Did he—bathe me? Removed my clothes, carried me into the bathroom?

  In the bathroom was a marble tub with claw-feet. An antique tub, deep as an Egyptian coffin. Vividly I remembered.

  A worn tile floor, slick with wet. A camera-flash, blinding.

  “Ah, good! You’re waking up, are you? Yes.”

  Mr. Sandman spoke distractedly. Perhaps I had slept too long.

  He had freshly shaved, his skin exuded an air of heat. His thinning gray hair too was damp, brushed back from his creased forehead. Had Mr. Sandman changed into a fresh-laundered white shirt?

  A panicked thought came to me—He is naked, below.

  But no: Mr. Sandman was fully clothed. White shirt, dark trousers. At school he wore a white shirt, dark trousers, tweed coat. No necktie.

  I was very confused. Sitting up, foolishly clutching the silk robe around me. It was shocking to me, to see my bare feet.

  You can’t run away. Can’t run far. He would catch you.

  He could kill you if he wished. Strangle you.

  The man was waiting for me to realize. To scream. To become hysterical.

  His fingers were poised. It was up to me.

  Lying very still trying to summon my strength. Like water, that falls through outstretched fingers. Despair filled me, yet the calm of reason—silly bare feet, I could not run far.

  “Your clothes are here, Violet. I had to launder them—they were soiled . . .”

  Mr. Sandman spoke briskly, disapprovingly. Indicating, at the foot of the bed, clothes neatly folded. Strange to see, how neatly folded.

  So grateful to see my clothes! I’d been clutching the silk robe around me, in terror that Mr. Sandman would snatch it away.

  But he was a gentleman, you could see. The cobblestone house on Craigmont Avenue. So many books.

  Could have wept, suffused with gratitude. For he would allow me to live, and he would forgive me the fear and repugnance in my face.

  “Our secret, Violet. Do you understand, my dear?”

  Yes. I understood. Understood something.

  Understood that I’d been allowed to live. To continue.

  Discreetly now Mr. Sandman retreated. Allowed me some privacy.

  (A bedroom, dimly lighted. At the windows, darkness. The floor was covered in a thin carpet, against a farther wall a tall vertical mirror reflecting pale-shimmering light.)

  Hurriedly I dressed. Underwear, jeans. Shirt and sweater. (It did seem as if my panties had been laundered, and had not quite dried in the dryer, the synthetic white fabric somewhat damp, at the same time somewhat warm.)

  In his car driving me to my aunt and uncle’s house on Erie Street Mr. Sandman explained that, after school that day, there’d been an emergency meeting of the Math Club. As the Math Club secretary, I had had an obligation to attend.

  “You understand, dear, that if you tell anyone about our friendship it will hurt you most. Your family in South Niagara, who have disowned you, will never wish to ‘own’ you again. Your relatives here in Port Oriskany will expel you from their home. And I, too, might be shuttled to—an inferior—school . . .”

  At this Mr. Sandman chuckled. As if it were so unlikely, the last of these possibilities might occur.

  BATHED ME. HELD ME DOWN. LICKED ME WITH HIS SANDPAPER tongue. Until I squealed, shrieked.

  Took my hand in his and guided it between his legs where he was swollen, fattish.

  Don’t pretend, Vio-let Rue. Dirty girl!

  The face was contorted. Of the hue of a cooked tomato, about to burst. Eyes about to burst out of their sockets. Breath in gasps. Like a bicycle pump, my brothers’ bicycle pump, pumping air into a tire, that wheezing sound it makes if you are not doing it correctly, and air is escaping.

  The hand gripping my hand, so that it hurts. Pushing, pressing, urgently, faster and faster, jamming my hand against his swollen flesh, my numbed hand, as he groans, rocks from side to side, eyes roll in their sockets, he is about to faint . . .

  But no. None of this happened. For none of this was witnessed.

  ONE DAY IN SECRET I WROTE ON A SCRAP OF PAPER—DEAR TYRELL, I love you.

  It was not true that I loved Tyrell Jones. I did not love anyone except my parents. And possibly Katie, and Miriam. (Though my sisters were not very nice to me any longer.) (But I would forgive them and immediately love them again, if they were nice to me.) But if I were to write a note to Tyrell Jones I had to say something and I could think of nothing else to say that would justify a note.

