Alice McDermott - After This

Pauline turned an impassive face to her, standing between the two beds.

“I don’t expect you will,” she said.

And then there was the sound of Clare coming in. Clare coming through the front door, dropping her books in the vestibule. “Maaa?” They heard the girl’s footsteps on the stairs. “Here,” her mother called. And then she was in the room. Her coat and her hair were wet with rain. She smelled of pencil shavings. Of the halls of St. Gabriel’s.

“You’re here,” she said to Pauline, and easily went to her, put her arms around her, as her mother had not, her cheek against her breast. “How do you feel?” she said, gingerly. “Are you better?”

Pauline, with something of her old dignity, said, “Oh, yes. Much better.”

At dinner, there was the new configuration at the table: Annie had taken Michael’s place and Pauline sat beside Clare. Afterward, Clare sat in front of the television as Michael used to do, watching while she did her homework. Sitting in the chair behind her, Pauline said, “Doesn’t the TV distract you? Wouldn’t you rather sit at the table?”

And Clare shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” Her hair had gone wavy from where it had been wet and it caught the TV light at its ends. “Can you really concentrate?” Pauline said and the girl nodded, “I really can.”

The boys’ room was chilly after the overheated rooms of the hospital, but it had a pleasant smell: there was a box in the bedside drawer that contained sticks of incense-Pauline put it to her nose-a smell like an old church, just after Benediction, a smell that ran just under the other, ordinary smells of clean sheets and the lingering scent of dinner. She turned back the plaid spread. Both beds were made up, but she chose the one nearest the wall to avoid the light from the hall that came under the door. She was well asleep when she felt Clare’s hands on her shoulders, patting her softly, and had a momentary belief that she was in the hospital again, that another patient had wandered in.

But Clare laughed a little in the darkness, whispering, “Is that you? I can’t see.”

Pauline said, “Yes, it’s me.”

She heard the girl moving away. “Okay,” she said. Heard her pulling at the sheets on the other bed, getting under the covers. “I sleep in here sometimes,” she said. “When Annie stays up reading.” She was only a voice in the darkness, but even in the darkness, Pauline would have known the voice.

“That’s all right,” Pauline said.

They were both silent. There was, perhaps, some faint music, piano notes from next door. Pauline was beginning to see a little more, some thin light behind the curtains, perhaps the outline of the girl’s small body under the spread. In a moment, she could hear her breathing softly, sweetly, into the dark.

The girls had heard it through the night: rain drumming on the roof and rattling down the drainpipes, rain amplifying, giving voice or music (depending on their dreams) to the sound of passing cars. They had ridden to school this morning with the metronome shush of windshield wipers thrumming at their temples, erasing one thought, then another, then another as it formed again. Riding the school bus or in their fathers’ cars with their sleeves and shoulders damp, their loafers and the crowns of their heads darkened with rain.

They felt the dampness of it still at 10 a.m., second period, as they moved into the classroom, their books in their arms.

The overhead lights had not yet been turned on, nor had the teacher arrived, so here was an opportunity to sprawl, for a minute. Put your head on the desk.

Outside the mullioned window was a slate-gray sky, a dark lawn, a black hedge that hid the road, although they could see the headlights of cars behind the tangled shrubs, low beams moving as if through water. There had been general consensus this morning, on the radio at least, that were it not for the unseasonable warmth of the day, there would have been two feet of snow.

The raindrops ran in fits and starts across each pane. The morning light, filtered through the rain-spattered glass, turned the colors in the unlit classroom into various shades of gray.

Clare Keane folded her arms across her books and rested her forehead in the crook of her elbow. She closed her eyes and the sound of the rain and of her shuffling, murmuring classmates grew hollow and distant, veered from noise to echo to dream.

Beside her, Barb Luce slumped at her desk, then stretched her legs to straddle the chair legs of the seat in front of her. Idly, she took inventory: penny loafers, navy kneesocks, dimpled knees, bare thighs-winter pale against the pleated plaid wool of her skirt-a nick of dried blood between knee and skirt hem from this morning’s razor. She licked a finger and put it to the scab, assessed the smoothness of the shave with her fingertips. Knees were always tricky.

There was a general yawning, a leaning forward and a leaning back. A lethargic unclipping of hair clips and a clipping back up again. A roll of Life Savers was passed around, its plume of unraveled wrapper like a lengthening stream of smoke as it went from hand to hand. A clicking of candy against teeth. A general whisper, Did we have homework in here? Did she give us homework?

Monica Grasso shuffled her books and said out loud, “I don’t want to be here,” but opened her notebook anyway and reviewed (the Diet of Worms, the Council of Trent), just in case.

The rain was steady, no particular wind to drive it or to vary its rhythm. Cynthia Pechulis pulled her hair up into a ponytail at the top of her head and Dawn Sorrento, sitting behind her, saw in the lovely declivity between her neck and spine the fine blond hair Cynthia had been born with.

They were all fourteen or fifteen in identical plaid skirts and navy blue blazers, white blouses with soft collars.

Kathleen Cornelius, her large face drawn, her lips parted, noticed that the blackboard glimpsed through her lashes bled a little at the edges but snapped to again when she opened her eyes wide. She tried this a number of times until her attention was diverted by the floating dust motes that appeared in the gloom of her lowered lashes. They were perfectly round, transparent, either dust motes or sloughed skin cells, bits of dandruff, perhaps, or perhaps merely an optical illusion, her own blood moving behind her cornea, illuminating the defects, snags, infinitesimal genetic mutations in the sticky fabric of her eye.

The interval of idleness grew longer. Was it possible there would be no class today?

Clare Keane dreamed she was still at the breakfast table. Her father was watching the coffee percolate on the stove. Annie (who in the dream was not really Annie) was stirring her cereal. Pauline was spreading soft butter on a pinch of sweet roll, covering her fingertips with it. Much to Clare’s surprise, Annie picked up her cigarette lighter which she had unaccountably left beside her plate and struck the flint three times.

“Good morning, all,” Sister Lucy said. She stood at the door, her index finger held under the three light switches as if (Clare thought) she was hoping to keep three little noses from sneezing. “In the name of the Father,” Sister began, as she walked in, not blessing herself because she held her crutch in one hand and her large leather briefcase in the other, “and of the Son.”

Overhead, the trio of fluorescent lights merely buzzed, then clicked, then flashed angrily, before coming to full, obedient light as Sister Lucy limped into the room. One by one, the girls raised their heads, touched a pencil, stored some books beneath their desks, praying with her all the while. Clare Keane had a red spot on her forehead, marking the place where her face had heavily met her forearm. Kathleen Cornelius closed her mouth.