By Sara Davis
When Kirstie interrupted me I was in the break room. I had just sat down at the round, perpetually stained plastic table in the corner and was listening with satisfaction to the coffee maker as it began its quiet gurgle. Reluctantly I made a small gesture of greeting.
She asked if it was a “fresh pot,” and I nodded, and to discourage any further conversation I bent my head over the weekly paper that happened to be open on the table in front of me. She was dressed, I noticed, entirely in athletic clothing—black and elastic, with a muted sheen. Her cheeks were flushed, and the triangle of flesh below her collarbone was flecked with beads of perspiration.
She passed behind me and asked, startling me, “Is that the horoscopes?”
She moved closer to me and I could smell the scent of her freshly exercised body in the small, windowless room.
“That’s funny,” she said. She had not pegged me for the kind of man—the kind of “guy”—who read the horoscopes.
“Oh,” I said quickly. “I’m not—I’m not reading this.” And as I said it I saw that I looked like a very poor liar. I had failed to notice, somehow, that the paper in front of me had been turned to the horoscopes section, and not only that, but the facing page had been folded back with care.
“Could you read me mine?” she asked, reaching for a mug. “I’m a Pisces,” she said, and my heart sank.
As a rule, I maintained a careful neutrality toward my colleagues. I preferred not to involve myself in university gossip, or department politics, aware, without regret, that I had chosen for myself a somewhat lonely stance. But when Kirstie arrived, early last year, I found that she provoked in me a strong aversion that I couldn’t shake, an abiding hostility I could not explain even to myself. And yet, I thought, there was no real way to refuse her request, and so I found the right place on the page, next to a picture of two turning fish.
“‘Wishful thinking won’t make it so: don’t waste any more time, energy, or resources on a dead end. You get your point across better by keeping your dignity. Some people just aren’t buying what you’re selling.’”
I thought of something else just then, and when I became aware of Kirstie again I saw that she was sitting back on her heels in front of the cabinet below the sink, as if momentarily frozen in place, her gaze apparently fixed on an unremarkable strip of wood below the sink’s lip.
“Was that really,” she asked, her voice suddenly very quiet, “what it said?”
I could not quite see how to answer her, and I was grateful when the coffeepot switched itself off with its distinct click and Kirstie seemed to forget her question and revive.
What I meant to do next was turn the page quickly, to forget all about horoscopes and Kirstie. This was not a day, after all, when I could afford to be distracted. But somehow, contrary to my intention, I saw my own index finger slide quickly down the page to rest on a crude drawing of a goat.
Dear Capricorn, the text read, don’t be afraid to connect the dots. The path between events that may seem unrelated will soon become clear. With your moon in the fifth house, you will find yourself uniquely positioned to set things in motion.
When I had finished reading, I looked up at the wall. Somewhere, as if far away, Kirstie was stirring something into her cup and making some quiet remark, but I could barely hear it. I looked back down at the paper. I read my horoscope again. The path between events that may seem unrelated will soon become clear . . .
It was all very odd. The horoscopes had turned out to be something very different than I’d expected them to be. Uniquely positioned, I thought, to set things in motion. As much as I lacked confidence in the source, the message could not reasonably be dismissed. It was not irrelevant at all. Could it be a coincidence, I wondered, that I had received this strange message on this day, the day of my father’s open house? A strange message, undoubtedly, and yet somehow encouraging.
My father—my late father, I should say—and I were not close at the time of his death, and our relationship had not been without its complications—and yet. And yet, I thought, as I rose from my seat and went out into the hallway, between a father and his only son, no matter the circumstances, runs a thread that should not be underestimated.
I put my hand out absently to my mailbox as I passed it in the hall; it was empty. My mind slipped, then, to the dream I’d had the night before the start of winter quarter, a peculiar dream in which I saw my father shoot himself on a bridge above a churning gray river. I also saw a hearse and cars creeping along Palm Drive, spooling out along the Oval, heading toward Memorial Church.
In the thin half-light of the next morning, I’d had a lingering sense of unease. It was just a dream, I told myself, although I’d seen that river before, I thought with a wry smile, I would recognize that bridge if it were coming down a dark alley with its collar turned up against the cold; it had featured in more of my previous dreams than I could count, though never, it was true, in conjunction with my father. What could it mean? I had not dreamt of my father since I was a child.
As I walked down the hallway toward the break room that morning I could not shake the feeling that even if the events in my dream did not conform precisely to real life, surely they did not mean nothing at all? Perhaps there had been some important change. It could, I thought— But there I stopped myself; dreams were dreams, and that was—
Consumed by my own train of thought, I had burst somewhat unceremoniously into the break room, where a group of graduate students, occupying all four chairs at the round plastic table, turned to me, startled, like children interrupted at a forbidden game. Now that I thought of it, I had the impression that they had been talking quite noisily just the moment before, and on my arrival had been struck dumb. One of them—Weber, I thought, was his name, a fey and bespectacled little Italian—turned to his neighbor and muttered, under his breath.
“Eccolo,” he said. “Il fratellastro.”
Excerpted from THE SCAPEGOAT by Sara Davis. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Sara Davis. All rights reserved.
Sara Davis, the daughter of two Stanford immunologists, grew up in Palo Alto, California, and received her BA and MFA at Columbia University. She has taught creative writing in New York City and Detroit. She has been awarded residencies from Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She lives in Shanghai, China.