An Educated Death (22 page)

At last, burdened like a packhorse and ready to collapse, I found the perfect sweater for Sonia—an oversized pink cashmere in an argyle pattern of pale gray, pink, and cream. It was on sale for a mere $225, more than I wanted to spend on the woman in a lifetime, but I was tired of looking and caring and thinking about it. At least, for that price, they were willing to wrap it for free. The clerk even filled out a tag which gaily urged her to have the merriest of holidays.

As she attached the tag to the package, the clerk's weary eyes took in my bundles and bags and my own weary face. "May I make a suggestion?" she asked. I nodded glumly. "A few years ago, I decided to give myself a Christmas present every year. That way I can always be sure I get something I really want." I nodded again, more hesitantly. I don't like people who try to sell me things. "Well, anyway..." She was rushing now, afraid she'd offended me. "There's this sweater that would be really beautiful on you." She bent down so that her disembodied voice was rising from behind the counter. "I put it away for my daughter, but it would be better on you. It's the last one...."

She opened a box and spread the sweater out on the counter. It was an oversized tunic style with a rolled turtle neck. Soft, soft mohair, in wide stripes ranging from brilliant turquoise to a deep forest green. "Take it," she urged. "It was made for you." It was and I did. She even wrapped it and affixed another tag wishing me a happy holiday.

The overwhelming proximity of so many holiday reminders forced me to think about my own holiday plans or lack of them. Tonight when I talked to Andre I'd see what he wanted to do. I didn't expect it was to spend Christmas with my family. What I didn't know was whether he was planning to spend it with me. He had to, didn't he? We lived together. Sort of.

Despite a high level of carbon monoxide from all the cars prowling around looking for parking spaces, the outside air felt deliciously good after being inside. I trudged along through the slush, trying not to get run down or backed over, stowed my purchases in the trunk, and headed on up the highway. Eric Clapton proved to be a good antidote to saccharine Christmas carols and by the time I got home, I was in a pretty good mood.

Except, of course, that it wasn't home anymore. Home was in Maine, with Andre, at least if home is where the heart is. If home is wherever you spend your time, then it was a toss-up between my office and my car. If home was where you kept your clothes, then my home was a suitcase. My good mood vanished, leaving me feeling depressed and homeless and confused.

It didn't help that, despite the cleaning company's heroic ministrations, my beloved condo looked bare and battered. Geoff, from the cleaning crew, had left a succinct message on the counter. Rugs and drapes had been taken away for cleaning; one chair had gone to be recovered. Several things were too damaged to be repaired. I called down a thousand curses on the head of Bobby's so-called friend, the prick, and picked up the receiver to check my voice mail.

 

 

 

Chapter 11

 

According to the pleasant canned voice on our office voice mail, a lot of people had tried to reach out and touch me. There was a message from Dorrie, saying that she'd spoken with Kathy Donahue who had reported I was the one who'd been rude and impossible, but Dorrie felt Kathy was behaving strangely and was looking into it. She asked me to stop by in the morning before I started interviewing. Next was a message from Rocky Miller asking if I'd give him a call at my convenience. Lori Leonard had called to say she'd have the list of Curt's people ready for me in the morning. Suzanne had called to remind me that we were all supposed to go out for dinner on Tuesday in lieu of an office Christmas party and I was supposed to get gifts for Sarah and Bobby.

"Yes, yes, I know all that," I said impatiently, realizing that during my blitz at the mall I'd forgotten to get something for Sarah. Bobby was getting a lovely big bowl to support his adventures into creative pasta. I supposed Sarah wouldn't be satisfied if I told her her present was that I was getting the copier replaced for the second time this year. I suspected she took a secret pleasure in yelling at the repair man. It kept her from biting her husband's head off.

The next call was from Andre and I must have been feeling very lonely because despite the awkwardness of the night before, I listened to it twice. He told me that he expected to be working much of the night—the holiday season brings out people's homicidal tendencies—but to please call him at work because he missed me. It was nice to hear his voice. Sitting in the wreck of my lovely condo, I suddenly missed him terribly.

