Arcadia Falls

17


Fawn’s question haunts me all week. Who—or what—had Isabel been running from? Could she have been running from Chloe? But why? And how could a tiny girl like Chloe force a bigger girl like Isabel off a cliff? As ridiculous as it seems, I call Callum Reade to tell him what I overheard.
“You requested that I inform you of any information I might have,” I say formally when I reach him at the police station. I describe the girls’ conversation as best as I can recall it.
“And where were you when this conversation transpired?” he says, picking up my tone.
“Uh … behind a bamboo curtain in an alcove,” I say, instantly realizing how silly it sounds.
He makes a noise that is something between a bark and a cough.
“If you’re not going to take what I say seriously, I won’t bother you again—”
“No, no, I just got something stuck in my throat. This is very useful. You were right to call. I’ll question Chloe again. In the meantime, I’m concerned about this ceremony the kids are planning above the clove. Perhaps you ought to speak to your dean about it.”
Dean St. Clare is the last person I want to talk to, but I realize he’s right. I make an appointment to see her the next day.
“I appreciate your concern,” she tells me, leaning forward with her hands clasped together on her desk. “I had my doubts as well when the students asked my permission, but then I realized that it would provide just the closure they need after such a senseless tragedy.”
“But can’t they reach that closure someplace safer?” I ask. “Someplace on flat ground instead of the edge of a precipice?”
Ivy St. Clare tilts her little birdlike head at me quizzically. “I suppose it’s being a mother that makes you so … paranoid. Why don’t I put you in charge of overseeing the event? That should channel your energies constructively. I believe the club is meeting upstairs in the Reading Room right now. Why don’t you drop in on them to discuss security measures?”
Dismissed, I head upstairs to the Reading Room, wondering if the dean always responds to criticism by handing out extra work. It would be an effective deterrent.
As I approach the library, I hear a girl’s voice raised in anger. “I think the whole thing is just wrong. I don’t want anything to do with it!” As I reach the doorway, Haruko comes out in such a hurry that she collides with me. She apologizes somewhat cursorily—though she’s always been cheerful and polite with me—and hurries down the stairs. I consider going after her, but then I look at the circle of guilty faces in the library and decide that these are the people I need to talk to.
“What was that all about?” I ask Sally, who’s curled up in a window seat, bent over her sketchpad. She shrugs but doesn’t reply. Instead Chloe answers from the depths of a velvet wingback chair in the center of the circle. “I’m afraid she’s one of those girls who doesn’t want to play if she can’t have things her own way.”
Justin Clay, who’s lolling on a love seat with Tori Pratt, straightens up and untangles his legs from Tori’s. “Yeah, she’s kind of a drama queen.”
“She is a bit sensitive,” Hannah Weiss concedes from her perch on the hassock next to Chloe’s chair. I almost laugh at this sentiment coming from Hannah, who’s about the most sensitive kid I’ve ever met.
I turn from student to student as each one dismisses Haruko’s outburst. “That doesn’t sound like Haruko at all,” I say to Sally.
“How would you know?” Sally asks without lifting her head from her drawing pad. “She’s not even in any of your classes.”
Looking from face to face I feel as if I am watching a carefully orchestrated chamber piece: an arrangement for five voices. But the fifth member of the circle, sitting cross-legged on the floor, remains silent. I turn to him.
“Clyde? What was Haruko upset about? What did she think was ‘wrong?”
Clyde blanches and squirms uneasily on the floor, as if he could dig himself a hole to hide in. “The rite of the autumn equinox is all about facing the dark,” he says finally. “It’s about accepting death as a natural part of the life cycle….”
Someone in the room—I can’t tell who—begins to hum the theme from The Lion King: “The Circle of Life.” Tori and Chloe giggle. Clyde blushes. “Anyway. I guess that’s what Haruko thought was wrong.”
“And how exactly do you intend to ‘face the dark’ during this equinox ceremony?” I ask. I have a vision of the clove at sunset, the dark gash in the earth gathering the shadows into its folds. If their idea of facing the dark means going down into the clove, then I will to put an end to the ceremony right now.
“It’s just a candle-lighting ceremony,” Chloe says, her voice sweetly lilting. “You’ll see, it will be very pretty.”
“The dean has put me in charge of safety,” I tell Chloe. “So pretty or not, I want your assurance that no one will go within five—make that ten—feet of the ridge.”
“No problem. The main ceremony will be held in the clearing as you approach the ridge.”
“You remember, Ms. Rosenthal,” Hannah adds. “Right by that fallen tree where we found that piece of Isabel’s dress.”
“Yes, I suppose that would be far enough away from the edge,” I say. “But you said the ‘main ceremony’ will take place there. Is there a sideshow?”
