Special Topics in Calamity Physics (56 page)

No, it wasn't like it was in the Olden Days.

Due to my new fondness for trawling through the trash, I was able to locate something else of note Dad had discarded for the sake of my mental health, The St. Gallway Bereavement Pack. Judging from the date on the large manila envelope in which it'd come, apparently The Pack had been launched with the velocity of a Tomahawk cruise missile as soon as news of the catastrophic event hit school radars.

The Pack included a letter from Headmaster Havermeyer ("Dear Parents: We are saddened this week by the death of one of our dearest teachers, Hannah Schneider . . ."), an overexcited article from a 1991 issue
of Parenting
magazine, "How Children Grieve," a schedule of counseling times and room numbers, Crisis Team constituents, a pair of 24-hour 800-numbers to call for psychological assistance (1-800-FEEL-SAD, and another I find difficult to remember, 1-800-U-BEWAIL, I believe) and a tepid postscript about a funeral ("A date for Ms. Schneider's memorial service has yet to be arranged.").

One can imagine how strange it was for me to read these carefully prepared materials, to realize they were talking about Hannah,
our
Hannah, the Ava Gardnered person across from whom I'd once eaten pork chops —how scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead. Chiefly unsettling was the fact that The Pack mentioned nothing of how she'd died. True, The Pack had been prepared and mailed well before the Sluder County Coroner's Office would release its autopsy report. Yet the omission was bizarre, as if she hadn't been murdered (a sensational word; if I had my way there'd be something a little more serious at the intersection of Death, Murder and Slaughter— Mauleth, perhaps). Instead, according to The Pack, Hannah had simply "passed"; she'd been playing poker and decided not to take another card. Or, reading Havermeyer's spongy wording, one had the sense she'd been seized ("taken from us"), King-Kong-style ("without warning") by the gigantic, smooth hand of God ("she's in good hands"), and though such an event was gruesome ("one of life's toughest lessons") everyone should nail a grin to their face and continue robotically with daily life ("we must continue on, loving each day, as Hannah would've wanted").

St. Gallway's Grief Management began, but certainly did not end, with The Bereavement Pack. The day after I found the thing, Saturday the 2, Dad received a phone call from Mark Butters, Head of the Crisis Team.

I eavesdropped on the conversation from my bedroom phone with Dad's silent complicity. Prior to Butters' appointment to the Crisis Team, he'd never been a confident man. He had the complexion of baba ghanoush and his flabby body, even on bright, sunny days, reminded one of nothing more robust than a much-used carry-on suitcase. His most obvious personality trait was his suspicious nature, the unflagging conviction that he, Mr. Mark Butters, was the secret subject of all student jokes, quips, puns and personal asides. Over his table at lunch, his eyes searched student faces like drug dogs in an airport for the chalky residue of ridicule. But, as evidenced by his sonorous, newly confident voice, Mr. Butters had simply been a person of untapped potential, a man who needed only a Tiny Calamity in order to shine. He'd given up Hesitation and Doubt with the surprising ease of anonymously returning erotica in the middle of the night to the RETURNS slot at the video store, had effortlessly replaced them with Authority and Daring.

"Your schedule permitting," said Mr. Butters, "we'd like to arrange a half-hour session with both you and Blue in order to discuss what's happened.

You'll be sitting down with myself and Havermeyer, as well as one of our child counselors."

"One of your
what?"

(Dad, I should mention, did not believe in anyone's counsel except his own. He thought psychotherapy promulgated nothing more than a great deal of handholding and shoulder massaging. He despised Freud, Jung, Frasier and any person who thought it fascinating to instigate a lengthy discussion of his/her own dreams.)

"A counselor. To share your concerns, your daughter's concerns. We have on hand a very competent, full-time child psychologist, Deb Cromwell. She's come to us from The Derds School in Raleigh."

"I see. Well, I have only one concern."

"Oh?"

"Yes."

"Great. Hit me with it."

"You."

Butters was silent. Then: "I see."

"My concern is that for the entire week your school has remained mute—out of terror, I suppose—and now, at long last, one of you has mustered the courage to come forward, at, what time is it,
three-forty-five
on a Saturday afternoon. And all you have to say is that you'd like us to schedule a time to come in and be psychoanalyzed. Is that correct?"

"This is a just a preliminary question-and-answer session. Bob and Deb would like to sit down with you, have a one-on-one— "

"The true intention of this phone call is to intuit whether or not I plan to sue both the school and the Board of Education for negligence. Am I right?"

"Mr. Van Meer, I'm not going to try to argue with—"

"Don't."

"What I
will
say is that we wish — "

"I wouldn't say or wish anything if I were you. Your reckless—let me rephrase that—your
deranged
staff member took
my
child, a
minor,
on a weekend field trip
without
securing parental permission—"

"We're well aware of the situa — "

"Endangered her life, the lives of five other minors
and,
let me remind you, managed to get herself killed in what is looking like a highly disgraceful fashion. I am
this
close to calling a lawyer and making it my life's ambition to ensure that you, that headmaster of yours, Oscar Meyers, and
every
person associated with your third-rate institution ends up wearing stripes and leg irons for the next forty years. Furthermore, in the off chance my daughter
does
wish to share her concerns, the last person with whom she'd choose to do so would be a private-school counselor named
Deb.
If I were you, I wouldn't call here again unless you wish to beg for clemency."

Dad hung up.

And though I wasn't in the kitchen with him, I knew he didn't slam down the phone, but gently returned it to the wall, much in the manner of putting a maraschino cherry atop a sundae.

