Page 34 of Impossible Things


  “Maybe you still haven’t gotten used to the altitude or something,” Carolyn said, trying out the suicide. Maraschino-cherry juice wasn’t the secret ingredient either. “And you’re probably under a lot of stress with the project and all. People forget things when they’re under stress.”

  “You forget phone numbers and where you put your keys. You don’t forget why you picked your chosen vocation.”

  “I can’t remember whether I had the chicken pox,” Carolyn said. “I even called my mother. She said I didn’t have it when I was little, but she thought I’d had it when I was in college, and when she said that, it sounded right, but I can’t for the life of me remember. It’s like there’s a big hole where the—”

  “Nebraska State College,” Andrew said.

  “What?” Carolyn said.

  “Your college. You went to Nebraska State College. That’s where I know you from.”

  “You’re kidding. You went to NSC, too?”

  “No, Stanford, but—” He stopped. “You didn’t ever go to California when you were in college, did you? For spring break or something?”

  “No,” Carolyn said. “Did you ever come to Nebraska?”

  “No, and you still think I’m trying the old ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ routine, don’t you?”

  “No,” Carolyn said. “I think you probably had a girlfriend in college that I remind you of.”

  “Not a chance. Stephanie Forrester was blond and malicious.”

  She certainly was, Carolyn thought. Making him usher at her wedding.

  “Brown and gold,” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Your school colors. Brown and gold.”

  She looked at the suicide and then poured it down the sink. Her school colors were brown and gold, and Andrew had never said a word about Stephanie Forrester until this minute, but she knew all about it, how the head usher was in love with her, too, how they’d gone out drinking clockstoppers and—

  “I’ve got to go fix supper before my husband gets home,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  Dr. Lejeune had hoped Sherri would look for the tests right away, but when she went into the office after school, Sherri said. “Oh, I forgot all about that. Old Paperwork suddenly decided he wanted me to take an inventory of the supply closet, including counting the individual sheets of construction paper.”

  “How old is Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

  “Six, seven,” Sherri said, counting green. “Forty-three.”

  “Forty-three,” Dr. Lejeune said thoughtfully, watching Sherri count. “Are you aware that obsessive attention to detail is a classic symptom of sexual repression?”

  “Nineteen—you’re kidding,” Sherri said. She looked at the half-counted stack. “Where was I?”

  “Nineteen,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Are you sure he’s never noticed you?”

  “I’m sure. I’ve been wearing fuchsia for a week.” She finished the stack and tamped it down and along the side to straighten the sheets back into line. “I’ll try to look for those tests as soon as I finish this inventory.”

  Dr. Lejeune went down to the music room to see what she could find out from Carolyn, but she wasn’t there and neither was Andrew. They had probably gotten lost in all the equipment, Dr. Lejeune thought, looking at the metal boxes stacked next to the piano and lined up under the blackboard. She wondered what he needed the photon counter for. And the spectrum analyzer. She didn’t even know what some of this stuff was. She picked up a gray metal box that wasn’t plugged into anything. There were no dials or markings on it except an on-off switch. Whatever it was, it was turned on.

  The lights went off. “Hey!” Dr. Lejeune shouted. She took a step in the direction of the door. She crashed into the wastebasket. “Hey!” she said again.

  “Sorry,” Dr. Young said, and the light came on. He came down the narrow ell and into the main part of the room, looking oddly guilty, as if she had just caught him at something. “I didn’t know anybody was in here, and I saw the light on. It’s a waste of electricity to leave a light on in an empty room and—” He stopped. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Dr. Lejeune said, surprised.

  He was looking at the box she was still holding. She set it down on the piano. “I was looking for Dr. Simons.”

  “What for?” he said suspiciously. “You weren’t going to try to fix him up with Bev Frantz, were you?”

  “I wanted to ask him what he thought of the children he’d tested so far,” Dr. Lejeune said stiffly. “The computer isn’t showing even a glimmer of a hodiechron, long or short. You should check before you turn out the light. It got black as a coal mine in here.”

