The Whole Golden World Page 7

  TJ already had his coat on and was shaking hands with his brother at the door. “There you are,” he said without emotion when he saw Rain and handed over her jacket.

  Rain hardly had time to give her congratulations to Greg before TJ was pulling her out the door and down the long front walk to the semicircle of driveway in front of their home. He deposited her in the passenger side and slammed the door.

  Rain was glad she’d pulled in her legs quickly or he might have crushed her ankle.

  “Should I drive? I think I should drive,” she said, aware of his charged state, the number of beers he’d had.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  Rain unbuckled her seat belt and made to open her door. “I’ll just drive. I mean what if—”

  TJ revved away, having already started the engine, and Rain fell back hard into her seat. “I said I’m fine!”

  Rain buckled her seat belt again, closed her eyes, and prayed. Lord just get us home safely. Please. Besides the risk of accident there was also the chance of getting pulled over, and he might be over the legal limit. A high school teacher with a drunk driving arrest? That would make headlines.

  In fifteen minutes they were back in their driveway, and Rain slumped, trembling with released tension. Thank you, she prayed silently. No sirens. Scarcely another car to be seen, in fact, even on a Saturday night.

  Just inside their front door, TJ seized her suddenly, pressing her back to the wall with a fierce, hard kiss. Rain almost felt as if she was drowning.

  He was tugging off her jacket, then raking his hands across her breasts, down her sides to her hips. He pushed up her sundress, then hoisted her hard up against the wall. Without meaning to, Rain uttered a small cry of pain because of the pressure of him bracing her against the hard surface; the force felt crushing as he used one free hand to fumble with his own buckle.

  Rain held him as much to hold herself up as from affection. Now that he’d freed himself from his pants, he went to work on her underwear, yanking them down only as far as he had to before he slammed inside her.

  She cried out again and he seemed encouraged; pain and pleasure do sound so much alike, Rain thought then, holding her breath as TJ continued slamming her back against the wall. A glance at his face sent a chill across her skin, despite the sweat that might have been his or hers or both—he looked angry.

  He shouted, sounding both furious and relieved, and then together they sank down the wall, ending up in a heap on the carpet. Rain’s purse was next to her foot, her jacket by her head. She felt scraped up, sore, and burned.

  “Feel better now?” she asked in her playful voice, as she gingerly put her panties back in place. “That was quite a performance.”

  TJ was panting and did not answer her for several long moments.

  Then he said, “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “Right now?” At this rate she wouldn’t be able to walk tomorrow.

  “I just want to lie down with you,” he said.

  He sat up, fastened his pants, and then scooped her up like a fairy-tale princess. He carried her smoothly up the stairs, sneaking looks at her face during his careful progress.

  Rain was quietly thrilled at the ease with which he carried her.

  He laid her down carefully on the bed and arranged the covers over her. He slid in beside her and nestled up behind her, spoon fashion.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She took his hand that was draped over her side and squeezed it. “I love you, too.”

  He reached down her abdomen, his arm gliding over her hip. It was her turn, he meant. She squeezed his hand, moved it gently back to her waist. Not now. No need.

  She was content enough with him resting there so close to her.

  He whispered in her ear, “Let’s call that doctor. The one you mentioned to me.”

  Rain sat halfway up in the blush-orange light of dusk as it filtered through the blinds. “Dr. Gould?”

  “Yeah. Her.”

  The fertility specialist. When she’d showed TJ the pamphlet last June, he’d torn it up, saying he was not about to make a baby “in a test tube like some lab rat,” as he’d put it then. Rain’s timing had been poor; he was still trying to finish grading exams. Despite this, she’d pressed on, reminding him that he’d promised to have children with her, always swore he wanted a family, too, and finally he’d just stormed out of the house and walked somewhere alone for over an hour, coming back calm but refusing to discuss it.

  Now, the sentence on the tip of her tongue went something like this: I don’t want to do this because you are competing with your brother.

