Arcadia Falls (25 page)

He grins. “I wasn’t always so law-abiding.” He rakes his hand through his hair, and I can picture him as the boy he was, those green eyes alert in the dark woods, waiting for the white woman to appear. If I were the white woman haunting those lonely woods I don’t think I’d have been able to resist appearing before those eyes. “I broke a window to get into the building—it was easy, the school’s never been much for security—and raided a supply closet full of paints and pencils. I was looking for
something more substantial to steal in the parlor when I saw her. A life-size naked woman glaring down at me from the wall. It was how she stood there—completely unashamed, brazen as an animal—that got me. That and the way she was looking at me as if she saw right through me to my soul and knew all my secrets. I put back everything I had taken and spent the rest of the night just looking at her, wondering who she was. When I found out that she’d died in the clove I wondered if I hadn’t met the white woman after all.”

“Is that why you work here?” I ask.

“Partly. I first came to the barn when I found out the paintings were done here. Dymphna caught me here once—you know she and her cousin Doris own the barn and the farm stand—”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Yeah.” He smiles again. He seems like a different person here, more relaxed. His hand drifts to the statue and brushes a smudge of dust off the curve of her hip. A tremor moves through me, as if he’d touched me and not the statue. Do I
want
him to touch me? It has been so long since I’ve felt a man touch me like that—longer than the year since Jude died. We’d been having one of those
lulls
—as I’d come to think of the sexless spates in our marriage—in the weeks before he died. It might have been a whole month, but I never liked to count. Jude had been working a lot; the market had been especially volatile and he’d started trading at night. I’d started to feel a little restless and concerned, but I reassured myself that we’d always come out of these dry periods with renewed passion. That’s how a marriage worked, I figured, you had to weather the ups and downs. I just hadn’t figured on that particular lull stretching into eternity.

“Are you okay?” Callum Reade asks, moving closer to me.

“I just caught a chill,” I say. The chill of an eternity of not being touched, I think. I look up to find Callum’s pale green eyes fixed on my own, intent, as if he could read my thoughts. Again I feel heat coming off him, the heat of the sun on his skin … or maybe it’s from the accumulated heat of Lily and Virgil’s passion all those years ago. Whatever its source, I find myself leaning into it, hungry for it. I close my eyes and
picture his hands carving rough wood into the shape of a woman, feel his hands cup my face as if he were measuring my contours for a mold, and then, before I can change my mind, I tilt my head up and meet his lips. They are soft but firm, as smooth as polished cherrywood. They even taste like cherries. He takes a step closer, his arms enfolding me like giant wings, which I can almost hear….

And then I do hear them. And feel them. Stirring the air right above us. I open my eyes just in time to see the barn owl swooping over our heads, heading out into the fields. I step back, breaking the embrace, and glance toward the statue, away from the look of confusion and hurt in his eyes. Standing in the circle of light she looks like a woodland nymph surprised at her bath—Diana discovered in her sacred grove by Actaeon. Only instead of punishing her intruder she has been punished herself, turned into wood for all time.

I turn away from her and Callum Reade. Walking out the door I think to myself that I know exactly how she feels.

Callum follows me across the field. “Where are you going?” he calls from behind me.

“Back to the ridge,” I shout without looking back. “I’m supposed to supervise the autumn equinox. I can’t be late.”

“That’s where I’m going, too,” he says.

“Fine,” I say, quickening my pace. “We’d better hurry.”

The climb up through the clove is longer and harder than I had anticipated. It’s so steep that we have to dig our fingers into the cracks in the rock to pull ourselves up. We do it in silence, saving our breath and concentration for the climb. I’m relieved that we don’t have to make small talk or acknowledge the interrupted kiss. It’s not the time, I tell myself as I attack the steep rock face as if I could burn away desire like a few extra calories. Another voice reverberates in my head as we climb, though.
Will it ever be time?
Or will I always feel like this, as lifeless as a woman carved from wood?

By the time we reach the top of the clove, my fingernails are caked with mud and I suspect my face is streaked with it from wiping the sweat
off my brow. My legs are trembling with effort. Callum gives me a hand up over the last boulder—and then holds on to my hand at the top of the ridge.

