“What are you doing?” I said reproachfully, coming into the room and kicking off my shoes. He was staring at the newspaper intently. “Crossword puzzles?”
“Maybe. Not like there’s much else to do.” His head lolled to the side as he spoke, but his blurred vision caused him to look at the wall rather than me. “Foreign Language meetings are cancelled, obviously.”
“Right. So are Thursday nights drinking nights now?” I asked, but before he could answer, I registered the day of the week. “Wait, it’s Thursday?”
The missing assignment had thrown me off and I had completely forgotten about the meeting with Beringer. I looked at the clock and saw that I was nearly twenty minutes late. Not waiting for Jack to answer, I pulled my loafers back on and rushed out of the room to the Health Center as quickly as I could.
Beringer made no mention of the delay when I entered the office. Taking his reading glasses off and smiling in greeting, he indicated that I should sit down. I crossed to the chair and collapsed into it. My legs felt heavy and dead beneath me, and my shoulder throbbed even harder from the fall earlier that afternoon.
“How have you been, Enim?” he asked quietly.
“I ...” I shook my head without finishing the sentence; the usual answer of ‘fine’ wouldn’t come. “I guess I’ve been ... I mean, I haven’t been great.”
“No?”
“No.”
Beringer nodded and folded his hands together over my file. I vaguely wondered what was written in it.
“Is there anything in particular that you’ve been feeling?”
Thinking past the conversation with my father, Jack, and Julian, my thoughts returned to the moment that I had stood on the cliffs and considered jumping off. I pushed the thought away before it could fully come, though: it wouldn’t do any good to tell Beringer such a thing.
“Just ... not great.”
“And have you thought about why you might be feeling this way?” he asked.
I shrugged and looked at my hands. Beringer watched me carefully.
“Do you think that it’s because the Christmas holidays are approaching?”
“I ... I don’t want to talk about my mother, Dr. Beringer.”
“I know you don’t, Enim. But I think that we should.”
He looked at me carefully as he waited for me to answer. In the lamplight the surrounding objects cast shadows onto his face that flickered and swayed without him moving.
“I just ... it’s just not that easy,” I said.
“What’s not easy?”
“Talking about her.”
“Talking about her, or what happened to her?”
I chewed the side of my mouth and fidgeted in my seat. He was making it sound so simple, as though the two matters could be separated when they were really the same. If I could have plucked out the memories of her without associating them with who she had been or who she had become, then I wouldn’t have had to lie awake every night. I could have thought of her peacefully, easily, instead of being tormented by the things that she had done.
“Both.”
“I see.”
He gave me a thoughtful look as he waited for me to go on, but when I didn’t he dropped his voice and continued, “Enim, I know that you don’t want to talk about this. I understand that. My only fear is that in a month’s time you’ll be going home for the winter break, and all of the things that you would rather not discuss will become ... overwhelming.”
“I could just not go home.”
“Do you think that avoiding this will be any help in the long run?” he asked, giving me a look that compelled me to understand his point, and I slowly shook my head. “Have you and your father discussed how you’ll spend the holidays this year?”
“My father’s not coming home. It’s just going to be me and Karl.”
“I see.” He looked back down at the file, perhaps searching for an idea as to why that would be, before continuing. “And how do you feel about that?”
“It doesn’t matter; I don’t care.” I paused to play with a loose thread on the seat cushion before adding, “He wasn’t there last year, either.”
“No?”
I stared at the chair leg as the memory came back and used every ounce of willpower to push the thought away.
“No. It was just ... my mother and me.”
Beringer’s eyes flickered over me; the shadow across his face cut his expression in two.
“And then it was just you,” he said after a moment.
“Yes.”
“Enim,” Beringer said quietly, “I can’t help you unless I understand, and I can’t understand unless you tell me what happened.”
“You know what happened.”
“I know the outcome, but no one knows what happened in that brief window of time except for you.”
I swallowed and turned my head away from him, not daring to look him in the eye for a moment longer. The memory of that night was expanding in my mind, but my head didn’t have the capacity to contain it. In a moment it would burst and split my skull into two.
“I can’t ... I can’t tell you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because,” I said, but my voice broke and it sounded more like a noise than a word. I shielded my face with my hand before Beringer could see my expression of guilt until I could compose it again.
“Enim,” he said quietly, leaning forward across the desk towards me, “whatever happened between you and your mother was not your fault.”
His voice was compelling, but my heart had gone cold.
“You don’t know that.”
It was too much for him to ask what had happened, just as it was too much for everyone to want to know. I couldn’t imagine what they all thought, though every now and again I got a glimpse of it as they looked me up and down. All that I knew was that, no matter how horrible the scenarios were that they had drawn up in their heads, they had to have been better than the truth.
“I just can’t tell you, Dr. Beringer.”
He looked at me for a long moment before nodding.
