Soul Catcher (10 page)

At exactly nine-fifteen, Silvera came through the kitchen door dragging a high stool. He placed the stool in front of the fireplace. It seemed logical that he had gone to all that trouble so he could sit on the stool himself, towering above everyone. But instead, he stood next to it.

‘I love this school,’ he said, ‘I really love this school. And I love all of you, every single one of you.’ He drew in his lips and his eyes rolled to the ceiling. A tear ran down his cheek. ‘But damn it!’ His voice was scratchy now. ‘When I find out that you... That you...’ He shook his head dramatically and paced once, back and forth, across the floor. “That you
lie
to me, it hurts me. I don’t ask for much. Do I? Do I really ask for so much? No, no, I don’t think so. All I ask is honesty. But when you withhold things, when you play games and keep them secret, then every single thing you do or say every single minute is a lie. A lie. Because, if you’re not completely honest all the time, then you are dishonest. You are dishonest if you withhold the truth.
You are a liar.’
He paced quickly now and his eyes flashed around the room.

‘You!’ He shouted, stopping suddenly and pointing at Louise. She stared back at him, stunned.

‘And you!’ He pointed at Eddie.

‘And you, both of you, liars!’ he shouted at Patrick and me.

My heart raced. I wished I knew what Eddie’s letters had said. I stared into Silvera’s black eyes, until he turned his attention elsewhere. When I looked at Patrick, I found him staring at the space abandoned by Silvera as if it were a ghost.

‘What is this?’ I whispered.

Patrick shook his head. Before he could speak, Silvera shouted:

‘Kate Steiner! Kate! Come on, come on!’ He slapped the stool.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t.

‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear it from you.’

‘What?’ My voice sounded disembodied, high and weak. I felt dizzy. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Bullshit.’
He stood there and glared at me. When I still didn’t move, he came forward. His stomach bounced and his face looked big and grotesque, like a monster or a bad dream. This
was
a bad dream. I squeezed shut my eyes, terrified. He had slapped me once before and I never really understood why. This time, at least, I was ready.

I heard a chair scrape the floor and topple over. I opened my eyes. Patrick was standing in front of Silvera. Silvera’s hands were on Patrick’s shoulders, trying to push him aside. Patrick clenched his teeth and kneed Silvera in the groin. The man crumpled in pain.

Voices rose and a few people stood. But no one came forward. Patrick stood with his hands loose at his sides as if to indicate that he didn’t intend to fight again. But I think he did. His face was white and angry; rage sparkled in his eyes.

Silvera was squeezing his thighs together, cradling his groin with a cupped hand. He lifted his other hand and ejected a straight fat finger. ‘Get out!’ he told Patrick.
‘You’re expelled! No grace period! Get what you need and leave immediately!’

Patrick’s hands curled into fists and he lurched forward, poised to fight. ‘You sick slob,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to be here anyway!’

‘Ha! Then why did you come back?’

Patrick hesitated; his anger paused. He said, ‘I had nowhere else to go.’

He was crying when he turned to me. He wove his way through the chairs to the front door. And was gone.

Patrick! But NO, I would not cry, not for the fat man. If I cried, he would have loved it, it would have fueled him in whatever his current crusade was. I pulled in my tears, recalled them, and stared right back at him, into those inkwell eyes.

‘He’s gone now,’ Silvera said, ‘you don’t have to cover up for him.’

‘What?’

He nodded quickly. In a low, controlled voice, he called, ‘Eddie Cohen!’

Eddie sat by the front door, near Gwen. I hadn’t noticed her before. She looked exhausted, pale, tense. Her eyes snapped away when she saw me looking at her. Her lips clutched together. She watched Eddie.

Eddie pretended not to hear Silvera. He stared mutely at his knees.

‘Eddie,’ Silvera said.

Walter, Lower Boys dorm father, nudged Eddie’s shoulder. ‘I’m fine right here,’ Eddie said, his voice cracking.

‘Come here,’ Silvera said.

He got up grudgingly and struggled past chairs and legs until he was standing in front of Silvera.

‘What do you want?’ Eddie asked, but it sounded more like a threat than a question.

Silvera pointed at the stool. ‘This is your seat.’

‘What do you want?’

