Dead Beautiful (5 page)

“Good. Good.” My grandfather led me to a set of French doors in the corner of the room. “And this,” he said, turning the knobs, “was her closet.”

I stepped inside, the smell of potpourri tickling my nose, and pulled the string dangling from the bulb.

In the light, the closet was transformed from an old storage room into an enchanted boudoir filled with rows and rows of jewelry and shoes and clothes. Beautiful clothes, in styles I had never seen before. The mere sight of them filled me with an unexplainable childish excitement, and I ventured deeper, running my fingers along the racks, the hangers clinking together behind me. The fabrics melted beneath my fingertips—silk, crushed velvet, suede, taffeta, cashmere, fine cottons. I had to remind myself that I didn’t like clothes like this. They were expensive, extravagant, snobby. My parents used to tell me I didn’t need material things to define who I was, but now I couldn’t help but want to put them on.

“These were your mother’s when she was your age. I think she was about your size. Anyway, they’re yours now.

Everything in this closet adheres to Gottfried’s dress code, so take whatever you think you’ll need.”

I glanced at the clothes, trying to imagine my mother at my age wearing the sweaters, the skirts, the dresses, the Mary Janes, the cloaks. I couldn’t. I fingered the sleeve of a sweater. It was so soft.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. Lunch will be served at half past one.”

I nodded and watched my grandfather’s reflection in the mirror as he bowed out of the room.

I spent the next hour examining my mother’s clothes. She had boxes full of barrettes and rings and headbands; drawers packed with silk pajamas, scarves, earmuffs, and lamb’s-wool mittens. I thought they might smell of her, but instead they just smelled like lavender, which made it easier to forget that they were hers, that she was gone. The only trace of her I could find was a single brown hair clinging to a cowl-neck sweater. I pulled it out and examined it in the light. The hair was longer than I had ever seen her wear it. I imagined her in one of the plaid jumpers in front of me, her long hair held back with a ribbon. “What am I going to do?” I asked her, my voice cracking. I thought of my father next to her, his hair short and parted on the side. He wore a shirt and tie, just like he did in the pictures of when they first got married. “Dad,” I said into the empty closet, “what do I do now?” A row of extra hangers clinked together above me, mocking the silence. Suddenly I felt incredibly angry. It was unfair. Why did my parents have to die? Why did I have to find them? Now all of my memories of them were polluted by the image of them dead in the forest.

With a single movement, I knocked the hangers off the rack. They clattered to the ground, and I kept going, throwing her box of jewelry to the floor, her collection of headbands and barrettes, her scarves and mittens and hats, then sank into a sobbing heap, clutching my mother’s clothes to my chest. What would my dad say if he were here? I thought back to when I hadn’t made the lacrosse team last year. “Crying only makes your problems last longer,” he had said. “Why don’t you go practice? That way you’ll make it next year.” Wiping my tears on the bottom of one of my mother’s dresses, I picked myself up and stood in front of the mirror. I wanted to see something of her in me, but all I saw was my plain, thick hair, the bangs that always got in my eyes, my freckled face, and my gray eyes, now swollen and red. Was I like her?

I searched through my mother’s drawers until I found a pair of scissors. Standing in front of the mirror, I took a lock of hair in my hand. I closed my eyes and cut it off. I continued until half of it was gone, and my hair fell just below my shoulders. Finally feeling free, I shook my head, the wisps fluttering to the ground and collecting on the floor like spaghetti. Satisfied, I took a dress off a hanger and tried it on, examining my reflection. To my relief, it fit perfectly.

After packing three suitcases full of skirts, dresses, oxford shirts, cardigans, cable-knit tights, and plush winter coats, I felt adequately prepared for whatever weather the New England winter had in store for me.

“You cut your hair,” my grandfather said, aghast, when I walked downstairs for lunch.

I nodded. “I wanted a change.”

“It looks very nice,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, with a slight smile.

