You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [48]
THAT AFTERNOON, SAMUEL tried watching Giles and a few others play a game of French cricket out by the field house, but his gaze kept wandering up to the billowing white clouds. The sight of the stretcher, the clean white sheet, the open palms. It had stilled a part of Samuel’s mind he’d never realized had been moving. A tiny ball in the middle of his brain had spun to a halt. It scared him. He’d always thought fear would be something fast, a thing that pushed you forward.
Up in the dorm that morning after breakfast, he’d still hoped for an explanation of his knowing, a conversation between masters he’d overheard without realizing, some comment made at supper. But when the headmaster had described what happened, the timing of it, all of a sudden Samuel saw the food on his plate and the boys opposite him and the whole dining hall as if through the wrong end of a telescope. It was as though the everyday world, all that was familiar to him, had been revealed as a tiny, crowded dwelling, full of noise and chatter. A house on an empty plain. Beyond its walls a vast landscape.
The barely noticeable pace of the clouds’ approach across the sky seemed like evidence of this hidden enormity, his classmates’ frantic motions on the pitch nothing but the buzzing of insects against the window of an attic room. Sitting there on the playing fields, he longed more ardently than he ever had to be with Trevor, hanging out in his room, watching him at his desk fiddling with his computer, talking on and on about computer things, the books he’d ordered by mail open beside him, his brother not listening to half of whatever Samuel said, but nodding. His brother who’d never seemed happy at his own school, who never seemed to make friends. In that room with Trevor, he might still be safe.
By the time his parents’ Peugeot turned into the car park at ten to four on the Monday, it seemed he hadn’t spoken to another person in years. He ran to the car. His mother in her black dress and handbag had barely risen from the passenger’s seat when he began, “Mum, I knew, I knew before everyone else, before they told us, I knew they’d have to get another teacher and it was right when it happened, just after seven, I knew he was dead before anyone.”
He burst into tears, pressing his face against his mother’s body, hugging her. Her hands came down to rub his back, arms cradling his head.
“All right, dear, it’s all right.”
“But I knew,” he mumbled into her dress. “Why? Why?”
Her hands came to a stop and she pressed him harder against her.
“It’s okay now, it’ll be all right . . . Of course you didn’t know, dear. He was a good teacher . . . you liked him. It’s hard, that’s all.”
Samuel looked up into her face. She had long black hair a bit ruffled now in the breeze. She never usually wore makeup but today she’d put on pale lipstick, the look in her eyes the look she had when he got sick. He wanted to comfort her, to explain.
“Mum, I knew on Friday. Mrs. Pebbly didn’t find him till Saturday morning.”
She smiled weakly, looking down at the gravel.
“You remember when Granny died,” his father said across the top of the car, his voice weirdly loud. He was staring intently at Samuel, his shirt and tie done tightly up against his throat. “You remember we were all sad then. You’re sad now. You see? And sometimes you think things when you’re sad. It’s natural.”
“But it was Friday. I was playing—”
His father turned his head away abruptly, glancing across the field. He closed his mouth and swallowed, his eyes squinting into the distance, lips turning down into a kind of grimace, as if he were forcing something nasty tasting down his throat.
“Come on,” he said to Samuel’s mother, turning around and heading across the lot. “We’ll be late.”
In the chapel, the headmaster recounted Mr. Jevins’s life, his days in the army, a military cross, teaching in Rhodesia,