“Think about it,” I say. “If a normal man pats a girl on the knee, no big deal. But if a man who’s been accused of being a pedophile does it? People are going to react disproportionately. So, no, I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at them. I’m mad at the world that turned him into a monster when all he did was have the bad luck of falling in love with me.”
Ruby crosses her arms and stares down at her lap, as though she’s trying to calm herself.
“I know how this all sounds,” I say. “I’m sure you think I’m terrible.”
“I don’t think you’re terrible,” she says quietly, still gazing down at her lap.
“Then what do you think?”
She takes a deep breath, meets my eyes. “Honestly, Vanessa, what I’m hearing is that he was a very weak man, and even as a girl, you knew you were stronger than him. You knew he couldn’t handle being exposed and that’s why you took the fall. You’re still trying to protect him.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek because I won’t let my body do what it really wants—to contort itself inward, to curl so tight my bones snap. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“Ok.”
“I’m still grieving, you know. On top of everything else, I’m mourning the loss.”
“It must be hard.”
“It is. It’s excruciating.” I swallow down the tightness in my throat. “I let him die. You should know that, just in case you start feeling sorry for me. He called me right before he did it, and I knew what he was going to do and I did nothing to stop him.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ruby says.
“Yeah, you keep saying that. Nothing ever seems to be my fault.”
She says nothing, staring at me with that same pained expression. I know what she thinks, that I’m pathetic, intent on creating my own doom.
“I tortured him,” I say. “I don’t think you understand how much I contributed to everything. His whole life descended into hell because of me.”
“He was a grown man and you were fifteen,” she says. “What could you have possibly done to torture him?”
For a moment I’m speechless, unable to come up with an answer besides, I walked into his classroom. I existed. I was born.
Tipping my head back, I say, “He was so in love with me, he used to sit in my chair after I left the classroom. He’d put his face down on the table and try to breathe me in.” It’s a detail I’ve trotted out before, always meant as evidence of his uncontrollable love for me, but saying it now, I hear it as she does, as anyone would—deluded and deranged.
“Vanessa,” she says gently, “you didn’t ask for that. You were just trying to go to school.”
I stare out the window over her shoulder, at the harbor, the swarming gulls, the slate-gray water and sky, but I only see myself, barely sixteen with tears in my eyes, standing in front of a room of people, calling myself a liar, a bad girl deserving of punishment. Ruby’s far-off voice asks me where I’ve gone, but she knows that it’s the truth that has spooked me, the expanse of it, the starkness. It offers nowhere to hide.
2006
It’s early September, senior year of college about to begin, and I’m cleaning my apartment with the windows thrown open. The sounds of seasonal transformation drift in from the downtown streets below, the loudspeaker from the trolley tours mixed with the moaning brakes of a moving van, the final wave of tourists in town for the last of the warm weather and cheaper hotel rooms. The center of town has shifted toward campus, and until May, Atlantica will belong to the college. Bridget, my roommate, is due to arrive from Rhode Island the following day and classes begin the day after that. I’ve lived here all summer, cleaning hotel rooms for cash and getting stoned and wasting time online at night—except when Strane comes over, which he’s done only a handful of times. He blames the long drive, but really he just hates the dingy apartment. The first time he visited, he took one look around and said, “Vanessa, this is the kind of place people go to kill themselves.” He’s forty-eight and I’m twenty-one, and mostly it’s the same as it was six years ago. The big threats are gone—no one’s going to get thrown in jail or lose their job—but I still lie to my parents about him. Bridget is the only friend who knows he exists. When he and I are together, it’s either at his house or in my apartment with the shades drawn. He takes me out in public sometimes, but only places where there’s little chance we’ll be recognized—the secrecy, once a necessity, now seems a product of shame.
I’m in the bathroom wiping down the sides of the shower, something I only do when he’s coming, when my phone trills with an incoming call: JACOB STRANE.
I hit “answer,” my fingers pruned from the cleaner. “Hey, are you—?”
“Can’t do it tonight,” he says. “Too much going on here.”
I move into the living room while he goes on about being reappointed department chair, his mounting responsibilities. “The department’s a mess,” he says. “We’ve got someone on maternity leave and the new teacher they hired is completely clueless. On top of that, they’re implementing some new school-wide counseling program, hired some girl barely older than you to instruct us how to handle students’ feelings. It’s insulting. I’ve been doing this for two decades.”
I begin to pace the length of the living room, following the path of the oscillating fan. The only furniture we have is a duct-taped papasan chair, a coffee table made of milk crates, and my parents’ old TV stand. We’ll have a couch soon; Bridget says she knows someone getting rid of one for free.
“But this was the last chance for us to be together.”
“Are you leaving on an extended voyage I don’t know about?”
“My roommate’s moving in tomorrow.”
“Ah.” He clicks his tongue. “Well, you’ve got a bedroom. The door closes.”
I let out a tiny slip of a sigh.
“Please don’t sulk,” he says.
“I’m not.” But I am, my limbs heavy, my bottom lip jutting out. I spent the whole morning clearing the empty bottles and coffee cups out of my bedroom, washing the dishes, wiping the hair out of the bathtub. Plus I want to be with him. That’s the real source of my disappointment. It’s been two weeks.
Into the phone, I mumble, “I’m needy.” It’s the closest I can get to saying what I feel, which isn’t horniness, because it isn’t really about sex. It’s him looking at me, adoring me, telling me what I am and giving me what I need to get through the day-to-day drudgery of pretending I’m like everybody else.
I hear him smile—the quick exhale, a soft sound from the back of his throat. I’m needy. He likes that. “I’ll get out there soon,” he says.
Bridget arrives the following afternoon, dropping her bags in the middle of the living room floor. With shining eyes, she asks, “Is he here?” She’s anxious to meet Strane; I’m not sure she’s convinced he’s real. I told her a vague version of the story last spring at the bar after we signed our lease. She’s an English major, same as me, and we’d had classes together for three years, but we weren’t good friends. Living together was an arrangement of convenience. She’d found a two-bedroom apartment; I needed a place. Yet over the course of one night at the bar, I went from mentioning that I’d gone to Browick for “about a year”—usually that’s as close as I came to the truth—to giving her a disjointed history of the whole mess five drinks later. I told her that he singled me out and fell in love, that I was expelled because I wouldn’t betray him, but we ended up back together because we can’t stay away from each other, despite the age difference, despite everything. She was the perfect listener, widening her eyes at the most intense plot points, nodding empathetically at the difficult moments, and through it all showing no hint of judgment. Since then, she had never been the first to mention Strane, always followed my lead. Even now, asking Is he here? was only because I texted her the day before with an apologetic warning: I hope you won’t be too alarmed if a middle-aged man is in the apartment when you get here tomorrow. That was the first time I ever tried turning him into a joke and it felt good, surprisingly so.