The Realm of Last Chances (17 page)

“I don’t know if I do or not,” she said. “I mean, it’s the juxtaposition I find troubling. You go out and almost get killed and then proceed to beat somebody senseless, and then you get an erection for the first time in …” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Ten months,” he said helpfully. “If you could call what I got that night an erection. I’m not sure it qualified.”

She wasn’t sure it did either, but agreeing would have been unkind. She went around to the other side of the bed and sat down with her back to him. The clock was over there on the bedside table, and she set the alarm. She had a meeting at eight thirty the next morning with the chair of the history department on a matter he’d termed extremely urgent, and what she really wanted more than anything was to go to sleep.

Sleep wasn’t the only thing she wanted, though, or the only thing she needed, a truth she found disquieting. She sat there for a moment longer, her bare feet on the cold floor. Then she pulled her nightgown up over her thighs, raised her arms and lifted it off.

“I probably better stay on my back,” he said. “My left arm and hand aren’t too useful right now.”

“That’s all right. You’re not going to chord me.”

When she turned toward him, he said, “Jesus. I forgot how beautiful you are. I feel like I did when I saw you the first time.”

“You’ve seen me every day for fifteen years.”

“Some days I see better than others.”

“Almost dying’s sharpened your vision?”

“I imagine that’s what it does to most folks.” He raised his head long enough to stare down the length of his torso. “Kristin,” he said, “I’m scared I’ll lose it.”

“Well, we can’t let that happen, can we?” She reached under his waistband. “You’re fine.” She knelt and pulled his shorts down over his legs and feet and dropped them off the side of the bed. Then she straddled him.

It hurt when he went inside her, and also that he failed to acknowledge her discomfort, pushing hard rather than allowing her a moment to recover. She bit her lip and closed her eyes, but it only got worse. When she opened them again and looked down at him, she saw that his jaw was clenched, that he was hurting too, though where his pain came from she couldn’t imagine.

His hand closed on her left breast, kneading, squeezing. She leaned over him, flattening her palms against the mattress, struggling to find her own rhythm. No one was in control. They were equally helpless, two lost bodies.

From his vantage point all Matt could see was her shadow, but that was more than enough. She bent forward, then seconds later rocked backward. He stood beneath the maple at the corner for another moment, then turned up the collar of his windbreaker and walked down the hill into Cedar Park.

He’d waited at the station in Andover for close to an hour. Waiting was all he could do, because he had no way of reaching her. When he’d suggested they swap cell numbers, she said it was a bad idea, and her home phone was unlisted. His wasn’t,
but when he got back she hadn’t left him a message. Just to hear a voice, he turned on the TV and, while eating leftovers, saw the report about the attempted robbery. They said her husband was treated for minor injuries and released.

He sat on a bench next to Pleasant Pond, where he’d learned to ice-skate. He couldn’t have been more than three or four when his mother brought him here to teach him. He’d wanted to zip across the glistening surface like the bigger kids, because it looked like so much fun. But when the day finally arrived he woke up crying, claiming he had a sore throat, that it was too cold out and his ear hurt. She paid his protests no mind, just bundled him up, took him by the hand and led him firmly down the street. While he sat on this same bench, she squatted before him and strapped on his skates, then sat down beside him and strapped hers on too. After that she again clasped his hand, and together they stepped onto the ice.

“When you start skating,” she told him as he clung to her, “don’t look at your feet. Hold your arms out straight, like you’re about to lay them on the dining room table. If you feel a fall coming on, bend over and grab your knees. That will lower your center of gravity. And most importantly? If you
do
go down, get right back up.” She towed him around in front of herself and gave him a gentle shove.

though no one ever
came right out and said it, Kristin gradually understood that Sarah Connulty’s religion was of another order than that practiced by her parents and Mr. Connulty and Patty and everyone else she knew growing up. The only prayers Kristin heard at home were the perfunctory graces her father used to say over dinner at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Eventually, by the time she entered high school, he’d even quit saying those, and neither she nor her mother ever missed them. The Connultys themselves never prayed over their meals, so it was a while before Kristin noticed that once she sat down to eat Mrs. Connulty would quickly shut her eyes, her lips moving wordlessly.

