River Road (17 page)

My mind was as clumsy as my limbs, going round and round the question of Leia. Why had she painted herself like that? What dark thing was rising to engulf her? Was it Troy's infatuation for her as Ross had said? Was that what she had come to talk to me about that day? It all came back to that. If I had taken the time to listen to her would I have made a difference? Could I have stopped that tide of dark rising up to engulf her on the river road?

The climb back up the hill was rough. The snow had melted in the sun and then turned to ice as the day grew colder, making the footing slippery. I kept sliding backward on my skis and falling. I fell over and over, my feet and hands clumsy with the cold. By the time I reached the top of the hill I staggered out of the woods like the last survivor of a new ice age—and blundered straight into another skier.

We went down in a tangle of legs and skis and poles. The other skier was wearing a face mask and sleek neoprene leggings and jacket. I couldn't even tell gender until she ripped off her mask, unleashing a Medusa's nest of braids.

“Cressida?”

“Nan? What are you doing here? You ran right into me. I was going too fast to stop.”

“I-I-I . . .” My teeth were chattering too hard to talk.

“You're suffering from hypothermia,” Cressida said with clinical calm.

I tried to protest but I couldn't form the words. My lips felt swollen and clumsy, my thoughts sluggish and confused.

“Let's get you inside,” Cressida said, deftly unsnapping her boots out of her skis and helping me up. “We'll go to my house—it's closer.” I tried to tell her that my house was just down the hill but I couldn't find the words. Besides, I wasn't sure I wanted Cressida to see the sad state of my house. Even if I was suffering from hypothermia.

Though we were friends, I'd never been to Cressida's house. I had gotten the feeling over the years that she cherished her privacy.
I could never live with anyone
, she'd once told me.
I think writers are naturally reclusive.
So, even though she lived just up the hill from me in the old Blackwell gatehouse, I'd never “popped in” to borrow sugar or to ask if she wanted to take a walk. We did most of our socializing trading quips across the hall between our offices, at department parties, and over the occasional drink at the Black Swan. Now, approaching the tiny brick house with black-and-cream gables overlooking the river, I felt like I was being admitted to the inner sanctum. I was expecting something like the witch's gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel.” Instead, she led me inside to a spare but comfortable room with gleaming hardwood floors, a cream-colored sofa and sleek Scandinavian chairs, and uncurtained glass windows with spectacular views facing east over the orchards on one side of the house and west toward the river on the other side. She turned on a gas fire in a circular glass hearth that glowed over crystal shards.

“Take off your clothes and I'll get you something to put on.”

Embarrassed, I plucked at my soaked clothing ineffectively. When
she came back with fleece leggings and a silk T-shirt I'd barely gotten one sock off. She did the rest, in a businesslike fashion that spared me any further embarrassment. I might have been a Barbie doll she was undressing. The leggings and shirt she put on me felt delicious, like they were made of spun clouds. She put wool socks on my feet and wrapped me in a sheepskin throw, then went to make tea. I sat on the couch and looked around me, feeling like I'd landed in Valhalla. Everything was neat and polished. Even her desk—a gleaming length of pale wood cantilevered beneath a wide window with practically the same view I had from my desk—contained only a neat stack of papers (graded, I was sure) and an open laptop displaying a muted seascape—a familiar-looking seascape.

I got up and shuffled across the floor in stocking feet to get a closer look. Yes, it was the picture posted over the thread on “Overheard at Acheron.”

“I think it's unconscionable how social media is spinning your story, Nan.” Cressida had come up behind me on silent slippered feet. She led me away from the screen, sat me back down on the couch, and handed me a glass mug of steaming hot liquid. I wrapped both hands around it and took a cautious sip. It tasted sweet and faintly medicinal, some kind of herbal tea with something alcoholic added, brandy perhaps, or some kind of Nordic glogg.

“I tried to add a more reasoned voice to the discussion but things had gone too far.
Fama volat
, as Virgil says, and this is indeed a monster with a hundred eyes and a thousand tongues beneath each wing.”

