“I had to give a speech to the doctors there.”
Mackenzie settled back into the cushions, mild disappointment reshaping his mouth. It would be difficult copying the technique. Murderers were reluctant to give speeches. He’d have to make them sweat the old-fashioned way.
“All these people with Ph.D.’s in sciences I’d never heard of—I had to talk about my feelings about body odor,” Sasha said. “I knew it was part of the experiment, but even so, I thought it mattered what I’d say in my talk. I got myself into a lather—see? That’s exactly what they wanted. God, just thinking about having to speak and I’m beading up on my forehead.”
Public speaking. Ahead of death on the great fear list. I thought of the many oral book reports I’d assigned, supposedly to help America’s youth and actually just adding to their load of misery. I seemed to do a lot of that lately. “But the sniffers?” I asked. “Who are they?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know if they’re chemists or what. They’re trained, though. Like wine tasters. Professionals. I wish I’d been allowed to take photos. Whole lines of these people, going from one to the next, lifting our arms, sniffing this pit, then that one …”
Strike pit sniffing off the list. It felt good to clear away another possibility. Through the process of elimination, I’d sneak up on the right career.
“What say to a change of subject?” Mackenzie asked. “The wine taster analogy—that pushed it over the edge for me.”
“Can I ask just one thing? Do you know if the experiment was a success?”
“I’m not sure what they wanted,” Sasha said, refilling her glass. “You know how sometimes they tell you it’s one thing, but it’s another altogether.” She was good at talking and sipping simultaneously. “You know, when they first isolated this chemical, they thought it had to do with schizophrenia—”
Mackenzie turned and checked me out, as if I’d fed the word to Sasha.
How had aimless talk about her bizarre job involved schizophrenia? It was as if we’d entered the room playing the game Don’t Drag Adam into This Evening. Rule one: Whatever you say, do not say schizophrenia.
“—because the chemical was in schizophrenics’ sweat. They thought they had a major medical breakthrough, but it turned out it’s also in the sweat of people who don’t have schizophrenia. The point I’m making is, who knows what they wanted this time and whether they got it, found something else accidentally, or what. I just know they now are aware of my feelings about body odor.”
Both Mackenzie and I smiled weakly. I tried for more and failed. He seemed to have stopped trying altogether. “He got himself in more trouble today,” Mackenzie said.
“I know. I just didn’t know if you knew.”
“What?” Sasha said.
“Did you arrest him, then?” I asked.
“Who?” Sasha asked.
“No,” Mackenzie said. “Hard to find runaways.”
“Not fair. You’re so—”
“Thanks, guys,” Sasha said. “You’re making me feel right at home. Or is this a new experiment designed to make me sweat?”
“We’ll find him, you know. Soon.”
“Won’t you even look around first? We were at Emily Fisher’s sister’s store this afternoon and—”
He shook his head. “That’s my job, Amanda. I don’ tell you how to teach. Why do you insist on—”
“But she lied. She was in the library Thursday and she’s lying about it. And she wears these oversized scarves—”
“I’m going home,” Sasha said. “This is downright creepy.”
The microwave beeped. I stood up. “You’re right, Sash. I apologize. We’re being rude.” I knew all I wanted about Adam’s status now. He was still among the missing. And I knew a little more about Mackenzie’s lack of open-mindedness than I wanted to know.
The pork was still frosty in the center, but I thought it was now capable of being transferred to a pot for a slow reheat, which process I then began. Not that transferring bits of meat in a frozen sauce is that engrossing, but it did take me a little too long to realize that the room was suffused in silence. It was as if when Adam was removed as a conversational subject, the remaining option was muteness. I heard Mackenzie offer Sasha more wine, heard her accept, heard him murmur about finding another bottle somewhere. Heard more silence.
“I’ll put on music,” Mackenzie said, standing. I nodded from where I was, even though nobody was looking my way.
At the same time Sasha must have completed her mental global search for a safe topic. “So,” she said in a forced party voice, “what do you think of Mandy’s plans? You going to visit us in merry old England? Make it merrier?”
