The Headmaster's Wife(26)

For a while there is silence in the room. Then the man says, “So, you killed her.”

Arthur sighs. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Have you been listening to me?”

“Yes, of course we have. How did she die?”

“I suffocated her.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugs.

“Is there more to it?”

“There is always more to it. But not now. I am tired.”

He puts his head down on the desk then, and it feels good, having his head down. The desk is not wood but some kind of fake wood, and there is something cool about it, like when you put your head against the cool porcelain of a toilet when vomiting.

He thinks, I have nothing more to say. But now that they know the truth they will not let me go. Maybe he has erred, though there is only one story to tell and it needed to be told. He lifts his head as the man who does all the talking says, “There is someone we think you should meet.”

“Who?”

“He’s an attorney.”

“I don’t want a lawyer.”

“He’s not your lawyer. He’s … he’s not going to be your lawyer. He just is a lawyer.”

“I don’t care to meet him.”

“He came down here to see you. We’ll just bring him in for a moment, okay?”

He turns then, the man who does all the talking does, and all it takes is for him to turn and a moment later the door opens. A man comes in the room, late middle-aged, tall, a thick head of gray hair brushed back from a full, wide face. He wears a suit, a nice one, Arthur notices, though it doesn’t fit him particularly well.

“Hello, Arthur,” the new man, the lawyer, says, and he looks up at him, and suddenly there is a flicker of remembrance, and he knows he knows this man but he cannot put a finger on how.

“Hello,” he says.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No,” he says. “I do not.”

“My name is Russell Hurley.”

He sits up and looks at him. He peers at his face. He tilts his head to the side, as if this will provide a better look. He remembers being in his office and imagining Russell Hurley as he might become when he grew old. Now he is looking at the man’s face, and the effect is at once disconcerting and puzzling. Is this one of their stunts?

“The Russell Hurley I know is nineteen years old,” he says.

“Arthur,” he says. “We were classmates. At Lancaster. For most of a year, until I was … until I was asked to leave. We never talked about it, but I think you know why. But that is a matter for a long time ago, water under the bridge. We lived in the same dorm. We both lived in Spencer.”

“Impossible. You were a student last year. You played basketball. You dated Betsy Pappas.”

“All true,” the man says, bending his tall frame and putting his big hands down on the table in front of him. “Except that I was not a student last year. You and I were students together almost forty years ago.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Arthur, Betsy Pappas was your wife. You married her.”





EXPECTATIONS





Army specialist Ethan Winthrop, Lancaster School class of 2002, steps onto a dusty road and sees stars. His only crime is that he doesn’t mind being the first one out when the Hummer grinds to a halt, for while, outside, the midday sun is unrelenting, inside the crowded vehicle it is even hotter. Ethan opens the back door and climbs down. His rifle is slung over his right shoulder. Everything is quiet. Everything is still. It is whisper quiet. Ethan looks around. His eyes scan the cluster of small buildings and then beyond them to the open desert. Not a living thing moves, and this pleases him. Movement is what they train for. In truth, he loves this moment, being out front, sensing the men behind him without seeing them. All of it is right here for him, what he has been built for, he thinks. When he was first in-country, hearing a mortar land, the fear ran through him like water. Some men never get over that, but he has found this place where he can go where it all falls away, where things are simple: his footsteps, the heat, the weight of the rifle where it hangs off his shoulder like another arm.

He loves this realization about himself, that there is something in this world he’s good at, and just as he thinks this, he steps forward again, and now he hears something, a sound no more than a dull pop—confusing, really, this sound, the IED going off—and when he turns back to look at the men in his squad, there is that frozen-in-time moment when he sees something in their faces, surprise or horror, he cannot be sure. Everything is suddenly soupy. He wants to say, “Hey, fellas, what’s up? What is it?”

But Ethan Winthrop has no way of knowing that what they are looking at is vastly different from anything he can perceive. For the surreal truth is that half of Ethan’s face is no longer there, and unbeknownst to him as well, his right arm is skidding brightly across the dirt road like a cigarette butt someone has tossed.





From Basra they take Ethan Winthrop to Baghdad and then fly him to a hospital in Germany, where he lives nine long days made less miserable by pillowy morphine dreams. When the time comes, there isn’t a damn thing they can do for him anymore. He goes as quickly as smoke. His flag-draped casket joins others on a cargo plane, where it first goes to Andrews Air Force Base and then to Logan Airport, where it is taken by hearse to Lancaster, Vermont.