Sourland

now overgrown with tall grasses and yellow and white wildflowers. The walls were covered in faded once-elegant wallpaper and in this room too was sculpted molding in the ceiling. On the coffee table near the sofa were ashtrays heaped with butts and ashes. I resolved, if Mr. Carmichael lit another cigarette, I would ask if I could have a “drag” from it as girls were always doing with older boys they hoped to impress. Mr. Carmichael took back the beer bottle from me and drank again thirstily and asked me which year of high school I would be in, in the fall, and I told him that I was just starting high school: I would be in tenth grade. “That sounds young,” Mr. Carmichael said, frowning. “I thought you were older.”

To this I had no ready reply. I wondered if I should apologize.

“You were my student years ago, not recently. How’s it happen you’re just going into tenth grade?”

Our math teacher’s displeasure showed itself in a quick furrow of Mr. Carmichael’s forehead and a crinkling of his nose as if he were smelling something bad — and who was to blame? He asked if I had a boyfriend and when I said no, the bad-smell look deepened. Stammering, I said, “People say — I have an ‘old’ soul. Like maybe — I’ve lived many times before.”

This desperate nonsense came to me out of nowhere: it was something my grandmother had told me when I’d been a little girl, to make me feel important, I suppose, or to make herself feel important.

Still frowning, Mr. Carmichael said suddenly, “The Stoics had the right goddamn idea. If I was born a long time ago, that’s what I was — ‘Stoic.’ Y’know who the Stoics were? No? Philosophers who lived a long time ago. Marcus Aurelius — name ring a bell? ‘In all that you say or do recall that the power of exiting this life is yours at any time.’”

“You mean — kill yourself?” I laughed uncertainly. This didn’t sound so good.

Mr. Carmichael was in a brooding mood so I asked him if he thought there might be memory pools that collected in certain places like the hospital, the way puddles collect after rain; in places where people have had to wait, and have been worried, and frightened; if there were places where you left your trace, without knowing it. Mr. Carmichael seemed to consider this. At least, he did not snort in derision. He said, “‘Memory pools.’ Why not. Like ghosts. Everywhere, the air is charged with ghosts. Hospitals have got to be the worst, teeming with ghosts like germs. Can’t hardly draw a deep breath, you suck in a ghost.” Mr. Carmichael made a sneezing-comical noise that set us both laughing. “Could be, I am a ghost. You’re a sweet trusting girl, coming here with a ghost. Or maybe you’re a ghost yourself — joke’s on me. Some future time like the next century there’ll be explorers looking back to now, to 1959 — what’s called ‘lookback time’ — y’know what ‘lookback time’ is? No?” Mr. Carmichael’s teacherly manner emerged, though as he spoke he tapped my wrist with his forefinger. “‘Lookback time’ is what you’d call an astronomical figure of speech. It means, if you gaze up into the night sky — and you have the look of a girl eager to learn the constellations — what you see isn’t what is there. What you see is only just light — ‘starlight.’ The actual star has moved on, or is extinct. What you are looking into is ‘lookback time’ — the distant past. It’s only an ignorant — innocent — eye that thinks it is looking at an actual star. If our sun exploded, and disappeared, here on earth we wouldn’t know the grim news for eight minutes.” Now Mr. Carmichael was circling my wrist with his thumb and forefinger, gently tugging at me to come closer to him on the sofa. “Eight minutes is a hell of a long time, to not know that you are dead.”

I shuddered. Then I laughed, this was meant to be funny.