I turned, too late to hurl myself between Sasha’s mouth and the sound waves, but in time to see Mackenzie pause for a slice of a second, complete the insertion of the CD into the player, wait until soft Brazilian shusses swirled through the room, adjust the decibel level imperceptibly, and then turn, smiling, in Sasha’s direction. He was good. You’d have to know him intimately to be sure he’d heard what Sasha said, let alone digested it, made sense of it, and been upset by it. Unfortunately, I knew him intimately. He was intensely upset.
“Which question you want answered first?” he asked mildly.
Sasha cocked her head. “How about we begin with how you feel about Mandy going to graduate school in England?”
I was heartsick. This was no way to treat a lover, no way to broach the subject, and I wasn’t even sure yet that it was seriously a subject to broach. It was an idea to play with, a security blanket, an escape hatch.
“Sasha,” I began, “you take everything so seriously! When I said that, I was only—”
“What?” she began, but Mackenzie interrupted, his voice silky, Southern, and suspect. “How’d I feel about those plans? Well, when I first heard, I was stunned, of course.” He looked over at me and smiled, as if we were in collusion, even though the time he’d been stunned was approximately one minute earlier. I hadn’t realized what a fine actor he was. I didn’t know if I liked knowing it now.
“Amanda’s always seemed confused—no, that’s too harsh … ambivalent about what precisely she wanted next.”
His bayou roots strangled his syllables. Precisely was said as imprecisely as possible. Emotion does that to him. When it’s sexy emotions, it sounds just right, like auditory dessert. But at that moment, all the hard edges he had sliced off his every slurred word and sentence joined like magnet filings and zigzagged through my bloodstream.
“So to have her make such a drastic plan … to go so far in pursuit of … well, it took me by surprise, is all. Made me speechless, to tell the truth. But I’m impressed that her thinkin’s clear now. That she’s willin’ to make the necessary adjustments an’ all. That she knows what she wants.”
At the moment what I wanted was to curl up in a fetal position and stay that way a few years. Instead, I positioned myself behind Mackenzie, where Sasha could see me but he couldn’t. It was as close to hiding as I could rationally get, given the situation. I shook my head at Sasha, ran my finger across my throat. She saw it. She got it. She ignored it. I’d upset her when I’d tossed out the idea of my relocating along with her, and she had the rapt expression of a missionary, the zeal of a mediator.
“Won’t you miss her?” she asked Mackenzie sweetly. “Or will you be able to spend lots of time over there?”
He sighed. “I’ll miss her big-time. She knows that. But unfortunately, the police department’s not goin’ to change its structure because Amanda’s changed her life plans. She knows that, too,” he added softly.
“Listen, you guys,” I began, “let’s not talk about this now. This is making me really uncomfortable. First of all, you’re acting like I’m not here—”
“Just practicin’, honey,” Mackenzie said.
His words, so perfectly aimed, and so deserved, hit me and left me speechless.
“That’s what I thought,” Sasha said. “You didn�
�t tell him, did you? You didn’t even discuss it. Just this one-sided—”
“I really don’t think you should be—”
“Right!” It came out close to a snarl. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be the goof-off. You’re the sane one. I’m the one always screwing up with men. So I should keep my mouth shut and definitely not offer advice, but I’m telling you, sister, we’ve switched roles, and this is dumber than any dumb thing I’ve ever done!” She stopped a moment to consider her own words. “And that’s saying a lot!”
It was indeed.
“This,” she continued, opening her arms until she looked like an evangelical Edwardian princess, “this is pure foolhardy—”
“Sasha, please. You have no right—”
Mackenzie remained immobile, except for his head, which swiveled from the one of us to the other, spectator at the U.S. Open of Girlfriend Spats.
“I do so have the right,” she said, one hand on her hip. “I have the right to be your friend, you stupid woman! I’m being a friend, you dolt! I’ve known you since before you suspected that boys would be of interest, and that gives me the right, you hear?” She stamped her foot. I knew, and she knew that I knew, that the stamp was in place of a total throttling, as were my clenched fists.