The last message was from my late husband's friend Larry, who looks after me on David's behalf by calling a few times a year and leaving jokes on my machine. I don't think I've spoken to him more than once since David died, he's kind of weird and shy, but the jokes are nice.

Tonight's joke was, when a man is making love to a prostitute, his mistress, and his wife, what is each woman thinking? Well, the prostitute is thinking
Faster, faster,
the mistress is thinking
More, more!
and the wife, noticing that the ceiling needs paint, is thinking
Beige. Maybe I'll paint it beige.

There was a call from my mother that I wasn't ready to return. Otherwise, the world had left me in peace. I kicked off my shoes, longing for bourbon and popcorn, but the cupboards were bare. I settled down on my lovely leather couch for some mindless television. I couldn't find the remote and after ten minutes of fruitless searching, I concluded that the rat must have taken it. Channel surfing is no fun if you have to stand right beside the set to do it, so I settled for a colorized Rosie and Charlie heading down river on
The African Queen.
I had no choice but to settle on Bogart and Hepburn. Even though I despised colorizing, I was definitely in the mood for a bit of love triumphing through adversity.

At least the little prick hadn't stolen my phone. Couldn't. It lived in my purse. I settled into the soft leather, remembering the first time Andre and I had tried it out, and dialed the number he'd left. No deep voice. No chance to flirt or even to tell him how much I missed him. Just a brusque, businesslike fellow who offered to take a message. Settling for second-hand romance, I remained glued to the screen until Charlie and Rosie were married and the
Louisa
blown up.

But when I turned off the TV and the silence and emptiness of the place enveloped me, Laney Taggert took over my head, foreshadowing another night of troubling dreams. Something I'd read recently urged people who had trouble sleeping to eat potatoes as their evening snack because they helped the body produce tryptophans or some chemical that helped induce sleep, but it was cold and late and the nearest grocery store was five miles away. I was too tired to drive ten miles for a damned potato, even if it would help me sleep. Maybe tomorrow I would lay in a supply of health-giving potatoes and other good things, like leafy green vegetables and foods rich in fiber.

Healthy eating is not much fun. The way things are going, soon we'll all be breakfasting on an amorphous bowl of multi-grain somethings with no more than two tablespoons of blue milk from free-range cows, lunching on shaved carrots, sweet potatoes, and cruciferous vegetables with a splash of nutritionist-approved oils, unless we're supposed to rub the oils on our skins while we're eating. For afternoon snack it will be organic potatoes grown in soils high in zinc and magnesium and at dinner a minuscule portion of fish caught off Greenland where the waters aren't full of toxic chemicals, napped with a sauce of pureed fennel and kohlrabi, no salt, please, and some kasha and lentil salad with enough vegetables to be sure we've gotten our five servings, plus maybe a compote of dried prunes and other fruits to promote regularity unless we've been careful to ingest sufficient roughage in other ways. Just thinking about healthy food was enough to put me in a deep depression.

I shrouded myself in a voluminous flannel nightgown and fell into bed, which some kind person on Geoff's team had been kind enough to make. I was ready to fall into Morpheus's arms but not even potato power could have protected me from the workings of an agitated mind. My dreams were restless again. I spent the night racing through damp, fog-shrouded woods on the Bucksport campus, pursued by unseen predators, carrying Laney's bright nylon duffle bag. Ahead of me, chattering gaily, Rick McTeague the would-be novelist crashed his way through the underbrush, speculating endlessly on who might be chasing us and how they might intend to do away with us. His imaginings were vivid, graphic, and sick, and I couldn't get him out of my mind. Periodically, the hulking lout from buildings and grounds would grab me and shake me. I succeeded in drowning Rick McTeague and woke up with a dull and fuzzy head from a dream in which Denzel Ellis-Jackson was swimming in the icy pond while a woman in a tight sequined dress gyrated on the shore to Aretha Franklin's "Respect."

