If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  “Stop,” she said, but Gavin kept going.

  “Gavin!” she said. She was nearly screaming. She yanked at his shirt so hard that he pulled up short and she fell into his back.

  “Jesus,” he said, but she felt him turn to face her. “What?” She couldn’t see him but she could smell the alcohol on his breath, which meant that he was close. He couldn’t have been more than a few inches away.

  “Gavin, we need to go back,” she whispered. “I’m not kidding.”

  “Why?”

  She heard a rustling in the leaves, an animal or a man’s footstep, and dug her nails into his shoulders. “Gavin,” she said. She was almost crying. “I’m serious.” Her ears were ringing and she knew that if she didn’t turn around now she would start hyperventilating. Desperate, she did the only thing she could think of to make him leave—she groped for his face and shoved her mouth against his. Instantly she felt the pressure of his tongue, and when within seconds he was under her shirt, fumbling at her bra, she said, “No—not here,” and pushed him back toward the mouth of the trail. “Hurry,” she said, holding his hand and trying to breathe normally, stepping on the backs of his flapping Tevas. When she spotted lights ahead—thank God, thank God, thank God—and they stepped into the street, she dropped Gavin’s hand and bent forward and drew a few lungfuls of air, bracing her hands on her knees.

  When she stood upright, Gavin was looking at her strangely. Anna wiped at her tears. She didn’t say anything, and neither did he, except to ask: “Are you okay?” She nodded. Sensation was returning—her vision sharpening, the buzz subsiding in her ears. “You sure?” he said, and when she nodded again, they started slowly back toward the house. Gavin took her hand, not minding that it was limp and clammy, and after a minute started talking about his new roommate at UVM, who seemed like a pretty cool guy, a lacrosse player. Anna had never been so grateful for his solid boyness, his normalcy. As they passed the pile of damp firewood, he stopped and turned to her. “You still with me?” he asked, and then he kissed her, and she knew it was because he wanted to make sure she didn’t get too sleepy or change her mind. But she wouldn’t change her mind. Back in Gavin’s basement, she would have sex with him just to prove she was okay—a nostalgia fuck, she would report to Kim and Janie later—then she would try to put this night, this whole day, behind her. In the morning, she would go home and she would finish packing for college, and when her mom asked about the sleepover at Kim’s, she would say that it was fine, it was like old times.

  Three

  The old red barn looked romantic from a distance, but up close it was sagging, soft with neglect. The shingles were loose, the paint chipping. The roof was skimmed with moss and the gutters choked with damp leaves. Still, Saturday morning, standing at the kitchen window as the sky grew light, Maggie felt as if she were gazing at a postcard. That was just the sort of lazy cliché she instructed her students to avoid, but in this case, it was the truth.

  It was just past dawn, a private hour. The sky was the color of wet lilac, the moon a pale wedge suspended just above the trees. Maggie had gone to bed well past midnight but slept fitfully, replaying her conversation with Bill Wall. Now she filled a thermos with coffee, ate a piece of dry toast standing at the kitchen counter. It would be hours yet before Anna made her way home. When she pushed open the back screen door, the air was light and cool, near weightless, an apology for its oppressiveness the day before. The morning sat thick and glittering, the only sounds the hum of unseen insects. As Maggie started across the wet grass, she saw that an animal had indeed torn into her garden overnight, dug its way under the wooden fence.

  Immediately after last night’s phone call, Maggie had gone on to her computer and managed to find—easily enough, to her surprise—the Facebook page of Luke Finch. Birthday: March 29. Hometown: Paxton, Maine. There were no pictures of her former student, at least none immediately visible. At the top of the page was a photo of two dogs, golden retrievers, and just below it, a post written ten hours before:

  I had a class with this kid

  Four years ago

  Today he shot and killed three people

  Then he killed himself

  The bluntness was jarring at first, though within just a few lines, Maggie could tell that this was not the Facebook post Bill had described. It was not intended to grab attention, go viral. I didn’t really know him but I still remember him, Luke wrote, and what followed was a litany of memories, an elegy of sorts.

  I remember these big headphones he used to hang around his neck

  The stress ball that he squeezed until his hand turned white

  The way he sat with his two pointer fingers pressed together

  Maggie had no memory of the stress ball (in fact, she found it hard to imagine), but she remembered the pointers. Indeed, he had sat like that.

  He wore this big green coat all year, Luke continued, and here Maggie bristled—see? She’d known how distracting that coat had been.

  The class I had with him was Freshman Comp with Daley

  Her chest tightened at the sight of her name on the screen. That Luke referred to her by her last name only was vaguely disorienting; it had a jocular quality more appropriate to a football coach but here, she thought, might confer a hint of disrespect.

  He always sat in the same seat in the front next to the window

  Sometimes he brought his dog to class

  He was always one of the first ones there

  Was he? Maggie hadn’t known this, but she wouldn’t have. She always arrived a minute or two late, to let a class settle in.

  He never talked to anybody and if he talked in class he kind of walked over people

  At this, she felt an old sting of remorse—that it had been so obvious, that she hadn’t better managed to control it.

  He wrote this paper that was really weird

  There: Maggie stared at the words, let herself absorb them. Read and reread them until they were drained of meaning. Weird. Weird. Weird.

  So today when I heard what he did there was a part of me that didn’t feel completely surprised

  And I wonder what that means

  If I knew deep down something was wrong with him

  Maybe I should have been nicer to him

  I didn’t really talk to him but now I wonder if it could have helped him

  If anybody else from that class is reading this please write back

  #classmate #millviewmallshooting #nathandugan #freshmanyear

  At twelve fifteen a.m., the post appeared to have been shared 1022 times.