After a lunch of tea sandwiches and cucumber salad, Dustin invited me to play a game of croquet. Manning a croquet mallet, I followed him to the back lawn. After only fifteen minutes he was already beating me by six swings. Frowning, I stepped up for my turn. I didn’t like to lose. After a moment of deep concentration, I swung. It was a swift hit and I rested the croquet mallet over my shoulder while I watched the ball roll all the way to the other side of the lawn, in the complete opposite direction of the ring I should have been aiming for. Dustin chuckled, but I scowled and ran over to my ball. It was resting at the edge of the woods, where a thicket of birch trees shaded the grass. Dustin called out to me, but I ignored him and bent down. Just as my fingers grazed the ball, I jumped back.

A pulp of feathers and dried blood was resting in front of it, the bones jutting out at unnatural angles. Unable to control myself, I screamed.

Dustin ran over to me, surprisingly agile despite his age and the stuffy suit he was wearing. He summoned a garden worker as my grandfather approached and surveyed the scene. “Get rid of it, please,” he said to one of the gardeners, patting me on the back. “Just a dead bird. Nothing to be frightened of.”

“Right,” I said, standing up, embarrassed that I had caused such a fuss. This had happened to me before. Even as a child, I seemed to find my way to dead things.

“Let’s go inside.”

Dusk settled over the mansion. My grandfather and I dined at one end of an exceedingly long table, and he attempted to make small talk about the subjects I was interested in at school. I told him I wasn’t sure. I had always been good at history. Both of my parents had been high school history teachers; my father had specialized in ancient Greek civilizations, and my mother had taught on the Roman Empire. So when I did well in my history classes, they’d always encouraged me to read more on my own.

“But what are
you
interested in, regardless of what your parents wanted?” he pressed.

I hesitated. “I... I don’t know. I like books and reading. And I like Biology. Anatomy, dissection. It sounds kind of cool. But I’ve never really taken it, so who knows. I probably wouldn’t even like it.”

He gave me a troubled look. “Why do you say that?”

“Dad told me that science was a flawed field. Something about how it was just another form of prediction. It tries to explain the mysteries of life and death by using a very small vocabulary. That’s what he said, at least.”

My grandfather rubbed his chin. “I see. Well, perhaps you should give it a try, lest he was mistaken. At Gottfried.”

I nodded. Was my grandfather actually being supportive of something I wanted to do? Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

That night after my grandfather went to bed, I turned on the bedside light and explored my mother’s room. It was like a museum, everything perfectly preserved, as if the sixteen-year-old version of my mother had just left for a date with my father, and would return any minute, sneaking in through the back door so my grandfather wouldn’t catch her. I ran my hands just above her perfumes, her porcelain figurines, her pens and pencils, not wanting to touch them, to change anything about them. She had stacks of books, mostly paperback fantasy novels and children’s tales, a pile of old notebooks scrawled with numbers and equations from math class, I assumed, and a binder full of notes from what seemed to be a literature class. In the margins, she had doodled my father’s name over and over again. I traced my fingers around the letters.
Robert Redgrave.
I liked the idea that they had once been my age, passing notes and daydreaming about each other in class. With a yawn, I clutched the notebook to my chest and crawled into my mother’s bed. Surrounded by her things, I finally felt safe, and fell into the first full night’s sleep I’d had in weeks.

In the morning we set out. Dustin drove us through the grassy knolls of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and finally into western Maine. It was getting late in the afternoon, the sun beating a yellow orange on the horizon. In the distance an airplane left a trail of white steam heading toward the west, and I watched as it disappeared behind the mountains. We hadn’t seen civilization in hours.

Up ahead, the darkened mouth of a tunnel was carved into the earth. Dustin locked the car doors. The radio became scratchy until it turned completely static.

When we emerged through the other end, we were in the mountains. The alpine passage had been carved into the granite. Giant peaks jutted out of the ground, framing the horizon like jaws. As we climbed higher into the mountains, the temperature dropped. Snowmelt trickled down from the peaks, soaking the road, and Dustin slowed as we turned a bend.

And then out of nowhere, we passed a house. It was half dilapidated, made of a dark wood that was rotting at the base. I was sure it was abandoned until I spotted a figure moving inside, behind the curtains of a cracked kitchen window.

