“You’re saying she took her own life?” I said.
“Do you doubt it?” she said flatly, as a liar might.
The fire snapped a coal onto the carpet, and the Headmaster’s wife just let it burn.
“But why would she do that?” I said, feeling my confidence return in her absence of sense.
Hidden away, she might have once been a powerful force, but now, in the full light of the fire, I saw her madness as a weakness I could exploit. If I was careful, if I could come to understand the unique contours of her broken rationality, there was hope.
“She loved you boys,” she said. “She was devoted to you.”
The ember smoked and faded, as the ash had, and I realized I could not recall the particulars of Ms. Klein’s face. Only her gnarled fingers in the dirt, the weight of her body in the wheelbarrow.
“She wanted to be with you,” she said. “She wanted it more than anything her life in the village had to offer. You have to understand, she wasn’t a woman of means or talent. She wasn’t a person people gravitated toward, and she didn’t particularly like them anyway. As a result, she had been alone for many years. When we took her in, we had no idea how suddenly and completely she would come to love you boys, or how quickly her work would become the focus of her life.”
“Then how devastating for us that she’s gone,” I said.
“Ashley,” said the Headmaster’s wife. She leaned in, catching the light of the fire in her grotesque cavern of a mouth. “You haven’t stopped shivering. Can I fix you something warm to drink?”
“We were already stretched to the limit with boys like you when the state started sending us sick ones,” said the Headmaster’s wife. “My husband went into town each year to present our case to the state,” she said, “to tell them how thinly stretched our resources were. It didn’t matter to them, of course. Their facilities were as jammed as ours, and boys were already being turned away, made to sleep without beds, made to last days without food.”
The tea she’d brought me was like lake water—metallic, vaguely vegetal—but it was warm, and so soothing that I found myself quickly feeling comfortable in a way I had not since I’d held her hand by the fire. With each sip, I felt more like myself. Less anxious. Less afraid. More capable of understanding her, and how I might safely be able to remove myself from this unexpected situation, without causing alarm, in order to alert the other boys.
“Crowded as we were, we knew we could offer the sick boys a decent enough end,” she said, “and thereby be the better of two bad options. The decision to cut Ms. Klein wasn’t an easy one. Our numbers grew with each semester, and the situation became so dire, we could no longer pay her or feed her or house her without eating into the resources we needed for the boys in our care. The state was no longer sending only sick boys, but challenging boys, boys who needed special attention. ‘Bad apples,’ they called them. Rotten souls who would fare better in a controlled environment. What were we to do? Turn them away? Send them back to a society that had already once pushed them out? We did what we could. We made the decision to release Ms. Klein. She was old enough to have another life and young enough to have some fun with it, if she were so inclined, or to find another school and another set of boys to love and educate and comfort.”
It was either the tea or the fresh logs I’d added to the fire, but I was no longer shivering. My muscles had relaxed into the chair, and I could feel that where I’d once held fear, I now held nothing. My body was like a cushion for the brain that held it in place, and it was a pleasant enough feeling, after all I’d been through. I listened, watching her and sipping my tea. No doubt I was still in danger, but my awareness of it was very clean, uncompromised by my anxieties, which I had abandoned to the floor of her home, like the ember and the ash.
“But the decision didn’t stick,” said the Headmaster’s wife, rocking ever so slightly now in her chair. “Ms. Klein kept coming back to us, the poor thing. With such passion and consistency that I couldn’t help wondering if she’d lost her sense along the way. There is a madness in loyalty, in that kind of devotion. You become blind to the possibilities of life, sacrificing the present, and the future, to the past.”
“I don’t agree,” I said, but it came out almost like a yawn. I wanted to say that loyalty was something I imagined could grant an otherwise inconsequential life meaning, and that devotion to others kept some from living exclusively for themselves. But the moment I paused to consider them, my thoughts seemed suddenly too far from me to collect.
