Final Exam (14 page)

Eighteen

I finally kicked Max and Fred out of the dorm at ten-fifteen, a good forty-five minutes before I would have had to write them up and submit their transgression to the Student Judicial Council. Tommy Moore never returned to finish sitting desk, so I stayed put. Crawford and Fred were off duty when they arrived, so they hadn’t broken any department rules when they dropped by and overstayed their welcome.

It seemed like détente had been reached, and while Fred and Max were amicable, they had come to no significant agreement, except that they were to see each other over the weekend to talk further. While they recounted this development to us, Crawford stood behind them, imploring me silently to tell them something, anything. But I couldn’t. First of all, it wasn’t really my place to tell them; that fell on their priest. And second, I was chicken.

I kissed Crawford good-bye outside the dorm. Fred and Max were talking quietly by the Crown Vic. “Good night, Chad.”

“Listen, Coco,” he said. “You’ll have to have a talk with our niece. She can’t wear underwear out in public.”

“After my next trip overseas,” I promised.

“As long as it’s overseas and not into the convent,” he cautioned. He didn’t think my snooping around the convent to look for Wayne was such a great idea. I had to disagree. I thought it was an excellent idea. But I didn’t tell him that.

After I bid him adieu, I went back into the dorm to call Tommy Moore. I hadn’t seen Mary Catherine leave the building and probably wouldn’t. I was sure her departure would be under cover of night or in the wee hours of the morning.

Tommy was in his room and answered the phone on the first ring. “Everyone’s gone, Tommy. You can come back down,” I said. He came down the stairs a few minutes later, looking around the banister before he reached the lobby, making sure that I was telling the truth. I waved him down. “They’re gone.”

He let out an audible sigh. “What was
that
?” he asked, referencing the event that had sent him scurrying a few hours before. “That guy was pretty mad.”

“Long story,” I said. “Hey, are you going to finish out your shift? Because I have to go out for a half hour or so.”

He took his place behind the desk and organized all of his supplies. “I’ll be here.”

“Good.” I headed out of the dorm and down the side road toward the river. For some reason, the song “Cracklin’ Rosie” by Neil Diamond popped into my head and I couldn’t get it out. “Cracklin’ Rose you’re a store-bought woman”? I thought. What does that even mean? I hummed the song as I walked along in the dark, thoughts of Neil Diamond in his rhinestone-studded shirt keeping my mind off the fact that it was dark, damp, and downright spooky on campus after dark. The cemetery was to my right, the dark and uninhabited classroom building to my left, dark trees reaching over me and extending sinister limbs. But I had Neil Diamond to keep me company, at least in my head.

I turned the corner at the end of the road, the convent door in front of me, its big brass knocker shiny, even in the dark. The nuns have people for things like keeping the door knocker clean, the stairs swept, the smell of beeswax redolent in the air. I approached the door, not sure what I was going to do. I was fairly certain that the door was locked—it almost always was—but I flashed on the keys in my pocket and Dean Merrimack’s rat face.

“The one with the red dot is the master key,” he had said when he had handed them over.

“Oh, yes it is,” I whispered. I tried the knob to see if the door was locked and it was; I gingerly slipped the key into the lock. The door opened silently and I stole in, trying to make as little noise as possible.

I’ve been in the convent a few times and have always been amazed at how quiet it is. I spend my day surrounded by students in an area not too far from where I was now but it might as well have been a world away; at midday, the din in the halls is deafening. I looked around, my eyes adjusting to the dark. There were a few wall sconces casting a warm glow in the foyer but no bright lights; this place was closed for the night. I stepped gingerly onto the stairs, so clean that you could eat off them, and proceeded up to the fifth floor.