I put on my robe and went into the living room. It was a clear night and moonlight glinted off the snow and lay like silver frosting on the water. The world looked beautiful but it could be an ugly place. Look what happened to Laney Taggert. Even if my audit showed that generally those responsible crossed their
t's and dotted their i's, I couldn't shake the feeling that everyone had failed Laney, that they hadn't been listening. And that one of them had taken advantage of her in a forbidden way.

The phone rang. Andre. "Thea," he said, "I'm sorry to wake you. I couldn't wait...."

I wanted to crawl into the phone and be transported across all those lonely miles. "It's okay. I was awake. Missing you..."

He made a small humming sound of agreement. "When are you coming home?"

"Friday, I hope. I hope. I hope. This thing at Bucksport is complicated and I have to talk to everyone before they break for Christmas... and then Denzel's gone and gotten himself into a scrape...."

"Denzel?" he said sharply.

"I told you about it. The King School. Sexual harassment—"

"He's the guy you think is so good-looking?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Why don't you let Suzanne handle it?"

"We're all handling it. Besides, she's pretty overwhelmed with the baby and all."

"I thought we were supposed to be living together."

I made a frustrated gesture to the empty room. I wasn't the one who had avoided him much of the past two weeks. "Yeah, so did I. But I was home last night, and you weren't, and I called home tonight, and you weren't there...." But this wasn't the conversation I wanted to have. "I miss you, too," I said. "You at work?"

"Yeah. You know how it is. The holiday season. All that pressure and expectation. People go snap and kill each other...."

"I know what you mean. My mother keeps calling and asking if I'm coming for Christmas. No... if
we're
coming for Christmas."

"My mother keeps asking the same thing."

"And?"

"I haven't called her back. What are we doing?"

There were loud voices behind him, yelling. People always seemed to be yelling around him. I wondered how he stood it. At least the people I deal with mostly whine. "Andre?" No answer.

I heard him speaking to someone and then he was back. "I don't believe this, Thea. Guy just used the first barrel of his shotgun on the Christmas tree and threatened to use the second on his wife. I'll call you as soon as I can."

I went cold all over and started shivering. Just as he wanted Suzanne to do the work so I could come home, I wanted someone else to go after the bozo with the gun so I'd have someone to come home to. "Andre... please... be careful. Very, very careful. Call me as soon... as soon as you can."

"You'd better believe it."

After that I dozed a bit, in a restless kind of pre-exam anxiety. I started my day far too early, feeling as if I'd been beaten about the head and shoulders and stuffed into a plastic bag.

The person most likely to succeed in curing plastic-bag syndrome was standing at the front of the aerobics studio in an adorable red-and-green holiday unitard, his smile as bright as the Christmas star. He wished me a cheerful good morning as I skulked off to my usual place in the corner. I was pleased to see I wasn't the only person in the room who wasn't cheerful in the morning. Across the room there was a guy who looked like he'd already dined on prunes and lemons and the woman behind me kept making little low moaning sounds as we went through the warm-up. An hour later, weak-kneed and spit-shined, I was disgorged from the mouth of the health club like Jonah from the whale, my faith restored, ready to go into the world and do good work.

I found Dorrie at her desk, makeup flawless and every hair in place, signing Christmas cards. She looked up and smiled. "Want some coffee? I started some a few minutes ago. It ought to be ready." Over coffee, she reviewed my progress. "I told Rocky you had some questions. He said he'd call you."

"He did. Last night. I had a meeting and then I went shopping."

"This year I'm doing it all from catalogues," she said. "And having everything wrapped and sent. I'm not setting foot in a store. Except bookstores. I can't stay out of bookstores. Luckily they've given me a house here with hundreds of feet of shelf space. I'm filling it as fast as I can. Oh, speaking of books, I ran into Bill Donahue last night coming out of the library. I asked him about Kathy. He said her mother has been very sick and Kathy has been distracted by that. He promised to talk with her, so maybe tomorrow you can speak with her again and find her more cooperative."