Well, I
did
have concerns. And Dad was right; I had no intention of sharing them with Deb. I had to share them with Jade, Charles, Milton, Nigel and Lu. The need to explain to each of them what had happened from the moment I left the campground to those seconds I saw her dead was so overpowering, I couldn't think about it, couldn't
attempt
to outline or ABC it on note cards or legal pads without feeling dizzy and dumb, as if I were trying to contemplate quarks, quasars and quantum mechanics, all at the same time (see Chapters 13, 35, 46,
Incongruities,
V. Close, 1998).

Later that day, when Dad left to go buy groceries, I finally called Jade. I estimated I'd given her enough time to recover from the initial shock (perhaps she'd even continued on, loving each day, as Hannah would've wanted).

"Who's calling please?"

It was Jefferson.

"This is Blue."

"Sorry, honey. She's not taking calls."

She hung up before I could say anything. I called Nigel.

"Creech Pottery and Carpentry."

"Uh, hello. Is Nigel there? This is Blue."

"Hey
there, Blue!"

It was Diana Creech, his mother—or rather, adopted mother. I'd never met her, but had talked to her countless times on the phone. Due to her loud, jocular voice, which snow
-
plowed everything and anything you said, whether it be a lone word or the Declaration of Independence, I envisioned her as a large, cheery woman who wore men's overalls covered with clay smears from her own gigantic fingers, fingers that in all probability were wide as naked rolls of toilet paper. When she talked, she took big bites out of certain words, as if they were bright green, solid Granny Smiths.

"Let me go see if he's awake. Last time I looked in on him he was sleeping like a baby. That's all he's been doing for the past two days. How are
you?"

"I'm okay. Nigel's all right?"

"Sure.
I mean, we're still in
shock.
Everyone is! 'Specially the school. Have they called? You can tell they're nervous about a lawsuit. Obviously we're waiting to hear what the police say. I told Ed they should have made an arrest by now or come forward and
said
something. Silence is inexcusable. Ed says no one has a
clue
what happened to her and that's why they're holding out. What I
will
say is that if somebody
did
do it—'cuz I don't want to think about the
other
possibility, not yet—you can be sure he's on his way to Timbuktu with a fake passport in a first-class seat." (The few times I'd spoken to her on the phone, I noticed Diana Creech always managed to stick the word
Timbuktu
into the conversation as many youths stuck in
like
or
whatever.)
"They're dragging their
feet."
She sighed. "I'm sad about what's happened, but I'm thankful you guys are safe. But you turned up Saturday, didn't you? Nigel said you weren't with them. Oh,
here
he comes. Hold on, sugar."

She put the receiver down and walked away, the sound of a Clydesdale trotting down on a cobblestone street. (She wore clogs.) I heard voices and then the hooves again.

"Mind if he calls you back? He wants to eat something."

"Sure," I said.

"You take care now."

No one answered when I called Charles.

At Milton's, the answering machine picked up, a whine of violin accompanied with a woman's fanciful voice, "You've reached Joanna, John and Milton. We're not home ..."

I dialed Leulah. I sensed she'd be the most unglued out of all of us, so I hesitated calling her, but I had to talk to someone. She answered on the first ring.

"Hey, Jade," she said. "Sorry about that."

"Oh, it's Blue actually." I was so relieved, I oil-spilled. "I'm glad you picked up. How are you? I-I've been going crazy. I can't sleep. How are you?" "Oh," said Leulah. "This isn't Leulah." "What?" "Leulah's asleep," she said in a strange voice. I could hear, on her end, a television. It was thrilled about house paint, only a single coat necessary for total coverage, Herman's Paints are guaranteed to last five years regardless of exposure to rainfall and wind.

"Can I take a message?" she asked.

"What's wrong?"

She hung up.

I sat down on the edge of my bed. The bedroom windows were crammed with late-day light, soft, yellow, the color of pears. The paintings on the wall, oil landscapes of pastures and cornfields, looked so shiny they might have still been wet. I might have run my thumb through them and made a finger painting. I began to cry, dumb, lethargic tears, as if I'd cut into a scarred old gum tree and the sap could barely leak out.

This, I remember distinctly, was the worst moment—not the insomnia, not my wasted courtship of the TV, not the endless chanting in my head of a certain hysterical phrase that became less alive the more I said
it—someone killed Hannah, someone killed Hannah—but
this awful desolate feeling, desert-island aloneness. Worst of all, I knew it was the beginning of it, not the middle or the end.

25

Bleak House

"If n 44 B.c., ten days after he stabbed Caesar in the back, Brutus probably felt the same way I did when the student body re
turned to St. Gallway for the
commencement of Spring Term. Brutus, strolling down the dusty roads of the Forum, doubtless came face-to-face with the harsh realities of "Corridor and Country Road Ostracism," with its principal tenets, "Keep a wide girth," and "As you come closer, fasten your eyes to a point immediately north of the leper's head so for a second he/she thinks you're acknowledging his/her pitiable existence." Brutus most likely became well versed in "Modes of Seeing Through," the most startling of which were the "Pretend Brutus Is a Diaphanous Scarf" and "Pretend Brutus Is a Courtyard-Facing Window." Though he once drank watered-down wine with the perpetrators of this unspoken cruelty, once sat next to them at Circus Maximus and rejoiced in the overturning of a chariot, once bathed with them, naked, in both the hot
and
the cold pools of the public baths, these things meant nothing now. Because of what he'd done, he was and always would be their object of disgrace.

At least Brutus had done something productive, albeit controversial, carrying out a meticulously laid plan to seize power for what he believed to be the continued well-being of the Roman Empire.

I, of course, had done nothing at all.

"See, if you remember, everyone
thought
she was amazing, but I always thought there was something hair-raising about her," said Lucille Hunter in my AP English class. "Ever watch when she's taking notes?"