The Remedy for Love: A Novel (2 page)

Two

A HUGE SNOWSTORM
was predicted, first big snow of the season, the inaugural flakes desultorily falling, some kind of unusual confluence of low-pressure and high-pressure and rogue systems, lots of blather on the radio as if a little snow were nuclear warfare or an asteroid bearing down. Eric liked his old Ford Explorer at times like this, even though (as Alison always said) it was a gas pig. He put his groceries in the back, if you could call them groceries, and swung out and across the glazed lot—last week’s ice storm—and there was the young woman, staggering and limping under that mountain of a coat but making determined progress, her seven plastic bags hanging from her arms like dead animals. Eric pulled up beside her but she didn’t stop walking, didn’t look.

“I can give you a lift,” he called.

“Okay,” she said to his surprise, still without looking. He’d expected her to demur in some proud way. He helped her load her stuff next to his in the back and then the two of them got all of his legal folders and books and naked cassette tapes and envelopes and other junk out of her way on the passenger seat, and she climbed in.

“Seatbelt,” Eric said.

She buckled up reluctantly.

“Where are you?” Eric said as he pulled into traffic.

She looked puzzled, peered around the edges of her hood, really caught his eye for the first time.

“I mean, where to?”

“Oh. Like, Route 138. Out toward Houk’s Corners. Just out of town the other way. Before the bridge. Maybe a mile before the bridge.”

“That’s six miles easily. Maybe seven.”

“I didn’t mean to buy so much. I’d already put a bunch of stuff back. I had another box of wine. I had oatmeal. Too heavy.”

“You thought you were going to walk the whole way?”

“I can’t believe you still have cassettes. I love cassettes. The way the tape is right there? You can touch the fucking music.” She looked at him quickly, then straight ahead, like someone driving, in fact watched the road minutely, sinking back into her coat. Her stench had begun to permeate the car. In profile, cut by the hood, her chin and nose and forehead lined up in a certain sculptural way. She wasn’t just anybody, Eric realized, and began to string together a tale of mental illness in a good family, runaway patient, perhaps, or just a college kid off her meds. He’d dealt with more than a few of those, too, on both sides of the family equation. He also knew how easy it was to be wrong about these things: best not to have theories.

Gently he said, “I forgot my wallet once. I mean, it happens to everyone.”

“I don’t even have a wallet,” she said quickly, and he realized his mistake: whatever had happened to her certainly did not happen to everyone.

After that, they rode in silence. At the traffic light by the Park ’n’ Ride, Joan Killen was in the next lane, silent Prius. She didn’t look, but might have been interested if she had, her proper small-town attorney accompanied by some scruffy young woman in a darkly quilted hood.

“Now where on 138 again?” Eric said.

“Across from the veterinary?”

“Oh, okay. Right. My dog goes there. Used to go there.”

“You make it sound like a
girl’s
school.” Brief glance. Her voice was throaty, melodic despite her.

He didn’t want her to stop talking. He said, “You go to the college?”

“I go wherever I want.”

“And where have you wanted to go?”

“Nowhere.”

“And yet you’re here.”

“Actually I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“I’m a ghost, if you want to know.” She slipped the hood back to see him better, tugged it off, whiff of mildew, faint trace of amusement leaving her face. Her hair looked like it had been chopped with a machete on one side, thinned with animal bites on the other, anyway it bunched heavily, with bald spots. Hair like that, you might
want
to wear a hood.

Eric said, “What did you study?”

“Study?”

“At the college.”

“Elementary ed and mathematics,” she said. There was an old cut on the top of her ear, might have been pretty bad, dried blood. “I’m good at mathematics. Also archeology, which was great, and English composition, which was okay.” A yellowing bruise on her neck. She said, “I got my teaching certificate, um, last spring. And then in the fall I had an actual, real job. Watch the fucking road.”

The road was damp, nothing worse than that, and well paved, and empty, not that 138 was ever crowded, or even busy. Eric kept his eyes ahead, said, “You were graduated last spring?”

“Last May.”

“Nontraditional student?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well. You’re a little older than the usual, that’s all.”

“They don’t get many ghosts.”

“And you earned your teaching certificate.”

“They gave it to me, anyway.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“The college. Who do you think?”

