A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [55]
“No,” I said, “I have to go now.” I couldn’t abide the dark hallway, or the men on the school board, or Robbie and his mother, or Mrs. Watson and Luther Tritz and pretty Grogan and handsome, dumb Melby. Bless me, Grogan, for I have sinned.
“Are you okay?” Grogan asked. “You didn’t look too good at that meeting.”
I hadn’t noticed them in the cafeteria, but they must have been watching. They had been spying, because they wanted to get me. I’d slapped Robbie and been so careless Lizzy had drowned. “I’m not well,” I said. I felt woozy and I had to touch the wall with both hands to stop it from whirling.
“I’m sorry to keep you standing,” she said. “Why don’t we sit on the bench at the end of the hall there. This really won’t take too much longer.”
“I can’t stay!” I shouted. “I’m sick, don’t you understand?”
“We just have a few more things—”
“I’m having a complete nervous breakdown! Do you want to know the truth? I’m having a complete nervous breakdown and no one will let me do it in peace and quiet.” I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. “Oh God,” I cried, as the floodgates burst.
“What’s the matter with you?” Grogan asked sternly.
“I hurt everybody!” I sobbed. I was thinking of Nellie just then, thinking what an ungrateful wretch I was. I started to run away backwards, and then I turned and hurtled through the door. When I got to the car I jammed the keys in the ignition and screeched away. The sound, the howling coming from my mouth, was such a strange, loony noise, I had to stop making it to listen, to know that I was calling for Howard.
Chapter Eight
——
WHEN I GOT HOME the sky was not yet dark, but a luminous blue, the color and quality of neither day nor night. A few stars, a planet, were shining. I went upstairs to our room, undressed, and got into bed. Over the burr of the fan I could hear my heart beating its muffled private thumps. I had had a run in with Mrs. Mackessy once, before I’d smacked Robbie. I could talk myself into thinking I hadn’t really hurt him, make small adjustments to the picture to alter the angle of my hand and the force of the stroke. I had also convinced myself that the scene with Mrs. Mackessy didn’t amount to anything fearsome. She had come to pick up Robbie at noon, to take him away early. He had been sick to his stomach all morning and naturally no one had been home or within reach. I was sure that he’d been ill earlier, before he got to school. I had sat with him for three hours, swabbing his hot forehead, holding him while he vomited. He was too miserable to struggle, too worn out for mischief, and for once he seemed to know that he needed me. He didn’t have the strength to lie down after he’d sit up to retch, and I’d have to set him back in place, on the cot.
My rage at Robbie Mackessy’s mother had smoldered as I tended her boy. I can truthfully say that I felt for the child, who had seemed to me, on so many occasions, to already be ruined and well beyond rehabilitation. Mrs. Mackessy had sent him to school sick because she didn’t care much about him, because she assumed he was the school’s problem and not hers. At noon, from my office, I saw her slowly getting out of her car, smoothing her dress, tossing her head so that her golden mane fell down her back. I watched her walk down the hall in an intricate gait like a horse that has spent its life learning dressage. She picked up her little feet and set them carefully down starting at the toe and working through to the instep and heel, all the while turning her head from side to side, her hair flicking back and forth over her shoulders. She was fifteen minutes late to pick him up so she could take him and dump him elsewhere. She was the manager of a steak house in Blackwell, no doubt a complex job involving hiring and ordering food, arranging schedules, as well as hostessing. That day she was wearing a conservative boxy blue dress with thick red piping around the collar and cuffs and hem. She had gold sandals with straps that crisscrossed, Jesus sandals in gold lamé.
“What’s he got?” she demanded.
“The same