A Letter from Iowa

The letter came on Monday, and it was the first one that hadn't been opened.

He knew it the moment he saw it. The envelope was creased and grubby, the flap still gummed down, a smudge of ballpoint on one corner. It had been handed to him at the door of Room 202 by a monitor he had never seen before, a nervous, spotty boy who held it out at arm's length and fled.

Cassian tore it open standing in the corridor.

The handwriting wasn't neat. It was slanting, hurried, the letters running into one another like someone writing in a moving car. Pages from a hospital notepad, folded small. Half a dozen words crossed out and re-written.

> Cassian. I don't know if this will reach you. I'm mailing it from the pharmacy across the street so no one at the hospital sees. Listen to me.

>

> Last Thursday the bills stopped. The medical fund. Billing called and said the account had been closed, the school had withdrawn the grant, all charges are due immediately. Forty-one thousand dollars. I called the number on the letter and nobody answered.

>

> Then Saturday your father came.

>

> Cassian, he was SOBER. I hadn't seen him sober in ten years. He wore a clean shirt and he had a lawyer and he had the deputy with him. Burnell. They had papers. As her husband he's the legal guardian, and since Daniel isn't family, and since the "accident" file is closed, there was nothing I could do. Your mother is awake, honey. She cried and she begged. They moved her out in a van that same afternoon.

>

> They put her in a place called Cedar Hollow. It's a county care home. Long-term. It's cheap and it's terrible. Daniel went to see her and they wouldn't let him in.

>

> And your father says he's coming to get you. He told the nurses. "I'm bringing my boy home."

>

> I'm so sorry. I tried. I swear I tried.

>

> Don't trust anyone at that school.

>

> — D.

He read it twice.

Then he stood very still in the stone corridor while boys in gray cloaks flowed around him and the tower bell struck twelve, and the world went a long way off.

Sober. With a lawyer. With Burnell.

That was the part he couldn't swallow. Edward Hale had never owned a clean shirt in his life. Edward Hale did not hire lawyers. He did not hold his tongue in front of a deputy. He did not, as a rule, think more than a day ahead.

Somebody had put him up to it. Somebody had given him a script.

I will give you my word, Kell had said, with his hand on the arm of the leather chair. Edward will never trouble her again.

The corridor tilted. He put a hand against the wall. And then, like cold water running down the back of his neck, came the first real thought he had had since Wednesday, the one that had been hiding behind all the others.

Why would he say that?

If he didn't know Edward in the first place—

…

They called him to the Headmaster's office at two.

He had never been inside it. In a month and a half he had not seen the Headmaster at all, only a silhouette in a high window now and then. The room was on the second floor of the administration wing, oak-paneled and cold, with a view across the courtyard to the chapel. A fire burned in the hearth with no warmth in it.

Gregory Vance stood behind his desk.

He was a thin man, stooped, in a three-piece suit that had been expensive twenty years ago. His hair was thinning and combed carefully across his scalp. His hands rested on the blotter, and they were shaking. He had dark eyes. Big, dark eyes, with a rim of red.

There was something familiar in them, a shape he could not place, the same deep-set darkness he had seen somewhere else. He tried to catch the resemblance and it slid away. Whatever it was, the stillness was different: where the stillness he remembered was the stillness of a held breath, this man's was the stillness of a rabbit in a field.

"Mr. Hale," said the Headmaster.

He didn't look up. He looked at a spot on the wall behind Cassian's left ear.

"It is my duty to inform you," he went on, in a thin, rapid voice, "that following a review by the Disciplinary Council, you have been placed on suspension of studies. Effective immediately. The grounds are insufficient cooperation with the, ah, community life of the institution. A letter has been sent to your guardian. Your father has been notified and will, ah, collect you this afternoon."

"I haven't done anything."

"The Council's decision is final."

"I didn't break a rule. I was punished for—"

"Mr. Hale." The Headmaster's voice cracked. He lifted his eyes, for one heartbeat, to Cassian's face, and what was in them was so naked, so abject, so shamed, that Cassian stopped. "Please. I have no authority in this matter. I have never had any authority in this matter. I would ask you, as a courtesy, not to... not to make it harder."

He looked away. His hand, on the blotter, was trembling so hard the paper rattled.

"Dunmore will see you to your room. You have one hour to pack."

Cassian stared at him.

He's afraid. The thought was strange and calm. He's the Headmaster, and he's afraid of me. Not of what I'll do. Of what I'll see.

He turned and walked out.

…

They gave him back his phone at the gate.

