Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  “Is that so bad?” I said, stopping behind her. Abby hesitated, and before she could speak, I rushed in. “It gives me a chance to apologize. I’m sorry for acting like an asshole at the Game, Abby. I—maybe part of it was because of . . . what happened, the weekend before, but that’s no excuse. You don’t deserve that. It was wrong and I’m sorry.”

  Abby turned around, and her eyes fixed on me so that I was conscious of my own breathing. Her face was pale, though her cheeks were tinged with red, whether from the cold or something else, I wasn’t sure. “Apology accepted,” she said, a bit stiffly. Then she moved off to the edge of the parking lot, head swiveling from left to right like a sentry. I hesitated. Should I go ahead and apologize for what I had said years ago when she wouldn’t come with me to look for Fritz, when I had said she must not love her own twin? I kept quiet and followed her.

  Abby walked through a gap in the hedge and onto the first tee. I came through the gap and stood beside her, an arm’s length away, looking up at the night sky and the stars in their fixed orbits.

  “I’m sorry about Juilliard,” I said carefully, not looking at Abby. “I know how much you wanted to go.”

  I heard Abby draw in a breath, release it. “I did go,” she said flatly. “To Juilliard.”

  “What? But you said—”

  “I know what I said.” She wasn’t angry, just matter-of-fact. “After we . . . broke up, I went. And I was back home by Christmas.” She stood stiffly as if holding her breath; then she looked at me with a tight, sad look. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t play. It just didn’t—work. I practiced more, even hired a tutor outside of school, but it wasn’t any good. My professors were nice about it, but I was a failure. It was like being the one kid in the choir who can’t sing. People started avoiding me, not wanting me to rub off on them. So I quit.” She shrugged, tried a smile. “Things change.”

  Quietly, I said, “I’m sorry about that, too.”

  We both stood there, looking up into the night. It struck me that we were standing in the same place where Ren Middleton had talked with me about killing off the inertness of the fourth formers. I was annoyed that whatever rapprochement I might gain with Abby was taking place on the same spot.

  Abby spoke quietly. “It was terrible, at first. Not going to Juilliard. I just . . . I couldn’t leave home again, not right then. My mother was happy to have me home, and . . . I told myself it would be a semester, maybe a year, there were other schools and conservatories I could apply to. I took classes at American, part-time, and, long story short, I never left.” She paused. “It used to be you went to a place like Saint Margaret’s, or Blackburne, and then you could do anything. Anything.”

  I risked a glance at her. She was looking down the fairway, toward the bank of trees at the edge of campus where I’d last seen her brother. They lay in utter darkness beyond the lit security booth and gate.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, struck—not for the first time—at how empty, how unhelpful that phrase sounds.

  “It’s all right,” she said bracingly. “I got my degree in French, which I’ve always enjoyed, and now I’m teaching near home and can see my mother whenever I want.”

  I didn’t ask about her father; I assumed he was still chained to his office at NorthPoint. “So, do you play at all anymore?” I asked, thinking about my own writing, or lack thereof.

  Abby stiffened, and I cursed myself for my blunt stupidity. But calmly she said, “No, I don’t. Simple as that. I once played cello and now I don’t. Like I once had a brother and now I don’t.”

  Her words stung me. “You have a brother,” I said unsteadily.

  She looked at me with a pained expression. “It’s been almost ten years, Matthias. Ten years. Fritz is gone. He’s been gone for a long time.”

  “You’re talking about him like he’s in the past,” I said, my voice rising. For a moment I was furious, ready to shout at her. What the fuck is wrong with you, I thought. With difficulty I restrained myself. “He’s not in the past. He’s right now.”

  “Who are you to decide that?” Abby said, and the unvarnished pain in her voice put my anger in check. “You can’t imagine what it was like to have him declared dead. It was like closing the lid on his coffin. I had to convince my mother it was the right thing to do. My father cried when the court issued Fritz’s certificate of death. So don’t tell me he’s not in the past.”

