If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  “Walked right into the mall and started shooting. Fucking Christ.”

  It was one of the things she appreciated about Robert: his directness, lack of filter. Tom was always so even-tempered that when finally he’d burst she was blindsided, but Robert’s outrage relaxed her, most of the time.

  “It’s terrible,” she said, her mind roaming for another word, a bigger word, one that would do the thing justice. “It’s—unthinkable.”

  “You didn’t have him, did you?”

  In the open window, the curtains hung limp as tongues. The air didn’t move. The house wasn’t air-conditioned, so on rare days like this one, the heat collected like tide pools in the rooms upstairs.

  “As a matter of fact,” Maggie said, “I can’t believe it, but I did.” Then she laughed, though she wasn’t sure why.

  “Me too.”

  “Did you?” The sharpness of her relief took her by surprise. She sat up straighter. “And?”

  “And nothing,” Robert said. Maggie could picture how he looked, agitated, pushing one hand through his hair. “I checked my files. He was in my 101 four years ago and I don’t remember a damn thing about him. A future killer sitting in my classroom and his name doesn’t even ring a bell until I dredge up an old roster and see it sitting there.” Robert was clearly bothered, but his lapse was justified. Introduction to American Government was enormous, a lecture course with a reputation for being one of the simplest routes to satisfying a Gen Ed. The class was so large and so popular that it was held in a small theater. There was no attendance policy. Exams were fact-based, objective, dots to darken and feed through a machine—it was nearly impossible to really get to know students in a class like this.

  “It’s different.” She spread her free hand in her lap, bare and freckled, the nails rimmed with dirt. “A class like yours.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s a lecture. It’s so much more impersonal.”

  “What class did you have him in?”

  “Comp, of course.”

  “Why of course?”

  “Does this seem like a kid who was taking upper-level writing classes?”

  “Why? Because he was a psychopath?”

  “No,” she said evenly. “Because he was an Engineering major. He wouldn’t have taken any writing class but mine.”

  “You never know, though, do you?”

  Maggie didn’t reply; she was generalizing, yes, but she knew she wasn’t wrong. She stared at the wall above her dresser, where the ceiling sloped steeply downward and the old flowered wallpaper was wrinkled and swollen, stained at the seams. Melted snow had crept through the roof last winter. Five, six feet of snow. Record-setting snow. Route 18 had been a tunnel of darkness, the ten-foot drifts on either side blocking the sun.

  “So he was a freshman when you had him,” Robert said.

  The connection wavered, and Maggie angled slightly toward the window. The reception in here was notoriously shaky; Anna frequently complained that the bay window in the living room was the only reliable spot in the house. Before Robert, this hadn’t affected her, as Maggie had never used a cell phone—she despised the cumbersome effort of texting, the electric warmth of metal against her cheek—but she didn’t want to talk with him in front of Anna. “Right,” she said. “A freshman.”

  “Was he a whack job?”

  “I wouldn’t call him that,” she said, bristling at the term.

  “What would you call him?”

  Through the cast-iron grate in the floor, Maggie heard the low hum of the news, the sharp dip and rise of Anna’s voice. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “It was years ago, after all. Four years ago.”

  “Point taken,” Robert said. Then, thankfully, moved on. Maggie liked this about him too: He never prodded beneath the surface of a thing, wondering what was simmering there unsaid. In part, this was just his personality—big and broad and external, not attuned to nuance—but it was also because their relationship was still relatively new. Because he didn’t really know her. He wouldn’t know, for example, that she never forgot a student.

  “This is going to be hard on the school,” he said then. “Enrollment will take a hit.”

  It was just the kind of thing Robert thought about and Maggie didn’t. “But it didn’t happen on campus,” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter. He was a student. A current student. A killer in our midst, and nobody picked up on it.”

  Maggie gave a short laugh. “Sounds like an awful TV movie,” she said.

  “Bad for business is what it is,” Robert replied, which struck her as crass, though he was probably right; after four semesters on campus, Robert had a keener grasp of university politics than she did after almost thirty years. For better or worse, Maggie had always stayed away from all that: She focused on the students, cared little about the rest.

  Then he said, “I wish I could be with you right now.”