“Neither did Ms. Klein,” she said. “Ms. Klein had a theory, as I’m sure you do, Ashley, and a plan. We’d known of the stories for some time, and we saw it as perfectly natural for children in a facility such as ours to imagine something so grandiose as a life that could be lived in its halls after death, particularly when the sick boys began to go. Who could blame them? But when Ms. Klein proposed to us her plan to return to the facility after her own self-inflicted death, we were at a loss for what to do. We’d clearly allowed things to get out of hand. We knew the matter would have to be dealt with, and in a way that mitigated harm. We could have had her committed, but given that the joys she’d found in this life were so limited, it seemed unduly cruel to lock her away. And what right did we really have to interfere? After all, it’s possible this was something she’d been working up the nerve to do even before we knew her. It’s possible she’d had the plan for years but had only just found a socially acceptable justification to see it through.
“I have no love for suicides,” she said. “I find the self-
absorption involved exhausting. But if she was doing it for you boys, she might have reasoned, what was self-absorbed about that? Dead, as she explained it to us, she would require no food, no rest, no comforts. And, conveniently, she would have no memory of her departure. She could haunt our halls for as long as they held, feeling as alive as ever and helping you all without taxing our resources. Madness, we were certain of it. But a notion such as hers is a lock not easily picked.”
It seemed to comfort her, ascribing to Ms. Klein the very diagnosis that had undoubtedly cast a shadow over her own life. But in her tale of our teacher’s demise, the Headmaster’s wife had clarified little more for me than her own insanity. The more she spoke, the better I understood that there was no ghost in our facility. No ghost, and no ghosts. Ms. Klein was nothing other than a corpse tied to a rock in a lake, and her murderer was a red mess in a green shawl, jamming together whatever sketches of reality still existed in her virtually toothless skull. By now my body was so relaxed, either from the tea or from simple exhaustion, I was hardly more than a nub in her dead husband’s chair. But I was not without my critical faculties. I needed only to keep her talking, and I would be safe. There would be an opportunity for escape soon enough. My body would return to me eventually, or the morning would overwhelm us, shedding new light on the proceedings and maybe even bringing a few of the other boys down the hill to come to my aid.
“Even when her plan worked,” said the Headmaster’s wife, “it brought us no relief to see her wandering the halls, day after day, clueless to the nature of her predicament.”
She almost laughed. I could hear the lift in her voice as she spoke.
“You can’t imagine,” she said, “what it was like for her to come up to us while we were walking the grounds, day after day, and forfeit her salary, over and over again. Imagine the tragedy of it happening once. Now imagine that tragedy occurring every few days or so, even multiple times in one day, each time with renewed zeal and sincerity. Madame and Mister, she would call us, though we were anything but noble or decent. ‘Madame and Mister, for the sake of the children.’ It was clear to both of us that we were complicit in something terrible, that exploiting a lost soul was a damnable offense, even if it was in the interest of the school and, in truth, that very soul’s dying wish. She’d turned hers into an eternity of suffering for the facili
ty. And on top of that, you boys kept digging her up. It was all simply too much for us to take.”
I was much drowsier than I’d realized. I couldn’t even find it in my neck to shake my head. I could only bring my chin to my shoulder and watch the floor. When I blinked, my eyelids held together for several seconds before I could open them again, and my teacup fell to the carpet, where it split.
“But seeing Ms. Klein again,” she said, “after what she’d done, it brought our unexplained occurrences here sharply into focus. The grisly mishaps, piling up over the years, seemed suddenly too coincidental to be overlooked. You boys always had stories, but they were only that: the stories of children. So we did some reading. And we tried to arm ourselves against the nightmares to come.”
I brought my head back to center, where I felt my jaw fall open and hang. The depths of her madness, and its obvious influence on the inhabitants of our facility, were, in their own distorted way, impressive. What evils had she provoked by spreading these ideas, by allowing her insanity to infect the isolated boys in her care? Had she twisted them so completely as to turn them against one another, or had they always had those murderous impulses and she’d merely provided an outlet? I knew I had to be careful now. She was undoubtedly trying to influence me, as she had been so successful in doing with the other boys, whose faces I could not recall, exhausted and limp as I was in the chair. I could listen, I could learn, but I could not let her distort what I knew to be true. These weren’t explanations but ghoulish obscenities meant to obscure all she had done. I held on to that thought as well as I could, understanding it would be my only salvation as the night grew longer.
