The Ghosts of Lovely Women

by Julia Buckley

  Normally the families get a bit squirrelly at this time. Brenda read the standard warning about how they shouldn’t clap before all the names were read, but there were always people who ignored that, who felt they were exceptions to the rule of etiquette. Their kid had graduated. Their kid deserved special applause.

  Tonight, though, that didn’t happen. Perhaps people realized that the occasion was more solemn than usual. Perhaps they were remembering Jessica had walked across this stage just one year before — or perhaps they were silent with anger that a trusted leader had taken the life of one whom he had sworn to protect.

  The evening passed in a most dignified way.

  We processed back out to the traditional pomp and circumstance, then watched the seniors file past us in their ethereal pearly robes. That was how they left us — white and angel-winged, to fly off to another place and bequeath us only our memories.

  Several of my students slapped me five as they filed past. “Crime and Punishment!” said Carla with a grin. “I’ll never forget it, Miss Thurber!”

  That had me closer to tears than most anything which had happened on stage.

  I finally escaped the auditorium and made my way down the long dark hall, headed toward the teacher’s lounge where we had to turn in our rented finery. Josh passed me and gave me a high-five. He had informed me that day that he would, in fact, be returning to St. James, and he seemed genuinely glad of it. “Talk to you later,” I promised him as he jogged past. He and Tim, he had informed me, still had a late dinner planned. I entered the faculty room to see scholarly robes, collars, hats, hoods, flying through the air to land in various boxes placed there for collection. And then people whizzed out the door. No one lingered after the long ceremony.

  Marnie Taylor, though, more pregnant than ever, was looking a bit shaky, sitting alone on the dusty faculty room couch. “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Yeah. It was just long, and I don’t think I ate enough protein, and these shoes are killing me!” She was near tears.

  “Number one, take those shoes off. You’re about my size. See my comfy flats? Put these on, Marnie. I won’t have you walking to your car in those.”

  She let me slide off her shoes and put mine on her feet. “Now I know how Prince Charming feels,” I joked.

  “Ah. Oh, Teddy, thank you so much. I couldn’t find any black shoes but the heels, and they said it had to be black.”

  “Number two, hang on.” I went to my locker where I’d stowed a little snack in case I left the ceremony starving. “Look what I have! String cheese. Eat this, now, or your poor baby will shrink.”

  She did; she was beyond fake refusals. “Teddy, you are saving my life.”

  “Someday you’ll do the same for me, assuming I ever decide to get pregnant. At this point I’m thinking no.”

  “You are wonderful. I’m sending you a fruit basket or something.”

  I pulled her up and escorted her to the door. “Do you need help to your car?”

  “No. It’s right out front. Thanks, Teddy.”

  I patted her hand and watched her leave. Then I turned to see that Derek had been watching it all from a corner by the broken copy machine. Tonight the sign said, “R.I.P.”

  “Hey,” I said. We were alone in the room. Derek still wore his cap and gown, although the gown was unzipped and I could see that he sported black pants and a white T-shirt underneath. “Fancy clothes.”

  “No one will know, except you.”

  “True.”

  We stared a bit longer, and then Derek said, “I’m in love with you.”

  I knew this. But here is the reality of words: they are powerful. They have force. And those words lifted me like a strong wind, filled me up, made me smile with a giddy abandon.

  I walked toward him. His cap had slid down his head so that it sat on the back like a square black halo. “Can I help you with this?” I asked. I took it off and tossed it in a box.

  “Teddy?”

  “I know, I’m just reveling in it for a minute. I love you, too.”

  “Okay. That’s a relief. I didn’t get beyond the point in the script where I said it to you.”

  “You take risks, you get rewards,” I said, slipping into Marnie’s heels and finding I was just the right height to kiss him.

  Twenty-Nine

  “I was thirty.”

  —Nick, The Great Gatsby

  Frost said nothing gold can stay, but my golden birthday was a most memorable occasion. My mother came to my apartment early to decorate it, then brought in caterers for the festivities, which were shared by Lucky and Matt, Will, Cindy and Charlie, Derek, my parents and me. I was given all sorts of gifts and mercifully no one in my family went with the black balloon motif.

  Derek was a hit with everyone in my family, especially, somehow, my father. The two of them spent long periods of time talking in one corner, and at one point I saw my dad examining Derek’s pipe, which had appeared out of nowhere. They clapped each other on the shoulders more than once, as though they had gone to college together and had been recently reunited.

  “Your father has really taken to that boy,” my mother said, noting that I was watching them.

  “He’s not a boy, Mother.”

  “What did he give you for your birthday?”

  I smiled. “He gave me a box of almonds. And a gift certificate to Jake’s pizza down the street, because we were supposed to go there once and never did.”

  My mother looked extremely disappointed.

  “Oh, and a pair of diamond earrings. I’ve never had diamonds before. I’m afraid to wear them.”

  “Diamonds!”

  “Yes. And he took me to a bookstore and let me spend all morning there, and he paid for all of my books.”

  Now my mother was pleased. “Very nice,” she said.

  My brother sidled up to us, holding Charlie. “Derek is trying to take my place in Dad’s heart. What, is he trying to get a slot in the will?”

  “Derek’s father died when he was young,” I said. “Let him have some dad time.”

