See No Evil

by B. A. Shapiro

  He stood up and crossed his arms in a disarmingly adult gesture. “I’m not going to school,” he said, looking her straight in the eye. “It’s stupid and I hate it.”

  Lauren closed her eyes for a moment, wanting more than anything to just say, “Okay, we’ll both play hooky and stay home and watch videos.” But even if her conscience would have allowed it, she couldn’t say it today. Today she was meeting with Mrs. Baker at nine. Today she was studying up on the paranormal. Today she was going to read Deborah’s chronicle.

  “I’ll help you pick out your clothes,” she said calmly, standing up and dropping her coffee cup in the sink. “Do you want to wear your Cambridge Camp sweatshirt or the Red Sox one Daddy got you?”

  “I’m not going to school.”

  Lauren turned him toward his bedroom. “No matter what you do, you still have to get dressed. Let’s go into your room and—” Lauren was cut off by the ringing of the telephone. “Now,” she said to Drew as she picked up the receiver.

  It was Jackie. Her voice was breathless and charged with excitement. “I’m so glad you’re still there. I’ve been up all night reading this chronicle—I just couldn’t bear to stop. It’s unbelievable. Completely enthralling. Magnificent! I can’t wait for you to read it. Although I sure hope Deborah meant what she said about just reenacting the Immortalis.”

  “Why? What’s the deal with the Immortalis?”

  “Nothing, if you don’t mind—”

  “Hold on a sec, Jack.” Lauren turned to Drew, who hadn’t moved. “Scott will be here in fifteen minutes. You go do your stuff right now or no TV tonight.” Drew and his friend Scott had been walking to school together since the beginning of the year, both very proud of the new independence their mothers had reluctantly bestowed upon them.

  Drew looked down at his foot, turned his ankle a few times, then looked back up at her. “I don’t care about TV.”

  “If Scott gets here and you’re not ready, I’m going to send him off and I’ll walk you to school myself,” Lauren said in her don’t mess with me voice. When Drew sauntered slowly out of the room, Lauren sighed and returned to the phone. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m dealing with the ‘terrible sevens’ here—and let me tell you, sevens have got it all over on twos.”

  “Listen, Lauren, you’ve got to come over here earlier than we planned. I’ve found something—something really big—and I don’t know what to do with it.”

  Lauren rolled her eyes heavenward. She could just imagine what Jackie’s “really big” something was. But before she could reply, she heard the sound of Rocky and Bullwinkle blast from the other room.

  “Hold on,” she said again and went tearing out of the kitchen.

  When she got to the living room she found Drew, still in his pajamas, standing defiantly in front of the booming TV set. “Just what do you think you’re doing, young man?” she demanded, grabbing the remote control and clicking the television off. “I’ve had enough of your nonsense. No TV tonight—and if you don’t get into your bedroom right now, that television is off for the whole weekend.”

  “Not the whole weekend,” Drew wailed. “That’s not fair.”

  “What’s not fair is the way you’re acting,” Lauren said. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pointed him toward his bedroom. “Now get!”

  Back in the kitchen, Lauren picked up the phone again. “I’m sorry, Jack, but I’ve got to run. How about I cut my time at the library short and come over earlier in the afternoon?” Before Jackie could answer, Lauren dropped the phone and leaned out into the hallway. “Are you dressed yet?”

  “—not what you think,” Jackie was saying when Lauren returned. “It’s bad. Really bad. I’m going to call Deborah as soon as I get off the phone with you.” Jackie hesitated. “I was reading this section on religion in Colonial life, and it struck me that something wasn’t quite right. It’s pre-Phipps, yet it posits a much more reduced role for theology than I’ve ever seen before—”

  “Mom!” Drew cried. “Someone stole my Red Sox sweatshirt!”

  “I’ve got to run,” Lauren interrupted. “I’ll be there by mid-afternoon.” She hung up the phone and headed down the hall, wondering how she was going to make it through the day.

