Sandrine's Case Page 20

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I mean about us?”

  “There is no ‘us,’ April,” I reminded her. “In a way, there never was.”

  “But they might ask,” she protested. “What if they ask you, Sam?”

  “Ask me what?”

  “About us?”

  I moved to put my hands on her small rounded shoulders but stopped myself in time.

  “Why would they ask about anything like that?” I said. “Look, April, the facts are these. Sandrine was going to die. She’d been diagnosed weeks before. She didn’t want to face that kind of death.” I shrugged. “It’s an open-and-shut case of suicide. Nobody is going to ask me anything.”

  “But the paper said there was an investigation and that—”

  “The cops here in Coburn are just stirring up headlines,” I interrupted. “They enjoy seeing their names in the paper. That’s all this is, a trumped-up investigation they’ll abandon at some point. Even so, it’s just routine in a suicide.”

  She stared at me pleadingly. “She didn’t know about us, did she? Sandrine?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I mean, she didn’t . . . it wasn’t . . .”

  “It had nothing to do with you, April.”

  She glanced about, as if looking for eyes in the darkness. “I wouldn’t have called you or come here but I’m so scared, Sam. I feel like it’s part of a plan, you know? God’s plan. Punishment, I mean.”

  “April, please, just go home and stop thinking about this.”

  “But I’m so scared.”

  “I know you are, but you don’t need to be.”

  “You really don’t think they’re going to be asking questions about . . .” She stopped because I’d already denied the reality of “us.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I have all the answers I’ll ever need to get them off my back.”

  She glanced left and right again, as if certain she were being watched.

  “I just wanted to give you my condolences,” she said. “That’s what you can say if someone sees us here.”

  “No one will see us here.”

  “But that’s what we could say if someone did.”

  “Okay, sure, but I won’t have to say anything, April,” I assured her. “You played no part in this, and there’s no reason you’ll be dragged into it.” I smiled quite confidently. “Don’t lose any sleep over this,” I told her. “Believe me, your name will never come up.” I put my hand on my heart. “I give you my word. I will never say your name.”

  But I had given April’s name, of course, and it was still ringing through the courtroom when I returned to my body.

  “So Professor Madison acknowledged that he’d been unfaithful to his wife with April Blankenship, correct?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes,” Detective Alabrandi answered. “He said that he had carried on an affair with Mrs. Blankenship. It had lasted only a few weeks, he said, and it had ended three months before he’d learned of his wife’s illness.”

  “Did you ask Professor Madison if his wife was aware of this adulterous affair with April Blankenship?”

  “He said that she was not.”

  Had she been aware of it, I asked myself now, only half listening as Detective Alabrandi continued his testimony, whose exact content I was already well acquainted with. Was it possible at some point that Sandrine had learned about April and me? Had Clayton somehow found out and, in a seizure of anger or pain, confided April’s betrayal to his best friend at Coburn College, none other than tweedy little Malcolm Esterman?

  I glanced back toward the rear of the courtroom, where Malcolm sat on the back row, in his, yes, tweed jacket, staring through the bottle-bottom thickness of his hornrimmed glasses. He’d always seemed quite humble, a modest man, as Churchill once famously quipped of a political opponent, with much to be modest about. He was just the sort of man, self-effacing and seemingly without envy, to whom Clayton Blankenship might have gone in search of whatever a man seeks in the aftermath of such betrayal. But who would have told Clayton in the first place? Certainly not April. And if April had not told Clayton, then he could not have told Malcolm, and Malcolm could not have told Sandrine.

  So if Sandrine had actually known about April and me, how had she known? Or had anyone told her at all? For this was Sandrine, I reminded myself, who could look through walls.

  Again I went out of my body, and at the end of that unexpected journey I found myself at a faculty gathering not long after Sandrine had first learned of her illness. It had been one of those end of the academic year parties, held on the lawn of the president’s house, everyone choosing between white and red wine and dining on pig-in-a-poke canapés carried on faux silver trays by mostly black servers dressed, for all the world, like plantation-era house slaves.

  The president had thanked us for another splendid year, praised our excellence and commitment to the “life of the mind,” then released us to wander about the grounds, forming circles of conversation. Sandrine and I had often hung pretty close together during such affairs, but on that afternoon she’d broken away, and I’d ended up alone, leaning against one of the ground’s great oaks, sipping wine and nibbling at a miniature crab cake but otherwise unengaged.

  It was then I’d caught April in my sight, wearing a pale blue dress that made her look almost transparent. She’d had her doll-sized hand tucked in poor, frail Clayton’s crooked arm and in that pose she looked more like his nurse than his wife. For a time, they strolled haltingly among the faculty, then, rather abruptly, she was with them, my tall, elegant, porcelain-white and raven-haired Sandrine.

  For a moment, I’d thought it better to keep clear, but as I watched, April had looked increasingly ill at ease, and so, by way of keeping the lid on that particular pot, I strolled over and joined them.

  “Are you folks enjoying this little soiree?” I asked.

