“You need to create a life for yourself,” he says. “One that isn’t so focused on me.”
“You said you weren’t mad.”
“I’m not mad. Look at me, I’m not.” It’s true—he doesn’t look at all angry, his eyes calm behind the wireless frames.
For two weeks, I stay in my apartment, camped out in front of the TV with Minou curled against me. I work through the DVD set of Twin Peaks, then go back and rewatch certain episodes again and again. Sometimes Bridget watches with me, but when I start rewinding the scenes of violence and screams, the ones in which the good man character is overtaken by a sadist spirit that drives him to rape and murder teenage girls, she goes into her bedroom and shuts the door.
During those weeks in the news, a fourteen-year-old girl named Katrina disappears out in Oregon. Pretty, white, and photogenic, her face is everywhere, the headlines blurring into the TV series. “Who Took Katrina?” “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” Both were last seen running for their lives, disappearing into a grove of Douglas firs. The obvious culprit for Katrina’s disappearance is her estranged father, who has a history of mental illness and hasn’t been heard from in weeks. Compared with the dozen pictures they have of Katrina, the news uses only one photo of her father, a disheveled mugshot from a DUI. Eventually, the two are found in North Carolina, living in a cabin without electricity or running water. When the father is arrested, he is quoted as saying, “I’m just glad this is finally over.” Later, more details emerge—how frail Katrina became while on the lam, that while living in the cabin, she resorted to eating wildflowers to survive. Alone in the living room lit blue by the TV, I mumble things too terrible for anyone else to hear, that I bet a part of her loved it and never wanted to be caught.
Bridget ventures out of her bedroom and finds me stoned on the couch, coughing up tears. She feeds the cat, picks up my empty bottles, leaves the electric bill on the coffee table, along with her half and a stamped, addressed envelope. She knows something bad happened that night Strane came over but gives me room to deal with it on my own. She doesn’t ask, doesn’t want to know.
* * *
From: [email protected]
Subject: Seminar absence
Vanessa, are you ok? Missed you in class today. Henry
From: [email protected]
Subject: Worried
I’m starting to get concerned over here. What’s going on? You can call if that would be easier than writing. Or we could meet off campus. I’m worried about you. Henry
From: [email protected]
Subject: Serious concern
Vanessa, another absence and I’m going to have to give you either an F or an incomplete. I’m happy to give you an incomplete and we can figure out how you can make up the work, but you need to come by and fill out a form. Can you come in tomorrow? I’m not angry, just very concerned. Please let me know. Henry
When I appear in his doorway, Henry breaks out in a smile. “There you are. I’ve been so worried. What happened to you?”
Leaning against the doorframe, I stare him down. I’d expected a wave of apologies as soon as he saw me. It’s unfathomable that he hasn’t already made the connection. The night at Browick was three weeks ago, not long enough to forget.
I hold up a course withdrawal form. “Will you sign this?”
His head jerks back, surprised. “We should probably talk about it first.”
“You said I’m going to fail.”
“You haven’t been coming to class,” he says. “I had to get your attention somehow.”
“So you manipulated me? Awesome. That’s so great.”
“Vanessa, come on.” He laughs like I’m being ridiculous. “What’s going on?”
“Why did you do it?”
“Why did I do what?” He sways back and forth in his desk chair, watching me with put-on obliviousness. He looks like a child caught in a lie.
“You attacked him.”
He stops swaying.
“You waited outside a bathroom and grabbed him—”
At that, he jumps up and pulls the office door closed so hard it slams. He holds out his hands as though trying to calm me down. “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry. Obviously, I shouldn’t have done what I did. There’s no excuse for it. But I hardly attacked him.”
“He said you shoved him against the wall.”
“How could I even manage that? That man is enormous.”
“He said—”
“Vanessa, I barely touched him.”
At that, a lump forms in my throat. I barely touched him. I touched her, that’s all. Both boil down to me overreacting, determined to portray these men as villains.
To Henry, I ask, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about your wife? You must have known I’d figure out eventually that it was her who worked there.”
He blinks, thrown by the pivot. “I’m a private person. I don’t like to divulge my personal life to students.”
But that’s not true. I know plenty of personal things about him, details he’s offered up himself—where he grew up, that his parents never married, that his sister was hurt by someone older the same way Strane hurt me. I know his favorite bands from high school and his favorite bands now, that he was a burnout in college, one semester skipping twelve credits’ worth of classes. I know how long it takes him to drive from his house to campus and that when he grades papers, he sets mine aside for when his mind is exhausted and needs a break. It’s only his wife that I know nothing about.
“You know,” I say, “marrying one of your students is pretty fucked up.”
He hangs his head, takes a breath. He knew this was coming. “The circumstances were totally different.”
“You were her teacher.”
“I was a professor.”
“Big difference.”
“It is different,” he says. “You know it is.”
I want to tell him the same thing I said to Strane: that I don’t know what I know. Months ago, I wrote about how different it was with Henry, that I wouldn’t be taken advantage of this time. That difference now feels too subtle to locate. I need someone to show me the line that’s supposed to separate twenty-seven years older from thirteen years, teacher from professor, criminal from socially acceptable. Or maybe I’m supposed to encompass the difference here. Years past my eighteenth birthday, I’m fair game now, a consenting adult.
“I should report you for what you did to him,” I say. “The college should know about the type of people they have working here.”
That touches a nerve, his face flushed as he practically yells, “Report me?” and for a moment, I see the anger he must have let loose on Strane. But then, conscious of the voices passing by the closed office door, he lowers himself to whisper, “Vanessa, you knew what that man did to this other girl and you made me feel like an idiot when I mentioned it to you. Then you come in here, telling me that he’s harassing you, hurting you. What did you expect?”