When others suffer grief
It is so hard to say
What we ourselves would likely do
If pain spoiled our own day
Conveniently we do assume
That we would rise above
From on high we’d take the long view
And remember God is love
But would we really do this
Or would we weep and fret?
We think we know what we’d do in another person’s shoes
When we haven’t occupied them yet
It may be best to simply say
Good times will come again
Till then, dear Marshall Lockard,
Accept the condolences of your friend
Mrs. Adam Barrows
Instead of heading off to see McCallum with the good news/bad news he went back to his office and, still stunned by the poem, unable to imagine any response to it, called Sophia. Facing whatever was in store for him would be good practice toward writing the letter to Cheryl.
Just when he was about to give up, the phone was answered. He asked for Sophia and was told to “hang on,” loud music playing in the background.
“Finally,” she said, when she heard who it was.
“I was at a funeral yesterday. I just got your messages.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll cut to the chase: a reporter from the newspaper is interested in talking to me about Livan Baker’s involvement with your buddy McCallum.”
“Sophia,” he said, “McCallum isn’t my buddy. We teach in the same department, but actually, I hardly know him. I’m pretty sick of all of this, and if McCallum’s in trouble, I’m sorry, but McCallum’s in trouble. I’m not McCallum.” He waited for a response. There was only a slight sigh. “Why would they contact you?” he said.
“It’s not exactly a secret that Cheryl’s my best friend, you know. And Cheryl roomed with Livan. And Livan got busted, and Cheryl’s gone. And I have another thing to tell you: I was in their apartment. Timothy and I were packing the things she didn’t take to send to Virginia. Livan hadn’t been there for days, but the night she got busted they got a search warrant, and Timothy and I found ourselves surrounded by cops.”
“Well, I’m sorry you got involved. This has been a nightmare for all of us. I was on my way to see McCallum with the newspaper. I thought it would make him feel better to know who Livan Baker really was, but since the cops are no doubt going to be questioning him about her, I suppose he might have already heard it.”
“I’ll tell you what I called about,” Sophia said.
He gave a nervous laugh. “I thought that’s what I was hearing.”
“No,” she said, “what you don’t know is that I took one of the notebooks — it was one she had rough drafts of her letter to you in — I took it to the apartment because she’d left it at my place, and I knew she’d want it back. It was there with everything else when the cops came in and it was like the movies; we had to raise our hands and be patted down, you know? We had to leave everything there when they threw us out and took over the apartment.” She sighed. “It’s not incriminating,” Sophia said. “The drafts were just early versions of what you saw. I mean, she’d probably die if anyone but you knew about the letter, but what are the cops going to do? Read it on TV? Maybe they won’t care about every single piece of paper in the place. They were looking for drugs, right? What would they care about her roommate’s notebook?”
All he could think was that for the rest of his life he would be questioned by the police. Sonja would be sure to find out all the details about the whole messy situation. She might even wonder why he’d never written the girl, after she’d made such a painful confession to him. Sonja might wonder, in fact, how much of a secret life he had, since he hadn’t mentioned anything before McCallum’s visit about Cheryl Lanier, alluding only to the problems of her roommate, Livan Baker.
As if McCallum didn’t have enough problems, now there was this.
As if Sonja weren’t upset enough, with Evie just buried.
As if he’d get off the phone with Sophia Androcelli without one more zinger.
“There are two snowpeople outside your building,” Sophia was saying, “both of which are incredibly offensive. One is stereotypically offensive and the other is sexually offensive. I’ve written an editorial for tomorrow’s paper, but in the meantime I would appreciate your not disturbing them, so anyone who missed them can take a look once my piece appears. Just in case you were going to wring the pumpkin tits off on your way out, or decapitate them, or anything.” She snorted. “Just a preemptive strike,” she said. “If I were you, I think I might feel like demolishing something. Just don’t go after my target.”
God, they were all so self-absorbed: Cheryl; Livan; McCallum, Susan McCallum; Sophia. Whoever had built the two snowpeople was a jokester amid people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take a joke. Sonja, though, was not crazy, and he intended to give her the long version of everything once he got home. He would make her see that the students’ problems had seemed too sad and bizarre — and, at the same time, inconsequential — to burden her with. Being sane, she would understand.
15
AFGHAN TUCKED AROUND her legs, Sonja listened as Marshall began at the beginning, giving her information she already had about Livan Baker, segueing into a discussion of Cheryl Lanier. She was his student, from a large family in Virginia: not brilliant, but dedicated; a person interested in learning. How he picked her up hitchhiking because she was young and poor and wet. How he’d taken her for coffee (omit mention of food, Marshall), how he’d been surprised when she confided in him (will Sonja put two and two together, realize that the time he called, claiming to be with someone named Thomas, or Todd, or whatever name he came up with, it was actually Cheryl Lanier?). He assumed Sonja’s deepening frown was an expression of concern for the people involved.
Earlier that afternoon, Sonja had gone to the hospital to see McCallum, whose recovery was not progressing very well. First an infection had set back the course of physical therapy, then he’d become allergic to one of the medicines. He had fallen asleep after talking to her for just fifteen minutes, she said. It was as if McCallum, overnight, had become an old man. Her talking about McCallum, though, had seemed the perfect opportunity to fill her in on what she didn’t know about his involvement (he thought, self-righteously: I didn’t sleep with her) with the two girls (Sonja was his wife; he wasn’t going to call two girls “women”).
“Why are you telling me this?” she said.
“What?” he said.
“It’s a pretty straightforward question. I’m not trying to trick you, Marshall.”
“Who said I thought that? I’m just, I just … I’m not sure there’s any reason to tell you these things now, it’s just that I realized there were quite a few things you didn’t know, and I wasn’t intentionally keeping them from you. With all that’s gone on, I guess I thought there was enough to deal with without including unnecessary asides.”
“When did Cheryl Lanier stop being an ‘unnecessary aside’?”
That gave him a moment’s pause. He hadn’t expected to have to go on the defensive (he hadn’t slept with her; so what if he hadn’t said anything about a hamburger and a beer, a Jack Daniel’s — so what if those things had become “coffee”?).