Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

“Will this do?”

The photograph Chloe had chosen was a class portrait, possibly Kat’s yearbook shot. Dale would have preferred something that wasn’t so obviously airbrushed; the very fact of alteration seemed to suggest that Kat had needed it, which she had not. But the photo was suitable, he supposed. He felt a sudden desire to reach out to Chloe, to find some kind of rapprochement. They had lost their daughter. They were in this together. They would need each other, going forward, to survive. Two people, left alone by some cataclysm, just like Kat’s poem for graduation.

“She looked more like you every year.”

“Really? All I see is my hair. Her face is yours-actually-” She stopped, unusual for Chloe, who never worried about how her words landed.

“What?”

“She looks like Glen to me. I know you don’t like to hear that, but it’s true. His face is just a little rounder. Gentler.”

“My brother’s face,” Dale said, “has not been hampered by thought or stress. Instead of getting Botox, maybe more women should just smoke marijuana every day of their lives. While living off their parents, of course.”

“You’re too hard on Glen,” Chloe said. “Always have been. It wasn’t easy being your brother. Not just your brother but your twin, for God’s sake. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

But I’m your worst enemy.

“I don’t see how being my brother was such a disadvantage. I was the one who was told I couldn’t go to Stanford because my father thought it was unfair for me to go to private school across the country while Glen was at College Park.”

“And you let Glen know just how much you resented him for it.”

“You two always were thick as thieves.”

“Thick as losers, you mean. That’s what we had in common. We were the only underachievers in the bunch. Even your mom, sweet as she was, made me feel scattered and useless.”

“You raised Kat, and she was lovely. If you never did another thing, Chloe, what you did with our daughter would be a greater accomplishment than most people ever know in their lives.”

To his astonishment, Chloe put her arms around him and began to cry, but not in the frightening, rage-filled way he remembered. She cried silently, her body heaving with tears, and he started to cry, too. He had cried frequently over the past three days, but this was different somehow. The grief was powerful yet pure. For a moment he was free of the desire to redress or avenge, to somehow fix what had happened.

But just as quickly Chloe broke the embrace, as if embarrassed to have dropped her guard in front of Dale. Disoriented, she began fanning herself with the envelopes she still clutched in one hand, then patted her cheeks with them.

“Oh, shit, look at me-I’m trying to dry my eyes with the mail.” She sat at the table and slid a letter opener through one. “That reminds me-you didn’t pay child support this month.”

“I’m sorry. I had meant to bring the check Friday night, when I came to take Kat out to dinner.” Despite the traditional every-other-weekend custody arrangement, Kat seldom spent full weekends with her father anymore, given the demanding social life of a high-school senior. So Dale came out every Friday for dinner and talked to her by phone almost every evening.

“Do you have your checkbook with you now?”

“No-why?”

“For the check.”

“What check?”

Chloe’s voice was patient, practical. “The June child support.”

“I’ve never examined this part of our separation agreement, but I have to think that child support ceases when the child is dead, Chloe.”

“The check was due on the first. I agreed you could bring it out Friday, the fourth, rather than risk it getting delayed in the mail. But you owed me that money as of the first.”

“I cannot believe you are busting my balls this way. Our daughter is dead, and all you care about is extracting more money from me.”

“I just want what I’m entitled to. I’m sorry I don’t have the option of being so pure in my grief, Dale. But I have bills.” She waved the envelopes at him, then began tossing them at his feet one by one. “Utility. Water. Credit card-no, wait, that’s a new credit card application, because that’s one part of the world that finds a forty-five-year-old woman desirable: credit card companies. Oh, the Glendale Association-for the services and clubs I don’t even use. And-what the fuck is this?”

“Your fur-storage bill?”

“Shut up, Dale. This is…this is…” She flapped it weakly, but all Dale saw was a plain white envelope, addressed in an elaborate handwriting, almost like calligraphy.

“Maybe it’s a note of condolence,” he said.

“It’s for Kat.”

He took it from Chloe, turning it over in his hand. “I’m sure it’s some school thing. It’s postmarked Friday morning. It was mailed…before. Certainly before the sender knew.”

When Dale opened it, a single page fell out: “I ask only that the truth be told.” The word “only” had been crossed out with a single pen stroke, and it was signed in the same blue ink: “Love, Perri.”

Alexa hadneither office nor classroom in Glendale, a situation attributed to her lack of seniority, although she suspected Barbara Paulson’s resentment of her was the real reason. For all Glendale ’s overcrowding issues, it should have been possible to carve out a space for her things-a desk, a cupboard, a filing cabinet-if not an actual classroom. Instead she was relegated to floater status, ferrying her papers and supplies on a wheeled cart, meeting with students wherever a quiet corner could be found. “My door is always open to you,” Alexa told her students with what she hoped came across as wry acceptance of a bad situation. “That is, my door is always open, assuming you can find it.”

This morning she established a temporary beachhead in the dressing room behind the auditorium to begin gathering her thoughts about the assembly she had volunteered to organize. Had Barbara tricked her into taking on this extra chore? Alexa was no longer sure. All she knew was that she had found herself insisting that she had the necessary background, with her undergraduate work in rhetoric and her postgraduate degrees in psychology and education.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you,” Barbara had said. “Besides, I really don’t have the authority to assign you extra work-as you often remind me.”

“It wouldn’t be an imposition,” Alexa had said. She was still remembering last year’s assembly in the wake of a car accident that had killed three popular athletes, how the outside grief counselors had mishandled it.

“If you insist.”

Barbara’s bland tone couldn’t quite conceal her smugness. Over the past two years, Alexa had been quick to remind Barbara that the Girl Talk! Empowerment Project had a specific purpose, and that Alexa had to account for her activities to both the state and the nonprofit that underwrote her grant. Yes, it made her sound a little petulant at times, but Barbara would have exploited her otherwise. If Barbara had her way, Alexa would have ended up pulling cafeteria duty and Lord knows what else.

Alexa knew she looked privileged and protected to the rest of the staff, holding what were derisively known as her “hen sessions,” with blocks of time kept open for one-on-one counseling with students. Sometimes she dreamed of placing a sign on her desk-in her fantasies she had a desk-a sign that said IT ONLY LOOKS LIKE I’M NOT WORKING.

She picked up the in-house phone and dialed the office, thinking, as she had frequently over the past three days, about the in-house call that had started everything on Friday. Well, not started, exactly. The shots had been the signal, the clarion call, but even the shots were a reaction to something, something as yet unknown. What had motivated Perri to do such a thing? The school today was rife with rumors, stories so wild that they seemed more like Internet fanfic inspired by one of those prime-time teenage soap operas. Jealousy was the common element in all the stories. Perri must have wanted something that Kat had, or resented her. Her blond good looks? Perri was pretty enough, in her angular way. Her future? But Perri’s admission to North-western’s theater school was as prestigious as Kat’s early acceptance to Stanford.