The Twisted Thread

To my students at MPS:
as they say in Wolof,
this one's for you.

Contents

 

CHAPTER 1

F
ive mornings a week, Madeline Christopher jogged through the cool air of Armitage, past tidy clapboard houses, below stately maples, down the quiet, shuttered High Street. It was New England at its most pristine. The town had staved off box stores and cul-de-sacs plowed from cornfields; high taxes and strict zoning had allowed Armitage to relegate the Shop 'n Saves and condos to Greenville, a factory town it bordered to the north. Her route used to include it. After living in one of Cambridge's seedier neighborhoods, Madeline had felt comfortable with the body shops. Gradually, and not quite consciously, she'd retooled her five miles so that she traveled down elm-shaded lanes, parallel to porches with Doric columns. One stretch of the run now took her past a reservoir where swans nested, white birds on black water, while the wind chapped her face raw well into spring. A big curve guided her around the Quaker graveyard and then up a steady hill and through iron gates to the plush, orderly campus where she had lived for the last nine months. Armitage Academy, where ivy clung to mellowed brick and lawns unfolded like thick, green pelts. Madeline felt always that she was not grand enough to walk on the marble stairs or through the shady buildings. It was preposterous that schools like this still operated, were available to teenagers, of all people, and even more, that she worked at one of them.

For all its appearance of mannered ease, Armitage was a place of ferocious industry. Forty-five minutes was all she had to herself each morning, and it was the only time she could call her own until late that night. Her day was pared into slivers—four minutes to change before track practice, seventeen for lunch. An intern in the English department, she'd had nineteen years of education, acquiring two degrees and no practical experience of any use in the process. But an M.A., a firm handshake, and the willingness to relinquish one's personal life were apparently all it took to qualify you as a teacher at a boarding school.

Her mother, when she'd seen her at Easter, had placed a thumb between her daughter's eyes and pressed critically at the skin. At first, Madeline thought Isabelle was engaging in some yogic practice—trying to pry open a tightly shut third eye, for instance, as out of character as such a gesture seemed. Then she said, “You know, they're doing Botox younger and younger.”

Being responsible for the transmission of American literature to four classes of intelligent, slouching adolescents sometimes struck Madeline as a task more ludicrous than ending dependence on foreign oil. That she was also entrusted with the girls' JV track team, the literary magazine, and dorm duty twice a week in Portland, a residence known, even to teachers, as Potland, just added to her sense of living in a Sisyphean nightmare.
Sisyphean
was a word one of her sophomores had used in an essay; Madeline had had to look it up in the dictionary to make sure it had been spelled correctly. It had been. Grindingly repetitive, relating to the futility of labor.

At least it would soon be over. In ten days, she'd be spending the summer on the Cape, in a house her mother had wrested from her second marriage. The plan was to stay and lend a hand to Kate, her older sister, caught in the throes of early motherhood. Rather self-consciously so, thought Madeline, who had seen Kate, her husband, Nick, and their baby, Tadeo, during the recent holiday.

At twenty-eight, Kate had a Ph.D. in architectural history, a husband, a son, a house, and a dog, which seemed like a lot of having for someone so young. What was more disturbing to Madeline was that all these possessions seemed equivalent to her sister. The house equaled the baby; the degree equaled the husband. This wasn't going to work as a long-term strategy, Madeline sensed. Babies and husbands in general rebelled against being treated like hardwood floors or dissertations, things that could be polished. But for now, Kate's life looked admirably shiny, well appointed, primed for more and more accomplishment. Kate was a graduate of Armitage.

It was Kate, in fact, she had to thank for having a job here in the first place. Madeline had produced a thesis on Flannery O'Connor and a covertly written collection of short stories—well, at least seven, and that was almost a collection, wasn't it? By early last spring, she had also amassed a quiver of rejections from the community colleges where she'd hoped to teach near her boyfriend's medical school. By May, Madeline's prospects for employment had thinned like her father's hair after divorcing his third wife. It was Kate who had bluntly captured the situation. “Face it, Madeline, Owen wouldn't move for you, so why move for him? Put him to the test. Strike out on your own.” She was right, of course. Owen had steadfastly and with no guilt insisted that Duke was the only place he was willing to study medicine. And there he was in North Carolina, dissecting Gary, his cadaver, into thousands of tiny bits. Quite happily. With only occasional calls that had, in truth, become so occasional they were almost nonexistent. The question was, would he break up with her by e-mail or by text?