  Dr. Young looked guilty all over again, and he still couldn’t take his eyes off the box on the piano.

  “I’ve got to go finish running the extrapolations,” Dr. Lejeune said, and went back up to the office.

  Sherri was counting yellow construction paper. Dr. Lejeune asked if she could use the phone in Mr. Paprocki’s office to call the university. “Forty-two, forty-three,” Sherri said. “Sure. You have to fill out these.” She handed Dr. Lejeune a sheaf of forms an inch thick.

  “I’ll call collect,” Dr. Lejeune said. She went into the office, shut the door, and called the physics department. “I need to talk to somebody who worked on the temporal oscillator with Dr. Young,” she told the graduate assistant who answered the phone. “I want to know exactly what it does.”

  “The main unit?”

  “I suppose so,” Dr. Lejeune said. She hadn’t been aware the thing had more than one part.

  “It has two functions. It produces the agitational stimuli, and it stores the temporal energy collected by the portable transmitter-receivers.”

  “Agitational stimuli?”

  “Yes. A combination of subsonic emissions and subliminal messages that produce an excited emotional state in the experimental subjects.”

  Yes, and I’ll bet I know what those subliminal messages are saying, Dr. Lejeune thought.

  “I don’t suppose this ‘main unit’ looks like a lava lamp, does it?”

  “A lava lamp? Why on earth would a temporal oscillator look like a lava lamp?”

  “Good question,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Tell me about these portable transmitter-receivers.”

  It took two more days to finish kindergarten. Brendan James was the last one on the list. “Maybe we should just skip him,” Carolyn said. “He’s under a lot of stress.”

  “I’m not sure we have enough time left today anyway,” Andrew said. It was nearly two-thirty. He could tell because the third grade was rattling past on their way out to recess. “Let’s put it off till tomorrow, and I’ll ask—”

  The lights went out.

  “Just a minute,” Andrew said. “I’ll get the flashlight. You can’t see a thing in here.”

  That was an understatement. It was as black as pitch, as black as a mine shaft in there. It was so black, it seemed to destroy his sense of direction as well. He took a step toward the piano and cracked his knee against the desk. Wrong way. He turned around and started in the opposite direction, his hands out in front of him.

  “I’ll try to find the light switch,” Carolyn said, and there was a loud metallic crash.

  “Stay right where you are,” Andrew said. His hands hit the keyboard in a clatter of notes. “I’m almost there.” He grabbed for the piano top and got hold of one of the square metal boxes and then the other. The flashlight wasn’t there. He patted his hands over the surface of the piano. “Did you move the flashlight?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Did you?”

  “No,” he said, turning in the direction her voice was coming from. He crashed into the wastebasket. “I can’t see a thing,” he said. “It’s black as the pit from pole to pole in here. Where are you?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, but he didn’t need her to tell him. He suddenly knew exactly where she was. He couldn’t see a thing; there
was not enough light for his eyes even to make an attempt at adjusting, but he knew exactly where she was.

  “I’m by the blackboard, I think,” she said. She wasn’t. She was between the photon counter and the oscilloscope, and all he had to do was reach out his arm and pull her toward him. Her face was already turned up toward his in the pitch darkness. All he had to do was say her name.

  And then what? Make her be the next piece of gossip for Sherri to spread? Well, you know what happened to Wendy and Liz’s mother, don’t you? She ran off with the hodiechronicity man.

  “The blackboard’s over here,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder and turning her gently toward it. He patted the surface with his free hand, completely sure now of where everything was. He could have walked straight down the narrow tunnel to the light switch and never have made a misstep. “You have a better idea than I do where the light switch is,” he said, letting go of her shoulder. “Just keep your hand on the chalk tray, and when you get to the end of it, feel along the wall.”

  “It’s against the rules,” she said. “The music teacher doesn’t let the kids run their hands against the wall like this.”

  There was nothing in her voice to indicate she had any idea of how close they’d come to disaster, and probably she didn’t. She was happily married to the gymnastics coach. She had a teenaged daughter who was getting ready for college and one who was out for volleyball. She probably hadn’t even noticed that they couldn’t move in here without touching each other.