“Are you done running from me?” he asks. “Or are you going to find another mountain to climb to get away from me?”

“I’m sorry,” I say when I see the look of hurt in his eyes. “It was a mistake—”

“Oh, I can see that!”

“I mean it was a mistake for me. I’m just not ready yet. It hasn’t even been a year yet.”

“Okay then, I wasn’t trying to rush you. In fact, I believe it was you who kissed me.”

I’m grateful my face is already red from exertion as I feel the blood course into my cheeks. “As I said, it was a mistake. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. Now if you don’t mind, I have to go home and shower….”

“I’m afraid there isn’t time.” He lifts his chin up over my shoulder. I turn and look into the darkening woods. It’s like a swarm of fireflies is coming up the hill.

There must be at least forty students walking single file, each holding a lit candle. It looks like a river of light flowing uphill.

Leading the procession is Chloe, dressed in a long dark green dress that hugs her hips and breasts. A gold rope is tied over her hips, the tassel swaying back and forth as she climbs the hill. A wreath of red and gold leaves crowns her head and some kind of symbol is painted on her forehead: a circle topped with a crescent moon. When she reaches the clearing, she stops at the stump of the lightning-struck tree and sets her candle down among the twisted roots. As the other students file into the clearing, they spread out into a circle. I see Clyde Bollinger in a white dress shirt that flaps loosely around his thin hips and bony wrists, Hannah Weiss in a floaty pink dress trimmed with violet ribbons, and Justin Clay in a pink Oxford shirt and khakis, looking more like he’s at a clambake on the Cape than at a pagan rite in the woods. Tori Pratt, also in a snug long dress, approaches the tree stump with a wide copper basin, which she places next to Chloe’s candle.

I strain to find Sally in the crowd. I’m tempted to go closer to the clearing, but then I want to stay between the students and the ridge. Callum seems to have the same idea. With his arms folded over his chest and legs planted wide apart, he looks like he’s ready to block any student’s approach to the cliff edge. I finally spy Sally and Haruko among the last arrivals to the clearing. Sally’s at the point of the circle farthest way from me—and the ridge—which suits me just fine. I want her as far from the edge as possible.

The last of the procession enters the clearing and I see the rear guard is made up of faculty and staff: Shelley Drake in a floaty gauze caftan, Ivy St. Clare in her usual black tunic and slim pants, Colton Briggs looking out of place in suit and tie, a woman in a Grecian style robe whom I don’t recognize at first but then identify as the regal Miss Pernault with her hair down, Toby Potter looking perfectly in character in a homespun monk’s robe, and motherly Dymphna Byrnes in a flowered housedress and burnt orange cardigan. The librarian, Miss Bridewell, in some kind of floral muumuu brings up the rear. Everyone is holding a candle except for Ivy St. Clare.

Behind me the sun, which has reached the line of mountains in the west, sends a gold light skidding into the clearing. As if that was the signal, Chloe picks up her candle from the stump and holds it high over her head.

“We come to say farewell to the sun,” she says, her girlish voice clear and sweet in the quiet woods. “And to say a final farewell to those who have traveled into the land of shadows before us. Isabel Cheney, we speed you on your journey and beg you to forgive any wrongdoing you suffered here. We ask all of those we have lost to watch over us in these coming days, as the nights grow longer and the shadows stretch farther and the dark rises. We promise to honor you, to look deep into the darkness in our own hearts, and pray we survive the journey into the dark until the light returns.”

Chloe takes a black candle out of a pocket in her dress. She lights it from the wick of the white candle and then turns around and starts walking up toward the ridge.

“What’s she doing?” Callum asks, his voice low.

“She said the ceremony required her to approach the ridge. The rest of them are supposed to stay in the clearing.” As the circle of candle-holders stirs, though, I have a sudden misapprehension. What if they all start walking up toward the ridge at once? I have an image of them all marching up the hill and over the edge like lemmings plunging into the sea, taking Callum Reade and me with them.