At the sound of her tone, defensive, Eric said, “Of course. The college.” But he knew from a recent and painful false-credentials case that the state conferred certification, not the college. You had to apply for certification. It cost money. You had to provide fingerprints, full set, and that cost you, too: fifty-five bucks. He also knew when someone was lying. And English composition was a first-year course. Why would you mention that when you’d just been graduated?

“I didn’t love teaching,” she said.

He couldn’t help but return her sudden stare, unnerving, the remains of her bangs standing up as if in surprise. Still, face-on there was even more to her than he’d begun to think, intelligence, for one thing. And some kind of basic honesty. Her mouth was full with a dent in the top lip, off-center. Her nose was like a tired dog that had found a warm place to lie down and sleep. And she’d relaxed maybe a notch, kept his eye. She needed to wash her face, that’s all—she was sooty, plain dirty.

“What grade?” Eric said at last. He’d done hundreds of these interviews. You look at the police report, meet with the client, keep it friendly, try to put two and two together, draw inferences, become a master of observation, figure out what’s true and what’s not, try, when there’s a choice, to take cases you can actually win. Not much choice lately.

She let the tiniest smile arrive, cut it off short when she saw he noticed. “Maybe third,” she said. “Or maybe all of them.”

“All of the grades, you mean?”

She sought protection from his gaze, tweaked her own soft nose, clearly designed by the ghost shop to add some femininity to a rather hard face. “The principal adored me.”

“What was his name?”

“He hated me.”

“Both?”

“People are complicated.”

He said, “Two sides to every coin.”

So quick: “And two to most clichés.”

“I’ll have to think about that.”

“Watch the road.”

They were getting close to the veterinarian’s. Eric found himself driving more slowly. He said, “What was the school called?”

“Captain Arnold Elementary, named for Benedict Arnold, who not everyone knows made a heroic trek through Maine to attack the French at Montreal. We were happy at first.”

“Who’s we?”

“Jimmy and me. He taught phys ed. I loved teaching third grade—third and fourth together, actually. Nine kids with two sets of twins. I miss them slightly.”

“Slightly.”

“One of the twin-parents complained. About, like, nothing. I didn’t explain the homework supposedly, which was like a math sheet with instructions, which I copied right off the curriculum they make you use. And Mr. Guest calls me in and there’s no support of any kind coming from him. So I call my advisor back at the college here and she just says, ‘Keep your head down, honey.’ And then the really nice parents . . .”

“The ones you slightly miss.”

“I don’t miss them at all. They come in for parents’ night and the other twins’ dad stands up—he’s like this rotund, bank-president, logger-swagger, king-of-the-garbage-men kind of guy with his wife pushing him—and he says the
meek
kids are bullying
his
kids. But, come on! The meek kids? They’re like these little fragile brainy wisps five years ahead of everyone else. And what Mr. Guest didn’t tell me is that these kids’ very nice parents had complained the year before about how
their
kids were being bullied. And so anyway the very nice dad bravely says, Nonsense. And the bank-president, logger-swagger dad says, And you, the teacher, just letting it happen? And I’m like, I wouldn’t ever! And Mr. Guest is like, Anyone else? And yes, like two other parents get up and repeat the whole thing, say that these meek little twins have been bullying their kids and as the teacher I’m letting it happen.”

Eric slowed his car, stopped on the inadequate shoulder, pulled a little further ahead. He said, “There’s the veterinary clinic.”

“But it’s just not true, outlandishly not true. So I’m like, Well, let’s think about how to communicate about this as adults and role models. And one of the moms gets up and says if I don’t get control of my classroom.”

There was nothing across from the vet’s. Eric said, “Where did you say your house was?”

She pointed vaguely to the dense forest. “I’m down there.”

“Down where?”

“Oh, it’s nice. Don’t worry. It’s down on the river.”

And there was, if you looked, a bit of a path. She climbed out of the car. Eric helped her recover her groceries, and between them, Eric felt, was this overwhelming feeling of loss (or maybe it was just Eric, his lonely mood), anyway the feeling that she wasn’t ever going to get to tell him the rest of her story, that he wasn’t ever going to get to hear it, get to the bottom of it, clear the discrepancies, something he was very, very good at and enjoyed, the best part of his work. He couldn’t help it, said, “So you’re not there anymore. At Captain Arnold Elementary.”

