“Well,” he said, “how’d we do?”
He was wearing a worn waxed field coat over a T-shirt, the beginnings of a belly pressing against the cotton. It took Coach Fink a second to realize that he was asking about the game.
“We got our butts kicked.”
“I’m sorry about that.” Bishop patted his thigh, and the dog parked itself at his side. “How far did you run?”
“Maybe five miles.”
“You’re barely even breathing hard.”
“I take care of myself,” she said, and then she blushed. He was just being nice, she thought, just trying to sidetrack them from the subject of the game. She couldn’t be sure if the blush was born of his effort or her pride or the fact that his kindness was just another sort of pity. To cover the blush, she started pacing again, like she hadn’t finished warming down. The dog fell into step beside her, and Bishop followed suit.
“What’s his name again?” she said.
“Pickett.”
“Pickett,” she repeated, and the dog gazed up at her as if eager to hear the rest of what she had to say. “I remember this one game my sophomore year. I went 0 for eleven in the first half against Belle Meade. It was like I’d forgotten how to shoot a basketball. It was awful. A nightmare. One thing I was good at in the world and it was gone. The more I missed the worse it got. I thought I’d never sink another basket.”
“Let me guess,” Bishop said, “you played better in the second half?”
“I bricked my first five shots before Coach Udall benched my ass.”
He laughed, and she could feel him looking at her.
“You probably shouldn’t use that story in a halftime speech.”
“Oh, screw you, Bishop,” Coach Fink said. “I shot better in the next one. Dropped a double double on Massanutten.”
She kept waiting for him to turn back, but he matched her stride down the hill, Pickett trotting circles around them, tags jangling in the dark.
“How’s the play going?” Bishop said.
Coach Fink stopped and glared. “Are you trying to rack my balls?”
Bishop pinched his fingers and drew them across his lips like he was pulling a zipper closed. “I’ll just keep it shut,” he said.
“I don’t even like the play,” Coach Fink said, walking again. “It’s just girls sitting around a dorm room. They talk and talk and talk, but nothing ever happens. I prefer a little action with my entertainment.”
“Isn’t one of those girls a ghost?”
“Not a very scary one,” Coach Fink said.
Pickett huffed at the scent of horses in the stables as they rounded the bottom of the loop. In the gatehouse, bathed in yellow light, the security guard smoked a cigarette on his stool, his white truck parked in the exit lane. It occurred to Coach Fink that someone observing their progress might have mistaken them for friends.
“The cast hates me,” she said.
“I doubt it’s as bad as all that.”
“They gave me pubes.”
“They what?”
“Pubic hair,” she said. “In an envelope. They think I’m a lesbian.”
Bishop opened his mouth but closed it without speaking.
“You probably thought so, too.” Coach Fink socked him on the bicep. “Goddamnit, Bishop. We’ve been acquainted a long time, but I don’t know a thing about you. I don’t even know where you’re from.”
“Richmond,” Bishop said, rubbing his arm.
“You play sports?”
“I played baseball in high school.”
“What position?”
“First base.”
“You any good?”
“I was OK in the field, but I couldn’t hit a curve.”
“And what are you doing out here?” she said.
“How do you mean? I’m walking my dog.”
“It’s the middle of the damn night.”
Bishop kept his eyes on his feet. Streetlamps spaced Shady Dell Loop every twenty yards or so, causing their shadows to bloom into being, then fade and bloom again, as if they couldn’t make up their minds.
“I haven’t been sleeping very well.”
“Now I know something,” Coach Fink said.
They started back up the hill in silence. This side of Shady Dell Loop was higher than the other, built up on a sort of grassy berm, so they were almost level with the darkened second-story windows in the buildings on the quad. From this angle, at this hour, with the moonlight casting everything silver, the buildings appeared miniaturized, like the school was an elaborate scale model of itself.
Pickett pricked his ears at something only he could hear, then ranged off into the woods. Bishop let him go.
