The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman Page A

hold up a hand to wave him off.
    “I’m covered with lead dust,
Professore,”
I explain. He purses his lips and blows out a puff of air—
puh!
—a dismissive sound as if to say,
what’s a little lead poisoning between friends
, but still I keep my distance.
    “So you have taken the Lady away,” he says. “She went willingly?”
    I laugh. “Like Blanche DuBois on the arm of her gentleman caller.”
    “
Bene
. After Christine’s lecture yesterday I dreamed bad dreams of her all night.”
Of Christine
, I wonder,
or the Lady?
But Umberto is already raising a hand to signal his departure—a gesture that is at once elegant and imperious: Augustus saluting the centurions. The professor comes from an old Italian family—like my mother—which is, I believe, the source of his fondness for me.
    “Ciao Professore,”
I say, resisting an impulse to high-five his raised hand. “If you miss the Lady come down to the studio to visit—we’d both appreciate the company.”
    The women’s locker room is cold and empty. I strip off my powdery clothes and seal them in the same garbage bag that holds the cream-colored pages. The shower floor is so cold on my bare feet that I decide, after rinsing off, to hop in the sauna for five minutes just to warm up and bake some of the soreness out of my neck and shoulders. Seven hours of chiseling and craning to look up at the window have taken their toll on my back. I stretch out on the hot wood of the top shelf and close my eyes. Splotches of bright color float across the inside of my eyelids—bright citrine yellow, ruby red, cobalt blue—lozenges of bright jewels, all the colors in the window I’ve spent the day removing. When I hear the click of the door and open my eyes to see who’s come in all I can see are sunbursts of color hovering ghostlike in the dimness of the sauna.
    “Oh, Juno, there you are. I wanted to have a word with you.” It’s Fay, Gavin’s assistant, acting for all the world as if she’d found me in the president’s waiting room instead of naked and sweating on a slab. I adjust my towel, which was not made to cover a five-foot-eleven-inch woman, and sit up. Fay, I notice, is wearing the kind of terry wrap that buttons at the side, the elastic puckering over her flat chest. Her fine silver hair—which I’ve only ever seen folded and clipped to the back of her head—is combed back wet from her high forehead, so thin in places I can see the shape of her skull.
    She sits sideways on the bottom shelf, leans against the wall, and stretches her legs out in front of her. “Have you spoken to your friend Christine today?”
    “No, I’ve been in the library all day.…”
    “Because there are several pages missing from archival material she borrowed.”
    I wipe away the sweat beading up on my forehand and wonder if Fay turned up the thermostat control when she came in.
    “You mean from Eugenie Penrose’s notebook? Christine said you were copying it—”
    “Well, I can’t copy what I don’t have, can I? Personally, I don’t see why she was given the original source material in the first place and now look what’s happened.”
    “I’m sure Christine would never be careless with a rare document. Are you sure the missing pages were there when she took the journal?” I’m thinking of the pages in the bottom of the garbage bag in my gym locker. For all I know they’re the missing pages, torn out from Eugenie’s notebook years ago. I’m afraid, though, that if I mention them to Fay she’ll confiscate them immediately. “Are you sure that Eugenie’s notebook was completely intact when you gave it to Christine?”
    Fay purses her lips and rakes a hand through her hair, leaving whitish trenches where the scalp shows through. “Unfortunately a full inventory has never been made of this material,” Fay admits, “but I’m almost certain there were pages there that are missing now. You know what I think?” Fay leans forward, her thin shoulders hunched