When the two families gathered, there was always a pre-dinner drink, and a couple bottles of wine would be consumed during the meal. Afterward, the adults decamped to the living room, where they had yet another drink—brandy or cognac—and while Mrs. Connulty always joined in these activities, she never appeared to do more than wet her lips. When the girls cleared the table, an inch or two of wine usually remained in her glass.

If Kristin’s mother noticed these tendencies, she never remarked on them. Her father made at least one reference, asking his wife, after the two of them went to New York to see
Jesus Christ Superstar
, if they’d run up much of a bar bill at their Midtown hotel and if Mrs. Connulty agreed with those born-again Christians who considered the Broadway musical blasphemous. Her mother ignored the first question but responded sharply to the second: “If she did, do you think she would’ve gone to see it?”

“Maybe she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for.”

“She was the one who suggested it. Did you forget?”

“I guess I did.” He was dressing up as Santa for the school Christmas party when this conversation took place. Their bedroom door was ajar, and as Kristin walked past she could see him pulling on his red velour pants. His beard and stocking cap lay on the bedside table.

“Yes, I guess you did,” her mother replied. “For someone who teaches literature, you’re far too quick to stereotype.”

That response pleased Kristin. She felt oddly protective of Mrs. Connulty. The source of this impulse was hard to identify, but it had at least something to do with the fact that Patty’s mother differed from the other women in the town in a number of respects and that she never could’ve concealed these differences, no matter how she tried. And try to conceal them she did.

One February morning when Kristin was in junior high, she woke up with an earache. Her mother insisted on taking her temperature and discovered it was already 101. She offered to stay home with her, but Kristin assured her she’d be fine until the school day ended. They made a doctor’s appointment for four fifteen. She went back to sleep but woke up again around eleven with her face on fire and her ear feeling as if someone had stuck a power drill into the canal and was doing his best to drill right into her brain.

When she got out of bed, she felt dizzy and had to steady herself against the bedpost. As soon as the world quit spinning, she looked out the window and saw that Mrs. Connulty’s car was in the driveway. She stepped into her shoes and wrapped herself in her warm bathrobe, then went downstairs and outside. Later, she wondered why she didn’t just pick the phone up and call her.

She knocked on the door, but nothing happened. People didn’t lock their houses when they were home during the
day, and some probably didn’t even lock them at night, so she opened the door and stepped inside. “Mrs. Connulty?” she called.

Sarah would claim afterward that she hadn’t heard her, but she said this with no small amount of embarrassment, her face the color of an August sunset as she stuck a thermometer into Kristin’s mouth. She hadn’t heard anything because she herself had been speaking so earnestly.

The voice came from the pantry, where Kristin had first tasted those homemade wafers. Initially she assumed Mrs. Connulty must be in there talking on the phone, which hung on the wall near the electric range but had an extra-long cord. When she entered the kitchen, however, the receiver was in its cradle. If she hadn’t been in so much pain, she probably would have turned around and gone home to call her mom, but she needed to be comforted and knew that Sarah Connulty wouldn’t disappoint her.

When she parted the curtain, she saw her friend’s mother on her knees, her back to the entrance and her forehead resting on her hands, which were squeezed together atop a twenty-five-pound sack of Martha White flour. “Please, Jesus, please,” she was saying in that thick mountain accent, “don’t let folks find out I’m such a awful fraud. Help me keep it hid. Forgive me, Jesus, please, my God in heaven.”

She didn’t say what she needed to be forgiven for, presumably because God and Jesus already knew. Kristin let the curtain fall and turned to run from the house, but then stumbled into the electric range, at which time Sarah realized she had uninvited company and called for her to stop.

After she’d taken her temperature, she made her lie down on the couch under a blanket while she phoned the school and asked for her mother. With her good ear, Kristin heard her speaking calmly. “Yes, it’s awful high, and her ear’s red and hot to the touch.… No, I don’t think you need to do that. I’ll
just call them myself and take her right in.… Yes, of course, I’ll let you know the minute we get back.… It’s no bother, I love her too.”

