“Rose? What do you think?”
She started, blinked, glanced up guiltily as twelve pairs of eyes looked at her in mild reproach. She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Jim, I missed your question.”
“We were talking about widening our catchment area to include some of the towns in northwestern Androscoggin County. I asked what you thought of the idea.”
He was trying to help her, feeding the information to her, one spoonful at a time. And she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. “Sure,” she said. “Sounds like a great idea.” She crossed her arms, stared down Mary Lumley, who quickly found somewhere else to look. Rose reached for her coffee cup, bumped it with the back of her hand, and spilled coffee all over herself.
She muttered a soft curse. Vicky ran for a paper towel while Rose sat there in abject mortification. After a brief assessment of the situation, Jim rolled his eyes and moved on to another subject. Vicky came running back in with a handful of towels, and Rose mopped up as best she could. “Here,” Vicky said, “I’ll get rid of that. You go on into the bathroom, Mrs. Lindstrom, and see if you can wash the stain out of your skirt before it sets.”
Wring would have been a more appropriate word. What in hell was the matter with her lately? Did pregnancy make all women this ditzy, or was she the only one? She scrubbed furiously with a soapy paper towel, succeeded only in working disintegrated scraps of cheap paper into the nap of the tweedy fabric.
She was bent over, picking minuscule fragments of paper towel from her skirt, when it happened, a soft fluttering inside her belly that felt like she’d been kissed by butterfly wings. Rose dropped the paper towel, and her hands went to her belly. Silently, she willed it to happen again. Could it have been her imagination?
But the second time, there was no question. Sixteen years might have passed, but some things you didn’t forget. The tiny, perfect individual she and Jesse had created had chosen this moment to announce his presence. Her wrists began to tremble. She was thirty-six years old. Was she really ready for this? Diapers and midnight feedings and colic? What if she couldn’t handle it? What if she was too damn old?
In a panic, she fled to her office and dialed the high school. When Hazel answered, she said briskly, “This is Rose Lindstrom. I need to talk to Jesse.”
There was a pause. “Right now?” Hazel said in her abrasive voice.
“Yes, of course,” she snapped. “Right now.” Damn the woman.
Inside her womb, the baby moved a tiny arm. Or maybe a leg. Tears sprang to life behind her eyelids and she tapped a foot in impatience while she waited. An eternity seemed to pass before he picked up the phone. “Rose?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
She suddenly realized that Hazel must have dragged him out of class. Oh, hell. She always did everything ass-backwards. “Nothing,” she said, and began to cry.
“Rose?”
“I felt the baby move. God, Jesse, I felt the baby move. He’s really there.”
“Well, of course he is.” His voice softened. “What did it feel like?”
She searched through the rubble on her desk for a tissue. Found one, and wiped her nose with it. “Like little butterfly wings. It’s the most incredible thing. But I’m so scared. What if he hates me because I’m almost old enough to be his grandmother?”
“Aw, Rose. He won’t hate you. Is that why you’re crying?”
She dabbed at her nose again. “How the hell should I know? I’m pregnant. All I do is cry.”
At the other end of the phone, he chuckled and said, “I have to get back to class, or there’ll be no classroom left to get back to.”
“Yeah.” She sniffed. “Okay. Listen, Jesse?”
“What?”
She paused, not sure why she’d detained him. “Never mind,” she said. “I have to get back to work, too. I’ll see you tonight.”
Rose hung up the phone, swiveled in her decrepit chair, and stared out the window. “Holy mother of God,” she said aloud. “I’m going to have a baby.”
***
She hadn’t attended a high school dance in nearly twenty years, but when Jesse had asked her to help him chaperon the annual Christmas dance, Rose had thought it sounded like fun. She and Jesse checked their coats and strolled into the gym. The kids were loud and rowdy and ready to kick up their heels. The lights were dimmed, the polished wooden floor sprinkled with sawdust, and a wave of nostalgia swept over her. “It reminds me of when I was a kid,” she said, inhaling a deep breath of that fresh-sawn aroma. “Do you remember going to school dances and necking in the corners?”