  Lauren had an image of herself as barely out of childhood, a mere youngster playing grownup, and often wondered why people didn’t act more surprised that she was the mother of a seven-year-old. After all, she wore jeans and sweatshirts and listened to the “in” rock-and-roll station. But when Lauren walked into Mrs. Baker’s second-grade classroom, she was forced to acknowledge that she had been out of elementary school for a long time.

  The room was a whirlwind of activity as clusters of children worked at different “learning stations”: Three girls were sprawled on the floor reading a single book, a group of boys was throwing various sized metal weights into the pan of a beam-balance scale, Drew and Scott were pouring sand all over each other’s hands.

  Although Mrs. Baker had explained the school’s educational philosophy at Parent’s Night—as had Ms. Anderson in the first grade—Lauren had difficulty believing children could learn amidst what appeared to be unsupervised chaos. Not that she had such fond memories of being one of the silent, prim children doing rote arithmetic drills in her own second-grade classroom, but somehow she thought there had to be a middle ground.

  “Mrs. Freeman,” Mrs. Baker called cheerfully, turning from two children at a computer. “As soon as I get Seth and Rachel outfitted for their trip to Oregon, I’ll be right with you.”

  Lauren nodded and waited by the door. Drew shot her a look that clearly told her she was not to approach him, and a few of the other children glanced at her curiously. But most of the class appeared oblivious to her presence, obviously comfortable with parents walking in and out of the classroom—another change since Lauren’s school days.

  “Come,” Mrs. Baker said, touching her arm. “Let’s go to the cafeteria—there’ll be no one there at this hour. The aide will watch the class.”

  As they walked down the hallway lined with colorful self-portraits and maps of New England, Mrs. Baker—Ellen, she had told Lauren to call her—chatted about what an interesting mix of children there was in the class this year and how much she was enjoying getting to know them all. But when they were seated at a table at the far end of the cafeteria, Ellen grew serious. She folded her hands and said, “I’m concerned about Drew. He’s a very bright boy, and happy much of the time, but there are occasions, more and more lately, when nothing seems to interest him. He withdraws from me, from the other children. He seems so sad.…” She let her words trail off and watched Lauren intently.

  “How, how often has this been happening?” Lauren asked, trying to get the words out from around the huge lump in her throat.

  “It was only periodic during September. But there’s been a gradual increase this month, and now I’d say, oh, at least three or four afternoons a week.”

  Lauren looked at the mural of happy primary-colored children riding trains and planes on the wall across from her. What were she and Todd doing to the poor little guy? How could they have thought he’d be capable of calmly accepting the dissolution of his family, of the only world he had ever known? “You know his father and I are getting divorced?” she asked softly.

  The teacher’s gaze was compassionate. “That’s why I was so concerned about the incident with the family portrait. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  Lauren took a deep breath. “What exactly happened?”

  “The assignment was to draw a picture of your family. As you know, we allow many opportunities to complete an assignment, but after three days, when almost all the other children had finished theirs, Drew still hadn’t begun.” Ellen ran her fingers through her fashionably short hair. “It was partly my fault. I wasn’t thinking—if I had been, I’d have let the whole thing slide—but instead I told him he had to have it done or he’d lose afternoon recess. The next thing I knew, Kisha Liebhaber,
the girl who sits next to him, was crying hysterically. Apparently unprovoked, Drew grabbed Kisha’s painting from her desk and ripped it in half.”

  Lauren dosed her eyes against the pain. “I suppose Kisha’s family is happily intact.”

  Ellen reached over and touched Lauren’s hand. “Things happen to kids. Friends move away. Grandparents die. Marriages break up. I simply want to help Drew adapt to the situation.”

  Lauren opened her eyes and smiled at the teacher through the tears in her eyes. “Thanks.”

  “Which is why I’m suggesting you give him lots of TLC at home and that you and your husband—and Drew too—talk with Dr. Berg, tike school psychologist.”

  “Psychologist?” Lauren demanded. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

  “Not at all,” Ellen said calmly. “Drew’s behavior is a cry for help—and I think we should give it to him.”