  “I’m sure the music teacher will make an exception this time,” he said. “This is an emergency.”

  He could tell she had stopped, her hand already on the switch. “I know.”

  She turned on the light. “I guess I’d better go talk to the third-grade teacher,” she said, and opened the door.

  “I guess you’d better,” he said.

  After school Dr. Lejeune went up to the office to ask Mr. Paprocki if she could use his phone to place a long-distance call to Fermilab.

  “I can’t believe it,” Sherri said. “The last single man in the state and he quits.”

  “Who quit?” Dr. Lejeune said. “Dr. Simons?”

  “Yes. He came up about two-thirty and said he was leaving, to tell Dr. Young he was going back to Tibet.”

  “Is that all he said? Did he leave a note?”

  “No,” Sherri said. “It’s not fair. I went out and bought a whole new fuchsia wardrobe.”

  Dr. Lejeune went and found Dr. Young. He was in the third grade passing out lollipops. “Andrew’s quit,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. He handed her a lollipop.

  “He says he’s going to Tibet,” she said. “Aren’t you going to try and stop him?”

  “Stop him?” he said. “Why would I do that? If he’s unhappy, he’s not much use to the project, is he? Besides”—he unwrapped a lollipop—“you can run a video camera, can’t you?”

  “You sent all the way to Tibet for him. You said he was perfect.”

  “I know,” he said, looking speculatively at the lollipop. “Well, we all make mistakes.”

  “I should have introduced him to Bev Frantz while I had the chance,” Dr. Lejeune said under her breath.

  “What?” Dr. Young said.

  “I said, what about the project?”

  “The project,” Dr. Young said, sticking a lollipop in his mouth, “is proceeding right on schedule.”

  “I’ve got bad news,” Sherri said when Carolyn got to school in the morning.

  “Don’t tell me,” Carolyn said, looking at the testing schedule. “Pam Lopez’s mother ran off with the Lutheran minister.”

  Sherri didn’t rise to the bait. “Dr. Simons left,” she said.

  “Oh,” Carolyn said, moving Brendan James’s name to the end of first grade. “Where did he go?”

  “Tibet.”

  Good, Carolyn thought. Maybe now you’ll stop acting like a college girl. You are not nineteen and living in the dorm. You are forty-one years old. You are married and have two children, and it is just as well he is in Tibet instead of down there in that music room, where you can’t even move without brushing against him. “Is Dr. Young going to continue the project?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Brendan James’s mother was married and had two children, Carolyn thought, and what on earth is the matter with you? Brendan James’s mother is a complete flake and always has been, and you love your husband, you love Liz and Wendy, and just because they are a little preoccupied with gymnastics and volleyball and college right now is no reason to act like a college girl with a crush. “I wonder who they’re going to have replace him? Dr. Young?”

  “I don’t know. Honestly, you don’t seem very upset that he left,” Sherri said. “Well, maybe you don’t care that the last single man around just departed for another continent, but I do.”

  Another continent, Carolyn thought. The university wasn’t far enough. Even Duke University wasn’t far enough. He had to go all the way to Tibet to get away from me.

  “There’s always Mr. Paprocki,” Carolyn said, and went down to the music room.

  “Dr. Simons was called away suddenly,” Dr. Young told her. He was showing Dr. Lejeune how to use the video camera. “Some kind of emergency,” he said.

  Some kind of emergency. “This is an emergency,” Andrew had said, and he hadn’t known the half of it. She had known exactly where he was, standing there in the pitch darkness. She hadn’t been able to see her own hand in front of her face, she hadn’t been able to find the spectrum analyzer even when she crashed into it, but she had known exactly where he was. All she would have had to do was put her hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to her.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Sherri said, holding out a note to Carolyn. “I’ve got bad news. The senior high just called. Liz has the chicken pox.”

