In the Night Season (9 page)

Nora understood that the older woman, in her embarrassingly hortatory, vaguely ecclesiastical way, was trying to ease her fears.

Sister Agnes went on. “Someone will take notes for you.”

Nora collected her things as quietly and unobtrusively as she could. Sister Agnes watched her go.

Out in the hall, she worked to shake off the feeling, which Sister Agnes always engendered in her, of being a child. She went to the central office, to deposit the pad of legal paper that she took to every meeting and never used. In her mailbox were the folders she had to take home, papers to grade; they always required work on into the night. At the main desk, Opal Stimson sat, paring her long fingernails. Small, dark, with the bulging eyes of thyroid-trouble, she appeared always to be about to break into conspiratorial laughter.

“Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,” she said.

“You could hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Opal, what’re you talking about?”

“Just talking.”

Nora looked at her. The flat nose, with a crooked place near the bridge where it had once been broken, and the crowded lower teeth, which when she smiled made the whole face seem rather oddly uneven and comical. Almost everything Opal said was in some way a non sequitur. “Did my son call?” Nora asked her.

“The school board called. The police want a list of all the kids who are computer literate. Can you imagine? They want to talk to all the hackers.”

“Do you think it’s some kids?”

“Somebody, coming or going.”

“Coming or going.” Nora was at a loss.

“Young or old.”

“Thank you, anyway, Opal.”

“Are you going home early?”

“It’s too late for that,” Nora told her.

Opal had been married four times, and two of the husbands had been from the same east Tennessee family, the Stimsons, and she’d kept the name. Her maiden name was Oiler, but she was from Wise, Virginia, and pronounced it “All-er.” She had told Nora all this in the first few weeks Nora had been on the job, and when she found out that Nora was a widow, she had become so solicitous that Nora felt awkward. The subtle and circumspect expression of this awkwardness, which had really only been a gentle reluctance to accept the other woman’s enthusiastic affection, had evidently hurt her feelings. Nora had been looking for a way back from this difficulty, but had not discovered it. Tonight, her weariness found expression in a wordless rush of deciding that she no longer cared what Opal’s feelings were. The truth was that she lacked the will for any kind of social pressure or requirement, and if that bothered people, it was just too bad. And oh, how tired she was of this old concrete building with its fake Romanesque facade and its bad paintings and psychobabble sayings in frames on the walls. Above the main doorway, carved in the lacquered wooden block letters of the shop class, were the words:
Today is the first day of the rest of your life
.

Nora stood in the harsh, institutional light and realized that she had reached this impasse concerning her work: she no longer
believed it was of any value at all. Out there, in the darkness beyond the doorway, the ignorant and the bigoted were gathering; it felt that way, something awful spreading in the dark.

A student approached her from the doorway off the left hall. One of the good ones, she thought. Her heart went out to him—a thin, usually disheveled boy with bad skin, whose clothes never seemed to fit. A child whom the system was badly failing, all the time. He was seventeen and had had to repeat a grade. She had been one of the teachers he came to for help, or solace, since at home he was mostly left to his own devices—his parents concentrating on their respective careers. Nora never saw him without thinking of Jason, and this had colored her behavior toward him. Not long ago, he started showing signs of having a crush on her. She had very gingerly discouraged it, while trying to maintain his confidence. He only appeared to grow more tentative, more painfully timid, and she had the feeling that something relentless was weighing him down.

He walked over to her now, with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His blond hair stood straight up on his head, like a fright wig. She could see through it to the shine of his scalp under the lights. She possessed neither the time nor the energy to offer reassurance to him at this moment, and her mood was standoffish. She knew her expression had already communicated this to him, and it made her feel sorry again. Still, she spoke in an even, professional tone. “What is it, Greg?”

“Is the meeting over?”

“What’re you doing here this late?”

“Yearbook.” In the past month, he had taken on extracurricular activities, to keep from going home. The other students were already complaining about his slovenly habits, his bad breath, and body odor. He never seemed to get anything done.

