Watching her from where I stood directly beside the bed, it was hard to imagine that only a few hours before she’d been so fully alive, so proud of the progress she’d made in her lessons with Miss Channing, drawing the African bracelet onto her wrist as if it were an emblem of her newfound mastery. Nothing had ever made life seem so tentative to me, so purely physical, and therefore utterly powerless to secure itself against the terrible assaults of accident or illness or even the invisible deadliness of time. It was just a little point of light, this life we harbored, just a tiny beam of consciousness, frail beyond measure, brief and unsustainable, the greatest lives like the smallest ones, delicately held together by the merest thread of breath.
We returned home that afternoon in an icy silence, my mother in the front seat of the car, fuming darkly, my father with his eyes leveled on the road, no doubt trying to fix this latest catastrophe within his scheme of things, give it the meaning it deserved, perhaps even some imagined grace.
As for me, I found that I could not bear to think of what had happened on Black Pond, either to Sarah or to Mrs. Reed, could not bear to hold such devastation in my mind, envision Sarah’s shattered bones or the last hellish gasps of Mrs. Reed.
And so I concentrated only on Miss Channing, imagining her alone in her cottage or out wandering in the nearby woods. It seemed entirely unfitting that she should be left to herself under such circumstances. And so, as we neared Myrtle Street, I said, “What about Miss Channing? Do you think we should …”
“Miss Channing?” my mother blurted out, twisting around to face me.
“Yes.”
“What about her?”
“Well, she may be all alone. I was thinking that we might bring her …”
“Here?” my mother demanded sharply. “Bring her here? To our home?”
I glanced at my father, clearly hoping for some assistance, but he continued to keep his eyes on the road, his mouth closed, unwilling to confront the roaring flame of my mother’s rage.
“That woman will never set foot in our house again,” my mother declared. “Is that clear, Henry?”
I nodded weakly and said nothing else.
∗ ∗ ∗
The atmosphere in the house on Myrtle Street had grown so sullen by nightfall that I was happy to leave it. My father dropped me off in front of Dr. Craddock’s clinic, saying only that someone would relieve me at midnight.
The doctor met me at the door. He said that Sarah’s condition hadn’t changed, that she appeared reasonably comfortable. “There’s a nurse at the end of the corridor,” he added. “Call her if you notice Sarah experiencing any distress.”
“I will,” I told him, then watched as he moved down the stairs, got into his car and drove away.
Sarah lay in the same position as before, on her back, a sheet drawn up to her waist, her shattered arm in a plaster cast. In the light from the lamp beside her bed, her face took on a bloodless sheen, all its ruby glow now drained into a ghostly pallor.
I watched her a moment longer, touched her temple with my fingertips, then settled into the chair beside the window to wait with her through the night. I’d brought a book with me, some thick seafaring tale culled from the limited collection available from the school library. I would concentrate on it exclusively, I’d told myself as I’d quickly pulled it from the shelf, let it fill my mind to the brim, allow no other thoughts inside it.
But I’d gotten through only twenty pages or so when I saw someone emerge out of the dimly lighted hallway, tall and slender, her dark hair hung like a wreath around her face.
“Hello, Henry,” Miss Channing said.
I got to my feet, unable to speak, her presence like a splash of icy water thrown into my face, waking me up to what I’d done.
“How is she?”
I let the book drop onto my chair. “She hasn’t changed much since the … since …”
She came forward slowly and stood by the bed, peering down. She was wearing a plain white dress, the shawl Sarah had knitted for her draped over her shoulders. She watched Sarah silently for a time, then let her eyes drift over to where I continued to stand beside my empty chair. “Tell your father that I’d like to sit with Sarah tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Channing.”
“For as long as she needs me.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She pressed her hand against the side of Sarah’s face, then turned and walked past me, disappearing from the room as quickly as she’d entered it.
I know that for the rest of that long night she remained alone in her cottage, no doubt staring at the old wooden pier as she sat in her chair by the window, the unlighted hearth only a few feet away, the ashes of Mr. Reed’s letters still resting in a gray heap where, three days later, Mr. Parsons would find them when he came to question her about what he called “certain things” he’d heard at Chatham School.
As for me, I remained at Sarah’s bedside, trying to lose myself in the book, but unable to shut out the sound of her breathing, the fact that as the hours passed, it grew steadily more faint. From time to time a soft murmur came from her, but I never saw any sign of the “distress” Dr. Craddock had warned me about. If anything, she appeared utterly at peace, so that I often found myself looking up from my book, imagining her unconsciousness, wondering if, locked so deeply within the chamber of herself, she could feel things unfelt by the rest of us, the slosh of her blood through the valves of her heart, the infinitesimal firings of her brain, perhaps even the movement of those tiny muscles Miss Channing had once spoken of, and which any true artist must come to understand.
And so I didn’t know until nearly midnight when Dr. Craddock came into the room, walked over to her bed, took hold of her wrist, held it briefly, then released it, shaking his head as he did so, that whatever small sensations Sarah might have felt from the depths of that final privacy, she now could feel no more.
My father had already been told that Sarah had died when he came for me. As he trudged toward me from down the hallway he looked as if he were slogging through a thick, nearly impenetrable air. He drew in a long breath as he gathered me into his arms. “So sad, Henry,” he whispered, “so sad.”
We went directly home, drifting slowly through the center of the village, its shops closed, the streets deserted, no one stirring at all save for the few fishermen I saw as we swept past the marina. Glancing out over its dark waters, I could see Mr. Reed’s boat lolling peacefully. The Elizabeth’s high white mast weaved left and right, and for a moment, I remembered it all again, he and Miss Channing sitting together on the steps of Chatham School or on the bench beside the bluff, the cane like a line drawn between them. By spring, as I recalled, they’d begun to stroll through the village together, companionably, shoulder to shoulder, their love growing steadily by then. No, not growing, as I thought suddenly, but tightening around them like a noose, around Mrs. Reed and Sarah, too, and even little Mary, so that love no longer seemed a high, romantic thing to me at all, no longer a fit subject for our poems and for songs, nor even to be something we should seek.
And so I never sought it after that.
“We’ll have to make an announcement in school tomorrow morning,” my father told my mother as he came into the parlor. “The boys have to be told. And Captain Hamilton wants to question a few people tomorrow afternoon.”
My mother, working fiercely at her knitting, so much death burning in her mind, aid not seem in the least surprised by such a development. “No doubt there’ll be plenty of questions,” she said without looking up.
“Who do they want to question?” I asked my father.
“Me, of course,” he answered, now trying to pretend that it was merely some kind of police routine, a formality. “Some of the teachers.”