  Andrew took the Greyhound bus back to the university. Someone had left a McCall’s on the seat beside him. The cover had a picture of Elizabeth Taylor and the headline, “Are You Ready for an Affair? Our Test Can Help You Tell.”

  He took the test, answering the questions the way he thought Carolyn would. He remembered her saying her husband was a coach, so he answered yes to “I am lonely a lot of the time.” He also answered yes to the question that said, “I sometimes fantasize about someone I know,” even though he was sure that was wishful thinking.

  Under the test it said, “Give yourself one point for every yes. 0-5: You’re not ready. 6-10: Getting there. 11-15: Ready or not, here it comes. 16 and up: DANGER!”

  Carolyn got a four.

  He stared out the window a while and then took the test himself, rewording the questions so they would apply to him. To eliminate sexual bias, he answered no to every other PMS question and no to the one that said, “I find myself thinking a lot about an old flame.” Stephanie Forrester was not who he thought about while he was staring out the window, and he didn’t see how Carolyn Hendricks could qualify as an old flame when all he had ever done was know where she was in the dark.

  He scored a twenty-two. He went back and marked all the PMS questions no. He still got a seventeen.

  Dr. Young didn’t seem any more upset about losing Carolyn than he had about losing Andrew. In fact, as he recited number strings to Troy Yoder, he looked positively cheerful. As soon as he was finished, Dr. Lejeune offered to get the next first grader and went up to the office. “Have you found those tests yet?” she asked Sherri.

  “No,” Sherri said disgustedly. “I am knee-deep in chicken pox, and he decides the milk money accounts should be double entry. The second I get a chance, I promise I’ll look for them.”

  “It’s okay,” Dr. Lejeune said.

  “If you’re in a hurry, you might ask Heidi Dreismeier’s mother,” Sherri said. “She probably sneaked copies of the tests home to try on Heidi.”

  “Heidi Dreismeier’s mother?” Dr. Lejeune asked. “How many people exactly did Dr. Young test?”


  “Well, he started out by screening the staff and volunteers and all the homeroom mothers, but that was just an interview kind of thing. Then he narrowed it down to five or so and gave them the whole battery.”

  “Who were those five?”

  “Well, Carolyn Hendricks, of course, and Heidi’s mother, and Francine Williams …”

  Shannon’s mother?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

  Yes, and who else?” She thought a minute. “Oh. Brendan James’s mother. It’s a good thing she didn’t come in first, isn’t it? And Maribeth Greenberg. She taught fourth grade here last year.”

  “How old was she?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

  “Forty,” Sherri said promptly. “We had a birthday party for her right before she quit.”

  “She didn’t happen to run off with anybody, did she?”

  “Maribeth?” Sherri said. “Are you kidding? She left to become a nun.”

  Liz didn’t look too bad when Carolyn picked her up at the high school, but by the next morning she was covered. “What am I going to do?” she wailed. “My senior picture appointment is next week.”

  “I’ll call and change it,” Carolyn said, but the phone rang before she could find the number.

  “More bad news,” Sherri said.

  “Wendy?” Carolyn said, thinking, please let them get it at the same time.

  “No. Monica and Ricky Morales. I can’t get in touch with their mother. She’s in real estate. And your name was on the emergency card.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Carolyn said. She checked on Liz, who was sleeping on the living-room couch, and drove to the elementary. On the way over she stopped at the grocery store and stocked up on 7-Up, Popsicles, and calamine lotion. She also bought some Dr. Pepper, which she had decided was the missing ingredient in Allison’s suicides.

  When she got to school, Monica and Ricky were sitting in the office looking flushed and bright-eyed. “We’ve had five cases since this morning,” Sherri told her. “Five cases! And Heidi Dreismeier threw up, but I think it’s just her nervous stomach.” She helped Monica into her jacket. “I’ll keep trying their mother. The office said she was showing apartments to some bachelor.”

  Carolyn took Monica and Ricky out to the car. Ricky promptly lay down on the backseat and wouldn’t budge. Carolyn had to put the groceries in the trunk so Monica could sit up front beside her. She fastened Monica into the seat belt and started the car.