Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  “How’s your writing going?” Mom now held the Joseph figurine in her hand. As always, Joseph looked a bit bewildered, trying to figure out where exactly he fit in with Mary, God, and baby Jesus.

  I twisted the tissue around the shepherd. “I’m actually taking a break from it. It’s insane how busy it is at school, with grading papers and dorm duty, weekend duty. But I’ll get back to it.”

  Mom began wrapping Joseph. “Well, I hope they let you make some time to write next semester. You’ve got a gift, Matthias. You don’t want to lose it.”

  I stopped wrapping the shepherd. “I haven’t lost it, Mom.”

  Mom looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Honey, I’m not suggesting you have. I just don’t want you to waste it. That’s all.”

  “I’m not. I’m just busy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Fine.” I finished wrapping the shepherd and shoved him into a box.

  A brittle silence descended, and we packed up the rest of the crèche without saying anything else. When we next spoke to each other, it was about taking down the wreath on the front door and the electric candles Mom had placed in every window at the front of the house. Mom fussed at me about how to pack up the candles. When I took the wreath down from the front door, I told her she should get an artificial wreath she could use year after year. She retorted that artificial wreaths looked tacky and she and Dad liked the real thing. Later, I stood on the pull-down stairs to the attic and made Mom hand the ornament boxes up to me rather than allow her to climb up herself. In passive-aggressive skirmishes like this, we spent the rest of the morning.

  At noon, Mom called for a lunch break. “We could go to the Grill Room at the club,” she said.

  The Grill Room would be full of more neighbors who would want to know how I was doing, how teaching was, et cetera. “Not the Grill Room,” I said.

  She made a face. “You used to love the Grill Room.”

  “I used to love Sesame Street.”

  Mom put her hands on her hips. “Matthias Duncan Glass, are you going to be a pain in the ass all day, or are you going to have a nice lunch with your mother?”

  I’m not sure which was more effective, her use of my full name or her calling me a pain in the ass. I stared at her, openmouthed. She scowled at me. Then she suddenly chortled and put a hand over her mouth. “You look like a trout that just got pulled out of a pond,” she said, still smiling, and then took me by the arm. “Let’s eat here. Come on.”

  Mom made hot tomato soup and tuna fish sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise. When we sat down in the dining room to eat, I started to apologize, and Mom shushed me. “We eat first,” she said. Food for my mother was the basis of all social contracts. If people sat down and had a good meal together, she had always asserted, they could solve almost anything. Dutifully I ate while Mom talked about the various Christmas cards she and Dad had received, the old friends who still kept in touch and the ones who didn’t, who had gotten married and who had given birth. “How’s Michele doing?” she asked in the middle of all this. “You two still together?”

  I managed not to choke on my soup. “We broke up.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, although I could see the relief in her face.

  I did not want to talk about Michele or our sordid, dysfunctional relationship, and so I asked the first question that popped into my head. “Did you get a Christmas card from the Davenports?”

  My mother was as surprised as I was by my question. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “They haven’t sent us cards since—since you graduated.”

  There was an unspoken question in her voice, and I shrugged. “I ran into Abby Davenport. At a mixer at Saint Margaret’s. She’s a teacher there now.”

  Mom wiped her mouth with her napkin and pushed her chair back from the table. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Just a minute.” She stood up and walked into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind her. I could hear her open and close a drawer in her desk. Then she came back through the door, holding something. “I found this in your room when I was cleaning it,” she said. “Last week before you came down.”

  It was a jewel case for a compact disc. I took it from her and opened it, even though I already knew what was inside. It was the recording of the Bach cello suite that Abby had made for me ten years ago. I stared at it, hearing the melancholy strains in my head. To Matthias. Christmas 2000. Love, Abby.

  “Matthias?” my mother said.

