Crushed (23 page)

Chapter 78

An Unexpected Visitor

In the front room of Clyde's apartment, Clyde's mother was hooked up to an intravenous machine that dripped morphine. She slept on one side of the hospital bed. Clyde and his father sat nearby, playing cards on an end table.

It was Sunday afternoon, the woman from the hospice was away, and Clyde and his father were playing casino. His father laid an eight on a two, said, “Tens,” and gave Clyde the evil eye. “Better cover that, señor, or I'm going home with the big casino.”

Clyde was used to his father's bluffing tactics. “Yeah, you will,” he said, and was in the process of matching a jack when the doorbell rang. He got up, peered through the peephole— it was a girl—and then opened the door.

Standing before him was Audrey Reed.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

There was an awkward silence, and she said, “Could I talk to you for a second?”

This was different from school, and it was different from a note. Clyde glanced past her down the dimly lit hall. “There're some chairs down there,” he said, though when they got to the communal sitting area, they didn't sit. They stood staring through the tall windows toward the park. Finally Audrey said, “I just wanted to apologize. For what I said to Theo to get you . . .”

“Pulverized?” Clyde said.

She smiled weakly. “Yeah.” A pause. “And I also wanted to thank you for what you did on Friday with Theo.”

Clyde shrugged. “It's okay.”

“It was like a nightmare I wasn't going to wake up from.” Clyde nodded, and after a short silence Audrey said, “I guess Theo broke the vase, huh?”

“No,” Clyde said. “He tossed it up in the air, I caught it, and he walked off saying ‘Merry Christmas.' . . .” Clyde's voice trailed off.

Audrey looked down, then back up. “For a while I thought you were one of the bad guys. And I thought Wickham Hill was one of the . . .”

“Yeah, well, sometimes the label's kind of hard to read,” Clyde said, and suddenly realized he was not uncomfortable. He wasn't blushing or croaking out words or anything else.

“I'm sorry about your mom,” Audrey said.

Clyde shrugged. Then, when there didn't seem to be anything else to say, he said, “You want to come in?”

Audrey Reed seemed pleased with the invitation. “Would it be okay? With your mom . . .”

“She's sleeping. Then, when the morphine wears off, she'll wake up and feel okay for a little bit.” He didn't mention that the pain would come back soon after and she would need more morphine, which would put her out again.

Chapter 79

“Happy to Meet You”

Clyde pushed open the apartment door, which he'd left ajar, and Audrey followed him down a short corridor that opened into the front room. There was a hospital bed there. It seemed huge, but Audrey wondered if it didn't seem that way because of the smallness of the woman sleeping in it.

She was olive-skinned, with deeply sunken eyes and short gray-black hair. Audrey could see from her features that before the illness she'd been pretty. A card game in progress lay on a little table nearby.

“Clyde?” a voice called.

“In here, Dad.”

A moment later, the kitchen door swung open and a middle-aged man who looked like a silver-haired Clyde came walking out with two plates containing sandwiches. Seeing Audrey, he looked surprised. He glanced at Clyde, then smiled at Audrey. “I don't know you,” he said, “but how do you feel about chicken salad?”

Audrey laughed, then worried that her laugh would wake Clyde's mother. “I love chicken salad,” she whispered, looking at the plates Clyde's father was holding. Two plates, two sandwiches. “But I don't want to take yours,” she said.

Clyde's father said there was plenty more where this came from. Then he said, “I'm Lloyd Mumsford. I'm happy to meet you.”

Audrey smiled. “I'm Audrey Reed.”

Clyde's father took this in, said, “Ah,” and then turned to Clyde.

“See that?” Clyde said, grinning. “That's a knowing look he's giving me. That's because I looked your name up once on one of his programs.”

Clyde's father nodded, then said, “Back soon with more grub,” and disappeared into the kitchen.

Audrey's eyes moved from the kitchen door to Clyde. “Why did you look me up?” Audrey said.

“Idle curiosity. I wanted to know where you lived.”

“So you
could
have been the Yellow Man.”

“I just looked at addresses. Except for Wickham. And I didn't tell anybody about him except you.”

Audrey remembered the scooter passing by some time ago. “Did you ride by my house on your Vespa?”

He grinned, and didn't seem at all embarrassed. “Maybe.”

“More than once?” she said.

“Possibly.” He laughed. “Hey, it's a nice house.”

“Was,” Audrey said. “We lost that house.” She was surprised how easy it was to say this to Clyde.

