If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Elise Juska

  Cover design by Elizabeth Connor. Cover photo © Adam Crowley/Blend Images. Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

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  Grand Central Publishing

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  First Edition: April 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-6177-3 (hardcover); 978-1-4555-6175-9 (ebook)

  E3-20180110-DANF

  Contents

  Cover

  Book Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Two Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Part Three Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part Four Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Elise Juska

  Reading Group Guide

  Q&A with Elise Juska

  Newsletters

  For Bill Hollenbach

  Part One

  One

  It was an unseasonably hot late summer day in Maine when Maggie’s daughter read about the shooting. The kind of hot you could sense just by looking: the sky that flat, empty blue. Along the back of Maggie’s yard, the trees stood motionless and silent, thick green spruces and pale, thin-stemmed birches. The heat was like a haze, a filter through which the world appeared grayer, more obscure, like fog on glass.

  It was just before noon, a Friday. In a little over a week, Maggie would be back to teaching, her life built around her classes and crowded with her students, but these final days of August were still long and shapeless, defined by the immediacy of Anna’s leaving. Maggie looked up from where she knelt in her garden, pushed a lock of hair off her damp brow, and surveyed her property: a shaggy two acres strewn with rocks and wildflowers, an old red barn, woods on three sides. Later, looking back, the stillness of the trees that day would seem different—tense, knowing, braced for something—but in the moment, they appeared only sleepy in the heat.

  Maggie tore a final handful of weeds from the garden, pushed herself to standing, closed and latched the fence gate, and headed for the back door. Inside, she let the screen flap shut behind her. The house was quiet. Anna was upstairs, packing. Maggie spied a few things—down comforter, windbreaker, old scuffed leather boots—in a pile by the front door. She had just turned on the faucet and was rinsing dirt from her hands when Anna shouted: “Mom?”

  “Yes?” Maggie called back over the rush of water.

  “Mom!”

  Even from a floor below, Maggie could hear the telltale edge in her voice. “What?” she said, twisting the faucet off, and paused, leaning on the knob.

  “Did you ever have Nathan Dugan?”

  Right away Maggie recognized the name. She prided herself on her memory of her students—would argue she could summon up any one of them given ten seconds—and with this one she didn’t miss a beat. “He was in my comp,” Maggie said. She straightened and stood still, waiting, hands dripping over the sink. She heard movement in Anna’s bedroom, footsteps hurrying down the hall. “Why?”

  “So you knew him?” Anna said, louder as she ran downstairs.

  “Of course,” Maggie replied, calmly, but felt a kernel of worry. “He was my student.” She pressed her wet palms to her jeans. “What is it, Anna?” she said as her daughter rushed into the room. She was still wearing the clothes she’d slept in—old T-shirt, plaid pajama bottoms—hair tied in a loose ponytail. But her expression was awake, alarmed: This was more than nerves, Maggie thought. Her eyes were wide, almost pleading, cheeks pale beneath her summer freckles. She carried her laptop under her arm. As she set it on the table, she kept her eyes on Maggie’s face.

  FATAL SHOOTING SPREE IN REED, ME MALL

  AT LEAST THREE DEAD

  SUSPECTED GUNMAN STUDENT AT CENTRAL MAINE STATE

  “Oh my God,” Maggie said. She could hear the stillness in her voice; she was conscious of the body’s instinct to freeze, flatten and protect itself. “Oh my God,” she repeated. It had happened again, happened here, just fifteen minutes down the road. As Anna scrolled down the screen, Maggie took in a photo of two teenagers standing outside the mall, hugging. A mother clutching her baby, her face such a raw mask of pain that Maggie felt indignant it had been put online. And suddenly: Nathan Dugan. Alleged gunman takes own life, the caption read. The picture was just his face. It was him, no question, though he looked considerably older—older than the number of years (four? five?) it had been since he was in her class. He was bigger now, heavier. His face seemed thicker. The buzz cut he’d worn as a freshman had grown past his ears. He had two faint lines of mustache, a cap with some kind of cartoon animal on it. His chin was raised, eyes angled down toward the camera, although his expression looked preoccupied, as if residing in his own private world. It was the thing that looked most the same about him. He’d worn that same look in class.

  “Is that him?” Anna asked. She had folded herself into a kitchen chair, arms wrapped around her knees.

  “That’s him.”

  “Was he creepy?”

  “Creepy,” Maggie repeated. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Usually, this would have prompted a roll of the eyes—Maggie was a stickler for language, always looking for the best, the most accurate word—but her daughter had fallen quiet, reverent before the faint glow of the screen.

  “What was he like?”

