Unlike in a high-school classroom, at least I know what to do in a fight. Though after my captivity I’d gotten enough wins to earn some low-level attention, I stopped fighting right before signing the book contract. Fighting helped me regain my physical strength, but it couldn’t get me back to photography.
I can only hope that the classroom and teaching will.
After responding to the text with the word No, I take a suit and tie out of the closet.
I don’t know if any of the Monarch High teachers wear suits, but I like the ritual of tucking in a crisp white shirt, buckling my leather belt, knotting a striped tie. It had taken me hours of practice to relearn how to knot a tie.
I watch the movement of my hands and fingers in the mirror. There’s still sometimes a disconnect between my brain and my body, like I’m watching someone else perform an act that I can’t do myself. As if I’m looking through the lens of a camera.
Flexing my fingers, I shrug into the suit jacket. Small blessing that there’s a lot of work to do around Henry’s house. I need to use a hammer, dig in the dirt, fit broken pieces back together.
After putting on my shoes, I pick up my camera bag. The weight is familiar, but no longer comforting. I still don’t know if I’ll ever be able to take a photo again.
No sense in taking my camera to school today. I leave the bag on a chair and go downstairs with only my briefcase.
Henry’s and Nell’s voices rise from the kitchen. Hers is edged with frustration, his is calm and measured as always. Henry hasn’t changed. Not in any way that’s noticeable, at least. Unlike his daughter.
I enter the kitchen. They both stop talking. Nell’s arms are crossed, and she has a deep line between her eyebrows.
“Ready?” I ask.
She hefts a book bag from the table and walks out the kitchen door, letting it slam shut behind her.
“She’ll come around.” Henry gives me a rueful glance. “She’s just not used to having another person in the house. And with you also being her new teacher…”
His voice trails off and he shrugs. “She doesn’t handle change all that well.”
“I don’t want it to be rough on her. I can find another place to stay.”
“No, no.” He holds up his hand in protest. “It will be good for her to learn how to handle changes in circumstance. She’s eighteen. She needs to understand how to adapt.”
I don’t bother remarking that Henry’s strategy of adapting—closing himself off in his studies of ancient history—hasn’t changed.
Not that I can blame him. For years, he struggled to balance his work with the volatile, unpredictable equation of Katherine. When he wasn’t trying to help her, he was shielding Nell from Katherine’s highs and lows, or he was closed off in his room with his books. And then Katherine’s death…
When Nell was in sixth grade, she came home from school one day and found her mother hanging from the garage rafters. Henry had been in a lecture course, and I’d been…somewhere.
Nell called Henry, who called 911 before rushing home. The police arrived first and found Nell crouched beside her mother’s collapsed body. She’d climbed a ladder and sawed through the rope to cut Katherine down.
I can’t stand thinking about it. Neither Henry nor I had been able to shield Nell from her mother’s last act of brutal despair. Though I have enough guilt for a thousand lifetimes, this guilt is sharpest of all.
I’ve always felt responsible for Nell, not only because she’s Henry and Katherine’s daughter. I also know what it was like to contend with Katherine, and I’d been the one to introduce Henry to his future wife in the first place. She’d spun him into her whirlwind faster than a tornado and had gotten pregnant with Nell less than three months later.
Henry—kind, scholarly, mild-mannered—hadn’t known what hit him. But despite his parents’ opposition and threats, he’d been determined to marry Katherine and support his family. And though he was walking into a minefield, nothing he’s done before or since has earned more of my respect.
What has Henry and Nell’s relationship been like since Katherine’s death? He’s the same—still teaching at the local college, traveling to conferences, and working on his longstanding manuscript about Roman civilization. He devotes his time to his students and studies. Though Nell has always been his first priority, his reason for everything, he probably hasn’t even thought to move out of this old house, to give himself and his daughter a fresh start.
Nell has changed, though. In ways I’d expected to some degree, but in others I don’t fully understand.
I walk out to the car. She’s in the passenger seat, her arms folded and spine stiff.
I toss my briefcase into the backseat and start the ignition. Search the dusty vault of my brain for something of the past.
“What do you get when you cross a vampire and a snowman?” I pull onto the narrow dirt road that leads to the paved streets of downtown Grenville.
She doesn’t respond.
“Frost bite,” I offer.
Nothing.
“Why did the cookie go to the hospital?” I brake at a turn and glance at her. “Because he felt crummy.”
She looks out the window, the heavy curtain of her hair half-concealing her face.
“There was a time when you would have laughed at those,” I remind her.
“Well, that time is long gone, isn’t it?” she replies tartly. “I’m not a kid anymore.”
“I know.” I stop at a red light. “So you’ve outgrown jokes. What do you like besides writing and drawing?”
“Nothing.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Too bad.”
Damn. She’s gotten tough.
I like her bluntness. In the year since I’ve been back, people either haven’t known how to act around me or they’ve gone overboard trying to pretend like they do. Huge, false smiles and adulation that don’t hide their seething questions about the details.
They want the scum at the bottom of the well. The worst, more horrible things that happened to me. They want to know what it felt like to be pushed into the dirt with a gun pressed to the back of my head and the trigger clicking multiple times on an empty chamber. They want to know what I thought about when I was hog-tied and beaten, when I got so hungry I ate the bugs crawling in my cell-like room, when I was locked in a cage. They want to know how bad the pain was.
I flex my hands on the steering wheel, shoving it all back down. Nell doesn’t seem curious about any of that. As far as she’s concerned, I’m her out-of-touch, embarrassing uncle whom she wants to avoid as much as possible.
It’s not a role I’ve ever had before. But maybe it’s the kind of normalcy I need.
When we arrive at school, Nell hurries out the second I park, as if she doesn’t want anyone to see her getting out of my car.
I join the students streaming toward the front doors of the two-story brick building. Monarch High is a private secular school—highly regarded for both its academic and arts programs.
When Henry told me about the photography teacher position, I’d refused. Couldn’t imagine teaching photography when I couldn’t even pick up my own camera anymore.
“This might be exactly what you need,” he’d said. “To relearn by teaching others in a safe environment. And you’ll have time to work on your book.”