When Madeline confessed in July that even the slimmest of job leads had evaporated, Kate had wangled an interview for her at the academy. Hired in August, as far as Madeline could tell exclusively on Kate's recommendation, she'd had a sudden insight into how these schools functioned. Blood mattered. If she was related to Kate, fantastically successful even by Armitage's distorted standards, she had to be all right. It almost hadn't been an issue that the hem of her skirt had gapped a little and she had tripped coming up the stairs to meet Porter McLellan, the head. It couldn't be that bad for a year, they must have thought. They had Mindy Allison's place to fill; inconvenient of her to be having her fourth child, but there it was. They could make Madeline a last-minute intern, give her a closet to live in, get her to fill unpopular dorm and coaching slots, pay her less than a third what they paid regular teachers, and she'd be grateful in the end to have Armitage on her résumé. A neat trick all around.

The literary magazine—
The Turret,
for the room where for the past eighty years the faculty adviser and perhaps one competent student had thrown it together—had been published; the track team had one last meet, an invitational. Armitage had conceived of the brilliant system of giving exams early, making the last two weeks of school far less burdensome all around. Now all Madeline had to do was finish teaching, grade several tall stacks of papers, survive the stuffy rituals of graduation and reunion, and she'd be blissfully, completely done. Come September, she had a job tutoring high school kids in Boston and an apartment on Marlborough Street to be shared with three friends from college. She also sustained a misty fantasy of finishing her story collection and achieving some vague form of artistic notoriety, but that was far too embarrassing to admit out loud. Beyond that, she had no idea what the future held.

Thinking about all this—Kate, Owen, her decidedly patchy earning potential—had made Madeline run a bit faster than usual, and before she knew it, her dorm swam into view. Normally, at this time of day, especially on a Monday, Portland, a gambrel-roofed building three stories tall on the far side of the Quad, was dim except for the column of lights that illuminated the central corridor. The girls slept in as late as possible before chapel, unless they were up early to finish a lab, nudge a boyfriend out the door, smoke a cigarette, or do any of the dozens of things forbidden in the Major School Rules. They pursued none of these activities in the light, and at 6:50, Madeline expected only dark windows and hush before the day sprang relentlessly forward.

But Portland was ablaze. Every pane shone. An ambulance and two police cruisers, their red, white, and blue lights pulsing irregularly, pasted the faces of the girls clustered at the door with fleeting, transparent tattoos. Madeline discovered herself bolting past the statue of James Armitage, a gunpowder merchant who'd founded the academy in 1820 for the “betterment of boys,” and straight toward the students. Strange to have had such ambivalent feelings about them so much of the year and find suddenly that she considered herself responsible for their welfare.

Someone's dead, Madeline thought, and panic jolted through her. She hated this sensation, the knowledge, only half-admitted most of the time, that the world could crack wide at any moment, and that you would never, despite wit, fiscal prudence, or luck, be entirely prepared for what might happen next. Who was it? Maybe Harvey Fuller had keeled over after forty years of teaching biology and almost as many living in the same apartment at the back of Portland. Old enough to have known Darwin, not only teach his theories. But it wasn't Harvey. There he was, spry in a bathrobe of Black Watch, as he spoke to a policeman. Looking, Madeline thought incongruously, as leathery as those oceangoing lizards the naturalist had studied in the Galápagos.

“You're finally back, Madeline. No one knew where you were,” Grace Peters scolded, intercepting her before she could reach the terrified girls. And that was the word, Madeline realized: they
were
terrified, tearstained and quaking. Grace, the dorm head, glanced at Madeline's damp T-shirt and shorts, the untied lace of one of her sneakers. Even in the midst of a crisis, Grace, a classics teacher, had managed to find an unwrinkled pair of brown slacks and a neat gray cardigan. She was known to give pop quizzes with breathtaking regularity. Her students regularly scored 5s on AP exams. Madeline couldn't believe she was thinking about iguanas and Grace's reputation, but it was the way the mind worked when frightened, wasn't it? Forming and clinging to ridiculous impressions when least necessary.

