Goodnight Blackbird (7 page)

"The day after the killings, in my senior English class," Lancaster said, "we talked about what happened. Some of the students were crying. Some said nice things about Rachel, even though most of the kids in class were the popular ones who didn't hang around with her. The sight of her empty desk there in the back.... The next day I reorganized the class, arranged everyone in a circle, and I put the extra desk in the hallway. I just couldn't look at it."

A grey-haired woman put her head outside the door. "Rob? Dinner." She looked at Darren quizzically and held up a hand in greeting.

Lancaster got to his feet, cracking his back. "Wait here a sec," he told Darren. "Something I want to show you." He went in the house and returned a few minutes later with a creased copy of the autumn 2000 edition of the Brush High School literary magazine, a humble little pamphlet with a cover adorned with clip art caricatures of famous writers like Shakespeare, Poe and Hemingway.

"I was the magazine's advisor that semester and it required a considerable amount of holding my nose when it came to evaluating the poetry," Lancaster said. "Lots of warmed-over Rod McKuen, lots of goodhearted but hamfisted doggerel about world peace and tolerance. But I thought Rachel contributed a very nice piece." He found the appropriate page for Darren. The poem was called "My Love":

My love for you is fierce

Like a hungry dog with its bone

I will protect you, my love

From harm

From heartbreak

From the wolves in the night

This mangy mutt has been lonely for so long

I will carry you in my jaw like a pup

Carry you across this field where the wind troubles the wheat

Under the ferocious summer sky.

"She'd written a couple other poems for class as well," Lancaster said. "She had a fondness for animal imagery and I asked her about it. She said she admired the purity of animals. 'A dog loves you because it loves you, not because you're pretty or because you buy it nice things,' I think she said."

Darren stared at the poem for a long time.

"You can keep that," Lancaster said. "I have other copies. Are you all right? You look a little pale."

"I'm fine."

Lancaster gathered up his painting supplies. He paused by the rose bush near the front porch. "She loved roses. That's another thing I remember. She was always doodling them on her notebooks."

"Roses."

"One morning she came into homeroom with a white rose blossom in her hair," Lancaster said. "It was sweet, though she got teased about it quite a bit. Teased by girls with nose rings and pink streaks in their hair, if you can believe it. I always wondered why roses were so meaningful to her. But I suppose it was just something beautiful that she liked." He squinted at Darren. "Do you really think it's Rachel in your house?"

"I don't know."

Lancaster ran a finger over one of his roses. "The Persian Sufis used to believe the rose was the symbol of perfect understanding," he said.

"I
have
to keep the house," Jacqueline told her lawyer, Pulaski, on the phone at work after the Fourth of July weekend. She tried to keep her voice as quiet as possible, even though the two cubicles on either side of her had been empty for months. "That's the dealbreaker."

"That may not be up to you, Jacqueline. The math just isn't working. Even if a judge orders generous spousal support it's not going to be enough to cover the mortgage, even with your salary. I've been through dozens of similar cases and pricey houses like this always have to be liquidated. They're a drain on both parties. Look, I have to take this other call."

The consultation with Pulaski a few days before had cost her a cool hundred, and Jacqueline was sure he would have a meter running every time she called. And what was she getting for the money?

She could barely concentrate on her project—a study of the US ethanol market. She spent most of the morning staring at a graph of escalating corn prices through the latter half of 2008. The jagged line of the graph reminded her of the spike in an electrocardiogram just before the patient flatlines.

On her way to the bathroom, she heard a familiar sound. Amy, one of the junior research assistants, was standing by the cubicle of Mara, another research assistant, and they were having one of their hourly half-whispered gabfests. Amy always wore lots of pink and talked with her hands. She had graduated from Cornell and loved reminding people about it. Although she and Mara usually had free-ranging discussions about such meaningful issues as clothes, their boyfriends and who was doing what on Friday night, lately their talks had taken on a more focused quality. Amy was getting married in the fall, as was her sister, and Amy felt an almost biological need to tell any available ear about all the intricate dual preparations. Today she was telling Mara about the wedding cake for Amy's sister's nuptials. So many things to consider! Two tiers or three? And the frosting! My God, the frosting. It was enough to make your tits fall off from exhaustion.

