Arcadia Falls (9 page)

“That’s another part of the tradition,” Sheriff Reade says. “You’re supposed to throw out all your bad habits and regrets from the last year and wish for what you want this year.”

I’m glad to see that Sally is part of this crowd and not the group chasing Isabel in the orchard. I watch her as she tilts her head up and squeezes her eyes tight just like she used to when she blew out her birthday candles or threw a penny into a fountain. Then she cocks her arm—exactly as Jude taught her to for softball—and throws the corn doll into the very heart of the fire. I think I know what she’s wishing for, but it’s the one wish no one can ever grant her: for time to go backward and restore her old life.

A
s soon as the sacrifice of the corn dollies is over I leave the bonfire, eager to make it back to the cottage before Sally and Clyde. Sheriff Reade offers to walk me back, insisting he’s going that way anyway to patrol the woods for bonfire stragglers. “Although they usually stay out of the woods.”

“Really? I’d have thought it would be a popular spot for clandestine activities.”

He smiles—a sly smile that makes him look devilish. “This generation tends to prefer their
clandestine activities
indoors. Certainly not in a haunted wood.”

“Haunted?”

“According to local legend,” he says. “This is one of the oldest tracks of virgin forest in the state. The Dutch wouldn’t cut down the trees because they thought it was inhabited by wood elves and moss maidens. When I was growing up, boys would dare one another to spend the night in these woods. They said the
wittewieven
would eat you alive.”

“The
wittewieven?”

“The white woman. It’s an old Dutch myth, from the first settlers who explored the clove. They thought they saw a ghostly white woman in the mist from the falls. It’s mixed up with a story about a woman from Kingston who died in the clove. Just something kids used to scare each other witless…. anyway … here we are. Will you be all right on your own or do you want me to walk you to your door?” I don’t relish the idea of going on by myself even though I can see the lights of my cottage, but when I see the sheriff’s teasing smile I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking he’s scared me with the local folklore.

“I’ll be fine. I don’t think the white woman will get me between here and my front door.” I mean it to be a joke, but then I recall that I glimpsed a woman in white earlier tonight. Or I thought I did. I almost ask him to escort me to the door, but he’s already saluting me with his flashlight and turning up the path that leads to the ridge. As soon as he’s gone, I realize I never did retrieve my flashlight when it fell earlier tonight, and now I’m alone in the dark. I fix my eyes on the lighted windows of the cottage and walk toward them, ignoring the sounds of the trees creaking behind me and trying not to think of white women and changelings and other things that inhabit the trees of folklore. Only when I get to my door do I risk turning around … and catch my breath at the sight of slim white shapes swaying in the woods. But then I see it’s only a stand of white birches among the pines.

To keep myself from watching the clock until Sally comes back, I go upstairs to do some more unpacking. I unpack the boxes marked
SHEETS AND BLANKETS
and make up my bed and Sally’s. Then I open a suitcase and put nightgowns and underwear in the cupboard drawers and hang up shirts and dresses in the closet. When I’m done I lift up the suitcase to put it on the top shelf of the closet, but I notice that it’s still heavy.
Putting it back down I see that one of the outer zippered compartments is bulging. I unzip it. Inside I find Jude’s old Rolex watch, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, and a handful of round, speckled stones.

I put the stones and the bottle on the night table and sit down on the bed, the heavy gold watch cradled in my hands. I looked for it off and on for the last ten months until I concluded Jude must have had it on when he was taken to the hospital and that someone stole it from him. It had seemed a final indignity—the thought of someone removing the expensive watch from his still-warm wrist—and I feel absurdly grateful knowing that’s not what happened. He’d used this suitcase for a trip he’d taken just a few weeks before he died and left the watch in the zippered compartment. It was a strange oversight, though, since he usually wore the watch. A sign, perhaps, that he was under stress.

I slip the gold band over my wrist where it dangles loose and surprisingly warm against my skin, as if it still held the warmth of his flesh. It’s still ticking. It’s kept time all these months, outlasting its owner’s heart.

The idea is so painful that I instinctively reach for the bourbon and take a long burning swallow. I pick up one of the stones and close my eyes, trying to imagine where Jude found it, what exotic beach or mountain stream, but all I feel is the cold, smooth empty weight of it in my hand. When I open my eyes I’m looking at the watch face. It reads 11:20.

Okay, I think, she’s a little late. No big deal. She was with polite, well-mannered Clyde Bollinger. I get up and look for a place to hide the bourbon. I stopped keeping alcoholic beverages in the house after some friends of Sally’s broke into the liquor cabinet last year and Lexy Roth-stein threw up all over her mother’s BMW. Sally might invite some of her new friends over and I don’t want a repeat of last year’s debacle, especially with kids who will also be my students. It’s going to be a little tricky having Sally socializing with my students. How will I deal with Clyde, for instance, when he finally gets here with Sally? Should I mention that they were late even if it’s only twenty—I look down at the watch—well, forty-three minutes late?

I go to the window, the bottle still in my hand, to look for them coming up the path, but I can’t see a thing. I turn off the bedroom light so I
can see better—and so Sally won’t find me framed in the lit window when she comes home—but all I can see are those white birches swaying in the wind. I open the window to listen for Clyde and Sally’s voices and hear the wind instead.