“You know what you should do,” he said. “You should try to contact Eugenia Marsh.”
“And why would I do that? I’d like to strangle that kook.”
“I was thinking you could invite her for opening night,” Bishop said. “That’d give the girls something to get excited about.”
“I thought she was a hermit.”
“Things change. She wrote that letter to the Post.”
For a few long seconds she let herself entertain his proposal—she could practically feel the machinery whirring behind her eyes, could see the looks on the faces of Demarinis and Roebuck and the rest of them—but then her mind blanked, like the idea had tripped a breaker.
“It doesn’t matter,” Coach Fink said. “I have no idea how to find Eugenia Marsh, and even if I did, she wouldn’t come.”
She walked backward to work her quads. A few steps behind, with his hands in his coat pockets, Bishop was puffing up the grade, old oaks lining Faculty Row like the canopy of an enormous, ruined tent, moonlight sifting between the branches. Pickett coalesced out of the night and led them all the way back to Bishop’s yard.
“You know I played the lead my senior year,” Coach Fink said. “Maria. We did West Side Story.”
She recognized the skepticism in Bishop’s silence. “What?”
“Nothing,” Bishop said.
Coach Fink drew her braid over her shoulder and gripped it with both hands. She made a noise in her throat, a sort of harrumph, like a scandalized old biddy. Then she began to sing. “There’s a place for us … somewhere a place for us.” She started softly, but as she felt her way into the lyrics, she shut her eyes and let the song unfurl. Hers was not a great voice—she knew that—but it was clear and full, and even she could hear how lovely it sounded on this night. “There’s a time for us … someday a time for us.” The words lifted out of her. She felt them hanging in the air like mist. This had always been her favorite song in the show. She liked how sweet and simple it was, how hopeful, how tragic. “Somehow … someday … somewhere.” Coach Fink held the last note, and then she opened her eyes, and for a moment it was like waking from an impossibly vivid dream, the real world all around her hazy and false.
Bishop was standing close enough to surprise her. Pickett swiped the air with his tail. Headlights cut the darkness along Faculty Row, the security guard making his rounds, the light catching on Bishop’s T-shirt. As the truck passed and the darkness settled over them again, Coach Fink shot a hand out and pinched the flab at Bishop’s middle, and he made a sound like “Yeef” and clapped his palms over his stomach. She didn’t know why she’d done it but she had, and now it was too late to take it back.
“We need to get you out here exercising more often,” she said. “Your dog looks pretty good, but you could use a little work.”
Then she pivoted and walked away, her cheeks blazing again. But for the sound of her footsteps Shady Dell Loop was quiet. She didn’t look back, not once, just kept striding down the row to her place and then up the steps and through the door and into bed, where there waited a dream of mysterious letters and gravel lanes.
XII
Bishop’s lesson plan on the day of Poppy’s hearing was to divide his students into groups and have them discuss the ethics of the atom bomb, one group in f
avor, one against, but he had trouble focusing on the debate. He’d been instructed to make himself available to the Disciplinary Committee during his free period in case his testimony was required. While his students spoke, he nodded and made interested noises in his throat, aware that Juliet Demarinis was saying something about the casualties that would have resulted from an invasion of Japan, and Marisol Brooks was saying something about the murder of women and children, and Lenore Littlefield was saying nothing at all. Every time he glanced in her direction, he found her staring out the window, her gaze, he supposed, focused on the Herndon Annex across the quad, where the hearing was already in progress.
He needed to talk to her. Something. Already he’d let a week go by. But the bell chimed the end of class, and the atom bomb was forgotten, the room a hubbub of girlish voices, and he watched Lenore shoulder her backpack and follow Melissa out the door, his blood skittering with a feeling very much like relief. He waited until the building was quiet before shutting off the lights. He figured he had just enough time to let Pickett out for a minute or two before he made his appearance at the hearing.
