“Good. That’ll help your situation.”
They missed three more stoplights before she spoke up again. And even then she surprised herself. A thought floated through her mind, but she hadn’t seen it coming, and she definitely hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“Now I won’t be able to teach that boy to read.”
He caught her eye in the rearview mirror.
“What boy? That kid who was there at the house when we picked you up? He doesn’t live there, right? We were told there was just a single mom and a girl.”
“No. He doesn’t live there.”
“What’s his story?”
She sighed, and let her mind go blank. She vaguely wondered if she even knew his story.
“He’s had a lot of loss in his life. He just needs someone to need him around.”
“Maybe he could come visit you.”
“Where? In Eastbridge? Or in jail?”
He caught her eye again in the rearview mirror. His curiosity had been replaced by something that looked like a mild revulsion.
“Well, that remains to be seen,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”
She sat in the plush administration office, waiting to see who would come in to read her the riot act.
Please be Boris, she thought to herself. Over and over. It had become a loop in her brain. Please be Boris. Please don’t be Lynne.
The door opened, and Lynne strode in.
She was a tall, bizarrely thin woman of maybe forty, with long arms and legs. She looked as though she had been stretched into her current height.
She sat down behind the desk, making a steeple of her fingers. Marilyn made a point of looking down at the green wall-to-wall carpet.
“Well, then,” Lynne said. “What do you have to say for yourself, Mrs. Clements?”
Marilyn sat quietly for a long time. Or maybe it only seemed like a long time. She was hoping the question would go away on its own. It didn’t seem to.
“Most people think chickens can’t fly at all,” she said at last. “But they do. They try. They’re just not all that good at it. I looked it up online after someone told me that. They flap and they flap, but they never seem to gain much altitude. Sooner or later they hit the ground again. Generally sooner.”
Silence. A strange, awkward one.
Then Lynne said, “Is this a metaphor?”
“Seems that way. Doesn’t it? The longer you live, the more you come to believe that pretty much everything is. Yes, I hit the ground, but you have to give me credit for trying, though, right?” She waited. She glanced at Lynne, hoping the woman would at least smile. Even wryly. Lynne did not smile. She seemed utterly devoid of humor. Then again, Marilyn reminded herself, she always had been. “Well. Never mind. Of course you don’t. What was I thinking? I have most of the money. I could give back what I still have. Maybe one of my children could make up the difference.”
“You don’t think we already approached your children about the money?”
“But that was all of it. This is only the difference. It’s not really that much. You’d be surprised how little I got by on while I was gone. If I give it back . . . would you consider not pressing charges?”
“I’m not making any commitment about that,” Lynne said. “Get it all together and bring it back here, and then we’ll see what’s what.”
“How did you find me?”
“Oh, no you don’t.”
“Oh, no I don’t what?”
“I’m not going to draw you a road map for how to do it more effectively next time.”
“I would think it would only convince me that you’re very smart and have a lot of tools at your disposal.”
It was worth a try, anyway.
“I’ll say this and this only: It didn’t help your case that you tried to take on your deceased roommate’s name. We all spent a lot of time wondering why you would do that. Boris had a theory. He thought it was your unusual way of showing that you actually cared about her. You go around trying to convince everybody that you care about nothing and no one. But since then I’ve found myself wondering if Boris was on to something.”
“It’s because I went to talk to the principal at that boy’s school, isn’t it?”
“I’m not saying any more.”
“I know it is.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Now that’s a very good question,” Marilyn said.
But she didn’t go on to answer it.
“Well,” Lynne said, when she seemed to grow tired of waiting. “Go on back to your room. You have some phone calls to make.”
Marilyn looked up at the younger woman, blankly. She wasn’t sure if her face was blank, but her mind certainly was.
“What kind of phone calls?”
“The kind that will get that money back here. Call one of your children. Tell them how much hangs in the balance.”
Marilyn moved to open her mouth to speak, then realized it was already open. Hanging open. Her jaw had dropped without her realizing.
“You won’t even take me back there to get my things?”
“We have all of your things that you didn’t pack to take with you. You couldn’t have carried all that much. But . . . to answer your question . . . no. Absolutely not. We want you right here on the premises. We’re not taking any chances with you after what happened. We want you where we can keep an eye on you. Make some calls and get whatever you need to come to you. And, more importantly, get what I need to come to me. And the sooner the better. And then, when you’re done, get down to the cafeteria as fast as you can. It’s steak night, and you know how long the line gets on steak night.”
She sat in her old room, staring out the window. It was on the second floor. A bird had nested in the branches of the big maple tree outside her window. She could see the little birds moving about inside the bowl of the nest. They were not babies, from the look of them. They looked half-grown. Soon they would fly away. Really fly. With altitude. With real range. Marilyn envied that.
She took a deep breath and picked up the phone on her bedside table. Dialed her daughter’s number by heart. It struck her as odd that her mind, which dropped so many details so regularly, still held on to that. It seemed as though the older memories had a firmer foothold. Many days she remembered with startling clarity the day when one of her children was born—but not why she had gotten up and walked into a new room.
The line rang. And rang. And rang.
Marilyn found herself relieved that Betty wasn’t home. She could leave a message. It would hurt less to talk to her daughter’s voice mail. It felt safer.
Then she was struck with an unpleasant thought: Maybe Betty was home. Maybe she was staring at her caller ID and choosing not to pick up.
The thought was just disturbing enough that, when the outgoing message in her daughter’s familiar voice finished playing, Marilyn didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak.
The beep, and a long, panicky silence ticked by.
“Betty,” she forced herself to say. It came out too sudden and loud, betraying her fear. “I need you to call me. I need you. I’m back at Eastbridge and I need your help. Please call me here.” A pause. Then she added a humiliating second “please.”
She held the phone to her ear in silence for several seconds, then realized her message was still recording. She hung up the phone.
Then, because she was not at all sure Betty would call her back, she made a similar begging, humiliating call to Gerald.
When she was done, she lay back on her bed and watched the little birds. Robins, from the look of them.
She did not go down to the cafeteria for steak night. She didn’t feel the least bit hungry.
She realized she was physically and mentally exhausted from the experience of her terrible day, but she didn’t notice herself falling asleep.
When she woke in the morning, she checked the message light on the phone beside her bed. When she saw that neither of her children had returned her calls, she felt depressed but not in the least surprised.
She decided to wait until close to the end of the day—just in case they came through—before falling back on her last-ditch option.