The Madwoman Upstairs (24 page)

At the time, Dad was dead and my mother was living with me in Boston. I read and reread the headlines and paced back and forth on our patio, barefoot, clutching the paper in my hands and thinking how nice it was that at least Dad would never have to know. I never told my mother, since I knew it would upset her. She had never liked it when my father spoke of Rebecca. The knowledge of my former tutor’s demise was my own burden.

Back in my tower, my fingers were numb and shaking and it took me three tries to type the right name into Google.
Rebecca Smith dies at sea, breaking news, lover, yacht
. I pressed enter. Immediately, several articles appeared.
Mystery at Sea, Mystery at Sea.
I felt vindicated, but only for a very short moment. A closer inspection and a more thorough reading told me that this was not, in fact, the woman I knew. This Rebecca Smith—the one who died—had been a grade-school teacher and romance novelist.

I sank back in my seat. My heart was no longer pounding; it was bleeding, spilling all over me. Whoever had invented this life for me had had a sick sense of humor. I was furious—not at myself but at the child version of myself, the one who had put curlers in her hair, read something in the paper, and wanted so badly to believe it that she must not have thought to finish the article. This, as my father used to say, was what happened when people didn’t do close reading.

I thought of all the pity I had wasted over the years. In the days after Rebecca had “died,” I dressed in black and refused to eat. I took a bath with all my clothes on, submerged my head, and waited in the dirty bubbles until I thought I would implode. I denied myself cheese and avocados, in a self-imposed mourning ritual whose genesis I can’t actually remember. I pressed all ten fingers against my lips and blew a kiss to the sky, thinking,
God bless you, Rebecca,
even though I was not religious, and God probably didn’t take requests from imposters. I did a lot of things out of guilt, because I had never had the courage to admit the truth: I hated Rebecca.

Really, very passionately—I hated her. It was a loathing so pure that in its absolute form, it might have passed for love. But it was the kind of hatred you could only admit to when someone has
not
died in unspeakable tragedy. Only after knowing she was alive was I able to acknowledge what I had been hiding for years. I was now, perhaps for the first time, a reliable narrator.

Memories came back to me in their uncorrupted, unfictionalized form: Rebecca sitting at the kitchen table, eating my mother’s old Swiss chocolates; Rebecca by the paddling pool, taking my old spot next to my father; Rebecca using the master-bathroom shower, even on Monday mornings. She stayed over when our lessons went late into the evening and she didn’t want to drive home—at least, that was what she said. As time went on, she started filling the master bathroom with things she would need for the night: toothpaste, floss, lipstick.

Sometimes, I would sneak in through the window and take things from the guest room where she slept. Yes, technically, I “stole.” It was immoral, probably, but I saw it as just. I would nick her magazines, her scarves, her nail-polish remover—little things that at the time seemed like grand victories. Rebecca always made me return them to her, eventually, but I remained undeterred. I’m sure I made her life as miserable as she made mine. The only comment I remember her making on the subject of my thefts was also the only piece of advice she ever gave me: we were sitting down over linear equations one morning when she turned to me, coolly, and said,
The only thing you own in this world is your reputation, Samantha. Don’t let it be tampered with.
I had never been able to decide whether she had been advising me or threatening me.

I paced the loose floorboards of my tower, refusing to look directly at the corner in which I had stacked
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
Agnes Grey
. I supposed I had found the woman who had delivered them. I felt cheated. If anyone were to come back to life, it should have been my father. I sat on the edge of my bed and methodically arranged the pillows around me. All I could think of were Rebecca’s two blank eyes staring at me from the depths of a vast ocean. Quietly, I reached for my bedsheet and hung it back over
The Governess
.

That Thursday, I broke into Rebecca’s office.

If that sounds drastic and illegal, it’s because it was drastic and illegal. To be fair, I did not go to the Faculty Wing with the intention of breaking in. It was the day before my trip to Paris. My suitcase was waiting for me back in my tower. All I meant to do was pop by, politely request the rest of my books, and demand a thorough explanation of what the hell was going on.

Instead, it happened like this: I crept into the Faculty Wing at 4:55 p.m., and spent twenty minutes trying to locate Rebecca’s office, which turned out to be in a vaulted corridor in the South Wing that reeked of rubber and shoe polish. I found the office easily enough—it was in the corner, with the same misleading last name that I had discovered in the paper.
Defoe
. Her office door was old. I noticed that the lock was on its last legs. I knocked once, then twice, then once more again, but there was no response. I knocked harder. I was angry. I had finally tracked her down—would she avoid me? I knocked again and again. I could feel the door rattling. I took the door handle in my hand and pushed on it, and then I pushed some more, and then, after one hard shove, there I was.

I had entered so easily that for a brief second I thought that it must have all been a trick: Rebecca would erupt out of the closet, ready to whack me with some partial differential equations. But there was no one inside. Her office was sunny and incalculably clean. The only thing that felt out of place was the wrappings of what must have been a meal once—tuna fish and cheddar, right on her desk. Hadn’t she thought to throw away her lunch? What a pig.

My heart was pounding. I thought of the
Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures
, and wondered if the punishment for stealing from a don’s room would include the swift seizure of my lands and castles. I should have realized the gravity of my crime and left. I did not do that. Instead, I took a slow turn about the room. My lip curled in resentment. Rebecca has been alive this entire time, eating tuna fish. There was a refrigerator in the corner of the room—black, with a white rectangle in the middle. I thought of what I might find inside: a watermelon, jam, a bottle of white wine. Two Beefeater Gibsons. A human heart. On the desk was a pile of problem sets with some eigenvectors drawn in pencil. Nearby was a small sticky note attached to the lampshade, reading,
Thanks for the advice; I love you with all my heart, Rebecca.
I made a face, and looked around, as though the person who had written it was standing somewhere nearby, smoking something.

