Shadow Season (12 page)

But Ray taunts you with that line for the next ten years, throwing it out every so often, sometimes letting eighteen months go by, sometimes hitting you with it three times in a week.

But always jabbing you at the worst times.

Kneeling beside some meth mama who’s starved her baby. Cuffing a teenager for knifing her own brother for reasons you can guess at. During a hostage situation when you’re out front with fifty other cops listening to a couple of meltdowns popping the patrons inside.

It’s my job to protect the innocent.

They let you slide, but Ray doesn’t. Ray holds that kick in the ass against you right up until the end.

Now, all this time later, you rarely feel the need to unburden yourself, at least through conversation. But on occasion, as Murphy shows greater interest through the deepening nights, and the Jameson is going down smooth, you find yourself rambling on about being a cop. You haven’t cried since you were a child, but sometimes your voice will catch as you talk about what it was like to carry a badge. Murphy listens intently, chuckles, and goes, Oh, but that’s a mighty cracking story.

FINN RETREATS TO HIS OFFICE, FEELING
edgy. His instincts are prodding him along, driving him toward a bad mood. He feels the way he did in the city, always expecting the worst and enjoying the feel of an oncoming heartache. He can’t shake what Harley Moon said to him.

God no, you want to die?

There’s a gentle knock at the door. His first thought is, Maybe here it is, maybe this is what’s finally going to shove me off the roof. “Mr. Finn?” It’s Vi.

He’s been expecting, dreading, and dreaming of this moment. The one where they’re alone together, and he can confront the weakness inside. So he can test himself against it once more.

His voice is hard, unwavering. It doesn’t match his guts. “You shouldn’t be here, Violet.”

Since the beginning of the semester he’s had to willfully exclude and shun Vi. For his own good, hers, and the academy’s. She can’t help him mark essays anymore, can’t sit and discuss Baudelaire or Twain. He can’t act as
an advisor, a counselor, or a friend. He can hardly even act as her teacher. And it’s his fault.

“I think we should talk,” she says.

“We’ve already talked, Vi. We’ve done enough talking. Everything that had to be said has been said. Now you need to go.”

If he had any real balls, he’d step up and start addressing her as Miss Treato. Put some of that blue-blooded snoot into it, the kind of thing she’s probably used to getting from her other teachers. He had a college professor who could make “Mis-tah Finn” sound like a boot heel scraping shit loose on brick.

He wouldn’t have to be mean, just remote. Brusque, short-tempered, inaccessible. His stomach knots. He turns his face aside because the force of her stare is enough to make him blush. He thinks, What if Ray could see me now. What if Dani could see me now.

You never know what’s going to do it to you. What gets under your skin and burrows in deep. What it is that sets you on fire. Who climbs under your defenses and whines in the night, what you suddenly need in bed. Finn’s seen honest men become ax murderers because of a burned roast. He’s seen millionaires licking the floors of crack dens. He’s arrested more than one priest, and he was nearly strangled by a stocky nun. He’s seen college kids suicide over an A minus. He was once introduced to a politician’s wife who turned out to be a high-priced call girl in her spare time. It was an open secret. Nobody brought her in. Finn was pretty sure his lieut had partaken. Nobody’s in control.

Vi makes his skin heat up. He feels rooted and established.

The world is already too far from him. He can’t find it within himself to push it even farther away.

The air grows unsteady. She moves closer. Finn draws his chin back to his chest. She takes another step, and her heels whisper across the tile. He thinks the things that all men think, imagining scenarios that can never be.

The girl wants to be a woman. The girl is becoming a woman for him. It’s a powerful narcotic. Her breath touches his throat and it stings his skin.

“Finn, you don’t have to worry,” she tells him, dropping the “Mister.” She’s trying to sound a little more like Roz. “I won’t cause you any troubles. I don’t want you to lose your job. I’m here to help you. That’s all I want to do. Really. I hope you’ll trust me.”

His face is as impassive as he can make it. “This isn’t help, Vi, and it’s not what you want. Not what you should want.”

“But I—”

“You need to go.”

“Can’t we just talk for a little while? We were friends, weren’t we?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“We weren’t friends?”

“No, I’m your teacher and that’s all I am.”

“There’s nothing wrong with saying we were friends. Nothing.”

“Please don’t come back unless it’s during my office hours.”

He sounds like a prick. He sounds like every prick
he’s ever met that he wanted to smack in the chops. It makes him nearly as disgusted with himself as his frenetic thoughts painting pictures that fill the dark and start to arouse him. He’s as bad as the burnt-roast murderer. He can’t control himself for a fucking minute. He’s failing this test big-time boffo.

“I understand, Mr. Finn,” she says, the “Mister” back in place. But there’s an amused lilt in her voice, as if this is foreplay Maybe she thinks it is. “I really do. But look, what happened that day, it was—it was—”

Idiotic? Asinine? Disgusting? Insane?

“—it was no big deal.”

She’s so young that she actually believes what she says is true. He tells her, “It was, and you need to realize that.”

“It meant a lot to me, but I know I was wrong. I shouldn’t have pushed. It was
impetuous
of me.”