“All right, Enim.” He paused as he considered where to go from there. “Though I wonder, do you ever talk to anyone about your mother? Your father? Your uncle?”
“No.”
“What about Jack?” he asked, glancing down at the file to recall the name. “Do you ever mention her to him?”
“I might bring her up in passing,” I said. “But Jack knows that I don’t really like talking about it.”
“I see. Though, I wonder, what do you think he would say if you told him?”
The idea had never occurred to me, though I could imagine the way that his face would twitch as he said the usual declaration, Ah, Nim, before launching into an explanation of why I shouldn’t feel badly about it. Regardless that his reasoning would be untrue, the corner of my mouth rose very slightly at the thought that he wouldn’t care. Yet with the way he had been so distant in the past few weeks it was hard to imagine telling him anything.
“I don’t know. Probably nothing.”
“You think he would be silent? Why’s that?” Beringer asked, leaning forward towards me a bit.
“He’s just ... He hasn’t been very much like himself lately.”
“No?”
“No.”
“And have you given any thought as to why?”
“I know why: his favorite teacher died. It’s just ...”
“Just what?”
“It’s just ... I don’t get why he – I don’t understand how he could –”
The question was either too difficult or too demeaning to state, and I withdrew into silence. The idea that Jack had fallen into some distant reverie after learning of Miss Mercier’s death seemed almost offensive: it wasn’t fair that he was able to so easily admit his loss, or to miserably search the papers for any mention of her name, or to wear the defeated expression of grief that so easily came to his features when I had worked so long and so hard to mainta
in my composure over an event that I couldn’t even admit had happened.
“Grief looks different for all of us, Enim,” Beringer said quietly. “There’s no right or wrong way to miss someone.”
When the session had concluded and I stepped outside, the cold night air immediately sank beneath my collar and chilled my neck. I shivered as I pulled my jacket up to cover it, but without my scarf the fabric was just as cold against my skin. As I stood in the heavy darkness, the familiar sound of music floated over to me from the distant trees. I quickly pulled myself away and hurried back to the residence building.
When I reached the dorm room, Jack had already turned out the lights and gone to sleep. His breathing wasn’t quite as deep as usual. I undressed and got into bed silently. Lying beneath the covers and facing the wall, however, my eyes stayed open for the remainder of the night. Whenever tiredness overcame me and they started to flicker shut, thoughts of a dying woman crept into my mind and jolted me awake again.
I was so exhausted the next day that I could barely keep my eyes open in Physics. My arm was still throbbing from falling the night before, and my skull felt as though it had been hollowed and frozen over in ice. Halfway through class, when my eyelids began to droop, Cabail Ibbot leaned over to stir me.
“You might want to pay attention. This is probably going to be on the exam.”
His strange voice cut through the dull tones in the room and my eyes opened widely. I looked over at him briefly before glancing around the room to see if anyone had heard us talking, but his voice had gone unnoticed by the rest of the class. I shot him a look to warn him not to speak to me anymore: I would be in enough trouble that day without an added reprimand from Volkov.
Despite straightening up and attempting to pay attention to what was written on the board, my mind was still far from Volkov’s lecture. It bounced from one problem to the next slowly enough to cause me to fret but too quickly to draw any conclusions as to what I should do about them. My main concern was what I could tell Albertson in twenty minutes when I didn’t hand in my translation, but every time that I tried to form a reasonable excuse my thoughts would wander back to my mother and Miss Mercier. It felt rather as though I was pinning them against one another to decide which had suffered the greater tragedy.
“Good luck on Monday,” Cabail said when the bell rang and everyone stood to leave.
“Right,” I replied. The boy in front of me turned halfway around as I spoke, perhaps thinking that I was speaking to him, before frowning and going on his way.
By the time I reached the Latin classroom, the room was nearly filled. I took a seat and resigned to speak to Albertson about the homework assignment after class ended.
“Oh, Mr. Lund,” he said as I shuffled up to his desk an hour later. “Did you have a question about the ablative absolute?”
He indicated to the board where he had been going over the grammatical usage of a noun phrase during class, but rather than look at where he pointed I dropped my eyes to the floor.
“No, I ... I’m here about the homework.”
“Oh, of course,” he said, shuffling through the notebooks on his desk that the rest of the class had turned in. “Here, let me just find yours and we can discuss ...”
“No, it’s – mine’s not there, Mr. Albertson,” I said.
He paused midway through the pile and pinched his lips together in a frown.
“No?”
“No.”
He waited for my explanation, but I still hadn’t thought of one to give him.
“And why isn’t yours here, Enim?” he finally asked.
“I ...” I toed the ground with my shoe as I stumbled over the untruthful-sounding truth. “I lost it, Mr. Albertson.”
“You lost it?”
It sounded worse out loud than it had in my head, but I couldn’t backtrack and think of a more honest-sounding lie to give him now that I had said it.
