In the Dead of Summer (29 page)

“Not a damned thing. He’d spoken to the hospital and he gave me an update. I’m sorry I let him borrow your piece of the bench. I’m sorry he makes you insecure. Bet you can’t stand it that he can’t be a suspect for last night’s events because you and I are his alibi.”

Mackenzie emitted a Southernized version of
hmmmph!

“Hey, there,” I said. “How about forgiving me for not treating your bench with proper reverence and tell me what’s up with Lowell? Did he admit being here?”

Mackenzie nodded.

“Well? Why?”

“He forgot his Walkman.”

“I don’t get it.”

“He came to retrieve his Walkman, then couldn’t hear you call him because he was wearing it. Kind of dancing to it, too, as I recall.”

“He came here at night for it? Why? He doesn’t look like a jogger, and why would he deny he was here if that was it?”

Mackenzie sighed. “I can’t tell you. He desperately doesn’t want you to know this, prob’ly because you might call off the engagement—he practically told me you two are betrothed.”

“Then surely I deserve to know.”

“Surely, you do. To set your mind at ease, understand, I will divulge his dark secret for your ears only.”

“I promise.”

“Lowell’s afraid of the dark, and night noises. Can’t sleep. Truth is, the man is afraid of ever’thin’ ’cept you, so he puts on the security system, slips a sleep mask over his eyes, then plugs himself in with his special music, and only then can he doze off.”

“For real?”

“TV doesn’t do it for him, nor do tapes of white noise, nor does a radio. Needs those earplugs to be safe.
Connected
is his word. And as of this summer, the tape has to be Barry Manilow.”

“Not singing…”

He nodded. “Right. ‘Mandy.’”

I felt personally ashamed to be, even if in name only, part of the ritual.

“Truly. An’ even though he has a spare Walkman and an old pair of headphones, the Barry Manilow tape was erroneously taken to school yesterday along with papers he’d marked, an’ in the confusion of the fire drill, he forgot to check for it before he went home. He was so agitated that he put on the headphones as soon as he retrieved the tape and therefore heard absolutely nothing—’cept Barry, of course—after that point.

“So now you know,” Mackenzie said. “Jus’ promise that if and when you break your engagement to the man, you make sure he doesn’t think it’s ’cause of anythin’ I said. Be kind, you hear?”

IT’S EITHER MIRACULOUS OR HORRIFYING TO REALIZE
how quickly human beings regain their equilibrium. The worst happens, and if people don’t throw in the towel and become catatonic, they carry on. Reorganize, regroup, and start again.

Which is why, I have to assume, my afternoon session was so much calmer and more
normal
than the morning had been. Of course, they were less directly affected, which always makes coping easier. Woody had been in the morning class, and most of these students probably didn’t know him. Still, a major disaster had occurred in their school, to one of their own. But by afternoon the catastrophe in the gym was old news, a part of local history. There were no dramatic late-breaking developments. Woody was going to live. No further complications or horrors. Life and time and clichés march on. Even English class marches on.

We got through our four hours with as little awkwardness as possible, even during the necessary, but never-popular punctuation segment. I wrote the advice the oracle at Delphi had given an ancient Greek who was wondering whether he should fight in a battle:

Thou shalt go thou shalt return

never by war shalt thou perish.

“So he went,” I said. “But he didn’t come back. That Oracle was no good with commas. This should have read:

Thou shalt go, thou shalt return

never, by war shalt thou perish.

“Lack of comma sense killed him.” I’ve scored a pedagogic touchdown when I see kids copying an example or exercise on which they’ll never be tested.

The working portion of my day ended at about the same time that Mackenzie’s reentry into employment began. We were back out of synch, and I already missed having him at the ready, there when I needed him, devoting his daily routine and all his energy to making my time at home pleasant and relaxing. Anxious for news of the outside world, a little depressed, but eager to please.

I’d had a gender-free retro housewife, and it was hard to give it up. No wonder so many men had been royally pissed since the Seventies.

