Lindsey walked through the hallways and in and out of the rows of lockers – dodging anyone who might be near. I wished I could walk with her, mimic the principal and the way he always started out a meeting in the auditorium: “Your principal is your pal with principles!” I would whine in her ear, cracking her up.
But while she was blessed with empty halls, when she reached the main office she was cursed with the drippy looks of consoling secretaries. No matter. She had prepared herself at home in her bedroom. She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy.
“Lindsey,” Principal Caden said, “I received a call from the police this morning. I’m sorry to hear of your loss.”
She looked right at him. It was not so much a look as a laser. “What exactly is my loss?”
Mr. Caden felt he needed to address issues of children’s crises directly. He walked out from behind his desk and ushered Lindsey onto what was commonly referred to by the students as The Sofa. Eventually he would replace The Sofa with two chairs, when politics swept through the school district and told him, “It is not good to have a sofa here – chairs are better. Sofas send the wrong message.”
Mr. Caden sat on The Sofa and so did my sister. I like to think she was a little thrilled, in that moment, no matter how upset, to be on The Sofa itself. I like to think I hadn’t robbed her of everything.
“We’re here to help in any way we can,” Mr. Caden said. He was doing his best.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“What?” Lindsey asked. She was being what my father called “petulant,” as in, “Susie, don’t speak to me in that petulant tone.”
“Your loss,” he said. He reached out to touch my sister’s knee. His hand was like a brand burning into her.
“I wasn’t aware I had lost anything,” she said, and in a Herculean effort she made the motions of patting her shirt and checking her pockets.
Mr. Caden didn’t know what to say. He had had Vicki Kurtz fall apart in his arms the year before. It had been difficult, yes, but now, in hindsight, Vicki Kurtz and her dead mother seemed an artfully handled crisis. He had led Vicki Kurtz to the couch – no, no, Vicki had just gone right over and sat down on it – he had said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and Vicki Kurtz had burst like an overinflated balloon. He held her in his arms as she sobbed, and sobbed, and that night he brought his suit to the dry cleaner’s.
But Lindsey Salmon was another thing altogether. She was gifted, one of the twenty students from his school who had been selected for the statewide Gifted Symposium. The only trouble in her file was a slight altercation early in the year when a teacher reprimanded her for bringing obscene literature – Fear of Flying – into the classroom.
“Make her laugh,” I wanted to say to him. “Bring her to a Marx Brothers movie, sit on a fart cushion, show her the boxers you have on with the little devils eating hot dogs on them!” All I could do was talk, but no one on Earth could hear me.
The school district made everyone take tests and then decided who was gifted and who was not. I liked to suggest to Lindsey that I was much more pissed off by her hair than by my dumbo status. We had both been born with masses of blond hair, but mine quickly fell out and was replaced with a grudging growth of mousy brown. Lindsey’s stayed and acquired a sort of mythical place. She was the only true blonde in our family.
But once called gifted, it had spurred her on to live up to the name. She locked herself in her bedroom and read big books. When I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, she read Camus’s Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. She might not have gotten most of it, but she carried it around, and that made people – including teachers – begin to leave her alone.
“What I’m saying, Lindsey, is that we all miss Susie,” Mr. Caden said.
She did not respond.
“She was very bright,” he tried.
She stared blankly back at him.
“It’s on your shoulders now.” He had no idea what he was saying, but he thought the silence might mean he was getting somewhere. “You’re the only Salmon girl now.”
