Fool's Journey Read online

  ...It is my regret to bring a matter of considerable consequence to the English Department, indeed to the entire campus, to your attention. I have recently learned that one of our junior faculty, Professor Deirdre Kildeer...

  The monitor went black. When he looked up, Willard was pointing to the door. Manny shrugged and backed out of the room, taking the trash with him.

  As Manny loaded the waste from Willard’s office into the front seat of his car, he glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Ten thirty-five. Not too late to call Deirdre. He doubted she’d be asleep yet after the day she’d had. The story of Diana Vibert had unnerved him, too. This Willard needed to be dealt with before he could do more damage. Manny glanced about the darkened campus, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said when Deirdre answered.

  She laughed briefly. “Did you think I was already tucked in, dreaming of the sugar plum stalker?”

  “I hoped not. I have some stuff to show you that might be important. Can I come over?”

  “What is it?” she asked. Deirdre sounded as if she were holding her breath.

  “Well,” he hesitated, “I’m on campus and I’m not sure this is a good place to talk. I can be there in fifteen minutes if you don’t mind staying up a bit.”

  “I don’t have any intention of going to bed anytime soon. Come on over. I’ll watch for you from the window.”

  When he pulled up in front of the apartment almost exactly fifteen minutes later, he spotted her slim form silhouetted against the dim light of her living room. Watchful and alone. The sight brought the corners of his mouth down. The wariness was just as fundamental a part of her as her beauty. Would she ever be able to live her life without looking over her shoulder? Aunt Rosa would tell him some lives were made that way, part of their design, part of the lesson, but he didn’t want to accept it. He realized even now that he’d begun to care too much. He was walking right into the big heart trap. Selfishly, he hoped Deirdre was too.

  “I don’t know if this stuff will help,” he said as Deirdre let him in, “but it could be important.” He carried his load through the shadowy living room into the bright light of the kitchen and set it on the table.

  In response to the look of curiosity on her face, he said, “Willard’s garbage. We don’t know much about what he has, but maybe we can learn something about it from what he throws away.”

  “How did you get it?” she asked, peering over the edge of the container.

  He related the incident, playing it for humor. “It’s amazing,” he concluded, “how much you can get away with once someone decides you’re an imbecile.”

  Deirdre didn’t smile. “Asshole,” she muttered. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  Manny patted her on the shoulder. “Anyway, it’s a comfort to know that if he had to pick me out of a line-up with the Cisco Kid and Tonto, he’d be hard-pressed to make an I.D. Come on, let’s take a look at this.”

  He dumped the trash onto the table and together they began to sort through it, smoothing out wadded papers and making stacks. Manny kept an eye on Deirdre as he went about the task, watching to see if anything caught her attention, made her tense up. So far, nothing.

  “I feel like I should be wearing rubber gloves and a mask,” Deirdre commented. “I don’t even like touching this stuff.” She gathered a pile and tossed it back into the can. “Just memos,” she explained. “The kind everyone gets.”

  “Here’s a stack of copies from Internet sites. Take a look through them and see if anything jumps out at you.”

  “I sincerely hope not,” she returned, taking the pile gingerly. Manny watched as she flipped through the pages one by one. Her hair was coiled in a knot, covering the place where it had been cut. One lock had escaped and curled over her shoulder like a party streamer. He wanted to touch it, feel it wrapped around his finger in a shining copper ringlet. He could almost understand someone wanting to cut off a piece to have for their own, to see the sheen as light traced the coil.

  Manny shuddered. For a moment, a blinding flash of communion had seized him and forced him to feel what had prompted a hand with a blade. It was uncanny and sickening. He shoved his hands in his pockets and pulled his gaze away from her.

  “It looks as if Freemont’s been searching for poetry,” Deirdre said, interrupting his thoughts. When he glanced up again, she was absently tucking the stray lock behind her ear. “I can’t say anything he’s printed really looks familiar. In fact, a lot of it’s pretty bad. Like something you’d see in an intro writing class.”

  “Self-conscious confessions of love?” he asked.

  “Mostly,” she nodded. “Why would he bother, I wonder? We read enough of it in our classes without seeking it out. Unless . . . well, we know he’s plagiarized before this.”

  She turned another page. Her hand arrested in midair as she stared at the sheet before her.

  “What is it?” Manny asked.

  She shook her head slowly as she continued to smooth the crumpled page.

  He glanced at it and saw lines of poetry printed from a web page. “Your poetry?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Her voice sounded neutral, almost matter-of fact. “I don’t know how… I haven’t thought of these poems in years. It was a small publication. I thought I had all the copies.”

  Manny sighed. Had Deirdre made the obvious connection? A key to the past she guarded so closely was out on the Internet for the whole world to see.

  She looked him in the eye, just then. “I’m okay,” she said. “Just surprised. Shocked. I know I shouldn’t be, but…." Her voice drifted off. Manny waited for her to form the words.

  “I thought I’d done everything to cover my tracks, but I’ve been found. Twice in one week. It’s almost funny.”

  “Found twice?” he queried.

