see one of them. It’s Sally standing alone in a desolate landscape underneath a lowering sky. She looks sad and pathetic and lonely. My heart contracts at the thought that this is how she sees herself. But then, when I get closer to the painting, I see that the label beneath it reads: HOW OTHER PEOPLE SEE ME—ALONE. I look to the right at its companion piece. It’s a group picture of Sally flanked by Jude and me. We both have our arms around Sally, but my face is level with hers, while Jude’s floats a little above and behind us. It’s from a photograph that Jude took of us on a trip to Florida a few years ago. He’d set up his camera with a timer and rushed to get into the shot. As a result, he had come out blurry in the photograph—and spectral in this painted version, as if his ghost were watching over Sally and me. Eyes blurring, I look down at the title of the painting: HOW I SEE MYSELF—LOVED.

  “Do you like it?” Sally asks. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “I love it,” I tell her, slipping my arm around her waist. For once she doesn’t pull away at a public display of affection. She leans in and rests her head lightly on my shoulder for just a moment but long enough to make me feel as loved as the woman in that painting—secure in the embrace of her family.

  That feeling of being loved makes me feel strong enough to do something I’ve been putting off. A few days after the art show I go into town to see Callum Reade. I go to the station because I’m afraid that if I meet him anywhere else I’ll fall straight into his arms—and I can’t do that. I think he must recognize my reasoning when he looks up from his desk and sees me standing in his doorway. The gladness in his eyes barely reaches his mouth before he reins it in.