If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  Later, Maggie would go picking through the rubble, turning moments over in her hands. The time she’d arrived to pick up Anna at Janie’s house and watched from the car as she jumped rope, her movements light and buoyant, but on her face a driven sort of grimness. The time, after a swim practice, she’d discovered her counting tiles around the lip of the pool. But it was when Tom left that whatever trouble had long been brewing inside their daughter had hardened into fact: a rapid and distressing thinness. An obsession with swimming that was joyless and strange. A call from the coach when she collapsed one day after practice. Panic disorder, diagnosed Theresa Massey, the counselor at the high school whom Anna began seeing sophomore year. Tom, living in Portland by then, had proposed that Anna was acting out to give them a reason to be in contact, hoping their worry for her might bring them back together—it’s not uncommon, he said, no doubt quoting the social worker girlfriend, in whom he’d evidently been confiding about their daughter. Maggie’s daughter. Fuck you, she said. The outrage had nearly split her in two.

  “She’s spooked,” Maggie said now, watching the sky. The sunset was incongruously, inappropriately beautiful, sweeping strokes of red and purple thickening into a band of deep gold. “Naturally. She’s unnerved.”

  “Unnerved how?”

  “I mean, unnerved in a normal way,” Maggie clipped, but she couldn’t blame him for asking. “She’s okay, though,” she said, adding, “They all are, from what I can tell.”

  “Thank God,” he said. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”

  From upstairs, Maggie heard the shower shut off, a deep shudder in the pipes. The line went quiet, though she could hear Tom’s breaths. Now that his panic had receded, the space between them felt once again vast, unswept and groundless. Maybe Anna hadn’t been entirely wrong: Without their concern for her to unite her parents, a tide pulled back and left them stranded.

  “Is she packed?” Tom asked.

  “Getting there,” Maggie said. From upstairs, she could hear the bumping of dresser drawers. “They’re having a sleepover tonight,” she offered.

  “Oh?”

  “The three of them. At Kim’s.”

  “Well,” he said. “That’s probably a nice thing. Comforting, I mean.”

  “Right,” Maggie said. She had felt the same way. It was endearing, the girls reverting to their adolescent rituals in the final few days before heading off to college. In junior high, sleepovers had been their Friday-night routine: renting movies from Reel Video, staying up all night whispering, eating pizza from Romeo’s and slathering frosting on saltines. This was before boyfriends, before the divorce, before Anna would refuse to let pizza or frosting cross her lips. Even then, though, Kim and Janie had always stood by her, and Maggie was grateful for their loyalty. It was they who had sought out Maggie three years ago, showing up together at her office on campus, Kim wiping at her eyes while Janie did the talking, telling her they thought Anna might be cutting. (Maggie would never forget the pause she took before the meaning of the word sank in—foolishly, she’d first thought they meant skipping school.)

  “Did you know him?” Tom was saying.

  “Who?”

  “This Dugan kid?”

  Maggie detected a faint tapping sound. Naturally, Tom was at the computer. There was another sound too—the drone of a vacuum, or a hair dryer. She hated that she noticed, hated that she cared. She knew, of course, that Tom had had girlfriends (after the inevitable breakup with the social worker), but this new one, Felicia, seemed to have stuck. She was younger, and worked in marketing. Anna said they’d met online. Maggie didn’t know much more than this, though evidently she would be meeting her on Sunday. She was coming to campus for drop-off, information Tom had relayed in an email titled heads-up.

  Tom said, “Because I read that he went to the college—”

  “Yes, I know he went to the college, Tom. He was my student.”

  “Oh,” Tom said, and paused. “My God, Mag.” Silence, this time a kind of awe, swelled on the line. The tapping ceased. Maggie closed her eyes. She could picture just how Tom looked when absorbing news that was sad or shocking: the moment’s stillness, then the flexing of his hands, just slightly, as if making sure that, cast in the light of this newly altered world, everything still worked. “When?”

  “Four years ago,” she said. “The year you left,” she added, then felt low. “Anna’s freshman year of high school.”

  “Which class? Comp?”

  “Comp, yes.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “What was he like?”

  Maggie stared at the darkening sky, strewn now with torn purple clouds. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get away with the sort of non-answer she’d given Robert. Of all people, Tom knew how much she poured into her students. Of the many surreal aftershocks of divorce, this one had never stopped surprising her: Though her marriage had ended four years ago, and Tom now lived in Portland with another woman, it was he who really knew her—or knew her as much as any one person could really know another.

  “Do you?” Tom was saying. “Remember him? Anything off about him?”

  Off—this wasn’t the right word either. It implied a student who was imbalanced, truly and unmistakably, and surely Nathan Dugan had not been that.

  “Not really, no,” she said. “Not exactly.” She watched the night gathering outside the window. Soon it would be dark out, true dark. From the corner of her eye, she saw a shadowy movement in the garden. Quickly she crossed the kitchen and flung open the screen door, but by the time she stepped outside, the creature was running back to the woods.