  This piece of paper I folded over several times. Forced it into Tyrell Jones’s locker when no one was in the corridor to see.

  Afterward I never looked in the direction of the locker (which was across the hall from my own, near Mr. Sandman’s classroom) if I could avoid it. In this way I had no idea if Tyrell ever found the note.

  I did not want to know. I did not want to know indisputably.

  If he’d found the note, and read it, he would have been shocked. Would’ve crumpled the note in his fist, and shoved it into his pocket.

  But it isn’t a joke, Tyrell. Not a cruel joke.

  I am not like Mr. Sandman. I am not making fun of you.

  I was too shy to speak with Tyrell Jones. I could not even bring myself to smile at him encouragingly, when Mr. Sandman called him to the front of the room to solve a problem on the blackboard.

  Fortunately, Mr. Sandman never made Tyrell Jones walk the plank. But I hated it when Mr. Sandman tormented him at the blackboard.

  Mr. Sandman’s goon squad was entertained. Husky boys, with loud laughs. They were not so skilled at algebra as Tyrell Jones but they could laugh at the nervous black boy, for they had the teacher’s permission.

  Tyrell was one of a half-dozen students in the class who did the math homework correctly. But Tyrell was so intimidated by Mr. Sandman’s interrogation, he could not think clearly. His glasses slid down his sweaty nose. So nervous, he fumbled the chalk. Once at the blackboard he began to gasp for breath, seemed to be choking before our eyes, and Mr. Sandman quickly took mercy on him— “Hand over that chalk to Violet, Ty-rell. Let’s see if a slip of a girl can solve the problem that eludes you.”

  Almost you could hear a slip of a white girl. But Mr. Sandman had not said that.

  The previous day after school Mr. Sandman had given me this very problem to solve. He’d checked my calculations, and helped me with them. So, I knew how to solve the problem and rapidly the chalk moved against the blackboard. Fascinating to observe how an algebra problem is solved. At first it seems hopelessly snarled, like hair. Then, if you are patient, and know the way, it is “solved”—“unsnarled.”

  I felt how the class stared at me, resentful. Girls in particular hated me. White boys hated me. Tyrell Jones could not even raise his eyes to observe me, in ignominy seated back at his desk, surreptitiously spraying a medicinal liquid into his mouth out of the red plastic device he carried in his pocket.

  For it seemed that I must be very smart. Also, I was spared the worst of Mr. Sandman’s teasing.

  “Very good, Violet. You are a credit to your sex.”

  Sex. The very word aroused a kind of spasmodic titter in the classroom. Though by uttering “sex” Mr. Sandman did not mean (it seemed) “sex” but something clinically neutral, like “gender.”

  Mr. Sandman clapped, smiling at me. With a bully’s gesture he inveigled others to clap too, if but briefly, resentfully.

  After the bell rang I tried to follow Tyrell Jones in the crowded hall but he eluded me. And later in the day, when I saw him again, and hurried to catch up with him, I did not know what to say.

  Tyrell Jones was my height, though heavier. His eyes glared at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. Before I could draw breath to speak he turned away abruptly.

  Our classmates were watching us, curious. Soon, some would burst into wide grins of wonderment, derision. Not with the usual mockery but with indignation. That phrase muttered in my wake.

  “THIS ENDEARING LITTLE BLEMISH, VIOLET?—NOT A BIRTHMARK, I think, but a scar?”

  Mr. Sandman drew his fat thumb over the star-shaped scar at my forehead. Involuntarily, I shivered.

  “Futile to try to hide it, you know. And what caused it?”

  “I—fell from a bicycle . . . When I was a little girl.”

  “Ah! Tragic, in a female so young.”

  Tragic. Mr. Sandman was joking, I supposed.

  “Well, dear, if it’s any consolation—you were not destined to be a ‘beauty’ anyway. The scar gives you character. Other, merely pretty girls tend to be bland.”

  Steeled myself to feel the fat lips against my forehead, to smell the hot meaty breath. Shut my eyes, shivering, waiting.

  ONE DAY, DISCOVERING MR. SANDMAN’S (SECRET) ARCHIVE.

