“I was going to work up the nerve to mail the card this week,” he says. “My plan was to drive to Augusta and drop it in a mailbox there so your parents wouldn’t see a Norumbega stamp.”
I toss both envelopes on the coffee table as though I’m unimpressed, force myself to roll my eyes. That isn’t enough. I need more evidence of his agony—pages and pages of it.
He sits beside me on the couch and says, “Nessa, think about this. By leaving, you got to escape. Meanwhile, I had to spend my days in a place that only reminded me of you. Every day, I had to teach in the room where we met, watch other students sit at your spot at the table. I don’t even use my office anymore.”
“You don’t?”
He shakes his head. “It’s full of junk now. Has been since you left.”
I can’t shrug off that detail. His office sitting unused seems a testament to the power my ghost has wielded. Every day, I haunted him. And he’s right about me being able to escape; the public high school hallways and classrooms offer zero reminders of him, something I had viewed with endless grief, but maybe I had it easier by being thrown into an unfamiliar environment. Maybe there were benefits to what I went through compared with what he endured.
I drink the second beer. When he sets a third on the coffee table, I protest, say I have to drive home, but take a long swallow anyway. My tolerance for alcohol is shot; after only two, my face is flushed, my eyes slow. The more I drink, the further I drift from the anger I came in with. My rage is left onshore while I’m pulled into deep water, floating on my back, little waves lapping against my ears.
He asks what I’ve done over the past two years, and, to my horror, I hear myself tell him about Craig, the men I talked to online, the boy who took me to the semiformal. “They all made me sick,” I say.
He smiles wide. There’s no hint of jealousy in his reaction; he seems pleased that I tried and failed.
“What about you?” I ask, my voice stumbling, too loud.
He doesn’t answer. He’s all smiles as he evades. “You know what I’ve been up to,” he says. “Doing the same thing as always, right here.”
“But I’m asking about who you’ve been doing it with.” I take a swig, smack my lips against the bottle. “Is Ms. Thompson still here?”
He gives me his tender-condescending look. I’m being charming. My demand for answers is cute. “I like your dress,” he says. “I think I recognize it.”
“I wore it for you.” I hate myself for saying it. There is no need to be so honest, yet I can’t stop. I tell him I talked to Jenny, that she called him a broken man. “She’s the one who told me about you getting me kicked out. She knew everything. She read the letter you wrote to Mrs. Giles about how I was ‘emotionally troubled.’” I hook my fingers into air quotes.
He stares at me. “She read what?”
I smile, can’t help it. Finally, something got under his skin.
“How did she read that document?” he asks. I laugh at how he says document.
“She said Mrs. Giles showed it to her.”
“That’s outrageous. Totally unacceptable.”
“Well, I think it’s good,” I say. “Because now I know how conniving you really were.”
He studies me, trying to gauge how much I know, how serious I am.
“You called me ‘troubled’ in that letter. Right? Like I was crazy. A stupid little girl. I get why you did that. It was an easy way to protect yourself, right? Teenage girls are crazy. Everyone knows that.”
“I think you’ve had enough to drink,” he says.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “You know what else I know?”
Again, he just stares. I see the impatience in his clenched jaw. If I push much further, he could cut me off, grab the bottle out of my hand, force me out the door.
“I know about the other letter. The one you wrote way back at the beginning of everything. How I had a big crush on you, and that you wanted to leave a paper trail in case I did something inappropriate and it got out of hand. You’d barely even fucked me and you were already thinking about how to cover your tracks.”
His face might’ve gone pale, except my eyes lag, won’t focus.
“But I guess I understand that, too,” I say. “To you, I was disposable—”
“That’s not true.”
“—like garbage.”
“No.”
I wait for him to say more, but that’s all he has. No. I stand and take a half dozen steps to the door before he stops me.
“Let me leave,” I say. It’s a clear bluff; I don’t even have my shoes on.
“Baby, you’re drunk.”
“Big deal.”
“You need to lie down.” He guides me upstairs, down the hallway, into the bedroom—the same khaki comforter and tartan sheets.
“You shouldn’t use flannel sheets in the summer.” I flop down on my back, again floating on the lake, the bed rocking with the waves. “Don’t touch me,” I bark when he tries to pull my dress strap down my shoulder. “I’ll die if you touch me.”
I roll onto my side, away from him, facing the wall, and listen to him stand over me. Endless minutes of his sighs, “fucks” muttered under his breath. Then the floorboards creak. He goes back into the living room.
No, I think. Come back.
I want him to keep watching, to remain vigilant beside me. I think about getting up and faking a faint, letting my body collapse onto the floor, imagining that he’d run to me, pick me up, stroke my cheek to bring me back to life. Or I could make myself cry. I know the sound of me sobbing will bring him running, turn him tender, even if that tenderness will inevitably turn hard, an erection digging into my thigh. I want the moments before sex. I want him to take care of me. But I’m too drowsy, my limbs too heavy to do anything but sleep.
I wake to him getting into bed. My eyes fly open and I see the pattern of sunlight and shadows has shifted across the wall. When I stir, he stops, but when my eyes flutter shut and I don’t move again, he eases himself onto the mattress. I lie there, eyes closed, hearing and feeling everything, his breathing, his body.
When I wake again, I’m on my back, my dress bunched around my waist, my underwear off. He kneels on the floor, head between my legs, his face buried in me. His arms are wrapped around my thighs so I can’t move away. He looks up and locks eyes with mine. My head lolls and he keeps going.
I see my body from above, ant-small, pale limbs floating on the lake, the water now past my ears. It laps at my cheeks, almost to my mouth, almost drowning. Beneath me are monsters, leeches and eels, toothy fish, turtles with jaws strong enough to snap an ankle. He keeps going. He wants me to come, even if it means rubbing me raw. A reel starts to play in my mind, a parade of images projected onto my eyelids: loaves of bread dough rising on a warm kitchen counter, a conveyor belt moving groceries while my mother looks on, holding her checkbook, a time lapse of roots extending into soil. My parents washing the dirt from their arms, looking at the clock, neither one of them yet asking out loud, “Where’s Vanessa?” because acknowledging I’ve been gone too long will let in the first pinprick of fear.