Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (35 page)

Something in those kind and noble eyes softened slightly. “I'm so sorry it has come to this.” He drew the hammer back and it sounded with a fatal click. “Well,” he said softly. “Well, then.”

He hesitated, and I have no idea if he actually would have pulled the trigger. I know only that a voice came out of the dark.

“Dad?”

It was Alexandria. She was standing at the door, peering out at what must have seemed a strange tableau, Clayton and I facing each other.

“Hi, Mr. Blankenship,” she said gently, sweetly, with great . . . yes . . . kindness. On that note, my eyes grew moist. Oh how like Sandrine she is, I thought, oh how like her deeply knowing mother.

Clayton immediately returned the hammer to its place and sank the pistol into his pocket.

“Do you want to come in?” Alexandria asked.

There was an edge of fear in her voice, but she acted against it and took an impossibly courageous step out onto the lawn.

“Good evening, Alexandria,” Clayton said softly as he turned toward her. A smile flickered onto his lips. “I just came to tell your father . . .” He stopped and his large eyes drifted over to me. “. . . that I agree with the jury.”

Alexandria took another step toward us, then another, until we formed a small tragic circle in the frigid moonlight.

“I truly admired your mother,” Clayton said to Alexandria. Then he looked at me and with a decency hardly imaginable he said simply, “I hope you have a good life, Sam, the rest of it.” He glanced toward Alexandria. “With your loyal, loyal daughter.”

“Thank you,” I told him, and with all my heart I meant it.

He turned and walked back into the darkness, in every way a knight in shining armor.

“So what do you want for dinner?” Alexandria asked.

“Popcorn,” I answered softly.

She looked at me, clearly puzzled.

“Remember when you were just a little girl?” I asked. “Your mother and I would declare ‘junk night' and just have popcorn for dinner, or potato chips and onion dip.”

She laughed. “And a movie,” she reminded me. “Always with a movie.”

“Right, a movie.”

“I'll go get one,” she said.

“I'll make the popcorn.”

I'd popped up a huge bowl of popcorn by the time she got back. I'd also melted butter and generously doused the whole mixture with a flavorful excess of salt.

“Smells good,” Alexandria said as she walked into the kitchen. She held one of those generic DVD cases and I couldn't see the movie she'd chosen.

“It's an old one,” she said, keeping things mysterious. “One of Mom's favorites. I remember us watching it together.”

“Perfect,” I said and picked up the bowl of popcorn and added it to the tray upon which I'd already placed two glasses of soda. “I guess we're ready then.”

The movie was
The Chosen,
and Alexandria was right, it had been one of Sandrine's favorites. It was based on a Chaim Potok novel that I was reasonably certain she had never read, and yet something in the film had always gotten to Sandrine, perhaps its tale of two people torn apart but ceaselessly attempting to connect again. It had always struck me as a rather sentimental movie, and it still did, save for the voice-over that comes at the very end of the film relating a story from the Talmud.

Sitting in the dark with my daughter, the dregs of junk night strewn around us, I listened once again to that voice, the tale it told of two people who'd once loved each other but whose relationship had foundered and who now lived in different places. One sends a messenger to the other. “Come half the distance that divides us,” the message says, “and I will meet you there.” The other refuses. “I am sorry,” the return message says, “but I cannot meet you halfway.” The other considers this message, considers the consequences of never again seeing or being with this other person that he loves. And so he sends a second message: “Then tell me how far you can come toward me, and I will meet you there.”

I recalled that Sandrine's eyes had glistened at that.

Mine hadn't, and didn't that night either. And yet I found myself quite moved by this old story, moved and wondering where it might be, this place where I could yet meet Sandrine, a woman who'd so loved language and felt that sentences should be held together by “into which” and “according to whom,” held together like the fingers of a hand, as she'd told her students, so that they might bear the weight of wisdom.

“What are we going to do now, Dad?” Alexandria asked as the final credits rolled.

Suddenly I knew.

“This,” I said.

Samuel Joseph Madison, the beloved founder of the Sandrine School of Kumasi, has died at the age of seventy-four. Mr. Madison founded the school in 2014, in honor of his wife, Sandrine Allegra Madison, for whom the school is named. For twenty-five years, Mr. Madison taught the children of Kumasi and its surrounding villages. Many of his students went on to obtain advanced degrees in England, Australia, and the United States, including this reporter. Mr. Madison is survived by his daughter, Ali, also a teacher at the school, and according to whom the school's doors will remain open into the indefinite future.

West African News Agency
Accra, Ghana, July 12, 2042