To The Power Of Three

15

Alexa had her Sunday routine down pat-the gym, then the farmers’ market under the expressway, shopping for whatever new recipe she had picked out for that night’s supper, usually something from Gourmet, or Food & Wine, or Nigella’s column in the New York Times, but not Martha, never Martha, even before her legal problems. Martha Stewart was cold, while Nigella Lawson had an earthy sensuality that Alexa believed was not unlike her own nature. Warm, giving. And although Alexa sometimes invited Washington friends to her Sunday-night suppers, entertaining was not the point of her ritual. In fact, she prepared meals just as elaborate when alone-single portions of pot-au-feu, soufflés, paella. She refused to be one of those women who were stingy with themselves, postponing pleasure until the proper husband or boyfriend showed up.

That was one reason it had been so important to buy her own house, rather than settling into some sterile rental. The house needed quite a bit of work, but Alexa was patiently renovating one room at a time, which meant living in a perpetual cloud of dust. Only the kitchen had been done before she moved in, because the kitchen is the heart of any home. She had a hunch that granite was over, and she couldn’t afford it anyway, so she had gone with an almost retro look, all white wood and milk glass. In the eighteen months since then, she had completed the downstairs half bath and the dining room-refinishing the floor, installing her own moldings, even finding an old chandelier at a flea market and rewiring it herself. It was a beautiful, sensuous room with cranberry red walls and a mahogany dining room set that Alexa had unearthed at an antique store not far from Glendale.

The antique stores and flea markets in north county had been her primary solace after being assigned to Glendale by the nonprofit that was underwriting her pilot program. A certified teacher and guidance counselor-Alexa preferred to think of herself as an ethnographer-she had designed a curriculum intended to tap into current concerns over girls’ self-esteem. Unlike others in the field, who concentrated on psychology and sociology, Alexa had designed her program around language, the girls’ weapon of choice. She had assumed she would find a berth in Montgomery County, which would make it possible to keep her apartment in D.C.’s Adams-Morgan, close to her friends from graduate school. When she found out she was being sent to the distant reaches of north Baltimore County, she had insisted on living in the city, a curious choice in the mind of her new colleagues, who couldn’t see why anyone would choose the city over the suburban apartments and condos, especially with so many move-in specials available. “I suppose you get a lot more house for your money in Baltimore,” Barbara Paulson, the principal, had said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t understand at all. “And the reverse commute isn’t so bad.”

The truth was, Alexa had gotten very little house for her money, a tiny bungalow, Craftsman era but definitely not a Craftsman, on an unusually large lot in Beverly Hills, a neighborhood ripe for a yuppie influx that would send prices soaring. If she just sat on her investment for a year or two, doing nothing, the house’s value would probably triple from the land alone. But Alexa could not live that way. She needed a home, for emotional reasons so psychologically naked that they made Alexa, with her double degrees in rhetoric and psychology, a little sheepish.

She had done well by the house, but she was ill suited to harnessing its greatest asset, the wild and overgrown lawn. A neighborhood man had helped her with the basics-clearing out the weeds, cutting back on the overly rambunctious border plants-but the yard would have to wait for someone with a greener thumb to realize its true potential. Alexa’s primary grudge against gardening was that it was never done. A room might take three months to renovate, especially if one were doing it in piecemeal fashion, but once finished, it was finished for years. A kitchen might take three hours to clean after a particularly ambitious day of cooking, but it would still be tidy the next morning. One could work in a garden every day, from first to last light, and a half-dozen tasks would remain, while another dozen would spring up overnight. Gardens were just so ceaselessly needy.

Teenage girls were, too, of course, but Alexa did not find them as exasperating-quite the opposite. When she stood in front of a group of girls, she felt an almost spiritual thrill. Not holy per se, but as if she were the holder of simple but essential truths that could free them. They needed only to understand the power of words and stop using them to harm and harass. That was Alexa’s gospel, and she had been making progress at Glendale, in the same way she was making progress on her house-one room at a time, one project at a time, and, right now, on her hands and knees in the living room, one strip of Pergo at a time. It was much harder than the guy at Home Depot had suggested, however, and Alexa was trying not to cry at the seeming impossibility of fitting the floor into her slightly off-kilter living room.