Chloe winces at my choice of words, as if I’d just turned her sacred rite into a circus act. “The culmination of the rite requires the goddess—that would be me—to approach the ridge with a candle. But I can assure you, Ms. Rosenthal, I have no intention of following Isabel into the clove.”
“I’m sure you don’t, but just to be safe I will go up with you.”
Chloe inclines her head, for all the world like a benignant deity accepting an offering from a supplicant. Tori was right; I think, Chloe is beginning to think she is the goddess she’s playing. “That will be fine,” Chloe says. “As long as you are quiet and respectful.”
“And then I want an orderly procession down the hill,” I add.
“All arranged, Ms. Rosenthal. That’s part of the ceremony. Then we all reconvene in the Lodge for cider and doughnuts. You can do a head count. I promise you, no one will be wandering in the woods on the eve of the autumn equinox. Not when the dark is rising.”
Chloe’s words follow me for the rest of the week. The coming of fall back on Long Island meant new school clothes for Sally, the migration of the elderly to Florida, and the annual PTA debate over whether to ban Halloween. Here in the mountains and farmlands, the cast of late-September light already threatens cold and darkness. The sycamore leaves have turned the greenish gold of tarnished brass. The air in the morning is sharp and smells like woodsmoke. Lying in bed at night I hear geese flying overhead and the wind thrashing in the pine trees as if it wants to fly away with them. When I drive into town I see that someone has put a peaked witch’s hat on the tin White Witch sign. Outside the houses I pass in town, woodpiles climb higher and higher, as if the residents are preparing for the next ice age. It’s easy to see why the arts colony was originally only meant to last during the summer. According to Lily, the artists began to flee at the first sign of cold.


Mimi announced tonight at dinner that she’d been offered a job painting murals at a convent called St. Lucy’s in the western Catskills. “I’m not sure exactly where it is. Some little town called Easton.”
“But aren’t you Jewish?” Gertrude had asked, askance.
“Yes, but don’t tell the nuns. I told them that I knew the lives of the saints intimately. I’d better start boning up.”
“I think St. Lucy is the one who plucked her eyes out,” Vera said. “I’ve seen many representations of her on my travels in Italy.”
“Ugh,” Mimi said, making a face. “I don’t want to have to paint that! But I think it might be a different St. Lucy. This one is Irish and is the patron saint of unwed mothers. St. Lucy’s is an orphanage and home for unwed mothers.”
Mimi’s confession unleashed a torrent of winter obligations. Dora and Ada were afraid that they’d lose their lease on their apartment in Manhattan if they didn’t get back soon. Mike Walsh was going out west to sketch Indians. The Zarkov brothers had been invited by a cousin to winter in Palm Beach. Virgil announced that he’d been offered a fellowship to paint at the American Academy in Rome. Last of all, Gertrude mentioned that she had agreed to go to Europe with her husband. “Of course he’s a ninny, but in exchange for my agreeing to take some preposterous fertility cure at Baden-Baden, he has agreed to let me start a little art museum in the city. And I can use the trip to collect art.”
“Well, I guess Lily and I will have to keep the hearth fires burning by ourselves,” Vera said, glancing toward me with a proprietary smile that warmed me. Some might have rebelled under that possessiveness, but I knew where it came from and it made my heart swell to see her look at me as if I were hers.
It had taken half the summer to breach Vera’s delicate sense of decorum. After May Eve, we had continued to leave the door open between our rooms. We called our goodnights across the threshold but then we would speak long into the night. I’m afraid I didn’t pay attention to all she said—her talk was full of pragmatic details of running the estate and her plans for expanding the summer colony—but I loved to lie in the dark, listening to the sound of her voice. I did pay attention, though, when she spoke of purchasing a printing press.
“I’d like to collect some local tales of the area to print in a special edition with your lovely woodcuts,” she said.
I told her, then, about the fairy tales I’d made up for my sisters on the farm. She begged me to tell them to her. Then it was my voice that filled the darkness between the two rooms. I began with the Dutch stories I’d heard from my mother and grandmother, and then I told her the stories I had made up. I was shy at first of telling her the ones about the brave heroine I’d invented because I’d come to think of her as Vera. It was Vera’s face I saw when I thought of those stories, even though I had created them before I met her. Soon, though, I gained confidence from the dark and I began telling her my stories. I described my heroine as part Valkyrie, part fairy queen. She slew dragons and saved whole villages from evil wizards. She sailed on pirate ships and discovered lost kingdoms.
