The Drowning Tree (8 page)

“Christine gave me your number in case I needed to reach her over the weekend,” he says, “and I was wondering if she were still there.” There’s a pause and I think the message is over, but then his voice resumes. “She didn’t show up for her classes today. When I went by her apartment today to feed her cat it looked like she never came home.”

I
TRY
C
HRISTINE’S HOME NUMBER TWICE BEFORE
I
GO TO SLEEP, BUT ONLY GET HER
answering machine. In the morning I try her again but when she doesn’t pick up I call Nathan Bell.

“She missed a meeting with her dissertation adviser and her senior seminar,” he tells me.

“That doesn’t sound like her at all.”

There’s a silence that lasts so long I think we might have been disconnected, but then Nathan Bell asks me a question, “Look, you’re her oldest friend, aren’t you?”

It takes me a moment to answer. I’ve never put it that way to myself but I guess it’s true. Christine never mentioned any friends from high
school and although she seemed to know everyone in college, I was the only one you could really call her friend. Well, Neil maybe—but she’d met him at the same time I had during junior year.

“Yes, I guess I am,” I finally answer. “Why? Do you think something’s wrong?”

“I wanted to know if
you
thought there was anything wrong. How did she seem this weekend?”

“To tell you the truth we didn’t get to spend that much time together. She was pretty much in demand all weekend—” I don’t mention that I avoided most of the reunion events, “—and by the time we hooked up after her lecture we only had an hour before she had to catch her train.”

“And how did the lecture go?”

“Great—you know Christine, she’s a performer.” I picture Christine standing in front of the window twirling her hand in the yellow light. Thinking about the window prompts me to wander down the spiral stairs to the studio, where the window has been laid out on the glazing bench, waiting to be dismantled. I notice again how the Lady’s hand is tangled in her own hair and I realize that Christine’s gesture with the light had echoed the Lady’s pose. “It was like she had really absorbed her subject,” I tell Nathan Bell. “I remember once when she was writing a paper on John Everett Millais’s
Ophelia
and she read that he made Elizabeth Siddal pose for hours in a full bathtub. Christine decided to see how long she could stay in a bathtub. She managed five hours and came down with pneumonia.”

Nathan Bell laughs. “Yeah, that sounds like Christine. When she talks about a painting it’s like she’s walked into that world and chatted with the subjects—whether it’s one of Brueghel’s villages or a de Chirico streetscape. It’s part of her brilliance, but I wonder sometimes if she doesn’t pay too high a price for that insight. In the last few months she’s seemed possessed by that Penrose window. I wondered if you noticed a change in her or if there was anything in her lecture that struck you as odd.”

“Well,” I say, picking up a lead knife and sliding it under the came at the top edge of the window, “she identified the figure in the window as Eugenie’s mentally ill sister Clare. I guess that’s bound to be controversial. We’ve always been told that Eugenie was the model and that Augustus
Penrose designed the window as a tribute to craftsmanship. Christine identified the iconography with the story of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and drew an analogy between being stuck in an insane asylum and spending four years at Penrose. She ended her lecture by saying that the Lady is calling us to ‘turn away from the shadows and face reality.’ I think it’s a brilliant interpretation but it’s bound to strike some people as too radical.”

I shift the phone to my other ear to ease the crick in my neck from cradling the receiver against my shoulder and miss the beginning of Nathan’s response.

“…  anything about the Briarwood Asylum?”

The lead knife slips in my hand and nicks my thumb. When I draw back my hand a drop of blood falls on the landscape portion of the window. Fortunately, it’s not a piece that’s painted: In fact Penrose had used a technique called plating, in which he layered clear glass over the painted mountains to give an illusion of distance and depth.

“I’m sorry, what did you say about Briarwood?” I remember my promise to Bea to find out if her father was still at Briarwood, but of course I’d had to return Nathan Bell’s call first.

“Christine said she had some more research to do up there and she mentioned an aunt who worked at the hospital who could get her in to see the head doctor—could she have gone up to Poughkeepsie instead of coming back to the city?”

“Well, I put her on the southbound train.” I’ve put down the knife—I had no business using it while on the phone anyway—and look into the Lady’s face, only it’s like she’s looking past me at something in the distance. How had Christine described the blush of color on her face?
It is the reflection of the sun striking her for the first time in her life. She might be bound for death, but in this moment—the moment in which she chooses life over shadow—she is more alive than she has ever been
. There is something in her expression that reminds me of my last glimpse of Christine before her train compartment’s lights went out but I don’t know what. Christine had looked more worried than radiant.

“She did seem preoccupied with something when I put her on the train,” I tell Nathan. “Like she’d remembered something she’d neglected to do.”

“Maybe it was something she wanted to research up at Briarwood. Are you sure she didn’t get off the train?”

“Well, I stayed until the train pulled out.” Waving at the blank window. When the train was gone I walked south, away from the station, toward the factory. “I suppose she could have gotten off on the north side of the stairs,” I tell Nathan, “and gone up to the station and waited for a northbound train. Her mother still lives in Poughkeepsie. Even though she and Christine don’t get on so well she could have gone there for the night. Why don’t I call her and check?”

Nathan Bell thanks me and gives me his cell phone number. “Let me know as soon as you find out anything,” he says. “I won’t feel easy—”

His voice is drowned out by a high-pitched moan.

“What the hell is that?” I ask.

“Christine’s Siamese,” Nathan tells me. “I though I might as well bring her over here. She doesn’t seem very easy about Christine’s absence either.”

