Cloudland by Joseph Olshan Page B

her away, something I would not have done so blatantly in the past. “I’m okay, really. Just, ya know, shook up. And therefore can’t sleep. Don’t,” I warned, meaning don’t hug me, which is something that Fiona did reflexively with many people. I could see how my defensive response offended her. “Everybody’s worrying,” I complained. “And while I appreciate it, I would like things to go on normally. Remember, I didn’t know her. No sympathy should be spent on me.”
    “I realize that,” Fiona said, “but finding a body—”
    “You find people dead in your life,” I made myself say. “And it’s a lot worse when you actually do know them. Although in this case, unfortunately she was … brutalized.” Fiona flinched at my choice of word. “And then lay there frozen for months. So it wasn’t the ordinary finding of a body. Anyway, how are you doing?” I asked.
    She frowned at me. “You really want to know?”
    “I asked, didn’t I?”
    “Well, the usual: swamped at school. I have parent/teacher conferences next week.”
    I wouldn’t say that Fiona and I have ever been what one would call “friendly.” We do see each other every other Monday at the prison and sometimes have sat together at town meetings. Perhaps her greatest strength is her way of setting you at ease, as though you could confide in her and in return she’d empathize and guard your confidence. She jogs around Woodstock’s stately green, stays fit, seems to have plenty of friends, mainly male friends, and there is something just a little bit disconcertingly bubbly about her. And I know I’m splitting hairs, but Fiona does have this one yellowed front tooth that I always find myself staring at, wondering why she doesn’t have it attended to. That tooth drives Wade crazy. Whenever he sees Fiona he says, “I wish she’d just get that damned thing bleached!”
    I put down my spiral notebook and the seven one-page assignments that I’d collected from the felons the previous session, for the most part atrociously written and which I’d gone over relentlessly with a red pen. “Did I see you drive by me the other day, Fiona?” I asked her, which of course I hadn’t.
    She couldn’t help but glance away for a moment. “Where?”
    “Up on Cloudland.”
    She blushed deeply. “Oh … I keep forgetting you live up there.”
    “Whom do you know up there besides me?” I asked her mildly, thinking she must realize that there were only three full-time households.
    “Well, I mean, I know Anthony, but who doesn’t?” she said nervously. “I … I actually go up there to that old Seventh-Day Adventist cemetery back in the woods. I get rubbings from the tombstones. Distribute them to my second graders. I like to combine art and history in one project.”
    “Even at this time of year?” I probably sounded disingenuous.
    “Snow is gone now in most spots,” Fiona said, which was true. “I should stop by and see you the next time I go,” she offered, realizing too late this was probably ill-advised.
    “Yes, do drop by and see me,” I said, “the next time you’re up…” I wanted to say “doing grave rubbings” but refrained. After all, I reminded myself, who am I, who’d had an affair with one of my students, to judge? Then again, Anthony was still married.
    *   *   *
    The classroom has bulletproof windows, a steel door that buzzes one in and out, and a portly, pimpled twenty-year-old guard standing outside monitoring the discussion by intercom. In the five years that I’ve been volunteering at the prison, there have only been a few occasions when the guard—and not I—determined that the classroom was getting out of hand and burst into the room with reinforcements to restore order.
    When I arrived to teach that day the guard was looking at me curiously. “Everything okay, Miz Winslow?” His question wasn’t exactly unusual, but he leaned toward me when he said it so that I sensed what drove his