  I closed the case. My heart swelled with something like grief. “Thanks,” I said, my voice squeezed in my throat. “Thanks for finding this.” I took a breath, exhaled. “There was a boy, at Blackburne. His name was Terence Jarrar. He died, at school. Right before Thanksgiving.” Mom gasped, her face pained. “There’s more,” I said. “I found drugs in his room. And—and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  She reached over and took my arm above the wrist, squeezing hard. “Do you want to wait for Dad to get home?” she asked. “Tell us both about it all at once?”

  Despite everything I smiled a little. My mother was ever the practical one. “No,” I said. “I think I’d better tell you now. Before I change my mind.”

  IN THE END I had to tell it all twice, the second time over dinner that night in order to bring my father up to speed. Oddly enough, it wasn’t any easier to talk about Terence the second time around. I said nothing to either of my parents about Fritz or what I’d learned from Lester Briggs. Instead, I told them about Terence’s death, about hearing the gunshot and finding Terence’s body in the river. I told them about later discovering the marijuana in his room and arguing with Ren Middleton, who was going to sweep it all under the rug and get me to help him do it. Still, it felt like less than half a confession, as if by telling them about Terence, I was trying, and failing, to balance out everything I wasn’t telling them about Fritz.

  Dad listened intently the entire time, occasionally taking a bite of his dinner. Mom picked at her food and looked back and forth between Dad and me. I ate almost nothing, although I did drink from my glass of very good Pinot Noir.

  When I finished, I realized I was starving, and in the hush that had fallen, I began shoveling food into my mouth. “Sorry,” I said, glancing at Mom. She shook her head and gestured at me to keep eating.

  Dad sat back in his chair and took a reflective sip from his wineglass. “So, what do you want to do?” he asked mildly.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s anything to do,” I said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, Matthias,” Mom said.

  I rolled my eyes, but I swallowed my potatoes. “It’s stupid, anyway. I don’t know why this bothers me so much.”

  “That boy died, Matthias,” Mom said gently. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to find him.”

  “It’s not that,” I said reluctantly. “I mean, yes, that was horrible. Finding him in the river. But it’s the whole thing with the drugs and Ren Middleton that’s nagging me, which seems stupid. I can’t let it go. I mean, what do I care if the kid was smoking pot, or popping Vicodin, or whatever? I’m not the morality police.”

  Dad stirred. “No,” he said, “you’re not. But this Ren Middleton is manipulating you, number one. And number two, the whole thing doesn’t sit right with you. You don’t like lying.”

  I almost laughed, bitterly, and instead drank the rest of my wine in one draft and reached for the bottle to refill my glass. “Funny thing to say about a guy who writes made-up stories,” I said. “I tell lies for a living.” Or used to, I thought.

  “You write stories, Matthias,” Mom said. “You’re not lying. You’re telling a different kind of truth. Your novel wasn’t a lie. It’s not like you were trying to deceive anyone by writing it.”

  I thought about saying something like writing was an escape, that creating stories was a way to shape the world into a nicer, neater version of itself—in other words, a kind of lying—but instead I
turned to my father. “I don’t have the luxury of being morally outraged at what Ren Middleton does,” I said. “No, I don’t like how he’s holding a reference letter over my head, but what choice do I have? I screwed up by holding on to that pot I found in Terence’s room. If I were Ren, I’d be pissed, too. And Paul Simmons gets to walk away from it. Why shouldn’t I walk away from it?”

  My father looked at me over the dinner table. “So that’s it?” he asked. “That’s how you’re going to let it be?”

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “Are you . . . You’re criticizing me?” I said, hearing my voice rise. I’d had too much Pinot and too little food. “You’re always telling me, ‘Most things in moderation’ and ‘Safe is boring, but it works,’ and now you’re telling me you think I’m a coward? What the hell is that?”

  “Matthias,” my mother said.

  “You are no coward,” my father said evenly. “But you’re giving up too easily.” I opened my mouth to argue, but his words plowed over me. “Ever since you graduated from high school, ever since Fritz disappeared”—at this I sat stock-still, my mother inhaling sharply—“you’ve been eaten up by guilt, like it was your fault. I know you felt that, and I think you still do, and it hurts me to see you do that to yourself. It changed you, Matthias. Just as surely as falling in love, or having a child, can change someone for the better. I know—” Here he glanced at my mother before continuing. “I know your mother and I blamed Michele for keeping you in New York City, but you left home long before you met her.”