  Deirdre nodded as she began to sort through the rest of the stack, but said nothing more. She wasn’t really looking now, he could tell, just smoothing and sorting the pages with such automaticity that they might have been a pile of socks to be matched and folded.

  “A relative of mine surprised me this week,” she said finally. “My father’s sister. She’s a horrible woman. She has fingernails like talons and paints them crimson.” She gave a dry laugh. “When I was a little girl I thought she was a witch. You know the story that scared me most when I was growing up?”

  He shook his head but said nothing.

  “Hansel and Grethel. Somehow children can believe that story more than any other fairy tale. It seems altogether likely to them that their parents could abandon them to the forest and whatever monster might live there. However many crumbs they scatter they will never find their way back. Crumbs of love, I used to think.”

  Deirdre took a moment and surveyed the piles of papers on the table. Then she went to the sink and washed her hands.

  “I’d better tell you my story now,” she said evenly. “Then we can talk about what to do.”

  XXI.

  Deirdre led Manny out to the dark living room. A shaft of light shone from the kitchen and a glow from the street below. Everything was in shadow.

  As he sat down, Deirdre lit a candle. The holder, he noticed was etched with the faces of angels. They looked stern, daunting, not the usual smiling faced cherubs.

  She took a seat beside him, then reached up and uncoiled her hair. It fell in a cascade of auburn. As she ran her fingers through it, she reminded him of a subject for a painting, a Victorian perhaps, glints of red on her curls, her expression closed. A stranger might even have described her as serene or thoughtful.

  “Where to begin?” she mused. She tapped her fingertips together in the silence and looked straight ahead into the flame of the candle.

  “I don’t remember a time before the Nightmare King,” she said. “He was always there, waiting in the darkness. I knew he was everywhere I couldn’t see. Waiting for me to disturb him, to displease him, so he could exact a punishment
.”

  Turning her eyes to him, Deirdre smiled. “You’re waiting for me to get past the metaphor aren’t you? I’m sorry, Manny. This is real.”

  Manny shifted. Fear was real for him, too. In the days of hiding, before the green cards and finally citizenship, the places he and Aunt Rosa had huddled together were full of fear. He often thought that was why his aunt took such pleasure in cleaning. It was a way of cleansing the past. But Deirdre's story was going to be very different from his own. His heart sank at the knowledge.

  Deirdre sighed and began again.

  “You see,” she said, “it was my father who was the Nightmare King. That’s what I called him in my head. My father, whom the world respected and rewarded, was the nightmare I lived with, the incubus who shared my mother’s bed. Everything we did was driven by the need to please him. I used to try to hide my sins. My mother tried to teach me that there was no hiding. She tried to help me please him, and tried to protect me when I didn’t. No, she never attempted to hold him back, just distracted him with her own transgressions. Sometimes it worked, but when I was old enough I learned the only way to protect her was to help her please him.

  “It was a game he played with us. We couldn’t really please him, of course, and the three of us knew it. I think it amused him to see the lengths we would go to avoid his anger. That was at first. Trivial mind games. Later it took more to make him smile.”

  In the silence, Manny reached out and took Deirdre’s hand. It was stiff beneath his. He smoothed it softly, and felt it relax a little.

  “I . . . I can’t begin to tell it all to you,” she whispered.

  “Hush,” he said and continued to stroke her hand. He could sense in his soul how bad it must have been. He didn’t need her words to help him see. In his mind the image of a harsh Goya battle scene was beginning to form. How had she managed to come through such a life? She seemed so frail, yet he’d already glimpsed the razor wire that held her together.

  “I had my poetry. I had my mother,” she said, as if in answer to his unformed question. “I don’t blame her. She’s not as strong . . . she was never strong.”

  “None of it was anyone’s fault except your father’s. You fell into the hands of a monster. That’s all.”

  “No.” Deirdre shook her head emphatically. “I’m guilty as hell. I grew in anger, deeper and more violent than his even. One day I didn’t hold it in.”

  Even as Deirdre pronounced the words, the memories of being Katie came flooding back. Like Freemont, her father had played with her, drawing out her anxiety as long as he could, letting relief snap back into place, only to be withdrawn a moment later. She remembered his soft footsteps coming down the hallway. Always, they paused outside her bedroom door, and she would begin counting. The longer he stood there, the more likely she would see the handle turn and the door open. Always, he spoke to her in a quiet, almost gentle voice, a slight smile on his lips.

  But the things he said. She shut her eyes for a moment.

  In all those years, he never actually harmed her. Just stroked her hair and made her touch him. That’s all he ever asked her to do. It was always her mother who suffered the real blows, who willingly offered her small frame as she took the blame for Katie’s sins. The last time, Katie was thirteen years old. He had come to her room that night, flipped on the bright overhead light and glanced about, taking in the details. Everything was perfect; she had made sure of it. Behind the closet door, her dozens of pale, sweet pea colored dresses hung on silk padded hangers. Shoes stood in a polished row, toes exactly aligned. Her books on the shelves were arranged according to height. Her bathroom was spotless, no sign of any human function. And she herself in a pink nightgown lay rigid, barely making a wrinkle in the bedspread.

  He stood at the foot of her bed and shook his head. "I’m afraid your mother has let you be bad," he said softly. "Very bad indeed."