  It was disorienting on such a day, in such a moment, but Maggie felt a low flicker of desire. She closed her eyes and pictured Robert there beside her, his sure hands and strong shoulders. His thick hair, still brown but for two blasts of gray at the temples. Tom was a big man too, but lanky and unassuming. Robert was physical, vital, all volume and energy. He rode his bike to campus, swept her up in long kisses. He spoke what was on his mind.

  “I want to see you,” he said. “I want you, period.”

  She opened her eyes. “Well, you know,” she replied. She let the words just hang there, bloated with implication—well, you know, get a divorce. Well, you know, move out of your house. Robert and his wife were separated but still living together—he occupying one part of the house and she another—though Maggie had played no part in their separation (by the time she met him, on a committee of all things, Robert had already been sleeping in his guest bed). He’d assured her repeatedly that the marriage was over, he just didn’t feel he could leave yet. His wife was fragile, possibly depressed. He felt a responsibility to her; he was the reason they had moved to Stafford. Maggie felt uneasy about the arrangement, but understood it, even admired Robert for putting his wife’s feelings first. She knew, though, that other people would make assumptions. It was why they never went out in public, why they met mostly in Robert’s (larger, less conspicuous) office in Strathmere Hall. This summer, they had barely seen each other, with Anna home and neither of them teaching. A small town, a college campus: One never knew how things could be perceived.

  Now he asked, “When does that daughter of yours leave?”

  His tone was playful, but still, it bothered her. He knew she didn’t like when he referred to Anna, not even lightly. “That’s not what’s keeping us from being together,” she said.

  “Oh, Maggie. A joke.” He sighed. “I just wish I could see you, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’m available,” she said, but cringed at the neediness in her voice. Most of the time, being the one who was legitimately unattached was a safe berth, a role that reassured her. Other times, like now, it made her feel insecure, a high school girl waiting for an invitation to the prom.

  “You know I hate this too,” Robert said. “But I wish you’d let me in a little.”

  Outside, the maple stood red-tipped, motionless in the heat. Maggie didn’t know how to reply. Tom had accused her of being closed off, but this was different. To put herself out there would be reckless, foolish. Until Robert left his wife, moved out of his house, there was no future here. Whatever he and Maggie were doing together remained within limits; sometimes their whole relationship felt scarcely real.

  Then he said, “Okay then,” with a suddenness that made clear Suzanne had just entered the room. “Thanks for calling,” he added, and like that, he was gone. Call Ended, the screen confirmed. She felt stung, though she had no right. She’d told Robert she wasn’t comfortable talking on the phone with his wife in earshot; even if they were separated, it seemed unnecessarily cruel. She placed the phone on one knee and fixed on the old oak dresser, the on
e that had been her parents’ and listed to one side. She pictured Robert’s house, a few blocks from the college, an elaborate Victorian she had several times driven by, not accidentally, on her way home from school. Pictured Suzanne appearing in his office doorway, sensing somehow he was on the phone. Maggie had seen her only once, at the university holiday party the previous winter, tall and pale, a native Southerner not cut out for the Maine cold. She’d spent all night by her husband’s side. At the time, Maggie had known Robert only a little, but found him so dynamic that she’d been surprised to find he’d married someone so obviously uncomfortable at a party. Her shoulders were slightly stooped, as if curved permanently inward. Fragile, Robert had described her, and Maggie had thought, even in that glimpse, she saw what he meant.

  Then again: There were two sides to any story. She’d heard this from Jim Whittier, the couples counselor in whose office she and Tom had spent seven excruciating hours. She preached it to her freshmen every semester, when teaching the significant personal experience essay—everything is a matter of perspective, she told them. Every story of what happened is just a version of what happened. Memory is subjective. Fact and truth are two different things.

  Maggie closed her eyes. She was overwhelmed by the desire to lie down. Robert had stayed here at her house just once, early on. A Saturday in March, when Anna’s weekend with Tom coincided with Suzanne’s visit to her family in South Carolina. It had snowed, and they had stayed inside all weekend, in bed mostly, emerging to make coffee and feed the fire and retrieve the paper—ordinary things, but off-limits they had taken on the quality of a dream. Maggie had sworn, after Tom’s affair, she would never be the other woman, and technically, she wasn’t. Still, late Sunday morning, when Robert’s car drove away, the sight of it had sent a storm of heat to her cheeks. How exposed they had been: Robert’s brazen red Jeep rambling down her snowy driveway, flanked with winter maples, visible as a cardinal in a bare tree.

