It was a stunning oxymoron. When Solange turned from the microphone and walked back towards us, a sob broke the silence. Rae Colby came out of the crowd, handed Taylor back to me, then Womanswork stepped forward to begin their final song. There were tears in Kristy’s voice, but her back was straight, and as she linked hands with the other women of the trio, I could feel their strength.
“This is by the Wyrd Sisters.” Kristy said.
The song was “Warrior,” the story of a girl who, haunted by her failure to respond to a woman’s screams, ultimately transforms herself into a warrior who knows she must fight until “not another woman dies.” From the moment Solange had told me about her epiphany on the night of the massacre at L’Ecole Polytechnique, I had associated that song with her. As the trio’s voices floated high and pure on the still night air, I watched for her reaction. There was none; she had become a woman carved in stone.
When the song ended, Kristy leaned into the microphone. “Never forget Ariel,” she whispered, then she lit the candle in her hand and raised it into the darkness. “Never forget any of our fallen sisters. Never forget.”
I bent to put a match to Taylor’s candle and my own, and when I stood and faced the quadrangle again, the darkness was flickering with scores of tiny flames. Lighted from below, the faces of the mourners seemed alien and frightening. I drew Taylor closer.
Ann Vogel pushed past me towards the microphone. “Never forget,” she shouted. The words were Kristy Stevenson’s, but Ann turned the gentle elegy into an injunction, harsh with hate. “Never forget,” she said, brandishing her lit candle like a club.
As her words echoed over the courtyard, they detonated the rage that lay beneath the grief. The responses exploded in the sweet spring air. “Never forget. Never forget. Never forget!”
“No!” Molly Warren’s anguish was apparent. She started towards the microphone, but when she put her hand on Ann’s arm, Ann turned and locked eyes with Livia.
“Pull her back,” Ann hissed. Without hesitation, Livia stepped forward and obeyed.
“Why won’t you let me stop her?” Molly asked.
“They need to experience this,” Livia said.
“No one needs to experience hysteria,” Molly said witheringly.
“You don’t understand what we’re feeling,” Livia said.
Molly whirled around. “I was her mother,” she said, and she had to shout to be heard above the voices calling for vengeance. For a beat, the two women stared at one another, like combatants.
Finally, Molly shook her head. “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t understand what you’re feeling, and I don’t want to.” When her neat figure vanished inside the library, Rae Colby followed her.
Taylor looked up at me. “Is the vigil over?”
“Yes,” I said. “The vigil’s over.” I smoothed her hair. “Taylor, I’m sorry, it was a mistake bringing you tonight.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” she said. “For a while, it was really nice.”
“For a while it was,” I agreed. “But not any more. Let’s go home.”
The library, the Classroom and Lab buildings, and College West were linked by inside walkways. Taylor and I could get back to the Parkway without going through the crowd. The prospect of escaping the ugliness outside was attractive, and as we walked through the cool silent halls, I was grateful my daughter and I had found an easy way out. Like most easy ways out, however, this one came with a price. Just as we were about to turn into the Lab Building, Kevin Coyle appeared.
He was flushed with anger, and one of the lenses in his glasses was missing, so he was glaring at me with one hugely magnified eye and one ordinary eye.
“Your glasses,” I said.
“The goddamn lens fell out while I was leaning out of my office window watching those women. It landed somewhere in the grass out there. But I saw enough. This is going to be my case all over again. That same hysteria. Wombs. The Greeks were right.”
“Kevin, take a hike. I’ve had enough.”
“You’ve had enough. What about me?”
“Hard as it is to believe,” I said, “this isn’t about you.”
“You’re wrong there, Joanne. This is about me. That little council of war just decided that it’s about all men. What do you think the nurturers’ next move is going to be? I’m not without allies among the students, and one of them came and warned me there are rumours about Ariel and me.”
“What kind of rumours?”
“Someone heard an exchange between us and misinterpreted.”
“What was the exchange about?”
“It was about my case. I told you before that Ariel had found out something. I was pressing her to tell what she knew. She was reluctant. It must have sounded worse than it was.”
“I imagine it did,” I said wearily.
“She was on my side, Joanne, and I’m going to go down there and confront those women with the truth before they come up to my office with their tar and feathers.”
“Just go home, Kevin. No one’s making sense tonight. Everything’s too raw. Let it go.”
He stepped forward so he could look straight at me. His mismatched eyes were a grotesque sight, but it was a night for the surreal. “If I let it go, it will destroy us all,” Kevin said. “I have to be vigilant for you, for me and” – he touched his upper arm – “for her.” For the first time, I noticed that he was wearing an old-fashioned black broadcloth mourning band around his upper arm. “Ariel Warren was a good woman, Joanne. So are you. Don’t get swept away.”
He patted Taylor on the head in a gesture that only someone who had never been around children would make. “Do you play Risk?” he asked.
“My brother does,” she said, “but he says I’m too young.”
“You’re never too young to learn the world conquest game,” he said. “When you decide you’re ready to learn, have your mother bring you by my office. I always keep a game set up, and partners have been in short supply of late.” He drew himself up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back outside and look for that lens.”
Taylor and I watched him stomp off into the night, a rumpled, angry man in search of normal vision.
When we got back to Ed’s place, Taylor asked if she could see if Florence was asleep. After she ran inside to check on the nightingale, Ed frowned at me. “I know that porch light isn’t flattering, but are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but, as the jocks say, there is a question about how much I have left in my tank.”
“Would a nightcap help?”
“I’ll take a rain check. Taylor has school tomorrow, and it’s already nine-thirty. Way too late.”
“How was the vigil?”
“Sad,” I said, “and scary – very, very scary.”
“Then we’ll talk about it another time,” he said. “Now, just to prove to you that I can stay on task, here are those keys you came over for.” He handed me the keys and an envelope. “Instructions for everything are in here. All the crankiness and idiosyncrasies of the plumbing explained in full. As Livia would say…”
“No surprises.”
“And,” Ed said, “the cappuccino machine is brand new, so it should be problem-free.”
“A cappuccino machine! Talk about roughing it in the bush. Ed, I hope you know how grateful I am for this.”
He waved his hand in dismissal. “No gratitude necessary. Just come back with a sunburn, a smile, and some new photos of that granddaughter of yours.”
As soon as I pulled into our driveway, I could hear the pounding rhythms of Tool. Taylor and I walked through the front door into what seemed, after the sombre events of the evening, to be a parallel universe. The house smelled of cooking, and the captain’s chest in the hall was heaped with hastily shed jackets and baseball equipment. As I reached over to remove a jockstrap that I didn’t recognize from a branch of our jade plant, laughter erupted in the kitchen. Angus and Eli’s baseball team had stopped by after practice. I walked into the living room and turned down the volume.