  Zipping her parka up to her neck and throwing her backpack over her shoulder, Lauren walked slowly down the wide library steps and turned onto Cambridge Street. She couldn’t remember an October so wintery. It must be well below freezing, and the gathering clouds foretold an early dusk and possibly snow. Raising her eyes to the darkening sky, she saw the day was working itself toward evening. Where had the hours gone? she wondered and then thought back on her meeting with Ellen Baker. Were Jackie and Todd right? Was she using her work to avoid confronting the problems with Drew?

  Right now Drew was at Aunt Beatrice’s, getting all the TLC he could stand from his “on-site grandparent.” Both her parents and Todd’s lived in Florida. Friday nights were “Aunt Beatrice night” and had been since Drew was an infant, when she and Todd had lived for those few precious hours of privacy each week. Lately, Lauren had taken to spending the early hours of Friday evening wandering around her empty apartment, watching the news—and then the clock—until it was time to pick up Drew.

  At least she had somewhere to go tonight, Lauren thought as she sidestepped a gaggle of undergraduates giggling their way to the square. She jammed her hands in her pockets and thought of her own undergraduate Friday night sprees in the days before Drew and divorce and dissertation. At least she had Jackie. For without Jackie, Lauren knew this difficult time in her life would be almost unbearable.

  She thought of how pleased Jackie would be with the research she had done. She had skimmed Carl Jung’s discussion of the collective unconscious and Ian Stevenson’s anthropological study of children who remembered previous lives. And she had found herself strangely intrigued by an odd little book by Brian Weiss, a well-known psychiatrist, that described his encounters with “spirit entities” who controlled reincarnation and revealed to him the secrets of immortality. She wondered if Dr. Weiss’s entities were anything like Deborah Sewall’s sages.

  Walking briskly through the university’s nether-lands—where the outer reaches of campus pushed their tentacles into an old residential area of Cambridge—Lauren thought of Jackie’s excitement on the phone that morning. Maybe Jackie had found something that would make it all click, that elusive concept or piece of information that would hold their book together, giving it coherence and shape.

  But as she turned the corner onto Trowbridge Street, Lauren remembered the tension underlying Jackie’s voice. “Not what you think,” Jackie had said. “It’s bad. Really bad.” The sky darkened and the street lights switched on in a vain attempt to fend off the gathering gloom. Suddenly, Lauren was filled with a premonition: Jackie had found something that invalidated their book. Lauren just knew it.

  Hurrying up the steps, she banged the wrought iron door knocker against the grimacing countenance of a bearded Colonial farmer—the face of the stingy man who had built the house, Jackie liked to say, the one who made the ceilings too low and the stairs so steep and narrow. But Lauren heard no motion inside. Standing on her toes, she tried to see through the mottled bull’s-eye glass of the two small windows in the door. But it was useless.

  Damn, she thought, Jackie must have given up on her and gone out. It was her own fault for procrastinating. She thought about using the spare key in the mailbox, but she decided against it and knocked again. Then, in a last futile gesture, she pressed the door latch. To her surprise the door swung inward, creaking slightly on the old hinges.

  “Jackie?” Lauren said, sticking her head into the entryway. A lone lamp on the dining room table cast a circle of light over Jackie’s cluttered desk, and a small fire licked at the last remnants of a log in the living room fireplace, but the house had an abandoned feel.

  “Jack?” she called again, her voice echoing through the quiet rooms. Thinking she heard the back door closing, Lauren stepped tentatively forward, drawn into the shadowy house by a sense of unease—followed by a sudden and gripping fear.

  Groping for a light switch, Lauren walked cautiously toward the dining room. “It’s me. Are you—” Her words were cut off as she found the switch. As soon as light flooded the room, Lauren saw Jackie. She was sprawled on the floor, her broken eyeglasses just beyond her outstretched arm and the step stool toppled at her feet. Lauren stood frozen in the open doorway, unable to scream, unable to move, as she tried to understand what she was seeing.

  There was blood on the table leg and blood on Jackie’s forehead. But worst of all, Jackie’s chin was pulled sideways, twisting her neck into an impossible position.

