the name of historical context.”
“If you hadn’t she might not have talked to you. She’s doing poorly in my class too. I don’t think that school she went to taught the most basic U.S. history. I’ll be happy to work with her too.”
I’d talked to Jean and got all Paola’s teachers on board. I suggested she be paired with a high-achieving student as a mentor. Jean had suggested Lila, who had taken on the role so enthusiastically that when Paola’s roommate dropped out, Lila offered to room with her. I was gratified to see that with the extra attention Paola’s grades improved. She’d written an excellent essay on The Scarlet Letter and Harmon said she’d done well in his class. She was due to graduate in two weeks and had gotten a generous scholarship to Mount Holyoke. A success story.
I suppose I’m one of Haywood’s success stories too. I don’t know what would have happened to Rudy and me if I hadn’t had this place to come back to. I don’t know what will happen to us if we have to leave. The thought makes me feel suddenly breathless, reminding me of a story about the chapel, that on lonely nights here a voice can be heard sobbing and crying out, “I’m drowning, I’m drowning.”
And why would anyone have drowned on high ground a quarter mile from the water? Mr. Gunn, my English teacher, had asked us when he brought my Senior Seminar to the chapel. When no one had an answer, he told us that in 1918 so many of the girls at the Refuge had gotten sick with the Spanish flu that the church had been used as an infirmary. The afflicted had lain in long rows in the sanctuary. Do you know how you die of the flu? he had asked us. Your lungs fill up with fluid and you drown.
I hear a sob now, as if one of those suffering girls were here. The sound is coming from the first row, where there’s a woman whose head is bowed so low I didn’t see her at first.
I consider backing up and leaving her to her grief, but I’ve hesitated too long to retreat. I can tell by a shift in the woman’s back that she knows I’m here. And besides, I recognize the well-cut silvery hair and cobalt-blue suit jacket. It’s Jean. I walk forward and sit down beside her, put my arm around her, and give her a moment to collect herself. Then I say, “I’m sorry, Jean. I know how hard this must be for you.”
Jean’s own daughter died five years ago of a drug overdose. She had struggled for years with depression and addiction and Jean had struggled with her—fighting to get her into one rehab center after another, dealing with her outbursts and stealing, the fear and uncertainty when she disappeared for months at a time. It was always a marvel to me how Jean managed to keep herself together and still run the school so well. I have to keep working, she told me once, or I’d go insane.
“I was doing all right until I got here,” she says now, blowing her nose, “and then I remembered Tracy’s funeral . . .” She takes a sharp intake of breath and waves a shaking hand in front of her face, as if to fan away the waves of grief rising in her. I sit with her quietly, knowing there’s nothing to say. “It’s selfish, really,” Jean says after a moment, “to feel every grief through the prism of my own. Lila deserves her own mourning. She was a lovely girl.”
“She was,” I say, the past tense reverberating in the empty chapel. When I heard that story about the flu victims drowning here in the chapel I pictured the waves off the Point crashing over the church, sweeping the dead out to sea. You are never safe, Mr. Gunn’s story seemed to say. The sea could reach out and take you even on dry land. “Have the police told you anything more?”
“No,” Jean says. “Do you know they put Kevin Bantree on the case? He’s turned out quite good-looking. I always thought it was a shame he didn’t go to college, but his mother got sick his freshman year and he came back to take care of her.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say, regretting my earlier thought that he’d wasted his time at Haywood. “Poor guy. He looked miserable having to ask Harmon