“Why do you suppose a ghost haunts?” she said, watching me struggle with my neck.
I had an answer, but I could not manage it.
“They have lost their ability to connect to a world that no longer belongs to them,” she said. “Memories fade to the point where they can’t remember why they’ve made a particular choice, or that a choice was made at all, at least not for very long. A ghost will circle whatever feels familiar, or whatever starts to feel familiar after a period of aimless wandering. They will circle and circle until the possibility of the afterlife presents itself again, or the light of the candle finally burns out, and they are fully lost. A spirit turning in the yard without anything behind the act that could even resemble a conscious mind. It’s a pitiable state, whatever gruesome affairs it may yield, but not something to be afraid of, Ashley. Not here. Not with me.” She smiled kindly as my eyes began to water.
How had she so effectively gotten through to the others? We were young, it’s true, but surely not all so foolish as to buy into the ravings of a lunatic woman missing most of her teeth. What was the quality of this facility that led each of its inhabitants to readily abandon the knowns of our corporeal existence in favor of supernatural flights of fancy? Why did they all need to believe so desperately in something more?
Had I seen things I couldn’t explain? Yes. Was there something to all of this that I couldn’t hope to understand given the limited tools at my disposal? Perhaps. But ghosts? It seemed the most obvious expression of the limitations of human imagination to propose an experience beyond our lived one that simply mirrored what we’ve already been through in vaguely distorted ways. The sheer lack of ingenuity seemed evidence enough of the unlikelihood of her proposition, and yet no one in my cohort had been able to see through it? I would have laughed if I wasn’t so tired. If I didn’t feel drained beyond the point of even cracking my jaw back into place or reopening my mouth to explain that I hadn’t come down to discuss Ms. Klein at all, in fact, or her supposed ghost, or that her death felt like a thing so far in the past to me that it seemed hardly worth mentioning, especially in light of all that had happened since. Ms. Klein was gone, and to where I knew precisely, as I’d weighted her down and left her there myself.
I watched the Headmaster’s wife, wondering if she might understand some of this in the dull look I now gave her. And I will say that there was something like a fire, fueled by what might have been fear or righteousness, that seemed to light in her eyes then, as if she had somehow heard everything I had to say and understood its implications.
“I can see you have doubts,” she said. “But I would encourage you to take me at my word. Skepticism is often no more than the sound of an unenlightened listener, clumsily winding his watch.”
“Your husband,” I slurred, “is dead.”
I don’t know where I found the energy, or how the words took shape in the slack of my jaw, but they fell from me nonetheless and met her only a few feet away.
Her face was still, though the air in the room had changed once more. I felt a release as my original mission, stalled as it had been by her attempts to draw me elsewhere, came to its intended conclusion. I felt that the Headmaster’s chair could fold around me, and that I might sleep for an eternity in the stink of its embrace. I saw in her face the truth of her life as she’d known it fading so that reality might take its place. Here was something she hadn’t been able to guess, and something for which her madness, however inventive it was, had not accounted.
“Henry,” she said, gathering herself near the edge of her chair. “I should have known. That you’re here again, and he is not, was enough to tell me something was wrong.” She set her teacup on the table at her side. “You’ve come to confess,” she said.
“No,” I might have said, though I sat there frozen instead, thinking the word as hard as I could.
“Thank you,” she said, with a sigh of what sounded like genuine relief. It was almost touching. “I’ve never relished this position,” she said, “which is why I keep to myself and out of the way this time of year. But I knew upon your arrival here tonight, Ashley, that the core of our facility’s concerns remained unresolved.”