Silvera lunged forward and Eddie hurried to the stool. He
sat with his back hunched. He stared at the floor.

‘Spit it out, Eddie.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I hear you’ve got a problem getting it up.’

A murmur rippled through the room.

‘Quiet!’ Silvera shouted. ‘All of you, you’re here at my invitation. Keep quiet!’

‘What do you want from me?’ Eddie said. He looked frightened. He looked guilty. But of what? And how could a person look guilty when you don’t even know what they’ve been accused of?

‘Why did you do it?’ Silvera said, with syrupy, mocking concern.

Eddie shook his head and stared blankly at the man. Finally he said: ‘I was horny.’

‘Why trick girls into sleeping with you?’ Silvera asked. ‘Couldn’t you find a girlfriend? Couldn’t you wait for homegoing?’

Eddie shook his head.

‘Answer me.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

Eddie shook his head.

‘Okay,’ Silvera said loudly. ‘Fine. Call when you figure it out. You’re expelled, too.
Now. Out.’

Eddie slipped off the stool and hurried out of the dining room. But before he left, just as he was through the door, he turned and said, ‘You only wish you could get some too!’ He rushed out and the heavy door slammed shut behind him.

I felt dizzy from the heat, from anger. Oh, was I angry! Whatever Eddie was, whatever Patrick and I were, Silvera was even worse. The man was sick, crazy, an evangelist gone mad, a Stalinist agent with hemorrhoids!

Silvera paced. His shirt was wet down the back and under
the arms. He ran his hands through his black hair so many times it was slicked down.

‘Sex,’ he said, ‘will nun you! Sex ruins relationships. You cannot be friends and have sex. Sex outside of marriage atrophies love.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘All right. What’s going on here? What is the issue here? I’ll tell you what the issue is. The issue is deceit.’

I looked at Louise. She, too, had been accused of the mysterious something. I expected to see a reflection of my own mute anger in her face, an identical reaction, but it wasn’t there. Her face showed fear and shame. She was completely still.

‘Eddie has used my name,’ Silvera said, ‘for sexual credit. He has connived and deceived and yes he has received sex on the basis of forged letters from me granting him permission to explore his blocked libido. What shocks me is that anyone would believe him. How could any halfway intelligent person believe such a cheap charade? I’ll tell you how: because they wanted to. It is not a matter of simple coercion, it is also a matter of volunteerism.’

He paused as Louise stood up. His eyes burned into her as she navigated the crowded room. As she neared the door, Silvera called her name. She stopped, but did not answer.

‘Don’t go, Louise,’ he said. ‘We need you, Louise. If you go, you’ll be abandoning yourself.’

Her back expanded slightly, as if she were taking a long, deep breath, and she walked slowly and steadily toward the door. Jimmy ran after her.

Silvera laughed. He rolled his eyes and smiled. ‘You know?’ he said — the faker, the liar — ‘I have to doubt a love that allows one party to betray the other one so freely.’ His laugh was hollow, tinny. ‘Louise had agreed to
help
Eddie. Isn’t that funny?’

No one laughed.

He turned to me again. My whole body stiffened in my chair. I wouldn’t move; he couldn’t move me. He said, ‘And here’s our resident virgin.’

Who told him that? How was it his business? Why was he telling the whole school?

He shook his head. ‘Dear little Kate. Angel of addiction. Saint of purity. Girl in the black negligee.’

‘Wait a minute!’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You knew,’ Silvera said, ‘that Patrick was covering up for Eddie in return for a supply of drugs. He typed the letters and you delivered them. And you lied about yourself to your friends.’

‘I didn’t!’I said.

I looked at the faces surrounding me for support and understanding. These were the people with whom I lived, shared air and food, slept, joked. Yet I couldn’t read them. Silvera’s words, the wildness of his claims, was pulling me outside of their circle of trust.

‘Don’t lie to us, Kate,’ he said softly, with conviction.

‘No!’ I shouted. ‘You’re
wrong.
I didn’t do any of that! I’ve never lied! Ted,’ I pleaded, ‘tell him.’

Ted shrugged meekly.

I looked at Gwen and demanded, ‘Tell him!’

