The Headmaster's Wife

Prologue



1


Later, Mark DeAvecca would say that he could see the body from the moment he first looked out the narrow arched Gothic window at the north end of the Ridenour Library’s narrow catwalk—he could see it lying there, on the snow, under the stand of evergreens near the pond. It wasn’t true. The body wasn’t a body. It was alive. If Mark had been able to stand next to it, he could have heard it breathing, in and out, in and out, in a ragged contrapuntal staccato that sounded a little like broken bells. He could have felt the fear, too—or maybe not, since his own fear was as all-encompassing as anything he had ever felt in his life. His head was full of fuzz. The muscles in his hands were twitching spasmodically. He was so tired, it was as if all the blood had been drained from his body. He kept closing his eyes and trying to think of the word. What came into his head were scenes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Bats with human heads and fangs seemed to be hovering around his head. They darted away to hide in the stone arches in the ceiling whenever he turned to look for them. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. He flexed his hands and felt the pain in his joints like needles under his skin. Exsanguinated, he thought. That’s the word I want.

It was nine o’clock on the night of Friday, February 7, 2003, and as cold as Mark could ever remember it being. It was so cold there was ice on the inside of the window he was sitting next to and ice on the stone frame around it. The glass was leaded and heavy. That was supposed to mean something. He couldn’t remember what. Usually he came up here when he couldn’t face one more person wanting to look into the deepest reaches of his soul. Today he only wanted to read two short pages in The Complete Guide to Family Healthy a book he had been carrying around with him for five days. It was big, and heavy, and awkward, and there was always the danger that somebody would notice it and ask what it was about.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they ever came up with anything except clichés, he thought. What does it mean that they look into the deepest reaches of my soul and come up with clichés?

The book was lying on the floor. He was sitting on the floor. The floor was made of stone and was as icy as the stone frame around the window. He flipped the book open to the double-page spread on Huntington’s chorea and rubbed the side of his face until the skin under the stubble started to bum.

Depression, he thought. Yes, Mood swings. Twitching. Inability to concentrate. Memory loss. Clumsiness. Forgetfulness. Nervousness. Mental deterioration. Yes and yes and yes and yes and yes. The problem was, there was a single no, and it was the answer to the most important question.

“Huntington’s chorea is caused by a single dominant gene.”

Dominant, Mark thought. Dominant means it always exhibits. If you have it, it exhibits. And you had to have had a parent who’d had it, and parent would have exhibited.

Mark put his head down between his knees and tried to breathe. He had no idea why he wanted to believe he had Huntington’s chorea instead of a simple mental illness, schizophrenia, something. He was very sure he was going crazy. He had been away at school now for five months, and in that time he seemed to have managed a 180-degree personality turn. He no longer recognized himself in the mirror. He no longer recognized himself as a human being. If he’d been allowed to have a cell phone, he’d have called his mother five times a day just to hear her voice. After about a week of that, she’d probably have driven up here to Massachusetts to get him.

Maybe I should go home, he thought. Maybe they’re right and I just don’t belong here.

Out in the quad somewhere, the carillon was ringing. It did something or other every quarter hour and tolled the hours when they came. It went on all night, so that if you lived in Hayes House or Martinson, in one of the rooms facing the chapel, it could wake you up from a sound sleep. Mark’s hands were twitching. Sometimes his shoulders twitched, too, and sometimes the joints in his hands just felt so thick and out of sync that he found it hard to move them. It would be giving up to go home, and that much about him had not changed. He did not give up, not ever. The one time he had wanted to—in that first year after his father had died, when life had seemed like a tunnel without end—he had known, with the kind of absolute clarity most adults couldn’t manage to save their lives, that to do it would be to die himself. He’d been less than ten years old.

There has to be something wrong with me, he thought. It can’t just all be in my head.

But that wasn’t true, and he knew it; and so he unwound his body and began to get up. There was nothing to do but go to work and salvage what he could, even if it wasn’t much. He didn’t understand a word of what he read anymore. He’d finish a page and couldn’t remember if he’d been reading John Donne or his biology textbook. He drilled himself for hour after hour in German, or got Fraulein Lieden to do it with him, and half an hour after he was finished it was as if none of it had ever happened. It was cold, but he was sweating like a pig. The sweat was pouring down his back as if he’d just run the Boston Marathon. He was tired, but he knew that if he lay down he would not be able to go to sleep for hours. He had had at least six cups of coffee since lunch; but if coffee was supposed to wake you up, it didn’t work on him. He was the walking dead.