It turned out she had a bacterial infection. They told her to lie on her side while they put some drops in her ear. Then they prescribed an oral antibiotic, gave her an extra-strength pain reliever and let her go.

It was snowing hard when they left the doctor’s office. She sat in the car with the heater on while Mrs. Connulty used an ice scraper to clear the windshield, and looking through it Kristin could see the tears in her eyes. She didn’t think they were caused by the cold. She believed they’d been brought on by her fear of exposure.

That episode was on her mind the morning after the foiled robbery, as she waited for Donna to show the chair of the history department into her office. She had a public e-mail address, and lacking any other means of contacting her than walking up and knocking on her front door, Matt Drinnan had chosen to use it. Around three a.m. he’d written to say he was in love with her—
It seems impossible, but it’s happened
—and her inclination, after reading the lengthy message, was to delete it immediately, because messages sent to a university address were never private, especially if you were a personnel officer. In California, hers had been subpoenaed so often it seemed like the techies were rummaging through her inbox at least once a week. On the other hand, deleting it wouldn’t accomplish anything. It was still on the server. And it was still in Matt’s heart.

Donna ushered the chair in, then stepped out and closed the door. Kristin rose and offered him her hand. They’d met at a couple monthly sessions held by Academic Affairs, but had never really talked. Around forty, trim and fit, with a receding hairline, John Bell had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Delaware. Like a number of other chairs around the university,
he was a tenured associate professor. This was by design, since an associate was more likely than a full professor to do whatever the administration asked, even at the risk of annoying senior colleagues. If the department denied him promotion, the administration would overturn it—assuming he’d done its bidding. That’s how things worked both here and at any number of other schools.

“I saw the
Globe
article this morning about the attempted robbery in Cedar Park,” Bell said. “That was your husband who broke it up, wasn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“He must have real cojones.”

The academic cop in her noted his willingness to use that particular word in the presence of a female administrator. “That’s one way of putting it,” she said. “The other is to say it was foolish as hell. The guy pointed a gun at him and was obviously prepared to use it.”

“Is he all right?”

Wanting to get the meeting over with so she could decide what to do about Matt, she gestured at the seat opposite her desk. “He’s got bandages all over his arm. He won’t play the guitar for a while, which is a problem for him.”

Bell sat down. “He’s a musician?”

“Among other things.”

“I play a little guitar, though I’m not very good.”

She made a point of glancing at the wall clock. He hadn’t come to discuss musicology, and she had more momentous things on her mind.

Bell finally cleared his throat. “I don’t know you well,” he said, “but I’ve got a problem on my hands and don’t know where else to turn.”

“What kind of problem?”

“It concerns a couple of my faculty members, and it’s related to academic integrity.”

“Well, normally that would come under the purview of the dean and the provost. And if Joanne thought I needed to become involved, she’d tell me.”

“Yes, I know that,” he said, and even though the morning was cool and the heat in the office had yet to trip on, his cheeks were beginning to glisten. “The thing is … Well, Dr. Stevens …”

“Kristin.”

“Kristin,” he said, “the thing is, Joanne Bedard is a good friend of one of these people. He’s spent six years cultivating her, and she’s susceptible to flattery. If I went to her with this problem, I’m afraid she’d take a chunk out of my rear the size of a Big Mac.”

Kristin didn’t want to have this conversation any more than Bell did, but they clearly were going to, so she might as well try to ease his discomfort. She stood, walked over to the window and cracked it open. When she sat down again, she said, “Whatever you’re about to say to me is confidential. I won’t discuss it with anyone else without first asking your permission. Does that help?”

“Yes,” he said, “it does. My wife just lost her job, we’ve got two kids, and I was hoping to go up for promotion next year. I’d rather not be here this morning. But if I didn’t address this situation, that would be negligence. There’s only so far you can go in protecting your self-interest. That’s what I said to my wife, anyway, and she agrees.”