A few months earlier, I had stowed my friend Hernan here. At that time, I had been informed by the lovely Sister Louise, she of the ink-stained hands, that the fifth floor was vacant, save for the presence of Sister Catherine, who was legally blind. But from what I had gathered during my one trip to this residential floor, all of the sisters’ rooms were now empty; Sister Catherine had been moved so that she could be closer to the other nuns. Hardly anyone joins the convent anymore, but at one time this place had been bustling. Empty rooms and only a handful of habited nuns was a testament to this fact of modern life. I made it up to the fifth floor undiscovered and stood on the top step wondering (a) what I was doing here and (b) what I was going to do now that I was here.

I didn’t have to wait long to figure it out because while I was thinking, the door to the last room on the left opened up and a very relaxed-looking Wayne came out into the hallway, stretched, and padded down toward the bathroom, which was about four doors away from where I was standing. He didn’t see me and walked down the hallway, mouth-breathing, a bath towel around his neck.

“Wayne!” I whispered. “Wayne Brookwell!” It didn’t quite have the cadence of “Bond, James Bond,” but I had found myself saying it more and more in the past week.

He stopped, looked at me, and went white. And then he started running. Fast.

“Oh, jeez,” I thought. “Here we go again.” I took off down the hallway but that kid was speedy. And he obviously knew all of the nooks and crannies in the old building because he went through one door and was gone before I could even get my bearings.

I went through the door that he had entered and was submerged into pitch-blackness. I felt around the wall for a light switch but couldn’t find it. “Wayne!” I whispered loudly. “Come out. I want to help you.” I didn’t actually want to help him but I at least wanted to tell him that we got the drugs out of his toilet and that he needed to answer for that one. “Wayne!” I had no idea what room I was in and what I would find once I did get the lights on, but it was dark. And smelled like feet. It had the smell of a young, slack-jawed man, living alone. It was the smell of Wayne.

I moved farther into the room and banged my shin on something hard and metal, hollering out in pain. But yelling a very foul expletive was the last thing I remember because someone came up behind me and, presumably, hit me over the head. Instead of thinking “lights out,” because they really were, I just fell to the ground.

I woke up in the hallway; I’m not sure how much time had passed. I had obviously been dragged out there because one of my shoes was abandoned by the door that I had entered. But the lights were on now, and Sister Catherine, she of the sketchy eyesight, was standing over me; obviously, old habits died hard and Catherine had returned to her old stomping grounds, for what reason, I’d never know. I sat up and took in her bonnet, long habit, and wimple. I rubbed the sore spot on the back of my head and winced.

“Hello, Sister,” I said, struggling to get to my feet.

“Who’s that?” she asked. Sitting up, I was almost as tall as she was. “Is that you, Sister Lawrence?” she asked. “Have you gotten into the chardonnay again?”

I stood, a little woozy. I grabbed on to her bony shoulder for support. I fetched my shoe and put it on. “No, Sister. It’s Alison Bergeron. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“Alison? What are you doing here, dear?” she asked, staring up at me, her eyes huge behind thick glasses that probably did nothing to improve her sight. Her cataracts were visible behind the lenses.

“I got lost, Sister. I’m sorry to intrude,” I said.

“Got lost?” she said, her voice thin and reedy. “That must have been some cocktail hour down there in the faculty lounge.”

I didn’t disabuse of her of the notion that we had semiregular faculty cocktail parties and took off down the hall, my head throbbing in time to my footfalls on the worn wood floor.

I sneaked back down to the first floor and stole out of the front door without making too much noise. I gave myself a mental head slap for telling Sister Catherine who I was, but I comforted myself with the fact that she thought the professors were all drunks who had cocktail parties every week and couldn’t find their way home afterward. That would go a long way toward explaining why I was on the nuns’ turf after-hours if she chose to reveal my whereabouts.

I sat on the front steps of the convent and rubbed my head. I had a goose egg, but it wasn’t too bad. I had had a concussion before and knew that this injury didn’t approach it in severity, but I would have a mother of a headache in the morning, that I knew. I got up again and began my trek up to the dorm.