  Over the course of the afternoon, the Nathan Dugan story grew more terrible and strange. An hour before the shooting, Nathan had posted a video on YouTube, describing his planned attack. The video was titled: Greatness Comes to Those Who Wait. The news had the sense not to show it—Maggie was especially thankful, with Anna watching—but reported that Nathan had been planning something bigger. In the food court, he’d fired thirty rounds and was headed toward the south end of the mall, with the Sears and the carousel, when the sirens outside grew audible and he turned the gun on himself.

  The assault rifle, they reported, had been purchased at the Walmart adjacent to the mall on Route 18. Nathan had been employed there as a part-time stocker since March; he’d been fired the week before. According to the manager, he’d been making customers uneasy. On two occasions, he’d followed shoppers around the store. Sort of like policing them, the manager said, threading one hand through his hair. I told him he couldn’t act that way. He explained that, when Nathan got defensive, he’d told him not to come back. He was angry, he said, stunned-looking. But I had no idea he was this far gone.

  Inside Nathan’s bedroom closet, police found fourteen firearms, several rounds of spare ammunition, and tactical gear including assault vests and silencers. He had been living with his mother, Marielle Dugan, in Reed, in the small, depressed neighborhood that sat behind the mall. The mother worked at the Big Lots in Millville. The parents had been divorced since Nathan was a child. He’d been raised by his mother, in New Hampshire; his father lived in Florida—this triggered a memory for Maggie. An essay Nathan had written for her class. About love for his father, maybe, a bonding trip they’d taken together. Hiking? Camping? Something. A former neighbor from New Hampshire reported that Nathan was often walking his dog, or with his mother. You never saw him with kids his age. This same neighbor recalled him patrolling the neighborhood with a BB gun, shooting mailboxes and trees.

  The guns in Nathan’s closet had all been purchased legally, over the past few years, some at the Walmart and others at a gun shop on Standish Road. Local news showed a picture of the gun shop: a red clapboard box, an American flag. There was a shot of Nathan’s house too, small and square, painted an incongruously cheerful lemon yellow. A clip of Nathan’s mother, standing on what appeared to be the front porch, looking shocked and small as she was bombarded with questions. He’s a good boy. Another woman, no evident authority on anything, spat into a microphone, asserting she didn’t believe any mother couldn’t have known there was a serious problem. Easy to blame the mother, Maggie thought.

  “Okay,” Maggie said, turning the TV off. “Dinner.”

  Anna was still curled in the window, glued to her phone. “Really?” she said, glancing up. “That feels wrong.”

  “What does?”

  “Acting like this is a normal day.”

  “Even on an abnormal day,” Maggie said, “one must eat.” She didn’t feel like eating either, but hoped the routine—the food—would be good for Anna. She retreated to the kitchen and pulled the chicken off the stovetop, slid two potatoes from the oven, went to set the pans on the table. Then she thought better of it and filled two plates.

  “I’m not very hungry,” Anna said from the kitchen doorway. Her cheek was pink where she’d peeled it from the windowpane.

  “You haven’t eaten all day.”

  “I know. I’ve been too upset.”

  In the past, Maggie might have pressed the issue, but today she’d let it slide. In forty-eight hours, Anna would be starting a new life at college, and Maggie wanted to send her into it with as much confidence as she could.

  “Well, you can keep me company, then,” Maggie said, pulling back a chair.

  Anna dropped into her seat at the kitchen table and set her phone beside her, briefly considering her food. Maggie studied her daughter’s face surreptitiously, felt a pang of tenderness at the beads of sweat gathering in the tiny blond hairs above her lip. The kitchen was too warm. Thoughtless, to turn the oven on. Still, she began slicing into her chicken as Anna looked up, saying, “Did I tell you the latest about Laura Mack?”

  In the absence of information about the victims, Laura’s story was the main anecdote to have emerged from the afternoon; she’d overheard Anna rehashing it several times.

  “You did.” Maggie nodded. “Janie’s friend.”

  “But did I tell you she heard the gunshots?”

