Impossible Things (43 page)

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.

“Wait, wait!” Sherri yelled, pounding on the window on Monica’s side. Carolyn leaned across and opened the window. “You’ve got another one,” she said breathlessly. “It wasn’t nervous stomach. Heidi’s chest is covered with them. Oh, and I forgot to tell you. Don called. He tried to get you at home. He’s going to be late. Two of his girls have got it, and he and Linda have to work up a beam routine with one of the freshmen.”

Carolyn shut off the car. “Why do I have to take Heidi?” she said. “Her mother doesn’t work.”

“She’s at a three-day seminar on Spending More Time with Your Child.”

Andrew went straight to Dr. Gillis’s office as soon as he got back to the university to tell him he’d resigned. “Yes, yes, Max called and told me all about it,” Dr. Gillis said. “It’s too bad, but if they need you in Tibet, well, then, I guess our project will just have to wait. Now what can we do to expedite your getting back to Tibet?” He called Duke University and the U.S. envoy to China, made arrangements for Bev Frantz to give him a cholera booster, and found a place he could stay on campus until he left.

That last was a bad idea. The dorm room reminded him of the one he had had his junior year at Stanford when he had been in love with Stephanie Forrester. He should have met Carolyn Hendricks his junior year instead of Stephanie. She wouldn’t have been Carolyn Hendricks then. She wouldn’t have been married and had two kids, and he could have fallen in love with her instead of the kind of girl who would ask her old boyfriends to usher at her wedding. The head usher had been an old boyfriend, too. He had told Andrew that, after a half-dozen
clockstoppers or so, and they had both decided they needed a few more. He didn’t know how many, but it must have been enough, because the next morning he hadn’t been able to remember a thing, and he was completely over Stephanie.

A sure-fire cure. It was too bad liquor wasn’t allowed in dorms.

Dr. Young refused to give up on the project, even though by the end of the first week there was almost no one left to test. “We’ll work with the data we’ve got until the epidemic’s over,” he said, not at all upset. “How long does it take to get over the chicken pox?”

“Two weeks,” Dr. Lejeune said, “but Sherri says these outbreaks usually last at least a month. Why don’t we go back to the university until it’s over? We could leave the equipment here.”

“Absolutely not!” Dr. Young thundered. “It is that kind of attitude that has undermined this project from the start!” He stomped off, presumably to go to work with the data they had.

We don’t have any data, Dr. Lejeune thought, going up to the office, and my attitude is not what’s undermining this project. She wondered why he was so upset. Andrew’s leaving hadn’t upset him, Carolyn’s leaving hadn’t upset him, not even the chicken pox had upset him. But the suggestion of leaving here had turned the top of his bald head bright pink.

Sherri was dabbing calamine lotion on a fourth-grader. “I finally found the tests,” she said. She handed them to Dr. Lejeune. “Sorry it took so long, but I had six kids go home this morning, three of them to Carolyn Hendricks’s house.”

Dr. Lejeune looked at the tests. The one on the top was the Idelman-Ponoffo that they’d been giving the kids, and under it were an assortment of psychological tests.

“And as if that isn’t bad enough, Old Paperwork decides
he wants me to alphabetize the field-trip release slips.”

The last test was something called the Rick. Dr. Lejeune didn’t recognize it. She asked Sherri if she could use Mr. Paprocki’s office and place a call to the psych department at the university.

“It tests logical thinking, responsibility, and devotion to duty,” the graduate assistant said.

“How about fidelity?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Oh, yes. In fact, Dr. Young over in the physics department just used it in a project of his. He wanted to test the likelihood of affairs among forty-year-olds.”