  Six

  LAUREN DROPPED DOWN NEXT TO JACKIE’S STILL BODY and grabbed her hand. The bones of Jackie’s wrist felt so small and fragile that Lauren feared they would break under her clumsy probing. Lauren’s heart pounded and the blood was rushing so loudly in her ears that it drowned the street noise outside. Please, Lauren said to herself, or to the God she didn’t really believe was listening. Please. But she felt nothing under her trembling fingers. Jackie’s hand lay in hers, pale and limp and tiny.

  Then she felt it: a faint flicker that reminded her of Peter Pan’s dying Tinker Bell. Clap your hands, she thought idiotically. Clap your hands. Lauren pushed her finger more forcefully to the spot below Jackie’s thumb. Yes. There was a pulse. But she didn’t appear to be breathing. It was clear Jackie needed medical help. And fast.

  Lauren leapt up and then froze, her mind numb. What to do first? Frantically trying to remember the first aid course she had taken as a Girl Scout thirty years earlier, she looked down at her friend’s frighteningly white face. There didn’t seem to be much blood, so a tourniquet wasn’t necessary. Don’t touch her, they always said. Call the police and cover her with a blanket. Police, she thought, still frozen in place. Phone.

  Launching herself toward the kitchen, Lauren skidded through the pantry and grabbed the phone from the wall next to the sink. She punched 911. Waiting through the two longest rings of her lifetime, Lauren stared out the window. For a moment, she thought she saw a shadow slip through the hedges that divided Jackie’s backyard from her neighbor’s. “Come quickly!” she screamed into the phone when a crisp, tinny voice answered. “I think my friend’s dying. We need help right away!”

  “Please try and take it easy,” the voice said calmly. “Now tell me where you’re located.”

  “I-I …” Lauren stuttered, her mind suddenly blank. “Cambridge,” she finally said.

  “What street in Cambridge?”

  The cool competence of the operator cleared Lauren’s head. “Trowbridge,” she cried triumphantly. “Trowbridge Street!”

  “And the house number?”

  “Just come,” she pleaded. “I don’t know the number. I’ll meet you in the street.”

  “Do you see any mail?”

  “Mail?” Lauren was completely baffled.

  “For the address. Look around for some bills or letters—they’ll have the street address and apartment number.”

  Lauren frantically scanned the kitchen. A teacup sat in the sink. Herbs grew from dozens of jumbled pots on the windowsill. An assortment of neatly labeled keys hung from the wall. But she saw no mail. Then she looked down. Directly beneath the ph
one was a wicker basket filled with unopened envelopes. Lauren grabbed a fistful. “Forty-six,” she read off the phone bill. “Forty-six.”

  “Is there an apartment number?”

  “No,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “There’s nothing but us. Please send someone right away.”

  There was a moment of silence and then the tinny voice returned. “The ambulance has been dispatched,” he said with composed professionalism. “Now, I need you to tell me the exact nature of the problem so the paramedics can be prepared.”

  Lauren took a deep breath and forced herself to calmness. She needed to stay in control. Jackie’s life depended on it. “She appears to have fallen. There isn’t much blood, but her neck is twisted funny.”

  “Is there a pulse?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice shaky. “But I don’t think she’s breathing—and she’s awfully pale.”

  “Now what I want you to do is go to the front door and open it,” the operator instructed. “Turn on the outside light and wait for the ambulance. They should be there in a couple of minutes—the fire department’s right down the street. You may be able to hear the sirens already. Please wait outside and don’t try to move her.”

  “Okay,” Lauren said, letting her breath out in a rush. “Thank you.”

  “You did good,” the voice said, suddenly turning human. “I hope your friend’s all right.”

  Lauren hung up the phone and ran to the front door. She found the switch for the outside lights and, although she hated to leave Jackie alone in the house, she raced down the porch stairs. The house was only a few feet from the sidewalk, and by the time she reached the street, she could hear the approaching sirens. When the ambulance made the tight turn from Cambridge onto Trowbridge, Lauren stood in the middle of the road and waved it down.

  The vehicle screeched to a stop and a paramedic jumped out. “Where is she?” the woman asked.

  Lauren pointed to the house as the driver climbed down. She motioned them to follow her. As soon as they saw Jackie and the narrowness of the small rooms, they told Lauren to go sit in the kitchen.