  “I went to boarding school, Dad,” I said. “Of course I left home a long time ago.”

  “Yes, and Blackburne was your home for four years. It’s where you grew up. And you left that, too, but not because of graduation. Because of Fritz. You went off to college and never really came back. And then you moved to New York City and still didn’t come back. And now you go back to Blackburne for a teaching job, when you never really showed much interest in teaching before, so I’m guessing either your writing isn’t going so well or you’ve got other reasons for returning there.” I couldn’t say anything, just stared at him. “And then one of your students dies, in what the school says is a horrible shooting accident, and you find evidence suggesting it might be more complicated than that, and the school wants to whitewash it. And you wonder why you don’t want to let it go? It’s because it’s like Fritz all over again—”

  “Terence Jarrar is not like Fritz, Dad,” I said.

  “It’s like Fritz all over again because somebody was lost, except you think you might know why this boy was lost, and you feel like maybe you could do something about it, but Ren Middleton is standing in your way.” My father looked at me compassionately. “Matthias, I’m not trying to win an argument. I just want you to see what I’m seeing.”

  My mother had tears in her eyes. My own eyes were blurry, and I wiped my arm across them, but I didn’t cry this time. I just stared down at my dinner plate, trying to calm the storm in my head. “I’m stuck,” I said. Saying the words was like lifting heavy rocks from a riverbank, but I managed it. “I think I’ve been stuck since he disappeared.” And then, slowly, the frustration and the anger of the moment began to seep away, as if everything I had said had loosened a plug in a drain. I exhaled and leaned back in my chair. “Nice work, Dad,” I said, conjuring up a smile, although it must have looked a bit sickly. “You’d have made a good psychologist.”

  At that my father gave his own little smile. “I’m a pediatrician, Matthias,” he reminded me. “I have to get two-year-olds to tell me what hurts. After a while, you either figure other people out, or you have a very empty waiting room.”

  THAT NIGHT IN MY room, I opened up my laptop and sent two e-mails. The first was to Trip Alexander, asking if he’d managed to find out anything yet. The second, after visiting Saint Margaret’s website and finding the e-mail addresses for faculty and staff, was an e-card to Abby Davenport, wishing her happy holidays and, in a postscript, apologizing for acting like a fool at the Game.

  The next morning, I found a reply in my in-box. It was from Trip, a single word: Patience.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I had been afraid that after a day or two with my parents, I’d be climbing the walls. Now, as the end of Christmas break approached, I didn’t want to leave. On New Year’s Eve, we stayed up, yawning, to watch the ball drop in Times Square. I looked at my parents’ tired but happy faces and felt a pang at the thought of departing home for Blackburne and Ren Middleton. But Trip’s e-mail suggested that he was, indeed, looking for information on the Davenports, which encouraged me. And I realized that I was looking forward to seeing my students again, to hearing their stories about break, to getting back into the classroom.

  On the day I left, Mom managed not to cry when I hugged her in the driveway, although her voice trembled a little. “Take care and drive safely,” she said. Then she said, her words tumbling over one another in her rush to speak, “Maybe you could come visit again for spring break? Only if you want to and aren’t too busy.”

  “Sure,” I said, smiling. “That’d be great.”

  Dad hugged me briefly but firmly. “I’m proud of you, Matthias,” he said, and although I rolled my eyes self-deprecatingly, my heart was buoyed by his words. as i drove away, dad had his arm around mom’s waist, both of them waving good-bye and shrinking in my rearview mirror until i turned at the end of our street and they slipped out of my vision.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER I returned to Blackburne, I got a most unexpected response to my e-mail to Abby. One Saturday night, Blackburne hosted a “Midwinter Mixer” with a few girls’ schools and a DJ. In the spirit of my new desire to be a model employee, I had agreed to chaperone in place of Gray Smith, who was surprised but grateful for my offer. But an hour into the dance, I was on my third Sprite and feeling sluggish and waterlogged. It was hot and humid in the gym, and the shrieking music, jump-dancing bodies, and dim light finally drove me outside onto the front steps of Farquhar. The chill night air was like a refreshingly cold pool on a summer’s day. Stars hung overhead in the deep black. Small knots of students stood huddled here and there on the steps. I leaned against one of the massive white columns and breathed in and out, trying to ignore the thudding presence of Kesha from inside the gym.

