13. Thomas
Thomas
Micah Vane is alive. I've started this entry four times, and that's the sentence that has to go first, because every other sentence in it is about what alive turns out to mean, and I want the record to hold the fact for a second before the meaning gets to it.
The law firm's number has been in my notebook since September, filed flat against a pencil rubbing of his name.
I called it Monday night, from the pay phone outside the village store because I didn't trust my cell on college ground and I'm past pretending that's paranoia, one hour after the Headmaster of this college stood ten inches from me and asked me, personally, not as my employer, to stop looking.
I want the timeline in the record, plain: one hour.
A woman at an answering service took my name.
Tuesday, a voicemail: Mr. Gault will meet you Saturday, eleven a.m., somewhere off campus, your choosing.
I picked a diner in Denbridge, forty minutes out, because forty minutes felt like the minimum safe distance and because I've never once seen anyone from Ashgrave eat anywhere with laminated menus.
Tuesday I also sat through the review, four to five, and said nothing about anything, which is a skill I have now, and that's all I'm writing about Tuesday.
* * *
Thursday morning I went to the record room, because Ballard had said come, and because after the stair I've made a decision I might as well commit to paper: I'm not going down into this college again.
I'm going down through paper. Paper doesn't take your hour.
Paper is where this place keeps its editor, and the editor makes mistakes.
The record room is everything he promised.
Good chairs, a kettle older than some of the holdings, and Ken Ballard in his shirtsleeves among four hundred years of the college writing itself down.
He'd already pulled the 1840s accession registers for me, had them waiting on a foam cradle like patients.
He worked me through the handwriting, the abbreviations, the marginal codes the Victorian librarians used, and twice he took a volume away from me because I was turning pages at what he called reading speed instead of archive speed.
When I got lost he didn't take over; he leaned back with his coffee and let me be lost until I wasn't, which is rarer than it sounds and is, for the record, how you teach.
For the printed books, he sent me to the issue desk.
Requests at this library are yellow slips in duplicate: top copy travels with the book, and the flimsy goes onto a brass spike on Marion Hale's desk, where the whole term's curiosity sits in a spindled stack, mine now included.
I put in three slips: the 1911 college history, the county antiquarian society's Transactions for 1902, which Ballard says has the surveyor's elevations of the chapel and the east range, and a Victorian guidebook with floor plans.
Marion took the slips without a word, speared the flimsies, and said, "Returns close at nine, Dr. Mercer.
" Six words. Somehow both a rule and a welcome.
On the way out I mentioned to Ballard, casual as I could make it, that I needed to be off campus Saturday, personal errand, and did the local taxi firm actually exist or was it another of the college's decorative facts.
He didn't ask where I was going. He took a ring of keys out of his coat, worked one off, and held it out.
"Green Rover, north lot. She pulls left after forty miles an hour. Think of it as her opinion."
I could have hugged him. I didn't, because he's a Reader in ecclesiastical history, but the impulse goes in the log.
* * *
The fog gave out at the second cattle grid past the gates, all at once, the way a dog stops at the edge of what it knows is its yard.
I'm writing that down because I watched for it.
I had the window cracked and my eyes on the verges, and one moment the hedges were coming at me out of the gray, and the next the road was just a road, wet and ordinary under a sky doing normal things.
Forty minutes of normal. Gas stations. A man walking a spaniel. A world that has no idea.
The diner had a horseshoe counter and a sundae on the menu called the Kitchen Sink, and there's a version of me from September who would have ordered it for the bit.
I noticed him not being there. I got coffee.
It came in a thick white mug, burnt from sitting since morning, and I drank it anyway, and it tasted like being forty minutes from that fog, which is to say wonderful.
The booth's vinyl was split at the seam and mended with tape, and it sighed when I sat.
Gault was in the last booth. Sixties, heavy, gray suit gone soft at the elbows, a cardigan under the jacket, and a manila folder on the table with an elastic band around it, sitting in front of him the way you'd sit in front of a thing you'd stopped being able to feel.