I pressed my face against the glass to get a better look as we drove by. It was followed by another house, only this one was smaller and better kept, resting tenuously on a bed of granite. Slowly, we began to pass more houses until we reached an intersection with a general store, a gas station, and a diner with a faded sign that read beatrice’s.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Attica Falls,” said my grandfather.

A few cars were parked along the side of the road, and a man was pumping diesel into a rusty pickup truck at the gas station. A stray cat ran under a house porch. Otherwise, the town was empty. Dustin made a left at the intersection, then headed up a steep road that led us around the mountain. The town ended as suddenly as it began. I looked back to catch one last glimpse of it just as we hugged the bend.
Attica Falls.

When I turned back around, we had come to a stop. Nestled into the forest were tall iron gates spiraling together like the branches of a tree. Hanging at the center was a brass plate engraved with gottfried academy. A crest of arms was inscribed below it, with the words vox sapientiae clamans ex inferno. A small man dressed in a guard’s uniform approached the driver’s side.

Dustin rolled down his window. “Mr. Brownell Winters,” he said solemnly.

Surprised, the guard stepped back and stood up straight. “Sir,” he said, giving our car a stiff nod and running to open the gates. As we drove past, he peered into the car curiously, but quickly looked away.

Inside the school grounds the terrain was much different than the rugged wilderness that surrounded it. The ground was flat and green, with sprawling quadrangles of grass and trees. The massive buildings that comprised the campus were made of dark brick that had been stained and faded by the elements until it had acquired a smoky hue.

Ivy climbed up the walls, giving me the feeling that the buildings had not been built at all, but had grown naturally out of the earth.

We pulled into a half-crescent driveway and parked at the foot of a staggeringly large stone building, with
ARCHEBALD HALL
engraved above the entrance. Dustin left the car running and took my suitcases out of the trunk.

“Oh, I can get that,” I said, but he refused. With a bow, he carried them into the hall, leaving only my backpack at my feet.

“This is where we part ways,” my grandfather said.

“You’re leaving?” Suddenly I felt very alone.

“Would you have me stay?” He studied me pensively. “Edith Lumbar. She’s a professor here and an old colleague of mine. Should you ever feel unsafe, go to her. She’s very capable.”

I nodded, fidgeting with the bottom of my cardigan.

“And you have my phone number. Don’t be shy about calling.”

“Okay.”

“You remind me of your mother when she was your age. I should be happy if you turned out the same.”

In a gesture intended to comfort me, he gave me a stiff hug. And with only one place to go, I walked up the steps to Archebald Hall.

I found myself standing in a giant hallway with a high-vaulted ceiling and mahogany colored walls that reminded me of the interior of a church. I ambled down the hall until I reached an open doorway on my right. I peeked in.

“Come in,” said a friendly voice.

Startled, I stepped inside. A young woman wearing red lipstick and a secretary’s skirt suit was seated behind a desk, sorting through a stack of files. She was simultaneously plain and glamorous, like a 1950s movie star. I half expected her to look up from a typewriter and pull out a long cigarette. She smiled when she saw me approach.

“Hi,” I said. “I... I’m a new student.”

She nodded. “What is your name?”

“Renée Winters.”

She scanned the files with a long slender finger and handed me an envelope. I turned it over, not sure what to do. She seemed to know what I was thinking.

“Your schedule is inside.” She motioned toward the envelope. “Everything you’ll need is in your room, including your suitcases, which are being delivered as we speak. You’re in 12E, in the girls’ dormitory. Go straight out these doors and turn right. Follow the walkway past the green. When you get to the lake, you’ll see it on your left.”

I folded the envelope into my pocket. “Thanks.”

I walked down a cobblestone path through the campus, which was lined with oak and maple trees and small leafy shrubs. There were students everywhere. Girls in pleated skirts and oxfords, boys in collared shirts and ties loosened around the neck. I looked down at my cardigan and collared shirt, which I’d patched together from my mother’s closet, hoping my grandfather wouldn’t notice when I paired them with my cutoff shorts. It was the last time I could wear them, and to my relief he hadn’t said anything. But now I felt out of place. I picked up the pace, eager for the privacy of my own room.