Read Online Philly Stakes by Gillian Roberts - Free Book Online Page A

back a few minutes ago,” she said, “to say never mind. That first message, well, it was just a mood. Now I’m okay.”
    She definitely wasn’t. “Then how about a soda, or coffee?” I said.
    She checked her watch again, and reluctantly agreed.
    * * *
    “I’m sorry about your father.” We were across the street, on stools at Woolworth’s. I love the aroma of five-and-dimes—pressed powder, hot-dog casings, goldfish and laminated menus.
    Laura acknowledged my condolences with a twist of her mouth. She had a milk shake. I had black coffee. Saving calories for the madcap whirl of holiday parties the magazines promised me.
    Laura seemed engrossed in tracing lines down the side of her water glass.
    I leaped in, both feet first. “Laura, maybe this is a dumb time for it, but I wanted to talk about your paper. About Icarus—about Auden’s poem.”
    She did a sequence of softly spastic body motions that seemed to translate into: Yeah, great, who cares, so what?
    “It…troubled me,” I said. “There’s a great tension, a—”
    “It isn’t good?”
    “It’s marvelous. Exceptional. The best in the class.” She looked relieved, then slumped over her milk-shake straw.
    I spoke slowly, picking my way carefully between the words. “But I had the feeling you were talking about more than Icarus.”
    She sipped. “I’d better go,” she murmured.
    I looked at my watch. Five thirty-five. I took a chance. I was sure it was the sort of doctor’s appointment that has a set time. Like a fifty-minute hour. “Doesn’t she have fifteen more minutes?”
    Laura pursed her lips.
    “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” I said. “But sometimes it helps to talk to someone.”
    Deep in my brain, I heard a voice from the past. “You’re their teacher,” my department chair had said the first day I arrived at Philly Prep. “Not their friend, not their pal, not their psychiatrist. You won’t serve them well if you ever forget that.” I still didn’t know if you could so neatly slice up the many roles of a teacher, but I knew I had been treading out of bounds, so I backed off. We would share a fifteen-minute respite, then go our separate ways.
    “I’ll talk to my mother’s shrink.” She sounded defiant and frightened. “He’d like my dreams, wouldn’t he? You’ve seen them. The safe murders. The fires. He’d eat them up.”
    So much for proper professional reserve. Laura was being deliberately provocative, obviously in need of a reaction. “You still have those dreams?”
    “I think so.”
    I busied myself with a second cup of coffee, stirring in sweetener, and I made what I hoped was a wordless but sympathetic and encouraging sound.
    “I’m not always sure if I’m asleep.” She sounded in a dream state at the moment. “So are they dreams, or what?”
    “Everybody has daydreams.” But of course, that wasn’t what she was talking about. She was talking about wide-eyed nightmares. Insanity.
    She picked up her purse and stood.
    “Laura—where can I reach you? We could talk more. I’m not trying to be your psychiatrist. I just want you to understand that you aren’t out there alone.”
    She stood behind the row of stools, staring down at a ring she wore. It had a tiny blue stone. She twirled it around and around her finger. “I did it, you know.” She was barely audible.
    No. I won’t listen. I refuse to hear.
    “It wasn’t an accident. I killed him. I’m not sorry, either.”
    My mouth pursed, and a soft windy noise came out, but no words.
    “The other time, they say it was an accident, but it wasn’t. I let it burn.”
    “What happened last night is terrible, very sad, but why think you had anything…” She was pulling further and further inside herself. And yet she stood there, testing whether I’d follow her lead.
    “Why?” I asked again. “What do you think you did?”
    I hadn’t followed her lead at all. Instead, I’d taken the wrong path through the maze and dead-ended.