I set about searching for what I’d come for, except that I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly. Proof? Proof of what? Proof that the square root of any negative number was imaginary? Because in that case, there was ample evidence collected in a small avalanche of books on the desk:
Vector Calculus
,
Additive Problems in Combinatorial Number Theory
,
Graduate Texts in Mathematics
. They smelled like damp bread and deep June. They reminded me of algebra at eight in the morning, and the scent of freshly cut grass out the window.

One part of Rebecca’s room demanded further inspection. On the wall behind her desk, she had hung dozens and dozens of framed documents. I peered closer so I could read them. I stopped. For a woman who had won a mountain of awards in her lifetime, the only documents on her walls were framed copies of what appeared to be exams that she had failed, letters of rejection from different universities, notes from various publishers who had spurned her first book. This office—this well-lit, corner office—was a symbol of her academic triumph, and yet she had decorated it with a lifetime of petty failures. I had seen only one other person do the same—my father.

Everything seemed wrong, all of a sudden. The seriousness of the situation piled on top of me. It occurred to me that in all the times I had stolen something from Rebecca’s room in our own home, I had never gotten away with it.

Unease mounting, I searched through Rebecca’s bookshelf quickly, with sloppy fingers. My heart was slamming against my chest. I scanned the books of matrices and linear equations and I panicked, because it occurred to me that Rebecca’s sandwich might not be old at all. It was today’s sandwich.
Stupid girl,
I told myself—
it was
today’s. Rebecca would come back, and I would have to jump into the closet, which wasn’t—

There. There it was.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
It was wedged in between
Elementary Quantum Mechanics
and
Advanced Game Theory
. It was thick and swollen, like it had been fed and fattened for years and now couldn’t fit comfortably into anything. I plucked it from its position on the shelf. There was no back cover. I recognized the spot on the front where it had been chewed on the corner—by what I had never exactly been sure. Yes, yes, it was my father’s copy. It had been here the whole time.

I frowned. There was something new that I didn’t remember from my childhood. A bookmark was sticking out of the middle like a grasping, empty hand. I flipped the book open to the marked page. There was Emily Dickinson’s sneering face, peering out at me as if from behind bars. I didn’t understand. My bookmark had been red. This one—this new, strange one—was yellow, and reeked of perfume. I had never seen a yellow Emily Dickinson bookmark in our house. I rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger.
Much Madness Is Divinest Sense.
I was short of breath. These were supposed to be father-daughter bookmarks. They were not supposed to be father-daughter-and-math-teacher bookmarks. I was supposed to be the sole benefactor of his strange little games. Had my father been splitting his affection in half?

I let out a small wheeze. I put both bookmark and book under my arm and headed for the door. I didn’t bother looking back. I needed to leave. In a moment, I had ejected myself from Rebecca Smith’s office. I slammed the door but the lock clanked and it refused to close entirely. It was broken.

Then, I did the same thing any criminal would do. I walked down the hall, quite calmly, and fled the country. I was under the English Channel before Oxford could even say,
Expelled.

CHAPTER 11

I
had begun a race against time. It was only a matter of days before Old College would discover that I had broken into a professor’s office. I no longer belonged at Oxford. I had violated the implicit pact between teacher and student. The Serpent had sounded a gong, and there I fell, down from heaven. I would be ritually hanged and quartered, then retroactively denied dining hall privileges.

I spent Friday morning on the train to Paris, wallowing in guilt and visions of execution. There were two people seated next to me in the airline-blue, septic train booth: a man wearing an electric-green blazer and a mother wearing a squalling, fat-cheeked baby in a sack on her torso. Every few moments the kid would let rip its shrill harpy cry, and the man in green would look to the ceiling in response, as though he had taken up an argument with God.

“Don’t worry,” the mother said, sweating through a confident smile. She patted the baby on the back as it wailed. “I brought drugs.”

The man said, “For us too?”

I had
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
in front of me. I hadn’t touched it since I removed it from my bag an hour earlier. The woman on the cover, a middle-aged brunette with a receding hairline, looked like someone who had gone through everything there was to go through in life—twice. Both she and I seemed to recognize the newfound responsibility that had befallen us. Mine was to understand her; hers was to make herself understood.

My ears popped and unpopped as we sped underneath the English Channel, and the baby, on cue, released a blazing foghorn of a cry. His mother patted him on the back and started singing an original composition called “Wash my body, yeah, yeah, yeah.” I realized that she was looking at
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
with some curiosity, the way she would regard a sad Italian opera she couldn’t quite understand: beautiful, but somehow useless.

Near the French border, I opened up the book. This novel was not a pleasure read.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
was a mess. Chaos. It was Anne’s emotional vomit, masked in cool, reserved prose. She had written too many narrators, too many stories within stories, too many secrets that no one was allowed to share. It was what happened to an author when she was very, very angry, and trying to tell a complicated story far too quickly.
Tenant—
published after
Jane Eyre
,
Agnes Grey
, and
Wuthering Heights—
was the literary equivalent of a Russian doll: a diary inside a letter inside a book. This was not a story to get lost in. This was a story that reminded you, page after page, that it had been
written
. You could not help but be aware that there had been an author, that her name had been Anne Brontë, or that she had sat down one night at a lonely table, trying to figure out the best way to spill some secrets.