Any Bitter Thing (9 page)

I stared out the windows of my dorm room, taking in Sacred Heart’s maidenly lawns, with their prim, sculpted trees, feebly seeking a target for my uncontainable rage. Who could I punish? Mrs. Hanson, now in South Carolina with the daughter
she’d brought up on rules? Celie, who so robustly believed the worst? The titanic institution of the Catholic Church? My true home—my house and room, my ribbon of river, my friend next door—lay fifteen hundred miles from this stone windowsill on which I flailed my fists till they drew blood, scaring my roommates into silence.

At dawn, sick from weeping, it came to me. F
ORGIVE THINE ENEMIES,
exhorted the sign over the chapel doors. Well, I would. Oh, yes. I would forgive everybody but God. God was omnipresent, and so, too, would be my punishing silence. God would be forever denied my company. Collapsing into my bed as the bells sounded morning prayer, I plunged my face into my pillow and refused the call. For the first moment since my arrival there I felt a sweet, muscular spasm of control.

“Listen,” Mariette said, racking another row of test tubes. “You’re back. Just do your job, and screw all the gumflappers in this place.”

I had to blink hard, feeling another crying jag coming on and determined not to falter here, in this place of shiny starts. “What if he tried to reach me”—here I avoided her eyes, but it had to be said—“because he wants me to clear his name?”

Mariette regarded me stoically. “Clear his name?” Her voice softened. “Lizzy, it’s been over twenty years. It’s just a story now.” She cupped my face. “Nobody cares how a rumor turns out. After enough time passes, the truth doesn’t change a thing.” Then she hugged me, smelling of rats and rubbing alcohol, which wasn’t an awful smell on her. “Heaven is awfully far away,” she whispered. “Maybe he was asking you to let him rest.”

There was a period at Sacred Heart, as the copy of
Lolita
was being passed from room to room, when I spent most of my time writing letters to people from the parish, hoping for a reasonable explanation to my dawning suspicion.
Why did they send him away?
The few responses I received—out of pity, I
suppose—were brief and noncommittal. Father Mike had been transferred to “nonpastoral” duties. They made it sound like a promotion, but even through the mail I sensed their averted eyes. The transfer had been cloaked in a telltale secrecy; it was not commonly known that Baltimore was his destination, nor even that he had died. It took months to pry the truth out of Celie, longer still to get Mrs. Blanchard to admit, yes, there were accusations; from Mrs. Hanson, yes; that’s why the Church took him away. Mrs. Blanchard persuaded me to stop writing letters.
The more you say no, dear girl, the more they will think yes. This is how people are.

Mariette was moving through the room now, wiping down her lab tables.

“Mariette?”

She looked up.

“Did you ever—?”

“Not for one second. I never believed it for one second.”

After a moment, I asked, “Do you ever wonder if your father might come back?”

She resumed wiping. “No.”

I’d been wanting to tell her that since the accident her father, too, had been on my mind. “You don’t think he might be out there someplace?”

“He hasn’t spoken to me from the dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“Lizzy,” she said. “I’m tired of talking about fathers.”

I lowered my eyes. “I know I’ve been kind of hard to be around.”

She finished her chore, then picked up an armful of schedules. “Come on. Let me help you with these.”

We walked to my office together, out of words, our tandem footfalls echoing in the empty hall.

That afternoon, after the schoolwide in-service—a tedious primer on our new attendance policy—I found Jane on the phone and a lurid bouquet of roses on her desk. She banged down the receiver. “Jerk,” she muttered.

“A parent?”

“A
bully
who wants to talk to you this very instant and won’t leave his name.” Jane always got tense when school started, though her patience at other times flirted with legend. She had trouble with beginnings, is all. I had trouble with endings. “I told him we had a school year getting underway and he’d have to wait in line like everybody else.”

I looked around at the empty office. “And yet I see no line, thanks to you and your accomplice.”