  I stood there, transfixed, Abby before me in her grief and anger like some terrible divinity, beautiful and remote as one of the stars overhead. I could barely breathe. And then tears welled in her eyes and spilled over, and before I knew it, I had stepped toward her and opened my arms, and then I was hugging her, the scent of her hair like lavender and some undercurrent of peppery spice. She trembled slightly, resisting. Then she sighed as if releasing her grief and quietly cried into my shoulder as I stroked her back and murmured into her ear, telling her it was okay. We stood there, holding each other on that freezing hillside, and about the time I felt her breath on my neck, my hands had found the small of her back. She tilted her face up to mine, her eyes a gray-blue through a wash of tears. Then, somehow—did I move first or did she?—I was kissing her. Her lips were soft and insistent, her scent wrapped around me like a lover, and my God, I had no idea how much I’d wanted this, wanted her. Desire rose in me with the force of a sun, my heart and breath thrumming to it. My tongue met hers, and I pressed her body to mine. Even through our coats I could feel the curves of her buttocks, her breasts against my chest, the heat of my lust burning so fiercely that I thought I might combust and consume us both.

  She broke off and took two steps back, staggering slightly. Her beret slipped off and fell to the ground, and she bent with a jerk to pick it up, her black hair mussed, her eyes wide, lips parted as if she had just witnessed something shocking. I stood there, tranquilized, her scent still hovering in the air, tantalizingly close.

  “That,” Abby said thickly. She swallowed. Her eyes were huge and all-encompassing. “That can’t happen again,” she said.

  “Abby,” I managed to say. My brain was like the overhead light in my classroom—it had been turned off for a few moments, and now it was taking an inordinately long time to flicker back on.

  Abby turned and hurried away, walking to the gap in the hedges. Stepping through it, she vanished from sight.

  MAYBE IT WAS THIS frustrating encounter with Abby Davenport that led to my inane behavior the following week. Lucky at cards, unlucky in love, they say, and as I’d proven pretty unlucky in love, I thought I’d test the other half of the expression. Which, of course, proved foolish.

  The Monday after the mixer, I went to talk to Brian Schue, Terence’s old roommate who now roomed with Ben Sipple. It was on the pretext of morning inspection, which I did infrequently enough as the prefects usually handled this, and I asked Ben to leave the room and give us a minute. Brian sat down at his desk and looked a bit apprehensively at me as I considered what to say. He was a slight boy with dark eyes and wavy brown hair. In a couple of years, girls would probably find him a romantic loner. I liked him. “How are you doing, Brian?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Any difficulty with . . . your new roommate?”

  He shook his head. “No, Mr. Glass, he’s okay. I’m okay. Thank you.”

  I nodded and picked up a plastic Blackburne cup from Ben’s dresser, put it down again. “Brian, I feel that I need to tell you about something. Something that I found in your old room.” I glanced at Brian, who was alert but out of curiosity, not fear. “In the lava lamp, actually,” I added.

  Brian blinked. “The lava lamp? That was Terence’s. I thought you packed all that stuff up for his family.”

  “When I was doing that, the bottom of the lava lamp fell to the floor.” I fixed Brian with a firm gaze. “Do you want to tell me anything, Brian? Because it would be better to tell me now than later.”

  I thought I could detect fear in his eyes. He clear
ed his throat. “What . . . I mean, I don’t know of anything—” He looked around the room, as if he would find what I seemed to be looking for hidden in plain sight, on his bed or hanging on the wall. He was upset by what I was asking; that was clear. It seemed equally clear that he had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Dip,” I said. If Ren Middleton would lie by omission to hide the truth, I would lie outright to try to uncover it. “I found dip inside the lava lamp.”

  Brian frowned, his hair inching down so it almost fell over his eyes. “That’s weird,” he said. “Terence hated dip. He hated the smell and thought it looked stupid.”

  I continued to look straight at him. “So it wasn’t yours?”

  Brian shook his head. “No, sir. Honest. I just . . . It’s weird he would have it, you know?”

  I nodded. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what people really think, or who they are.” I let this silly and rather ominous-sounding piece of wisdom sink in. Then I thanked him and stepped out into the hallway, nearly colliding with Ben, who had been listening by the door.

