Free Undone by John Colapinto

added, with the shy hope that Mr. Dezollet might notice, and comment upon, the new dress Miss Simmons, who had been so taken with Mr. Dezollet at his job interview, was debuting that very day). She had slipped in just as Mr. Dezollet, standing behind the girl, was removing his pursed lips from her swan-like young neck. It was, to be sure, just a peck, a quick pressing of the lips to an area where her shoulder met the turn in her clavicle. But it was done with a familiarity that left no doubt in Miss Simmons’s mind that she had seen something worthy of severe sanction. Dez, who had seen Simmons flee the room, soon heard himself being summoned to the principal’s office over the school’s PA system. He elected not to obey the invitation, and instead quit the school with a haste that suggested the building was in flames or in imminent danger of exploding. When Dez failed to appear in the principal’s office, Miss Simmons, her breast heaving with indignation and hurt, demanded Principal Heinrichs notify the authorities of his flight. But Heinrichs, assured by Chloe that Mr. Dezollet had simply been innocently demonstrating a scene in a book (
The Scarlet Letter
), and eager to avoid a scandal, declined to call the police. However, when he recounted all of this over the phone to Holly, he did add: “This does not preclude
you
, as Chloe’s mother, from pressing charges, if you so choose.”
    Holly had already begun her afternoon cocktail hour. Drinkalways made her belligerent. Her response was blunt. “If anyone should be locked up,” she said, “it’s that little slut of mine.” She did, however, attempt to question her daughter when Chloe returned from school that afternoon. But the child simply ran past her and vanished into her room, slamming the door behind her.
    Chloe threw herself on the bed. Her heart and mind were in turmoil. After her last class, she had rushed to Dez’s apartment above the Mill—but found it empty, his belongings cleared out. He was gone. She would never see him again. She wept inconsolably. Then, shortly before midnight, the phone rang. It was Dez! He told her, in a hurried whisper (he was speaking from a pay phone at a pizza parlor ten miles down the lake, in Sayer’s Cliff), that he had moved to a trailer park, where he had rented a single-wide motor home. The location was secluded and would suit their needs for now. He told her how to get to him—”just follow the main road around the lake until you come to the sign for Black Point; take the next right, and then follow the narrow dirt path that leads into the woods and terminates at the grounds of the trailer park. I’m in a white and blue Tartarus.”
    She went to him, pedaling furiously through the icy dark, past jagged, leafless black trees, with a sliver of silvery March moon keeping pace with her both above, in the sky, and below, in trembling reflection, in the thawing lake. And it was from Dez’s new location—the scrubby clearing in the woods, with the ramshackle collection of trailers and RVs parked in rows amid the surrounding black pines and maples—that they resumed their romance. Dez insisted that she continue to live at home, continue attending school (“You’ve got to act like nothing happened—letthem forget”); but he also insisted that she come to him, every night, without fail. And he vowed that he would think of a way to better their lot.
    So matters rested for the next two weeks, until that morning at the end of March when Chloe arrived home from Dez’s trailer, at dawn, to discover a police cruiser in front of the house. Her mother’s car was not out front, in its usual spot. Dropping her bicycle, she ran up to the policeman, who was standing on the porch ringing the doorbell. She asked what was going on. Where was her mother? The cop, a young man with strangely lush, feminine-looking eyelashes, removed his hat. The cruiser’s red light kept spinning, intermittently bathing Chloe’s stricken,