Mrs. Fletcher(64)

“Good Christ,” said Al. “I can’t even look at this.”

The picture on the screen showed young Mark in a basketball uniform, looming over his scrawny teammates.

“The only good thing that happened to me in junior high was that I started playing basketball in a serious way,” Dr. Fairchild observed. A flurry of images followed, documenting Mark Fairchild’s career as a high school superstar. Some of the photos came from newspapers and yearbooks; others were candid shots taken at school or home. In every one of them, even those taken in classrooms or on a living room couch, Mark was wearing a basketball uniform or a warm-up suit with long pants and a zippered top.

“I felt like myself on the court. That was the only place. Everywhere else I felt like a big mistake.”

To illustrate this point, a prom photo appeared, Mark Fairchild tall and handsome in a classic black tuxedo, his arm around a pretty girl in a shiny pink gown. The girl was beaming with happiness, Mark not so much.

“I remember that night so clearly. I was miserable in my tux. I wanted to be in a gown like the one my date was wearing, to feel the skirt swish against my legs while I danced. I just wanted to feel pretty on my prom night, to be seen for who I truly was.”

“That’s wrong,” Al muttered. “It’s unnatural.”

Julian had finally had enough.

“Dude,” he snapped. “Could you please be quiet? People are trying to listen.”

Al wasn’t offended. In fact, he seemed genuinely interested in Julian’s opinion.

“Do you think that’s natural?” he asked.

“There’s nothing natural about gender,” Julian informed him. “It’s a social construction.”

Al shook his head. “I don’t know what that means.”

Julian was sorry he’d opened his mouth. Luckily his phone buzzed, saving him from further explanation.

“Excuse me,” he said, reaching into his pocket.

It was Ethan again, reminding him to bring a sleeping bag.

I’m not coming, Julian wanted to write, but he couldn’t think of a good excuse.

I have plans?

I hate the bus?

I don’t want to sleep on the floor?

He was still staring at the empty text bubble when he noticed that someone was crouching beside him in the aisle. It was the young woman in the polka-dot dress, Eve Fletcher’s employee. She was looking at him with a sour expression, as if he were the troublemaker who was ruining the lecture for everyone else.

“Excuse me.” She nodded toward Al, who was ranting about a man being a man and a woman being a woman. “Could you please tell your grandfather to keep it down?”

*

Eve was trying not to cry; it didn’t seem like something the executive director should do at a public event. It was hard, though—the slide show was breaking her heart, the inexorable progress of a child moving through time, changing with every picture, yet somehow remaining the same person. Mark Fairchild had been a beautiful boy—so confident, so happy, or so it seemed. But there was Margo standing right beside the screen, insisting that it had all been a lie and a more or less constant torment, a nightmare she didn’t know she could escape until much later in her life.

Of course Eve’s thoughts turned to Brendan—how could they not? She was overcome by an almost desperate longing to see her son’s face, to put her arms around him, to hear his voice, to assure herself that he was okay. She’d been a fool to surrender Parents Weekend to Ted, to volunteer for her own deprivation. She could feel her only child slipping away from her, and understood that she’d been complicit in the process. They hadn’t spoken on the phone in almost two weeks, and their text exchanges had been brief and unrevealing, just the usual banalities and apologetic requests for money. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten him, but she had allowed him to fade in her mind, to become peripheral. And it had happened so quickly, with so little resistance from either of them. She’d justified it by reminding herself that a little distance was good, that he was growing up, becoming independent, and that she was reclaiming a little of her own life, and maybe some of that was true, but the expanding lump in her throat suggested otherwise.

“This is my mother,” Margo said, as an old high school yearbook photo filled the screen, a pretty young woman with dark hair and an enigmatic smile. “Her name was Donna Ryan when this picture was taken. A few years later she became Donna Fairchild.”

A wedding-day picture replaced the yearbook photo, the bride admiring herself in an oval mirror. And suddenly the bride was a bald, emaciated woman in a hospital bed, staring at the camera with a bleak, defeated expression.

“If she were alive today, she’d be seventy-four years old. She died too young.”

Donna washed the dishes. She fed a baby with a tiny spoon. She stood beside Mark on the day of his high school graduation. Her head only reached to his shoulder.

“I fooled a lot of people,” Margo said. “But I never fooled her.”

Another picture appeared, this one an overexposed snapshot from the late seventies or early eighties: Donna Fairchild, neither young nor old, standing on the beach in front of an empty lifeguard chair, wearing dark sunglasses and a blue bathing suit with a ruffled skirt. Her face was blank, unreadable.

“I loved that bathing suit,” Margo said. “I loved it a little too much for my own good.”