The Wood of Suicides by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Page B

his doing. I almost felt sorry for him, so quickly did his smile fade and his good intentions dissipate. I was not the woman for him: I was nothing but heartache, exasperation, needless melancholy. At the same time, I was aware that he couldn’t be trusted; that the classroom behind him was empty and would be empty for some time; that he was only a matter of heartbeats, a tug of my elbow, and a few whispered words away from pulling me into that room with him. I wanted it; I couldn’t bear it. I broke away.

    I WALKED to the woods with my hands inside my coat pockets, fondling the canister of my father’s pills as another might have fondled a revolver. In fact, I didn’t have much need for the coat: it was a day of glare and white clouds, thick enough to trap whatever warmth came through. Having dumped my satchel in the dormitory, however, I had nowhere else to keep the pills. Besides, I was prepared to wait until nightfall, by which point it would no doubt be cooler.
    By the time I located my laurel arbor, lunch hour was almost up. I settled between the twin trunks as I had done on countless weekends before then, reeling from the heady scent of the leaves. In the distance, I could hear the bell for fifth period and couldn’t help thinking of the sunburst-carved door of his classroom sliding open, the girls filing in from lunch, and my beloved looking as I had last seen him. The thought of going back to him glimmered in my mind. I rejected it promptly. It wouldn’t be right unless he came to me.
    I was asking too much of him, I knew. It was too much to expect him to decide whether I lived or not, to respond to an ultimatum he knew nothing about. Huddled beneath the laurel, I felt how slim my chances of survival really were, and sobbed at the impossibility of me making it out of those woods alive. The hour slipped by, indifferent to my suffering. From the grounds below, I heard the end-of-day bell sounding. I closed my eyes and rested my head on my knees. My heart gave a violent wrench. I counted ten minutes, twenty minutes, without him having come. Then, soft and swift, came a rustling of leaves all around me. I looked up and saw him standing above me, overwrought in his tweeds and white shirt.
    “Oh!” he cried out, a crippled sound. “Oh, my girl.”
    And he fell over me, covering my face with kisses, framing my face with his hands, moving his hands over my thin shoulders, under my thick coat. He removed me from my coat, letting it bunch under us, in the dirt. I tried to sit up, offering my lips for a live kiss, a waking kiss. He pulled me back down, kissing my neck instead and tugging at my sweater. My god, things were moving so fast. “Do you want this?” he muttered between kisses. “Do you want this?” My cold, blunt fingers dug into the skin of his neck. I rasped, sobbed. The death rattle of the pills in my coat pocket was the only answer that I could provide.
    1 . The long sobs of the violins of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor. All choked and pale, when the hour chimes, I remember days of old and I cry. And I’m going on an ill wind that carries me here and there, as if a dead leaf.

P ART T HREE
    I ’ve never known a silence like that which came over us, once he had done what he had to do. The sky had darkened to a velvety blue and, against it, the laurel leaves were as black as thorns. I lay on my back, naked save for my kilt, and trying not to think too hard about the bloodshed, the dampness inside me, and everything that I’d lost. He stroked my arm, said my name. I felt raw to the touch, even there—as if a layer of my skin had been stripped away, along with the essential membrane. I began to cry.
    He was very kind. He took me in his arms and made his apologies, letting me wipe my tears on his shirtfront, as on that first day. Though disheveled—his shirttails out, his trousers unbuckled—he was dressed, and I was grateful for this; I didn’t think I could stand to feel his skin