When he does contact me, it’s an early-morning call, the phone ringing beneath my pillow, sending a vibration across the mattress that sounds in my dream like the drone of a motor on the lake, the rough muted hum I’d hear when swimming underwater as a speedboat passed. When I answer, I’m still in the dream, tasting lake water, watching the sunrays cut through the dark, all the way to the rotten leaves and fallen branches, all that endless muck.
On the phone, Strane exhales a shaky breath, the haggard kind you take after crying. “It’s all over,” he says. “But know that I loved you. Even if I was a monster, I did love you.” He’s outside. I hear wind, a wall of sound garbling his words.
Sitting up, I look to the window. It’s before sunrise, the sky a gradient of black to violet. “I’ve been waiting for you to call me.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I had to read about it in the newspaper. You could have told me.”
“I didn’t know it was coming,” he says. “I had no idea.”
“Who are these girls?”
“I don’t know. They’re just girls. They’re nobody. Vanessa, I don’t know what this is. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to have done.”
“They’re saying you molested them.”
He’s quiet, probably taken aback to hear the word come out of me. I’ve been gentle with him for so long.
“Tell me it’s not true,” I say. “Swear to me.” I listen to the white noise of the wind.
“You think it could be true,” he says. It isn’t a question but a realization, like he’s taken a step backward and can now see the doubt that’s begun to sidle up alongside the limits of my loyalty.
“What did you do to them?” I ask.
“What are you imagining? What do you think I’m capable of?”
“You did something. Why would they say this if you didn’t do anything?”
“It’s an epidemic,” he says. “There’s no logic to it.”
“But they’re just girls.” My voice cracks, a sob chokes out, and it feels like observing someone else cry, a woman playing the role of me. I remember my college roommate Bridget saying, after I first told her about Strane, Your life is like a movie. She didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to. She meant it as a compliment. Isn’t that what all teenage girls want? Endlessly bored, aching for an audience.
Strane tells me not to try to make sense of this, that it’ll drive me crazy. “What is this?” I ask. “What is it?” I need a scene to slip into, a description of where they were in the classroom, behind his desk or at the seminar table, what the light looked like, what hand he used, but I’m crying too hard and he’s telling me to listen, to please stop crying and listen to him.
He says, “It wasn’t the same with them, do you understand? It wasn’t like how it was with you. I loved you, Vanessa. I loved you.”
When he hangs up, I know what’s next. I remember the threat I made to Ira when, exasperated with my inertia, he’d said he was going to report Strane himself. “Ira, if you do that,” I said, my voice steady and cold, “if you tell anyone anything about him, you will never see me again. I’ll disappear.”
Staring at the phone, I tell myself the urge to call 911 is irrational, unwarranted, but really I’m scared. I don’t know how to explain any of this—who I am, who he is—without giving away the whole story. I tell myself it wouldn’t help, that I don’t even know where he is—outside, someplace windy. This isn’t enough to go on. Then I see a text from him, sent just before the call. You can do whatever you want, he wrote. If you want to tell, you should.
I type a response, my fingers flying across the screen: I don’t want to tell. I never will. I watch the message deliver and then sit unread.
I fall back asleep, first fitful and then deep like the dead, and I don’t wake up until quarter past eleven, when they’ve already dragged the river for his body. By five p.m., the Portland newspaper posts an article.
Longtime Browick Schoolteacher Found Dead in Norumbega River
NORUMBEGA—Jacob Strane, 59, of Norumbega, a longtime teacher at the Browick School, died early Saturday morning.
The Norumbega County Sheriff’s Department reported that Strane’s body was found midmorning in the Norumbega River near the Narrows Bridge.
“The gentleman jumped off the bridge. We recovered his body this morning,” the Sheriff’s Department stated. “We received a call at 6:05 AM about a possible jumper, and that person then witnessed the gentleman jump. There’s no indication of any foul play.”
Strane was born in Butte, Montana, and taught English at the Norumbega boarding school for thirty years and was a well-known member of the community. Last Thursday, this paper reported Strane was under investigation after five Browick students came forward with allegations of sexual abuse against the teacher, the allegations ranging in date from 2006 to 2016.
The Sheriff’s Department stated that while Strane’s death has been ruled a suicide, an investigation is ongoing.
The article includes a photo from a recent school picture day, Strane sitting before a blue background, wearing a tie I recognize and even remember the feel of—navy with little embroidered diamonds. He looks so old, hair thin and gray, face clean-shaven and sallow, all loose neck and hooded eyes. He looks small. Not small like a boy, but like an old man, brittle and worn down. He doesn’t look straight at the camera but somewhere off to the left, with a puzzled expression, mouth slightly open. He looks confused, like he doesn’t fully comprehend what has happened or what he’s done.
The next day, a box arrives in the mail postmarked the day before he jumped from the bridge. Inside I find Polaroids, letters, cards, and photocopies of essays I wrote for his class, everything resting on a bed of yellowed cotton—the strawberry pajamas he bought for me the first time we slept together. There’s no note, but I need no explanation. It’s all the evidence, every last bit he had.
The story spreads across the state. Local TV news runs a segment with quick shots of the Browick campus, students walking on pathways shaded by pine trees, white clapboard dorms, the administration building with its columned facade. There’s a lingering shot of the humanities building. Then the same photo of Strane and, beneath it, his misspelled name: jacob strain.
Time disappears as I scroll through comment sections, Facebook posts, Twitter threads, my phone dinging every so often from the Google Alert I’ve set for his name. On my laptop, I keep fifteen tabs open at a time, jumping from one to the other, and when I’ve caught up on all the comments, I watch the news clip. The first time I watched it, I had to run to the bathroom and throw up, but I’ve forced myself to sit through it so many times, I turn numb to it. No reaction when Strane’s photo flashes on-screen. When the newscaster says “allegations from five different students,” I don’t even flinch.
After about twenty-four hours, the story travels south. It’s picked up by papers in Boston and New York, and then people start writing think pieces. In an attempt to complicate the current cultural trend of allegations, they give the articles titles like “Has This Reckoning Gone Too Far?” and “When Allegations Turn Deadly” and “It’s Time to Talk About the Danger of Accusations Without Due Process.” The think pieces feature Taylor alongside Strane, and out of her they craft an archetype of the overzealous accuser, a millennial social justice warrior who never stopped to think about the consequences of her actions. Some defend Taylor on social media, but the louder voices vilify her. They call her selfish, heartless, a murderer—because his death is her doing; she drove him to suicide. The host of a men’s rights podcast devotes an entire episode to the story, calls Strane a victim of the tyranny of feminism, and his listeners go after Taylor. They get her phone number, her home and work addresses. Taylor posts on Facebook screenshots of emails and texts from anonymous men threatening to rape her, to kill her and cut up her body. Then, a few hours later, she vanishes. Her profile goes on lockdown, all the public content gone. It happens so fast.