Amy and Isabelle (25 page)

Apparently he was expecting her. This did not register until many days later when, reviewing the scene in her mind, she saw that he had answered the door with a certain hostile complacency; that Amy had undoubtedly called to say her mother was on her way. What did register, however, was some immediate sense of conspiracy that this man had with her daughter.

He was short and barefoot.

“I’m Amy Goodrow’s mother,” Isabelle had said, hearing how brisk and tart her voice sounded, and how it was all quite wrong somehow, right away. “And I would like to talk to you. Please.” This she said quietly, aiming in her tone for a superior detachment, which was ludicrous of course; she was in agony.

“Won’t you come in.” A very slight bow, a slow dropping of the eyelids beneath the rimmed glasses, as if he were mocking her. Later she realized he probably was. He appeared both somnambulistic and wary; his bare feet, flat and white at the end of his jeans, offended her in their nakedness.

Stepping past him into an angular and barren living room (there were no pictures on the wall, a small TV was placed upon a crate), Isabelle, before she turned back to face this man, caught briefly the view in the partly opened window. It was merely a tree. Part of a tree, a maple close enough to the building so that the leaves, green and thick and dappled by the early-evening sun, appeared to be pressing toward her through the open window. She heard for a brief moment their gentle rustling.

Why this particular glimpse of a tree with early evening beginning to settle upon it should present to her the most awful feeling of sadness and utter loss she had ever in her life experienced she was not able to precisely understand, but for a moment she thought she might crumple to the floor. Instead she turned to the man and said softly, “You
are
Thomas Robertson?”

He blinked his eyes slowly, not seeming to close them all the way. “I am. Would you care to sit down?” His jaw moved like a puppet’s when he spoke; his full beard made it impossible to see his mouth.

“No. No, thank you.” Her fatigue made her almost smile. In fact she felt, just slightly, the corners of her own mouth turn up, and even experienced, bizarrely, briefly, the sensation that they were working together, united in some understanding of catastrophe.

She no sooner felt this than she realized of course it was completely untrue; there was no hint of an answering smile from him. Instead she perceived in his gaze the watchfulness of someone encountering instability in another. She said, “But please. You sit down.”

He sat on the edge of a gray vinyl couch, resting a forearm on each knee, still watching her, his neck thrust forward.

“Let me tell you what I know of certain laws,” she said, and she proceeded to recite, rather quickly, what she knew. At the time she felt he had been impressed, though later, remembering it (there was a great deal she could not seem to remember), she felt that to proceed that way had been a terrible mistake, that she never ought to have exposed herself in such a way to him.

Because in the end he “won.” In the end he had retained his sense of dignity and managed somehow to destroy hers. This was unspoken, but they both knew. And she was not able to remember or figure out exactly how he had done it.

She had stated her case concisely: she wanted him out of town. “Of course I would like to go to the police,” she said quietly, “but my main concern is Amy, and I won’t have her put through any of that.”

He had not said anything. He gazed at her with a curious indifference and eventually slid himself further back into the seat of the vinyl couch, crossing one leg over the other’s knee, so that he seemed audaciously at ease.

“Have I made myself clear?” Isabelle asked. “Is there anything I have said that you don’t understand?”

“Not at all,” the man replied. “The picture is perfectly clear.” He glanced around the living room, which seemed more and more to Isabelle to have the sort of temporariness in its decor that one would find in the dwellings of a college student (a spider plant sat on a bookshelf near the door, many of its fronds brown and bent at the middle), and then, running a hand slowly over his head, the deep brown waves of hair rising off his forehead making Isabelle inwardly shiver, said that he could, if it pleased her, leave town tomorrow.

“Just like that?” she asked.

“Sure.” He stood up then, and walked a few steps toward the door, as though to indicate their interview was over. “I have no reason to stay,”
he added, turning his palm upward, as though both the words and the gesture would reassure Isabelle that he was telling her the truth.

But she heard in his remark the disposability of her daughter; and while she would have been mightily offended had he attempted to say he
cared
for the girl, she was even more offended that he did not.

