Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (24 page)

There is a vulnerability about the unintelligent, and April, more than anything, gave off the raw bafflement of the deeply inarticulate. As a woman she'd had little to offer but loyalty, and by being with me she'd failed even at that. In the end, it was this failure that had hurt her more, in fact far more, than our failed affair. In betraying Clayton, she had betrayed herself, as she'd made clear in the one good line I ever heard her say, and which she'd uttered on my front porch the night she came to beg me to keep quiet: I killed the little angel in me, Sam.

By then she'd heard of Sandrine's death, and the nasty fearmonger in her soul had been busy whispering all kinds of dire warnings, how there'd probably be a police investigation, that in such cases the husband is always the first to be suspected, that the authorities were bound to be looking into any motive I might have had for killing Sandrine, she, herself, being the most obvious one.

Still very much out of body, I now recalled April's face in the yellow light of the alleyway where she'd asked that I meet her, our two cars parked in a remote corner, shielded from the roadway by an enormous green Dumpster. She'd come to my car, looking thin and all but featureless, everything girlishly small, her eyes, nose, mouth, a little doll's face, though now a very frightened doll.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I mean about us?”

“There is no ‘us,' April,” I reminded her. “In a way, there never was.”

“But they might ask,” she protested. “What if they ask you, Sam?”

“Ask me what?”

“About us?”

I moved to put my hands on her small rounded shoulders but stopped myself in time.

“Why would they ask about anything like that?” I said. “Look, April, the facts are these. Sandrine was going to die. She'd been diagnosed weeks before. She didn't want to face that kind of death.” I shrugged. “It's an open-and-shut case of suicide. Nobody is going to ask me anything.”

“But the paper said there was an investigation and that—”

“The cops here in Coburn are just stirring up headlines,” I interrupted. “They enjoy seeing their names in the paper. That's all this is, a trumped-up investigation they'll abandon at some point. Even so, it's just routine in a suicide.”

She stared at me pleadingly. “She didn't know about us, did she? Sandrine?”

“Of course not.”

“I mean, she didn't . . . it wasn't . . .”

“It had nothing to do with you, April.”

She glanced about, as if looking for eyes in the darkness. “I wouldn't have called you or come here but I'm so scared, Sam. I feel like it's part of a plan, you know? God's plan. Punishment, I mean.”

“April, please, just go home and stop thinking about this.”

“But I'm so scared.”

“I know you are, but you don't need to be.”

“You really don't think they're going to be asking questions about . . .” She stopped because I'd already denied the reality of “us.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I have all the answers I'll ever need to get them off my back.”

She glanced left and right again, as if certain she were being watched.

“I just wanted to give you my condolences,” she said. “That's what you can say if someone sees us here.”

“No one will see us here.”

“But that's what we could say if someone did.”

“Okay, sure, but I won't have to say anything, April,” I assured her. “You played no part in this, and there's no reason you'll be dragged into it.” I smiled quite confidently. “Don't lose any sleep over this,” I told her. “Believe me, your name will never come up.” I put my hand on my heart. “I give you my word. I will never say your name.”

But I had given April's name, of course, and it was still ringing through the courtroom when I returned to my body.

“So Professor Madison acknowledged that he'd been unfaithful to his wife with April Blankenship, correct?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes,” Detective Alabrandi answered. “He said that he had carried on an affair with Mrs. Blankenship. It had lasted only a few weeks, he said, and it had ended three months before he'd learned of his wife's illness.”

“Did you ask Professor Madison if his wife was aware of this adulterous affair with April Blankenship?”

“He said that she was not.”

Had she been aware of it, I asked myself now, only half listening as Detective Alabrandi continued his testimony, whose exact content I was already well acquainted with. Was it possible at some point that Sandrine had learned about April and me? Had Clayton somehow found out and, in a seizure of anger or pain, confided April's betrayal to his best friend at Coburn College, none other than tweedy little Malcolm Esterman?

I glanced back toward the rear of the courtroom, where Malcolm sat on the back row, in his, yes, tweed jacket, staring through the bottle-bottom thickness of his hornrimmed glasses. He'd always seemed quite humble, a modest man, as Churchill once famously quipped of a political opponent, with much to be modest about. He was just the sort of man, self-effacing and seemingly without envy, to whom Clayton Blankenship might have gone in search of whatever a man seeks in the aftermath of such betrayal. But who would have told Clayton in the first place? Certainly not April. And if April had not told Clayton, then he could not have told Malcolm, and Malcolm could not have told Sandrine.

So if Sandrine had actually known about April and me, how had she known? Or had anyone told her at all? For this was Sandrine, I reminded myself, who could look through walls.

Again I went out of my body, and at the end of that unexpected journey I found myself at a faculty gathering not long after Sandrine had first learned of her illness. It had been one of those end of the academic year parties, held on the lawn of the president's house, everyone choosing between white and red wine and dining on pig-in-a-poke canapés carried on faux silver trays by mostly black servers dressed, for all the world, like plantation-era house slaves.

The president had thanked us for another splendid year, praised our excellence and commitment to the “life of the mind,” then released us to wander about the grounds, forming circles of conversation. Sandrine and I had often hung pretty close together during such affairs, but on that afternoon she'd broken away, and I'd ended up alone, leaning against one of the ground's great oaks, sipping wine and nibbling at a miniature crab cake but otherwise unengaged.

It was then I'd caught April in my sight, wearing a pale blue dress that made her look almost transparent. She'd had her doll-sized hand tucked in poor, frail Clayton's crooked arm and in that pose she looked more like his nurse than his wife. For a time, they strolled haltingly among the faculty, then, rather abruptly, she was with them, my tall, elegant, porcelain-white and raven-haired Sandrine.