When I ran out of my old stories, I started making up new ones. One night I began one with these words: “There once was a girl who liked to pretend she was lost until the day she really lost her way.” As I described this girl wandering in the woods alone, I pictured myself running through the forest on May Eve. How had I not known it was Virgil Nash following me? Why hadn’t I run from him when I did know? How had I gotten so lost? As I described how lost and tired the girl became I began to cry, but quietly so Vera wouldn’t hear.
“At last the girl grew so weary that she begged the spirits of the forest to turn her into a tree. She became a slender white birch leaning against a strong beech and she never felt lost again.”
When I finished Vera was silent. I was afraid I’d somehow revealed too much—that she knew all about my meetings with Nash in the barn, knew why I felt so lost—but then I heard the creak of a floorboard and turned toward the door. Standing on the threshold, in her white nightgown, she looked like the girl in my story transformed: like a slim birch swaying in the breeze as she hesitated to come farther or flee.
I stretched out my arms to her and she came forward as if pushed by an invisible wind. She was trembling when she came into my arms, quaking like an aspen in the wind. I pressed the length of my body against hers—and wrapped myself around her until I couldn’t feel any space between us. Like two trees growing from the same trunk, we tossed in the same wind, shook with the same passion, were cleft by the same stroke of lightning.
“Stay with me forever,” she murmured sometime toward morning.
I breathed my consent onto her skin, from the hollow beneath her collar bone to the dip above her ankle, spilling my yes into all the little pools and valleys of her body so she would be inundated by my love.
From that night on I stayed away from Nash, but on the night that Vera announced our plans to stay together for the winter I asked Nash to meet me in the barn again. I stayed with Vera into the early hours of the morning. I had learned over the summer that she reached her deepest sleep only then. Lying beside her, listening to her breathing, I studied her face. In the moonlight her noble profile reminded me of a Greek goddess carved in marble. Wise, gray-eyed Athena, perhaps, the warrior goddess. I could imagine her striding into battle, her brave heart beating steadily under her cuirassed breastplate, her eyes flashing bright as bronze. My dear brave Vera, named for truth. She would defend me to the end. And if she knew that I had betrayed her? For the hundredth time that summer I imagined telling her. The first time had been a mistake, I would tell her. I had gone to the barn looking for her. But then how to explain the other times? Could I tell her that I had done it for the good of the colony? After all, she was the one who had said we needed Nash and his reputation to succeed. Or should I just tell her that I was weak? He had flattered me, threatened to expose me, tricked me, taunted me, bewitched me, ensnared me. If she would only stand by me now and lend me some of her strength, I could give him up. It was her that I really wanted.
And for the hundredth time that summer I imagined her eyes clouding over as I spoke. Her clear vision of me—her pure Lily!—despoiled. And I imagined her turning her face from me. I knew that I couldn’t bear it.
I got up. I couldn’t lie beside her imagining that. I stole from our room—as she called it and I had dared to think of it—like a thief in the night. I wrapped a dark cloak over my nightgown, hiding myself from the face of the moon. Still, I felt the force of the moon’s gaze upon my back as I crossed the lawn. Even when I stepped beneath the copper beech, the hot white light found me there, stippling my arms and legs with black and white leaf patterns. I let the cloak fall from me and turned around in the light, holding my arms up in it to see the leaf patterns seared onto my skin. The light fell over my rounded belly beneath my shift. I turned slowly in the moonlight, letting the leaves made from shadow and light brand me. I wanted them to leave their mark on me. Why shouldn’t the darkness I felt show on my skin?
Maybe I hoped that Vera, waking and finding me gone, would come to the window and see me standing on the lawn. She would see what I had become: a tree sprung out of moonlight and shadow, carved out of light and dark. She would see what I had done, and what I had become, but she would also see that I loved her and not Nash. She would stop me from going to him and telling him that I was pregnant. Because that was what I had decided to do. I would throw myself on his mercy and ask him to take me with him—not because I loved him but because I no longer deserved to be with Vera.
But then a cloud passed over the moon and the pattern of leaves fell from my skin like leaves falling in autumn. I put my cloak back on and ran down the hill, through the orchard, into the woods behind the lodge, and up the hill through the old trees. A wind stirred the pine needles on the forest floor into little eddies. The air smelled like rain. I went faster, scrambling down the sharp rocks of the clove. No moonlight lit the path that night—the moon had hid her face from me—but I knew the path well enough by then to feel my way in the dark. I almost wished I would fall. I went faster and faster, daring the now rain-slicked rocks of the clove to dash me to the ground, but each time my foot or hand slipped the moss-covered rocks seemed to hold me up, like giants passing me from hand to hand, carrying me to him—and farther away from Vera.
