She looked at me as if the question were absurd. “Of course she will,” she said. She gave me a slight nudge. “Besides, even if Miss Channing didn’t like your drawings, all she’d want to do is teach you how to make them better.”
“All right,” I said, drawing the sketchbook from her hand as I got to my feet.
I walked a short distance away from her across the lighthouse grounds, then stopped and glanced back to where she remained seated on the little cement bench. “Thank you, Sarah,” I said.
She watched me closely, clearly sensing my insecurity, her teasing, carefree mood now entirely vanished. “Do you want me to come with you, Henry?”
I knew she’d read my mind. “Yes, I think I do.”
“All right,” Sarah said, coming to her feet with a sweep of her skirt. “But only as far as the courtyard, not into Miss Channing’s room. When you show her your drawings, you should do it on your own.”
I’d expected to find her alone, doing what she normally did at the end of the school day, washing the tables and putting away her supplies. It was only alter I’d reached the door of her classroom and peered inside that I realized she was not. Even so, I don’t know why it surprised me so, finding Mr. Reed in her room, leaning casually against the front table while she stood a few feet away, her back to him, washing the blackboard with a wet cloth. After all, I’d often seen them arriving at school in the morning and leaving together in the afternoon, Mr. Reed behind the wheel of his sedan, Miss Channing seated quite properly on the passenger side. I’d seen them together at other times as well, strolling side by side down the school corridor, or sitting on the steps, having lunch, usually with a gathering of other teachers, yet slightly off to the side, a mood surrounding them like an invisible field, so that even in the midst of others, they seemed intimately alone.
“Hello,” Miss Channing said when she turned away from the blackboard and saw me standing at the door. “Please, come in, Henry.”
I came into her room with a reluctance and sense of intrusion that I still can’t entirely explain, unless, from time to time, we are touched by the opposite of aftermath, feel not the swirling eddies of a retreating wave, but the dark pull of an approaching one.
“Hello, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.
I nodded silently as I came down the aisle, sliding the sketchbook back slightly, trying to conceal it.
“I thought you’d be at the game,” Mr. Reed said, referring to the lacrosse match that had been scheduled for that same afternoon. “It’s against New Bedford Prep, you know.” He glanced toward Miss Channing. “Traditionally, New Bedford Prep has been our most dreaded opponent.”
I said nothing, tormented now with second thoughts about showing my drawings to Miss Channing since Mr. Reed would be there to see them too. I’m not sure I would have shown them at all had not Miss Channing’s eyes drifted down to the sketchbook beneath my arm.
“Did you bring that for me?” she asked.
She could see my reluctance to hand it over. To counteract it, she smiled and said, “You know, my father used to stand me in front of a bare wall. He’d say, ‘Look closely, Libby. On that wall there is a great painting by someone who was afraid to show it.’ If no one ever sees your work, Henry, then what’s the point of doing it at all? Let’s see what you’ve done.”
I drew the sketchbook from beneath my arm and handed it to her.
She placed it on the table and began to turn the pages, studying one drawing at a time, commenting from time to time, mentioning this detail or that one, how the trees appeared to bulge slightly, something in them trying to get out, or the way the sea tossed and heaved.
“They have a certain—I don’t know—a certain controlled uncontrol about them, don’t you think?” she asked Mr. Reed.
He nodded, his eyes on her. “Yes, I do.”
She drew in a long breath. “If we could only live that way,” she said, her eyes still on one of my drawings.
She’d said it softly, without undue emphasis, but I saw Mr. Reed’s face suddenly alter. “Yes,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, yet oddly charged as well, as if he were responding not to an idle remark made in an open room, but to a note slipped surreptitiously beneath his chamber door.
I left Miss Channing’s room a few minutes later, reasonably satisfied with her response, but in other ways somewhat troubled and ill at ease, as if something had been denied me, a moment alone with her.
“I knew she’d like them,” Sarah said firmly when I told her what had happened.
She’d waited for me at the back of the school, the two of us now moving down its central corridor, other boys brushing past us, a few turning to get a better look at Sarah after she’d gone by.
Once outside, we returned to our little cement bench beside the lighthouse. From it we could see Chatham School just across the street.
“I wish I could leave here,” I said abruptly, almost spitefully, my mind turning from my drawings to the escape route they represented for me. Not art, as I know now, but an artist’s life as I then imagined it.
Sarah looked surprised by the depth of my contempt. “But you have everything, Henry. A family. Everything.”
I shook my head. “I don’t care. I hate this place.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere else, that’s all.”
She looked at me knowingly. “There are lots of places worse than Chatham,” she said.
It was then that Miss Channing and Mr. Reed came out the front door of the school and began strolling slowly toward the parking lot. Despite the formal distance they maintained, the fact that they at no point touched, there was something in the way they walked along together that drew my attention to them, called forth those first small suspicions that would later grow to monstrous size.
“I’ll bet they’d like to go someplace else too,” I said.
Sarah said nothing, but only turned toward the school and watched as Mr. Reed and Miss Channing continued toward Mr. Reed’s car. When they reached it, he opened the door for Miss Channing, waited until she’d gotten in, then closed it once again.
The car rumbled past us a few seconds later, Mr. Reed at the wheel as always, and Miss Channing seated beside the passenger door. A late afternoon chill had settled over the village by that time, and I noticed that she’d rolled her window up to shut it out. Her face, mirrored in the glass, seemed eerily translucent as the car swept by.
More than anything, I remember that she appeared to sit in a great stillness as the car drifted by. Just as she would some months later, after the verdict had been rendered, and she’d been hustled down the courthouse stairs and rushed into the backseat of a black patrol car. She’d sat next to the window on that occasion too, staring straight ahead as the car inched through the noisy, milling crowd, slowly picking up speed as it continued forward, bearing her away.
CHAPTER 11
I found that I couldn’t go directly to my office after leaving Dalmatian’s Cafe that morning. For there was yet another place that called to me even more darkly than Milford Cottage or Mr. Reed’s house or the silent reaches of Black Pond. For although the final act had occurred there, its tragic origins lay somewhere else, a different conspiracy entirely from the one Mr. Parsons felt so certain he’d unmasked in the courtroom the day I took the stand.
And so, after a second cup of coffee at Dalmatian’s Cafe, I walked back to my car, pulled out of the parking space, and headed up the steadily ascending coastal road that curved along the outerbank to Myrtle Street.
At the top of the bluff I wheeled to the right. The lighthouse gleamed in the bright morning air as I drove past it, a vast blue sky above, with only wisps of skirting clouds to suggest the tearing wind and rain that had rocked us during most of the preceding week.