  “He was—different.” A simplistic word, and an obvious one. Her mind roamed, looking for a better way, the right way, to describe him. “He wasn’t too engaged,” she said. Other details were returning. The way, during class, Nathan always kept his eyes on the desktop, jiggling one shoe—heavy brown boots with thick, ridged soles—on the dusty tiles. The pair of headphones he’d kept around his neck and, the minute class was over, clamped back on his ears. He sometimes brought his dog to class—a chocolate Lab, who slept with its flank pressed against t
he radiator. To Maggie’s recollection, Nathan never acknowledged the dog, and she didn’t either.

  “He didn’t seem to care much about being there,” she said. “He was restless.”

  “Restless how?” Anna asked. “Like anxious?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Maggie said, with a glance at her daughter’s face. “More like—” She paused. “Distracted. Checked out.”

  She remembered how, if he spoke, which was rare, Nathan never raised his hand. He’d called her Mrs. Daley, even though she always told students to call her Maggie. She remembered his essays too—not the content so much as the look of them, long unbroken paragraphs and small, stifled font.

  “He wasn’t really a part of things,” she said. “Part of the group.” She thought again. “He was hard to get to know.”

  “Creepy, you mean.”

  She remembered his coat: a heavy olive-green parka with a hood trimmed in dirty, peppery gray fur. In winter, he’d never take it off. The coat would fill the small desk, the hood blocking Maggie’s view of the students behind him and giving the permanent impression that class was about to end. With another student, she would have said, Relax and stay awhile, but with Nathan, she was certain she’d said nothing—his response would have been too literal, too humorless. And the coat, surely, would have stayed on, in so doing growing only more visible to the rest of them.

  “Was he a good student?” Anna said, her eyes still on the laptop.

  “In a way,” Maggie said. “He was diligent, as I recall.”

  “Did he have friends?”

  “Not that I knew of.” She studied Nathan Dugan’s face. His cheeks looked rougher, acne-scarred maybe, though it was hard to tell on the screen. “But I wouldn’t have known, necessarily.”

  “Did you like him?”

  Maggie did not think of her students in those terms, made a point of it, like parents with their children. But in fact: No, she hadn’t liked him.

  “I don’t think of my students that way,” she said.

  From the living room, Anna’s cell phone started ringing: the aftermath beginning. Outside, remarkably enough, the world looked as it had just moments before. The sky seemed muted, absent of everything: wind, colors, clouds. Against all that emptiness, the old red barn stood proud, near pristine, etched starkly against the pale afternoon.

  Freshman Composition was a required course for all students at Central Maine State University, so it was one that most faculty resented teaching. It was invariably populated by freshmen who didn’t want to be there—athletes, slackers, diligent but uninterested math and science majors—but Maggie didn’t mind. She liked the challenge of convincing them to love a class they thought they didn’t want to take. She prided herself on coaxing even the most passive among them to care about their writing. Write about what matters, she insisted. Anything else is a waste of time.

  And they did—just last semester Tyler Barrington, a thickly bearded, 250-pound eighteen-year-old Forestry major and volunteer firefighter, produced lovely elegies to nature. Stacey Cole, who never spoke in class, wrote a moving description of silently building a campfire with her equally silent dad. After twenty-eight years, Maggie could rely on the arc of a semester: the way, in the beginning, the freshmen would be tentative, wary, fifteen variations on insecurity—the glibness, the shyness, the overwrought machismo; was there any teenage behavior without insecurity at the root?—but as the weeks passed, they gained confidence in their work. They came to care about their classmates’ essays, respond to them with earnest nods and furrowed brows, script careful comments in the margins. Maggie took them seriously, so they took themselves seriously. (This, she maintained, was the key to being a good teacher: Care so much it’s impossible for the students to not care back.)

  At the end of fifteen weeks, her students’ growth was palpable. On the last day, Maggie always delivered a speech. I’m proud of what you’ve accomplished, she told them, voice thick with feeling. I will truly miss this class. Often the students lingered, making promises to stay in touch, and Maggie smiled, knowing what they didn’t: that despite all good intentions, the course was done. Fifteen weeks: a closed loop. The nostalgic fever of that final hour wouldn’t last, and shouldn’t; they would head back to their lives, remember the class fondly, and that was fine. The class would begin again. Still, Maggie sometimes felt a sharp sense of loss, almost like grief, driving home on the evening of the last class, final papers huddled in shopping bags on her backseat.