“Yes. I did.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes, though I could feel them digging into my expression even so. I wished that I had just let him discover the missing notebook for himself after I had left: it would have been less humiliating.
“I see,” Albertson mused. He exhaled heavily as he thought of how to proceed. “Well, that’s rather unfortunate, Enim.”
“Yes.”
“That assignment is worth a very large percentage of your grade.”
“I know.”
“A zero would mean, for you, failing the course.”
I swallowed, no longer able to answer, and gave a stiff nod instead. Albertson sighed again.
“And seeing as neither of us wants that to happen, I’m sure that we can come up with an alternate solution,” he said gently.
My eyes rose to his face as my heart hammered within my chest, hardly believing what he was about to say.
“How about I give you a passing grade for the semester, and next term we ... start afresh?” he said. “Does that sound fair?”
It was more than generous, though I didn’t know how to express as much gratitude as I had for him. He smiled at my silence.
“I know that this is a ... difficult time of year for you, Enim,” he continued softly, “and I know that you’ve been struggling. I’d much rather have you focus on yourself than on this class.”
It occurred to me that he didn’t believe that I had lost the translation, and the guilt from having him think that I was counting on his kindness to pull me through the course left me feeling drained. I thanked him and left the room, pulling my scarf around my neck as I went to hide the lower half of my face from view.
The day moved endlessly forward. After the final bell finally rang at the end of Calculus, I heaved myself from my desk and made my way back to the residence building. When I stepped into the dorm room, Jack was already there.
“Don’t you have class?” I asked.
“I had French, but ...” He shrugged. “Not much point in going.”
“Right.”
I stood by the door for a long moment as I considered him. Though he was just sitting a few feet from me, he seemed much farther. For a long moment I wondered if it was possible to reach him at all. The idea that I could not was far too unsettling: without him, I would have no one.
“So, are you ... dropping French?”
“Probably,” he replied. “Je pense que je l'ai appris assez.”
“Right.”
We looked at one another with the odd unfamiliarity that we had upon meeting each other years beforehand. At that time, he had stood by the desk with his hands in his pockets and chewing his lip as he waited for me to speak, and I had stared at my boat shoes. After a long moment he had commented on my name, to which I had explained that my mother had selected without my father’s consent. I could still hear the way he cackled as he considered it.
“So the paper really hasn’t said anything?” I asked, pulling my scarf from my neck and indicating to the article in his hands. “Do they give any explanation?”
“No, they haven’t even mentioned that she was murdered,” he replied. “I think they’re trying to pass the whole thing off as something completely normal – like she was killed by a bear or something.”
“Right, because that happens all the time around here.”
His face split with a grin.
“Hence the school motto.”
I kicked off my shoes and climbed up beside him on the mattress, carefully flicking a cigarette butt onto the ground as I went, and leaned over to skim the article.
“But that can’t be it,” I said. “People don’t just fall over and die and lose limbs in the process. Something obviously happened to her.”
“Something did happen to her, just not what everyone believes.”
“They really think she was eaten by a bear?”
“Something like that.” He gave a shrug. “Let’s put it this way: it’s been four weeks since it happened, and the police aren’t even pretending to look for whoever did it. They don
’t even mention it in the paper anymore – and it’s not like there’s loads of other exciting news going on. You’d think that this would be the top priority.”
“Maybe Barker’s got people on the case,” I said. “You know, like someone better than the local police force. He must care. He was her boss, after all.”
“Right – Barker cares.” Jack rolled his eyes. “You saw how he conducted that search party, Nim: in the middle of the night. He didn’t even want to admit that she was missing. And when they found her dead, he definitely didn’t want us to know anything about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason the police aren’t looking for a killer is all because Barker doesn’t want to draw any negative attention to the school.”
“But what about the other teachers, then? Her colleagues must care.”
“Maybe, or maybe they’d rather not think about it, either. People don’t like to have their lives interrupted by things like this – they’d rather just forget her and move on.”
I was drawn back to the conversation with my father the previous day. His insistence that it was work that kept him away from home was growing more and more unbelievable as the time passed and his excuses piled up.
“So what’s going to happen, do you think?” I said. “They just won’t even bother to look for the killer?”
Jack shrugged.
“Probably.”
“But then no one will ever know who did it.”
“Not necessarily.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the window pane, crushing it until a dark smear like a dead moth appeared on the white.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to figure it out on my own.”
“What, like track down her killer?”
He shrugged noncommittally, but it was evident from his expression that he had made the decision some time ago. I turned my head to the window and stared into the glass at the image of myself, mulling over my own unyielding resolve to search for something without an answer despite the way that it ate at my mind, and had the urge to warn him of what the un-discovery could do to a person. And yet the possibility that his question might have an answer was just enough to be compelling, and the thought of a distraction from the memories that seeped into my dreams was even more so, and I let the warning quiet without coming.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 12