  Maggie had taught in a basement annex of the English building that semester: Room 14C. It was not a good room. Cold in winter, warm in summer. In the coldest months, the radiator had emitted ghostly clanks and bangs. The windows were narrow rectangles at the top of the wall, like holes in an aquarium lid, level with the brick footpath on the quad. Through them she could check the weather—the softly piling snow or pelting rain—and the rush of boots and sneakers, which would thicken and disperse between classes. From Room 14C, Maggie was aware of the world outside, though the world—save a thin band of light that fell on the footpath in the evenings—was, certainly, unaware of them.

  She remembered that class, Nathan Dugan’s. Even after twenty-eight years, each of Maggie’s classes remained a distinct imprint in her mind: a sense, a shape. The configuration of chairs, the time of day, the size and appearance of the room. And the mood, which was about the distribution of boys and girls, shy students and talkers. Unlike Robert’s lectures, a writing class was a delicate infrastructure; so much relied on the particular alchemy of the fifteen personalities in the group. From that class, Nathan’s class, Maggie remembered Ashley Shay, a sturdy, red-cheeked girl from Washington County with a big laugh and an easy confidence—a girl who faintly glowed with self-esteem (which perhaps had been of particular note to Maggie then, as her own daughter’s problems consumed her). Hannah Chaffee dressed like a hippie, in long skirts and braids, an eyebrow ring; she wrote a starkly moving essay about an abortion she’d had at sixteen (certain phrases still resurfaced sometimes for Maggie—the gasp of the aspiration machine). Katie Sutton had described the heartbreak of her parents selling her childhood home, a farmhouse—cedar logs, red door, lovely parents hauling wood and heating cocoa; it had been overly sentimental, and couldn’t have been entirely truthful, but still Maggie had been charmed—jealous maybe—of the impossibly perfect light in which Katie still viewed her mom and dad.

  They were that kind of class: sensitive and serious, a class of girls mostly, eager to share and listen, making it even more regrettable that Nathan was getting in the way. This, Maggie knew, was why she wasn’t cut out for teaching high school, where more concern was directed toward the students who were disruptive—the sullen ones, the lazy ones, the ones who needed to be corrected and chased. In college, the students were responsible for themselves. Her job, as she saw it, was not to pay
undue attention to the troublemakers but to minimize them, prevent them from ruining the experience for everybody else. Under the best of circumstances, it happened organically, for the other students were so invested in the class that the outlier was shamed into caring about it too.

  With Nathan, it was different; his disruptiveness wasn’t laziness or insolence, something he could be manipulated into changing. The very inattentiveness that made him uncomfortable to be around made him impervious to change. Maggie could only try to alleviate the uneasy feeling that was generated by his presence. More than Nathan himself, this was what she remembered: the feeling in the room. How, if he was absent, the atmosphere loosened. How, when he was there, it shifted and morphed to accommodate him, like a river around a rock. When she broke the class into small groups to trade papers, she took care to partner Nathan with students she felt might be less bothered by him. On the occasions he spoke in class, he’d usually start talking over someone, prompting Maggie to remind him to raise his hand, and the student to flash her a sympathetic look. From time to time, in classes with problematic students, Maggie would feel the others looking at her, trying to commiserate and empathize, to wince or roll their eyes; tempting as it was to indulge those moments of connection, they were nonetheless something she tried to avoid. With Nathan’s classmates, though, Maggie sometimes let herself reciprocate—a tight smile, a quick nod, grateful, apologetic, an affirmation of how they were feeling, assurance that she felt that way too.

  One such incident, that spring, was with Meredith Kenney. Meredith was the kind of student who was endlessly positive—praised every paper, agreed with every comment—because she either lacked a critical edge or was simply too nice to offend. Not surprisingly, her own writing tended to be safe, somewhat narrow, until, that April, her brother was killed in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. Maggie had been notified by the dean of students, excusing Meredith’s absences; when she returned to class, the death was on her face. But to Maggie’s surprise, her first week back Meredith volunteered to read out loud about her brother—a flood of raw, shocked feeling—reducing her classmates to a stunned silence. It was Nathan who jumped in quickly, immediately pointing out the technical flaws in her description of the IED. The rest of the class turned, appalled, to Maggie. That may be factually correct, she said, cutting Nathan off midsentence. But let’s consider what’s really important here. She was filled with rage; it was almost freeing. Nathan didn’t reply. So she let his ignorant comment land, like a foul smell in the corner, and pivoted away from it. Focused all her energies on Meredith, on her essay. On the other students, the better students, who now had their hands high, ready to commend Meredith for being so brave.

  Maggie woke on the couch to the ringing of the phone. The windows were black; it looked late, felt late. She hurried to the kitchen and, upon seeing an unlisted number, felt the blast of worry she always did if the phone rang at night and Anna wasn’t home.

  “Maggie?” The voice was familiar but not immediately placeable.

  “Yes?” She stood in the darkened kitchen, the phone in both hands. “Yes? Who’s this?”

