Chapter 07
iris
When the final bell rang for the end of school, Iris was in no rush to get home. She waited for her ninth-grade class to leave the art studio, chivvying the lingerers, and told her TA, Caitlin, she didn’t need to stay after school.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to clean up?’ Caitlin asked.
‘I like doing it,’ Iris said, truthfully.
Her students were supposed to tidy up after themselves, but she had yet to meet a teenager who knew how to clean a toothbrush properly, much less an expensive sable paintbrush, and anyway, she found the repetitive nature of the task soothing – especially after today.
She set about cleaning palettes and rinsing water jars and hanging wet artwork, glad to have the peace and quiet of the studio to herself.
Her nerves were still jangling from her sister’s escapade on the roof this morning.
The adrenaline and anger that had flooded her in the immediate aftermath of the drama had faded, leaving her drained and anxious.
She wasn’t yet ready to go home to Jesse, who’d waved away the heroism of his own actions with a just happened to be there carelessness, dismissing Iris’s fear and fury as an over-reaction given the day’s happy ending.
Iris laid out materials for tomorrow morning’s class – handmade deckle-edge paper, charcoal, soft pencils, paints – her hands shaking as she poured water into the jam jars at each student’s station.
She couldn’t get the image out of her head: Amy falling a hundred feet onto the concrete, her body splayed out like a broken doll, limbs at unnatural angles, her head split open like a ripe melon, blood and brains and bone everywhere—
Iris sank down onto the nearest art stool, suddenly light-headed.
It hadn’t happened, of course; but the image was so visceral, so real. She could actually smell the blood, like liver in a butcher’s shop.
It took her right back to the dark days after Finn’s birth, when her brain had teemed with lurid, graphic, blood-soaked images: of her baby drowning in the bathtub, his buggy being hit by a car mounting the sidewalk, of him choking on apple, of invisible hands stabbing him, strangling him, throwing him against the wall.
In her nightmares, the hands had belonged to her.
‘Everything all right?’
Iris spun around.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to make you jump,’ Kate said.
‘I’m fine,’ Iris said, getting up from the stool as Kate came into the art studio. ‘You know. Just a bit—’
‘Yes,’ Kate said. ‘Me too.’
‘What possessed her?’ Iris exclaimed. ‘Raylan Adams is a great kid, but she could have been killed! How could she be so stupid?’
‘You know Amy,’ Kate said. ‘She thinks of those kids as her own. She’d do anything to save them.’
Iris rearranged the pencils in the jar on the desk nearest to her. ‘What she did today was incredible,’ she said, her anger suddenly fading. ‘She does have a bit of a knack of making you feel inadequate, though, doesn’t she?’
Kate smiled ruefully. ‘Always.’
Kate Walker had known Amy for longer than Iris herself had.
They’d been best friends since the age of four; they’d gone to the same primary school together, then Stowebury High, and they’d lived together for their four years studying at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Kate had got a job back at their old high school first, working in the development office before moving into admin; a couple of years later, Amy had followed her and taken a job there teaching English.
But Amy was the high-flyer, the one with real leadership qualities, and when she’d earned her promotion to head of school, Kate had been happy to be her consigliere, her right-hand woman, her dragon and bulldog and defender against all comers.
Growing up, Iris had been intensely jealous of the close bond Kate and Amy had shared. The five-year age gap between the older two girls and Iris had been a generation when they’d been young. Sixteen has nothing to say to eleven.
Kate and Amy had done everything together: they listened to the same music, shared the same clothes, played on the same sports teams, moved in the same friendship circles, attended the same parties and sleepovers.
Iris had been the unwanted little sister and third wheel, shut out of the confidences and closed circle of two.
But that had all changed when Iris had got pregnant in her final year at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Broke, single and terrified, she’d fled back home, and Kate and Amy had seamlessly folded her into their lives.
Both women were married by then and pregnant themselves, and suddenly Iris hadn’t been outside the magic circle, but part of it.
They’d all had their babies within a few weeks of each other: Kate’s little girl, Maggie, had grown up with Amy’s son, Nicky, and Iris’s own boy, Finn, the three children more like siblings than cousins and friends.
When Iris had been in the psychiatric facility suffering from postpartum psychosis, and Amy had taken care of Finn for her, it’d been Kate who’d taken care of Amy.
The women were a three-legged stool: none of them could stand without the other two.
When Iris had got better and come home, Kate had found her the job teaching art at the school, and Iris had felt intensely lucky and grateful to have it.
Later, when she married Jesse and no longer needed the money, she’d stayed, because the school and the students had become her family, and you didn’t turn your back on family.
Jesse had built her a studio at home in the grounds of the huge McMansion, and sometimes she even exhibited her work at the small art gallery in town; but she did it for pleasure, for therapy, to ground herself. She’d never have a career as an artist now, and she was at peace with that.
Kate reached over the desk between them and squeezed Iris’s hand. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ she said gently. ‘Amy’s not going anywhere. She’d never leave you; you know that.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Iris said. ‘I just need a good night’s sleep, that’s all.’
Kate knew better than to push. Iris never liked to be reminded she was vulnerable. And love made everyone vulnerable.
Kate stood and tucked her stool neatly beneath the desk.
‘Look, before I go, I wanted to see if you knew about prom,’ Kate said. ‘What with all the kerfuffle today, I don’t know if you heard. The fire marshal won’t back down on using the gym for prom, but Mac’s agreed to let the school hold it on the Lady of Champlain.’
‘Are you serious? We’re going to let eighty kids loose on a boat?’
‘I know. I’m not a hundred per cent about it myself, but this late in the day, we don’t have a lot of choices.’
‘Chad Givens is an asshole,’ Iris said succinctly.
‘I’m not going to disagree,’ Kate said. ‘But as Jesse says, at least it’ll be easy to keep an eye on the kids in a confined space.’
‘My husband has a short memory if he really thinks that,’ Iris said.
‘Doesn’t he remember what it’s like to be a teenager?
They’ll get shit on board one way or another.
Weed, vodka. Kids throwing up in the bushes behind the gym is one thing, but we could lose one of them overboard if they get wasted out on the lake. Has Amy thought this through?’
‘I’m sure she has,’ Kate said loyally, though her face told a different story. ‘And it was Mac’s idea. He’s done hundreds of events like this. He’d never have suggested it if he didn’t think it wasn’t perfectly safe, would he?’