In Things Unseen Page 7

  “Undo it?”

  “That’s right. What God can do He can just as easily undo, if He chooses.”

  “But what about me? What am I supposed to do with this ‘miracle’ of yours, now that I know about it? Pretend that I don’t? Act like I’m not aware that it’s occurred?”

  “You don’t have any other choice. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s nothing you or I or Michael could ever do to convince people that Adrian was dead three days ago and now he’s not, and it would be completely pointless to try.”

  Carrillo fell silent, letting the weight of Diane’s words sink in.

  “Let me show you something,” Diane said, softening. “Please.”

  * * *

  Diane Edwards left the kitchen, came back a few minutes later to set a short stack of disparate-sized and colored papers on the table in front of Laura. Laura saw it was a sampling of Adrian’s schoolwork—paintings and drawings, illustrated writing assignments—and a pair of progress reports.

  “I found these yesterday, in the drawer in my bedroom where I’ve always kept Adrian’s things from school. I’d never seen any of it before. Have you?”

  Laura sifted through the stack, one piece after another, her heart rising into her throat. She recognized the origins of each piece, yes, because she had assigned the work and seen many other papers exactly like it. Some of these had been graded and stamped with a comment in her own hand: Great work! Nice job! But every page here was new to her, and all bore the name and distinctively mature scrawl of Adrian Edwards.

  “Look at the dates,” Diane Edwards said.

  They ran from March right up to last Thursday. Six days ago. Laura’s signature was on the two progress reports that had been mailed to parents during that same eight-month period.

  “Do you see? If I have these here, what do you think they have on file for him at school? If you were to check your own records, what would you find? It’s all been changed, Miss Laura. Anywhere you’d care to look, or have someone else look for you, you’d see the same thing. Adrian never died. He’s been with us all along. That’s the only truth anyone besides us will ever believe now.”

  Laura could think of no way to go on denying it. She had the sense if she tried, if she inspected her own cache of student classwork, the result would be exactly as Adrian’s mother was predicting.

  “I know it’s incredible. That it defies all earthly logic and reason. But God is real and so is this. What He’s done is a beautiful thing, a wonderful thing. Accept it. Be thankful for it. Or else. . . .”

  Edwards stopped herself from completing the thought.

  Laura glared at her. “Or else what? Lose everything I love? My job and my career—is that what you were going to say?”

  “I shouldn’t have to say it. I think you’ve seen what your life will be like if you don’t let this go. They’ll never believe you. They’ll weigh your word against all the physical evidence to the contrary and choose the latter. Because that’s exactly what you’d do in their place. Isn’t it?”

  Laura fell silent, suddenly feeling as if she lacked the strength to stay upright in her chair. It had finally come down to this, a choice between two equally terrifying options: belief in something she could never hope to understand, or capitulation to the idea—probability?—that she was insane.

  “What about Adrian?” she heard herself ask.

  Edwards sat back down in front of her. “What about him?”

  “What does he say? Or remember? Does he talk about. . .?”

  “Death? No.” Adrian’s mother was smiling again. “He’s like everyone else. For him, it’s like the accident never happened.”

  “Then he can’t tell us anything about. . .what it’s like. On the other side, I mean.”

  “Oh, no.” Edwards laughed. “I’ve talked to him some, of course. Just to see what he does know. But he doesn’t seem to know anything he didn’t know before. He hasn’t changed. He’s the same little boy I’ve always known and loved. That you used to know and love.” She met Laura’s gaze. “You don’t have to be afraid of him, Miss Laura.”

  It wasn’t a declaration as much as a plea. She was asking for Laura’s acceptance of her son. Not so long ago, the boy had held a special place in Laura’s heart, after all.

  “I have to go,” Laura said, rising.

  She started for the door and Diane Edwards rushed to follow. “What are you going to do?” she asked again.

  Laura kept walking. “I don’t know yet. I can’t think straight. I need some sleep, and some time. To think and. . . .”

  Edwards opened the door for her. “Pray?”

  Laura hurried off without answering the question.

  THIRTEEN

  BETTY MARX WOULDN’T give up the teacher’s name.

  Flo had made a gallant attempt to sell Allison’s promises of confidentiality, but they fell on deaf ears, the vice principal at Yesler Elementary probably realizing she had made a terrible mistake that could cost her her job. The story of a young teacher under Marx’s charge insisting she’d seen a seven-year-old ghost in her classroom should have been kept in-house, not made the subject of public conjecture on Facebook.

  Allison was unfazed.

  Yesler was a post-modern spread of single-story bungalows nestled deep into the Seattle foothills near Lake Washington. Allison pulled into the parking lot out front just before noon, in the hour-long space she had between her household duties and her latest dead-end job as an Uber driver. The sound of laughing children, emanating from the far reaches of the campus where the playground was situated, was a feather on the air as she entered the main office, where she was greeted like an old friend by the black woman behind the counter.

  “Hi, there. Can I help you?”

  Allison had visited the school’s website before leaving the house, so she knew this was Edie Brown, Yesler’s office administrator.