Impetuous. Good word. He’s taught her well, at least.

“Vi—”

“But you didn’t do anything wrong. It was me, and I just want to apologize to you for it.” What do you say to that?

Jesus fucking Christ. Finn shakes his head. “Violet—” He can speak her name but nothing follows. How ineffectual. He tries again. He’s this close to talking real to her, and wonders if he should go all the way.

“You should’ve gone on vacation with your parents and seen some of the world. You shouldn’t have stayed behind. There’s nothing here for you. This is just a pit stop to help you grab the keys to the kingdom. There’s so much ahead of you. Start focusing on that.”

It’s the kind of thing a really old guy might say. A grandfather, some arthritic uncle, somebody so disconnected from the situation that everybody else just nods when he speaks. Nods and immediately dismisses his wrinkled ass.

“I don’t need to think about it,” she says. “I already know what’s ahead of me. My parents have told me all about it. I’m being primed to marry a rich doctor. They know a boy. His name is Mark Reynolds. His father is in business with my father. His parents are currently in Greece traveling with mine. He’s there too. I’ve met him only twice. We fucked both times. It was good but not very good. We didn’t talk much before or after. We lounged around on the beach. We drank a lot. We visited the temples of Athens. My mother asked if I fucked him. It was important to her that I didn’t annoy him and play hard to get. That’s the way she thinks. It’s the way my father thinks as well. Maybe everybody thinks that way, I don’t know. They want to double up on the family fortunes. Mark’s already got his kids’ names picked out. His kids, not ours. Eleanor and Kenneth. That’s what’s ahead of me. But I’m my own person. I’m going to choose to do something different and be someone else.” She pauses, catches her breath, wets her lips. “You know what he did with the condoms? He knotted them and threw them down behind the backboard. He left them there for the maid.”

It’s a lot to share and, in a way, Finn is flattered.

She knows how to say “fuck” the way a man likes.

“I have the courage and strength to go my own way.” Vi sounds determined and very young. “You taught me that, whether you realize it or not.”

What Finn realizes is that he’s never taught her any such thing. He’s just been on hand while she’s matured and learned it all on her own. Perhaps, in some small regard, the literature he’s given the class has helped. But when your mother wants to know if you’re fucking the boys in Greece, he finds it hard to accept that Flannery O’Connor or Albert Camus is facilitating maturity. He feels more inadequate than ever.

“Tell me the truth about one thing,” she says.

“All right,” Finn says, and he knows that whatever he does next, he’s never going to tell her the truth.

“Do you love Nurse Martell?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to. Violet, it’s time for you to go.” There’s nothing to do but repeat himself. “I don’t want you to come back here during vacation. And you’re to stick to regular office hours during the semester. You’re not to show up at my cottage anymore. If you do, there’s every chance you’ll be expelled and I’ll be asked to leave or forced to resign.”

“Or put in jail,” she says, and the worldly edge to her voice takes him low in the belly. He likes it too much.

“Yes.”

“You like my voice, don’t you?”

Before he can stop himself he answers, “Yes.”

“You still want me, don’t you?”

She reaches out and touches the scars at his hairline. She draws aside a curl so she can get a better view. Danielle would brush his hair away to stare into his eyes. Vi’s fingers are strong. She’s on the swim team and the gymnastics team.

Her warm touch is enough to make him shut his eyes and shut his mouth and dream. It’s a holdover from before the incident. The darkness beneath his eyelids is different from the darkness when his eyes are open.

“Stop it,” he hisses. He stands and backs away a step.

She follows, reaching so she can still trace the scars, stretching on her toes to keep in contact with him. She moves up against his chest. He’s backed to the window. He wonders if he should jump.

“I can soothe you,” she tells him.

“No, you can’t.”

“I can do things.”

“But you shouldn’t.”

“I can make you feel good.”

“I said stop it.”

“I promise, you won’t ever be sorry. I can take away your pain.”

“No, believe me, you can’t.”

“I want you.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“If only you’d let me—”

“That’s enough, Violet.”

It’s more than enough, and still not enough. He imagines her with the kid in Greece, staring into the boy’s face as they finish making love, the kid knotting his condom. Her mother talking to his mother about what the wedding should be like, which universities Eleanor and Kenneth will attend.

“Don’t be frightened, Finn.”

He knows twenty moves to get her away from him, but they’ll all hurt.

This can only play out one way. With calls from Mr.

Treato’s attorneys. Charges being filed, headlines leveled all over again. Is he still a short eyes if he can’t see? He imagines how it might go for a blind ex-cop child-raper in prison. It would pay to back off. It would really and truly pay to back way the fuck off. Finn thinks about that as Vi’s fingers probe and trace his scars, tapping here and there to feel the metal plate nailed down over the hole in his skull. Her fingers fit into the deepest grooves. His scalp tightens and slithers with cold sweat.

Being a blind teacher in an all-girls school during winter vacation with a student pressing her hand to your knitted bones, it’s a lot like being a cop. There are two small fuckers inside his gut going at it, and one is really getting sliced up.

With a swift rustle of cloth she turns away. Already he misses her touch.

“There’s someone out there,” Vi says.