  But it was a fact that she’d been off the pill almost two years now and had been timing their sex for almost as long. She’d even taken Clomid for a few months, courtesy of her ob-gyn who thought that might help, claiming she used it “like water” to get her patients pregnant. All it had done was make her cranky and give her hot flashes.

  TJ’s willingness might be poorly motivated, but perhaps here was their chance to become parents at last, just like they’d always said they would be, going back to their honeymoon when they were making up silly baby names like Saffron and Magenta as they lay in bed for hours at a time.

  Everything happens for a reason, her grandmother used to say.

  “I’ll call her tomorrow,” Rain said, and she turned to face TJ. He pulled her close, and she felt him incrementally relax, until they were both dozing in their soft marriage bed, and Rain dreamed of tiny toes, soft cheeks, and gummy smiles.

  11

  Morgan shivered, tucking her hands inside the sleeves of her hoodie. Inside the school it should have been warm; most other students were running around in shirtsleeves, and some girls were wearing thin leggings and light cotton shirts. None of them seemed to feel cold.

  But something about hearing the howling wind, and seeing the whirlwinds of snow through the double doors at the end of the hall, made Morgan cold down to her marrow, no matter what the inside thermometer said.

  She checked her phone clock. Two forty-five. Fifteen minutes before her solo practice with Mrs. DeWitt in the band room. She hiked her backpack higher up and snaked her way through the halls. Fifteen minutes should be just enough time.

  She passed Ethan in the hallway and looked down at the floor until he’d gone by. Every time she saw him now, she flashed back to two memories: him taking her hand that day in the hall that first week of school, then him repelled by her awkward kiss, crushing himself into the far corner of her couch.

  She hadn’t returned the texts he sent later, trying to smooth over what had just happened with a variation on their old in-joke.

  He’d sent things like,

  Closeted teen misses news about gay being cool, Film at 11

  Guy on deathbed from bout of terminal cluelessness, Film at 11

  After each message, her thumbs hovered over her phone, trying to come up with something to say, but she simply felt empty.

  Hall traffic was thinning out now. Buses outside were roaring off into neighborhoods; kids with cars had already burned rubber. A few stragglers were headed, like her, to practices and after-school meetings. The earnest types, the gold-star National Honor Society types. Or the jocks. There were some of them around, too, headed toward the fieldhouse to hit a volleyball or shoot baskets.

  A couple of teachers walked by her, sharing a laugh. She recognized them as they passed. Mr. Streeter and Miss Henry, both science teachers for the underclassmen. Teachers after hours looked so . . . normal, Morgan had noticed. They could let their masks slip a bit.

  This may have been one of the reasons she felt compelled to make this thrice-weekly trip, before practicing the Elgar concerto in the band room with old Mrs. DeWitt.

  She knocked on the open door, softly.

  He looked up and smiled genuinely to see her. “Hey there. If it’s Morgan, it must be Wednesday.”

  “Hi, Mr. Hill.”

  At first, when she started coming to his classroom after s
chool, she sat across from him, in one of the classroom desks she’d pulled up close to his teacher desk. That’s when she was still bringing her classroom notes as a pretense of needing some help, but honestly she was just looking for a way to kill some time before her cello practice that didn’t involve Ethan or Britney or any other high school idiot. One time he said, “This is silly, just come around here,” and went to grab a spare plastic chair from the math office two doors down.

  That time, she’d had a chance to stand at his desk unattended. She saw his phone vibrate and light up with an image of a very pretty, slim brunette with a high forehead and blue, wide-set eyes.

  He’d come back in and she was looking at his phone, and she felt flustered, explaining she had only been looking at the picture. “Your wife?”

  He’d smiled at the picture as he responded. “That’s my Rain.”

  “She’s pretty,” Morgan had said, watching her teacher’s face go from a warm smile to sad to something else, a frown that seemed deeper, nearly a scowl.

  “Yeah,” he’d said, then stowed the phone and changed the subject.