I was soaked from head to toe by the time I reached the barn. I had lost my cloak and my nightgown clung to my skin. He stood in the doorway smoking a cigar, his face, lit in the red glow of its burning tip, etched into a saturnine leer at the sight of me. What did he see? Did he see my swelling breasts and the curved dome of my belly? How could he not? He who always saw me so clearly.
“Finally! I knew you couldn’t stay away from me forever!” He tossed the cigar away, careless of the spark that could set the barn on fire, just as he’d been careless of how he set our lives on fire for his own sport … but no, I told myself, I couldn’t blame it all on him. I’d struck the match and held it to the tinder as well.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said, coming closer to him.
“But you’re frozen!” He took off his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders. “Come inside. Let me warm you.” With his hands still grasping the lapels of his coat around me, he pulled me inside into the warmth of the barn. It was full now of hay stacked to the ceiling, all the accumulated heat of a summer’s worth of sun piled up against the coming winter. The coarse wool of his coat rubbed against my damp skin and I felt electricity coursing through my veins. The air was crackling between us. The hair on the back of my arms stood up and leaned toward him. I was surprised to find that there was still passion between us, because I knew now that it wasn’t love that we shared. But I could still tell him I was carrying his child and ask him to take me with him to Rome. I wouldn’t have to tell him that I loved him; he took that much as his due. I wouldn’t have to lie—and even if I did, he wouldn’t know.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I began again.
“And I have something to tell you! I was surprised to hear Vera say you would stay here this winter—”
“I needn’t—”
“And to tell you the truth, I was just a little hurt that you’d made your plans without consulting me.”
“But you did, too!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t tell me about the fellowship at the Academy.”
“My dear, I only just had the letter yesterday. You’ve been avoiding me half the summer. Still, I was going to tell you tonight and ask if you would like to come with me. I had already begun to daydream about us drawing together on the Palatine and riding in the Campagna.”
I took a deep breath. “We could still do all that. I could still come with you—”
I saw something change in his face. His eyes narrowed and the muscles around his mouth tightened. “Well, that’s the problem, I don’t think it’s such a good idea anymore. When I heard about your plans, I realized it was best for you to stay here. I’ll have to be free to travel while I’m over there, to meet dealers and collectors. I’m not wealthy like Vera. I’ve got to make my reputation now when I’m young or it will be too late. Perhaps later when I’m more secure we could travel together, but for now I think it really is best if you stay here with Vera.”
He stepped closer and drew his coat tighter around my shoulders. It felt like a winding sheet binding my limbs, but I didn’t push him away. I shivered. He must have thought it was from the cold because he moved closer still, backing me up against the barn wall. But it was really from the coldness I sensed in him. Even as I felt the heat of his desire I knew that his heart was cold. No. I couldn’t go with him, even if I told him now that I was pregnant and begged and screamed and demanded he marry me; being with him would kill me. And yet I didn’t push him away. I felt a coldness in my heart answering the coldness in his. We were the same, he and I. I had deceived the person I loved and I was already planning to deceive her again.
The rough planks still held the warmth of the long day in the sun and the heat of the stacked hay. His body, pressed against mine, held that same heat. A summer’s worth of passion. I let him slide his hands under my gown and lift my legs around his waist. I heard the rain gusting against the barn, like a giant trying to batter down the walls. I wrapped my legs around his back and took him into me just as the lightning flashed through the skylight, lighting us up like torches. I gasped, thinking it would strike us, almost wishing it would—I imagined the shape our bodies made emblazoned on the barn wall, our flesh dissolved to ash—but the light faded harmlessly, leaving us in the dark.
When we were done, he wanted to take me back by the road because he thought crossing the clove in the rain would be too dangerous, but I told him no.
“I’ll be fine,” I told him. What else could happen to me? The lightning didn’t strike me while I was betraying my beloved; why would the fates dash me against the rocks of the clove now?
“I’ll see you next summer,” he said as I left, but I already knew he wouldn’t be coming back.
I ran quickly into the rain. I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t be spending the winter here either. As I climbed the slick rock path up into the clove, I made my own plans. I would get Mimi to help me. She could get me a job working on the murals at St. Lucy’s. It was perfect. When the baby was born, I could give it to the nuns.
For a second I considered finding a way to bring the baby back with me. I could claim it belonged to one of my sisters. Why shouldn’t Vera and I raise it as our own? Then I remembered what Vera always said: that once a woman had a baby, she lost her chance to be an artist. No, it was better this way for everyone.
As I made my way down the hill toward the Lodge I saw that one of the oldest and tallest trees in the forest had been cleaved in two by lightning. The first rays of the morning sun reached through the new break in the canopy and struck the still-smoking stump. I lay my hand on the seared wood where the lightning had carved its name into the heart of the tree—a great jagged ziggurat that looked exactly like the rend that had split my heart in two.