Mrs. March by Virginia Feito

Author:Virginia Feito
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

THE FOLLOWING morning—the first morning of a fresh new year—she brewed a cup of tea and blew on it gently as she stood by her bedroom window. “Rabbit rabbit rabbit,” she breathed, looking out at the neighboring building, at its lifeless windows. She continued, her volume rising until she was screaming, her breath fogging up the glass, “Rabbit! Rabbit! RABBIT!”

XXIII

A week after school resumed, Jonathan’s principal summoned Mrs. March to her office. “I’m afraid there’s been an incident,” the principal said. “It’s a little . . . delicate to discuss over the phone.”

And so Mrs. March prepped for the role of stylish, charismatic mother, one who would be concerned for her child but also intimidating to staff; enigmatic yet warm. She took a cab to the Upper West Side in high spirits, wearing her best clip-on earrings, but grew somewhat carsick from the driver’s repeated abrupt braking all the way up Central Park West.

As a child she had been driven to school by her father’s chauffeur. He ferried her back and forth for ten years yet she rarely ever saw his face. She remembered the nape of his neck, though—square and prickle-haired—visible through the gap in the headrest. On days when her father went into work a little later, he would be in the car with her, dressed in his tailored suit and reading the business sections of the morning papers, which would be waiting for him in the backseat, fanned out. The gasoline-like smell of the newspaper ink never failed to nauseate her. Once she’d vomited all over the leather interior and the door’s wood trim (she’d been aiming for the window). The chauffeur had been comforting and discreet, as always, and she’d felt bad for him—but at least she’d had the good sense to wait until after her father’s stop. The following morning the car arrived clean and fresh-smelling, as if nothing had ever happened.

Fanning herself to abate her current wooziness, she exited the cab in front of Jonathan’s school, where the second graders were playing in the adjacent basketball court amidst cheers and the occasional shriek. They were all wearing the school’s mandatory uniform.

She spotted a man hovering near the fence. She knew well what kind of men loitered around schools and parks. Her mother had warned her, very early on—when sending her off to confession for the first time, aged nine—from ever fully trusting a man. “What about Daddy?” Mrs. March asked, expecting some kind of exception to the rule, especially as her mother had only ever spoken words of praise about her father.

“Never let your guard down,” her mother answered.

Inside the school, the air carried a scent of metal and damp wood. It didn’t smell of children, which Mrs. March was grateful for. The walls, penitentiary green and treacle-colored, were disrupted here and there by colorful artwork on corkboards. It was reverently quiet, like a church, except for the low, monotone drone of a teacher that loudened as she made her way across the liver-spotted terrazzo flooring of the hallway.

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