In the decades of our friendship, I didn’t think we’d ever been this angry with each other. I was frightened—literally chilled, as if a cold wind had filled me up. I rubbed at my arms and had a moment’s happy fantasy that none of this was happening. That this was another bad dream in a bad month.
Then Sasha exhaled loudly, as if she’d been holding her breath for a year. I didn’t think people did that in dreams. “Listen,” she said in a soft voice. “I’m out of here. This is your chance—better late than never. Talk it through. Work it out. You guys make me really sad.”
We both opened our mouths to protest, to explain, to offer something in return, in defense—but I couldn’t think of what to say, and apparently neither could Mackenzie. With a rueful wave and a kiss, Sasha was out the door. And then the enormous loft, which so often felt frighteningly large, suddenly felt like the Poe tale where the burning walls move closer and tighter.
Mackenzie shook his head. “England?” he said. “Grad school? Where? Cambridge? Oxford? London School of Economics? What subject?”
“I … it’s still kind of … I …” I could have lied. I knew then I could have whipped something up, something that was so British I had to be there. English literature, for starters. Logic would be on my side, except I couldn’t lie. Didn’t want to. Wasn’t in the habit of doing so, most particularly, especially, with this man.
“Ah,” he said. “It isn’t about studyin’, it’s about movin’ on an’ movin’ out, do I have that right?”
“Listen, I didn’t mean—when I said that to Sasha, it was a whim, pure speculation, talk, a—”
“Is this because of Adam? I know you’re agitated, annoyed with me—and I with you—but to split … I had no idea.” He sat down on the couch again, heavily. “You could have said something.”
“Yes. Right. I would have. No, wait—that makes it sound as if it is because of Adam. Or something. It isn’t even an it!” I sounded like a world-class jackass. And I wasn’t making sense, even to myself, so how could I hope to make sense to Mackenzie? “This isn’t because of Adam, although I wish— Sometimes your job seems like a third person here, and you’re so bullheaded—”
“As opposed to your willingness to listen to the opposite side?”
I ignored that. “I said that about joining her—I said that maybe mostly to hear how it sounded because …” I, too, sat down. Balancing on my two feet no longer felt safe or possible. “Because I feel lost. I don’t know if I’m a teacher anymore. I don’t know if I’m doing anybody any good or harming them. I don’t know if I’m going to be employed anymore. I don’t know where we are.”
“That part at least, that last thing—we could have talked. Could have talked about it all, but definitely about that part. I’d think we owe each other that much.”
He was right. I knew he was right even though his words were so slurred by now they were barely English. “Everything’s falling apart,” I said. “All at once.” I had a sudden rush of hope. We could make this better. Look, we were starting to.
He looked at me with eyes that suddenly seemed the precise shade of blue that gave its name to sorrowful days and music. “It’s not the way you’re sayin’ it. Not as if it all just happens to you while you do nothin’. You’re pushin’ things over yourself, it seems to me. Like a little kid who wants to see what’ll happen if she topples what she’s built.”
His voice was practically a whisper, but what I heard were shouts.
“You want to talk now?” I asked.
He stood up. “I want air. Need to walk some. A breather.”
He was gone within seconds. I watched the door close behind him and felt my skull fill with words written in thick capitals, words I’d seen on the computer screen before it crashed, words that weighed and pressed and bolted themselves to my brain: FATAL ERROR, FATAL ERROR.
And more softly, like a lament: You are losing your best friend.
And then, good English teacher that I was, I edited them, revised them, made them closer to the truth. I wasn’t losing anything; Mackenzie was right. I wasn’t a little victim girl, standing innocently by as bad things happened to me. Not all the time. Not now, for sure. I’d behaved as if I could opt to leave, unilaterally behaved as if I could have my adventure, follow wherever it took me while Mackenzie and whatever we had was wrapped in plastic and tossed in the deep freeze. As if he didn’t matter and didn’t count. I wasn’t losing my best friend—I was tossing him out with a negligent, dismissive flick of my wrist.