Somehow, we began arm wrestling. Before I knew it, with a gleeful chortle, Mr. Carmichael had kicked off his moccasins, worn without socks, slouched down on the sofa, and lifted me above him, to straddle his stomach. “Giddyup, li’l horsie! Giddyup.” My khaki shorts rode up my thighs, Mr. Carmichael’s belt buckle chafed my skin. Beneath the Rangers T-shirt he ran his hard quick hands, where my skin was clammy-damp; he took hold of my small, bare breasts, squeezing and kneading, running his thumbs across the nipples, and I slapped at him, shrieking in protest. Suddenly then Mr. Carmichael rolled me over onto the sofa, pinned me with his forearms, and gripped my thighs, between my legs he brought his hot, rock-hard face, his sucking mouth, against the damp crotch of my shorts and my panties inside my shorts, an act so astonishing to me, I could not believe that it was happening. Like a big dog Mr. Carmichael was growling, sucking, and nipping at me. “Lie still. Be still. You’ll like this. L’il bitch goddamn.” Wildly I’d begun to laugh, I kicked frantically at him, scrambled out of his grasp on my hands and knees — on the floor now, on a carpet littered with pizza crusts, dumped ashtrays, and empty beer bottles. Cursing me now, Mr. Carmichael grabbed hold of my ankle and pinned me again, mashing his mouth against mine, his mouth and angry teeth tearing at my lips as if to pry them open. By this time I’d become panicked, terrified. No boy or man had ever kissed me like this, or touched me like this, so roughly — “Why’d you come here with me? What did you think this was — seventh grade? You’re a hell of a lot older than you let on. Hot li’l bitch.” With each syllable of hot l’il bitch Mr. Carmichael struck the back of my head against the carpet, his fingers closed around my throat. Fumbling, he tried to insert his knee between my thighs, he pressed the palm of his hand hard against my mouth to quiet me, I struggled, desperate to free myself like a fish impaled on a hook desperate to free itself at any cost, I would have torn open my flesh to be free of Mr. Carmichael’s weight on me. Now he lurched above me, grunted and fumbled, unzipped his trousers, I had a glimpse of his thick engorged penis being rammed against my thighs, another time Mr. Carmichael grunted, and shuddered, and fell heavily on me; for a long stunned moment we lay unmoving; then he allowed me to extricate myself from him, to crawl away whimpering.

Somehow next I was in a bathroom, and I was vomiting into a sink.

Must’ve been, Mr. Carmichael had led me here. In this sweltering-hot little room, which was very dirty — shower stall, toilet, linoleum floor — I ran water from both faucets to wash away my vomit, desperate to wash all evidence away. I could not bring myself to look into the mirror above the sink, I knew my mouth was swollen, my face burned and throbbed. On the front of my T-shirt were coin-sized splotches of blood. (Was my nose bleeding? Always in school I’d been in terror of my nose suddenly beginning to bleed, and the stares of my classmates.) With shaking hands I washed away the sticky semen on my thighs, which was colorless and odorless. Outside the bathroom Mr. Carmichael was saying, in an encouraging voice: “You’ll be fine, Maddie. We’ll take you back. We should leave soon.” Yet the thought came to me He could kill me now. He is thinking this. When I come out of here. No one will know. But when I opened the bathroom door Mr. Carmichael was nowhere in sight. I heard him in the kitchen, he was speaking on the phone, pleading, and then silence, the harsh laughter, and the slamming down of a telephone receiver. A man’s raw aggrieved voice — “Fuck it. What’s the difference….”

When Mr. Carmichael came for me, his mood had shifted yet again. In the kitchen he too had been washing up: his flushed face was made to appear affable, his disheveled hair had been dampened. His badly soiled sport shirt was tucked into his trousers, and his trousers were zipped up. The moccasins were back on his feet. It was with a genial-teacher smile that Mr. Carmichael greeted me: “Madelyn! Time to head back, I said we wouldn’t stay long.”

In the Dodge station wagon, in late-afternoon traffic on Route 31 East, Mr. Carmichael lapsed into silence. He’d forgotten about driving me home, there was no question but that we were returning to Sparta Memorial Hospital. From time to time Mr. Carmichael glanced anxiously at me as I huddled far from him in the passenger’s seat, trying to stop my nose from bleeding by pinching the nostrils and tilting my head back. So distracted and disoriented was Mr. Carmichael, as we passed beneath the railroad trestle bridge, he nearly sideswiped a pickup truck in the left-hand lane of the highway; behind the wheel of the pickup was a contractor friend of my father’s. He saw me, and he saw Mr. Carmichael at the wheel beside me, not knowing who Mr. Carmichael was but knowing that it was very wrong for a fourteen-year-old girl to be with him, this flush-faced adult man in his mid-or late thirties. I thought, He sees us, he knows. With the inexorable logic of a dream it would happen then: my father’s friend would telephone my mother that evening, that very night Luther Carmichael would be arrested in the cobblestone house on Old Mill Road. Mr. Carmichael would be dismissed from his teaching position because of me, of what he’d done to me; because of this — having been seen with me, in the Dodge station wagon this afternoon. And now, telling this story, I remember: Mr. Carmichael hadn’t yet been dismissed from his teaching job, as I’d said. All that lay ahead of him. The remainder of his foreshortened life lay ahead of him. He would be arrested, he would be charged with sexual assault of a minor, providing alcohol to a minor; he would be charged with the forcible abduction of a minor, and with kidnapping. He would be charged with keeping me in his house against my will. Some of these charges would be dropped but still Luther Carmichael would kill himself in the ugly cobblestone house on Old Mill Road, hanging from a makeshift noose slung over a rafter in the smelly earthen-floored cellar.

All this had not happened yet. There was no way to accurately foretell it. All I knew was, I had to return to