Part 10 (1/2)
”Professor Polson?” Perry Edwards asked after Mira was silent for a very long time.
She held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else, and then she put the hand over her eyes and forced herself to count to five before she looked at this boy again, and said, ”Okay.”
Part Two.
18.
It was one of those soul-s.n.a.t.c.hing, deadly dull days at the Chamber Music Society. The offices buzzed with it, literally. A fly caught between the window and the screen in Sh.e.l.ly's office was tossing itself between the two barriers with exhausted fury. She watched it from her desk, its electrical droning competing with the sound of her dozing computer.
It was the end of September, and the weather was making a concerted effort to change. The sky was closer to lavender now than blue, and there was a smell of leaves sweetening, softening, giving way, s.h.i.+fting into a lower gear. As always, the change from late summer to actual autumn brought back for Sh.e.l.ly every September of her life-the dust swirling around her kindergarten desk, bobby socks and s.h.i.+ny shoes, straight through to her last year of graduate school, lugging an expensive textbook back from the store to her little efficiency over the Beer Depot-along with all the Septembers since then, the years pa.s.sing one by one outside the window of her office at the university's Chamber Music Society.
What, she wondered, was September like for people who didn't work at an educational inst.i.tution? Did the melancholy reminiscence of September simply skip them?
If so, Sh.e.l.ly thought, it would be a little like skipping one of the Twelve Trials of Hercules: you'd still be stuck with the Christmas despair, but you wouldn't have to relive the end of every summer vacation of your life, that sad realization of your own mortality, year after year, as the kids swarmed back into your world with their freshly sharpened pencils and new sweaters.
No, she supposed, it wouldn't be like that. They'd all gotten that calendar engrained on their psyches so early. No one escaped the mortality of autumn.
”G.o.d, you depress me,” her ex-husband used to say, and said for the last time on the day she left him, shaking his head sadly-and then, as if some switch had been flipped in his head, charging after her, fists whirling around them both as she stumbled out the back door, and he yanked her back in by her hair.
”Sh.e.l.ly?”
”Yes?”
”Do you think, you know, since we're all caught up, I-”
”-could leave early?” Sh.e.l.ly tried not to let out an exasperated sigh.
”Yeah,” Josie said. She was twirling a strand of silken black hair around her index finger. She had her face tilted at a right angle, like a sparrow. ”It's Greek Week.”
”You're in a sorority?” Sh.e.l.ly asked.
”Yeah,” Josie said.
”What house?”
”Omega Theta Tau.” Josie p.r.o.nounced each Greek letter with irrepressible pride.
Sh.e.l.ly turned around in her chair to face Josie fully in the doorway, and asked, ”Isn't that the sorority Nicole Werner was in, the girl who was killed?”
Josie began to nod slowly and melodramatically with her eyes half closed.
”Did you know her?” Sh.e.l.ly asked. How was it possible that she'd not only not known that Josie was in a sorority but in Nicole Werner's sorority?
Josie shrugged. She said, ”We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time. It's not one of the bigger houses-sixty girls-so, yeah, sure, I knew her. It was a huge shock.”
Sh.e.l.ly stood up. She said, ”Did you know-?”
”-that you were in a sorority?” Josie brightened. ”Yeah. You were wearing that Eta Lambda T-s.h.i.+rt the day I ran into you outside the gym, so I looked you up on their Plaque Wall when I was over there for a party, and found your name! That's so cool. I mean, I'm sure it used to be a better house back when you-”
”No,” Sh.e.l.ly said, shaking her head, dismayed to feel rising the familiar defensive self-consciousness related to sororities you'd fully expect a lesbian in her forties to be far beyond by now. ”No. That's not what I meant. Did you know I was at the scene of the accident? Nicole Werner's? I was the first one there.”
Josie bit her lip, and seemed to look upward, to scan her brain for this bit of information. Not finding it, she said, ”No,” and then, eyes widening, ”That was you. The middle-aged lady, the one who didn't give directions to 911?”
Sh.e.l.ly felt her cheeks redden, burning, and her breath escaping her. She shook her head. She said, ”No. I gave perfect directions. I was there when the ambulances arrived. I stayed until they took those kids-”
”Jeeze,” Josie said. ”That must've been awful. I had no idea.”
Of course she hadn't.
How could she have?
Sh.e.l.ly's name had never even made the papers, where not a single detail of the accident had been reported correctly-except, apparently, that Sh.e.l.ly was middle-aged.
”They got the facts wrong,” Sh.e.l.ly said. ”I was there when they took the kids away.”
”Oh. Wow. Okay. Well, this is a b.u.mmer. Would you mind, can I ask you, you know-”
”If you can leave early?”
”Yeah.”
”Yeah,” Sh.e.l.ly said, and in less than a second, the girl was gone. Sh.e.l.ly stood, looking at the threshold, empty now, and listening to the sound of the front door of the Chamber Music Society opening, then closing, and then the sound of Josie tapping down the stairwell in her black flats. Then, she sat back down, opened one of her desk drawers, and pulled out the file with Josie's name on it.
Her resume, her application-Sh.e.l.ly scanned them for Omega Theta Tau. These girls never left their sorority affiliations off their applications. They were so impressed with themselves that they a.s.sumed everyone else would be, too.
But it wasn't on any of the paperwork, and Josie had given only her home address in Grosse Isle as her contact information.
Grosse Isle?
How had Sh.e.l.ly missed that detail?
The girl was getting financial aid for the ”work” she was doing at the Chamber Music Society. Was there anybody in Grosse Isle who needed work-study funds to attend college? When Sh.e.l.ly herself had been at the university, one of her sorority sisters from Grosse Isle had invited her home for a weekend. The house the girl had grown up in had a helicopter landing pad, and her father's helicopter, on its roof.
Well, of course, Sh.e.l.ly had no way of knowing the Reillys' situation, even if they were from the wealthiest suburb in the state. A bitter divorce could have accounted for the need, or a family illness, or parental job loss. It wasn't Sh.e.l.ly's job to a.s.sess the candidate's financial situation. That a.s.sessment was sent over from the Financial Aid Office to the dean of the music school, who gave it his stamp of approval.
Sh.e.l.ly put the file back in her drawer and looked out the window. A white b.u.t.terfly, seeming to try to land on the windowsill, was being jostled around by the breeze, buffeted away from the ledge each time it got close.
Sh.e.l.ly watched, feeling nervous for it-unable to look away and hating the spectacle of it. Her eyes focused on it, as her thoughts fluttered around: Omega Theta Tau.
Those were the Virgin Sisters. Theirs was the house on campus that supposedly advocated chast.i.ty and sobriety. The press had made a big deal of that with Nicole Werner. It was another stratum of the tragedy, that she'd been such a good girl.
Back in Sh.e.l.ly's day, the eighties, there'd been a bit more cynicism than that-strange as it was to think that Americans were getting more innocent as time pa.s.sed.