Exactly how many girls have you touched? The question sits hot on my tongue, yet I don’t say it. I swallow it, burning my throat all the way down, another stomach ember.
“Loving you branded me a deviant,” he says. “Nothing else about me matters anymore. One transgression will define me for the rest of my life.”
We sit in silence, the sounds of his house amplified—the refrigerator hum, the hiss of the steam heat.
I tell him I’m sorry. I don’t want to say it but feel I have to, like he needs to hear it so badly, he’s pulling the words out of me like teeth. I’m sorry you’ll never get out from under the long shadow I cast. I’m sorry what we did together was so horrific, there’s no path back from it.
He forgives me, says it’s all right, then reaches over and pats my knee, until he realizes what he’s doing, stops, and curls his hand into a fist.
When we go to bed on his flannel sheets, we keep our clothes on and I think of this girl he touched, faceless and bodiless, a specter of an accusation and a harbinger of the obvious: that I am getting older, and each passing day brings girls into the world who are younger than me, who might someday end up in his classroom. I imagine them, their bright hair and downy arms, until I’m exhausted, but as soon as my mind tempers down, I recall what he said about Henry, about his wife. Another wing of the labyrinth to get lost in, remembering what I told Henry about Strane, the r-word I used, how he must have gone home that night and told his wife everything. I made him promise not to tell, but the promise was only an extension of his lie. Of course he’d tell his wife. He’d have to—and who would she have to tell? If she’s a counselor, would she be obligated to report it? My mouth goes dry at how easily it could all come back around. I can’t get out of this. I was stupid to think I could say something, anything, without it eventually getting back to Strane.
Around midnight, we hear sirens. First faintly, then closer and closer, until it sounds like they’re outside the house. For a moment I’m sure they’re coming for us, that police are about to burst through the door. Strane gets out of bed and peers out the window into the night.
“I can’t see anything.” He grabs a sweater and heads out of the bedroom, down the stairs to the front door. When he opens it, smoke wafts in with the frigid air, so pungent it soars upstairs, fills the house.
He calls up to me, “There’s a fire down the block. A big one.” After a couple minutes, he returns wearing his parka and boots. “Come on, let’s go see it up close.”
We dress in so many layers we become anonymous, only our eyes showing above our scarves. Walking down the snow-packed sidewalks, he and I could be anyone, could be ordinary. We follow the sirens and smoke, not finding the fire until we turn a corner and see the five-story Masonic temple both ablaze and encased in ice. Six fire trucks park around the perimeter of the building, all hoses on full blast, but the night is too cold. The water, every last bit of it, freezes as soon as it hits the building’s limestone exterior while the flames rage inside. The longer the firefighters try to douse the building, the thicker the ice shell grows.
While we watch, Strane reaches for my mittened hand and holds it tight. The firefighters eventually give up and, like us, stand back and watch the building burn—a small crowd gathers, a news truck arrives. Strane and I stay for a long time, holding hands, both of us blinking back tears that collect in crystals on our eyelashes.
Later, in his bed, body and mind exhausted, I ask, “Is there more you’re not telling me about that girl?” When he doesn’t answer, I ask it plainly: “Did you fuck her?”
“Christ, Vanessa.”
“It’s ok if you did,” I say. “I’ll forgive you. I just need to know.”
He rolls toward me, holds my face in both hands. “I touched her. That’s all I did.”
I close my eyes as he strokes my hair and calls her terrible names: a liar, a little bitch, an emotionally troubled girl. I wonder what he would call me if he knew all the things I’ve called him in my mind over the years, if he finds out what I told Henry. But I say nothing. My silence is so reliable. He has no reason not to trust me.
At three in the morning, I wake and slip out from underneath his heavy arm, pad barefoot on the cold wood floors out of the bedroom, downstairs to the kitchen where his laptop sits on the counter. I open it and the browser loads his Browick email inbox. Weekly newsletters, minutes from faculty meetings—I scroll until I see the subject “Student Harassment Report.” I freeze when I hear something, one hand hovering over the trackpad, the other poised to slap the laptop closed. When silence settles again, I click open the email and scan the text. It’s from the board of trustees, written in language formal to the point of impenetrable, but I don’t want to know the details anyway. I’m just looking for a name. I scroll up and down, eyes darting back and forth across the screen, and then I see it on the second line: Taylor Birch, the student making the claims. I close the email and sneak back upstairs into bed, under his arm.
2017
Taylor works in a new building five blocks from the hotel, a shock of glass and steel amid the limestone and brick. I know the name of the company, Creative Coop, and that it’s described as a creative work space, but I can’t figure out what anyone does there. Inside, it’s all natural light and leather couches, expansive tables where people sit with open laptops. Everyone is smiling and young, or if not, then cool in a way that masquerades as youth—trendy haircuts, eccentric glasses, normcore clothes. I stand gripping my purse until a girl with round wire-framed glasses asks me, “Are you looking for someone?”
My eyes dart around the room. It’s too big, too many people. I hear myself say her name.
“Taylor? Let’s see.” The girl turns and scans the room. “There she is.”
I look where she points: bent over a laptop, thin shoulders and pale hair. The girl calls, “Taylor!” and her head lifts. The shock on her face sends me backward toward the door.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I made a mistake.”
I’m already outside and half a block away when I hear her call my name. Taylor stands in the middle of the sidewalk, white blond braid hanging over her shoulder. She’s wearing a turtleneck sweater with sleeves so long they fall past her wrists, no coat. As we study each other, she reaches up, fingertips poking out of her sweater sleeve, and tugs at the end of her braid. Suddenly, I see her as he might have—fourteen and unsure of herself, worrying the ends of her hair as he gazed at her from behind his desk.
“I can’t believe it’s really you,” she says.
I came prepared with rehearsed lines, sharp ones. I wanted to slice her to the bone, but there’s too much adrenaline pulsing in me. It turns my voice shaky and high as I tell her to leave me alone.
“Both you and that journalist,” I say. “She keeps calling me.”
“Ok,” Taylor says. “She shouldn’t have done that.”
“I have nothing to say to her.”
“I’m sorry. Really, I am. I told her not to be pushy.”
“I don’t want to be in the article, ok? Tell her that. And tell her not to write about the blog. I don’t want any of this to touch me.”