Final Exam

by Maggie Barbieri

  One of the paramedics, a short stocky woman, asked me a series of questions, only a few of which I could answer. I didn’t know how long Amanda had been in the closet, I didn’t know how long she had been unconscious. I had no idea whether or not she had an ingested any substances. But I did know that she was twenty or twenty-one, and that she lived in New Jersey. I even had her home address. That much I knew.

  When the paramedic was done with me, she went back to her partner and spent some time on Amanda, asking her a few questions. But Amanda was still not fully conscious and was clearly disoriented. I wrapped my arms around myself as I watched what was going on, standing close to the open window trying to get some air. I kept my arms close to my body so that I wouldn’t be tempted to touch anything; the room was now a crime scene and I had been involved in enough crimes of late that I was starting to know exactly how to behave. I looked out the window and scanned the parking lot for a sign of Crawford, and I didn’t have to wait too long before his puke-brown Crown Victoria skidded to a stop on the far side of the parking lot by the cemetery.

  The paramedics loaded Amanda onto a stretcher, an IV having been started in her arm, an oxygen mask on her face. Her eyes were now open wide and she looked scared to death. I held her hand and assured her that someone would call her parents and that I would meet her at the hospital as soon as I talked to the police, a group of whom had congregated in the hallway waiting for the stretcher to pass.

  Crawford entered through the side door with Fred in tow. I ran to him and threw my arms around him. He held me at arm’s length. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “I have to get to the hospital to be with her. Will you take me over there?”

  Nobody had been murdered, so the case wouldn’t be his. He spoke briefly with one of the patrol officers who had shown up and gave him a few instructions. “Where did they take her?” he asked the cop.

  “Mercy,” the cop said, and went into the room, his hands already gloved for the investigation.

  I looked at Fred, standing by the janitor’s closet, and remembered Max. A quick survey of the area revealed that she was nowhere to be found.

  “Max!” I hollered, startling the cops who were clustered in and around the parlor. She didn’t respond. “Max!” I called again. I had no idea where she had gone but figured she couldn’t be far. I started down the marble hallway, the sound of my voice reverberating off the tiled ceiling. “Max!”

  I heard the sound of her heels hitting the marble risers as she slowly made her way down the staircase in the lobby. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and peeked around, looking to see who was there. “Is the coast clear?” she asked.

  I marched toward her, my blood boiling. “You are completely useless, you know that?” I could hear Crawford call my name but the sound of my own pulse in my ears nearly drowned every sound out.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, rooting through her pocketbook, not really paying attention to me.

  “It means that you are completely useless!” I grabbed her pocketbook and threw it to the ground to get her attention. “I had a body fall on top of me. The body of one of my students. Who you didn’t know whether or not was still alive.”

  “I got scared,” she protested, and bent down to pick up the contents of her purse. Her indignant attitude toward what I considered a very serious situation made me irate.

  “Well, what about me?” I asked, kicking a tube of lipstick out of her reach; it ricocheted off the wall by the unmanned desk and skidded to a stop by the TV room, where just a few days ago she had tried to sort out her feelings about her husband. Who wasn’t really her husband. They hadn’t been together long enough to even qualify as common-law spouses. I jabbed her in the chest with my index finger. “What about Amanda? What if we needed help?”

  She was finally starting to realize the depth of my ire and her green eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? You’re sorry? How about thinking about someone other than yourself every now and again?”

  Crawford arrived at my side and took my elbow. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

  I shook it off. “No, I have some things I want to say.”

  “You’re very upset,” he said, grabbing my elbow a little more tightly this time. “Let’s go,” he repeated forcefully.

  I continued crying, more upset by Amanda’s condition than Max’s reaction to the situation. I spied Fred out of the corner of my eye and he wisely chose to keep his mouth shut and not use the opportunity to profess his love for Max or to make some sarcastic comment to me.

  Max’s expression turned sad. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to say.”