  Then there was that other time a couple of weeks later. By then she’d quit bothering to even get her math notebook out of her backpack. They’d just sit for a few minutes and talk about whatever. She enjoyed hearing his stories of high school back in his day, and his early teaching foibles like the time he got stuck subbing for a Spanish teacher and had ended up sounding like Dora the Explorer.

  That time—it was a Friday, Morgan remembered—he’d gotten a call from his wife and apologized for the interruption. Morgan looked at her own phone and tried to play deaf, but she couldn’t help overhearing some excited chatter spill out into the air.

  He replied, “Well, that does sound good. . . . I know . . . We’ll see soon, I guess.” His own voice was forced and sounded thin, like he wasn’t even really breathing. Then he said, “I gotta go, I have a student here. Bye, babe . . . You, too. Bye.”

  He hung up and looked at Morgan with a strange, searching face, and said, “You ever see someone get their hopes up a million times only to be crushed? Until you just want to crush them in advance to save them the heartache?” Then he shook his head, as if remembering where he was, who she was.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to listen, but . . . that sounded tough.”

  Mr. Hill looked over her shoulder at his open classroom door. He lowered his voice and said, “She wants to have a baby. And so do I, but at what cost? It seems like that’s all she thinks about, that her mood is dependent on things like cycles and tests . . . Not just her mood. Her whole self. So what happens if it can’t happen for us ever? Do I never get my wife back? Will she stay like this forever? Or worse, because there’s no hope?”

  Morgan’s hand was on his forearm before she even consciously formed a notion to reach out. His arm felt warm and strong through the thin cotton of his dress shirt. He glanced down at her hand with something like surprise, but when he met her eyes, she read gratitude and understanding in the way he smiled sadly. He placed his hand on top of hers.

  She nearly gasped aloud, then. His touch had lit her up from inside, all the way to her fingernails and the ends of her hair.

  Someone walked by the open door and laughed, and the two of them broke apart quickly.

  Today, the extra plastic chair was already waiting for her, pulled up to his side of the desk. She sat down and opened up a bottle of water from her backpack.

  “Here,” Mr. Hill said. “I was about to open this. You can have some.” It was a bag of white cheddar popcorn. He also produced some napkins from a desk drawer. “It’s my weakness. It’s also messy, so be warned.”

  The sight of the popcorn awakened Morgan’s appetite, which had shriveled in the face of the school lunch offerings earlier. She eagerly shoved her hand in the bag at the exact moment Mr. Hill did, and their fingers briefly tangled. They laughed, and then both reached for the same stack of napkins, and laughed again.

  Mr. Hill gestured grandly to the napkins and intoned, “After you, m’lady,” tipping his head in a sort of bow.

  “Why, thank you,” Morgan replied in the best aristocrat voice she could muster.

  “So how are things in the dog-eat-dog world of high school society?”

  Morgan groaned. “I’m so over it. I can’t wait to get out of here. Sitting two rows from my ex in your class, listening to Britney go on and on about who’s sleeping with whom . . . what’s so funny?”

  He’d started chuckling as she spoke. “Just that you said ‘who’s sleeping with whom.’ I don’t know many kids who use ‘whom’ correctly in a sentence when complaining about their classmates.”

  “I’m not a kid,” Morgan retorted, pointing the water bottle at him for emphasis.

  “Touché, Morgan. You’re really not, are you? That’s the funny thing about age. It’s so arbitrary. You’re more mature than some adults I know. More mature than me, probably.” He laughed, but the crease of his brow suggested more behind the comment than a self-effacing joke.

  “Oh, I hardly think that. You’re a fun teacher, but that’s good. I think it takes more work to be a fun teacher, doesn’t it? Not like grumpy old Señora Graham.”

  Morgan’s phone vibrated with a text. “Hang on,” she said, and looked.

  From her mother.

  Jared broke glasses have to get him new ones can you come to the Den and watch the register?

  “Shit,” she muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” Mr. Hill asked, cocking his head. Morgan allowed a moment of pleasure that he didn’t acknowledge her cursing.

