The Headmaster's Wife(25)

So I slide her white tights back up over her legs, and then I put on her black pencil skirt. Next I struggle a little with her bra, but once it is on, I put on her white button-down, slowly lifting each button through the hole, finishing by tucking the shirt into the top of her skirt.

Outside, the night has cleared and it is now bitter cold. The wind is not as vicious as it was, but it still runs right through me as I walk. It is late. The campus is silent and asleep. Dwayne, the night security, is the only one I might run into, but I know from experience that he seldom leaves the security shed, and if he does, it is to smoke cigarettes in the dark in front of it. That is on the other side of campus.

Betsy is in my arms, wrapped tightly in a wool blanket. I hold her like a lamb, my arms underneath the mass of her, cradling her. In my arms across the snowy fields, she is suddenly amazingly heavy. It feels like the weight of her will tear my arms off. I look up and measure with my eyes the distance to the girls’ dorms, the dorms my father built, the dorms that meant a Betsy Pappas would be at Lancaster at all. It feels impossibly far, but I remember the old rule about long treks and look down at my feet. I take it one step at a time.

The wind is icy on my face, and my fingers are cold. The ache in my arms is almost too much to bear. But at the same time, I can look up and fix my eyes on the horizon, and there are the winter stars in the sky. I can see the great curve of the earth, arcing away from me, and for a second I have that awareness of movement, the ceaseless, endless spinning that keeps us locked on the ground.

I come down the small slope before the girls’ dorms, and the dorms themselves are black in the night. In the far corner, where Mr. Linder and his family live, there is the glow of lamplight in the window. Otherwise it is as it should be: sleeping students, silence.

I am going to the only place that makes sense to me right now. When I reach it, when I reach the river, I stop and take a moment before I continue. I lay Betsy down on the snowy bank, and it is good to have my arms back, the numbness receding up my limbs.

It is dark here, since there is no moon. But under the starlight, I can see where the water still flows in places and where it is still, covered with a light tarp of gray ice. I can see across to where the other bank rises sharply, and then, in the distance, the barren fields of New Hampshire, a darker black against the thin light of the sky. I look up and, for a moment, study the infinite stars. The thing about stars is that we cannot tell, with the naked eye, which ones are alive and well and which ones have already died but have not told us yet.

I bend down and, for the final time, gather Betsy in my arms. I step forward and then take a slight step downward on the bank. When my shoes reach the river’s edge, I feel the crumble of ice, and then the water is in them, shockingly cold water, around my ankles and soaking my socks, but I do not care. I step forward again, and now the water is up to my calves. I breathe in deep against the cold.

And then I turn sideways. I want to get this right. She is so heavy. Betsy is so heavy. It takes all the strength I have, but I lean back and, transferring the weight from my right arm to my left, I push her out into the air as much as I can. One moment she is there, and the next moment she is not, and when she hits the ice, the sound is strangely beautiful. The ice is thin, and it cracks immediately on impact. It is like glass breaking—no, more subtle than that. It crumples underneath her like the crust on a crème br?lée from a fork’s pressure, and then there is the sound of the water spilling up around her, pulling her down to the bottom of the river.





Returning from the river to my house, I am aware of every sound. The smallest of things seems amplified now, my foot pressing on the loose floorboard of the third step on the stairs sounds like the crack of breaking ice.

I am curiously calm and want nothing more than to sleep. I want to close my eyes and disappear into sleep. But I know sleep will be elusive tonight, and it is, and I am lying in bed haunted by what took place just hours before in this very house when Elizabeth comes to me.

I do not remember the door opening, but suddenly she is there. It has been a long time since she came into my room, into my bed. She stands for a moment at the edge of the bed, and in the half light I see the length of her nightgown and the outline of her. She moves into the bed. We have not made love in years, and yet, without her saying anything, I know this is why she is here.

“Are you awake?” she says.

“Yes.”

She comes into the bed and curls herself with her back to me. It is familiar, and we know just what to do. I trace her arms with my fingers, her skin so different from the skin I touched the night before, ashy to my touch. I wrap my arms around her, and when it is time, we move together in silence with the yellow moonlight falling through the window. It is tender and beautiful, and for a moment it makes me sad, and I know, somehow, I know, that this is the last time we will ever make love.

After a while she says, “What happened to us, Arthur?”

“What do you mean?”

“When did we get so old?”

I look toward the window. I don’t know whether to laugh. I say, “I don’t know.”

“Well, it sucks.”

This time I do laugh. “It does.”

We fall asleep that way, her backed into me, my arms around her, my face pressed into the nape of her neck. When I wake in the morning, there is no sign of her. I roll toward her side of the bed and it is perfectly made, as if she never slept there. She is gone.