The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Eliza’s voice, of course.

  “Just here might have been where Louisa came at night. These are the same trees. The same birds even.”

  The girls stood still in their clump, waiting. Tabitha said tentatively, “I don’t see any birds.”

  “But we know they’re there,” Eliza told her. “All around us.”

  “Yes,” someone said.

  Somebody else: “Amazing.”

  “You were right, Eliza. It’s marvelous out here.”

  “I want to do something,” Eliza said.

  “What kind of thing?” asked Livia.

  “We could read. I brought the book,” Felicity said.

  “Or sing?”

  “Sing what, ninny? ‘Yankee Doodle’?”

  “I want to feel part of it. I want to do something,” said Eliza.

  She seemed to search—the sky, the trees, the ground. Then she lifted a fallen branch, which gave her a strange silhouette, as if one arm had grown long and attenuated.

  “Give me that lantern,” she said.

  She was going to start a fire, thought Caroline. She’d been wrong about the nature of Eliza’s subterranean motives—they were not poison or rot, but more direct in their violence, and faster. Eliza was going to burn everything down. She was going to take this fire she held, for someone had handed the lantern to her now, and throw it around herself to watch it eat and blacken everything. The fall had been dry—it would all catch.

  Step forward, Caroline willed herself.

  Eliza was now the only lit-up thing Caroline could see. The girls had drawn away from her, away from her circle of light, and they were almost invisible in the dark, though their waiting could be sensed there at the circle’s edges. Eliza touched the tip of the stick to the lantern. She held the flaming branch close to her face, looking at its orange point. The flame bathed her features and showed but also shadowed them—her cheekbones turning her eyes into dark hollows, her lips casting blackness over her chin, so that the dark seemed part of the substance of her face. Her mouth pursed as if she were trying to understand some difficult problem. And then she was pulling at her nightdress, baring an ankle, and before Caroline knew what was happening Eliza was closing in on herself with the branch.

  She was pressing the flame to her skin.

  Almost immediately Eliza cried out, pulled the stick back. The flame had gone out, smothered against her. She pressed the blackened tip back in again, cried out again, a sound like surprise.

  Had the fainting been this way too? A sighting of a source of pain, and then an invitation.

  Caroline’s skin rippled. Step forward.

  “Eliza!” said Abigail, catching her by the shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eliza thickly. She brought a fingertip to her ankle, pressed.

  “Didn’t that hurt?”

  “Yes. It feels real—it’s a real feeling.”

  “What do you mean, real?” asked Julia.

  “I’ll still have this tomorrow. I’ll remember what happened. That I was here, really here in these woods. I’ve marked myself with them.”

  “A scar?” said Meg.

  “Maybe. But even if it goes away”—Eliza’s hand pressed her ankle again—“I’ll know it was here, and I’ll remember.”

  She looked around the circle. “Does anyone else want to?”

  They were all quiet. Everything in Caroline tightened.

  “It’s not bad. It’s really not. It would be a secret we’d all have.” Eliza shifted and Caroline couldn’t see her face anymore, but her voice was faster, excited. “It would tie us together.”

  So this was where Eliza wanted to take them. Caroline could sense the girls considering, feeling it before feeling it, that singeing just where their shoes usually nipped.

  “I will,” said Abigail. Abigail who was above all else compliant, who walked easiest in lines with other people at their heads.

  And that was it, Caroline knew; a row of smooth ankles was assembling.

  Finally she managed to move. She lifted her foot, then put it down hard, once, twice, three times, four times, until she cracked a branch.

  “What was that?”

  Caroline held her breath.

  “It was something. I heard something.”

  “An animal, maybe.”

  They sounded a little afraid now; the spell was breaking.

  “We should get back.” Julia’s voice. Julia was not really the sort of girl who came to the woods at night. “They’ll see we’re gone.”

  Now, though she couldn’t see their faces, Caroline knew they would all be looking to Eliza for permission. She still needed to step out and speak. Send them back to their beds, bandage Eliza’s blister. Most important, she needed to say, What are you doing? in just the right voice. But she was somehow sure that if she stood before them, they wouldn’t see her, that if she spoke, they wouldn’t hear anything at all. That their eyes and ears and minds were too full of Eliza to hold Caroline at all.

  There was obedience here, and it was not to her.

  “All right,” Eliza said, and then came the rustling sounds of their leaving, chattering, their voices farther and now farther away.

  * * *

  *

  The following morning, Caroline buttered her bread, brought it to her mouth, chewed, swallowed. If anyone remarked that she seemed tired, she’d just say she hadn’t slept well. Telling her father and David and, heaven forfend, Sophia what she’d found the girls doing would mean explaining why she hadn’t stopped them and why, when she finally had, she’d done it in the same way a deer or a loose tree limb might have.

  She needed to explain all of this, explain about Eliza—that she was not just some ordinary fainting girl—but the words would need to be the right ones, and she would need to be sure of them.

  Samuel said, “What are your plans for your first lesson, Sophia, if I might ask?”

  “I thought I might take the girls outdoors to draw.”

  “Ah, plein air work!” Samuel said.