Jesse raised his eyebrows. “I thought you went to Catholic school.”
She grinned. “Only through eighth grade. I went to public high school.”
Since this was the holiday event of the season, the customary deejay had been upgraded to a live band, whose members were on stage, tuning their instruments with more enthusiasm than talent. Beside the stage, a small artificial Christmas tree stood at an awkward angle, light glinting from the shiny silver balls that hung from its branches. Red and green streamers hung from the ceiling and were looped over the basketball hoops at both ends of the gym. “Great decorations,” she said. “Original.”
He gave her That Look. “Be nice,” he said.
She sighed mightily. “Oh, all right. I suppose I can behave like a proper faculty wife for one evening. So what’s our mission, captain?”
“Our mission,” he said, “is to make sure there’s no fighting, no drinking, no drugging, and no sex.”
“That sounds incredibly boring. What do we do now?”
“Now,” he said, “like a true gentleman, I offer you my arm. Like a true lady, you accept it, and we mingle.”
The music kicked in, and it was as awful as she’d expected. A few of the braver souls moved out onto the dance floor and began gyrating to an excruciatingly painful cover of a hit song that Luke had played at full volume so many times she’d wanted to smash the stereo. They circled the perimeter of the room, meeting and greeting, nodding and smiling while keeping one eye on the kids. “Now I understand what my mother was talking about,” Rose said. “She told me that someday my turn would come. I think it’s arrived.”
“Don’t complain. It keeps the kids off the streets.”
“I’m all for that. Have we mingled enough yet?”
“Not quite. I want to introduce you to Evelyn Silverburg. She’s been teaching ninth-grade math since before I was born, and she’s directly responsible for my being a teacher today.”
Evelyn Silverburg was a white-haired, birdlike woman with twinkling blue eyes. “Your husband,” she said, “was the only student I’ve had in forty years of teaching who got a perfect grade in my class.”
Rose smiled wryly. “I’m not surprised.”
“So tell me, dear, how far along are you?”
Rose’s hand automatically went to her stomach. “Almost five months.”
“It’s so exciting, bringing a new life into the world. I had three babies, and each one was like a gift from God.”
As they moved on, she murmured to Jesse, “Nice lady.”
“Very nice. Her husband had a stroke last year and he’s in a wheelchair now. Sometimes I do yard work for them. Raking, mowing, pruning. She has arthritis, and the bending kills her.”
“You’d never guess to look at her.”
“She’s a tough old bird. Wait until she catches some kid up to no good. She’ll grab him by both ears and escort him out of the building. Her nickname is Killer.”
“That nice old lady?” Rose snorted. “Get out of here.”
“Seriously. Why do you think she chaperons school dances? It sure isn’t the music.”
The cacophony of clashing, banging guitars grew louder. After being greeted by the twentieth adolescent female in ten minutes, Jesse leaned closer so she could hear him and said, “We can sit down for a while if you’d like.”
They found an empty table near the dance floor and settled down t
o watch the dancers. Mercifully, the band ended the torture they were inflicting and began to play a soft ballad.
It was a major improvement. “You have quite a fan club,” she said dryly, pulling her chair up to the table and resting her elbows on the tabletop.
“They’re just kids,” he said. “Little girls. Believe me, I prefer real women.”
She rested her chin on her hand and studied him boldly while he gazed back at her. “Lucky me,” she said.
“Mr. Lindstrom?”
Rose glanced up. The girl who had spoken was about Devon’s age, plain and bookish-looking, although she could have been pretty if she lost the glasses and learned what to do with lipstick and a mascara wand. She stood next to a lanky teenage boy whose hands were tucked into the pockets of baggy pants. The girl glanced quickly at Rose, then turned back to Jesse. “I didn’t know you were chaperoning tonight.”
“I’m filling in for Mrs. Kelley. She had a family party to go to. This is my wife, Rose. Rose, I’d like you to meet Jolene Hunter and Roger Thibodeau. They’re both in my Honors English class.”
“Greetings,” Roger said, and gave her a funky salute. Jolene mumbled a brief hello and turned back to Jesse.
