The Headmaster's Wife(48)

One spring morning she wakes to sunlight coming through the tops of the windows where the blinds don’t reach. She gets a sense of blue sky. She rolls over and she does not know what time it is. Arthur is gone, of course, already left for the administration building. He might be mad but he is somehow still remarkably punctual. It is probably midmorning, and soon she will be expected at the library, though she is not thinking about that, not thinking about it at all.

She rises and considers her closet. All this waste, she thinks, looking over the array of dresses that have been worn only a few times, the piles of sweaters on the shelves, the shoes stacked neatly against the far wall. She was never much of a clotheshorse, but that is not what she is looking at. What she is looking at is the accrual of a life, things bought, things discarded, and somehow this is what has survived. All these sensible clothes.

She cannot be decisive, not today, and she turns away from them, and once again she is drawn to the blue sky sliding through the crack of sky. She goes to the hallway and for a moment she lingers at the top of the stairs—so grand, these stairs, swooping down and then around like something out of an old movie. The kind of stairs that women are carried up. She lingers there for a moment in her nightgown, and down below she can see the windows that line the front door, and the sunlight, the sunlight of spring, streams through them with a warmth that draws her.

Then down the stairs she goes, and instead of to the kitchen and to coffee, she goes to the door, opens it. The day is warm. The campus in front of her is silent. She watches a car make its way down the rural highway between their house and the other side, where the quad and the old part of Lancaster School are. Even though the day is warm, it is early spring and the grass on their front lawn still has patches of dirty snow in the corner, and the grass that is exposed is pressed down, brown and wet.

She can see between the buildings on the other side, and the walkways are all empty; no one is coming in and out of the doors. It must be second or third period, and everyone is in class. This brings a smile to her face for some reason, the clear regimentation, students and faculty moving with the synchronicity of swallows.

She steps onto the lawn and she grins again, this time from the cold and squish of the soft lawn on her bare feet, surprisingly pleasant, and then the feel of the slightly crunchy snow at the edges as she begins to walk. She walks around the house and then makes her way down the slight slope to the flat of the soccer field, and soon she is halfway across it, walking with purpose now, the sun warm on her face, though the breeze on her legs and ruffling her nightgown still has some of winter’s breath.

In front of her are the girls’ dorms, the low-slung brick buildings where she lived as a student almost forty years ago, and where she lived as a dorm parent ten years after that. They, too, look deserted, since everyone is on the other side of the campus.

She comes off the raised soccer field and onto the cold asphalt of the access road that runs in front of the dorms. She crosses it and then between her old dorm, Fuller, with Jameson to her right. On the left corner she passes the room she lived in her junior year and instinctively she looks toward the window, and because the shade is drawn, the only thing she sees is her reflection staring back at her, her hair wild, her face haggard with age and a morning without a shower or makeup. She looks like a ghost, she thinks, which in some ways she is.

She emerges on the other side, and at first she cannot see the river. She can see only the broad swath of land on the other side, snow-speckled, leading to the trees standing like rows of sentinels in the distance.

But, coming forward, stepping in deeper snow, up to her ankles in the lee of the building, she sees it now, a hint of blue caught in the sun. She walks until she reaches its banks and looks down at a winter’s worth of runoff. The river is high and fast and silty, swirling and swirling with quick-moving currents. She stares at them. They are violent and almost mesmerizing. As if an invisible hand were running sticks angrily across the surface of the water. Breaking the plane and then pulling up suddenly, the ripple disappearing as if it has run its course.

The wind coming off the fields in front of her blows directly at her and takes the thin cloth of her nightgown and presses it tightly against her skin. She raises her arms to her side and holds them out and then she closes her eyes.

Falling is the easy part, she tells herself. We think it’s not, but it is. We are just taught not to do it. All you have to do is say yes. Say yes, Betsy, she says. Just say yes.

She goes up on her tippy toes. She leans forward. She opens her eyes as gravity does its work, and the last thing she sees is the blue sky, and the brown of the fields, and the water rushing toward her. She closes her eyes as she tumbles underneath it, instinctively holding her breath for the smallest of moments before allowing the river to fill her, suspend her, take her and not let go.





AFTER





Russell Hurley turns toward one of the men.

He says, “Do you think I could have a few minutes alone with Mr. Winthrop?”

The man nods. The two of them get up and leave the room. Russell sits down across from Arthur. He studies his eyes for signs of sentience, but it is like looking in a mirror. All he sees is reflection, and he wonders if it will be possible for Arthur to be whole again or if he will live the rest of his life in the shadows.

“Arthur,” he says. “I don’t expect you to understand everything.”