Amy and Isabelle

  Triumphant, successful, she was filled with shame. She thought Flip Rawley glanced at her. Amy Goodrow staying after school? When the bell rang, she kept her head down as she left the room.

  INSUFFERABLE CLASSES: HISTORY as dull as death; Spanish pale and endless. There was no meaning to anything except for the fact that after school she would sit in Mr. Robertson’s classroom. And when the final bell rang she was exhausted, as though she had gone for a very long time without food. In the girls’ room she studied herself in the mirror above the row of sinks. This was her? This was what people saw when they looked at her? Her hair was nice but her face seemed without expression, and how could it be when so much was going on inside her? She pulled open the door of the girls’ room and it swung shut behind her, a tired thunk.

  The hallway was empty. She had never stayed after school before and it was a different place this time of day. The sun falling over the classroom floors seemed a deeper shade of yellow; the large windowsills and dusty blackboards had a friendly, worn-out feeling to them, the way her clothes sometimes felt at the end of the day. Around her was the silence of an empty hallway, although she could hear in the distance the echo of cheerleaders practicing in the gym.

  Mr. Robertson was sitting at his desk in the back of the room, writing, when she came in. “Have a seat,” he said, without looking up.

  She chose a desk up near the blackboard instead of her usual place, and sat down quietly, unsure of what to do. She squinted toward the window; dust particles hung suspended in the afternoon air, lit by a shaft of sunlight. Down the hall was the metallic sound of a locker being slammed shut and, closer by, the janitor’s broom bumping against the stairwell.

  She heard Mr. Robertson drop a pencil onto his desk. “Get started on your homework,” he said mildly, “if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” she answered, shaking her head; and then, like that, there were tears in her eyes. Such terrible sadness! Such a sudden collapse; she was worn down by her afternoon of anticipation. She sat with her hands in her lap, away from him. Her hair hung down on either side of her face, and squeezing her eyes she felt warm tears drop on her hands.

  “Amy.” He had gotten up from his desk and was walking over to her. “Amy,” he said again, appearing beside her. He spoke her name gently, his voice a soft strumming, so grave, serious. Had anyone ever spoken to her this seriously before? “I understand, Amy,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  He must have understood something, because the tears did not seem to alarm him, or even puzzle him. He sat down at the desk beside her and simply handed her his handkerchief. It was a red bandanna, big as a place mat, and she took it, rubbed her eyes, blew her nose. It should have been excruciating to be crying in front of this man, but it was not. And that must have had to do with his lack of surprise, with the kind weariness she saw in his eyes. She gave him back his handkerchief.

  “I know this poem,” she finally said, and he smiled at the way she said poyme, at the way she sat simply, like a child, her eyes still wet and slightly red. She struck him as something entirely innocent, and bruised.

  “It’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay,” she explained, tucking her hair back behind her ear, “and one time in class I thought of it. The first line is, uhm—is ‘Euclid alone looked on beauty bare,’ I think that’s it.”

  He nodded slowly, his gingery eyebrows raised. “ ‘Let all who prate of beauty hold their peace.’ ”

  “You know it,” she said, amazed.

  He nodded again, his eyebrows drawn together thoughtfully, as though he was considering something he had not thought he would be called upon to consider.

  “You know it,” Amy repeated. “I can’t believe you know that poem.” For her it was as though some bird had just flown free after being kept in a cardboard box. “Do you know any others?” She turned in her chair so that she was facing him, their knees not far apart. “By Millay, I mean. Do you know any others?”

  Mr. Robertson spread his fingers over his mouth, contemplating her. Then he answered, “Yes, I know others. Her sonnets. ‘Time does not bring relief; you all have lied …’ ”

  “ ‘Who told me time would ease me of my pain,’ ” Amy finished, bouncing slightly in her chair, and her hair, tucked behind her ear, slipped loose, catching the slice of sunlight that fell through the window, so that she saw him through a golden haze; she saw the surprise and interest on his face, and then she saw something else, something she would remember for a very long time: a motion deep within his eyes, as though something had just shifted underneath.