  “You need to understand something,” I said. “Sometimes you need to do the complete opposite of what your brain is telling you to do.” I pointed at my own head and took a deep breath so that I could continue my rant. “That means that if your brain tells you to run, you stay put. That tells you that if you want to break up with your husband for some ridiculous reason, you stay put. That means that you do what’s logical, not what I would consider completely illogical.”

  I heard Fred harrumph and give me an “amen, sister.”

  Max gripped her pocketbook a little closer to her chest; her lip quivered. I noticed that a group of students were now congregating in the lobby, watching this scene play out. If I hadn’t been so upset, I would have taken this conversation to the TV room, but I was on a roll.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I asked. I don’t know what possessed me at this particular moment to unleash nearly twenty years of anger toward this woman whom I considered the closest thing to a sister but it all came out in an ugly torrent; it wasn’t unlike the one time my family’s septic system had overflowed and befouled the backyard, not to mention the entire neighborhood. I was befouling the closest female relationship I had and I didn’t know if someone with rubber boots and a wet/dry vacuum would be able to bail me out this time. “Sometimes, if you think that you can’t handle something, you have to find a way. Because people might be depending on you.” I stared at her, my anger increasing with every second I looked at her puzzled visage. “Did that ever occur to you?”

  Behind me, I heard footsteps on the stairs and Kevin appeared at the bottom of the staircase. “Alison? What’s going on?”

  I turned and let out a long and shaky sigh. “Kevin . . .”

  “Did you tell her?” he asked. If I had been thinking more clearly and not been so upset, I probably would have heard the relief in his voice. He was off the hook; someone else had done the dirty work.

  I almost started in on him but Max looked at me, less sad now and more puzzled. “Tell me what?” She looked at Kevin, who turned crimson.

  I threw up my hands. “Oh, you’re not married. We might as well just go for broke tonight.” I started walking down the hallway. “You’re selfish, but you’re not married. Kevin screwed up the paperwork. The archdiocese found out. You’re not married. You never were. There. It’s all out now.”

  Twenty-Five

  I woke up in Crawford’s bed, his eyes trained on me. I sat up, startled. “Have you been staring at me the whole night?”

  He stretched out. “Not the whole night.”

  “Okay, that’s creepy,” I said and sat up. I was really cranky. “You know who stare at people when they sleep? Serial killers, that’s who. Crazy people. Dogs. Dogs stare at people when they sleep.”

  “Are you having some kind of breakdown?” he asked, completely serious. He looked at me with concern.

  “No, I’m not having a breakdown.” I put my feet on the floor and dropped my head into my hands. “This has been a terrible week.”

  “I thought you told me that you were enjoying the whole campus thing.” Crawford is extremely literal and doesn’t shift gears easily.

  I stood. “Well, I was until an innocent, lovelorn girl got mixed up in something she has no business being involv
ed in.”

  Crawford adjusted his pillows so that he was half sitting up. “I noticed that we didn’t hear any mention of the boyfriend at the hospital last night, but we did hear her ask for Wayne several hundred times.”

  “Yeah, and did you notice how the dad got angry every time she brought him up?”

  Crawford nodded. “He’s not a big fan of Wayne’s.” He knew he was stating the obvious. “By the way, who was the stoned-looking kid with the blond hair?”

  “Spencer Williamson. Methinks that he, too, carries a torch for dear Amanda.”

  “Really?”

  I yawned. “Really. It’s nice to know that men can see past the outdated glasses and the Princeton sweatshirt to the beauty that resides underneath.” I stretched my arms up and changed the subject. “How mad do you think Max is at me?” I asked.

  Crawford’s look said it all.

  “Kevin?”

  “I think you’re in better stead with Fr. McManus.”

  “Fred?”

  “I only know when Fred’s hungry or tired. We don’t delve into our emotions very often,” he said.

  “But he must have said something to you.”