“Is it going well?” she asked him.

“I guess not. They asked me to take a break out here.”

“I see,” Nora said. “Well, gotta go.”

“The meeting’s not over.”

“No.”

“I have to speak to Sister Agnes.”

“Well, she’ll be a while.”

“One hopes so,” Opal Stimson said in a singsong voice. Then: “Good night, Mrs. Michaelson.”

Nora shouldered her purse and gathered the folders under her arm.

“Sister Agnes wants to see me about being late all the time,” the boy said.

“Well,” Nora told him. “I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

“You helped me before,” he said, trying for something. Clearly, he had taken her demeanor toward him as a rejection. “Will you talk to Sister Agnes?”

“Oh, Greg,” she told him. “It’ll be just fine, okay? Now, I really have to run.”

“You won’t talk to her?”

Nora sighed. “Well—sure.”

“Thank you,” Greg said and then just stood there.

“I have to go now,” Nora said.

“Okay.”

“You gotta do what you gotta do,” Opal Stimson said. She opened her desk drawer, then closed it. “If that door opens, and the meeting’s over, and she finds you standing here,
then
you’ll be in trouble.”

The boy, Greg, thanked her and hurried back down the hall.

Nora smiled. “Were you talking to me, or him?”

“You.”

“Thanks.” She turned and started out and felt abruptly like crying. She was alone; and her loneliness was like a failing.

That was what she had been fighting all these weeks and months, a pervasive feeling of her own culpability in the circumscribed life she was leading. And there had been no one to talk to about it—not really, not with things as they were. No family lived near enough to be of any consolation to her, even if she could have found the time for them. Her days were too crowded with work—six classes a day, each with twenty to twenty-five students, a total of more than one hundred thirty, all told. The grueling daily round of teaching classes, grading papers, proctoring exams, working on the holiday functions, the dances and the programs—religion classes, chapel
hour, the student newspaper and the yearbook committee—everything requiring her best attention, all of this while grappling with her own grief and the grief of her son…. Everything had become this dizzy, dispirited rush through the days. She couldn’t find time for herself, to be alone, to replenish anything of her spirit, her once-humorous way with the world; there wasn’t enough time to decide much beyond what to eat in a given day, what to make for her son, what to do, or undo, or leave undone concerning the house, the bills—which kept piling up—or the future, which seemed to be collapsing. There hadn’t even been time for friends. (It seemed that
they
were also falling away from her: the couple she and Jack had been most comfortable with, and closest to, had moved to Arizona over the summer, promising to keep in close touch. Nora had stood in the shady lawn out in front of their house, thinking of the hours of summer evenings relaxing with them, when she and Jack had been happy, and there was time and hope was easy.)

During the weeks just after Jack’s death, she had spent some days with an elderly friend from Charlottesville—Elaine Tyler, who had been the principal of the first school Nora had taught in after college. Elaine had come to the house to stay for a time, and Nora had gone to Charlottesville to stay with her, too, though Jason was restless and obviously unhappy to be away from his own circle of people—those skinny inarticulate boys with their video games and their science fiction, who seemed always to be harboring some grievance against the adult world. Elaine had lost her own husband thirty years ago and remembered it quite well, and she knew how to talk to Nora about everything, even when it began to be clear that Jack had left nothing behind.

“You’re angry with him,” she said at one point, as Nora sat crying at the table in the small kitchen of the house in Charlottesville.

“I can’t understand what he could’ve been thinking.”

“And you’re angry.”

“Okay,” Nora had said. “Yes. I am angry at him.” And she felt suddenly as though she were able to breathe out, after a long holding-in of air. “Yes. I’m so damn mad.”

“You see?” Elaine said. “Perfectly fine.”

“God
damn
it.”

“I’m mad, too, honey.”

She hadn’t seen Elaine since early in the fall. She hadn’t had the chance to get away, or to do more than speak to her briefly over the phone. The school consumed everything. Edward Bishop had become the one person she could talk to about all of this.