  Then, as if his anger had telegraphed itself directly to her heart, she knew. For three months in a row, she and her mother had kept the secret, but today, he must have found some accidental sign. A cramp rose up deep inside her, but she kept herself as still as death.

  Her father paused and looked her up and down, his eyes as narrow and accusing as those of a puritan judge. Then he continued, "Your mother says you couldn’t help yourself, but we both know she’s lying. Don’t we, Katie? Don’t we?"

  Of course she couldn’t help it. Her mother had told her that menstruation was natural, part of growing up. But it was to be kept secret from her father, as so many things were.

  Her whole life was so woven with secrets she could almost hear them whispered in the walls, rustling in the curtains, flickering in the candles at dinner. She wondered if her father could hear them too, if that was how he found out. Maybe he wasn’t listening at the door, but to the door.

  He walked toward her, softly as a cat, and touched the covers where she had pulled them up to her throat. "You thought I wouldn’t find out, didn't you? You're as much a fool as your mother and just as filthy. I thought you could be my pure one, but no. You're a bleeding bitch."

  Then he came for her and she could see what he was holding: a small bright knife. He yanked at one braid and sliced it off, grazing her scalp. She tried to escape, but he was too fast. He pinned her with a knee to the chest, twisting her head as he pulled at the other braid. "This is an old ritual for whores," he whispered. "This is how they'll know you for what you are." Then he sliced again.

  Her head reeled as a little trickle of blood found its way to her neck.

  He looked back at her from the doorway. "Don't move an inch. It's your mother's turn. I'll teach her a lesson she won't forget."

  Outside a siren wailed in the distance.

  “I don’t regret what I did,” she whispered. “Not at all. But my mother . . . what I did broke her into little pieces. That’s the sin I live with. And that’s what Freemont must know by now:

  “I was the girl who murdered her paragon of a father. I shot him in the heart and watched as the light faded from his eyes.”

  XXII.

  Deirdre hurried along the hallway to class the next morning. Freemont would be ahead of her, probably gloating over this small offense, reading it as fear. This morning she would do battle armed with the power of heaven-sent revenge: the manila envelope Bess had given her the previous day. It contained a weapon she could use. She had found herself lost in its contents since the early hours of the morning and now she was at least five minutes late for class.

  Taking a breath, she slowed her steps. She might be late, but she wasn’t going to give Freemont the pleasure of seeing her make a hurried entrance. From the door in the back of the lecture hall, Deirdre surveyed the scene. Her students were already assembled, eyes pointed to the front where Freemont Willard slouched over the podium grinning, bantering with those seated in the front. Behind him on the chalkboard, he had already scrawled a poem.

  “Well, Professor Kildeer!” he greeted her as she made her way down the aisle. “How nice that you could join us. I’ve just been chatting with your students about the class. They’ve been pouring their hearts out.”

  Deirdre refused to respond to his jeering tone. Instead, she joined him at the front of the room and placed her books and papers on the desk. She glanced up at her students. Most of them were opening their notebooks now, but Todd sat with his closed, smirking, as usual. Some of the students looked tense. Adam directed a distant gaze into space.

  Freemont Willard cleared his throat. “I’ve taken the liberty of starting your class, my dear. There’s already a poem on the board for you to explicate if you choose. I’m sure you’re quite familiar with it.”

  Deirdre didn't bother to look at what he’d written. Line by line dissection of poetry was not what this class was about. Besides, if she knew Freemont, he had chosen something charged with innuendo, just to unnerve her. Two could play at that game, though. She opened a folder and pulled out copies of the poem she had selected for discussion earl
y this morning.

  “How thoughtful, Professor Willard,” she said, pressing a smile onto her face. “I’ve made other plans, however. Have a seat, please.”

  Freemont laughed slightly, then sketched a mock stage bow and retreated to the front row, taking a seat next to Todd.

  “I’ve brought a poem today,” she began, “that has changed a number of lives. That of the poet, certainly. My own life. And perhaps it will change the lives of some of you here today.” She caught Freemont’s eye. “That, after all, is the purpose of poetry, isn’t it? To evoke those emotions that refine us or kill us, but do not allow us to stay the same. You can measure real poets by the growth of their souls,” she went on. “And people without souls can never be poets. Just imitators. Or worse.”

  A smile slid across Freemont’s face. “So, by your interesting definition, Professor, a plagiarist would be the ultimate damned soul?” he asked.

  She stepped past him silently and began handing out copies to those in the back of the room. That’s what he was, she thought, a damned soul. They both knew it. He had bartered his soul away for the power he sought to hold over others. By God, he’d have no power over her, despite his nasty little games.

  She handed the last copy to Adam.

  “I’m sorry, Professor Willard,” she said. “I don’t have a copy for you. I think you’re familiar enough with the poet’s work to get along without it, however.”

  Deirdre took her place at the podium. “This poem is by Diana Vibert.” She ran her eyes over the class. They looked back at her blankly, except for Freemont Willard. The smile remained in place. His eyes held no humor, though. His gaze reflected back at her with the dead, dull gleam of a shark’s eye.