Ms. Dunmore did it, in the drizzle, with the same stainless steel tongs. She lifted the sealed bag from a wooden box, broke the red tamper seal, and held out the phone in the jaws of the tongs, arm extended, face averted. The screen was cracked in the corner. The battery had died weeks ago. He took it and slid it into his pocket and it felt like a stone from another life.

"Upon graduation," she said, in her flat voice. And then, so quietly he almost missed it, "I am sorry, Mr. Hale. It was never my decision."

She stepped back and turned away.

He stood in the gravel with his canvas bag over his shoulder. The mist hung low on the oak forest. The black iron gate rose before him, and beyond it the road, and at the roadside an old blue pickup truck with a dented fender and a crack across the windshield.

He knew that truck.

He had ridden in it every Saturday of his childhood, to the feed store, to the lumber yard, to the plant. He knew its smell, motor oil and wet dog and tobacco. He knew the sound of its engine, a wheezing diesel cough. He knew every rust spot on its tailgate.

Edward leaned against the hood, smoking.

He wore a clean flannel shirt. His hair was combed. He had shaved, badly, and there was a nick under his jaw with a scrap of tissue stuck to it. For the first time in Cassian's memory, his father's eyes were not bloodshot. They were gray, pale, steady, and they rested on his son with an expression of almost courteous interest.

A second man stood beside the truck. Short, stocky, in a quilted hunting jacket, his nicotine-yellow fingers hooked in his belt.

Hank Dobbs raised his chin in greeting.

"There he is," Hank said. "Look at him. Look at the size of him. They fed him up."

The gate opened by itself. Cassian walked through.

His father threw down the cigarette and ground it out under his heel.

"Get in the truck," Edward said.

"Where's Mom?"

"I said, get in."

"You moved her. You took her out of the hospital. Cedar Hollow, Dana said—"

"Dana." Edward smiled.

It was a small, wide, strange smile. It stretched his lips without moving his eyes, and something in it, a bent, glassy, rehearsed quality, made Cassian's stomach drop. This was not his father's smile. His father's smile had always been a baring of teeth. This was the smile of a man who had been shown a photograph of a smile.

"Don't worry about your mother," said Edward. "She's being looked after. I'm a changed man, boy. I've found Jesus." His eyes slid to Hank, and Hank, behind him, coughed into his fist. "You and me, we're going to have a long talk when we get home. A real long one."

Cassian didn't move.

He looked at the two of them, his father and the man with the yellow fingers, standing side by side in the rain at the gate of Blackthorne Academy. Hank's hand on Edward's shoulder, easy, familiar. The tilt of their heads, the same angle, as if they'd practiced.

Hank gave him the flyer. The thought was slow and monstrous. Hank gave him the flyer, and Edward signed it without reading, and he got on that bus the same night. A school that took only boys with no other guardian. A school that paid your mother's bills. A school that wanted something that happened to be in my hands.

It was never an accident. They picked me. They bought me.

"Burnell closed the file," he said.

Edward's smile slipped for an instant.

"The deputy. He drew a line through the notebook. I saw him." Cassian's voice was low. It shook, but it didn't break. "You two shook hands. In the waiting room. I thought it was to keep you out of jail."

Hank Dobbs's yellow fingers stopped moving in his belt.

"Get in the truck, boy," said Edward softly.

"That wasn't for jail."

"I'll say it one more time." His father stepped toward him. The strange smile was fixed now, rigid, and behind it Cassian saw something move, the old thing, the one he knew, the hot red animal rage that had lived in this man all his life. For an instant it flashed in those pale eyes, naked and furious, and then was gone, as if smothered. Edward bent his head, and when he spoke again, his voice was a hiss.

"I told you not to make me look bad. I told you."

Cassian looked at the truck. At the iron gate behind him, slowly swinging closed. At the wet road. At the dark forest on either side.

At nothing.

He got in.

…

The truck coughed and shuddered and pulled away from the curb. Hank climbed into the cab beside Edward, jammed against the passenger door, and rolled down the window to spit. Nobody spoke. The wipers beat. The heater rattled.

Cassian turned his head.

In the cracked side mirror, the iron gate dwindled. Behind it, up its hill, the chapel stood against the pewter sky, black and silent, its bell tower pointing at the clouds like a finger. It grew smaller and smaller as the road bent, and still it seemed to hold his eye, as if it were waiting.

In the dormitory, a pale oval showed behind a barred window.

Someone stood there. Someone dark-eyed and very still, with one hand pressed flat against the glass.

Then the road turned, and the pines closed over, and the mirror was filled with trees.