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“The roots of truth,” another student, a boy in leather and piercings, added in a mocking tone.
“Where the real dirt lies,” another volunteered.
Clearly Phoenix’s students had memorized her adages. Unfortunately they all revolved around the theme of telling the truth. What would these students think when they found out that her entire memoir was fake?
I asked if anyone would be willing to read aloud what they’d written over the break. A few students raised their hands, but when Mara raised hers they put theirs down. Wow, I thought, it’s like they’ve been trained. I called on Nicky.
“Um…I actually wrote about why I don’t like memoirs,” Nicky said sheepishly.
“Well, then,” I said, exasperated. “Read that.”
So Nicky got up and read something she called “Household Ghosts,” a vivid evocation of her house and the people who lived in it.
“Sometimes I think it would be better to forget the past andfocus on the future,” she concluded. “I suppose that’s why I don’t really feel comfortable with writing about my life. I grew up surrounded by the ghosts of the past, ghosts shaped like the silk cotillion dresses rotting inside dusty armoires and like the dead wrapped in burlap sacks beside the railroad tracks. Wouldn’t it be better to let those ghosts rest in peace?”
I walked home haunted by the last image in Nicky’s piece—the bodies wrapped in burlap sacks—that she must have gotten from the photographs of the ’93 train crash, a crash possibly caused by her great-great-grandfather’s negligence. What must it feel like to grow up in a town with that family history? You wouldn’t have to be under a curse to feel like you were.
My musings were cut short by an ear-splitting shriek. It sounded like someone was being torn limb from limb, and it came from my house. I broke into a run and nearly fell on the still-slick street. I forced myself into a brisk walk, keeping my eyes on the street for patches of ice. When I reached my house I halted on the front path, as frozen by the tableau on my front porch as the ice doves and angels hanging in the trees. Phoenix—or Betsy Ross Middlefield, as I supposed I should think of her—was standing on the porch in her purple chenille bathrobe, hair wild and loose in the breeze, both arms wrapped around a column.
“I can’t go!” Phoenix wailed. “The demon will find me if I go outside. We chased it out of the house, but I saw it before looking in through the kitchen window! It’s just waiting for me to leave the house before pouncing on me!”
A sixtyish woman with impeccably cut and styled ash blond hair, wearing a slim camel hair coat, stood beside Phoenix, her lips pressed together, one gloved hand resting on Phoenix’s back.
“There, there, Betsy,” I heard her saying. “There are no demons at McLean. You remember Dr. Cavett, don’t you?”
I saw the man she referred to standing in the shadows of the porch with Dean Book. He was a short balding man in a checked blazer and rust-colored turtleneck. He looked frightened of all the females on the porch, perhaps most of all by Dean Book, bristling in her heavy fur coat. She came forward when she saw me and the sunlight rippled across the deep brown fur. For a moment the pelt seemed to move on its own, as if a large furry creature held the dean in its grip. I blinked and the illusion faded…if ithadbeen an illusion.
“Oh, Callie, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been explaining to Dr. Cavett that some of Phoenix’s notions about demons and incubi might have come out of your research.”
“Her name is Betsy, not Phoenix,” the woman in the camel hair coat insisted. “She was named after her grandmother who was a descendant of Betsy Ross and it’s a perfectly good name.”
“I hate it, Mother,” Phoenix cried—no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t think of her asBetsy. “I’ve told you that a million times. And I hate being named after my crazy grandmother and I hate McLean. I’m a writer—an artist!—and I have an idea for a new book about what I’ve experienced here at Fairwick, but I need to stay here at Honeysuckle House to write it.”
“Where there’s ademonwaiting outside the house to pounce on you?” her mother asked, her voice icily mocking.
Phoenix’s bloodshot eyes skittered from her mother to me. If she asked me to corroborate her story, what would I say? I didn’t want it on my conscience that Phoenix was dragged off to a mental hospital…but neither did I want to be dragged off to one myself. But Phoenix didn’t ask me to testify that the house had lately been occupied by a demon.
“Oh Callie, you took over my class, didn’t you? Did you see Mara? Did she ask for me? Did she give you any more of her memoir for me to read?” Then, turning back to her mother, she said, “You see, I can’t possibly leave. Mara Marinca is depending on me.”
Dean Book glanced nervously at me. I imagined she was thinking the same thing I was—that Phoenix’s obsession with Mara was no healthier than her fixation on the demon.
“All your students asked for you,” I fibbed. “Nicky Ballard read something…”
Phoenix waved away my mention of Nicky. “It’s Mara who matters!” she shrieked. “Mara who must learn to tell the truth. She mustn’t think I lied. I have to explain.”
Dean Book sighed. “Perhaps it’s better if you explain everything to your studentsafteryou’ve had a nice rest.” Then, turning to Phoenix’s mother and doctor, she added, “I can’t have her upsetting her students in this state.” She turned once again to Phoenix. “But once you’re more yourself, we can consider having you come back.”
It was an unfortunate choice of words. “Iammyself! Who else would I be?” Phoenix screamed, and flung herself at the dean. She only meant, I think, to throw herself on the dean’s mercy, but she came at Liz with such force that she knocked her back several feet. Liz tottered for a moment, her arms flailing to keep her balance. I stepped forward to help her while the doctor and Mrs. Middlefield tried to restrain Phoenix. They were between Liz and Phoenix, their backs to Liz, so they didn’t see what happened next. They didn’t see the shadow thrown by Liz rear up on the wall—a huge bearlike creature with claws and an enormous mouth stretched wide in a toothy snarl. But I saw it, and so did Phoenix. She screamed one more time, a scream that sounded so insane that I couldn’t blame Dr. Cavett for sticking her with a tranquilizer needle. As Phoenix’s screams subsided into soft whimpers, I had half a mind to ask for some of that tranquilizer myself.