Secretly, selfishly, she wondered how her pilot program would be affected by Perri Kahn’s-But Alexa did not know how to describe the actions of her star pupil. “Act”? Far too weak. “Crime”? Not if she were mentally ill, which she must be. But how could Alexa have missed the warning signs of such a profound psychosis? She had approved of Perri’s break with Kat, seeing it as an important stage in the girl’s development. True, Perri had been gloomy this year, emotional and secretive, and her papers had been increasingly fixated on violence, but in a cool, analytical way. She had written a particularly smart piece on the role of minorities as sacrificial totems in horror films, showing how even those movies that seemed to subvert this trope ended up serving it. For proof she had offered some B-movie about a snake, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube emerge heroic, yet all their efforts center on helping the injured blond hero, just as Sigourney Weaver had battled aliens to save a similarly comatose white male. Perri had been an absolute delight to teach, but Alexa knew that this was not information anyone wanted just now.

If Perri Kahn had shot, say, Thalia Cooper, then Alexa might have understood. Thalia was the stereotype, the mean girl who hid her cruelty beneath her bland, blond good looks, sending the pinch-faced Beverly Wilson to do her handiwork. If a boy was heard to remark approvingly on any facet of a girl that Thalia did not deem respectable, then Thalia tried to destroy that girl. That had been the whole motive behind her attempt to humiliate Eve Muhly. Eve had been getting too much attention for her ridiculously lovely body, a scale model of voluptuousness, not that Eve had a clue what to do with it. Of course, now that Eve hung with the skeezer girls, she dressed in such baggy clothes that one could say Thalia had won, after a fashion. No, if someone had shot Thalia, it would have made perfect sense.

But Kat Hartigan was almost as nice as everyone said she was. As a new arrival to Glendale, Alexa wasn’t quite so inclined to be gaga over Kat. And as a guidance counselor with unrestricted access to student records, she knew that Kat’s admission to Stanford had rested heavily on the status of her father’s girlfriend, an alum who’d gone to bat for her big-time, recruiting other area alums to write her letters of reference. Her grades were impressive, straight A’s across the board, but her SATs were average by Glendale standards. Kat simply could not crack 1400 despite the money her father lavished on coaches and tutoring programs, making Stanford a reach for her. Strangely, reading comprehension was her downfall. She soared through the vocabulary on verbal only to hit a mental block when asked to interpret words in context. But Kat-well, Kat’s father-was nothing if not sly about the process. By the time the girl applied for early admission, she had found multiple ways to sweeten her application and compensate for her board scores.

For all this-the money, the connections, the doting father, the grandfather who had helped to build the town where all her friends lived-Kat was genuinely sweet-tempered. A little dull, perhaps, because of the very earnestness that made her so nice, a perfectionist who panicked at the smallest error. Sometimes she was almost too solicitous of others’ feelings, as if her parents’ divorce had left her with a profound fear of even mildly disagreeable discussions. She was a nodder par excellence, someone who gave her wholehearted approval to the tiniest projects and pronouncements, to the point where she risked being patronizing. Yet Kat was nothing if not achingly sincere. While Thalia and Beverly stalked the halls of Glendale, looking for new victims to terrorize, Kat had reigned from a base of niceness.

At a standoff with the Pergo, Alexa decided to take a break, pour herself some iced tea-homemade, with mint leaves, which still grew wild in a corner of her barely cultivated yard-and carried the glass to her back steps, along with her cordless phone.

She eyed the phone, trying to think of someone to call. She had checked in with her mother Friday night, of course, and the conversation had been almost as gratifying as it should be, her mother properly awed and frightened by her daughter’s brush with danger. Alexa had hung up with a rare feeling of satisfaction. Stories that one looked forward to telling so often fell flat. Yet this one became better with each telling, even as she called her best friend from graduate school, then took a call from an old high-school classmate who had heard the news all the way in San Diego.

But she had not called her older brother, assuming he would call her. Given their age difference, he had always been protective of her, especially after their father “decamped.” That was her mother’s preferred term, for it was at once literal and cruel, a reference to the fact that Mitchell Cunningham’s last act had been to pack the family’s camping gear in the trunk of his station wagon. He had been trying to find a place to fit the grill when his wife and daughter returned from church. Oona Cunningham told this story on herself to this day, as if being blunt about her own fate could keep anyone else from hurting her. But she had been better when Evan was home, before he went away to college. The ensuing eight years that Alexa spent with her mother felt forlorn and temporary-too much takeout, too many meals eaten in front of the television. It was as if a woman and a girl, living alone in a house where a father and a son used to be, did not count for anything.