  He stood and moved to the window, his hands in the pockets of his corduroy pants. “Come look at this sky,” he said, nodding his head toward the window. “I bet it’s going to snow tonight.” He turned in her direction, then back to the window. “Come look,” he said again.

  Obediently she went to the window. The sky had turned fierce and poignant, dark clouds moving in, and the harsh winter sun, golden at this time of day, as though it had been gathering force since morning, now lit a bank of clouds in the west so that a part of their darkness was rimmed in an almost electrical light.

  “Oh, I love it when it’s like that,” Amy said. “Look.” She pointed at the funneled rays of sun splayed down over the snow-crusted street. “I just love that. In real life, I mean. I don’t like it in pictures so much.”

  He watched her, biting down on his mustachy lip.

  “This old woman I used to have to clean house for when I was in seventh grade—this old lady from the church,” Amy explained, “—she had these ugly old-fashioned paintings in her living room. This girl who looked embalmed. Like a pincushion. Do you know the kind of painting I mean?”

  He kept watching her carefully. “Perhaps. Go on.”

  “It gave me the willies,” Amy said. “Dusting the chairs and having that girl stare down at me.”

  Mr. Robertson moved to lean against the windowsill, facing her, his ankles crossed. He ran two fingers lightly over his mustache. “I had no idea you could talk so much,” he mused.

  “Me either.” Her answer was ingenuous. She looked past him out the window again. The clouds were darker, still competing with the sun; light and dark on the spread-out wintry sky. “Anyways,” Amy said (such a tangled bunch of words hopping and bumping inside her), “there was this other picture in the old lady’s house that was old-fashioned too, where the sky is all dark but there’s bright rays of sun cutting through. And some battle with horses or something—you know, little figures—going on underneath. That kind of picture.”

  Mr. Robertson nodded. She spoke “picture” as pitcher, and he was careful not to smile. Plus how she said anyways. “Yes?”

  “Well, I don’t like that kind of pitcher.”

  “I see. ”

  “The sky looks so fake and dramatic. But in real life”—Amy indicated with her hand the sky out the window—“it’s a different story. Then I love it when it looks that way.”

  Mr. Robertson nodded again. “Chiaroscuro,” he said in a teacherly way.

  She glanced at him and looked away, disappointed he would suddenly speak in a foreign phrase. It fuddled her head, made her feel simple and stupid.

  “Chiaroscuro,” Mr. Robertson repeated. “It’s Italian. Lightness and dark. Lightness obscured.” He turned to look at the sky. “Like that.”

  If earlier Amy had had the image of a bird let out of a box, the bird began to falter now. But Mr. Robertson looked at her kindly. “So you no longer clean house for the old woman?”

  “No,” Amy said. “She got sick and she’s in a nursing home somewhere. ”

  “I see.” Mr. Robertson sat back on the wide windowsill, a hand on either side of him, his torso thrust forward. “How come you didn’t like to clean her house?” The way he asked the question made her feel like he actually wanted to know.

  She considered this. “Because it was lonely,” she said.

  He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Tell me.”

 
“The place was all sterile and icky. Like a museum. I don’t know why she had me come once a week, because nothing was ever dirty.”

  “You did a good job, then,” he said, smiling, but she was interrupting him already.

  “Like the fireplace. It was never used. She had these birch logs all stacked up in it and she had me wash the logs every week with Lestoil and warm water. Washing those logs.” Amy shook her head. “It was weird.”

  “It sounds depressing.” Mr. Robertson nodded.

  “It was depressing. That’s exactly what it was.” Amy nodded quickly. (He understood so much.)

  “And how did this job come about?” He tilted his head with curiosity.

  “An announcement in the church program.” Amy held her hands together behind her back and turned slightly to and fro as she talked. It was like drinking fresh water to be able to talk like this. “That she needed someone to help out, so my mother thought it would be nice if I did it. My mother likes to make a good impression at the church.”