“Mr. Lindstrom,” she said, “are you going to the Shakespeare thing in Portland?”
“As a matter of fact, Rose and I are planning to go on the fifth. Why?”
“Tessa and I would like to go, but we don’t have a way to get there. Do you suppose we could ride with you? If it’s not an imposition?”
He glanced at Rose. She shrugged. “Sure,” Jesse said. “I don’t see any problem with that. What about you, Roger? We have room for one more.”
“Ah…no. I don’t think so. Thanks, anyway, but I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare.”
“Thank you,” Jolene said. “I’ll tell Tessa. Nice meeting you, Mrs. Lindstrom.”
As the two teenagers disappeared into the crowd, Rose observed dryly, “Interesting pair.”
“You should see them in class. They’re both brainy as hell. Roger’s already been accepted at Northeastern, but Jolene hasn’t mentioned college plans to me. It’ll be a shame if she wastes that mind of hers.” He looked around at the dancers moving around the floor. “You know,” he said, “just because I’m chaperoning doesn’t mean I can’t dance with my wife.”
“Come on, then. I love to dance.”
He led her out onto the floor and took her in his arms. She lay her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. He was warm and hard and deliciously male, and there was something about dancing, something about being in his arms, here in the dimly-lit high school gym, that made her feel soft and feminine and cherished. It was a feeling she wasn’t accustomed to, but like the red roses, it was turning her insides to warm jelly.
She raised her face to his. “So tell me, Mr. Lindstrom,” she said softly, “why is it that when all the other little boys wanted to be doctors and firemen, you decided to become an English teacher?”
“It’s a pretty boring story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“I’m sure.”
“Actually, I didn’t always want to be an English teacher. I took a pretty circuitous route. I started out wanting to be a forest ranger. I liked the idea of working outdoors. Taking care of the earth, helping to preserve it for future generations. And then I read a book that changed my life. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The power of his words just slammed me in the face. After that, I discovered Shakespeare. Hamlet. I couldn’t get enough of Hamlet. I must have read it a dozen times.”
“To be or not to be,” she murmured, “that is the question.”
“Hey,” he teased. “I thought you only read Zane Grey.”
“I may have working-class tastes,” she said, “but I’m not illiterate. I went to college, too, you know. So what happened after Hamlet?”
“As soon as I recognized the power of words, I knew I wanted to write. Of course, I also knew I’d never be as good as those guys, but I had this fire inside me that wouldn’t stop burning. So I majored in English. But it’s pretty hard to put food on the table as a struggling writer, and in this neck of the woods, an English degree is good for two things: teaching school and washing dishes. Teaching school seemed to be the most viable alternative.”
“And you fell in love with teaching,” she said.
“Actually,” he said, “I hated it at first. I almost quit after that first year.”
“Really? Why?”
“I was only four or five years older than some of the kids I was supposed to be teaching. Young and idealistic. I thought if I was enthusiastic enough, I could turn these kids on to the books that excited me so much. But most of them were there because they had to be, and they didn’t give a hoot about Steinbeck, or Shakespeare, or anything except who scored the winning touchdown in Saturday afternoon’s game, or whether they were going to score with their date on Saturday night. Reality was a hard blow.”
“What made you decide to stay?”
“Evelyn Silverburg. She called me up one day, invited me over. We sat on her front porch, eating homemade chocolate chip cookies and drinking iced tea, and she told me about her abysmal first year of teaching. The message got through loud and clear, and I decided to stick it out for another year. That was twelve years ago, and I’m still here.”
“See?” she said. “I knew it wouldn’t be a boring story.”
“What about you?” he said. “Why social work?”
“It wasn’t anything as dramatic as you and old Will Shakespeare. I went to UMass for a year after high school, then Eddie and I got married and I dropped out. I was stuck home with two pre-schoolers, changing diapers and watching Sesame Street, and as much as I loved my kids, I was stagnating, starving for adult conversation and a little intellectual stimulation. The day Luke started school, so did I. I was twenty-six when I went back, and I felt ancient compared to the eighteen-year-olds who were in my classes. But I stuck it out. I got financial aid, and I worked a part-time job to help foot the tuition bills. I guess I got into social work because I liked the idea of helping people. And just looking around me, I knew there’d be plenty of opportunity.”