She slid the roses toward me. “For you,” she said. They had fully opened, petals flung back wantonly.

“Who brought them?” I asked.

“The flower man. No card”

I took the flowers into my office, where I found Andrea Harmon pinching my plants. “Hey, Mrs. Mitchell” she said, as if no time had passed since my accident. No time, no loss, no change.

One thing I admire about teenagers is their ability to remake themselves over the course of a summer. Some of the transformation is beyond their control, a six-inch growth spurt or a mouth whose baby curves have flattened out. The rest they assiduously tend—a new vocabulary, a pair of boots that hitches their natural gait, a copy of
On the Road
poking artfully out of a torn-back pocket.
I’m not that kid from last year
, these props warn all who witness,
Don’t even think I’m that kid from last year.
Andrea, however, looked the same. Same clotted eyelashes, same masky makeup, same gossamer hair dyed the color of a cheap merlot.

“You got a boyfriend?” she asked, eyeing the roses.

“I’m married, Andrea.”

“That doesn’t stop some people.”

I set the roses on the sill. “How’d you get past Mrs. Rodgers?”

Andrea gave me a methodical once-over, then dropped some plant parts into my wastebasket. “Mrs. Rodgers doesn’t have eyes in the back of her head,” she said.

I had to laugh, for this was Jane Rodgers’s perennial claim, and the other ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the student body appeared to believe it. Even the biggest, most galootish boys cowered in the lobby waiting for Jane’s say-so before making a dash for my office.

I closed the door, a metal rectangle with a peephole placed far above eye level. Despite the plants, the window, the plaid rug, the photo of Paulie in an electric-blue frame, my little chamber could not shirk its original identity as a stall for dyeing shoes.

I gestured toward a seat. Andrea would sit eventually, but she liked to meet even the smallest requests on her own timetable. It drove her teachers crazy. She would someday become the kind of adult other adults admired, if one of them didn’t kill her first.

“I got my schedule,” she said, fishing it out of the same handbag she’d toted all the previous year, a scabrous vinyl pouch that matched her jacket.

“That’s not final,” I informed her. “The prelims got mailed out by mistake.”

She slapped the printout on my desk. “I got the Rattlesnake for English.”

“I can’t imagine who you mean.”

Andrea tsked significantly. “Mrs. Ratclef.”

“Oh, Mrs.
Ratclef.
That would be the same Mrs. Ratclef who, as a member of our faculty, is entitled to our respect whether she is standing in the room with us or not?”

Andrea stared me down for a few moments, her eyes etched in thick swipes of black, deceptively ferocious-looking. “That’s the one,” she conceded at last.

“Shall we start again?” I said, sitting down. “How was your summer?”

She allowed me a small smile—I’d never seen her laugh. “Better than yours,” she said. Finally she sat, draping herself over the chair as if she were made of seaweed.

My desk faced the wall. My chair was turned out to face whoever landed in the student chair, as a kind of invitation. Across the hall Rick used his desk like a barrier, which I could understand. As vice-principal he likened himself to a prison warden who couldn’t afford to start feeling sorry for the inmates.

“How’s your mother?” I asked.

Andrea thrust out her wrist and consulted her watch. “Drunk,” she said.

I waited.

“My dad finally bailed on us,” she said, stroking the eyebrow ring that had more than likely been applied to commemorate the event. “He moved in with Miss Teenage America on August twelfth. Which he totally and completely forgot was my birthday.”

I nodded. The saga of her father and the girl from the hardware store had been a recurring theme the previous year.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Nope,” Andrea said, her vinyl jacket, spotted from the day’s rain, creaking around her as she sat up. “What I want is to switch to English 220. This class you put me in is for morons” Her eyes flickered over my face. “Or whoever put me in. Obviously it wasn’t you.”

“No,” I said. “I was kind of busy.”