I almost had him and he got away. Again. I was going to have to go into training to get this guy. He was fast and I was not. Once my headache went away, I would start a full-blown exercise regimen, maybe even visiting the newly renovated St. Thomas gym to do all sorts of activities that would bring me closer to being able to run for more than fifteen seconds without breaking down.

Oh, who was I kidding? I wouldn’t do any training. As it was, I wasn’t having sex or drinking, so that qualified as hardcore discipline for me. Eventually, my body would catch up.

A figure emerged from the shadows, bowlegged but broad and solid. I slowed my walk to a near crawl and considered my options. Go back down toward the convent and the river? Or bid a quick “good evening” and continue up toward the dorm? I didn’t have time to make a decision because the figure approached me and I saw it was Monsieur Pinkie Ring.

I didn’t think it would be wise to greet him that way so I remained silent.

“Where’s Wayne Brookwell?”

No hello? No nice to see you? Where did the love go? “I don’t know,” I lied. I didn’t know if it was the head wound or that I was just completely exhausted by the Wayne Brookwell situation, but I no longer found this guy to be a problem. Or a threat. Or a combination of both.

He leaned in close and I got a new whiff of his cologne. Dear Lord; what a stench. “Do you know you’re bleeding?” he asked, more out of curiosity than concern. He put the pinkie-ringed finger to my lip.

I followed suit and found that I had a bloody lip. “I must have bitten it,” I said. And that was the truth. I must have bitten it when I had fallen. He took what looked like a used tissue out of his pocket and attempted to wipe my face. I put a hand up; although he had lost all menace, I still didn’t want a perfect stranger touching my face not once, but twice. “I’ll be fine.” I rubbed at my lip vigorously, smearing blood onto the palm of my hand. I had a million questions to ask the guy, like who he was and why he was concerned with Wayne, but I was tired of investigating and started up the hill, hoping he would leave me alone.

“Hey, lady!” he called after me.

I turned.

“Tell that asshole that if I find him, he’s dead meat.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why is he dead meat?”

The man looked at me, apparently unable or unwilling to come up with an explanation. It was obvious that he never expected me to ask. He went with the ever-popular “none of your business” retort.

“You seem really interested in him,” I remarked. “You’ve come all the way from Jersey, for God’s sake.”

“Would you get off the Jersey thing?” he asked, exasperated.

I shrugged. “I’m just saying. It’s a long way.”

“Not if you take the GW,” he said, referring to the George Washington Bridge. “And then the Henry Hudson.” It was a momentary lapse, this conversation about the best route from Jersey to New York, and he seemed to realize it quickly. “Anyway, just tell him, would you?” he said, trying to summon up some menace again. He pointed at me for emphasis.

I saluted him. “Will do.” It was like playing a part in a bad mob movie, but being as I had some experience with the real mob, I knew that this guy was just a bit player if a player at all. A man who would hand a woman a used Kleenex to clean her bloody lip wasn’t a killer, in my opinion.

But who he was, why he was here, and why we were having a conversation about alternate traffic routes were just a few pieces of the puzzle.

Nineteen

Max called me the next morning, sounding more like her old self than she had in the past few weeks. “What’s that fancy French word you use all the time?” she started.

I rolled over and turned off the alarm; I wouldn’t be needing it this morning. It was seven o’clock and I had been awakened by the trill of my cell phone—a jaunty jingle from a popular television show about women on the prowl in New York City—next to my head on the nightstand. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“You know,” she said. “The one you used to use to describe your relationship with Ray?”

“Insensé?”
I asked, not remembering when I had described my relationship with my ex-husband as “insane,” but it was the only thing that made sense.

“No, that’s not it. It was more like you weren’t friends, but you weren’t enemies, but you could be in the same room?”

I searched my cobwebbed brain. “Détente?”

“That’s it!” she yelled into the phone.

I held the phone away from my ear and instinctively put my other hand to the lump on the back of my head.

“I think,” she began solemnly, “that Fred and I have reached détente.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Does that mean you’ll be moving back home?”