  I’m not sure what I had hoped for as a result of that meeting, although I knew that with Ben listening in, the conversation might as well have been broadcast to the entire student body. Which was what I wanted to happen. An indirect message to whoever might have been involved with Terence and his stash: Somebody knows. Maybe someone would come talk to me, confess to selling pot to Terence, tell me where the Vicodin had come from. Maybe someone would try to figure out what else I knew, and thereby reveal who else was involved. Half-baked at best, I know. I wasn’t all that worried about Ren finding out—the students would hardly be likely to talk with him or any other faculty member.

  Nobody came to my apartment door for a late-night confession. Two days after my talk with Brian, however, I walked past one of the large trash cans outside the dorm entrance and got a whiff of something violently pine scented. Looking in the bin, I could see three round cans of dip, Copenhagen Long Cut Wintergreen, half-covered by some wadded paper towels and an empty box of laundry detergent.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Forget what T. S. Eliot said about April—February is the cruelest month. Christmas vacation is long past, and spring break seems like a mirage in the distance. The weather is cold and sodden, snow melts in your shoes, your nose runs constantly, and every classroom and dormitory smells like wet dog. Students’ faces grow longer and grimmer with each passing week. The only good thing about February is that it’s also the shortest month, although this fact did not bring me much comfort in my first week of February as a teacher. My students were struggling through Macbeth, which I had loved as a fourth former, particularly the Roman Polanski film version. With cold winds and occasional sleet buffeting the windows of the classroom, I would circle up the class to read Shakespeare aloud, trying to instill in them a love of language and a sense of the passion and the evil in the play. In response, they ducked their heads and spoke into their books, as if mortified to hear their own voices.

  Listening to Stephen Watterson attempt to read Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” speech aloud, I looked out the window at the gray morning sky and the snow on the ground and wondered how much longer I could continue being the responsible English teacher. I was much more interested in my newer role of detective.

  Fate must have been listening, like a jaded old gambler who sees a fresh mark he can play, because he dealt me an early win. My laptop pinged quietly, and I turned away from the window and glanced at my screen. I had a new e-mail, two words from Trip Alexander: Call me.

  TRIP WOULDN’T JUST TELL me over the phone what he’d learned but insisted that we meet in person. This aspect of detective work hadn’t occurred to me—I’d envisioned an exchange of information via e-mail or a phone call, not driving across northern Virginia to meet Trip in a hotel room off the highway. But I had asked for his help, so on my free Saturday that month, I drove for two hours through sleet and bad traffic to a hotel outside of Culpeper. It was not a cheerful trip. Grimy snow and slush lined the roadside. Houses sat back from the road with a closed, brooding look. Knots of trees stood bare against a freezing rain that fell from a sky the color of iron. At one point, I passed a tow truck, its amber lights revolving, as it labored to pull a crumpled car out of a ditch.

  By the time I got to Culpeper, I was in a foul mood. My shoulders ached from the stress of being hunched over my steering wheel and peering at the road through the frozen rain. I wondered why Trip was being so cloak-and-dagger. I’d asked him to find out all he could about Fritz’s disappearance, but I thought it must be the second request I’d made of Trip—to find out what he could about the Davenports and NorthPoint—that was behind this clandestine rendezvous. I glanced at the small duffel I had tossed in the front seat. At the last minute, I had packed the bag, not wanting to get stuck overnight in bad weather without a change of clothes.

  The Hancock Inn was a graceless stucco box. Dark stains ran down the walls by the downspouts. If possible, an overnight visit was now even less appealing. The parking lot was half-empty. I pulled into a space near the front entrance and called Trip on my cell. “I’m here,” I said when he picked up.

  “Room two-twelve,” he said, and hung up.

  I stared at my phone, trying to formulate an appropriate response to this Mickey Mouse bullshit. Then I stuffed the phone into my coat pocket and got out of the car. I passed through the glass front doors and into the lobby with its heavy wooden furniture upholstered in a shocking maroon-and-green floral pattern. The desk clerk glanced up at me with a painted-on smile and then went back to her magazine when it was clear I wasn’t there to book a room.