  The irony was, outside the classroom, she was not a particularly emotional person. Unshakable—this was one of the more memorable words Tom had lobbed at her, out in the barn, where Anna wouldn’t hear. He hadn’t meant it kindly. You’re so closed off so rigid incapable of seeing things any other—one subject bled into the next, spilling onto the old barn floor. Maggie had been stunned, gutted. Tom had always been easygoing, gentle—passive, even—but suddenly the muck that had been collecting silently inside him for seventeen years exploded like a burst pipe. There was another woman. Naturally. A social worker, from Portland. She’s helped me realize how unfulfilled I am, he said, how lonely, and Maggie had not helped dispel these accusations by letting herself go empty, floating toward the ceiling, listening with a soothing sort of detachment, a faint humming sound in her ears.

  With students, though, Maggie took comfort in knowing that things would never get so messy. She could state her feelings safely, framed by the contents of their essays, the language and the themes. They were the students and she the teacher—it could go only so far. Even when her marriage was collapsing, and the first true glints of Anna’s anxiety were surfacing, and Maggie drove home down the dark wooded roads waiting for the evening when her husband’s unhappiness solidified into something—suitcase standing by the door, Anna weeping on the porch—even then Maggie had relied on this structure: Whatever else was happening with her family, in the classroom she could maintain a certain pose, fervent and energetic, tough but affectionate, never breaking character, for ninety minutes focused on nothing but the lesson, on the welfare of the bright young people assembled before her. It was one of the pleasures of teaching. You could forget everything else.

  What they knew so far was this: The gun was an AR-15. At eleven thirty, Nathan had entered the Millview Mall through the entrance by the food court, carrying a duffel bag holding two semiautomatic weapons and five spare magazines. He was a fifth-year senior, due to graduate in December, an Engineering major. (Maggie wondered about the reasons for the extra semester—failed classes, unfulfilled credits? Or something more fraught?) There was no word yet on why he’d done it. On the news, the same photo of him was shown repeatedly, over audio of the frantic 911 calls: There’s someone shooting! I think he just shot someone! He’d killed at least three people and critically wounded another. The police had found him dead at the scene.

  There were live aerial shots of the mall, of people who had been hiding in stores and in stockrooms now running into the parking lot where loved ones had gathered, clutching text messages confirming they were safe. In interviews, survivors were alternately shocked and weeping. They described the chaos, people huddling under tables in the food court or racing for the exits, the trampling of limbs. The sounds of screaming, then the tense, muffled quiet as they tried not to draw attention to themselves. There was the mother Maggie had seen on the Internet. She’d sat on the floor behind a jewelry kiosk, she said, breastfeeding her baby to keep her from making any sound; the baby now slept in her arms. Another woman had been in a Sears dressing room, and as she ran to the food court to find her son, she said, the security tag kept setting off alarms. The food court had been crowded, everyone said. The whole mall was crowded. Ninety degrees out. The mall was air-conditioned: It was someplace to be.

  From Maggie’s living room, fifteen minutes down the road, the helicopters over the mall were a faint but steady rattle. The kitchen phone rang frequently, the old rotary on the wall by the back door. Most of these calls were from A
nna’s classmates’ mothers—not women Maggie was particularly close to, but they all checked in, a tribe of parents accounting for their children—while Anna hunkered down with her phone in the bay window, checking with friends to see if anyone knew anyone who had been there. It was not impossible, Maggie knew. Especially in the summer, Anna and her classmates were at the mall all the time. She found herself grateful, for once, that none of them rose before noon.

  Before long, Anna had heard something: Kim’s little brother’s best friend, CJ. He’d been working at the Sbarro in the food court. Then, minutes later: a junior, someone named Laura, a friend of Janie’s from the basketball team. They were both home now, Anna said, they were okay, but they had been there. Her voice was trembling, but Maggie nodded, kept nodding, trying to keep her as calm as possible. She could see how, for Anna, these personal connections were bringing the tragedy into ghastly focus, and was acutely aware of the anxieties that lay barely dormant inside her. In two days, Anna would be leaving, and Maggie was desperate to keep her from getting thrown off-course. Over the past year, she’d watched as her daughter pieced herself back together, as if seeing the path to college, she’d finally had the incentive to get better. She’d gotten off the Lexapro. She’d stopped starving herself, gained back some of the weight she’d lost. She had applied early to Bradford College in Boston and been accepted, the work ethic that had at times seemed obsessive, even symptomatic, paying off.

  It was nearly three thirty when Maggie’s cell phone finally buzzed once: call me, the screen said. Maggie glanced at her daughter, texting feverishly, then crept upstairs. “Hi,” she said, and closed the bedroom door.

  “Can you believe this goddamn thing?”

  Maggie sank to the edge of the bed. It was still unmade from that morning, covers peeled back neatly at one corner, like a tabbed page of a book. “I know.”