Outside the heavy stone walls of the entrance, in the chilly dark, she paused and composed herself, kept back the rising urge to stand there crying. If the Virginia Front was just high school children, and there were no real repercussions to worry about, would she be able to come back from her already expressed hesitation? Why had she shown it to him if she hadn’t hoped he would volunteer to stay away for a time? Surely he must have perceived this. She felt the necessity of seeking to make Edward trust that she would not again, at the first indication of trouble, make this kind of capitulation to her own fear. No, she wouldn’t let herself think about it anymore.

She gathered her will and walked to the car, aware of the large, many-paned window to her left, the room where the meeting was still going on. It perplexed and troubled her that she could be made to feel guilty, even now, for walking away from there.

Somehow she plucked her keys from the confusion of her purse and managed to open the car door without dropping the folders. She leaned in and unlocked the back door, got it open, and put the folders on the backseat. Three of them dropped to the floor.

“Fuck,” she said, low, glancing up at the lighted window as though she expected to find Sister Agnes standing there staring at her, reading her lips. She said again, “Fuck,” pronouncing it exactly and clearly, then reached down and retrieved the folders, stuffing the papers back into them.

She got behind the wheel, settled into the seat as if she had collapsed there. She had left the keys in the door. She opened it, leaned out, and couldn’t get them from the slot. It was necessary to get out of the car. She did this, then turned to the night and bowed from the waist. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the fucking jury.”

She had the usual fight with the ignition, and the car took an age to warm up, while she sat breathing into her hands, trying not
to cry. The street was mostly a picture of decay and neglect: empty glass facades where stores had failed, a pawnshop with an iron gate in front of it, and a little all-night diner that no one ever seemed to enter or leave. Someone crossed from there now, going behind her car and away, a heavyset man in a lumber jacket, and a hat with furry earflaps. He headed toward the end of the block, twice glancing at her over his shoulder. Then he stopped and came back toward her, walked up to the window on her side, and knocked. The directness of it alarmed and momentarily paralyzed her. She had locked the doors when he started back, and now she cracked the window slightly.

“Yes?”

The man stood there with his hands in the pockets of his coat. He looked up the street and then down. “I was gonna follow you,” he said. “But let’s take your car.”

She quickly rolled the window up and put the car in gear. It stalled. He watched her, chewing something, the ample flesh of his jaw shaking. He seemed completely sure of himself. In the next instant, he brought his left hand out of the coat pocket, and she saw that he was holding a gun.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, Christ. Great. Just fucking great.”

He put the gun back in the coat pocket and signaled for her to open the window again.

She yelled at him through the glass. “I don’t have any money, and I’m HIV-positive.” A phrase she had decided upon as a protective lie, because she had to drive alone into the city each morning; she had never thought she would actually have to use it. And in any case it was lost on the man, who with all the casual officiousness of a police officer stood back a step and said, “Come on. Out.”

“Are you—is this—am I under arrest?”

“Right,” he said.

“You’re a policeman?” She felt herself grasping at this.

“Uh, no,” the man said, with a little exhaling laugh. He went around the back of the car and pulled at the passenger side door, and once more she tried to start it and get it going.

“Open it,” he said.

“Please leave me alone,” she said.

“Open the door.”

She didn’t move.

“Open it. If you don’t, I’ll hurt you. And your son’ll die, too.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, no.” It might only have been a breath.

When the man brought the gun from his coat pocket, she reached over and pulled the lock. He was in the car with a heavy bouncing of the shocks, looking back through the rear window and then leaning into the windshield and squinting, as if trying to read one of the neon signs down the street. “Be a good girl,” he said with that respiratory laugh. “And you won’t get yourself hurt.”

“All right,” she said.

He was too big for the seat. He looked at her over the roundness of his folded arms and said, “Can you get it started?”

“Where’s my son?” she said, hearing the words and disbelieving them.