“Oh, no,” she said, as if that were the silliest idea I had ever had. “I have a lot of work to do.”

“What?” I asked. “What work?”

“On the marriage,” she quickly amended, but I couldn’t help thinking that she meant something else. What that was, I didn’t know, but I knew Max well enough to know when she sounds like she’s trying to put one over on me. She’s a good liar but we had a lot of history on which to draw. Had I been more cogent, my Max radar would have been on full alert.

“So you’ll be going to counseling?” I rolled over and took half of the covers with me.

“I don’t think so,” she said. Obviously, I had reached another silly conclusion in my sleepy state. “But I don’t want to kill him. That’s progress, right?”

“Indeed.” I sat up and attempted to wake up. The image of Kevin’s stricken face relaying the news of Max and Fred’s non-marriage entered my consciousness and jolted me fully awake; my mental to-do list now included tracking down Kevin and laying another beating on him for not resolving this situation. “Listen, it’s early. Can we continue this later?” I was afraid I might reveal something in my addled state and wanted to end the conversation quickly.

“Sure,” she said, and hung up.

I looked at the phone. She is always one for the precipitous good-bye but this was ridiculous. I looked over at Trixie, who was resting her head on my bed, looking at me in that sad way she has. “I think she just hung up on me.”

Trixie raised one eyebrow as if to say, “Max always hangs up on you.”

“No, really hung up on me,” I explained. “Not like she usually does. I think I pissed her off.” I stared at Trixie for a few seconds, contemplating how Max—who was still enjoying all the perks of living in my house, the lack of baked beans notwithstanding—could be mad at me. Once she talked to Kevin, hopefully all of her ire would be directed at him and I would be back in her good stead.

I rolled out of the bed and put my feet on the floor, still trying to shake myself awake. I felt the lump on the back of my head again and my ire toward Wayne Brookwell awakened in me like an agitated beast. I stood and was happy to find that I didn’t have too bad of a headache, a state that I hoped continued the longer I was awake.

I headed outside to walk Trixie and took a look at the growing stack of parking tickets under the windshield wiper on my car. I was wondering how long this parking-space war was going to go on and decided that I, for one, was in it for the long haul. I wasn’t moving and there was nothing that Jay Pinto and his merry band of potbellied security guards could do about it.

I took Trixie on a walk down by the river and returned to the dorm twenty minutes later to dress and get ready for the day. I was teaching three classes, one of my lighter loads this semester, and looked forward to the end of the day. I decided to call Crawford and see if he could get away for dinner.

“Hey, handsome,” I said, sitting on the edge of my bed and pulling on a pair of black leather slingbacks. “Have dinner with me tonight?”

“If all goes well today, that is a distinct possibility,” he said cryptically, and I guessed that he was sitting beside Fred. “Can we play it by ear?”

“Sure,” I said, suddenly remembering something I wanted to ask him. “Hey, anything on that Jersey plate?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s back on my desk. I’ll bring it tonight. I can’t remember what it is right now, but I know I wrote it down. All I remember is that it’s a Greek name. Costas something or other.”

“Okay, bring it later.” I fiddled with the strap on my shoe. “I have a lot to tell you. I saw Wayne again.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. The bastard hit me over the head.”

“He what?” he called into the phone.

“You heard me. He hit me over the head.” I put on my other shoe. “And he’s in the convent.”

“He is?”

“Yep. But I’m guessing that he won’t be there for long now that I’ve smoked him out.”

“I’ll send another radio car down there.” I could hear him telling Fred the basics of our conversation. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Besides having a bump on my head and being incredibly pissed at Mr. Brookwell, I’m fine,” I said. “Oh, and I also had a chat with Mr. New Jersey.”

“We’ve got a lot to talk about tonight,” he said. “I’ll definitely find a way to get over there later.”

It took me several minutes to calm him down. He was more interested in finding Wayne and “tuning him up” than ever before, but I assured him that I was fine. We finally hung up and promised to talk after work. I headed off to class, crossing my fingers that I would see him later.