  Clayton nodded. “It’s always a pleasure to talk to your lovely wife, Sam,” he said, the very picture of old southern charm. “You know April, of course.”

  “Yes, hi,” I said to her. “You’re not drinking. May I get you a glass?”

  She shook her head but said nothing, which was not unusual for shy, birdlike April, and so I’d turned back to Clayton. “Well, I presume you had a successful academic year.”

  Clayton smiled, and I noticed that his teeth were quite yellow, stained by years of pipe smoking. Suddenly, I felt myself repulsed by the notion that April’s pink little tongue had no doubt found itself in that repellant mouth. The thought had come to me so quickly and I’d been so unprepared for it that for an unguarded instant I must have gotten lost in the sheer horror of it, and as she and Clayton broke away I looked at my little parakeet of a paramour with some impossible mixture of pity and revulsion.

  I caught myself immediately, but in the way of such glances something of my true feeling was revealed, and to which April’s glance responded in kind.

  “April is an odd little thing,” Sandrine said once Clayton and April were out of earshot.

  I quickly took a sip from my glass. “She reminds me of that line of Eliot’s.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The one about people who must prepare a face to meet the faces they meet.”

  Sandrine’s smile was bright enough, but I sensed a certain gloom coming from her. “As do I,” she said.

  At the time I’d thought the shadowy darkness of this remark had had to do with her diagnosis, the death that was coming for her, and which even as it came would strip her of all her powers. She was having to prepare a face to meet the faces that would pity her once they learned the news. But now I was not so sure it was her illness that had generated her response to my Eliot reference. Perhaps, in that quick exchange of looks between April and me, she’d seen something t
hat had forced her into a yet deeper deception, a villainous tale whose arch villain was me.

  We’d stayed at the party awhile longer, then headed home, Sandrine quite pensive as she sat, watching the town go by with the sort of look one sees in very young children, as if seeing something for the first time.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “How lovely it is,” she answered. “Pull over.”

  I did as she asked. We’d gone almost to the far end of the town, where there was a little park. There were swings and monkey bars and whirligigs, but Sandrine’s attention was on the shaded area at the near end of the park, where a group of teenagers had gathered.

  “Remember Palermo?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “That area where the streets came together,” she said.

  “Four Corners.”

  “They were dancing that day,” she continued quietly. “Those young people. The girls were in long pleated skirts, and as they danced they kicked very high, and their skirts hung down from their legs like fans.”

  I could find nothing to say and so I kept quiet. So did Sandrine, and for a while we sat in silence. Then she said, “Do you think it’ll be this way from now on, Sam, that all my memories—no matter how sweet or beautiful—that all my memories will be heartbreaking?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I hope not.”

  This was, God knows, an inadequate answer, but I could find nothing better to say, and so I simply watched as Sandrine held her gaze on a group of young people who seemed quite uninspiring to me, local kids who’d eventually end up in my freshmen English class, where I’d have to remind them—repeatedly and futilely, of course—that “unique” cannot take an adjective.

  “You know, Sam, the trouble with not living in the shadow of death,” Sandrine said after a moment, “is that you don’t notice how beautiful things are.”

  When I said nothing in response to this, she drew in a long breath, then released it slowly. “I’ve become a cliché, haven’t I? The dying woman who mouths nothing but bromides.”

  Again, I said nothing, for it seemed to me that what she’d said was, indeed, something of a bromide, and so we sat in silence for a bit longer before Sandrine spoke again.

  “You should get yourself another woman, Sam,” she said. “After I’m gone. But not someone like me. Someone who’ll make you feel important.” Now her gaze slid over to me. “Someone like . . . April Blankenship.”

  I’d laughed out loud at this, because at the time I’d seen not a hint of incendiary sparkle in Sandrine’s eyes. But was that only because I’d refused to see it, refused even to address the idea that she might have caught the look April and I had inadvertently exchanged an hour before, seen it and read it and gotten it right? Had that been the moment when I should have known that Sandrine would not go quietly to her grave, but that from then on she would begin to construct a plot whose intricate design was meant to pull me in after her?

  We’d later driven in silence the rest of the way home. A pall had fallen over Sandrine. She was deep in thought, perhaps more deeply in thought than I had ever seen her. Once out of the car, she walked directly to the scriptorium, retrieved her Nano, and from there headed into the sunroom, where she put the earbuds in, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes.

  I’d felt it best to leave her to herself for a time, but as the hours passed and night fell and she now sat in the total darkness of that no longer sunny room, I had at last made my way out to her. She stirred briefly as I entered, so I knew she’d heard me. Even so, she kept her eyes closed and the earbuds in place, waiting, I suppose, for the current song to end, and only then at last acknowledging that I was in the room.

  “Sam,” she said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes remained closed but she plucked the earbuds out and let them dangle from her long white fingers for a moment before dropping them into her lap.

  “I’ve made a decision,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t want to wait for it,” she said. “Death. I don’t want to go through all those terrible stages.” Her eyes opened slowly. “You understand? I want to be in control.”

  At the time, this had sounded entirely at one with her character, and so I made no argument against whatever decision she had made, or was in the process of making.