No first name offered. Six months of this had worn him down to a surname.
"We sent forty letters to your faculty," he said, when I sat. "Identical. You're the first call."
"Forty letters. There are maybe sixty of us."
"I know," he said. "Forty was enough to prove the silence wasn't chance without alerting every office." He squared the folder to the table's edge, and I watched him decide where to start, and he started the way lawyers start, with what he could prove.
Here's what he could prove.
Micah Vane did not transfer. There is no receiving institution.
Gault has written to every registrar in this country that could plausibly have taken a doctoral student in his field, and several that couldn't, and the answer is a stack of letters in the folder, all saying the same nothing.
A transfer has a destination. There isn't one.
In March, Micah's Sunday phone calls home got shorter.
His mother says he sounded tired, then he sounded polite, which frightened her more, because Micah was never once polite to her in his life; the two of them had the kind of running argument that is how some families say I love you.
In April the calls stopped. Two weeks later a letter arrived from a consultant psychiatrist: their son had suffered an acute psychotic break, was receiving inpatient care, was stable, and would be contacted through the proper channels.
The letterhead looks authentic, but the psychiatrist's practice named on it closed in 1998.
The separate facility named in the letter, a private place upstate called Greenbank House, is real; Gault's been on the grounds; he says it's clean and quiet and the staff are kind, and he says all three of those words like charges on an indictment.
The fees, which he estimates at more per term than my salary, are paid on the first of every month by something called the Halloway Trust. "I have spent six months trying to find a person inside that trust," he said.
"A settlor, a trustee, a beneficiary, a clerk.
There are no people in it. Money pours from it without any visible source.
I've never seen anything like it, and estates is my field. "
Although the family cannot obtain his records or effects, his mother is allowed one supervised visit a month, for one hour. Applications for more are neither granted nor refused. They're received.
"Received," I said.
"Received," he said. "Everything about this case is received."
Then he took the elastic band off the folder, and I understood the folder had an order to it, and everything so far had been the outside of the order, and we'd arrived at the middle.
"Fern took a photograph in October," he said. "His mother. She takes one every visit. She stopped knowing why a while ago. I'd call it habit of proof." He slid it across the laminate, one finger on the corner, and turned it right way up to me, gently, like turning a card he'd already lost on.
The cold hit my stomach before my eyes finished landing, and my hands came off the table into my lap, out of the photograph's reach.
It's a phone photo, printed at a pharmacy, gloss going matte where thumbs have been.
A day room. A big window with wire in the glass and a lawn beyond it.
A young man in a chair, angled toward the window.
He's clean. His hair is combed and parted, and it shines a little, the way hair shines when someone else has brushed it.
He is twenty-six years old. He looks well.
That's the thing I wasn't braced for. He looks rested, like the exams are finally over.
He is looking toward the window and there is light on his face and his eyes are open, and his eyes are aimed, and that is all his eyes are doing.
Aimed. Like a room with the lamps on and the furniture out and no one home to any knock, ever, and you could stand at that window with his mother's whole heart in your hands and knock and knock.
And his hands are folded in his lap. Left over right, fingers together, tidy.
I sat in a diner in Denbridge with coffee going cold and looked at a dead man breathing, and the detail I couldn't get past, the one I'll be seeing at two in the morning for the rest of my life, is what Kit had said in Whitlock, and the way Priya and Wes had agreed without a word: Micah Vane never sat still in seminar.
Somebody folds them. Somebody comes around the day room, and tidies him, and folds his hands the way you'd fold a blanket in a house where nobody's coming to stay.
Item one:
Nothing. I sat there with the pen out. There's no item. There's no list. Lists are for things that come in pieces, and this doesn't come in pieces; it's one solid fact the size of a boy, and it sat across from me in the booth for the rest of the meeting.