Clyde was quiet, and his father swung through the door carrying a tray and saying, “Okay, here we go. Chicken-salad sandwiches all around.”

So Audrey ate a sandwich (it was scrumptious) and finished Clyde's father's hand in casino while he went out to the market. She and Clyde played a few more hands—it was fun when she won, but it was even fun when she lost, too—and then Clyde said he was still hungry. “I make a mean banana split,” he said, and Audrey, grinning back at him, said she loved mean banana splits.

It was while Clyde was in the kitchen that Audrey noticed the blue vase standing alone on a simple table in front of the picture window overlooking the park. There were three pink tulips in the vase, and the composition in front of the white window seemed like something from an Asian painting.

Audrey walked over and inspected the vase (it really was beautiful), and then stared out at the park, its bare trees and rock outcroppings and iron benches stark against the brown-and-yellow grounds. Audrey thought of Wickham and felt a deep, almost flu-like pain. She heard the sounds Clyde was making in the kitchen, clinking silverware against glass, squirting whipped cream, and she felt that the pain might go away. Oggy was back, and Clyde had forgiven her. That was something.

She heard a small voice say, “Hello?”

Audrey turned, and Clyde's mother gave her a weak smile. Her eyelids were half closed. Her voice was stretched out, unearthly. “You're real,” she said. Her eyelids closed, and after a long second opened again. “I thought you were an angel.”

Chapter 80

Resilience

On the first Tuesday afternoon following vacation, Mrs. Leacock was sitting alone at her desk when Audrey walked in to do her makeup essay. Mrs. Leacock had returned to school the day before, looking the same, it seemed to Audrey—the same striped sweater set, the same mahogany lipstick— except thinner. She stood and walked with a wooden erect-ness, and during classes yesterday and today, Audrey hadn't seen even the beginning of a smile.

When Audrey entered the room, Mrs. Leacock nodded but didn't smile. She glanced at Audrey's note cards, handed her a blank blue essay book, and gestured toward the classroom's empty desks.

“Any of the front ones is fine,” she said, and went back to grading papers.

The writing proceeded smoothly, except for the reminders of Mrs. Leacock's strangely leaden presence—a drawer opening and closing, some papers shuffled, a pen uncapped. It made Audrey anxious to finish, that and the fact her car was in the shop, which meant she'd have a long walk home when she was done.

Half an hour passed, and Audrey was nearly done with her essay when the classroom door opened and Brian walked in. He didn't acknowledge Audrey, but he didn't seem surprised that she was there, either. He walked straight toward Mrs. Leacock, who was regarding him with a doubtful expression.

“Do I know you?” she said.

Brian shook his head. His big hands dangled. “Not really.”

“Then why are you here?”

Brian breathed deeply in and out. “To apologize.”

Mrs. Leacock cocked her head slightly and waited.

“I'm the one who wrote
The Yellow Paper.
”

If Mrs. Leacock was surprised by this announcement, she didn't show it. “Yes, and?”

“And I realized what I did wasn't as funny as I thought.”

Mrs. Leacock regarded him for a second or two. “What brought you to this realization?”

It took Brian a second to get started. “Well,” he said, “I had it worked out in my mind that it wasn't so bad, that it kind of evened the score or something, but the more I thought about what I'd written about your husband, the worse I felt, and I knew I had to do something, and so . . .”

Mrs. Leacock waited. Her face was white and impassive, and her twirling of the gold ring on her left hand seemed unconscious. When Brian didn't finish the sentence, Mrs. Leacock looked at him coldly. “And so here you are.”

Brian nodded.

“And you're willing to suffer the consequences?”

Brian looked down at the floor and nodded again.

“Because otherwise one could argue that this little exercise is more for your good health than mine.”

“Understood,” Brian said. To Audrey, he seemed at this moment suddenly adult.

In the stillness of the room, Mrs. Leacock looked at Brian for a few seconds before saying, “Anything else?”

Brian shook his head no, and Mrs. Leacock said that he could leave. As he turned to go, Brian let his glance meet Audrey's for just a second, and then she went back to writing. Brian shut the door gently behind him.

For a few minutes there was a heavy silence in the room; then Mrs. Leacock rose. Her shoes clicking on the linoleum floor, she walked to the same window where she'd written the words
Shame on you.

“Students never think their teachers are human,” she said, turning around.

Audrey didn't know how to respond to this.