I was hurting everything I touched—first Adam and now Mackenzie. Something was very wrong with me.
My eyes stung from something more than frustrated tears. Smoke and then an acrid stench hit my nostrils. The forgotten pork was burning. Some things are doomed from the git-go.
Sixteen
I SAT IN A NEAR STUPOR. IF I LET MYSELF THINK, THEN I WAS going to have to admit the scientific truism that every action has a reaction. Plus the less scientific but equally apt aphorism that I’d made my bed and had to lie in it. Actually, I wanted to—but it was too early in the day, although I surely understood why emotionally overcome Victorian women had taken to their beds, sometimes for years.
Besides, I was born in the wrong century, at the wrong time, with the wrong personality for swoons and neurasthenia. I had to solve this, but how? And in what way?
I tried to reverse the roles, and honestly didn’t know if I would be willing to forgive if Mackenzie had “forgotten” about me enough to never mention that he planned to relocate elsewhere, leaving me behind. Even if he wasn’t sure he was going to do so, had only mentioned it as I had, to test it out, I’d feel hurt and resentful as hell that he hadn’t tested it out on me.
What had I been thinking of? Flirting with the librarian, with all sorts of destructive ideas. Flirting with disaster.
I tried to sink back into the painless gray-flannel nothingness of the stupor, but it would have none of me. Just as well, because the phone rang.
I was sure it was Mackenzie and that this call would move us to the next stage, whatever that was. I was afraid to lift the receiver, held my breath.
Let the machine pick up, I decided. Let me hear what sort of message was forthcoming before I had to do anything. My reactions were off lately. Skewed.
The phone rang again.
Coward. He’s making a move. You aren’t supposed to duck. I lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I said, angry with myself for letting my nervousness show.
“Oh … I’m … oh, I don’t know … you have to—you said—I don’t know—”
I instinctively pulled back, away from the receiver, as if it could hurt me. “Adam?” I whispered.
“Yes,” a voice whispered back.
“Where are you?”
“Lost.”
“Yes. Can you see any—”
“My scarf.”
“Lost your scarf. Yes. But are you okay?”
Silence. Not good. Of course he wasn’t okay. He was ill, and virtually abandoned by his parents, who wanted to believe that this would blow over, that he was safe with his dangerous so-called friend, that he’d be fine, get into a good college, justify their existence.
“Adam—what do you want? Why have you been calling me? What do you need? Please let me help you.” This maybe I could do right. Finally. “Tell me where—”
The phone slammed down.
Nothing, a voice in my head tolled. Nothing works. I can do nothing right. Nothing makes sense.
The phone rang again. He’d changed his mind. I grabbed it. “Adam? Don’t hang up this time, I—”
“This is not Adam, Amanda!” The voice was definitely female. “Don’t tell me you mean that mentally ill boy, the one who—Please. This is your sister; remember me?”
“Beth?”
“Is there another sibling I don’t know about?”
You’d think my mind, already boggled with the turnarounds and miseries of recent days and minutes, would have no room for any more amazement. Wrong. “You—it’s just that you seldom phone, and this is dinner hour. The time you told me not to ever call you because things were too hectic there. Are you okay?”
She giggled. “Things probably are hectic there, but I’m around the corner from you.”
The city mouse in town—again? The third time recently that I knew of? What was going on?
“Have you eaten yet?”
“No,” I said, and the memory of the burned dinner and, worse, the reason for its burning moved my attention away from Beth-amazement and back to my woes.
“Is Mackenzie home?”
“No,” I said again. “Not really.”
She must have pondered this a moment. Then she returned to her upbeat voice. “Let me treat you to dinner. Girls’ night out.”
“That’s sweet, and usually … but I’m not hungry, and I’m really … I’m no fun.”
Adam and Evil Page 17