I entered the office area and was promptly ignored by Dottie; I assumed that we were still in a fight and that was fine by me. I reached around her and pulled a stack of papers out of my mailbox, the first paper being a pink-lined sheet from a message pad, which said in Dottie’s scrawl, “Go directly to Sister Mary’s office when you get in.” I knew Dottie was looking at me for my reaction but I remained impassive. But I knew this couldn’t be good. Mary generally leaves me alone, but my behavior of late, coupled with the fact that her sister and brother had come by campus the night before, could only indicate one thing: the jig was up.

I arrived at her office after doing a series of deep-breathing exercises as I traversed the stairs and the hallway one floor above. She was sitting at her desk, grading a paper for a student who obviously didn’t have a handle on whatever it was they were trying to present. She drew a big red
X
through one entire page and grimaced. She looked up at me when I cleared my throat to announce my arrival.

She waved a hand toward the chair across from her desk.

“Good morning, Sister.” My heart was beating so hard that I was sure she could see it through my blouse. I attempted to sit down gingerly, nearly missing the edge of it. I grabbed the arm and slid onto the wooden seat.

“Good morning, Alison.” She folded her hands on her desk. “Or should I say ‘Coco’?”

My heart went into my throat and I considered what to do. Deny? Too late for that. Call it a silly role-play that Crawford and I did to get in the mood? No, that wouldn’t work; she was celibate and I didn’t want to go there with her. I stared back at her, thoughts filing through my brain like a mental card catalog.

She stared back at me. “My sister, Geraldine, and her husband, Eben, took me to dinner last night and told me about a young woman, just shy of six feet with black hair and ‘sparkling’ blue eyes, whom they met recently. I think she was looking for a house in Scarsdale? And she’s got a niece in the school?” she said, looking up at the ceiling as if looking for the answer. “Yes, that was it.” She leaned back in her chair. “Apparently, she’s got a fabulous job, too. She’s a flight attendant for Air France.”

“Sounds wonderful,” I agreed. “She must have a lot of great stories to tell.”

Mary was silent but her gaze said it all. The smile slid from my face. I cleared my throat again.

“I don’t know what it is you’re trying to do, Alison, but you’d be best advised to stop. Immediately.” Her eyes went back to the paper she had been grading. “And now you may leave.”

I stayed rooted to the chair for a moment before I realized that the conversation, all of thirty seconds long, was over. I jumped up, losing my footing and crashing into the front of her desk, knocking over her statue of Jesus praying on the Mount, her cup of tea, and a family photo. I attempted to straighten everything up, an ill-advised move if I ever saw one. Mary looked up again and picked Jesus up first, ignoring the cup of tea spreading across the desk and creating a mess of the research papers she had stacked neatly on one side. After she had deposited Jesus safely onto the radiator behind her to dry, she looked at me, the red in her face going from the skin above her starched white oxford to the part of steel-gray hair. “Out!” she commanded and pointed at the door.

I stopped cleaning up the desk and left, not stopping until I had almost reached my office. I came to a dead halt right outside my office door and stood for a minute, not sure what possessed me to do what I did next.

I marched back to Mary’s office where it looked like the mayhem of the previous minutes had not transpired. She was exactly as she had been when I had first arrived, sitting at her desk grading the same paper. She was even putting a big red
X
through another page of the same kid’s work. It was like I had stepped into some kind of time warp. I walked back into the office and went for broke. “Why are you hiding Wayne in the convent?” I asked, asking the first of the questions to which the answers eluded me.

She looked up again. “Did you say something?”

“Why are you hiding Wayne in the convent?” I asked again, determined not to let her intimidate me into leaving.

Now she was the one scrolling through possible answers in her head. I could see her mind working behind her dead blue eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do. You know exactly what I’m talking about.” I put my hands on the back of the chair on which I had sat minutes earlier, leaning forward and establishing my physical presence in the room. “I’ve seen him three times now, Sister, and last night, he even hit me over the head.”