I shuddered at the image and Cressida twitched the sheepskin throw over my shoulders. “It must be awful being the target of such vitriol. I can imagine that you needed to get out. Is that what you were doing in the woods? Or were you coming from the river? Your clothes and shoes were wet . . . you weren't . . . ?”

Her voice trailed off and she lifted her eyebrows expectantly. I stared at her, my mind still so sluggish that it took a moment before I realized that she was asking me if I had tried to drown myself.

“No!” I said, sloshing tea in my eagerness to correct what she was thinking. “I didn't . . . I wouldn't . . .” I could feel my face and hands burning, the blood that had fled from my extremities rushing back in a hot, shameful flood.
Because I had been thinking about it.
The heat at least released my tongue. “I went down to the river because I followed Troy Van Donk to the old boathouse. Apparently it's where our students go to get high.”

“I've heard that,” Cressida said, steadying my hand and guiding the mug to my lips. The hot liquid was bringing feeling back to my body but my words must have been coming out slurred. “I didn't know you were so concerned about student drug use.”

“Of course I am,” I said automatically, “but that's not . . . I followed Troy because . . .” I tried to reconstruct the logic of the morning. I'd gone to the woods because of the dream I'd had, but I couldn't tell Cressida that.

“I was trying to remember what happened the night of the accident.”

“What do you mean? You said you hit a deer—are you unsure of that now?”

“Not that part. After, when I was in the woods looking for the deer, I sat down . . . and fell asleep for a while . . .”

I waited for Cressida to express the astonishment that others did at this point in the story but she only waited patiently for me to go on. She would have made a good therapist. Or a good cop.

“. . . and then I had a dream, someone calling ‘Come back.' I thought it was the dream I always have about Emmy but now I wonder if it could have been someone calling Leia back that night . . . someone who . . .”

“Ran her over?” Cressida asked coolly. “Was it a woman's voice?”

“I don't know. I thought so because it always is in my dream, but now I'm not sure.”

“You could have superimposed your dream on what you heard. You know my theory about why Jane hears Rochester's voice at the end of
Jane Eyre
?”

“No,” I said, smiling. Leave it to Cressida to turn everything back to a literary criticism. “What is it?”

“She's really hearing her own voice, but she superimposes Rochester's voice over her own because she's still in thrall to the male patriarchy. So you did the opposite—you superimposed a female voice over a male's because it's what you expect to hear in your own dream.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little blurry—as I often did when my colleagues discussed recondite literary theory. “I suppose that's possible. At any rate I went to the woods to remember it better.”

“And did you?”

“I didn't really get a chance. I saw Troy and this sleazy older guy. They were arguing about something they'd hidden—drugs, I think.”

Cressida rolled her eyes. “I'm not surprised. I know you've always thought well of Troy Van Donk but I've always thought he was low-life scum.”

“That's a little harsh,” I said, “but I am afraid that he may have fallen in with the wrong crowd—Leia too. Troy mentioned her. He said that he didn't think I killed her.”

“Well, you
are
his favorite teacher.”

“I am?” The pleasure I felt was immediately followed by a surge of embarrassment that I would still feel pleased that a drug-using student liked me. “How do you know?”

“He told me on the day he came in to castigate me for upsetting Leia at the party. He said you were the only teacher he'd had at Acheron who gave a damn about him.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking guiltily that I hadn't spent much time worrying about him lately. Maybe if I had I would have noticed that he was on a downward path. “He's a good writer. But I'm afraid there might be another explanation for his being so sure I didn't kill Leia.”

“You mean if he knew who did?”

“Actually . . . Ross came over last night to tell me that the police have found evidence that his car was involved in the accident.” The words
were out before I remembered that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that. Now that I had warmed up I couldn't seem to stop talking.

“Ross's car? You mean his Volvo?”

“No, the Peugeot. He keeps it in his barn and his keys were in a dish in the kitchen. Anyone could have taken them.”

Cressida laid her hand on my arm. “Or Ross could have driven the car himself.”