I
AM NOT ABLE, UNFORTUNATELY, TO PUT
N
ATHAN
B
ELL’S CONCERNS TO REST
. R
UTH
Webb tells me curtly that she hasn’t heard from
Chrissie
since Christmas although she had heard from her sister, Beth, who still works at Briarwood (Ruth had worked there in the kitchen before she’d injured her knee and retired on disability) that Christine had been nosing around up there last month. “You’d think she could have spared a minute to visit her mother.”

I murmur something noncommittal—the alternative being to point out that fifteen years ago Mrs. Webb hadn’t been able to
spare a minute
to come to Christine’s graduation. Christine had graduated
summa cum laude
and
Phi Beta Kappa
without a single family member in attendance. Since I had just given birth—and Bea was still in NICU because she’d been born prematurely—she also missed having her best friend there.

I
WISH
I
COULD SAY
I
SPENT THE REMAINDER OF THE WEEK TRYING TO FIND
C
HRISTINE
but although I was worried about her, I didn’t really see what I could do.
When I asked her mother if she would file a missing persons report she responded that Christine had vanished like this before and turned up
when she was good and ready to
. I could tell from her tone of voice that she assumed Christine must be drinking again. Maybe she was right. When Christine was drinking she would often disappear for days at a time. Nathan said that he would notify the police if she didn’t show up in another twenty-four hours. In the meantime I had my own work on the window to start and Bea’s end of school and upcoming rafting trip to think about.

Every time I looked at Bea I thought about not seeing her for eight weeks and I’d have to stop myself from saying something absurdly sentimental or hugging her, so instead I’d bring up the number of extra socks she was taking or how many protein bars she would need to subsist on her new vegan diet and we’d end up fighting. By Friday we were barely talking. I didn’t want her to go away like that so on Saturday I gave in to a request she’d been making for almost a year.

“I thought maybe we could go kayaking together,” I mention casually over breakfast (eggs and coffee for me; a protein bar and Japanese twig tea for her). “Kyle says I’m making a lot of progress.”

Bea looks up from her mug of murky brown tea. “Really? You mean like out on the river?”

I shrug. “Water’s water, right? Whether it’s chlorinated pool water or Hudson River water—” I’m about to say
you can drown just as easily in both
but stop myself. “—it’s the same drill flipping yourself back up. Besides, I hardly ever tip.” This part is true. During the lessons Kyle has given me at the college pool he’s had to push me to make me learn how to capsize and right myself. Otherwise I’m so rigidly still the minute I slide into the shallow boat that it would take a tidal wave to swamp me and, as far as I know, the Hudson is relatively free of tsunami.

Bea gets up from the table and heads barefoot out onto the roof with Paolo and Francesca close at her heels.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she calls to me. I get up and follow her, trying not to look quite as slavishly attentive as the dogs. Her palms flat to the railing, Bea leans out toward the river and sniffs at the morning air. Her red hair, loosed from its braid, fans out in the mild breeze. Francesca rises on her hind legs, paws on the railing, and muzzles Bea’s hip. Above the hills on the western bank the sky is bright with only a thin line of clouds
hovering over the Catskills. The river, which looks suddenly wider to me, is a shade of slate blue stippled with white caps.

“It looks kind of windy,” I say.

Bea turns to me, her hands already working in her hair to braid it. For a moment she reminds me of Christine standing in the same pose last week twisting her hair up, but then I realize the similarity is more in their expressions: the same shadow of worry that I saw in Christine last week has fallen over Bea. She’s worried I’ll be too afraid to go out on the river because of the wind. She’s right; I am.

“I’ve got an idea,” I say, “why don’t we cross the river and paddle up the Wicomico onto the old Astolat grounds? That way we’ll only be on the open river for a little while and I can see the sunken garden you and Kyle were talking about.” Bea’s face brightens instantly. I’m not sure what pleases her more: the fact that I’ve agreed to go kayaking with her or that I’m willing to trespass on private property.

W
E GO DOWN TO THE BOATHOUSE AND FIND
K
YLE GIVING AN INTRO LESSON TO THREE
couples who have come up from the city to spend a day on the river. Standing with his back to the river he’s inscribing figure eights with a red paddle in the bright air. He makes it look easy—a natural motion like the rise and fall of a dragonfly’s wings. His audience, when they take up their paddles, bats the air clumsily, more like bees drunk on honey. He tells them to keep practicing and wends his way between their darting paddles over to us.

“Hey, I was afraid you were going to head out before dropping by to say good-bye.” He’s talking to Bea, but he manages to catch my eye and wink. He’s supposed to come over tomorrow night after Bea leaves to make dinner for us.

“Mom’s finally ready to launch out into the great outdoors,” Bea announces. She looks so proud of me I’m instantly ashamed it’s taken me so long to do this. “Can we have two boats?”

“Maybe one of the wider models,” I say. The wider kayaks, though slower, are less likely to tip.

“Sorry, Juno, I’ve promised those to this crew, and frankly,” he lowers his voice, “they need them more than you do.”

We all look over just in time to see one of the men—snappily attired in lycra shorts and tangerine fleece—spade the dirt at his feet with his paddle.

“Don’t you have seven of the wider kayaks?” I ask.

Kyle shakes his head. “I did. One was stolen last week.”

“Stolen?” Bea sounds incensed. Although happy to break rules that she sees as pointless, my daughter possesses a fine sense of moral outrage against unkindness to others. “Someone broke into the boathouse?”

Kyle nods. “I knew the lock was flimsy. They took two kayaks, one of the reds—the wider kind—and a yellow. Also two paddles, two aprons, but no life jackets.”

“Serve them right if they drowned.”

“Beatrice!”

“Well, Kyle’s worked hard to get this business going. I bet it was some rich kids from the Heights on a graduation night dare.”

“Actually it happened last Sunday night—but speaking of businesses to get going, I’d better get this crew in the water before they kill one another on land. You two can tag along if you like.”