The snow had melted away, leaving the grounds spongy and damp, so Bishop trailed around Shady Dell Loop instead of cutting up the hill. Faint music drifted over from the student parking lot. A car passed, headed in the opposite direction. The driver honked a greeting, and Bishop waved without looking up from his shoes.
He was refilling Pickett’s water bowl when he noticed the message light blinking on his answering machine. He checked his watch, pressed play. For a few seconds, there was only vague rustling, like someone crumpling paper, and then dogs barking—Pickett pricked his ears—and then his father’s voice lifted into the room. “Hush, now. It’s just the mailman.” The voice was firm but distant, as if his father wasn’t speaking into the phone, and the dogs went quiet, his father’s dogs, Mercy and Rhett. Bishop heard footsteps moving away—his father must have forgotten the phone—and a door opening and closing and behind that a kind of living silence as the tape spooled out. Bishop stared at the machine, wondering what his father was doing home in the middle of the day. He was still with the Department of Corrections, an administrative position now, no longer handling cases.
Beside the phone and the answering machine was a ceramic bowl in which Bishop dropped his car keys and his loose change and whatever else might happen to be cluttering up his pockets, and he noticed, just then, the button Poppy had given him on the battlefield. FTM. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand, shaking loose a penny wedged behind the pin. In case your testimony is required. That phrase troubled him, particularly the word required. He didn’t know if his testimony would damn Poppy or exonerate her. In accordance with the bylaws, the committee would be composed of four members: the assistant headmistress (Olivia Proulx, Briarwood class of ’71); a representative from the board of trustees (Paul Ransom, whose great-grandmother, Agnes, class of ’29, had provided the endowment for the library); a representative from the faculty (Barbara Kline, biology); and an elected representative from the student body (Husna Hesbani, class of ’94). Headmistress Mackey would be presiding, but she could only vote to break a tie. All of this was taking place in the Bowles Room, with its wainscoting and its conference tables, its walls lined with portraits of headmasters past. By the time Bishop arrived, Poppy and her parents were waiting on a bench out in the hall. Poppy did introductions, and Bishop shook her father’s hand.
“They’re deliberating,” Poppy told him.
So Bishop’s testimony would not be required after all. He dropped onto a matching bench across from the Tuttles.
“That little Indian girl should have recused herself,” Poppy’s father said.
“Husna’s got it in for me,” Poppy explained. “She’s my RA.”
There was something amused in her demeanor, as if the hearing, like so many adult dramas—local elections, foreign wars—had no real bearing on her life, but she was charmed by their concern.
Her father leaned his forearms on his thighs.
“If it doesn’t go our way, we’ll have grounds for appeal.”
“We’re not going to appeal,” her mother said.
The Tuttles were both blond and blue-eyed, like their daughter, Mr. Tuttle in his gray suit and striped tie, his wing-tips, Mrs. Tuttle in black slacks and a matching tailored coat with brass buttons up the front, black heels. She looked so exactly the way Poppy would look one day that Bishop had trouble meeting her eyes.
Poppy’s father said, “They’re not going to run my daughter out of here because of some little Indian girl.”
“I think Husna’s family is from Pakistan,” Poppy said, and she gave Bishop a look, like the two of them were in cahoots.
“You just be quiet,” her mother said. “Both of you.”
Bishop had tucked the button in his breast pocket, and he fished it out and cupped it between his palms. He had thought he might return it to her, but that didn’t feel right, so he pinned the button to his lapel, and Poppy beamed at him for a moment. Then the door to the Bowles Room opened, and Valerie Beech peeked out. “We’re ready for you now,” she said, and it was clear from her expression that deliberations had not gone well.
He had two more classes to teach. He stuck to his lesson plan, listening to his students going back and forth about how many lives were saved and how many more were lost, and afterward he couldn’t remember a single word that anyone had said. Poppy had been suspended until the end of the semester. Bishop nicked his mail from the faculty lounge, started for home, then changed his mind halfway up the hill and veered toward Thornton Hall. Grace LaPointe let him in, shouting, “Man in the house.” She told him where to find Poppy’s room, and Bishop kept his eyes straight ahead as he moved in that direction. He tried not to see anything he shouldn’t see. Poppy’s father was perched on the bare mattress of her bed, taping a cardboard box. A hunter-green luggage set waited by the door.
