preseason, to try out for the tennis team. I’d won three out of five of my challenge matches and the coach had pulled me aside, told me she’d be taking me on as an alternate. She couldn’t, she’d said, allow me to officially join up, though, until I underwent a full physical. School policy.
Making the Williams tennis team as a walk-on was the first sign that the dark days were behind me, that quitting the benzos cold turkey had been worth the pain and trauma, the shakes and cramps and nights without sleep. My life, it seemed, was turning around, was going back, at least a little bit, to the way it was before Nica died. I’d wanted to tell Dad the good news in person. I’d also wanted to visit the Chandler Health Center, open year-round, though at reduced hours during summer break, which it still was for a another week, to see Dr. Simons, my doctor since I was a kid. So I’d jumped in my car and headed down to Hartford for the day.
That afternoon, Dr. Simons informed me I was pregnant. Eight weeks was his rough estimation.
I’m vomiting before I’m awake, my eyes still closed when my stomach seizes and acid floods my throat. I jackknife, lurching forward to open the door of my car but don’t quite make it in time, and a pale brown mixture of Diet Coke and low-sodium Saltines splatters out of me in a series of long convulsions. After the last one, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, sit all the way up.
I hadn’t intended to fall asleep. The house I’d been watching had gone dark just after eleven, which meant I was free to go. My lids, though, were heavy, getting heavier, so I put away my mom’s old camera, the one with the telephoto lens, doubling for me at the moment as a pair of binoculars, and crawled in the back. As I stretched out, my hand brushed the sleeve of a jacket: Nica’s, thin, dark blue denim, button-flap pockets. Immediately I recoiled. She’d left it there the day before she died. The way she’d tossed it, it still seemed to retain her shape. And I didn’t want to touch it, make it flat, or jostle it so that the scent of her, caught in its folds, escaped. As I moved back to the front of the car, reclined the passenger seat, I told myself I’d just close my eyes for fifteen minutes then drive home. That’s the last thought I remember having.
I lower the windows and get out of the car. The street I’m on is crowded with single-story houses set back among scraggly shrubs, the plaster statues of Our Lady in the front yards chipped and faded: a run-down neighborhood in a borderline part of town. The day’s going to be a hot one. I reach through the window for the Diet Coke can in the cup holder, swish the liquid around my mouth before swallowing, slowly and carefully, in distinct shifts, hoping my stomach won’t notice. Then I walk to the rear of the car, pop the trunk. The pack of paper towels is under a tennis hopper.
I use nearly an entire roll cleaning the passenger-side door.
It’s too early for traffic and I make it home in under ten minutes. I haven’t even stepped all the way inside the front door when the smell hits me: a kind of stale fustiness, a combination of dust and old furniture, of meals cooked and eaten, of frayed carpeting. If sadness has a scent, this is it. Dad would’ve gotten back from work just a couple hours ago, is probably in bed now, asleep. I move quietly as I go upstairs, shower and change, slip a book in my bag so I’ll have something to read later.
Before heading out the door again, I walk into the kitchen, as dark as the rest of the house. I open the refrigerator, the sudden bright light making me blink. On the bottom shelf, in front of a carton of milk, its use-by date several days past, is an aluminum container with a clear plastic top: linguine in red clam sauce. Dad must’ve swung by that all-night Italian place near the Amtrak station on his way home. My stomach begins to churn again, and I have to close my eyes, keep myself from imagining the smell of the congealed Parmesan, the glistening noodles, the gynecological-looking bits of gray shellfish coated in pureed tomato.
Blindly, I reach for the milk. Next, I take the box of Raisin Bran out of the cabinet. I pour a few flakes into a bowl, wet them with a splash of expired milk, then drop the bowl inside the sink. Dad’s pretty checked out these days. I doubt it would register with him that I’ve stopped eating breakfast, and if it did register with him, I doubt even more that it would register why. Still, it never hurts to be careful.
I’m about to get back in my car. Then I think better of it. If I smell vomit, I probably will. While I’m standing there, hand on the latch, I catch sight of the dashboard clock. It’s already past eight. Immediately I let go of the latch, start walking. If I don’t hurry, I’ll be late to my first day of work.
Chandler Academy of Hartford, Connecticut, was established in 1886 when an Episcopal clergyman, Reverend Peabody Chandler of the Boston Chandlers, converted the ancestral summer home in the Sheldon/Charter Oak section of the city into an academy whose mission was to “take the wayward sons of distinguished New England families and mold the disposition of their minds and morals so that they might become good Christian gentlemen.” In 1971 the minds and morals of the daughters of distinguished families became eligible for molding, as well. The wayward part stayed the same, though. And for a school that’s primarily boarding, Chandler, with its two-strikes policy, is tolerant of rule-breakers. Consequently, each fall it winds up with a high number of students who’ve either been rejected from or given the boot by its stricter rivals.
If Chandler’s reputation is only a cut above so-so, its campus, which looks more like that of a college or a small university than a high school, is anything but. The central building, aptly named Great House, is red brick, impossibly old, and covered in ivy. Great House is set among a trio of shorter and only slightly less grand buildings: Noyes, de Forest, and Perkins. To their left is Burroughs Library, pillared, marbled, silent as dust; and to its right, Amory Chapel, its bell plundered from some bombed-out church in Europe by an enterprising alum at the end of World War I; and, a little farther on, Francis Abbot Science Center and Caroline Knox Abbot Theater. Stokes Dining Hall is south. The hockey rink and tennis courts and various athletic fields are east. So is Houghton Gymnasium and the Health and Counseling Center. And way east, so far east you can’t quite see it from campus, is Chandler’s boathouse, the Gordon T. Pierpoint, a stone’s throw from Trinity College’s boathouse, Bliss, on the banks of the Connecticut River. The dormitories—there are four of them, two for the boys, Endicott and Minot, two for the girls, Archibald and Amory—are west. They’re separated from the main campus by the graveyard, controversial real estate at Chandler even before Nica’s body was found there. The graveyard belongs to the City of Hartford, and technically school rules don’t apply to it, making it a sort of gray zone for boarders, a moral no-man’s-land. It’s the hub of what the administration refers to as “narcotics-related activity.” Is also the hub of alcohol-related activity. Sexual-related activity, too.
I start toward the quad, the air sharp with the smell of cut grass and lawn fertilizer, fresh paint. Campus is empty, all the students in chapel, extra-long this morning because it’s the first day of the new school year. Empty except for a lone figure, a hundred yards or so ahead. And though this person has her back to me, I recognize her instantly. It’s the walk, tight and clipped and harried: Mrs. Amory, Jamie’s mother. She’s looking primly chic in a tailored gray suit, the skirt, meant to be fitted, puckering slightly on her no-ass frame, her sheer-stockinged calves tensed and shadowed by high heels, black and wickedly pointed. She changes paths and I can see her in profile now. Her face, behind its dark glasses, is as hard and brittle as an eggshell. As plain as an eggshell, too.
I slow down, not wanting her to spot me, though there’s little danger of that, so intently is her gaze focused on the doors of Great House. It’s no surprise finding her on campus. She’s been in charge of the Parent Giving Association for as long as I can remember and does a fair amount of volunteer work at the school besides. Plus,