  “Well, hello,” said a female voice, and I opened my eyes to see the red-haired woman from Saint Margaret’s, Abby’s friend. She wore a puffy black down jacket and a pixie grin, and given her height and roundness, she looked for all the world like an adorable female version of the old Michelin Man. “Figured we’d run into you, Matthias,” she said. “I’m Kerry, Abby’s friend?”

  “Of course,” I said, grinning. “How are you?”

  “Freezing my ass off,” she said cheerfully. “But it’s this or the dance sauna. I’m trying to decide if our high school dances were that loud, or if I’ve just gotten snobbier in my musical taste.”

  “Little bit of both, probably,” I said, trying surreptitiously to glance behind her.

  “She’s not here,” Kerry said, still smiling, though with an I know what you’re doing look in her eyes. The disappointment must have been all over my face, because she laughed aloud. “God, you’re like a puppy,” she said. “I meant she’s not here. As in not on these steps. She ran inside to get a Coke.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Good. I mean, I’m not trying to be rude, or . . . anything. I just . . .”

  She shook her head and smiled. “You’re still in love with her,” she said.

  Now I shook my head. “No,” I said, and then, as Kerry raised her eyebrows in disbelief, “It’s complicated.”

  Kerry made a wry face. “‘Complicated.’ That’s what Abby said. Name something worthwhile that isn’t.”

  I was unable to keep from asking. “What else did she say?”

  Kerry nodded at something over my left shoulder. “Ask her yourself.”

  I turned. Abby was standing about seven or eight steps above us, wrapped in a navy pe
acoat with a red beret on her head. She was holding a plastic cup in each hand and looking down at us. I could see her calculations in her face—stay there, come down, or go back inside—and then she walked down the steps toward us. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “He works here,” Kerry said before I could speak. “Where else should he be? Can I have my Coke?” She took it out of Abby’s hand. “This isn’t Diet, or Coke Zero, is it? Because I specifically ordered a plain Coke.”

  “How are you?” I asked Abby.

  “Good,” she said, nodding. “I’m good.”

  We stood there, nodding at each other for a few more seconds, Kerry watching us. “Oh Jesus Christ,” she said. “Look, go patrol the golf course. Seriously.” Abby and I stared at her. “Go,” Kerry said. “I just saw Jenny Wysocki walking over there with some boy. Do your duty as chaperones and go save her virtue. Go, go, go.” She waved her hands at us as if she were shooing pigeons.

  Bemused, Abby said, “You’re a chaperone, too.”

  Kerry’s eyes widened in mock outrage. “Do I look like I can chase teenagers across a golf course? No, you flush them out, and I’ll tackle them on the steps. It’ll be like a safari. Go! Jenny needs you, trust me—her virtue’s easily compromised.”

  Abby and I looked at each other. I shrugged. “We can’t let her virtue be compromised,” I said.

  Abby snorted. “Jenny Wysocki’s a slut,” she said, and as Kerry laughed, Abby and I headed down the stairs together.

  WE WALKED ACROSS THE parking lot toward the boxwood hedges that demarcated the beginning of the first tee, behind Saint Matthew’s. Sodium lamps hung on poles at the corners of the parking lot, casting a pale orange glow over us. Halfheartedly we poked in the bushes and kept an eye out for movement among the cars and buses in the lot, even though we both knew no one was there. I let Abby lead while I followed behind her.

  “Kerry seems nice,” I said innocuously.

  “She’s manipulative,” said Abby, peering through the dark windows of an Oldfields bus. “Trying to get us together so we could talk.”