“What's going on?” Madeline asked. She could barely breathe.

“Claire Harkness is dead,” Grace said, and Madeline saw that Grace was actually as gray as her sweater.

The worst thing possible, every teacher's private horror. A student dying on their watch. And why Claire? Madeline had taught her in Contemporary World Literature the first semester, and the girl's crystalline beauty and complete disdain for the adults around her had awed her. She hadn't quite realized kids like Claire actually existed, though Kate ought to have prepared her. At seventeen, Claire had a composure that Madeline couldn't imagine possessing at fifty, even if her hair had managed at last to stay straight. Claire's last paper—well argued, neatly phrased, but somehow bloodless—had compared ineffectual parents in the stories of Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro. Claire had not been a person whose passion for life bubbled through her, but the girl had a certain fierceness that made the thought of her dead almost impossible to fathom. And how? Suicide seemed unlikely, but even so, Madeline imagined rope, a bottle of pills. The school counselor, Nina Garcia-Jones, had devoted half a day during new teacher orientation to Warning Signs and Appropriate Responses. Madeline tried to remember when she had last seen Claire and couldn't. “What happened?”

“We don't know,” Grace said, looking over at the group of girls still huddled in the doorway. Sally Jansen had started to scream that Claire was on the floor and couldn't be woken up. That was all, so far. Grace's phone chirped, and she leaned in to answer it.

Madeline didn't know what to do. Faculty members and students had begun to stream from their dorms to investigate the unseemly commotion with which Portland had started the week. Grace was still on the phone. Was she talking to the police? Claire's parents? What a terrible job that would be. Wouldn't Porter take care of that? Madeline began to walk toward the girls and tripped on her shoelace. She leaned down to tie it, and memories of Claire scrambled around her mind. Her gold hair had flowed in even waves past her shoulders, and on that hair alone, Ned Madison, the dean for college admission, had snorted, she could have gotten into paradise, much less Harvard. He'd had four beers at the welcome picnic when he said it, but it was probably true. That she was a lithe, instinctive athlete, captain of lacrosse, a more than competent student, and a volunteer at the Greenville animal shelter combined to create an irresistible package for most schools. Add to that what was known as a “heavy leg,” four generations of relatives who'd gone and contributed mightily to Harvard, and Claire had been a shoo-in.

But in what counted as a rebellious move only at Armitage, Claire had chosen to go to Yale. She'd gotten in early and had done approximately nothing since then in most of her classes. She was close to failing calculus, Alice Grassley had said to Madeline at a faculty meeting. “And while I wouldn't call her a genius, behind that perfect nose she's no dummy,” Alice added. Far worse from most people's perspectives, the girl had refused to go out for lacrosse during this, her last year at Armitage. There had been hand-wringing about it at the lunch table.

Grace snapped her phone closed. Madeline stood up, shivering. One of the girls huddled at the doorway started to wail. It was Sally Jansen, a reedy, neurotic senior bound for Skidmore. Others gathered round and tried to hush her. “It shouldn't have happened!” Sally was screaming.

“What's she talking about?” Madeline asked. “What's Sally saying?” From the corner of her eye, she saw Porter, handsome and rugged in a groomed, patrician way. All he was doing was talking to a man in a suit, but even from this distance, Porter gave off a palpable impression that he could handle the job before him. He was almost universally considered competent. Even with her limited exposure to places like this, Madeline knew how rare it was to find someone as respected as he was, especially in an environment where stakes were so small and entitlements so large. Madeline always had a hard time calling him by his first name.

Sally was screaming louder now. “She shouldn't have died. It shouldn't have happened!” Porter appeared to see the girl for the first time. At almost the same moment, he glimpsed Madeline and motioned with his hand that she was to go and deal with Sally. He so rarely noticed her, his brief gesture had the weight of a touch. Just then, Sally broke free and dashed inside the dorm. Madeline felt her own knees unlock as she went to do Porter's bidding. She tore through the door, past police and students, and up the stairs, following the sound of Sally's quick feet.