  “I was hoping to see your principal, Mr. Alberts. Is he in?” She thought it safe to assume Betty Marx wouldn’t talk to her, and doubted Laura Carrillo would be back at work only a day after suffering what Marx had practically diagnosed as a psychotic break.

  “I’m sorry, no,” Brown said. There were no antenna visible on her head, but Allison could sense Brown’s were up all the same. “Mr. Alberts is out of the office and I can’t say when he’ll be back. What is this regarding?”

  “I understand you had a bit of excitement here yesterday. Paramedics were called out to see a teacher of yours. I think her name is Laura Carrillo?”

  The name earned a flinch. “I don’t think—”

  “I’m considering writing a piece on the incident and I thought I’d get a statement from Mr. Alberts to start.”

  “A ‘piece’? Are you a reporter?”

  “What’s going on, Edie?”

  Roused by the tone of their conversation, someone had emerged from one of the two offices at the rear. Not the principal, but a woman Allison recognized as Betty Marx.

  “This young woman is asking to see Mr. Alberts, Ms. Marx.” Brown gave the vice principal a look only Marx was supposed to see. “About that fainting spell Laura had in class yesterday. I think she’s a reporter.”

  The look of horror came over Marx’s face for only an instant, but it was long enough for Allison to catch it.

  “A reporter?”

  “That’s right. You’re the vice principal here, aren’t you? Betty Marx?”

  “That’s right, Miss. . . .”

  “Hope. Allison Hope.” Allison held her hand out for Marx to shake but the vice principal wouldn’t oblige her.

  “Well, listen, Ms. Hope. What happened to Miss Carrillo here yesterday was nothing I or anyone else would call newsworthy. Like Edie says, she grew faint in class and was sent home after the paramedics examined her. That’s all there was to it.”

  �
�I see. Then the information I have is incorrect.”

  “What information is that?” Brown asked.

  “Well,” Allison said, cutting a side-eye in Marx’s direction, “I have it from a reliable source on social media that Miss Carrillo’s breakdown was in reaction to a specific child in her class. A boy she seemed to believe had been—”

  “Let’s not talk about this out here. Come into my office, please,” Marx said.

  Brown started to complain. “But Mr. Alberts—”

  “It’s all right, Edie. There’s no need to bother Howard with this. I’ll handle it.”

  Marx opened the counter gate for Allison and escorted her into the rear office she had emerged from. She closed the door behind them, directed Allison to a chair, and sat down at her desk. The room was dark and cool, the blinds in the windows deflecting all outside light. Marx cleared space for her elbows on the blotter, then entwined the fingers of both hands in front of her with great precision.

  “You’re Florence Davenport’s friend. The one she emailed me about.”

  “Yes.” Allison couldn’t see any point in denying it.

  “I told Florence I had no interest in speaking to you, and neither will Mr. Alberts. What happened to Miss Carrillo here yesterday is a private matter I should never have made public, and I’m not going to make a bad mistake worse by discussing it now with a reporter. Do you understand, Ms . . .? I’m sorry, but I’ve already forgotten your name.”

  “Hope. Exactly what did happen to Miss Carrillo yesterday?”

  “You aren’t listening to me. I’m not going to comment on that, and neither will anyone else here at Yesler. Not Howard Alberts, not me, not anyone. So you’ve made this trip for nothing, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. If nothing else, you’ve removed any doubt that there’s a story here. Otherwise, why would you be so anxious to put me off it?”

  Allison smiled. Marx deflated before her eyes.

  “Ms. Hope, please. Let this matter drop. Nothing good can come from your writing about it, I promise you.”

  “You mean you could lose your job if anyone found out you’ve been posting about it online.”

  “No. I mean. . . .” She stopped, tried again. “Yes. It would be personally embarrassing to me, and possibly worse. But it’s not me I’m worried about. It’s Laura. If what happened to her yesterday became public, I doubt she’d be allowed in a classroom ever again.”

  “It was that serious?”

  “No. It wasn’t. But perception is everything, and a teacher who is perceived as a potential danger to her children is a liability few school districts will employ.”

  “Your post said she became hysterical in the middle of class. Over a student she claimed was dead.”

  Marx said nothing.

  “That isn’t true?”

  “What’s true is that she had a breakdown of some kind and frightened her children. She said some things that were nonsensical by way of explanation. More than that, I’m not prepared to say.”

  “Look, I’m not looking to hurt Miss Carrillo or anyone else. I’m just trying to do my job. A second-grade teacher has a meltdown in the middle of class because she thinks one of her students has risen from the grave. I’m sorry, Ms. Marx, but that’s a story people will want to read about.”

  “What people? Who do you work for? If it’s some sensationalist rag like the Star or the Enquirer—”

  Allison thought about lying. Admitting to freelance status was often akin to confessing to rank amateurism. But realizing her independence might be a point in her favor for once, she said, “I don’t work for anyone. I’m a freelancer writing this on spec. Which means I can approach it any way I see fit. I can write it as an exploitative piece of trash or an honest piece of journalism. It all depends on you.”

  “Me?”

  “With your cooperation, I can write a story that treats everyone involved honestly and fairly. But without it. . . .”

  Allison shrugged, her inference clear.