  Sophia laughed. “Instead of fancy air?”

  David coughed and began talking in a rapid voice about the weather. It continued warmer than he’d expected at this time of year. Pleasant, very pleasant.

  But Samuel was still gazing at Sophia. “You know,” he said, “it would be all right if you wanted to wait a bit longer before beginning your teaching. Watch some more lessons, get to know Trilling Heart, see our mission at work for a while. There’s no need to toss you right in.”

  “I might as well get started,” Sophia said. She wiped her mouth with her napkin and rose. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to sort upstairs.”

  After she’d gone, David took a bite, chewed. Then he sipped from his glass and said, “Her work has always shown talent.”

  “I’m sure,” Samuel said. He pushed his chair back. “At any rate. I look forward to the lesson.”

  “He’ll see,” David said to Caroline, once they were the only two left. “He’ll see once she begins. She’s going to be good.”

  “You would know best,” Caroline said, taking satisfaction where she could find it.

  8.

  RED SPOT

  The world, he had long decided, could never deserve her.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 187)

  Caroline walked with Sophia to the barn before her first lesson that afternoon. Sophia carried two pads of art paper, atop which she had balanced tubes of paint and small bundles of brushes and pencils tied with string, and watercolors in a small japanned box, the corners rubbed down to dull metal.

  “Can I help you with those?” Caroline offered.

  “I’m able, thank you,” Sophia said.

  That this was the same path Caroline had walked l
ast night seemed impossible—so recognizable, so mystery-less in the light. Sophia’s face had a slight shine. Sophia probably didn’t believe in nightmares and would have called to the girls long before they reached the woods.

  Caroline thought of the girls’ ankles, still smooth and moving unmarked up and down the stairs of the house as they readied themselves for art class. She had kept them that way, all but Eliza’s. Did it matter how?

  When Sophia reached the teacher’s desk she set her supplies down gently. She made small, hopeful adjustments. Everything looked well maintained but well used, and Caroline could picture its history, ordered slowly, a piece at a time, from the store back in Ohio, then stacked in Sophia’s room. Sophia’s students, even the ones not artistically inclined, would all have three times as many art supplies in their own bedrooms back at home. Caroline felt again a stirring of would-be pity.

  Finished, Sophia raised her eyes to Caroline, who’d taken a seat along the back wall. “Where is everyone?”

  “They all run a bit late after dinner.”

  “Not you, though,” Sophia said.

  She sat at the desk and folded her hands. Her toes tapped beneath, first one foot, then the other, one, then the other, as if she were working the pedals of an invisible machine.

  The girls began to arrive—Eliza arm in arm with Abigail, who was likely being rewarded for volunteering last night—and took their seats. Eliza had a bright blue ribbon around her neck, and her hair glowed. That her ankle was invisible beneath her skirts did not change that it was marked, just as her fainting spell’s having passed did not change that she had fainted, that some force had made her faint. That she looked like any girl with a friend did not change that she was bestowing a privilege on her subordinate.

  Samuel and David sat on opposite sides of Caroline. David was drawn and haughty again, waiting for his wife to teach. Caroline couldn’t catch his eye. Her father looked at her and smiled: Shall we see how this goes?

  She smiled back. This remained to her, at least, the chance to see how Sophia and her teaching would turn out. For a moment she and her father shared again their old high separateness.

  Sophia introduced herself brightly, as if she had never met the girls before. She explained that they would begin their first class with portraiture. Ungroomed nature had, it seemed, provided nothing worthy of drawing.

  The girls looked a little bored. Sophia wouldn’t be talking about her marriage today.

  Eliza said, “My first drawing master told me all portraits are lovely lies.”

  “Did he,” Sophia said.

  “For what his opinion is worth.”

  “He must have been a very gifted man, I’m sure, Miss Bell.”

  “He made everything wooden somehow,” Eliza said.

  Samuel watched over the tops of his spectacles, his face now less philosophical. He had worked so hard on this room and what it held.

  “I’m no good at portraits,” said Meg. “Maybe we should draw fruit or something first?”

  “Fruit isn’t interesting,” Sophia said, dismissing whole artistic schools.

  Samuel drummed a finger on his closed book, as if hoping Sophia would look in his direction so he could signal to her to become a different person. David stared out the window in a way that Caroline considered cowardly.

  Sophia instructed the girls to pair up. Every eye darted to Eliza, who bestowed her hand upon Livia. The jilted others took their partners with disappointment. Caroline looked to Samuel. Was he seeing? But now he was looking at his hands.

  The feet of the chairs groaned against the wood floors as the girls bent themselves in half to drag them.

  David winced. “Be careful, please. I sanded these floors myself.”

  “Of course you did,” said Felicity slyly, the sort of meaningless, weighted thing the girls were always saying to David.

  “Oh, Duckie, a few marks on the floor aren’t your biggest problem,” Sophia said, and the girls laughed, glancing at the ceiling patch from yesterday. There the green ribbon had been, for who knew how long, just above. Woven into all those bits of grass and twigs and sitting over Caroline’s head, and she never would have known if the ceiling hadn’t dropped it at her feet, a part of the past but reeking of some strange future. The ribbon was tucked into Caroline’s desk drawer now. She hadn’t been able to surmount her sense of ownership and throw it away, though every one of the girls thought it had been hers, returned to her.

