The Cloisters(66)

“So,” I said after ordering a stack of pancakes that I had watched pass by only a minute before, “how are things at Yale?”

“Everything is good,” said Laure, filling the silence, her shoulder pushed close against mine. “I’m sorry about Patrick.” She searched my face as she said it. “I wish I’d known you were there, I would have—” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

I resented her trying to play the big sister when for the last two years in Walla Walla I had fended for myself, never hearing a word from her. I had even emailed Laure for advice when I received my rejection from Yale, but she never responded. It had stung, of course; I was easy to leave behind. But now that I had managed to claw my way back into her world, we were at brunch again, like nothing had ever happened.

“Rachel and I found him,” I said, letting it hang between us.

“Ann—”

But I shook my head, shaking off Laure and the memory. “We’re getting by. I’m getting by. It’s been hardest on Rachel, I think. She knew him longest.”

“And how are things going with her?”

“What do you mean?” Perhaps there was a defensiveness in my voice, because Laure held up a hand, almost placing it on my arm, before deciding to rest it back in her lap instead.

“I just mean—” She took a breath. “Has she been a good colleague? Supportive?”

“She’s more than a colleague,” I said. “She’s a friend.” After last night, I had attributed her harshness in the gallery to the fact that we were all—her, myself, Leo—under an incredible amount of stress. It wasn’t enough—one interaction, one bad moment wasn’t enough to undo the summer we had spent together.

“And you haven’t noticed any”—she let her hand lift and wave loosely, punctuating the pause—“strange behavior?”

“Other than the death of our curator?” I didn’t mean for it to come out as snide, but Laure was finding my edges.

“I’m asking because things happened when Rachel was at Yale.”

I thought of her parents. I knew how a loss like that could shift the gravity of your world.

“In the middle of my first year at Yale, when Rachel was a junior, her roommate died,” Laure said. “She fell out of their window. They lived on the third floor of Branford, an old historic building. Everyone was shocked because so many of the windows in that building had been painted closed for decades. It was unbelievable that someone could even get the windows open, but somehow Rachel did. And right after the Christmas holiday, her roommate jumped. Or fell.” Laure took a sip of coffee and looked at me. “Or she was pushed.”

“Oh my god. Poor Rachel.”

“It turned out they had been roommates since freshman year. They were close, but the day after she died Rachel—”

“Everyone grieves differently,” I interrupted, wanting to head off what I anticipated to be a criticism of Rachel’s behavior in the wake of death.

“That’s the thing, Ann. I don’t think she was grieving. I think she was celebrating.”

Who, I thought, was Laure to judge? I knew how impossible it was for people who hadn’t experienced the loss of a loved one to understand how it remade your world in terrible, strange ways. That you couldn’t judge someone for how they grieved was an understanding Rachel and I shared.

“Did she have an alibi?” I asked.

Laure nodded. “She was in the city.”

“Then why are you suggesting Rachel pushed her?”

“There’s more than one way to push someone,” said Laure softly. I was about to say that I hadn’t seen behavior like that from Rachel when Laure continued, “And it wasn’t just that. She had a habit of treating other people badly. I saw her once, yelling at another student. She was screaming. Acting so loud and chaotic I could only pick up fragments, a refrain she kept saying: you don’t know, you don’t know. I asked another grad student about it, someone who had been at Yale longer than me, and he said that Rachel had a history of being difficult. Apparently, her freshman year she accused a male graduate student of artificially lowering her grade because she wouldn’t sleep with him. There was no material proof, just her word against his. The student ended up having to leave Yale. Then this spring, at a department party, she outed a married professor for having an affair with his student.” Laure took another sip of her coffee. “Everyone at Yale knows she’s smart—really talented, actually—but…” Laure paused. “She’s also pretty unhinged.”

“We’re living together.” I said it as much to refute Laure’s fears as to affirm my own bravery.

“Ann—”

“And we’ve been working together since I arrived.”

“Rachel doesn’t work with others.”

“She does—”

“No. You think you’re working together, but I can assure you Rachel sees it differently.”

The waitress arrived with our breakfasts, but the hunger I had felt leaving Leo’s was gone.

“Ann,” said Laure gently, “do you ever wonder why Rachel picked you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re nice. You’re new here, you’re eager to please. You want to make a name for yourself. But you don’t understand the kind of person you’re dealing with. The world she lives in. The kind of person she is. Rachel will step on as many people as necessary to get what she wants.”