There was another silence, and then Mrs. Leacock said, “I didn't, either, when I was in high school. My teachers all seemed old. Not like me in any way.”

Audrey still didn't know what to say, so she waited.

“Do you know what my husband was? A judge. I'm sure he would have forgiven that boy in an instant. ‘They're just kids,' he was always telling me. In his court, he saw everybody as a victim, even the perpetrators. He kept trying to figure out how to punish the right person, but he couldn't.” Her gaze drifted to the window. Outside, the sky was a dense gray, growing denser. “He used to say that judges needed an off-and-on switch so they could stop thinking about it. But he didn't have that switch. He thought I did. He told me once that I was the most armored person he'd ever met, and he meant it as a compliment.” She paused. “I don't know why I'm telling you this.” Another pause. “Maybe so one person will have the story right when I accept the district's offer to transfer to another school.”

Audrey didn't move.

Mrs. Leacock took a deep breath. “My husband talked about his suicide ahead of time. He said it was the point to which his life would inevitably lead him.” Mrs. Leacock's voice became softer. “He said he didn't have kids to live for. He made it a joke. He said he didn't even have a dog to live for.” Pause. “There was a sentence pounding in my head so hard I wanted to scream it. It was
You have me to live for.
But I never said it. I swallowed it back down and never said it.”

Mrs. Leacock had been looking off toward the windows, but now she let her eyes settle on Audrey. “I might really have been able to save him, but my pride kept me from it. That's the irony. That boy”—she nodded toward the door that Brian had closed behind him—“got a little information and made a wild accusation, but buried deep inside the hard little heart of it . . .”

She fell silent and returned to her desk. She didn't seem to want Audrey to say anything. In fact, she seemed to want Audrey to leave, as if that would free Mrs. Leacock, somehow, from the embarrassment of this fleeting intimacy. Audrey finished her essay, and as she brought it up, Mrs. Leacock was sizing and squaring the set of papers she'd just graded. Without smiling, she said, “Mr. Hill wasn't worth saving. One day you'll find somebody who is.”

Audrey nodded without saying anything. She didn't know which was more surprising: that Mrs. Leacock would talk about her husband's suicide or that she would have something consoling to say about Wickham.

“That boy who was in a while ago,” Mrs. Leacock said, “the one who wrote
The Yellow Paper.
By now he will have realized that I didn't ask his name.”

Audrey waited for Mrs. Leacock to say something else, or to ask Brian's name, but she merely snapped a clip over her set of graded papers.
She isn't going to ask Brian's name,
Audrey thought.
She is going to forgive him. Like her husband would've
done.

As Audrey handed Mrs. Leacock her blue book, she said, “Thanks.”

Mrs. Leacock nodded.

“No, I mean it,” Audrey said. “Thanks for everything. And I'm sorry to hear you're leaving. You're a good teacher.”

Mrs. Leacock made a small but actual smile. “Thank you,” she said.

Audrey turned to go, but Mrs. Leacock suddenly had something else to say. “Do you know what
resilience
means?” she said, and without waiting for an answer went on, in a reciting voice:
“The capability of a strained body to recover its size and
shape after deformation caused most especially by compressive
stress.”
She made a small, unhappy smile. “For years I kept that definition pinned on my refrigerator. The point is, we're all crushed at some time or other. It's true that some of us never recover our size and shape, but”—this time the smile seemed actually hopeful—“most of us do.”

She dropped her gaze from Audrey, adjusted herself in her seat, removed a clip from a stack of papers, and went back to being Mrs. Leacock, the physics teacher.

Audrey walked out of the room feeling the strange loneliness of Mrs. Leacock. She moved so much within a cloud of her own thoughts that she didn't notice a lone male figure silently leaning against the far wall of the deserted corridor. She was in fact nearly past him before he said in a low voice, “Hey, Audrey.”

At first, she was frightened. She thought Theo had come back. But when she turned and saw Clyde, she grinned.

“Still here?” she asked.

“Still here,” he said. “Thought you might want a ride on the Vespa.”

“Isn't it kind of cold for scootering?”

“Less cold when two go,” he said.

Lesscoldwhentwogo, lesscoldwhentwogo.
The words went through Audrey's head like a chant in a foreign language she thought it might be fun to learn. She put her arm through his and headed for the door, sticking her chin down inside her scarf and waiting to go with Clyde out into the cold.

“Hey, look,” she said when they pushed open the doors.

In Jemison, it was snowing again.