She looked at me stony-faced. Her eyes were welling with tears, but she wouldn’t speak on my behalf. She knew, if anyone did, that I knew nothing about Eddie or his arrangements with Patrick, and that I had never been to bed with a boy in my life. But then, yes, she had slipped the negligee back into my suitcase. And I remembered, now like a confession, her words of the night before: ‘I’m sorry,’ she had said.

The rest was a blur of voices and faces that culminated in a sensation of peacefulness. Maybe I fainted, I don’t know. All I remember is waking up in middle of the night and seeing Gwen asleep in her bed, huddled under her blanket. When I sat up and my covers fell off, I found I was still dressed. It was four-thirty in the morning. In a couple of hours, the machine of Grove would begin its grind.

I had only one thought: to leave, escape, steal my butterfly wings and claim freedom.

R
unning away. Actually, I was walking. Walking and thinking and feeling cold and excited about the power of walking away. Of making my own decision not to play the Grove games. It was one thing to go along with the flow, to exist in a moderate state between privacy and Grove theory, as I felt I had managed before. But it was another thing to be grease for the wheels of the machine. How that had come about deeply confused me. Pieces of information glued themselves together in my mind with speculation.
When, where, who, why, how?
For an instant, less than a second, as I was waiting at the light across the street from the deserted mall (waiting for a red light to turn green on an empty street, deep in the night, with no one around to see: playing straight by the rules), I experienced a wave of belief in Silvera’s story.
The girl in the black negligee. Angel of addiction.
Then, just as suddenly, my momentary insanity ended and I knew, definitely, that I was innocent. I had done nothing but wear the negligee. I had done nothing but trust Patrick. I knew exactly where I stood in relation to the truth. But that was all I knew about: myself. I was alone now. I didn’t know about anyone else.

I called a taxi from a pay phone. As I waited, I argued with myself over calling Patrick when I got home. Silvera
was a powerful man, and he had created in me an edge of distrust. I tried to fight it, but it was there: questions with no answers, doubts borne of accusations. Patrick had seemed fine to me — healthy, happy — since returning to school and starting Drug Group. Yet, probably because he had deceived me once before, I found myself capable of believing that he had continued to mask his addiction. I couldn’t forget how he had lied to me about the letters; he had to have had a reason, something more compelling than his love for me. I vascillated between an intense, unconditional love, and suspicion of betrayal. One minute I was impatient to get home and call him, and the next, I promised myself I never would.

The taxi finally came and I got in. ‘Bus station,’ I said.

‘Which one?’

The driver’s bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror frightened me. I didn’t know which one, but I couldn’t let him know I was lost.

‘Bus to New York,’ I said.

He let me off in front of a Greyhound station in a narrow side street. The door was locked so I waited outside. After about an hour, the sky started to get light, and then at last the sun rose: peachy streaks in the grey sky, then vivid blue. An attendant came around and opened the door. He told me that the first bus to the city was in twenty minutes. That was a relief; it was still too early for Grove to miss me. By the time they realized I was gone, I would have been on the bus for over an hour.

It was noon but felt like days later when I finally reached home. I opened the door with my key. The phone was ringing. Mom, of course, would be at the office. I started to run to answer it, but realized it could have been someone from Grove, so didn’t. By that time they would have been looking for me; they would have been at the inform-the-parents stage. The dining room would be packed for lunch and the word would be out that Kate had run away. Maybe
Silvera was telling them Patrick and I had plotted it and left together. Maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.

I went up to my room and slept. When I woke up, Betty was curled between my feet, and I felt comforted. Everything was so much clearer. It now seemed to me that if Silvera had lied about me not being a virgin, he could have lied about Patrick being back on drugs. Not to mention Louise sleeping with Eddie. Or was there some truth to Silvera’s lies? Maybe, at least, he really believed them... or had been led to believe them.
By Gwen.
But why had she done it?

Betty followed me downstairs. I made myself a sandwich, and was eating it at the kitchen table when the front door creaked open. Mom appeared in the kitchen, wearing a stylish brown suit and a white silk blouse with a fluffy bow at the neck. She wore large pearl earrings and deep red lipstick. She stood there looking at me before taking a slow breath and sitting down.

‘Hi Mom,’ I said, my mouth full of tuna fish.

‘Hello dear,’ she said softly.