In the Dead of Summer (9 page)

“Shhh.” He looked shocked that I was making any sound, and he waved toward the stage where, indeed, Dutoit had entered and was tapping his baton on the podium, then lifting and holding it aloft.

I looked at the conductor and then at Mackenzie. Sometimes, for all my long-suffering tolerance of his pain and inconvenience, the man just plain got on my nerves. I should read history, indeed.

I wondered whether Mackenzie would get out of that cast before I read about us—when we, too, became history.

*

Normally, when I can’t find something, I keep
looking. My organizational powers are peccable, which is to say, things are often out of place.

But sometimes I instantly know that the object is not only not where it should be, but that it’s lost forever. I get a specific, sick feeling in the vicinity of my belly button. It is a nearly infallible predictor. Once I’ve had that queasy presentiment, I just about never have found the lost item. Gone is gone.

That’s how it was with April Truong. As soon as the morning section entered the room and didn’t include her, I felt a nauseating, dread sureness in my stomach.

Lost. She’s gone,
my belly button said.
Something terrible has happened to her.
Even as another part of my brain started the counterrefrain:
Nonsense! She’s late, she’s ill, she had an appointment. You’re becoming a hysteric.

But the feeling in the pit of my stomach persisted, and April never showed up.

I stopped Woody as he was leaving the room. It wasn’t easy. He was built like a Doberman and moved quickly, and he pretended not to see me at all. “Could I have a second?”

He grimaced, then sulked his way over to my desk. His pals stayed outside the classroom, watching, their arms crossed like mob bodyguards. I wondered what they expected me to do. I was tempted to close the door, but this wasn’t top secret, only a question.

“Do you know where April is?” I asked.

“Me? Why would I?’

“She isn’t here. I thought maybe she might have told you where she’d be.”

“Why would I know anything about that? Why’d I know anything at all about her? I’m not like a truant officer.” His T-shirt looked as if it had been custom-fitted to highlight his pecs, and, like his friends at the door, he now crossed his arms, accentuating their every muscle. The official thug pose.

“But
…
I
…
I thought the two of you…”

“Me and a gook?” he demanded loudly.

“Really, Woody—please don’t use words like that.”

“Are you crazy? Me and her?”

Outside the doorway, Tony elbowed Guy in glee, then licked his forefinger and chalked one up in the air for their team. Woody wasn’t taking flak from the teacher. Woody was giving back in kind.

“Didn’t I see the two of you…yester—”

“I don’t know what you saw ever,” he said, “but it wasn’t me and her. Not me and her.”

I gave it up. What was the point? I wished I could close the door, wondered if it would make any difference. I felt as if he were performing for his pals, but on the other hand, maybe I had misinterpreted the scene outside yesterday afternoon. Maybe their encounter had been accidental. Maybe April had cried because he’d called her names.

“My mistake,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. Hope I didn’t delay your lunch too long.”

“No problem,” he said, already loping toward the door. But just at it, he turned his back to his friends and gave me a small salute. “Thanks,” he whispered, so softly that it was more a shaping of his lips than sound.

As soon as my shock ebbed, I understood just how grateful he must have been that I hadn’t persisted with questions. But why?

Meanwhile, he’d turned with almost military briskness and, surrounded by back-slapping allies, the smile, the friends, and Woody were gone.

But, of course, so was April Truong.

*

Philly Prep was originally built as a turn-of-the-century beer baron’s statement of his net worth, which made for quirky, not always logical school architecture. This included anachronistic, politically incorrect conceits like a narrow back staircase that was off-limits to students, for reasons of liability. However, nobody worried about the odds of servants or teachers—if anyone distinguished between the two—tripping on its dark and narrow treads and breaking their necks, so I used the back stairs regularly.

En route, I passed Five’s room. At least half a dozen students—including, to my surprise, Woody and his pals—milled around inside, some holding soda cans, others settling in with sandwiches. At the moment I passed, Five was sitting on the edge of his desk saying something I couldn’t hear. The robber baron’s house had solid-core doors.

I could see the boy nearest him laugh in response, however, and I was suffused with envy. Summer in the city, and the hardcore mob suspended its contempt for school and all things related and hung out with their teacher. How did Five inspire such devotion, and why couldn’t I manage even a shadow of its intensity? Was it a guy thing? Or a gender-free failing on my part?

Farther down the hallway, I passed Flora Jones’s room. She was reading at her desk again, oversized tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose.

I walked on, then doubled back. Her reading matter had looked unbusinesslike. Aura of mass-market paperback.

I knocked on her door. She looked up, smiled—a little tensely, I thought—waved me in with one hand and opened a desk drawer with the other and dropped the paperback into it. My suspicions had been correct, and I wasn’t interrupting a serious study session.

“I hope I’m not—” I began.

“Not at all.”

“Just that I miss you. Can I tempt you outside?”

“Sorry. Not today. So busy. Besides, it’s cooler in my room than anywhere else.”

“How come you get special treatment?” An enormous unit blocked one entire window.

“Don’t get jealous,” she said dryly. “The climate control’s for their computers, not me.”

“Listen,” I asked. “Are you… I mean last time we talked… Is everything okay? You aren’t staying up here because you’re angry, are you?”

“About what?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe something I said? Or didn’t say?”

Flora shook her head. “Don’t take it personally just because I prefer a quiet lunch hour. Besides, I never thought it was you.”

“You can’t think that anybody here, that somebody at Philly Prep, a teacher, made those calls. That’s the only thing that happened, right?”

It’s interesting how a whole passel of needs can shape a sentence. Instead of asking Flora whether anything else had happened, which was my real question, I virtually answered myself with what I wanted to hear. Nothing more had happened. Flora had suffered a one-shot of ugliness. Over and done. A fluke.