  “Oh. Okay, then. But we have to share custody of the old man. Derek can take him to the carpentry club events.” My mother laughed and murmured something about a cake, then moved away. To me, Will said, “You should marry this guy, Teddy. We all like him, and you know that kind of lightning doesn’t strike twice.”

  “I so agree,” said Cindy, walking up to hand Charlie a piece of cheese, which he claimed without taking his eyes off of Will. Will’s eyes were on Cindy, which I found interesting.

  My mother was back. She had actually shoved thirty candles into a cake; she and Lucky lit them and the lights were turned out. I listened to them all sing to me, thinking of The Glass Menagerie, which ends with the classic line, “Blow out your candles, Laura — and so goodbye!”

  “Teddy, do me a favor,” Will said dryly. “Stop thinking about books long enough to make a wish.”

  I looked at Derek, made a wish, and blew them all out with one gust.

  *

  Richard sent me a letter of apology, assuring me that he would not be contacting me again. “I didn’t realize how it came across to you, Teddy, but I’ve been making an effort to see it from your point of view, and I realize I might have seemed a bit inappropriate. In any case, good luck with everything.”

  I sent a copy of the letter to Dave the lawyer. He said he’d keep it in a file.

  The letter didn’t comfort me, nor did I necessarily believe that Richard was going to keep his word. The sad thing was that I couldn’t really do anything about it. If Richard wanted to plot revenge against me, that was still his prerogative. There was always a chance that the letter had merely increased his resolve.

  At this point I could only hope that it was over, that Dave had been right, and that Richard had seen the error of his ways.

  *

  Derek helped me carry a box to my car on the last day: my potted plant, some books I needed to read for the following year, my good
markers, my Shakespeare beanie-baby. He stowed it in my trunk and said, “Lunch?”

  “Sure.”

  We leaned there on the car for a moment, basking in a nice sunny day that wasn’t horribly hot. A little breeze lifted our hair. “What are your summer plans?” Derek asked me.

  “I’m teaching summer school, of course. Bills, bills.”

  “But that’s just for four weeks. Fancy going on a vacation?”

  “I don’t like traveling alone.”

  “Nor do I. Perhaps we should travel together.”

  I smiled. My summers in the past had consisted of working and reading. The thought of doing something different was intoxicating.

  “Okay, Derek. That would be lovely, indeed.”

  Thirty

  “We are the stuff that dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

  —Prospero, The Tempest

  Over the summer the Hallidays paid for a linden tree to be planted on school grounds in Jessica’s memory. A bronze plaque beneath it paid homage to her work as a student and as a thespian at St. James High. Mrs. Halliday had asked that I be consulted about a literary quotation which could appear at the end of the tribute — something, she said, that Jessica would like.

  I deliberated over this for a week. At first I wanted a line from A Doll’s House, especially because I found out that Jessica had, in fact, earned a part in a summer-stock production of that very Ibsen play. She had been cast as Nora. I’m sure that was one of the things she’d wanted to tell me when she called. I often wondered how events might have been different if I had answered the phone.

  In any case, the Doll’s House quotes were appropriate for me, perhaps, because in the end Nora blamed the men in her life for letting her down. But I couldn’t put that on a plaque as my personal revenge on the world. I needed to find a quote that would represent who Jessica had truly been — a girl who loved life, who believed in people, who wanted to champion the downtrodden. Ultimately Jessica believed in life and in humanity; that was why she wanted to confront those who didn’t meet her standards.

  I settled on Miranda’s words from The Tempest, when she finally meets human beings other than her father, her fiancée, and the monster Caliban. Never mind that these new human beings are criminals: Miranda finds them beautiful.

  Jessica’s plaque reads

  “In Honor of Jessica Halliday

  St. James Class of 2009

  Honors Student and Talented Actress

  “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it!”

  The Hallidays and the administrators seemed happy enough with the quotation; they felt it reflected Jessica’s joie de vivre. Those better versed in Shakespeare, however, would remember the response of Miranda’s father, Prospero, who had no confidence in her optimistic view of the world.

  “Tis new to you,” he had told her wearily.

  Jessica would have noted the irony. I still recalled her protest of this moment in the play: “But he’s criticizing her naîveté, and he’s the one who created it, Ms. Thurber! He kept her in ignorance on his little island, then felt superior to her when she didn’t understand the world. It doesn’t change the purity of her vision.”

  That was Jessica: defending the downtrodden, disputing injustice. She envisioned a world that acknowledged its flaws and took steps to correct them, and she spoke of it often — I can hear her voice to this day.

  Jessica existed, and still exists, because I can hear her lovely voice.

  The End

  About the Author

  JULIA BUCKLEY is a Chicago area writer. Her first mystery, The Dark Backward, was released in June of 2006 and earned high praise from Crimespree and others; her next book, Madeline Mann, was lauded by Kirkus and The Library Journal. It is now available for the first time on Kindle, as is as its sequel, Lovely, Dark and Deep.

  Her short story, "Motherly Instinct," appears in Anne Frasier's 2011 Halloween Anthology, Deadly Treats.

  Julia is a member of Sisters in Crime, MWA, and RWA. She keeps a writer's blog at www.juliabuckley.blogspot.com on which she interviews fellow mystery writers; her website is www.juliabuckley.com. She is one of Poe's Deadly Daughters, and posts weekly on their blog: www.poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com.

  Like Teddy Thurber, she is a bibliophile who teaches English.