  “The only thing he asked me is if killing Fr. McManus would be considered justifiable homicide.” Crawford rolled out of bed and stretched; if I had to guess, I’d say his arm span was longer than his entire body. “I’m guessing you’ll want to get back to campus soon.”

  He guessed wrong. I never wanted to go back there, but I had to at some point, at least to retrieve Trixie from Kevin. I figured it was the least he could do: he could watch my dog while I went to the hospital to see one of my charges. He had looked like he wanted to object to the request, but when he saw the expression on my face, he relented and took the dog up to his apartment on the top floor, my admonition to walk her before bedtime reverberating in the stairwell.

  Crawford and I had spent a couple of hours at the hospital, and when it was clear that Amanda was in good hands and that her parents were there, we had left, stopping on the way home to have a drink at a little local bar in his neighborhood to take the edge off the evening. While we sipped our drinks, Crawford had told me what he had learned: Amanda said she had been picked up after her babysitting job by two men in a black car, driven down to a remote spot by the river and questioned about the whereabouts of the heroin. When she professed her ignorance about its origins or where it had gone in the meantime, they roughed her up, but not seriously. It seemed that they were hell-bent on scaring the bejesus out of her and had succeeded. When they determined that she didn’t have anything to contribute, they had bound her, broken into my room, and stuffed her into my closet. Why in my room was anyone’s guess. She had been in there for a few hours, scared out of her wits, vomiting intermittently from shock.

  And not one person on campus, a security guard, the person who was supposed to be at the desk—one Michael Columbo—or a passing student had seen anything. That part of it frightened me more than anything. I would have to speak to Merrimack about that because if the last few years were any indication of the level of safety on the beautiful, bucolic campus, enrollments were going to drop dramatically.

  “I want to go home,” I said to Crawford. He made a sad face like I had just admitted that I was longing for home. “I need to pick up a few things.” I wasn’t having a Dorothy in Oz moment; I needed to find my black bra just in case I needed it for the week.

  “I have to get the girls,” he said.

  I knew that. That was the Saturday drill: drive to Connecticut, pick up the twins, bring them back to the city, drive them back to Connecticut the next day, go to work on Monday. It was the rare emergency that disrupted the plan.

  “Can I get you back into bed for fifteen minutes?” he asked.

  “You need fifteen minutes?” I asked, incredulous.

  He shook his head and smiled. “No. But you do,” he said, and pulled me back under the comforter.

  Fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds later, I was out of bed and in the shower. Crawford, exhausted from his week—or from the last fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds—was sitting on the bed trying to figure out the best way to handle our travel arrangements, what with me needing to go northwest and him needing to go northeast.

  “I’ll drop you off,” he said after a few minutes.

  “It’s out of your way,” I protested, even though dropping me off at school was a heck of lot easier than dropping me off at home.

  “I’ll drop you off,” he repeated in a way that told me that the discussion was over.

  So, he dropped me off. Who was I to argue? My goal was to get into my car and out of there as quickly as possible so that I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about what had happened to Amanda; I needed a day away to get an idea of how I was going to explain to the kids in the dorm what had happened to her. I also didn’t want to have to do due diligence with anyone in the St. Thomas administration just yet. I turned to Crawford and gave him a quick peck, and ran over to my car, which was parked in the space next to where he had pulled in. The coast was clear for the moment and I wanted to make my getaway without being accosted by any nosy students or even nosier administrators. I got into the car and started it, throwing it into reverse. The car didn’t move.

  Crawford was still in his car in the parking lot and looked over at me. Although I had my foot on the accelerator and was attempting to back out of the spot, the car was not in motion, instead making a grinding noise accompanied by a whining of the engine. Crawford jumped out of his car and put his hand up, giving me the signal to stop accelerating. I took my foot off the gas. I watched as he walked around the car and looked down at the front passenger side tire. He looked up at me and I knew that there was a problem.

  The windows were closed. He mouthed the word “boot.”