  “Demerol,” she added quite casually, as if it were merely a final item added to a grocery list. “Tell Dr. Ortins that I’ve fallen and hurt my back. She’ll prescribe all I need.”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said softly.

  The smile that struggled onto her lips was the saddest I had ever seen. “In the meantime,” she added, “just keep doing what you’ve been doing, Sam.”

  “Been doing?” I asked cautiously.

  Her smile seemed uneasily balanced, like a figure on a wire. “There’ll be plenty of time for your life to change.”

  Judge Rutledge’s gavel hammered me back to the present. I looked at the clock. My God, had so much time passed? On the stand Detective Alabrandi was gathering up his papers while Mr. Singleton turned and headed toward his chair. I looked at Morty, who was putting papers in his briefcase. When he’d packed the last of them, he glanced at me. “Okay, well, we got through some major testimony, buddy,” he said. He smiled. “Have a nice weekend, Sam.”

  Weekend Recess

  On Saturday morning, I woke up to a house whose emptiness now seemed quite familiar. Alexandria had driven me home at the end of Friday’s session, then rather diplomatically she’d suggested we spend some time apart. Besides, she had a few things she had to catch up on in Atlanta, she said, although she assured me that she’d be back in Coburn in time to accompany me to the courthouse on Monday morning, when my trial was set to resume at nine a.m.

  As I made my way to the kitchen to make my morning coffee, it struck me as quite strange, and very alarming, that with Alexandria gone Sandrine returned to me ever more emphatically, my mind continually calling her to the witness stand, demanding her testimony. It was as if I hungered for her accusations, deeply, deeply wished to know what she had actually thought of me.

  In such a frame of mind it didn’t surprise me that everywhere I looked she was there, a multitudinous ghost, her shape materializing in a chair or leaning against a bookshelf or sitting in the scriptorium as I passed it. Had I not closed that door? Probably not, but I’d begun to fall into that uncertain frame of mind where the trusted solidities of life had grown porous, the verities cracked, nothing any longer beyond the realm of possibility. Shakespeare had been right, there were, indeed, phantoms more real than their previously corporeal forms.

  I made coffee but had no stomach for anything else. I felt myself growing thinner by the hour, layers of me falling away like peeling paint.

  I’d never expected to be lonely but, even more certainly, I’d never expected to miss my colleagues at Coburn College. And yet, as I discovered that morning, I did miss them. How very odd and unpredictable, I thought, especially given the fact that I’d endlessly scoffed at my fellow professors. I always thought them a mediocre gaggle of academics waylaid in an inconsequential terminus at the end of the academic line. Sandrine had brought this up during that last, brutal fight. She said to me, You have always believed that you deserved better than Coburn College, Sam.

  When I facetiously asked her what esteemed educational institution could possibly be better than infinitely distinguished Coburn, she’d waved her hand dismissingly then added rather cryptically, One day, you’ll know.

  One day I’ll know.

  I pondered her words as I sipped my morning coffee, parsing them for every hint of threat, studying and restudying each intonation in Sandrine’s voice. Was it possible that by the time we’d engaged in that cruel battle she’d already carefully built
my staircase to the gallows, this final explosion merely the last bit of business in a plot she had premeditated weeks or even months before?

  I shook my head at how terrible it was, my fear that she had done just that. And if she had, it could be for only one reason: she had come to despise me, to loathe me, to hold me in utter contempt. Before finally hurling that porcelain cup, she’d accused me of every imaginable crime save the one that surely had topped them all, those ludicrous trysts with April.

  But did this prove that Sandrine had never learned of my affair, or had leaving it out been part of her plan? It was a question I couldn’t get out of my mind, a question that was like a needle in my brain, always pressing deeper, so that finally I grabbed the phone and dialed Morty’s number.

  “Morty, I need to know something,” I said tensely.

  “Who is this?”

  Morty’s voice was full of sleep, which caused me to glance at the kitchen clock. Jesus, it wasn’t even six o’clock.

  “Oh, sorry, Morty,” I said apologetically. “I thought it was later. I’ve been up since—”

  “What do you want, Sam?”

  “Well, like I said, I need to know something,” I told him. “It’s about Sandrine. I need to know if you ever got any hint that she might have known about April.”

  “You said you never told her,” Morty reminded me.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “But maybe someone else did.”

  Morty released a heavy breath, and I could imagine him still in bed, Rachel staring at him quizzically, wondering what in hell was going on, I no longer a harmless egghead but a deranged fruitcake who’d roused her husband from a warm bed, invaded their placid weekend, and imposed upon their private time. In my mind, I saw her shake her head and hiss, Jesus Christ! as she turned back to her pillow.

  “I’m sorry, Morty,” I said softly in the wake of that image. “I was just thinking about something, that’s all, and so—”

  “Look, Sam,” Morty interrupted, a lawyer no doubt accustomed to clients afflicted with severe mental shifts. “You need to relax. That’s what the weekend is for. You don’t need to be wandering the house at the crack of dawn, okay?”