Her head jerked faintly at his remembering the name. “Not there, no. Last April I just got in my car and left. Left them in the lurch, as they say.”

“So you quit?”

“Well, not really.”

A cold wind was picking up, flecks of wet snow.

“Well then, you were fired. You were unfairly fired.” Eric in the back of his lawyerly mind was already winning a breach-of-contract suit, with damages.

“I was fired for quitting, I guess.”

Then again, it might all be rubbish. He said, “Well, maybe sometime I’ll hear the whole story.” The river was pretty far down, by Eric’s estimation. Maybe half a mile or more, and steep terrain. Or maybe the young woman just didn’t want him to know where she actually lived, laudable caution.

She said, “ ‘It sifts from leaden sleeves, it powders all the wood.’ ”

“Okay,” Eric said.

She said, “We had to memorize a poem. In English class. That one was short, at least.”

Eric let his face brighten: “Oh, I get it. The snow. Nice.”

“ ‘Sieves,’ I mean. ‘It sifts from leaden sieves.’ ”

And here it came: one flake, two, a third one over here, and then suddenly the millions, dropping fast and hard, the wind suddenly whipping.

He said, “We’re supposed to get a lot, I guess. Storm of the century, that’s what I heard. Of course that’s what they always say.”

“And then there’s something about ruffling the wrists of fence posts.”

Eric’s car was mostly parked on the road, and the two of them just stood behind it, as if that were where people always chatted. He said, “High winds later and over two feet of snow, three feet or even more in some areas.”

“Some areas. That’s us, isn’t it? We’re always ‘some areas.’ It snowed I think twenty-five feet up there last winter, in Presque Isle. The roads were like driving down canyons.”

“I like your poem,” Eric said. “And just the idea of fence posts with wrists, nice.”

“I didn’t write it.” She let a long moment pass, finally began to gather her bags, picking them up by their many handles one by one till she and her coat were weighted down like a circus tent against the wind. “Well, thanks,” she said.

“My pleasure,” Eric said slowly. Again, that charitable rumbling up from his toes, a kind of twitching in his hands, his jaw, the words coming to his lips: “I could help you down.”

“No,” she said.

The snow was falling in earnest now, large, wet flakes. There had better damn well be a house down there. “Please,” Eric said.

“No,” she said again and put the enormous hood back over her head. She hefted those bags—easily fifty pounds dangling off her bare hands—and hunched off down the path a step at a time, definite hitch in her gait, painful to see. Eric watched her a moment, watched a little more, then climbed in his car, honked a couple of times to say good luck. She turned slightly, shrugged heavily by way of a wave, the weight of all that crap she’d bought. No ghost had ever been so tied to the earth as she.

Eric tore his eyes from her plight, drove off.

The snow had already begun to accumulate on the road—a kind of slush that would turn to ice when evening came, temperatures to plummet midway through the afternoon as the storm “re-intensified,” or so the serious taller guy on the Weather Channel had warned, possibly several days of snow, likely record-breaking, if the various systems lined up.

Eric decided to go the long way, enjoy the snowfall, so no U-turn but straight ahead on 138, driving slowly, the sweeping curve down the hill and over the new bridge. Beneath which the Woodchurch River was flowing deep and swift after an autumn of rains, iced now only at the banks and fringes, boulders like mounds of glass. Long glimpse, then up and up to Houk’s Corners, the gas station there, also the defunct video club where he and Alison used to rent art movies. He felt his own temperature had plummeted, something unnamed re-intensifying inside him, that charity again, or maybe plain kindness, the stuff he was really made of and had lately kept too close. That young woman, practically dragging her bags of groceries.

He turned around in the Mobil station at the Corners and headed back, parked at the veterinarian’s, which was the only building in sight, Dr. Mia Arnold, from Switzerland. He’d won a case against her just the spring before, some ultra-fancy show dog she’d euthanized in a mix-up. The snow was thick, wet, very heavy. But life continued as usual—a bearded man chunking down Dr. Arnold’s wheelchair ramp with an enormous black dog in tow, a put-together college girl climbing the stairs the other way with a kitten cupped in her hands, the dogs back in the boarding kennels oddly silent. It was still only early afternoon, plenty of time, but the sky was dark and getting darker, a notch colder, too, the wind picking up, snow in Eric’s face as he crossed the street to the young woman’s path.