In the bathroom, Jacqueline put some water on her burning face. Her hands trembled. She felt as if her body were thrumming with electricity. She stood at the sink for nearly five minutes, trying to calm down.

On the way back to her cubicle, she looked over and saw that Amy and Mara were still talking. This time it was about how many children Amy and her fiancé planned on having.

"—and even back at Cornell, I told Chris, I was like, it's better to have one then wait a couple years and have another one, because I
loved
having a big sister, and he was like, well, you know—"

Jacqueline politely interrupted and asked Amy if she had finished putting together the spreadsheet with the USDA historical commodity price data. Jacqueline needed it for her project, which was due in a few days.

"Oh!" Amy said. "I'm so sorry, I'll have it, like, by the end of the day. Excel kept crashing on me this morning."

The day went on. Work was done; coffee was drunk. Around noon, Jacqueline went to the bathroom again and saw that Amy had affixed herself to someone else's cubicle, another one of the twentysomething research assistants, and this time the discussion had veered back to the topic of the cake for her sister's wedding. The dilemma: cream cheese frosting or butter cream?

When Jacqueline adjourned from the bathroom a few minutes later the conversation had careened back to the topic of children and the names Amy and her fiancé had picked out.

"Amy," Jacqueline said, "I really need those figures."

Amy's large, innocent eyes got larger and her pink lipsticked mouth hung open in that almost cartoonish look of phony concern that twentysomething girls thought passed for seriousness. "Oh! Yeah, I'm real sorry. I'll get right on it."

"You've spent close to an hour socializing this morning. I need that spreadsheet."

Amy gaped at her. Jacqueline had committed a shocking breach of Datascape Research etiquette: she was rude. No one was rude here. Everyone got along, and if they didn't, they just avoided one another.

At her desk, Jacqueline's breath came in quick, shallow gasps. She had trouble focusing on her computer screen. She still felt that sickening, crackling electricity coursing through her body. No—it wasn't electricity. It was adrenaline. Somehow her fight-or-flight mode had been switched on.

Twenty minutes later, Amy appeared by Jacqueline's desk, meek and solemn-faced and bearing a sheaf of papers. Amy was blushing. "Here's the information. I'm
really
sorry it took so long." She was about to step away, much in the manner of someone who has strayed into a minefield and who then must delicately backtrack, but she seemed to feel the need to say something more.

"Oh! Like I said, I'm sorry it took this long, but you know, I checked the schedule and—maybe I'm totally wrong about this—but the schedule actually said I had until tomorrow to do the numbers. That's why it didn't get prioritized. But, you know, you
really
didn't have to be rude like that. I mean, it's no big deal or anything. It's totally my fault, I know." She said this in such a caring, apologetic manner, she couched her words in such soft cushions of humility, empathy and self-deprecation, that even the most hard-hearted of Bosnian war criminals would have had a tear in his eye. Any normal person would feel so ashamed at being angry at the cute, sweet pink girl that the person would spasmodically blurt out her own apology, and then catharsis would be achieved and they would end up braiding each other's hair or going shopping or diddling each other with sex toys, best friends for life.

Once upon a time Jacqueline had been a normal person. But now she had an overwhelming desire to punch this bitch in the face.

Jacqueline leaned back in her chair, taking in this fresh-out-of-college nincompoop whose life revolved around wedding invitations and cream cheese versus butter cream frosting. What kind of scars would life give her? Probably very few. Maybe her hubby-to-be would have a low sperm count. Boo fucking hoo. Perhaps one of her cunty girlfriends would make a snippy comment about her weight at a candle party. What a tragedy. It was a good bet, though, that Amy would never see the body of her daughter at the bottom of a swimming pool. God watched out for idiots and drunks.

"I was rude to you," Jacqueline said, in a tone of mild wonder.

"Look, it's no big deal, really."

"I've been here almost four years. You've been here approximately fifteen minutes, yet you are going to tell me how I should behave in the workplace."