I passed Aldis on the way down the back stairs. She looked at me with a cold, suspicious eye. I psychically frisked myself for guilt. She had that effect.

I had tried to be charitable for a long while now, but the woman gave me the creeps. The only attraction to teaching I could imagine for a chilly, single-minded woman like her would be the allure of control.

It has been my observation that it’s next to impossible and downright heroic for a teacher to significantly improve a child’s life, abilities, or mental health. But it’s easy to use the bit of power you’ve got to injure that child, to do serious damage to growing egos. Our capacity to wound far exceeds our ability to do good, and “first do no harm” should be our motto as much as it is a physician’s.

Aldis seemed likely to be a power monger sucking the joy from learning and leaving permanent scars in her wake.

I gave her a perfunctory nod. Once outside, we both slowed to look up at the slice of sky that showed between the buildings. Its earlier blue had turned sour, looked almost bruised and bloated. Rain skulked somewhere. Never trust the promise of a summer’s day.

Aldis unlocked her car and removed an iron bar device from the steering wheel of her dinged, rusty red sedan. A city conveyance, kept in bad shape, below the standards of thieves.

My vehicle was due to be picked up in two hours, so I walked. What had Aldis been doing at school last night? I wanted to grill her under harsh police lights. Forget the bogus roll-book story, babe, and confess, I’d say. The third degree, whatever that was. I’d have to ask Mackenzie what the first and second degrees were.

On the other hand, I feared that this entire string of events was going to turn out to have been hideously ordinary. Nothing to confess, nothing provoking headlines. One gang killed a member of the other. The other struck back. The same story that ran last week and the week before. Use the boilerplate print. Just change the names of the victims and suspects. And what could be more depressing?

I should have suspected that Woody was in a gang, even if nobody mentioned it. It was too dangerous traveling solo
in his world, and the only safety—albeit a shaky one—was
in numbers. There were markers and monuments to dead children all over the city, and even as these dark images surged through my mind, I saw an example on a passing car. Its trunk had a white cross painted on it and the back window shelf had become a shrine with plastic flowers and a small crucifix. A driver grieving for someone close to him who was murdered, unnaturally dead.

The car, my thoughts, even the sighting of Aldis, left a bitter aftertaste. Going home to an empty house, a space absent of the immediate possibility of Mackenzie, felt purposeless and dismal.

The voice of my guardian nag piped up to ask whether I might deduce something from this reaction to Mackenzielessness. But what did she know? She sounded too much like my mother.

Mandy, call your mother!
I had submerged Lowell’s directive, forgotten that I was supposed to check in with Boca, to prove that I wasn’t being held hostage. It still felt absurd to reassure her that something that had never even been suggested had, in truth, not happened. I hadn’t been promoted or knighted or banished, either. Was I supposed to constantly call to catalogue things that had not happened to me? Hey, Mom—I haven’t mutated or marinated or hallucinated today. Damn Lowell. It was too tempting to think of retaliation, of a public accusation of Barry Manilow dependency.

I trudged on. The humidity was like an overly affectionate, sweaty lover, refusing to let me out of its embrace. By the time I got home, I was slick and cranky.

My house wasn’t precisely empty. Macavity, despite his fur coat, looked unfazed by either the heat or the humidity. “Hey buddy,” I said. “I’m alone. Your hero is not here. What you got is she who provides your link in the food chain. Humor me.” He yawned and stretched. I picked him up and planted one on his round forehead. He looked startled, then squirmed out of my hands and started furiously grooming himself.

“Right,” I said “I forgot. I didn’t ask if you wanted to be kissed. I did not respect your boundaries, your otherness. You will probably take me to court for harassment, and I don’t blame you.” But I was just as bad as all the other rotters, because I winked at him, positive that he’d secretly enjoyed the nuzzle and guiltily aware that the next time I had an irresistible urge to kiss the cat, I would, no matter how he felt about it.

I was bucked up by the twinkle of my answering machine. Four messages. I felt loved, wanted. I pressed the rewind button and waited for life to expand and include grand surprises.