“No,” she said softly.

Unfortunately, juggling syntax does not alter reality.

“It’s still going on. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”

“With me?”

“With anybody except the police. And they said not to. But two days ago, there was a letter, like a ransom note—words and letters cut out of newspapers and magazines. It said: ‘Stay where you belong or else, Nigger.’” She took a deep breath and was silent, then she spoke again with her normal, brisk delivery. “Or else what? And where is it I belong? What makes me not there now?”

“Flora, I don’t know what to say.”

She stood up and stretched. “And then, yesterday, last night, painting, graffiti. All over the brickwork in front. Letters, zeroes, swastika. It’s making me crazy.”

“It’d make anybody crazy. But maybe you’d feel better if you didn’t isolate yourself. Maybe if you’d be with other people at lunchtime—or take a walk. Want to?”

“I don’t want to be with the other people here,” she said softly. “There’s one thing I didn’t mention,” she said. “I’ll tell you, but you’re not to tell anybody else, understand?”

I nodded.

“That note made out of clippings? The word
belong
was made up of a few words, and the second half, the
long
part, was set in type so that it
was
long, all stretched out. It looked familiar. Not like the daily newspaper or any magazine I read in particular. And then I figured it out. Those words were cut out of this school’s paper. A headline from the last edition in spring. Remember the ‘So Long, See You in September!’ banner? How the word
long
was stretched out? It was a perfect match.”

I am the faculty sponsor of the paper. The journalists are
my
kids. I felt irrationally responsible for whatever became of our words.

“Maybe terrorism is the way Philly Preppers fill those lazy days of summer,” Flora said. “When they’re too old for summer camp.”

“Somebody could have picked the
paper out of the trash, or found it.” It sounded unlikely—a terrorist who collected and saved high school newspapers just in case he needed that typeface? “Or,” I said, being more honest, “a person who knew the school could go downstairs to the files and help himself. But I hate thinking that.”

“Until I know for sure,” she said, “I seem to have lost my appetite—both for lunch and socializing. At least around this place.” She sat back down. I wondered when she’d had her last good night’s sleep. “Present company excepted, of course,” she said. “I didn’t mean to include you.”

“What do the police think?”

“Not much. There’s been a rise in hate crimes, and they’re concerned, but this is considered something less than a crime. Harassment, I guess. Low priority in today’s world. The police are overworked, busy folk. They’re sympathetic, want to be kept informed, but aren’t overly involved. Of course,” she said drolly, “if I’m killed, that’d be a different story. That’d be an authentic hate crime. They’re interested in the sticks and stones that can break my bones, not in the names they think can never hurt me.”

AS I ENTERED MACKENZIE’S LOFT, A DELIGHTFULLY Mediterranean fragrance greeted me: essence of peppers, olives, and tomatoes that still seemed hot from the sun.

I could get used to coming home to a lovingly prepared repast. I could get used to having a good old-fashioned
wife.

I’d spent a few hours taking care of scut work—retrieving a silk blouse from the cleaners, drudge shopping for kitty litter and lightbulbs, restocking Macavity’s bowl so that the oval kitty didn’t starve to death in my absence, and returning a phone message from my mother. Normally, I’d have let that last item slide, particularly since I was still miffed about her tossing Lowell at me. But her message was too bizarre to ignore, even considering the source.

“This is your mother,” she’d said although I’m such a quick study that I can, at age thirty-one, recognize my mom’s voice. “With
such
a good idea! Mandy—join AA.” End of message.

I was sufficiently worried to dial her back. “Mom,” I said when I reached her, “I must have misunderstood. It sounded like you wanted me to join Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“Yes!”

“But I don’t have a drinking problem. And although Lowell Diggs has not turned out to be Prince Charming, that isn’t going to drive me to drink, either.”

“Do they check? Is there some kind of secret password or salute? Does somebody have to verify that you drank too much?”

“I…well, from what I know, of course not. But what—”

“If they don’t check, then who’s going to know whether or not you belong there?”

“I will. What is this about?”

“Now listen, Amanda, Mrs. Farber’s niece?”

I hated it when she inventoried strangers’ genealogies. It almost always led to a Lowell Diggs. I didn’t know who Mrs. Farber was, let alone her niece. But if I dared to ask, my mother would insist that I
did
know by default, because I knew ten other people with connections to the Farbers, a delusion she would work to prove by chopping at more and more family trees. To my mother, the fabled six degrees of separation is nothing. She’s willing to go seven, ten, fifty degrees of separation—to find the missing links between all mankind.

I remained silent.

“The girl—Claudette, I think is her name—the blonde with the ankle bracelet, remember?”

I waited.

“She had a problem with liquor, caused her family a lot of grief.”

“Mom, I’m on my way out. I have a
date
.” That generally stops her, and in fact it worked now, too, but only for a second.

“With the cop? The
…
Chuck person?”

I admitted that I was, indeed, seeing C.K. Mackenzie again. Déjà Mackenzie. I’d never told her I didn’t know his first or middle names. Actually, she was fond of the man she called Chuck. She used to slow down significantly in her matchmaking when I mentioned him. But she refused to come to a full stop. Her bumper sticker read: I
BRAKE ONLY FOR SERIOUS MARITAL CONTENDERS.
After a year and more of our dithering, she was beginning to fear there was no future with him.

“Chuck can wait,” she said. “The point is, Claudette went to AA and met the most wonderful man. He was drying out, too. They were married last week.”

“Give the Farbers my congratulations.”

“You’re missing the point.” She sounded almost testy. “They’re
there
.”