  “Let me guess.” Mr. Robertson drew his head back, studying her, contemplating this latest addition to the picture. (For Mr. Robertson, it’s true, was a man who enjoyed contemplating things—“an observer of life,” he liked to say, observing now how very thin Amy Goodrow’s arms were, with her hands clasped behind her back.) “I don’t imagine somehow that you’re Catholic. I’d say … a Congregationalist.”

  Amy beamed; it was like he was a mind reader. “How did you know?”

  “You look it,” he said simply. “You appear it.” He hopped down off the windowsill and walked to the front of the classroom, where he began to erase the blackboard. “Did you know you looked like a Congregationalist?” His arm worked vigorously.

  She moved slowly down the aisle and sat in the seat where Flip Rawley always sat. “No,” she said honestly, “because I don’t know what I look like.” She picked up a few strands of hair from her shoulder and examined them for split ends.

  “Like a doe.” He dropped the eraser in the chalk tray and dusted off his hands. “A doe in the woods.” (It was her skinny arms and legs.) “But then of course there’s that hair of yours,” he added.

  She blushed and peered at him warily, her head ducked down.

  “No, really. It’s interesting.” He swung his leg over the chair where Elsie Baxter usually sat, straddling the chair backwards. “I taught sixth grade in Massachusetts for a while, and then three years later I taught ninth grade there, so I had a lot of the same students again. And it’s interesting, girls at that age. Many overnight become bovine.”

  “What’s bovine?” Amy was still studying her hair; his observations on the development of girls made her self-conscious.

  “Cowlike. Bovine.” He spelled the word. “And then there are others who remain thin and leggy. Like young does.”

  “A Congregational doe,” Amy said, speaking to cover up her embarrassment. She tossed her hair back over her shoulder and breathed in deeply, as though in need of air. She clasped her hands together in her lap.

  “That’s right. A Congregational doe.”

  The pleasant, jokey way he said this made her smile at him.

  “Tell me what else you don’t like, Amy,” he said, leaning his arms forward over the back of Elsie Baxter’s chair. “You don’t like cleaning for old ladies. What else?”

  “I don’t like snakes. I don’t like snakes so much I can’t even stand to think about them.” This was true. At the thought of a snake she could not bear to keep her feet on the floor out of sight, and so she stood now, walking anxiously to the back of the room and then over to the windows. The clouds had moved in almost completely; just a fragment of setting sunlight showed in one far-off part of the horizon. A few cars driving past had their headlights on.

  “All right,” Mr. Robertson said. He had turned in his chair to watch her. “We’ll forget about snakes, then. What is it you do like?”

  Being here with you, she wanted to say. She ran her hand over the varnished wood of the windowsill. In places it had risen in thin puckers and cracked; other parts were smooth and very shiny with years of reapplied shellac.

  “Poems, I guess,” she said after a moment. “The ones I understand, anyway. A lot of poems I don’t understand, and then I feel stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid,” he said, still sitting in the same position in Elsie Baxter’s chair. “You shouldn’t worry that you’re stupid.”

  “Thank you,” she said sincerely. “But like that Euclid poem. I never knew what that meant until you were talking about triangles that day—you know, the beauty of a triangle or something. I probably still don’t know what it means. Like what does prate mean? Let all who prate of beauty.”

  Mr. Robertson stood up and walked to his desk. “Come here,” he said. He was tapping a dictionary bound in dark green leather; it was the size of a Sears catalogue.

  “That’s nice,” said Amy, coming to stand by him.

  “I like words,” he told her. “Like ‘chiaroscuro.’ ” He glanced at the window. “No chiar now,” he said playfully, “just scuro, I guess. Have a seat.”

  She sat in the chair next to his desk, and when he handed the dictionary to her, telling her to look up the word “prate,” his fingertips accidentally ran across the side of her hand, and for a moment she felt a quick funnel-shaped suction straight down through the middle of her insides, and then they sat together with their heads bent over the dictionary while the last of the February sun faded from the sky, Mr. Robertson with wrinkles springing around his eyes as Amy whispered quickly, furtively, under her breath, the alphabet in order to find out that P came after O, and then there were more words to look up, and after a while the janitor’s thumping broom could no longer be heard, and the cheerleaders who had clapped and stomped in the gym went home.