  A door just beyond the bathroom. A closet, with shelves containing what appeared to be photography albums, dates neatly labeled on their spines. Daring to pull down one of the albums, 1986–87, stunned to see photographs of a dark-haired girl of thirteen or fourteen posed on Mr. Sandman’s sofa, and on the four-poster bed. In some photos the girl was fully clothed, in others partly clothed. In others, naked inside the royal blue silk robe that was so familiar to me.

  In the marble tub deep as an Egyptian coffin, head flung back against the rim of the tub and eyes half-shut, vacant. Beneath the surface of blue-tinged water, the pale thin body shimmering naked.

  Many photographs of this girl—M.H.

  Abruptly then, a sequence of photographs of another girl, of about the same age and physical type—B.W.

  Wanly pretty (white) girls. Thin-armed, with small breasts, narrow torsos and hips. Captured in the throes of deep sleep. Positioned as if dead with eyes shut, hair spread out around their heads. Lips slightly parted and hands clasped on their chests.

  Turning the stiff pages, and more photos . . . More (white) girls.

  Also, locks of hair. Folded-in notes fastidiously recording measurements—height, weight, circumference of skull, waist, hips, bust.

  Clumsily I shut the album, returned it to the shelf. Took down the most recent album which was 1991–92. But before I could open it there came Mr. Sandman’s voice from the kitchen: “Vio-let!”

  Mr. Sandman was assuming that I was in the bathroom. In another minute he would come seek me. Quickly I shut the album, returned it to its place on the crammed shelf, shut the door.

  Heart thudding in my chest. Such violence, like a fist punching my ribs.

  None of the girls I’d recognized. My predecessors.

  “Vio-let, dear. Come here at once.”

  ALREADY FORGETTING HOW IN SOME OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS, THE camera was close, intimate. Bruised mouth, open. The silk robe had been pulled open, or tossed away. Small pale breasts with soft nipples. The curve of a belly, a downy patch between legs.

  In one, a girl with opened, dilated eyes. A look of fear. A smear of blood on her face. Hands not clasped on her chest in that attitude of exquisite peace but uplifted as if pushing away the camera.

  But already forgetting. Forgotten. The ugliest sights.

  Unless it was myself I’d seen, confused with another.

  What had he done to this girl? Stared and stared.

  She’d failed to fall asleep properly. She’d been stubborn, resistant.

  Or, he had not drugged this girl because he had not wanted her to sleep. He had wanted her awake, conscious.

  But why was this? Why was one girl treated differently from the others?

  You are that girl, you wish to think. Always, you are different from the others.

  NOT TRUE THAT ALL TIMES WERE THE SAME TIME. FOR THERE WAS the last time in Mr. Sandman’s house that would not be repeated.

  Inadvertently he’d given me an overdose. A fraction of a teaspoon of fine-ground barbiturate dissolved into sweet blueberry juice but he’d miscalculated, or he’d become complacent over the months. For so obediently the stupor came upon me, each time a mimicry of the time before, his vigilance had diminished.

  And then, Mr. Sandman couldn’t wake me.

  Vio-let! Vio-let! Wake up, dear . . .

  No memory of falling asleep. Only vaguely, something in my hand that had to be taken from my fingers to prevent its spilling.

  A terrible heaviness. Sinking downward. Surface of the water far overhead, no agitation of my numbed limbs could bring me to it. Comfort in the dark cloudy water like many tongues licking together.

  Violet! Open your eyes, try to sit up—the voice came from a distance, alarmed.

  Shaking me, and shaking me. Bruising my shoulders with his hard fingers, naked inside the silk robe. My skin still warm from the bath, not yet beginning to cool into the chill of death. Slick creamy lotion caressed into my skin, smelling of lilac. Talcum powder on all the parts of my body that would be covered by my clothes, when I was clothed again.

  Except: he could not wake me.

  Did not dare call 911 (Mr. Sandman would confess) for then he’d be discovered, arrested. His secret life exposed.

  Yet, he did not want the girl to die.

  Well, yes—(Mr. Sandman would confess)—the desperate thought came to him, he might let the girl die, he would never succeed in waking the girl and so there was no alternative, he would let her die, and in that way he would be spared exposure and arrest, the outrage and loathing of the community of decent persons, he would be spared prison, how many years in prison, of which he could not bear even a few days. Yet, he did not want Violet Rue to die for (he would insist) he loved her . . .

