Night School: Legacy

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. ‘I hate birthdays. I don’t celebrate mine.’


‘How can you not celebrate your own birthday, Carter? That’s horrible.’ She felt unaccountably wounded. He’d kept it from her. He’d had a birthday and he hadn’t told her. He was seventeen now. ‘You didn’t say anything. I didn’t give you a present or bake you a cake …’

He tried to calm her, as if her reaction was unreasonable. ‘I’m sorry, Al. I just … I don’t celebrate it. I haven’t, you know, ever since my parents …’

But Allie shook her head, her lips tight, and dropped her eyes to her list of questions.

This was starting badly.

‘Parents’ names?’ she said, not looking at him.

‘Mother, Sharon Georgina West. Father …’

His voice trailed off and she looked up from the page to find him staring into the distance.

He cleared his throat. ‘Father, Arthur Jonathan West.’

She couldn’t be mad at him.

‘You have the same middle name as him,’ she said. ‘That’s nice. Like you still share something.’

He nodded.

After a second she continued. ‘Grandparents’ names?’

They went through the required list of family names and dates, towns where people were born, jobs they worked so long ago that she couldn’t imagine it being real.

‘None of your family ever went to school here? Before you, I mean?’ she asked at the end.

He shook his head.

They’d now reached the point of the interview she’d been dreading. She and Eloise had argued about whether she really had to ask it, and Eloise had insisted.

‘If you’re doing this, you have to ask,’ Eloise had said. ‘And you must forget your relationship to him, no matter how compassionate you might feel. Write the answer down and then ask the next question.’

‘But he’s never told me about what happened,’ Allie had protested, feeling increasingly aggrieved. ‘He doesn’t ever talk about it. It seems cruel to force him to talk about it.’

But Eloise had been unbending, and now Allie knew she had to say the words.

‘I know …’ she began and then faltered. Taking a calming breath, she tried again. ‘I need to know what happened to your parents and how you ended up here.’

When his dark eyes shot up to meet hers she saw a warning in them.

‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘And I hate to ask you this. But if I don’t, they’ll just make us do this again until I do. I’m so sorry, Carter. Can you tell me very quickly, maybe? I won’t ask for any details.’

He was so still for so long she wondered if he was going to just get up and walk away. She could see conflicting emotions in his face.

Finally, as if he were giving in to the inevitable, he raked his fingers through his hair. When he spoke his voice was low, and he looked away from her into a dark corner of the chapel.

‘My father worked in a car factory, but he lost that job before I was born when the factory closed. He couldn’t get another. There just … weren’t that many factories around. He saw an ad, I think, in a paper. Isabelle told me once but I can’t quite remember everything … My parents lived near here, I think. Before.’

Allie was having a little trouble following his tangled narrative but she said nothing. She sat as still as she could, barely breathing. She didn’t take notes – she knew she’d remember this.

‘Anyway,’ Carter continued, ‘at some point he was hired here to be the handyman, taking care of the boiler and the electrical system – anything you could fix with a screwdriver or a spanner. This place must have seemed like a godsend, you know?’ He looked up at her briefly then returned his gaze to the distance. ‘My mum worked in the kitchen – cooking and cleaning. They got a place to live rent free on the grounds; they were putting money in the bank. For them, even though the work wasn’t, like, thrilling, I guess it was a perfect set-up.

‘When my mum got pregnant they were really excited. They didn’t have any other kids and I think maybe they thought they couldn’t or something. I guess it was a big deal. When I was born my mum took some time off for a while but then she went back to work.’ He stopped to think. ‘It’s hard to explain but, because they lived on the grounds, it was kind of like I was raised by everyone. Nobody else here had young children. The teachers and other staff took turn babysitting me. I was, like, a novelty.’

Her hands still in her lap, Allie watched his face.

‘And you lived in that cottage?’ she asked. ‘The one we saw that night in the woods – with the roses?’

He looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten the night they’d come across the little stone cottage with the lush flower garden. He nodded. ‘Bob Ellison lives there now.’

‘It looked like a beautiful place to grow up,’ she said.

He shrugged as if it were a silly question, although she could see in his eyes that it wasn’t.