  “Boot?” I repeated to myself. It took a minute for the realization to dawn on me. “Boot?” I said again, this time much angrier. “Those bastards,” I muttered, and got out of the car to see for myself. Indeed, there was a boot on the front tire of my car that was going to prohibit my going anywhere for a while. I put my hands on my hips and looked at Crawford and told him the whole story of how because I now lived on campus, I was supposed to park a half mile away. I looked at him pleadingly, hoping he would take pity on me and either help me figure out a way to get the boot off or drive me all the way home. I knew neither was an option, given his schedule for the day.

  “I’m late,” he said regretfully, knowing that driving me the fifteen miles north to Dobbs Ferry was out of the question. “Can I drop you at the train?” he asked. He took my hand and led me back to his car. Once we were inside and on our way off campus, I let loose with a torrent of curse words I didn’t even know I knew. I gave the finger to Joe, who was sitting the guard booth, but my hand was below the window and he wouldn’t be able to see it. But I knew that I had done it and that was all that mattered.

  “Did you just give your stomach the finger?” Crawford asked.

  I didn’t answer, still incapable of uttering a sentence that didn’t have at least one or two multihyphenated curses in it.

  “I promise you that as soon as I get back to work on Monday, I’ll help you get that boot off the car.” He turned onto the avenue. “A guy in Transit owes me and I’ll give him a call.”

  “Those dirty bastards,” I said. I sat in silence all the way to the station, at a loss for words.

  Crawford pulled up close to the platform. “What time is the train?”

  “I don’t know!” I said, frustrated by the whole situation. Saturday trains ran infrequently so I could be sitting there for the better part of an hour if I had just missed the last local train.

  “Do you want me to wait with you?” he asked, hoping against hope that I would say no.

  I knew how much his weekly visits with the girls meant for him and wouldn’t cut into his time. I took a deep breath to calm down. “No,” I said. I leaned in and gave him a kiss. �
�Thanks. Have a good afternoon.”

  He promised to call me after dinner and gave me a final wave before driving off. I walked up to the platform and sat on the cement bench, staring out at the river and considering what had occurred over the past week and what, exactly, I knew.

  The drugs weren’t Wayne’s.

  And they weren’t Amanda’s.

  But they were someone’s and that someone was either the two goons or someone who had sent the two goons and who wanted to scare Amanda enough to have her tell them where they went, a fact that she didn’t know.

  I thought about the Wayne-Amanda-Brandon love triangle. I could understand why Brandon, her fiancé from Princeton, wanted to kill Wayne, but Costas? What was his stake in this? Did he see Brandon as more of a “catch” because of the Greek thing and the fact that Brandon stood to inherit the family business? Was that enough to try and kill someone? Or was it something else? Next time I saw Amanda, I wanted a little bit more information on Mr. Princeton and what his relation to her father was, if any. That whole part of the story confused me more than anything.

  I rubbed my temples, trying to force myself to think more clearly. I thought about Max and realized that I had been very hard on her. One side of my brain screamed, “She always abandons you when the going gets rough and you have every right to be mad!” while the other cautioned, “She’s going through a very difficult time.” Both sides were right but it didn’t excuse my behavior. I had been exceedingly hard on her and I had to make amends. Right after I went home and collected my black bra.

  I didn’t have to wait too long for the train; it arrived within fifteen minutes of Crawford dropping me off. I got off at the Dobbs Ferry station—another fifteen minutes down the train line—and began my trek up the hill toward my street. While I was walking, I left Kevin a message to keep Trixie for another couple of hours and to make sure she got water, she got walked, and that he gave her ample love. I was ready to make things better with Max, but when it came to Kevin, I was still incensed. I used to love Kevin’s flouting of church rules—it assuaged some of my lapsed-Catholic guilt—but now that his lack of respect for the rules and regulations was affecting me personally—albeit tangentially—I was ready to flog him. I was glad that he didn’t answer the phone when I left him my message because I was more incensed with him than I think I had ever been at one person and I needed what Crawford referred to as a “cooling-off period.”