Callum must have the same thought. As Chloe approaches us holding both candles, Callum steps between her and the ridge. She stops and looks up at him, her pale face glowing in the flickering light of the candles. She creases her brow, making the painted moon ripple as though a cloud has passed over it. It reminds me of how Lily described the clouds moving over the moon on May Eve. It strikes me that just as Lily’s life was irrevocably altered by an unwanted pregnancy, so the darkness of Isabel’s death has fallen over Chloe’s life.

“I need to go to the head of the waterfall,” she says in a small but insistent voice, “to put my candles in the water.”

“Why don’t you give them to me?” Callum says, holding out his hand. His voice is low and gentle, too low for anyone but me or Chloe to hear. The students below us are whispering among themselves, trying to figure out what’s going on.

“No!” Chloe hisses, her face distorted now by anger. “It has to be me!”

Callum tilts his head. “Why?” he asks.

The single word question seems to light a spark in Chloe. She flings herself at Callum like a small missile. Even though she’s tiny and light the force of her fury knocks him a step backward toward the edge of the ridge. Before I can think, I throw myself at Chloe, grabbing a handful of her hair to pull her back—whether to save her or Callum, I have no idea. It does both, though. Chloe spins on me, the wax from her candles spraying outward in a wide arc that hits my hands and arms, and Callum regains his footing enough to step forward and restrain her. He moves her down from the ridge, commanding the rest of the students to move back. Only one manages to get past him and make it to the top of the ridge. It’s Sally. I hold out my arms, which are only now beginning to
register the scalding pain from the hot wax—sure that she’s come to see if I’m okay. Her face is stained with tears.

“What were you thinking, Mom?” she cries, her voice breaking into a sob. “Why would you bring that man here? You ruined everything!”

She turns and hurries down the hill with the rest of the disbanded troop, leaving me to wonder which hurt worse—her angry words or the burns that I can feel already beginning to blister.

I
n the weeks following the disastrous autumn equinox, the campus seems plunged into mourning for the death of summer. The gold-tinged light that slants in through my classroom window bathes my students in an amber sap as if preserving them in the moment forever. The slow drift of yellow leaves from the sycamores might be tears for the dying of the sun. Perhaps my melancholy is just the natural turning inward that marks the change of seasons. Certainly I can’t complain that my students aren’t … well, studious. Even Sally, who did so badly in school last year that I was afraid she wouldn’t pass, is working hard. Whenever I see her on the
lawn beneath the deep wine-colored canopy of the copper beech or in front of the fireplace in one of the lounges in Beech Hall, she bends her head down to her book or sketchpad. She still blames me for bringing Callum Reade to the autumn equinox. I can’t really argue. I blame myself as well.

If I hadn’t kissed him in the barn maybe he wouldn’t have followed me and made that scene on the ridge. And as much as it embarrasses me to admit it, I was the one who initiated that kiss. It must be an aberration of grief that made me do it. He’s not at all the kind of man I’m attracted to—gruff, bitter, clearly with a chip on his shoulder when it comes to artists, intellectuals, and New Yorkers. Certainly he’s nothing like Jude. No—it’s better that he hasn’t sought me out since the day of the equinox.

To convince myself of that, I decide to find out just why he quit the New York police force. While my class is doing research in the library, I do an Internet search on his name and come up with the story. There’s a picture of Callum Reade, looking much younger, in his uniform.
OFFICER CLEARED OF WRONGDOING IN BRONX SHOOTING
, the caption reads. The boy he shot had a record and a gun, which three witnesses testified they saw him pull out and aim when stopped by the police. There didn’t seem much question that Callum’s shooting him was justified, but then, below Callum’s picture is a picture of the boy. Although he was fourteen when he died, he looks about eleven in the picture. He has a wide-open smile that reveals a gap between his two front teeth, and a mischievous look in his eyes. It’s hard to imagine him wielding anything more dangerous than an MP3 player. I can’t help but wonder if this is the face Callum Reade sees when he closes his eyes at night. I know I would see it. I wonder now if he was so adamant about keeping Chloe away from the ridge because he wasn’t willing to risk being responsible for another young life lost.