Although I'd had my own doubts about Ross's innocence I was horrified to hear Cressida voice them. “I don't believe that. Ross wouldn't have run over Leia and left her for dead.”

Cressida looked at me pityingly. “You still have feelings for him, don't you?”

“No—I mean, yes, as a friend. But we haven't . . . not since . . .”

“I know you stopped sleeping with him after we talked. I've always admired you for your resolve. But it must have been hard giving him up . . . and then, for what? You didn't get tenure in the end anyway.”

Tears pricked at my eyes. I rubbed at them and my vision blurred. I felt suddenly very, very tired. The hot tea had warmed me up but it had also spread a sluggish lethargy through my veins, an aftereffect of the hypothermia, no doubt. Seeing the exhaustion on my face, Cressida took the cup from my hands and adjusted the throw on my shoulders. I leaned back against the cushions.

“I've even wondered if I was wrong to intervene,” she said as she adjusted a pillow under my head. “I did what I thought was good for you, but Ross, well, he would have been better off with you. Maybe he would have stayed away from the students.”

“
Students?
You mean there's been more than one?”

“I'm afraid so. There was that girl from Long Island—Emily Auerbach—the one who went on to work at Random House—”

“Ross got her that internship,” I said drowsily.

“Yes. Have you ever wondered why it's always the prettiest girls whom he helps to the internships and recommends for MFA programs?”

I searched my brain for a male student who'd been helped by Ross but my head was swimming. When I closed my eyes I saw Leia's face sinking under dark water.

“I'm afraid Leia was just the latest in a long series of conquests. But Leia at least had the good grace to feel bad about it. When she came to see me that day it was clear she was feeling guilty about something.”

“When did she come see you?” I asked.

“Just before she went to your office. I thought she might have gone to you for a more sympathetic ear.”

I grimaced. “I'm afraid I was no better. I didn't even make time to talk to her.”

“Don't beat yourself up about that, Nan. These students act like they own us. Leia wouldn't even come out with what she'd done. She wanted me to sit there and play guessing games. She asked me if I thought confession was good for the soul—if she would feel better about something she'd done wrong if she confessed it or if she made amends some other way.”

“You think she was talking about having an affair with Ross?”

Cressida shrugged. “I can't imagine what else she was on about. You can't have helped noticing how much time she spent with him. I think she was asking me if she ought to make it public. Like ruining Ross's career would make up for her actions. I told her that maybe she should worry more about her own sins than exposing anyone else's. I'm afraid I might have been a bit harsh on her.”

I pried open my eyes to stare at Cressida, surprised at the bitterness and jealousy in her voice. Cressida was so beautiful—and barely forty. Why envy a girl like Leia? But then I took in the beautiful room we were in—the bare shelves and desk surface, the abstract photographs on the walls. There were no photographs of friends or family, no sign of any human being at all. In her memoir Cressida had described a loveless childhood with a workaholic father and a perfectionist mother who watched over every morsel of food she put in her mouth and hounded
her to become a ballerina to fulfill her own unfulfilled dreams. No one in her family had spoken to her since she'd published the memoir. “It's hard to be the one who tells the truth,” she'd once said to me. “And lonely.” It wasn't Leia's beauty that Cressida would envy, but her likability, the easy way she had of drawing people to her. I knew because I envied it myself.

“Leia could be a bit hard to take sometimes,” I said, working carefully to get the words right despite the growing numbness in my lips. “
That's
why I didn't make time for her that day.”

Cressida looked at me with such gratitude I thought she was going to hug me. She made do with patting my arm and tucking the throw under my feet. “You mustn't feel guilty about that, Nan. She could be very demanding. They all are, this generation, expecting you to answer their emails within minutes and read their novels, as if you had no work of your own, and to drop everything to listen to their moral quandaries.” She shook her head. “I told her that whatever she felt bad about she should examine her own conscience rather than exact retribution from someone else. She didn't like that one little bit. She left in a huff. That's why Troy thought I'd upset her at the party. She must have gone to talk to Ross, perhaps she threatened to make their affair public.”