What had I missed? Where had her cigarette gone? Maybe she’d left it in the kitchen when she’d gone to fetch the tea. I imagined myself speaking but made no sound. I only watched her, blankly, as her tears escaped.
“How did you do it, Ashley?” she said. She tapped two fingers to the wrist of her opposite arm. “Did you open his veins?” she said.
I blinked twice for no. I looked to my hands, which sat like strangers on the armrests of the Headmaster’s chair. I thought to move them, and when I couldn’t, I realized I was not tired at all. I was not exhausted by the day, but awake and alert. Ready to act. My mind simply had no power over its body.
I’d never experienced anything like it before, this strange paralysis that seemed to me, more than anything, mental. As if I was thinking about the movements I wanted to make in the wrong way. They seemed within my reach; I could imagine them happening. And yet, nothing did.
“Ashley,” she said, shaking her head. “How could you?”
“I’ve done nothing,” I would have said. “Now please help me up.” But instead of saying any of it, I realized that I had started to drool, or felt that I had. Humiliated, on the verge of hopelessness, the drawings returned to me as evidence of more than just an ongoing affair between the Headmaster and Ms. Klein. If his wife hadn’t murdered him, then he’d taken his own life, and he’d surrounded himself with images of the woman he loved before doing so. He had chosen to die among them, rather than at home with this creature, who was possibly a murderer twice over and who would, in that case, be more than ready to add to that number, should anyone challenge her or stand in her way. Whoever had taken Ms. Klein’s life, the Headmaster had made his final effort to return to her in the only way he’d imagined possible. If what the Headmaster’s wife had said of Ms. Klein’s plan was true, he’d possibly taken up that same delusion, out of sheer desperation, believing that in doing as he had done he would be granted an eternity alongside the object of his affection: a potentially sane woman, and one with her set of teeth still intact. It made tragic sense in a way that left me undone, and I was again impressed with my ability to
empathize in the most difficult of times.
“I’ve always had a bad feeling about you,” said the Head-master’s wife. “Since the day you arrived. Overweight, disinterested, unkind. I saw nothing worthy of any investment on my part, but Henry insisted you could be reached. He was always too generous with children.”
She let a tear fall, but it was not sadness I saw in her expression. It was anger.
I should have seen it coming, but I realized then that I had
always been optimistic to a fault. Instead of helping her, I
had allowed myself to become the locus of all the feelings I’d unleashed in her upon delivering the news of her husband’s demise. The more aware she was of all she had not known and could not know, the angrier she became, and, with the precision of a mousetrap, her broken mind had turned against the first defenseless creature to have wandered her way.
“How many is that?” she said. “One for now? Or two? Or are there others hidden in cupboards and dumbwaiters and piles of leaves around the campus? And, tell me, was I overly generous in assuming you’d let Ms. Klein take care of herself?”
With my body now frozen to the chair, my mind sped on, imagining all that was about to happen and the odds I had of saving myself. I struggled to reconcile the images I held in my thoughts of me getting up, of me running, of me scrambling up the hill as the Headmaster’s wife bolted after, with the reality that I was doing none of those things. Something had changed inside of me. Something was different in the relationship of my mind to its body, as if a link between the two had been severed. But I was thinking as clearly as I ever had. I felt as though something had crawled into me and nestled in whatever part of my brain might have activated my strength, leaving me captive here in a rotten house just out of view of the lake. I thought of the corpses I’d left there, bound together for eternity. What if I’d been wrong? What if there was still something inside Thomas, something inside Ms. Klein, pulsing away against the fate I’d forced upon them? It seemed no accident to me that the tea had tasted of lake water. If the Headmaster’s wife had truly turned against me, if she had put something in the drink that might have reduced my physical prowess in order to make me a more manageable target for her devastation, if she had put this all in motion with the only gift I’d accepted that evening, my body also understood this was a punishment come full circle. It had given me a taste, in that moment, of what I’d done to the poor souls of Thomas and Ms. Klein.
The Job of the Wasp Page 15