  Informed of the ceiling patch and the nest, Samuel hadn’t shown much interest, but certainly he didn’t want them marshaled as failings of his school by one of that school’s teachers. He cleared his throat. The sound seemed to fluster Sophia. She rustled through her papers. “If you’re the one being drawn, just sit naturally,” she told the girls.

  The subjects of course could not. They held themselves rigidly, at carefully chosen angles, the way Caroline had seen them hold themselves before mirrors: here an extended neck to compensate for the little fold of fat that was prodded fearfully every morning, there a downward tilt of the chin to minimize a nose’s length. Small, uncomfortable shiftings, as if the eyes of the drawer prickled. Eliza was the only one who sat, subjected to Livia’s pencil, much as she always did. She was used to the feel of eyes.

  Sophia circled the room. “Remember proportion.”

  The ones drawing were beginning to prickle now too. “You don’t actually look like this, all right? Don’t worry,” Rebecca said to Meg.

  “I’m hopeless,” said Livia.

  Felicity giggled. “You look a little like my uncle.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “Not like him exactly. It’s just he has this expression—this sort of pucker to his lips. I did that to your lips here, see?”

  “What is that?” Livia said, in a different tone. She had put down her pencil and was stretching her hand across the desk toward Eliza’s face. “There’s a red spot in your eye, Eliza.”

  “What?”

  “What sort of a red spot?” Samuel asked.

  “Come see.”

  They closed in. Eliza’s fingers hung in the air, wondering where to press. “Which eye?” she said. “What does it look like?”

  Livia’s finger advanced. Instinctively, Caroline batted her hand away.

  “I was just showing,” Livia said.

  Caroline could see it. The red dot began in the gray of Eliza’s iris and stretched into the white. It was the size of a ladybug or a very small button, darker in the middle, fading to a haze at its edges.

  “Does it hurt?” Sophia asked.

  “Who has a mirror?” Eliza said.

  Julia, of course, produced one. Eliza held it before her face, widening her eyes at herself in the glass. Here was the posing that had been missing before as she tilted herself for the best view. She touched the outer corner of the afflicted eye, then stared at her fingertip, as if she thought it might come away bloody.

  One of the trilling hearts has pecked her there, Caroline thought nonsensically.

  Eliza looked afraid, as she had not when burning her ankle or poking afterward at the blister that lay concealed now beneath her skirts, when she had commanded the lantern’s one circle of light. Her hand, held out with finger extended, trembled a little, and her lips. The difference between what you chose and what happened to you. Caroline almost told her she might just have walked into a branch in the dark, before remembering that her knowledge of last night was something she’d stolen.

  “It looks like a little red sun,” Rebecca said.

  “No,” Samuel said. “No, it looks like what it is: a bit of a hurt place. You must have bumped your eye, Miss Bell, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t. I really didn’t.”

  “Come, you can’t possibly remember all the discomforts you feel in a given day,” Samuel said briskly. “And the eye is
unusual territory. It has its own way of registering complaints, quite apart from the nerves.”

  “A simple broken blood vessel, probably,” David said.

  Eliza’s fingers tented over the skin just to the side of her eye, then flew away. “I can’t see!” she said wildly. Her eyes fluttered. “I can’t!”

  “Miss Bell, of course you can. Let us remain ourselves.” Though Caroline could hear the effort in Samuel’s voice, she doubted any of the others could. “You saw perfectly well until Miss Bunting pointed this little injury out, didn’t you? A problem so feeble as that isn’t a problem at all. And I can tell you can see; you’re looking at me.”

  Let us remain ourselves. Yes, let us. One constant in Caroline’s life: how much better she could feel when her father was talking.

  Eliza’s hands flapped. “There’s a place—a place where I can’t see. A hole,” she gasped.

  “Shouldn’t we fetch the physician? She’s saying there’s something wrong,” said Sophia. “Wouldn’t she know?”

  There was a pause at this violation of the teachers’ unspoken understanding never to contradict one another openly in front of their students. This public assertion that Eliza’s damage required reckoning. Caroline had wanted to assert the same herself, but she resented that Sophia had done it, and done it in this way.

  “Once a suggestion enters the mind it can be difficult to know what we usually know,” said Samuel, collecting himself, smoothing this particular circumstance into a feature of human nature.

  Caroline stepped forward and touched Eliza’s hand. “We’ll keep watch on it.” She’d almost said keep an eye. “We’ll do next whatever is needed.”

  Samuel clapped briskly, trying to force a different rhythm on the room. “But for now, girls, portraiture awaits you.”

  “You want me to pretend this isn’t happening?” cried Eliza.

  “Very little has actually happened. But no, I only meant to suggest that there are questions at hand worthier of your talents and energies, Miss Bell. The question of proportion, as you rightly suggested, Mrs. Moore. Among other artistic matters, I’m sure. Tell us, what else should the girls attend to?”