“Have you any idea,” she said, her eyes narrowing, taking a step toward him, “have you any idea how you have injured my child?”

He blinked rapidly a moment, then tilted his head slightly. “Excuse me?”

She could have harmed him, ripped his hair from his head and clenched it in her fist with little pieces of skin still clinging to its roots, she could have twisted his arm through the cotton shirt until she heard it snap inside the skin, she could have killed him easily. Her eyes blurred, making things sway.

“You have taken a very, very innocent girl and put your handprint on her forever.” Horribly, she saw two drops of saliva shoot from her mouth and land on the sleeve of his cotton shirt.

He glanced at his arm, letting her know by his expression that he considered himself to have just been spit upon (which was incredibly unfair, Isabelle felt, her head roaring every time she thought of this).

He placed his hand on the doorknob. “Mrs. Goodrow,” he said, and then he cocked his head. “
Is
it
Mrs
. Goodrow? I’m afraid I was never quite sure.”

Her face burned. “It is Mrs. Goodrow,” she whispered, because her voice seemed to have given out.

“Well. Mrs. Goodrow. I’m afraid you take a dim view of the situation. Amy may very well be underage, and in that I’m not without some respect for your position, but I’m afraid you’ve been a tad naive about the nature of your passionate and unusually attractive daughter.”

“What is it you’re saying?” Isabelle asked, her heart thumping ferociously.

He paused, his eyes moving about the room. “Mrs. Goodrow, Amy did not need a good deal of teaching, shall we say.”

“Oh,” said Isabelle. “Oh, you are horrible. You really are a horrible man. I’m going to report you—you’re loathsome. Do you know that about yourself?” She leaned forward peering at him, asking this question
with her voice raspy, tears in her eyes. “A loathsome man. I’m going to report you to the superintendent, the principal, the police.”

He was more than willing to hold her gaze, and she saw no indication in the brown eyes, seeming all the more impenetrable behind the lenses of his glasses, that her threat had intimidated him at all; it was her own eyes that glanced aside—she had never, even as a child, lasted more than two seconds in any kind of confrontation that required a stare-down with another person—and it was then she saw the books on the shelf beneath the moribund spider plant.
The Works of Plato
, she read, and next to that a white book with a circular coffee stain over the title
On Being and Nothingness
. Right before she looked away she saw
Yeats: The Collected Works
.

Thomas Robertson watched her glancing at the books, and when she met his eyes she read in them his final victory, for in a moment he said, “I think it would be best if you didn’t report anything. I’ll be gone tomorrow.”

At the door she turned and said, “I find you contemptible.”

He nodded just slightly. “I understand you do.” He closed the door slowly; it clicked.

AS SHE DROVE home Isabelle thought she ought not to be operating a motor vehicle. These were the words that came into her mind, as though lifted in fine print from the back of a box of decongestant tablets—
Do not operate a motor vehicle
—for it seemed her ability to judge distances, curbs, stop signs, was greatly impaired. There was no sense, as there had been on the way over, of having power, control, over the car. There was barely a sense of the car at all. There was only the image of Thomas Robertson, his eyelids blinking slowly, the stinging echo of his words, “I understand you do.”

She hated that he was smart. He was smarter than she was and she hated that. He was some kind of smart hippie, had undoubtedly been a hippie, had probably lived in a commune at some point along the way, smoking marijuana, taking anyone he cared to into his bed.

(What was worst of all, of course, was what he had said about Amy, what he had implied about Amy.)

And they had discussed her. She realized that driving back home, that
they had discussed her at times during their horrid little rendezvous. Because that was there in the slow lowering of his eyes (Is it
Mrs
. Goodrow?). That he knew things about her. But what would he know? That she was strict? That she had few friends? That she worked in the mill? That she had said Yeets instead of Yeats? (Yes, he probably did know that, and her face burned.)