  The vice principal grew quiet again.

  “I don’t want anything I tell you to be directly attributed to me,” Marx finally said.

  “No problem.”

  “And I won’t give you his name. The student Laura says. . . .” She corrected herself. “The one who set her off yesterday.”

  This last condition wasn’t to Allison’s liking, but she nodded, started the recorder app going on her phone, and set the instrument down atop Marx’s desk. She could always get the boy’s name from someone else later.

  Marx proceeded to offer her version of the previous morning’s events, showing great care to avoid identifying the student who had triggered Laura Carrillo’s outburst. It was a heavily redacted account but Allison didn’t care. Even in such abbreviated form, Allison found the tale compelling.

  What could have led a bright, young, but otherwise unremarkable teacher to suffer such a bizarre delusion about one child in her class? And why was this delusion so multidimensional, replete with false memories of events that everyone but Carrillo agreed could not have possibly ever happened?

  “We really don’t know,” Marx said when Allison put these questions to her. “Drugs, perhaps?”

  She caught the look on Allison’s face and added, “Oh, I don’t mean the illegal kind, of course. I mean prescription medication. Take the wrong combination by accident and a person is liable to experience all sorts of hallucinations.”

  “Was she on prescription meds?”

  “Not that we’re aware of.”

  “What about the boy? Could he have said or done something to upset her?”

  “No. Were we talking about any other child, that would have been my first thought. But Adrian—” Marx caught herself too late. She glanced forlornly at the cell phone laying on the desk in front of her before continuing. “He’s the exact opposite of a problem child. That’s one of the things I find most baffling about all this.”

  “What does he say about it?”

  “Nothing. He seems as confused by Laura’s behavior as the rest of us.”

  “So what happens to Miss Carrillo now?”

  “She’ll be put on paid leave until we and the district are satisfied she’s safe to return to the classroom. Which I’m sure will be very soon, providing the incident is kept private. Laura is a fine teacher, Ms. Hope. Whatever happened to her yesterday, I have every confidence it was something we won’t ever see from her again. Far stranger things have happened in other classrooms, at other schools, I can assure you.”

  She sat back in her chair. “So you see? It’s like I told you at the start—there’s no story for you here to write. One of our teachers suffered a brief, essentially harmless emotional breakdown and was sent home strictly as a precautionary measure, in accordance with district guidelines. No one was hurt, and no one will be”—she sat upright again, to better look Allison straight in the eye—”as long as you behave in a professional manner and forget this whole thing, just as Laura herself is hoping to, I’m sure.”

  Allison smiled and took up her cell phone again. “I’d like to thank you for speaking with me, Ms. Marx. You’ve been very kind.”

  She stood to show herself out, with Marx fast on her heels. “Wait! I need to know what you’re going to do.”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’m going to have to think about it. Have a good day.”

  Allison hurried past Edie Brown, through the gate in the service counter and out the main office door, Marx racing after her like a crazed fan before finally letting her go.

  FOURTEEN

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG time since Laura was last inside a church, but she went to one today. St. John the Baptist Episcopal was only blocks from the apartment she and Elliott shared in West Seattle.

  She had no idea what she expected to gain from the experience. This wasn’t something she�
�d thought about beforehand. She was driving by on her way home from seeing Diane Edwards and had turned into the church’s parking lot before she knew what she was doing. She got out of the car and tested the front doors, then slipped inside when she found them unlocked. She sat down in a pew at the back and waited for something to happen, something that might give her reason to believe she wasn’t going insane.

  For over an hour she sat there in the lovely little church, alone, save for a single priest who flitted in and out, disrupting Laura’s solitude with nothing more intrusive than a smile. Laura wondered when she’d last been inside a church and realized that, ironically, it had been the day of Adrian Edwards’s funeral service at St. Bernadette’s. Before that? It might have been a wedding she’d attended at a nameless house of worship in Phoenix during her junior year at Arizona State.

  She couldn’t remember devoting a moment’s thought to God on either occasion.

  But she was making the effort today. Her visit with Adrian Edwards’s mother earlier had given her little choice. To accept what Diane Edwards had told her as the truth required a complete reevaluation of Laura’s attitudes toward religion and faith. How could she leave the Judeo-Christian ideal of God out of any concession that Adrian Edwards had in fact been brought back from the dead? Laura’s long-standing adherence to the belief that random chance was the only guiding force in the universe could not explain such a phenomenon.

  And yet. . . .

  Her feeble attempts at prayer here were yielding her nothing. She’d never been good at praying, having been left to her own devices as a child to learn what the word even meant. There’d been no open prayer in her home, short of the occasional saying of grace over a holiday meal, and she’d received no formal instruction in how prayer was properly done. What did one say to God at a time like this, under these circumstances? What could one ask for that did not sound ridiculous? She wanted an end to her confusion, certainly, but she feared the cost. If she were granted the gift of belief, if she were suddenly shed of all her doubts, her life would be changed forever. The lens through which she viewed the world would cast everything in a wholly different light: her work, her friends and family. . .and Elliott. The man she was engaged to marry, the man upon whom she’d hung all her hopes and dreams for the future.