“He what?” she said, reacting before she had a chance to rein it in.

“I’d let you feel the back of my head but somehow I don’t think you’d want to.”

“You’d be right about that,” she said, and quickly composed herself. “Alison, you need to leave this alone. For all we know, Wayne is on an extended leave of absence or a vacation.”

“Does anyone else know that Wayne is your nephew?”

“Everyone knows,” she said, unconvincingly.

“Then how come I didn’t know? How come I had to figure it out on my own?”

“Get out,” she said calmly.

“I’m not leaving. Tell me the truth.” I went for the family connection. “You owe it to your sister, Sister, to let the truth out.” Had I not been trying so hard to appear strong, that last sentence would have made me burst out laughing. Sister, sister?

She stood, as tall as I was in her sensible loafers. It was the clash of the tall girls. “Do I have to call security?”

Although my first instinct was to laugh—an image of Joe, all three hundred pounds on his five-foot-five frame, ambling in to remove me—I thought about the implications of being removed from my boss’s office by a member of the St. Thomas security staff. That would not be good. I took a step back from the chair that I was leaning on and gave her one last look. “I’ll figure it out, Sister. You know I will. It’s just a matter of time. And if Wayne needs help, you know that I can probably help him, too. Think about what’s best here.”

I didn’t think she’d take me down in a wrestling move but what she did next surprised me about as much as if she had: she started crying. “Please leave,” she pleaded. “Please. Just get out.” Her voice cracked and a tear ran down her cheek and I immediately felt a deep shame, forgetting that it was her nephew who had gotten me a one-and-a-half-room
suite
on campus, had thrown a beer bottle at me, and had given me a near concussion. And that, ultimately, she was a big fat liar. But I’m a sucker for a crying nun, obviously.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and fled, running down the hall toward the stairs that would bring me back down to my office floor. I got back to my office, breathing heavily as I made it to my office door. I could feel Dottie’s eyes on my back and I took in one last gulp of air before going into my office. I had arrived just in the nick of time; my first class was starting in three minutes and it was clear on the other side of the building so I was going to have to hustle. Tomorrow, instead of slingbacks I was going back to clogs. Running around this campus in heels was ridiculous, but like many times before, I had opted for style over comfort. I grabbed my messenger bag, textbook, and a pen, and headed off, my face still red, my guilt complex in overdrive.

I got down to the first floor of the building, and seeing the hallways clogged with students in between classes, I decided to go outside to take a more direct route to my classroom. I hurried along the driveway that snaked in front of the building, slowed down by my slingbacks. I’m not that nimble in sneakers. In slingbacks? Catastrophe was right around the corner. I looked down at the river, hoping that it would bring me peace after my unfortunate encounter with Sister Mary. Instead, the sight of Amanda Reese in the parking lot between the building and the river, standing beside a late-model Lincoln Town Car, brought me to a complete halt. She was far enough away and distraught enough not to notice that I was standing about fifty feet from her, taking in her tearstained face. Her arms were crossed and she was talking to a young man in the driver’s seat of the car.

I watched for a few minutes, knowing that it would make me late for class. St. Thomas has a rule in its college catalog that I’m not sure is enforced at other schools but that states if a professor is five minutes late for class, said class is canceled. I teach a bunch of kids who would never crack a textbook at gunpoint, yet know about this arcane and ridiculous rule. I looked at my watch and saw that I had less than two minutes to get to my classroom but I couldn’t drag my eyes away from whatever drama was playing out in the parking lot. The man in the car got out and embraced Amanda, whose arms were crossed over her chest. I had been the recipient of a few of those hugs in my lifetime, mainly from my ex-husband. He would offer comfort and I would create a barrier between us. Amanda was doing the same thing. She continued sobbing while he held her, but she wasn’t comforted at all by the embrace.