  ISABELLE SWITCHED ON the radio in her car. The dark clouds worried her; they seemed too dark for snow, and yet what other kind of storm were you going to get this time of year? Once in a blue moon you heard of a tornado coming through, although Isabelle’s understanding of a tornado was limited—she didn’t think it darkened the whole sky: the only story she could recall from her youth was of a man driving down the turnpike when a tornado lifted his car up completely, and not far away the sky stayed blue. She couldn’t recall what happened to the man, and doubted now if the story was true. She fiddled with the dial to catch a weather report. Chances were it would be a heavy snowstorm, and that might start the roof leaking again. This thought depressed her. She would have to call up Mr. Crane if this was to be the case.

  “… family has offered a reward for anyone giving information that leads to an arrest in the case of the missing girl, Deborah Kay Dorne, who disappeared from her home on February tenth. So far no suspects have been named.”

  The poor family. Isabelle shook her head slightly. The poor mother. Isabelle switched off the radio as she turned into her driveway. But she felt bumped by chilly silence: the house was dark.

  “Amy?” she called, unlocking the door. “Amy? Where are you?” She dropped her keys on the kitchen table and the sound was brief, immense.

  She switched on the light. “Amy?”

  Into the living room; switching on the light there. “Amy?”

  She went from room to room, light switch to light switch, up the stairs. “Amy.”

  The bedroom was empty. The bathroom was empty. Her own bedroom was empty. She opened the closet in the upstairs hall. Folded towels sat quietly, three rolls of toilet paper stared out unperturbed.

  And now she felt hysterical. Now she felt as though cold water were pouring through her arms, her legs. She went down the stairs, stumbling at the bottom, bracing herself against the wall. This isn’t happening, she thought. This isn’t happening. Because clearly whoever had taken away poor Debby Dorne had come now and taken Amy. “Amy!” she called.

  She began again. Every room, every closet, every light. She reached for the telephone. Who would she call? The police. The school. Aver
y Clark. Most likely they would all tell her to check with Amy’s friends. They would all say, Oh, give her some time, she’ll be home. But she is never not home after school, Isabelle wailed silently. I know my daughter, and something is wrong. She sat down in a chair and began to sob. Huge, awful sounds erupted from her throat. Amy, Amy, she cried.

  And then there she was. First the sound of her boots on the front porch steps, and then the door shoved open quickly. “Mom, are you all right?”

  There she was, this daughter. This girl, without whom Isabelle’s insides had become the black, deep water of terror, stood now in the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, her eyes huge. “Are you all right?” she asked again, looking at Isabelle as though she were a ghost.

  “Where were you?” Isabelle demanded. “My God, Amy, you scared me to death!”

  “I stayed after school,” Amy said. “To get help with math.” She turned away from her mother as she unbuttoned her coat. “A bunch of us did. A bunch of us in the class stayed after school.”

  And Isabelle, with tears still wet on her cheeks, had some incoherent sense that she had just been made a fool.

  Chapter

  6

  THE DAYS GOT longer. And warmer, too; very slowly the snows softened, leaving slush on steps and sidewalks and alongside the roads. On days when Amy walked home from school after talking to Mr. Robertson—careful now to leave in time to get home before her mother did—the day’s warmth would be over, and though the sun still shone, a white luminescent wafer in the milky sky, she could feel as she walked, holding her books to her chest, coat unzipped, the moist chill that settled over her bare neck and hands and wrists. The late-afternoon sky that spread out above Larkindale’s field, the stone wall disappearing over the white slope, the tree trunks darkened by the melting snow—all this seemed to her to promise spring. Even a small flock of birds far away in the sky promised something, in the absolute silence with which they beat their wings.