For a moment, I'd thought it better to keep clear, but as I watched, April had looked increasingly ill at ease, and so, by way of keeping the lid on that particular pot, I strolled over and joined them.

“Are you folks enjoying this little soiree?” I asked.

Clayton nodded. “It's always a pleasure to talk to your lovely wife, Sam,” he said, the very picture of old southern charm. “You know April, of course.”

“Yes, hi,” I said to her. “You're not drinking. May I get you a glass?”

She shook her head but said nothing, which was not unusual for shy, birdlike April, and so I'd turned back to Clayton. “Well, I presume you had a successful academic year.”

Clayton smiled, and I noticed that his teeth were quite yellow, stained by years of pipe smoking. Suddenly, I felt myself repulsed by the notion that April's pink little tongue had no doubt found itself in that repellant mouth. The thought had come to me so quickly and I'd been so unprepared for it that for an unguarded instant I must have gotten lost in the sheer horror of it, and as she and Clayton broke away I looked at my little parakeet of a paramour with some impossible mixture of pity and revulsion.

I caught myself immediately, but in the way of such glances something of my true feeling was revealed, and to which April's glance responded in kind.

“April is an odd little thing,” Sandrine said once Clayton and April were out of earshot.

I quickly took a sip from my glass. “She reminds me of that line of Eliot's.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one about people who must prepare a face to meet the faces they meet.”

Sandrine's smile was bright enough, but I sensed a certain gloom coming from her. “As do I,” she said.

At the time I'd thought the shadowy darkness of this remark had had to do with her diagnosis, the death that was coming for her, and which even as it came would strip her of all her powers. She was having to prepare a face to meet the faces that would pity her once they learned the news. But now I was not so sure it was her illness that had generated her response to my Eliot reference. Perhaps, in that quick exchange of looks between April and me, she'd seen something that had forced her into a yet deeper deception, a villainous tale whose arch villain was me.

We'd stayed at the party awhile longer, then headed home, Sandrine quite pensive as she sat, watching the town go by with the sort of look one sees in very young children, as if seeing something for the first time.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“How lovely it is,” she answered. “Pull over.”

I did as she asked. We'd gone almost to the far end of the town, where there was a little park. There were swings and monkey bars and whirligigs, but Sandrine's attention was on the shaded area at the near end of the park, where a group of teenagers had gathered.

“Remember Palermo?” she asked.

“What about it?”

“That area where the streets came together,” she said.

“Four Corners.”

“They were dancing that day,” she continued quietly. “Those young people. The girls were in long pleated skirts, and as they danced they kicked very high, and their skirts hung down from their legs like fans.”

I could find nothing to say and so I kept quiet. So did Sandrine, and for a while we sat in silence. Then she said, “Do you think it'll be this way from now on, Sam, that all my memories—no matter how sweet or beautiful—that all my memories will be heartbreaking?”

“I don't know,” I answered. “I hope not.”

This was, God knows, an inadequate answer, but I could find nothing better to say, and so I simply watched as Sandrine held her gaze on a group of young people who seemed quite uninspiring to me, local kids who'd eventually end up in my freshmen English class, where I'd have to remind them—repeatedly and futilely, of course—that “unique” cannot take an adjective.

“You know, Sam, the trouble with not living in the shadow of death,” Sandrine said after a moment, “is that you don't notice how beautiful things are.”

When I said nothing in response to this, she drew in a long breath, then released it slowly. “I've become a cliché, haven't I? The dying woman who mouths nothing but bromides.”

Again, I said nothing, for it seemed to me that what she'd said was, indeed, something of a bromide, and so we sat in silence for a bit longer before Sandrine spoke again.

“You should get yourself another woman, Sam,” she said. “After I'm gone. But not someone like me. Someone who'll make you feel important.” Now her gaze slid over to me. “Someone like . . . April Blankenship.”

I'd laughed out loud at this, because at the time I'd seen not a hint of incendiary sparkle in Sandrine's eyes. But was that only because I'd refused to see it, refused even to address the idea that she might have caught the look April and I had inadvertently exchanged an hour before, seen it and read it and gotten it right? Had that been the moment when I should have known that Sandrine would not go quietly to her grave, but that from then on she would begin to construct a plot whose intricate design was meant to pull me in after her?

We'd later driven in silence the rest of the way home. A pall had fallen over Sandrine. She was deep in thought, perhaps more deeply in thought than I had ever seen her. Once out of the car, she walked directly to the scriptorium, retrieved her Nano, and from there headed into the sunroom, where she put the earbuds in, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes.

I'd felt it best to leave her to herself for a time, but as the hours passed and night fell and she now sat in the total darkness of that no longer sunny room, I had at last made my way out to her. She stirred briefly as I entered, so I knew she'd heard me. Even so, she kept her eyes closed and the earbuds in place, waiting, I suppose, for the current song to end, and only then at last acknowledging that I was in the room.

“Sam,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

Her eyes remained closed but she plucked the earbuds out and let them dangle from her long white fingers for a moment before dropping them into her lap.

“I've made a decision,” she said.

“About what?”

“I don't want to wait for it,” she said. “Death. I don't want to go through all those terrible stages.” Her eyes opened slowly. “You understand? I want to be in control.”

At the time, this had sounded entirely at one with her character, and so I made no argument against whatever decision she had made, or was in the process of making.

“Demerol,” she added quite casually, as if it were merely a final item added to a grocery list. “Tell Dr. Ortins that I've fallen and hurt my back. She'll prescribe all I need.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said softly.

The smile that struggled onto her lips was the saddest I had ever seen. “In the meantime,” she added, “just keep doing what you've been doing, Sam.”