  “No,” Maggie said, and paused, fork in midair. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “She actually heard the shooting. And the people, you know, screaming. Dying, maybe.” Her eyes welled with tears, a quick pool that surfaced then receded, and she shook her head hard. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  This was not an idle comment; Maggie understood how her daughter’s brain could get stuck on a thing, a needle skipping in a deep groove. “That must have been frightening,” she said, carefully. “I’m just glad she’s okay.”

  “I mean, she’s alive,” Anna said, pinching her bottom lip. “But she’s not okay. She’ll probably never be okay.”

  Her phone buzzed then, and Anna glanced down, picked it up.

  “What time are you due at Kim’s?” Maggie asked, forcing herself to take a bite.

  “Soon.” Anna looked up. “I need to shower, actually. I’m disgusting.”

  “Will you eat something later, at least?” Maggie asked—she couldn’t help it.

  “Don’t worry,” Anna said, scraping back her chair. Maggie traced the sound of her feet racing up the creaky staircase, the bedroom door shutting, mournful strains of that Adele song seeping through the floor. Then she set her fork down too. Briefly, she closed her eyes, felt the tension that had been collecting in her jaw all afternoon release in a slow ache. When she opened them, it was remarkably all still there—the high beamed ceilings, the soft pile of logs by the woodstove, the sun-bleached pillows piled in the window seat. It was on these days, the worst days, that Maggie was struck hardest by her affection for this old place. She was painfully aware that, in other rooms tonig
ht, other houses, other mothers were not so lucky.

  The ring of the phone startled her—probably another of Anna’s friends’ parents, she thought, even while she braced herself for the possibility of something worse—but as she picked up, she saw Tom’s name on the machine. “Hi,” she said, sliding the phone under her chin.

  “Maggie?” He sounded panicked, breathless.

  “Tom?” She moved the phone to her hand. “What is it?”

  “You’re home?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “And Anna’s there?”

  “She’s right upstairs.”

  “She’s okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. She’s here. She’s fine.”

  Tom blew out a long breath. “I just heard,” he said. “I was in a meeting all day. And no one called.”

  “Oh.” Maggie paused. “I’m sorry. I assumed she had.” She did feel sorry, and so refrained from pointing out the irony: Tom, a graphic designer, was forever glued to screens.

  “I tried her phone five minutes ago—”

  “She’s here. She’s in the shower. She’s going out.”

  “Right.” He expelled another breath. Maggie waited, letting him absorb the fact of Anna’s safety, standing at the sink by the window. Just past seven, and the sun was already sinking behind the trees.

  “Okay.” When Tom spoke again, the panic seemed to have left him, in its place a tender matter-of-factness. “So, how is she?” he said.

  Four years later, this was still the place Maggie and her ex-husband met and merged, the soft center of their bitterness: How is she? They both knew the potential it had to feed their daughter’s anxieties, a thing like this. They had become wary, vigilant, after years of apparent ignorance. None of those things struck you as unusual? Jim Whittier had asked, in what would be their final session, and Maggie had felt a blast of fury—weren’t therapists supposed to use language that was neutral, non-judgmental, non-blaming?—just before she began to cry.

  Because the truth was, over the course of Anna’s childhood, there had been things that marked her as extra-nervous, extra-sensitive. Little things. The way she’d sobbed over dead animals by the roadsides. The way she’d fretted about the fish in the fountain at the mall, afraid they might swallow the pennies and die. She’d always loved to read but couldn’t bear books with sad endings, avoided small spaces and locked doors and darkness—but wasn’t this true of many children? How was a parent to tell the difference between a phase and something more deep-seated and real? By the time she was ten, Anna’s fears had turned toward the hypothetical: fear of being homeless, being abandoned, kidnapped, abducted, shot. Sometimes she came into their room at night, frightened not by a nightmare but by a story of her own making, a fire she’d convinced herself was sidling through the walls or a robber she’d heard crawling across the roof. It’s all in your head, Maggie would say, trying to erase her fears. Maggie’s mode of response had always been firm and forward-looking, determinedly positive. For these hadn’t seemed like problems, or symptoms. If anything, they seemed evidence of Anna’s intellect and imagination. She was a straight-A student, a talented writer, a fast and dedicated swimmer. True, Maggie hadn’t been inclined to poke too hard or look too closely—if Anna seemed fine, she was fine. It was impossible to imagine that she wasn’t.