She dialed her brother’s cell, knowing better than to expect him to stay home on such a beautiful day. While Alexa sought relief in domesticity, Evan needed endless distractions. But then, his New York apartment was small and depressing. No one would elect to spend time there. Alexa had offered to give it a perk-up-make curtains, show him how a few pieces from Target and Pier 1 could tie it all together-but Evan hadn’t been interested.

“Alexa!” He was breathless. He was always breathless, always in a rush.

“Hey, Evan. Is this a bad time?”

“Heading uptown to a softball game. What’s up?”

“Oh, I’ve been running around a lot and just wanted to make sure you hadn’t tried to call me this weekend.”

“No. Should I? Was there something with Mom?”

“Nothing important. But I thought you might get a little unnerved, my school being all over the news.”

“Your school? Christ, was that your school? Oh, my God, Alexa, I didn’t put it together. I mean, yes, Maryland, but when it wasn’t Bethesda-Chevy Chase and when it wasn’t Baltimore…I always think of you as being in Baltimore.”

“I am in Baltimore,” she said lightly, letting him off the hook. “It’s the school that’s in the suburbs.”

“Did you see anything? Were you there?”

“I was in the office when the call came in, saying there were shots. And I’m going to coordinate the grief-counseling effort.”

Evan started to laugh, then caught himself. “I’m sorry, Alexa, it’s just that-I don’t know, I’ve never understood the need to qualify counseling with the information that it’s about grief, you know? It’s not like there’s a lot of joy counseling.”

She could have reprimanded him for his insensitivity or pointed out that there were, in fact, other types of counseling. Job counseling for one, as Evan should know, having changed careers three times so far. He currently worked as a graphic designer in downtown Manhattan, a job he had managed to hold for a personal best of four years, even after his firm cut back positions in the wake of 9/11. The day the towers fell, Alexa and her mother had tried frantically to call him, encountering overloaded cellular systems and no answer on his landline. Turned out he had slept through it all. Stranger still, he had not really known anyone among the dead, not intimately. “I haven’t lived in the city that long,” he said, unconcerned about his lack of connection, but that detail had bothered Alexa. She worried that Evan was more like their father than he knew, simply skipping the wife-and-family part and going straight to a selfish, solitary existence.

“I’ll let you go,” she said, keen to say it first. “I’m laying a new floor.”

“Is that all you’re laying these days? What’s wrong with Baltimore men?”

“Evan!”

“I’m serious. I’ve been to Baltimore. You raise the city’s aesthetic standards by several percentage points.”

“Bye!”

She dawdled on her back steps, less than eager to go in and confront her crossways pieces of Pergo. When she did return, she found that something-the tea, her brother’s heartening belief that her solitary state said more about her surroundings than it did about her-had soothed her, and the task fell into place. By day’s end her living room had a maple-hued floor. And only the most eagle-eyed spoilsport could identify it as anything other than the wood it pretended to be, much less find the spot where she had to cheat it, just a bit.

Fuck Evan, she thought as she began to prepare that night’s dinner, a Thai recipe modified from the New York Times’ Mini-malist column. Grief counseling mattered. She was going to help the students of Glendale get through this tragedy, making up for the way the school had botched a more ordinary situation a year ago, when three star athletes had been killed in a car crash. Then, still shy about asserting herself, Alexa had hung back and watched as Barbara Paulson did everything wrong, encouraging an atmosphere of hysteria and gossip that only summer’s arrival had stemmed. This time they would get it right, allow students to express their feelings without encouraging their paranoia.

And, when the opportunity arose, she would find a quiet moment to talk to Eve Muhly, see if the girl really did know more than she was telling. It was hard to see how she could-a middling junior such as Eve would have had little contact with outstanding seniors such as Kat and Perri, or even Josie. But there was no doubt in Alexa’s mind that Eve had wanted to confide in her and could feel that way again, given the opportunity.