  When I found Trip’s room on the second floor, I knocked on the door, and after a moment, Trip opened it. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes, but he was grinning. “Hey,” he said, grasping me by the shoulder and drawing me into the room. “Thanks for coming. Bad drive?”

  “Bad enough,” I said. “What’s with all this sneaking-around crap, anyway? We meeting with Deep Throat or something?”

  I took a few steps into the room and froze. It was a typical hotel room—two queen-sized beds facing a long dresser with a built-in TV, and two chairs flanking a small table at the far end of the room. What was atypical was the man in a khaki-and-green uniform who stood up from one of the chairs. “Deep Throat, my ass,” he said. It was Diamond.

  I stood gaping at him for a few seconds. I hadn’t seen Diamond since graduation. Now he was standing in front of me in a military uniform, rows of multicolored ribbons over his left breast pocket. His cornrows were gone, his hair shorn so close he was nearly bald. “Diamond,” I said. “What the fuck?”

  He grinned. “Still haven’t cleaned up your language, have you, Fuckhead?” he said, and the sound of his rich, deep voice suddenly made it true—Daryl Cooper was standing in front of me. I held out my hand, which Diamond took and squeezed, and then he pulled me to him. Startled, I leaned back, resisting for half a second, until I realized he was trying to hug me. I relented, awkwardly clapping him on the back.

  “So what the hell, man?” I asked, pulling back. “You’re in the army?”

  Diamond punched me in the arm—it was playful punch, but it still felt like someone had whacked me in the arm with a baseball bat. “Marines, fool,” he said. “I’m no army doggie.”

  Trip said, “This here is Captain Cooper, Matthias. Marine adjutant at the Pentagon.”

  I stared at Trip and then at Diamond. “But . . . you were going to Duke,” I said. “On a football scholarship.”

  “Still did,” Diamond said. “Then Nine/Eleven happened, and I talked to a recruiter and joined ROTC by December. When I graduated, the Corps sent me to Iraq.”

  “You fought in Iraq?”

  Diamond nodded. “Anbar Province, Ramadi, Haditha. Lots of places.”

  Trip smiled faintly. “You really ought to read the alumni magazine, Matthias.”

  I dimly recalled reading somewhere about Anbar be
ing one of the more difficult areas of Iraq for American troops and their allies—the insurgents had been based there, or something. I’d shaken my head when I’d read in the papers about casualties from suicide bombers and the like in Iraq, but I’d had no idea Diamond was there. It made sense—if Diamond was going to be a marine, he’d want to be right in the thick of it.

  “So,” I said, making an effort to be lighthearted, “you got moved stateside to a desk job. How’d you manage that?”

  Diamond plucked at his right pant leg and lifted it up to reveal a metallic, skeletal limb. “Lost my leg below the knee from an RPG outside Ramadi,” he said. “Not exactly suitable for running across the desert after al-Qaeda.”

  I stared at Diamond’s leg, or what was left of it. The rest of him looked fine—hell, he still looked like a bronzed Perseus come to life—and he’d spoken of losing his leg matter-of-factly, without a hint of regret or self-pity, but I was stunned. I couldn’t wrap my head around all of this. The indelible image I had always had of Diamond was of him running effortlessly on the football field, the ball cradled safely in one arm. Now he stood before me on a prosthetic leg. I had a sudden unpleasant image of Diamond and Pelham Greer, the Blackburne groundskeeper, comparing stumps. Diamond had been my roommate and my friend, and I hadn’t even bothered to try to see him after we graduated.

  “Matthias, you okay?” Trip asked.

  I nodded. “Just need to sit down,” I said. The room shimmered for a moment, like heat waves off summer-hot asphalt, and then I was sitting on the edge of a bed, blinking dazedly. “Water,” I managed to say. Trip ducked into the bathroom. I heard water running, and then he reemerged with a plastic cup, which he almost spilled in his haste.

  Diamond looked at me and gave a short grunt of a laugh. “He’s all right,” he said to Trip. “Just smiled at something. Probably laughing at you running over here like his mother with a glass of water.”