Fairen was wandering back toward him, her gaze curious, her purple ski vest swinging stiffly in the cold air. Her flaxen hair was backlit by the wicker man in a halo of yellow. The drummers in the circle stepped up the rhythm into a near frenzy, hands striking drumskin with a force he could feel in the ground.
“Come on,” she yelled, gesturing with a broad arc of her arm. “You said you’d dance with me!”
He offered Rhianne an apologetic nod and walked over to where Fairen stood, smiling and dancing, her hair aglow in the light of the burning.
I needed to get my head together, as Scott said. To sit and think.
I drove out to the lake, where I imagined I could park in the shadowy little spot where Zach and I had often stopped, and look out at the water, and talk myself back into a clearer frame of mind. Beneath those trees I could consider the full arc of our relationship. There I could follow the trail of memories from our first covert, intoxicating visit to that space to the last, when I climbed onto his lap and felt his skin blazing hot around me, delighting in it for the last precious moments before the just universe would begin to confront me with every sorry truth about who I was. Before it dismantled the playhouse my mind had built, hoping it would serve as a for tress.
But the parking lot was jammed full of cars. I had never seen it so full. I heard music not far away and realized there was a festival going on. Gradually I remembered seeing the posters around town, a straw effigy burning in some sort of Celtic winter ritual. I parked my car illegally on the painted stripes beside a handicapped spot, and left my motor running.
In spite of the crowd, I stared out at the water and called up my memories. In my mind I could still see the urgency in Zach’s movements the first time we stopped here, hear the ragged sound of his breathing that seemed magnified by the deep silence around us, like a voice calling across a field on a snowy day. I remembered the bone-deep comfort of wrapping my arms around his body and pressing my face against his belly, and knowing there was no chance he would send me away, because the car was mine, and the keys were in my pocket, and I had something he very much wanted.
I sighed brokenly and pushed my hair back from my forehead. Through the windshield I watched a couple making out, and envied them their passion, their indifference to the crowd around them. The young man turned the girl onto her back and climbed over her, and quite suddenly, from the shape of his arms and shoulders and the angle at which his bangs fell, I realized it was Zach. I exhaled hard in surprise, and then, as he kissed her from above, cupping her breast with his free hand, I felt a tightness gathering around my heart. How easy it must be to be done with me when he had the willing blonde. The lawyers’ daughter, the one forever kissing boys on the playground, the girl with her bent knees now on either side of Zach’s hips.
I pushed in the cigarette lighter.
A breeze blew at the stand of pine trees in front of me, and through their wavering branches I caught sight of the straw man beginning to burn above the water. The man was unrealistically silent, but the crowd screamed for him. The flames spun around the body like a swarm of bees. I pulled a Martinmas lantern out from the box on the floor behind the driver’s seat, wadded in the cleaning cloth for my sunglasses, and dug into my purse for the vial of Bach’s Rescue Remedy. Its maker purported the flower essences were blended specifically to help in traumatic situations, and whether or not they worked as claimed, I was certain the alcohol tincture would function reliably.
I doused the cloth in Rescue Remedy and stepped out of the car. When I dropped in the cigarette lighter, the instant blaze shifted the lighting such that I could see my reflection in the car window: hair long and wild, expression blank, eyes dark hollows that disappeared into my face. The image was strangely soothing. I had become nobody, only a caricature, a cautionary tale of the body gone terribly awry. I was a book of moral lessons, and children had reason to fear me.
The wind had calmed. I stepped toward the trees, but to my dismay Fairen was gone. Now Zach stood speaking to a woman who, as I drew closer, appeared to be Rhianne. She gestured to him with broad, adamant strokes of her hand, and although he kept his distance and shook his head, I felt a chill that countered my burning hands. Then Zach stepped around her and walked toward the dancing group, hands in his pockets, leaving her standing beside the blanket in a disgruntled posture.
I sighed and set the lantern on the asphalt. The flames leaped well above its rim, but I doused it with my leftover cup of coffee, and it sputtered out.
Then I jammed my keys in the ignition and headed back home.
When I returned to the house there was an ambulance sitting in the driveway, all its red lights whirling. The front door stood open. I gathered my purse and walked up to the door, where a medical technician in a blue uniform greeted me and told me Russ was dead. I felt anxious and a bit surprised. Scott had found him, they told me; and only then did I realize this explained why Russ had not come downstairs during my disagreement with the midwife. The two medics told me the police would arrive soon, as a matter of routine, so I sat in the rocking chair and waited for them. While I waited I wound balls of yarn, as I often asked my students to do during quiet time.
When they arrived they appeared surprised to see me there. The one policeman said, it doesn’t seem to come as much of a shock to you that your husband is dead in his office. So I said, Officer, my husband has had a drug problem for a long time now, and I warned him that eventually he would probably die without treatment. So I suppose you could say I feel a bit resigned.
What sort of a drug problem, said the other officer, and I said, prescription drugs of all kinds, I can show you the bottles if you like. And so I did. They said, do you have the original prescription for these, and I said, what do you think?
There’s no reason to get snotty, he said. And that’s when I saw Scott standing in the doorway, with a look on his face of absolute shock and dismay. I could see his heart was breaking. So easily had I come to take the addiction for granted that I had forgotten Scott didn’t know. And I felt very relieved that when it finally happened—almost exactly as I had anticipated, facedown on his laptop with vomit in the keys—it had been none of my doing. Because of course it could have gone very differently.
Life can be ironic that way. They took his body for toxicology tests and then sent him to the funeral home to be cremated. And when I sorted through his desk and found the letters and underpants from the graduate student he’d had an affair with two years ago that I never knew about, I thought, well, we’re even then. You maintained the illusion that you wanted us to stay married, and I maintained the illusion that I wanted you to stay alive.
It all seemed fair enough, in the scheme of things.
On Christmas Eve, three things happened.
I picked up Russ’s ashes from the crematorium. In the morning, because of their reduced holiday work hours.
On the way home, I stopped at the automatic teller machine and discovered my paycheck had bounced. That was when I knew I did not have a job anymore. That my son did not have a school anymore. It still stood in the shadow of trees, set back from the road on its wooded lot, but it was a relic now of a vanished past. No money, no school. Even a fairy-tale kingdom can’t run without gold.
And then there was the note from Scott, saying he had gone to stay with Russ’s family in Virginia, his aunt and uncle. Staying in the house freaked him out now, he wrote. But I knew the house was just a ruse. It was me he didn’t want to be near.
I suppose four things happened on Christmas Eve, really. But the fourth happened because of the three.