  “It’s Bill,” he said. “Bill Wall. I apologize for calling at this hour.”

  “Oh—Bill.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No, no,” she said as her eyes moved to the clock—eleven thirty-nine. “It’s fine. I was awake.” She flipped the switch above the toaster and pulled the top of her bathrobe closed, squinting into the light of the hanging lamp.

  “Not easy to sleep after a day like this,” Bill said.

  His voice sounded different, she thought, thinner than it did at school, though in fact she had never spoken to him on the phone.

  “No,” she said, “it isn’t.” She took a seat at the kitchen table, waited. Outside, the crickets chirped their sleepy, syrupy night song.

  “I’m calling about one of your former students,” Bill said, clearing his throat.

  “Yes.” Maggie paused, disoriented. “Nathan Dugan—”

  “Well, no. A different student. A Luke Finch.”

  Luke Finch: Maggie stared at the nicked kitchen table as the memory gathered in her mind. Luke had been in that same comp class, Nathan’s class. Thin-faced, narrow-shouldered. Huddled in his desk, chest pressed forward and knees locked. There was a melancholy about him, Maggie remembered, yet its source never made itself known. He spoke only if called on. He often doodled when Maggie was talking, though she understood this wasn’t necessarily a mark of rudeness; for certain kids—shy ones, usually—it was a form of concentration, a distraction that actually helped them focus more.

  “I remember Luke,” she said.

  “Same class as Dugan.”

  “Yes,” she said. He was from Maine, she thought, north of Augusta. And then—maybe because today it seemed so indiscriminate, so plausible—she was seized with a quick fear that he was dead. “Is he all right, Bill? He wasn’t—”

  “No, no. He’s fine.” Bill cleared his throat again, as if gathering loose strands of thought. “He put something online,” he said. “Something he wrote about that class.”

  Maggie leaned one hip against the counter. This was surprising. Like Luke himself, his essays tended to be quiet, unrevealing. “Okay,” she said. “What is it?”

  “A post on Facebook,” Bill said. “You know, social media—”

  “Yes, I’m aware of Facebook,” she said, with a laugh. “I may be our resident Luddite, but not even I am that out of touch.” Bill didn’t laugh. Maggie was struck then by the peculiarity of the moment, these two parts of her life intersecting: her worn bathrobe, Bill Wall’s voice on the telephone, the stick of butter softening on the table, bugs bumping gently against the screen. “What does it say?”

  “He talks about Dugan,” Bill said. “About that class, and things he observed about him. Some are relatively innocuous, but he also mentions some unusual behaviors. And he suggests Dugan wrote a paper that was potentially—well, incriminating.”

  Maggie tensed. “Incriminating?”

  “That’s the implication,” Bill said.

  “Is that the word he used?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think he—”

  “I’d like to know his exact words. Please.”

  As she waited, Maggie could feel emotion welling inside her—heartbeat thumping, some unformed dread rising—and tried to remain empty, to stay on the surface. She reminded herself that, for Bill Wall, the word incriminating might apply quite broadly, especially tonight.

  “Here it is,” Bill said. “The Facebook post.” Again, he paused, clearing his throat. “I won’t read the whole thing. You won’t have any trouble finding it. But he says here that Dugan wrote, and I’m quoting, ‘a paper that was really weird. So today when I heard what he did there was a part of me that didn’t feel surprised.’”

  “‘Really weird,’” Maggie repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Weird? Weird how?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, Bill, but I really don’t remember,” she said, and this was not untrue. What she remembered about Nathan Dugan was the quality of his presence. About his papers she remembered only the feeling of them, airless and dense. “He may have written something about his father,” she said. “But I can’t recall the details.” She paused. “It’s been years. Four years.”

  “Yes. Four,” Bill said. Was he trying to imply that she’d been negligent? That she didn’t pay attention to her students, didn’t remember every single one of them? The irony—Maggie almost laughed out loud.

  “It’s a long time,” she said. “Luke may not be remembering things entirely clearly.”

  “That may be,” Bill allowed. “Nonetheless, his post is already generating a fair amount of attention. We should be prepared, just in case.”

  “Prepared?” A hum had started to gather in her ears. “Prepared for what?”

  “It’s not impossible it could lead to ques
tions,” Bill said. “About Nathan’s performance in your class—his behavior, and what he wrote. Fortunately, these shouldn’t be too difficult to answer. I assume you kept the required student writing samples.”

  “Well, yes,” she said. In fact, she had a barn full of them—but there were hundreds. Thousands. Unlike most faculty, who accepted papers electronically, even required them, Maggie still insisted on hard copies: real, bound, to be read in their solid, substantive form. “I mean, I always do,” she said. “I always have.”

  “Good,” Bill said. His relief was palpable through the phone. “Let’s meet tomorrow then, my office, and bring whatever you—”

  This time, Maggie let out a short laugh. “Do you really think that’s necessary? On a Saturday?”