Amy blinked, blushing an almost painful shade of crimson. It accentuated the pink of her outfit in a striking way. "Jacqueline—"

"Let's get this straight right now," Jacqueline said, her voice steady but a bit hoarse. "This isn't your college dorm room. Your work comes first. I know you're at that age when you think your life is endlessly fascinating and it's difficult to control your self-absorption, but if you want to talk to your friends, you do it on your lunch break. The rest of the time you should sit at your desk and
do your fucking job
."

Amy's deep scarlet blush dissipated, replaced with ashen shock.

Fifteen minutes later, Jacqueline was in the office of Nick Hasselbeck, her supervisor, with the door closed.

"I don't think I've ever seen someone so upset," Nick said. "She was practically in tears."

"Oh, give me a break. She is not the injured party here. I am. The
company
is." With a vehemence that a distant, more rational part of her brain found alarming, she paced back and forth, enumerating for Nick all of Amy's workplace transgressions—the endless socializing, the half-hour lunches that invariably stretched into 45 minutes, her sloppy collection of automotive production data for Jacqueline's hybrid vehicle study last month. She got herself worked up into such a state that it was as if she had suddenly become the walking, talking mission statement for Datascape Research and Amy was some Marxist saboteur bent on the complete annihilation of the capitalist free enterprise system. Jacqueline's voice rose to such a pitch that it began to scare her.

Nick stared at her. "You need to calm down. What is going on with you?"

"With me? Nothing. The issue is Amy's behavior."

"And I promise I will address these things, especially if she's been wasting company time the way you say she is. But what I need for you to do—and it's a little thing—is to apologize to her."

"I am absolutely not going to apologize to her. I would rather die than do that."

"You are going to apologize to her," Nick said, "because you have class, and because we run a congenial ship here, and I can't have my twentysomethings crying at their desks. They're young and they're fragile." He leaned forward at his desk. "I don't understand you. This isn't like you. But I cannot have people being insulted and verbally intimidated here. Okay? It is absolutely not tolerated."

A few minutes later, Nick led her over to Amy's workstation. Amy's face was the portrait of a stricken and wronged woman trying bravely to pick up the pieces of her shattered day.

"Amy?" Nick said. "We've been talking, and Jacqueline wants very much to tell you something." With a gracious smile, Nick withdrew, leaving Jacqueline to stare into the Pink Lady's expectant pout.

The fabric walls of Amy's cubicle were festooned with Cornell pennants and an orgy of photos—Amy and her pimply dipshit fiancé on vacation in Maui, Amy and her pimply dipshit fiancé at a club, Amy and her friends, Amy and her family, all Amy all the time, a thousand giddy smiles assaulting Jacqueline from every angle. It was just so... typical. Jacqueline could have been staring at the clichéd images of her own life circa 1996. It made her sick to think that she had actually been like this, a shallow little fool who thought life was just one big cute party.

"I wanted to apologize to you," Jacqueline said, and Amy nodded coolly, visibly relaxing now that she was getting her reparations. "I'm sorry that you have the brains of guacamole. I'm sorry that your smugness and cluelessness have had a lobotomizing effect on your brain. You should have been in the special education classes with the mentally handicapped kids, and you weren't. I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry you've decided to stitch together a life out of silliness, out of bachelorette parties and gossip, and I'm sorry that all your grand ambitions seem to consist of getting a man to spread your legs for and getting a house in the suburbs and maybe taking a Pilates class. I'm sorry that previous generations of women have suffered and protested and marched for equal rights, for the end to war, the end to prejudice, only to pave the way for a new generation of Stepford Wives who discuss cream cheese frosting as if it was an issue of vital national importance. I'm sorry there's nothing much to you. And I'm sorry that you won't be prepared for the off-chance that life can come crashing down around you. Because it can. And all of this—" Jacqueline gestured at all the photos of smiling Amy in the superficial prime of her life "—all of this can be taken away."

Amy, as pale as curdled milk, practically sprinted for Nick's office.

At her own desk, Jacqueline shut off her PC and stuffed her few personal items in her purse. May as well beat Nick to the punch.