I can’t remember the last time I heard wind like this—not in our Avenue B apartment where the city sounds of traffic and sirens drowned out every natural noise, and not in our hermetically sealed, climate-controlled Great Neck house. My new home, though, seems to be engaged in a duet with the wind. Gusts whoosh out of the pine forest and fling themselves onto the house, which sighs and moans as if it were being caressed and then, as the wind sweeps back into the forest, keens like an abandoned lover. The white birches thrash like women tossing their long hair over their shoulders.

I take another gulp of bourbon and imagine Sally out on this wild night, buffeted by the elements. Just when I think I can’t bear to sit another moment I catch a flash of light between the pines, hear a scrap of laughter, and then Sally and Clyde emerge from the woods. I look down at my watch. It’s midnight. A full hour late. I can’t let that go. Swallowing the last half-inch of bourbon, I head down the stairs. They’re coming in the front door just as I reach the bottom step and I see in the two sets of eyes that stare up at me how I must look: a deranged woman shaking her hand at them. Clyde flinches as if he thought I was going to slap him.

“I believe we agreed on eleven,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm.

Sally looks from me to Clyde and then, heaving a disgusted sigh, lifts her hand so I can see her wristwatch. “It
is
eleven, Mom.”

I start to object, but then, looking down at Jude’s watch, I understand. The last time he wore the watch was in Japan where, no doubt, it is now twelve o’clock in the afternoon. I consider making a joke about how late she would be if we were in Japan, but she’s already stomping up the stairs, leaving me with an embarrassed Clyde.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s my late husband’s watch so it’s set to a different time.” Only when Clyde’s gone do I realize that what I’ve said sounds like the dead are on a different time zone.

Sally is still angry in the morning. I bring her orange juice—the only thing she’ll ingest before noon—as a peace offering, but she tells me she promised to meet Clyde and Chloe for breakfast in the cafeteria at—she holds up her watch—“eight o’clock standard sane person’s time.”

“I said I was sorry, Sally. You don’t have to be mean—”

“You were mean to embarrass me in front of Clyde,” she snaps. “If you don’t want me to make any new friends here we might as well have stayed in Great Neck.”

“Of course I want you to make new friends—”

“Good. Then I’d better go unless you don’t think I’m capable of walking to campus by myself.”

I concede that she can find her own way to campus.

And truly, in the light of day finding the spot where the trail splits—left to the campus and right to the ridge and Witte Clove—couldn’t be clearer or more straightforward. Once on the trail to campus, I deliberately slow my steps so that I have time to calm down from the scene with Sally and to think over how I want to open the class.

I had planned to simply go over the course outline, which will take us from primitive animal bride tales to Greek myth to the seventeenth century French salons to Marvel and DC superheroes. But now? I don’t want to start with chronologies and bibliographies; I want to start with the raw panic I felt in the woods last night. I want my students to hear the trees moving behind them, to see the fleeing peasant girl in the shadows of the pines—to hear her heart beating as she races from the witch’s house to reclaim her stolen life. I want them to experience the fairy tale as a living, breathing organism, not some quaint story in an illustrated children’s book.

As I enter Beech Hall and walk to my classroom, it strikes me that this was Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt’s achievement. They created a life here at Arcadia Falls crafted out of their dreams and visions—a fairytale kingdom where artists could come and paint and draw and write and compose amidst the beauty of nature, free from society’s demands and the stress of commerce and industry. They were changelings, I think as I enter the classroom, who refashioned themselves into the heroines of
their own stories. They had come here to reinvent themselves. Perhaps that was part of the reason I’d applied for the job here. I remembered my mother once saying that if she’d come here to school her life would have been different. She would have been a different person. I think that I’d hoped that Sally and I might be able to become different people here.

I stand in front of the class, looking out at the young faces that last night had glowed in the light of the bonfire. I recognize Chloe and Clyde but am disappointed not to see Isabel. I recall what she said last night:
let’s be the best that we can and leave regrets behind us
.

“What if,” I say now, “you could start completely fresh as someone new?”

“As anyone?” The question comes from a slight girl in the back row. I noticed her when I first came in because she’s striking in an unusual way. She has the oval face, high forehead, and almond-shaped eyes of a Botticelli madonna. She’s wearing an embroidered peasant dress and purple tights. “Absolutely anyone,” I answer.

“Any personality would be an improvement for you, Hannah,” a girl in the front row says.

I quickly look down at my roster and find the name Hannah Weiss. Then I look up at the girl who’s just spoken. She’s wearing faded jeans that hug the curves of her hips and accentuate the length of her legs. From the stitching on the pocket I recognize the brand as one coveted by Great Neck teenagers. A backless sheepskin slipper dangles from her right foot; she taps it against her heel. “And who would you trade places with?” I ask her.

“Oh, I’m perfectly happy with who I am,” she says, flipping her waist-length, perfectly straight brown hair over her shoulder, “unless … well, I wouldn’t mind trading places with Angelina Jolie if it meant I could be Mrs. Brad Pitt.”

A few of the girls giggle, but Clyde Bollinger straightens up in his chair and pushes the hair out of his eyes. “Why would you pick a mindless celebrity, Tori, when you could change places with someone truly extraordinary. Like Stan Lee, or the Coen brothers, or Stephen Hawking.”