  “Oh, my stupid brother broke his glasses, so now I have to drop everything and go cover for my mom at work so she can take him to get new ones. That’s me, Deputy Mom. In case of emergency, just ask Morgan. She’ll do it! Of course she will!”

  Her thumbs were furiously texting as she talked, reminding her mother about cello practice and Mrs. DeWitt. Her mother said she remembered but to get to the Den as soon as possible.

  Jared has a terrible headache without his glasses and is pretty much blind

  In other words: Yes, I know, but don’t care about your issues, hurry up already the world is ending because Jared broke his glasses.

  Morgan went to screw on the cap of her water bottle, but knocked the bottle over instead, sending the water splashing out all over her knee, causing her to jump up and spill her open backpack behind Mr. Hill’s desk.

  Morgan seized the now empty water bottle and flung it across the room, where the light plastic bounced off the cinder-block wall.

  She knelt down to gather her things, tears snaking down her face either from embarrassment, or frustration, or the previous night’s insomnia. Maybe all of it. Mr. Hill was down there, too, trying to help her. She slammed a notebook into her backpack and looked up, catching Mr. Hill’s eye. His expression was soft, concerned. “Hey . . .” he said softly. “It’s not so bad.”

  He reached out. The embrace was awkward, crouched as they both were, but Morgan found a way to rest her forehead gently on his shoulder, and for two exquisite beats she cried a couple of tears onto his white shirt.

  Then she sat back, trying to recover something like that maturity he’d mentioned. As she knelt on the floor and found her English textbook, she felt Mr. Hill’s hand brush her face. With his thumb he wiped away a tear.

  Morgan’s brief smile faded into a wave of queasy humiliation at having broken down. Some mature young woman she was, who throws water bottles when plans change.

  Her embarrassment got the best of her along with her realization she was about to be late for her cello practice. She zipped her backpack roughly. “Gotta run, I’m late. Thanks, Mr. Hill, sorry about the spill.”

  Before he could say another word, she was sprinting down the hall faster than an assistant principal’s kid ever should. By the time she made it to the band room, she was panting, and seeing stars in her peripheral vision.

  Mrs. DeWitt w
as at the piano already, playing some other piece, and when Morgan slammed the band room door open, the teacher regarded her coldly. “I have been waiting here for ten minutes, young lady. If you’re going to expect me to accompany you and practice three times a week, then have some respect for my time.”

  “I’m sorry. I was getting some help on my calc homework, and—”

  “It doesn’t matter. An assistant principal’s daughter should know better. Hurry up and tune. We only have time to go through it once today. I have another engagement.”

  Morgan flung down her backpack and stormed off to find a school cello. Why couldn’t there be another available pianist to accompany her at the solo competition? Why did it have to be rickety, dried-up old Mrs. DeWitt, the retired orchestra director who refused to go away? She kept finding reasons to come back to the school like a ghost haunts its former home.

  The orchestra door opened again as Morgan was unzipping the case around the cello. Mr. Hill poked his head in. “Morgan. You forgot this.” He held up her math book. It must have fallen out of her bag in her haste to go.

  She walked up to get it with a grateful smile. She would have been frantic trying to find it later.

  “Morgan!” barked out Mrs. DeWitt. “I asked you to please hurry.”

  Before Mr. Hill closed the band room door, he looked at Morgan and crossed his eyes, pulling an exaggerated face.

  Morgan snickered, then rearranged her features into proper contrition, and prepared to go rosin up her bow for the Elgar concerto and Mrs. DeWitt.

  12

  Christmas music twinkled through the peppermint-scented air of the Den, on one of those days when a thought hummed through Dinah’s head like the thrum of a purring engine: I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.

  Her crew of college and older high school kids had clicked into place and were running it well enough so that she could escape for a few hours and Christmas shop. People were in a festive mood and ordering lots of food and drink. Soon enough Joe would be forced by the school calendar to hang up his assistant principal’s hat and just hang out with them: watch football, play cards. The weather today was even cooperating: The sparkly snow danced to the ground like a little girl’s glitter.