Inside her belly, the baby stirred and began running through his calisthenics routine. “Jesse?” she said. “Give me your hand. Quick.”
In the darkness, she pressed his hand against her belly. “Wait,” she said. A moment later, she felt a hard poke from a tiny limb. “Did you feel it?”
“Yes.” He looked stunned. “Will he do it again?”
“Keep holding on. I think he just woke from a nap.”
The baby kicked again. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Of course not.” She looked at him quizzically. “Didn’t you ever do this when Colleen was pregnant with Mikey?”
His mouth thinned. “No.”
She waited for him to elaborate, realized she’d hit a sensitive spot. “I’d like you to be in the delivery room with me,” she said. “If you want to.”
“Of course I do. I wasn’t there when Mikey was born.”
“We’ll have to go through Lamaze classes. They last about six weeks.”
“I know. I’ve been reading about it.”
Rose was stunned. “You have?”
“It’s my baby, too, Rose. I’m interested in what’s happening to your body. I want to be involved.”
“I guess I just didn’t think you’d be interested. Eddie never was.”
“I’m not Eddie,” he said grimly. “Don’t make the mistake of confusing us.”
***
He found the Snickers bar with the note wrapped around it in his desk drawer on the twenty-third of December, after the classroom had already emptied for the day. The note was wrapped around the candy bar and secured with a rubber band. Jesse removed the rubber band and unfolded the note. The handwriting was unfamiliar, doctored up, perhaps for anonymity, perhaps only for clarity. MY DARLING JESSE, it read, I KNOW YOU DON’T LOVE ME, BUT YOU’RE ALL I THINK OF.
I JUST WISH I COULD TELL YOU TO YOUR FACE. THE CANDY BAR IS YOUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT. I’LL SEE YOU IN JANUARY.
Jesse hunched over the note, read it again, then opened his briefcase and pulled out a few selected homework assignments and compared the writing. None of them matched. But each day, Amanda Ashley spent most of his third period class gazing adoringly at him, and his instincts told him she was more than likely the anonymous letter writer. Maybe Rose was right. Maybe he should have her transferred out of his class, before the situation got out of hand.
He sighed and rolled his chair away from his desk. Note in hand, he headed for the principal’s office. “Henry in?” he asked Hazel, who was bent over her ancient IBM Selectric, typing industriously.
“Nope.”
He waited, but no further information was forthcoming. “Are we expecting him?”
“Nope,” she said without looking up. She picked up a piece of correction tape and inserted it into the typewriter, backspaced, and typed a correction. “He’s on his way to the airport. Going to Palm Beach for Christmas. Won’t be back until next week.”
“Wonderful.” But school was out for the next ten days anyway, so he supposed it could wait. When school started back up in January, he would bring the matter to Henry’s attention and request that the girl be transferred out of his class at the end of the ranking period.
***
They spent Christmas in Boston, in the bosom of the MacKenzie clan. Rose was touched by the way her boisterous family unconditionally accepted as one of them this quiet, unassuming man she’d brought home to them. Jesse slipped into the role of new in-law with diplomacy. He lifted a few drinks with the men, quietly charmed the women, complimented her mother on her superb cooking, and somehow managed to remember every blessed name, right down to the youngest grandchild.
Spending Christmas Eve together was a MacKenzie family tradition that had started with the birth of Mary and Patrick’s first child, some forty-odd years ago, and had continued through the births of five children and, at last count, twelve grandchildren. Occasionally, one or the other hadn’t made it home. Rob had missed the family gathering last year because he’d been on tour in Tokyo. Two years ago, Maeve had been stranded in Florida when her flight was canceled at the last minute and every other flight was booked because of the holiday. And Pat had spent one Christmas Eve pacing the fifth-floor waiting room of a Seattle hospital while Lizabeth gave birth to their third child.
Sleeping With the Enemy Page 18
