Her lips were colorless with chill. I wrapped my palm around the side of her face. Her jaw moved under my hand. Her gaze shifted to meet mine. I smiled. “No, you never told me your favorite characters.”
Then I noticed her hair. The candlelight revealed so little, but when I shifted to caress her face, the light fell on her hair spread across her pillow. They were one. The bed, the pillow, her hair had turned to stone. The side of her face, where my fingers rested, shifted. Skin grew solid. Below the syncopated patter of water dripping everywhere, I could hear her body changing, like ice crackling in a cup.
“Medusa and her two sisters. The Gorgons were misunderstood.” Her breath grew short. “It’s not too late, Allan. Embrace me now. Be with me, and we will be eternal.”
The third temptation: a single move, and the intervening sheet would be gone. I could cover her, and my hardness would meet hers, forever. No more fleshy disappointments. No blind stumbling among the blind who didn’t recognize the world they lived in. No reading books that none understood or talked of or cared about. It could be all Lynn and stone and our glittering underground world. I could see it now: we’d become the castle walls that stand long after the defenders have left the ramparts, the darkling cave that held dragons, the tall rocks at Stonehenge, all everlasting. I could be like that too with Lynn, an unseen monument to literature and love. Might someone stumble upon us in a far future? What would they make of the lovers’ statue?
I could choose to be immortal and unchanging, or I could stay among the flawed, the human.
Stone crept across the side or her mouth. “Quick,” she whispered. Then an eye glazed over, and what once was liquid and living stilled. I tried to squeeze her hand, to communicate what I couldn’t say and what she couldn’t hear, now, but her hands had already gone rigid. My heart froze. I might as well have turned to stone for the little I did in Lynn’s last moments with me. At the end, her sheet crystallized. With a touch, it shattered, leaving Lynn on her bed, waiting for me to join her for all time. The empress of limestone.
Finally, the grief drove me out of her room and out of Rock House. The front door gave way stiffly, reluctantly. Outside, a hard winter sun glared off an unbroken snow field. My eyes burned and watered. I covered them for minutes before I could look upon the sunlit world. Across the snow, trees’ bare limbs rattled in the wind. Late spring had become winter.
I waded into the snow.
A year later, I looked for Rock House again. Underbrush choked the trail so I made a dozen bad turns, but when I came to the clearing, there was no door. Just rough stone, cool even on a hot, summer day. I rested my face against the hard surface. The rock wall would last as long as time, as long as Rick and Lynn.
In silence, the mountain neither praised nor condemned. It only stood, like those great immortal books that Rick and Lynn and I read late at night, night after night, intertwined on his bed. All those marvelous authors whose works became human monuments. They would survive forever. So, with my fragile flesh pressed against the unmoving stone, I couldn’t help feeling that hesitation stole my choice. My chance to last had passed.
Behind me, the sun heated the waving grass. Trees creaked and leaves brushed against one another in an unceasing whisper. All living, living until winter came and stilled them, living until new grass and leaves and trees replaced them, temporary, fleshy and weak. Pretty in the sad way a soap bubble buoyed in the wind is pretty, catching the light until it pops.
I trudged away from Rock House, deeper and deeper into the living land, empty of all hope.
If you can, some time, rest your hand on a castle wall. Touch a statue. Pick up a round rock from a river and put it in your pocket.
Only stone goes on.
MRS. HATCHER’S EVALUATION
Yesterday’s conversation with Principal Wahr kept Vice Principal Salas awake all night. “We need to cut the dead weight, Salas. Those teachers who aren’t on board with the new curriculum will be moved out, and I want them moved out immediately.” Wahr, a skinny man with just the barest wisps of white hair on an otherwise bald head, kept one hand on his keyboard and the other on his phone. As he talked, he studied his computer screen which Salas couldn’t see. “Hatcher’s the worst. She ignores the lesson plan template we instituted last year. She doesn’t write her objectives on the board for the students to see, and I’ve sat in her class. Lecture from the tardy bell to the dismissal bell. She’s a dinosaur. I’m adding her to your evaluations. Vice Principal Leanny has ignored Hatcher’s performance forever. We need fresh eyes on her.”
“I haven’t heard anything bad about Hatcher,” said Salas. “She earned teacher of the year two years ago.”
“Popular student vote. Doesn’t mean squat.” Wahr leaned forward. “Here’s how I know she needs to go. My son is going to be a freshman next year, and I don’t want him in her class. Best practice, Salas. We’re a ‘best practice’ school, and all the studies say lecture doesn’t work in social studies.” Wahr turned his attention back to the computer screen, then tapped a couple keys. “Watch her. I’ve got to eliminate a teaching position, and now that the state has removed tenure protection, she’s the best candidate. Here’s two other possibilities. You’re doing their evaluations now.” Wahr dropped file folders on the desk between them. “Evaluate and choose. Somebody’s got to go. Budget, Salas. Budget and best practice.”
He knew Hatcher, a pleasant, older woman, tending toward fat, who looked like Salas’s grandmother. He’d never observed her teaching, though. That night, as the moon moved a tree’s shadow across his bedroom wall, Salas realized he’d have to start Hatcher’s evaluation immediately. He’d get notes from Leanny, then drop in to Hatcher’s last period American History class.
Vice Principal Salas organized his day by piles. The tallish one on the left contained discipline action sheets for students in trouble, many for attendance issues, but also for cell phones in the classroom, smoking, drugs, insubordination, and one for a Theodore Remmick, a freshman who’d brought a small propane torch to school in his backpack. Parent contact sheets made the middle pile. He spent most days on the phone talking to parents, often about the first stack. Teacher evaluations made up the third pile. Much of the time he avoided the third pile. He’d been vice principal at Hareton High for fourteen years, and he knew all the teachers. If they weren’t sending kids for discipline (which meant they weren’t good at classroom management), then he limited his contact with them to drop in visits while they were teaching. Salas evaluated the N-Z teachers. Leanny handled the other half of the alphabet.
Salas dreaded evaluations. Before he’d taken the vice principal job, he’d taught four P.E. classes and one Remedial Reading (his minor had been English), so he felt silly trying to evaluate the academic disciplines. He’d gone into P.E. because he liked sports and kids. He’d been an indifferent student himself.
“Hi, Salas. What did you need?” Vice Principal Leanny leaned into his office without stepping in, her gray-rooted dark hair pulled into a ponytail. She’d started teaching French and Spanish the same year Hatcher joined the faculty, but moved into administration after ten years. With Jack Quinn’s retirement from tech ed three years ago, the two women were the longest tenured employees in the building and old friends.
“What can you tell me about Mrs. Hatcher?”
Leanny grimaced. “Wahr’s after her, isn’t he? It’s not the first time. Best teacher we have. I don’t know why Wahr wants to mix up the evaluations. I’ve been giving her exemplaries as long as I can remember.”
“No one gets exemplaries!” Wahr had directed them not to give teachers the highest rating. He had said, “Everyone can get better. Besides, if we give a teacher the highest rating, it’s hard to fire him.”