Until that moment I had never seen that girl choke up. Not over her feckless father, her pickled mother, over the shack
she called home, an unpainted heap of planks with a dirt yard, fourteen miles from a cup of coffee or a tank of gas. She lifted her hands as if to touch me, her black nail polish looking like gangrenous wounds. Instead, she peered at my face, squinting closely at the scar along my eyebrow.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said. Her hands returned to her lap.

“The pay’s irresistible.”

Andrea didn’t smile. “I felt really bad,” she said.

“Me too.” My eyes stung unexpectedly as I took her schedule. “Let’s see how we can fix this”

My buzzer sounded. “Line one, Lizzy,” Jane said. “That bully-man.”

Andrea sat up with the alacrity of a federal agent. I picked up the phone.

“Did you get the flowers?” came a voice from the ether.

“Who is this?”

The moment hovered, and the voice said, “I’m the guy that saved you.”

NINE

He’d been waiting for me, hands knuckled hard into the pockets of a used London Fog with shiny spots and a broken belt loop. His head lifted edgily as I parked the car. He was scrawny and raw-skinned, with the white, wet-combed hair of a man in deep middle age trying hard not to look like a former drunk. I checked his boots, recalling the
tink-tink-tink
they made on the wet night road.

“Hello?” he said, heading toward me. I felt ridiculously glad to be recognized, though of course my cane is what gave me away. I couldn’t have looked much like the heap of bones he’d found on the road. “Harry Griggs,” he said, putting out his hand. He closed the space between us, taking my hand—clasping it.
Complicity
is the word that came to me. I put him at sixty: slack, heartbroken mouth, corded neck, wiry eyebrows. Old enough to be my father, though my actual father—the sunny Bill Finneran—would have been older still, more filled out, bonny and robust and easeful. Harry Griggs’s face, veiny and scrupulously shaved, sheened with regret. I wondered if he had always looked this way.

“You came all by yourself?” he asked. We were in the parking lot of Portland’s back cove, where sprightly people jogged in place, getting ready to run the perimeter.

“My husband thinks I’m at a soccer game,” I said.

He shrugged nervously under his Goodwill coat. “I didn’t know but what you might bring him with you.”

“He wouldn’t be interested in seeing you, to be honest.”

He shifted on his feet, thinking. “He knows I’m the guy that called the 9-1-1?”

I looked into his eyes, a chipped, not-unappealing kaleidoscope of blue and green. “He thinks you should’ve stayed with me till the ambulance came. I was sort of wondering myself why you didn’t.”

Harry Griggs took a couple of darting looks around, as if searching for a protocol he was ill-equipped to deliver. “I thought you were dead,” he said. “I was moving a body. But I saved you anyway. Next car around the bend coulda run you clean over.” His accent was a surprise: inland Maine, thick and reminiscent, the same dropped
r
’s and draggy
o
’s of the old ladies from St. Bart’s.

“I figured you called me to apologize,” I said.

On the phone he’d been confusing and inarticulate, but he was the only witness to my death, or whatever it was, and I was in no position to be picky.

“I wondered how you made out, is all,” he said. “Things haven’t gone too goddamn fabulous lately, and saving you was the one decent thing I could think of that’s happened in a goddamn ice age, pardon my French.” He looked at my hands as if I ought to be bearing gifts.

“It was a very decent thing” I said. “It’s just that most people would’ve stayed.”

“You ever see those
TV
shows where the rescuer gets to meet the one they rescued and everybody’s so goddamn glad to be alive, pardon my French, and they thank God and all the
saints in Heaven and sit down to a meal?”

“That’s what you thought was going to happen?” I asked. “Six months later?”

“I know,” he said, “six months later, Jesus Christ, it’s about goddamn time, but I’ve kinda been out of the loop for the duration.” His eyes slid sideways. “To tell you the truth, it wasn’t till recently I looked it up in the newspaper. The library’s got all that stuff, and I spend my free time in there. They did a thing that told you were gonna make it. They said a motorist called the 9-1-1. A passing motorist.”