“They gave us ’til Monday,” he said, “but what’s the point?”
Bishop volunteered to help carry Poppy’s things out to the car, a Land Rover with Georgia plates parked in the loading area behind the dorm. The two men went about their business without saying much, though every now and then, hefting another box, Poppy’s father would marvel at how it was possible to fit so much junk into such a small room. Poppy’s mother waited in the Land Rover, the hatch open while they worked, a tiny electric bell pinging and pinging and pinging all the while. Poppy and Melissa and Lenore sat on the curb, talking quietly. Poppy seemed reduced, the moment catching up to her. The image called to mind those roadside sufferers you often passed after an accident. Every time he emerged with a suitcase, Bishop had to resist the temptation to tell someone that if they would take the keys out of the ignition the pinging would cease. When the Land Rover was loaded, the hatch shut, the pinging silenced, Poppy gave her friends a tearful hug and said good-bye to Bishop and climbed into the back seat. Then she jumped out again and threw her arms around Bishop’s neck and kissed him on the mouth, startling him, clutching him tight enough to lift her feet off the ground. For an instant, less than that, he felt not desire but the thrill of being desired, and in the very next instant he wrenched his face away and pried her arms free and held her slim wrists in his hands. She stood there, grinning, that amused look on her face, and Bishop understood that she was just messing with her parents. Her mother rolled the window down and said, “Oh for God’s sake, Poppy, get in the car,” and for once Poppy Tuttle did as she was told.
Bishop found his scale under a pile of dirty towels in the bathroom closet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d weighed himself. The surface was scummed with dark patches roughly the size and shape of his feet. 191 pounds. A little heavier than he would have guessed but not too bad. Pickett studied him through the open door, head on his paws. Bishop stripped to his boxers and tried again. Minus his clothes, he was down to 189, half a dozen pounds more than he’d weighed in college. He gathered the flab between
his fingers where Coach Fink had pinched him. Such a strange woman, Coach Fink. With the ball of his foot, Bishop shoved the scale under the sink where it would be easier to locate in the future. He stepped out of the bathroom and shut the door to allow himself access to the full-length mirror bolted to the back. His weight was all right, but he’d sagged and softened in the last few years. Doughy was the word that came to mind. His winter pallor didn’t help. Somehow the mass from his chest had pooled around his middle. He rolled loose flesh between the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. Pickett’s eyes sought Bishop’s in their reflection.
“What do you think, buddy?” Bishop said.
The dog followed him into the kitchen, where he plunked ice cubes into a glass and soaked the ice in bourbon, then started a pot of canned chicken noodle on the stove. A toilet flushed next door. In most ways, Lionel Higgins was the perfect neighbor. Besides the plumbing, the only noises Bishop ever heard from over there were muted footsteps or coughing or the murmur of TV or NPR, the exact same sounds he was making on his side. He filled Pickett’s bowl with kibble. He let the whiskey burn down his throat and listened to his father’s message again. How long had it been since they last spoke? Two weeks? Three? His mother called once a week or so, but she didn’t always put his father on. While he waited for the soup to heat, Bishop knocked off eleven push-ups on the floor.
He was reaching a bowl down from the cabinet when the doorbell rang. Pickett stopped eating to listen. For a second, Bishop stood there in the kitchen in his boxer shorts like he didn’t recognize the sound.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Lenore. Lenore Littlefield.”
“Hang on,” Bishop said, and he hustled back to the bedroom and dressed himself again, cursing under his breath. He emerged barefoot, his shirttails hanging out. Lenore was sitting on the stoop. Bishop pulled the door shut behind him, Pickett whining on the other side.
At Briarwood School for Girls Page 8
