With my hand on the door handle, I ask if I’ll see him soon, and he says yes so gently I know he’s letting me down easy. His eyes dart away like I’m evidence of something he wants to forget.
Years pass without him. My dad has his first heart attack; Mom finally earns her degree. On a summer afternoon when I’m home visiting, Babe has an aneurysm while running across the yard; she drops as though she’s been shot, and Dad and I try to save her as though she were human, pumping on her chest and breathing into her snout, but she’s gone, her body cold and paws still wet from the lake. I leave CPS and go from one administrative assistant job to another, loathing the work, the sterile offices, the paper clips and Post-its and Berber carpets. When I find myself googling “what should you do if being at work makes you suicidal,” I snap out of it, realize this way of keeping myself alive could end up killing me, and get a front desk position at an upscale hotel. It’s low pay but an escape from the fluorescent-lit breakdown brewing within me.
There are men who never turn into boyfriends, who peer behind the curtain and see the mess of me—literal and figurative: the apartment with a narrow path through the clothes and trash leading from bed to bathroom; the drinking, endless drinking; the blackout sex and nightmares. “You’re kind of screwed up,” they say, at first with a laugh in their voice, an attitude of maybe this will be fun for a while, but as soon as I slur out the story—teacher, sex, fifteen, but I liked it, I miss it—they’re done. “You’ve got serious issues,” they say on their way out the door.
I learn that it’s easier to keep my mouth shut, to be a vessel they empty themselves into. On a dating app, I meet a man in his late twenties. He wears cardigans and corduroys, has a receding hairline and thick chest hair that peeks over the neckline of his shirt, a look-alike of Strane. Through our first date, I pulse my feet, shred my napkin. With our drinks only half drunk, I ask, “Can we cut the bullshit and go have sex?” He chokes on his beer, looks at me like I’m nuts, but says sure, of course, if that’s what you want.
On our second date, we see a movie with a plotline about pedophile priests. Through the two hours, he doesn’t notice my clammy hands, the little whimpers that escape my throat. Usually I’m good about researching movies beforehand in case there’s something that might send me reeling, but with this one I wasn’t prepared. Afterward, as we walk down Congress Street toward my apartment, the man says, “Men like that know how to pick the right ones, you know? They’re real predators. They know how to scan a herd and select the weak.”
As he says that, I see a scene of me, fifteen and wild-eyed, separated from my parents, running in a panicked gait across a tundra landscape while Strane sprints after me, gathering me in his arms without breaking stride. An ocean roars in my ears, blocking out the rest of the man’s thoughts on the film, and I think, Maybe that’s all it was. I was an obvious target. He chose me not because I was special, but because he was hungry and I was easy. Back at my apartment, while the man and I have sex, I leave myself in a way I haven’t in years. He and my body are in the bedroom as my mind wanders the apartment, curls up on the couch, and stares at the blank TV.
I stop replying to his texts, never see him again. I tell myself he was wrong. At fifteen, I wasn’t weak. I was smart. I was strong.
I’m twenty-five when it happens. Walking to work, wearing my black suit and black flats, I cross Congress Street and there he is, standing with a dozen kids in front of the art museum, teenagers, students, mostly girls. I watch from a distance, clutching my purse to my side. He leads the students into the museum—it must be a field trip, maybe to see the Wyeth exhibit—and he holds the door as they file in, one girl after another.
Just before he disappears inside, he glances over his shoulder and notices me in my dowdy work clothes, faded and old. For years I wanted nothing more than his eyes on me, but now I’m too ashamed of my own face, its fine lines and signs of age, to take a step closer.
He lets the museum door close behind him and I go to work, sit at the concierge desk and imagine him moving through the rooms, trailing the bright-haired girls. In my mind, I follow along behind, don’t let him out of my sight. This, I think, is probably what I’ll do for the rest of my life: chase after him and what he gave me. It’s my own fault. I was supposed to have grown out of it by now. He never promised to love me forever.
The next night, he calls. It’s late, on my walk home from work, when the only lit-up windows downtown are the bars and pizza-by-the-slice places. The sight of his name on the screen makes my knees give out. I have to lean against a building when I answer.
The sound of him grabs me by the throat. “Did I see you?” he asks. “Or was it a ghost?”
He starts calling weekly, always late at night. We talk a little about who I am now—the hotel job, the never-ending parade of boys, my mom’s pursed-lip disappointment in me, my dad’s diabetes and bad heart—but mostly we talk about who I used to be. Together we remember the scenes in the little office behind the classroom, at his house, in the station wagon parked on the side of an old logging road, the rolling blueberry barren where I climbed on top of him, the chickadee call and apiary drone drifting in through the open car window. Our details pool together. He and I re-create it vividly, too vividly.
“There’s a reason I haven’t allowed myself to remember all this,” he says. “I can’t let myself lose control again.”
I see him in the classroom, sitting behind his desk. His eyes move across the girls seated around the seminar table. One girl looks up, catches him staring, and smiles.
“We can stop,” I say.
“No,” he says, “that’s the problem. I don’t think I can stop.”
When he moves away from remembering me and begins to talk about the girls in his classes, I follow him. He describes the pale underbellies of their arms when they raise their hands, the tendrils that escape their ponytails, the flush that travels down their necks when he tells them they’re precious and rare. He says it’s unbearable, the way they drip with beauty. He tells me he calls them up to his desk, his hand on their knees. “I pretend they’re you,” he says, and my mouth waters as though a bell’s been rung, signaling a long-buried craving. I roll onto my stomach, shove a pillow between my legs. Keep going, don’t stop.
2017
The week before Thanksgiving, Janine’s article is published, but it isn’t about Strane. One contextual paragraph toward the beginning mentions Taylor and the online harassment she suffered. The rest is about a teacher at a boarding school in New Hampshire who abused girl students throughout his forty-year career. Eight victims are profiled in the article, their real names used. There are photos of them now and back when they were students, scans of their teenage diary entries, the teacher’s love letters. Through the years, he used the same lines on all the girls, the same pet names. You’re the only one who understands me, little one. The headline of the article cites the boarding school’s name—recognizable, prestigious, and guaranteed to generate clicks. It’s hard not to be cynical, to assume that’s what it all came down to.