The first message was a desperately worried where-are-you-how-are-you post-Lowell cry from my mother’s heart.

The second was a more puzzled, almost annoyed report that my mother had called the police, who, amazingly, had no record of anything like a hostage-taking happening, so where, then, was I?

By her third message she had regained enough equilibrium to remember where I most logically was, and she’d called the school. “The secretary wouldn’t let me interrupt your class,” she said, “so I asked her, ‘Does that mean she’s there, teaching?’ and she was snippy. ‘One must assume that, Mrs. Pepper,’ she said. ‘She went upstairs as did her students and none have come back down, so they are either there, or they’ve jumped out the window.’ What kind of woman is that, Mandy? Anyway, I’m glad you’re okay. I’m sorry I was so worried. Ignore my other messages.”

The fourth message was also from Bea Pepper. It told me not to ignore the part of the previous messages that said to call my aging progenitors, because it was high time I did so, even if I wasn’t being held by a masked gunman.

Good daughter that I am, I dialed my parents, although that is not completely accurate. I dialed my parent, since I can’t remember when my father last lifted a receiver. He doesn’t like phones and pretty much doesn’t acknowledge that they exist. On the other hand, my mother more than compensates.

Multiply her four calls to
me today by the aunts, cousins, and neighbors who had to be kept on ready-alert about all stages of my alleged disappearance, and you may understand why I nominate Mom as the long-distance vendors’ poster girl. “Be like Bea. Live on the line.” It makes a nice slogan.

The gods for once rewarded my good girl behavior. Nobody was home. I left my message. “Everything’s fine, Mom. Except for Lowell, who has a few itsy-bitsy flaws. Like he’s a hysteric. And delusional. And obnoxious. And a pest. And afraid of the dark. And an alarmist. And he has bad taste in music, too.”

Since I already had the phone in hand, I dialed the hospital again, and asked after Woody’s condition. He had had microsurgery on both hands, I was told, and they were guardedly optimistic about the operation’s success. Right now he was resting, and all his vital signs were stable. He was out of intensive care and could, indeed, have a limited number of visitors this evening.

I whooped and applauded. Woody hadn’t paid with his life or his hands for April’s misguided “escape.”

Maybe we should stop teaching
Romeo and Juliet
to anyone under fifty. It was too adolescent and set a bad example, presented wretched ideas. April had cried at the ending, yet still adopted the tragic heroine’s suicidal plan. It would work for
her
.
Very like a teenager.

I could tell Woody she was fine and ease his mind. I was sure he wouldn’t tell whoever it was that was menacing him or her, and I was positive his recovery would be quicker with the knowledge that he was guilty of nothing concerning her disappearance because she hadn’t disappeared.

There was enough time to have something to eat before visiting Woody.

I lifted the phone again. “He’s okay,” I told Five. “Resting but alert. I’m so relieved! I’ll aim for seven.”

Woody was at University Hospital, which was not far from Five’s apartment in Powelton Village, a semifunky collection of rambling Victorians near Penn’s campus and hospital. I’d have my cleaned-up car back by then, so it made better geographical sense for me to pick Five up than the reverse, and with that decided, I hung up and, feeling cocky, walked over and again picked up Macavity and kissed that irresistible spot between his ears. And once again he gave me his yellow-eyed glare and squirmed out of my grasp. “So sue me,” I said.

*

The cheap-and-quick body shop had not done a
great job. The car looked patched and makeshift. But you’d have to work really hard to decipher the eights or the half swastika. I was glad the light was so dim outside. It made my car look almost normal, even though it made finding Five’s house difficult. His neighborhood was poorly lit, the buildings not clearly numbered. Very Philadelphia.

The sky had lowered till its entirety sat on my car roof, congested with incipient storm. Dusk felt like midnight. I cruised his street until finally I thought I had it, a four-story shingled and turreted building. He was apartment A, ground floor, which was the only set of windows with lights on. But any hope of spotting him at the window was squelched by curtains or shades blocking every clear view. I honked twice anyway. Maybe he would hear.