  Or this he would claim, afterward.

  His solution was to dress me hurriedly, haphazardly, in the clothes he’d removed from me, and had partly laundered, and partly dried, and to wrap me in a blanket snatched from a cedar closet, and carry me out to his car, stumbling and sobbing; in the car, he drove me to the Port Oriskany hospital, to the ER which was at the side entrance of the building; half-carried, half-dragged me inside the plate-glass doors that parted automatically, and left me there, slumped on a chair; hurried back outside even as a hospital security guard was calling after him—“Mister! Hey mister!” He’d left the car running. Key in the ignition. He would make a quick getaway, was the reasoning. But he was so agitated, within seconds Mr. Sandman collided with a van turning into the hospital drive as he tried to escape.

  In the telling it would become a story to provoke outrage, and yet mirth.

  For, outside the tyranny of the math teacher’s classroom and house, the math teacher was revealed as bumbling, foolish. Bringing an unconscious fourteen-year-old to the brightly lit emergency room of a hospital, a hastily clothed and (seemingly) dying girl, believing that he might abandon the girl there, might simply run back out to his car idling just outside the entrance and drive away undetected, and then, so agitated, such a fool, colliding head-on with the first vehicle that approached him as if in his desperation he’d failed to see . . .

  But mostly, the story provoked outrage. Of course!

  A mathematics teacher entrusted with middle school students, revealed to have been sexually abusing one of his ninth-grade pupils over a period of seven months, routinely drugging the girl to make her sexually compliant, at last overdosing the girl with barbiturates, bringing her blood pressure lethally low . . .

  In the ER the girl whose heart was barely beating was revived. In the hospital driveway the ninth-grade algebra teacher was arrested by Port Oriskany police officers.

  Taken into police custody in handcuffs, brought downtown to police headquarters. Overnight in the county jail and in the morning denied bail by a repelled judge. Suicide watch for the distraught man had raved and sobbed and uttered many wild things, pleas and threats.

  It would be revealed that Arnold Sandman, fifty-one, longtime resident of Port Oriskany, faculty member since 1975 of Port Oriskany Middle School, had been accused of “unacceptable” behavior at previous schools, including a Catholic school in Watertown; but he’d been allowed to resign from the positions, and school administrators at two schools had agreed to provide him with “strong” recommendations, to get him out of their districts without a scandal. For there was the uncertainty of several girls’ accounts—there was the uncertainty that the girls’ parents would even allow them to make statements to the police, which would be revealed to the public. And Mr. Sandman denied all—everything. And Mr. Sandman did speak persuasively. And Mr. Sandman was, all conceded, a capable, if eccentric teacher whose students tended to do well on state examinations; in fact, better on the average than students taught by other math teachers. Jocosely it was said that Mr. Sandman “terrorized” students into learning math, where other, more gentle methods failed.

  This time, however, Arnold Sandman would plead “no contest” to charges of protracted child endangerment, sexual molestation of a minor child, drug statute violations, abduction and false imprisonment.

  The cobblestone house on Craigmont Avenue would be searched top to bottom. The incriminating archive would be discovered. Of thirty-one girls photographed by Mr. Sandman over a period of eighteen years all but six were identified; of these all but two were living in upstate New York and vicinity; the two no longer living had died “suspiciously” (suicide?) but in no ways (evidently) connected with Arnold Sandman.

  Contacted by investigators, none of the identified women could remember being photographed by their ninth-grade math teacher in his home, or anywhere. None could remember having been driven in Mr. Sandman’s car—anywhere. None could remember having been sexually abused, coerced, threatened by Mr. Sandman but most could remember after-school tutorials and Mr. Sandman being “very kind” and “patient” with them; a few would recall that their math grades were unexpectedly high—“Which was really wonderful ’cause I wasn’t so great in math, with other teachers.”

  “VIOLET. PLEASE TRY TO REMEMBER. TELL US . . .”

  No. Can’t remember. Don’t make me.

  I could not. My throat was shut up tight, there were no words to loosen it.

  Too weak to sit up in bed. Fluids dripped into my veins, too weak to eat or drink except clear sweet liquids through a straw.

  “Violet? It will help if you look up, dear. Try to keep your eyes open, and in focus . . .”