What she felt, turning into the driveway, was a fury and pain so deep that she would never have believed a person could feel it and still remain alive. Walking up the porch steps, she wondered seriously, briefly, if in fact she would die, right here, right now, opening the kitchen door. Perhaps dying was like this, those final moments of being rushed along by some powerful wave, so that at the very end one did not actually care, there was no reason to care: it was just over, the end was there.

Except she wasn’t dying. Tossing the keys onto the kitchen table, she felt the everydayness of life reappear. This was hers to bear. She felt she could not bear it, and so anger pulsed through her; her legs were shaking as she climbed the stairs.

Chapter

15

AMY HAD—JUST as Isabelle later surmised—telephoned Mr. Robertson, once her mother left the house. Standing by the kitchen window, she had watched to make sure her mother’s car did not suddenly return. It did not, and Amy, beginning to cry as soon as Mr. Robertson answered the telephone, told him what had happened since her mother came home. “I
hate
her,” she finished. “I hate her
so much
.” She squeezed her wet nose with her fingers.

There was a long pause on the other end of the telephone, and Amy, wiping her nose again, asked, “Are you still there?”

“I’m still here,” Mr. Robertson said, though surprisingly he said no more.

“But what are we going to do?” Amy asked. “I mean what are we going to tell her?” She turned the mouthpiece upward so he wouldn’t hear her crying; tears slipped down her face.

“Don’t tell her anything else,” Mr. Robertson advised. “Leave the rest to me. I’ll handle it. When she comes home don’t tell her anything more.” His voice, though, was oddly expressionless; he could have been talking in his sleep. Even when he said, “It’ll work out, Amy. It will all get worked out in the end.”

A new kind of fear spread through her as she hung up. In her mind
now was the brief image of a huge, black sea; she and Mr. Robertson bobbing separately on black waves in a black night.

But no. When he said it would get worked out, he meant he loved her. And that he would stand by her. He had said that just today: “You know you’ll always be loved, don’t you?” He loved her. He had told her so. She ought to have told her mother this, because her mother didn’t understand.

Amy walked up the stairs. Maybe Mr. Robertson would tell her mother, “I love your daughter and we want to be together.” Would he say that to Isabelle? And what words, exactly, would he use? Anyway, he was a grown-up and he would know what to do, Amy reasoned, tripping suddenly on the last stair; thinking there was one more stair, she had put her foot down too quickly. She steadied herself against the wall and went into her bedroom.

She sat waiting for her mother to return. She sat on the skirted vanity stool in front of her mirror, and after a while she began to brush her hair, and the thought even occurred to her that Mr. Robertson might return here with her mother. The early-evening sun, which at that time in June always passed for a few minutes through Amy’s room, sent through the window a haze of pale light that touched Amy’s hair, so it seemed at that moment like spun gold from a fairy tale. (She thought this as she gazed at herself.) But she felt unwell. She felt like she had just thrown up, with more left back inside her.

And it was so odd: the white hairbrush she was holding, a school notebook tossed onto the bed—these familiar things seemed to belong to a life she could now only faintly remember. Now that Isabelle had found out that some man loved her, everything was different.

He did love her. He had said, “You know you’ll always be loved, don’t you?” She could tell by the way he smiled whenever she walked into his classroom after school, but especially from the way he had touched her today in the car, from the things they had done. It was indescribably private what they had done. When people did that kind of thing … well, they loved each other incredibly. You had to be together after that.

Mr. Robertson would tell her mother it couldn’t be helped: people fell in love. Maybe he would even tell Isabelle that in a few years—his wife had left him, after all—he would like to marry Amy. (She pictured living with him, how he would empty out some bureau drawers for her
to put her clothes in, how on their first day he would hand her a clean towel and washcloth and say, “Here, Amy. These are for you.”)

The kitchen door slammed; car keys flung onto the counter; then her mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

Amy put the brush down quietly, as though by merely holding it she had been doing something wrong. The sun, just now leaving the room, touched Amy’s hair one final time as she turned to see her mother, appearing out of breath, standing in the doorway. “He’s leaving town tomorrow,” Isabelle said, her chest rising and falling, rising and falling. “He should be thrown in jail.”