  Maggie had read it twice more, sitting under the faint buzz of the lamp over the kitchen table. Each time, she actually felt a notch more reassured. Incriminating—surely that had been too strong a word. Bill must have been feeling rattled, overly sensitive, his judgment colored by the late hour or the horrific afternoon. For it was clear that Luke was not trying to agitate or provoke. He was shocked and saddened, trying to process his feelings, connect with his old classmates. In fact, rereading what he’d written, alone in her quiet kitchen, Maggie felt unexpectedly moved.

  As she neared the barn, the bottoms of her jeans were soaked and heavy. She stepped up to the wide, shallow puddle of mud by the door. When Tom lived there, the barn had been one of his ongoing projects—he’d planned to convert it to a writing studio for her one day—but in three years it had fallen into quick disrepair. Maggie hadn’t been in here since May, and when she pulled on the rusty handle and stepped inside, she was assaulted by the smell—trapped heat, wood, mildew. Something vaguely animal. Dust idled in the shafts of light beaming through the high windows, alighting on the dead and broken things strewn on the mud-streaked floor: a rusty lawn mower, a three-legged table, a stack of old snow tires. Anna’s bike leaned against the pile. As Maggie climbed the creaking ladder to the loft, the musty air rose with her. At the top, she surveyed the makeshift work space: a warped wooden chair, a desk made of a door propped on two old sawhorses, and the boxes. They
covered nearly an entire wall.

  According to the university handbook, all faculty were required to save samples of student writing: to maintain, for purposes of assessment, an archive of student work. It was one of many practices the previous dean had been lax about requiring, but under Bill’s watch had been strictly reinforced. Assessment metrics had been created, syllabi bloated with policies that made the students glaze over on the very first day of class. Faculty grumbled these things, about Bill in general—his methods were tedious, vaguely litigious—and Maggie understood their fatigue; when she was in college, a syllabus had often been a single, motivating page. Still, she respected Bill, how seriously he took things. And secretly, the collecting of student work was something she enjoyed; it was something she’d been doing for years. She’d always liked leaving with a tangible souvenir at the end of the semester: a record of the hard work done, the progress made. A paper trail of students she’d grown to know and, yes, love. If she rarely looked at them, she still liked knowing that she had them. Now, though, as she faced the wall of boxes—pliant, slumped against one another like piles of sleepy children—she felt only trepidation. Instead of amassing accomplishments, suddenly it seemed she’d been mounting evidence.

  This wasn’t an entirely new feeling. Over nearly three decades, Maggie had naturally encountered her share of troubling student work. Depression, addiction, mental illness, profound grief—the significant personal experience essay, cornerstone of the Freshman Comp curriculum, invited this kind of thing. Maggie had learned, repeatedly, how much of teaching was more than just teaching: the sensitive topics that might quickly boil to the surface, the thicket of personal problems a teacher might find herself wading through, undefended and unprepared. Every year some of the younger, more inexperienced instructors would come to view their classes like sessions of group therapy, mention their students’ problems at staff meetings with a flushed eagerness that looked more like excitement than concern. Maggie did not actively solicit such personal confessions, but her students offered them anyway. She was proud that they trusted her, proud to have fostered the type of class, year after year, that earned that kind of trust. For the freshmen, eighteen and homesick, she was the closest thing to a parent that they had. And usually, if she received a worrying paper, it was clear the student was telling her on purpose, asking for her help. Like Alison Bower, a bright, self-possessed young woman Maggie had watched unravel before her eyes—grades dropping, confidence disappearing, absences piling up. I think the world would be a better place without me in it, she’d written, setting in motion an urgent chain of events. Have you thought about committing suicide? Maggie had asked her—the recommended strategy, to her surprise, was to ask directly, but it worked. Then the teary confession, the phone call to the crisis line, the after-hours walk to the counseling center along icy footpaths, her hand bracing the girl’s narrow back. She still had the card she’d received from Alison later, thanking Maggie for all she’d done for her, standing on the shelf above her desk.

  This, Maggie thought, was why English teachers became the first line of questioning when tragedy struck on a college campus: They were the ones who read the students’ papers, glimpsed their inner lives—the personal confessions, tendencies toward violence or self-loathing or despair. Why the entire Freshman Comp staff had once been required to sit through a meeting with the counseling center. Concerning Student Papers, it was called. In the meeting, the counselors had talked about identifying students in crisis, coached the writing teachers on what subtleties to look for: expressions of extreme hopelessness, lack of empathy, suggestions of violence toward self or others. This was shortly after the Virginia Tech shooting, Maggie remembered. Like everyone, she had followed the unfolding story in wordless horror. She’d watched one of the shooter’s English professors interviewed on CNN, admiring her clarity and courage as she described the disturbing material she’d seen in his work. How she’d taken it upon herself to tutor him individually because his presence in the classroom was unnerving. How she’d alerted the school, and the police, who couldn’t act unless the threats were more explicit—but of course they weren’t explicit, Maggie had thought, indignant on the teacher’s behalf. That was the problem; that was the point.

  The memory of this now was unsettling, but in a small way, consoling—Nathan’s work, while perhaps really weird, had been nothing like that. Still, as Maggie stood in the barn surveying the boxes, piled in a rough pyramid under the steeply slanting roof, nerves swept through her like a wave. She reached for the top of the pile, cursing herself for not dating the boxes, then grabbed a few and hoisted them onto the floor. Kneeling, she pulled the lid from the first box. On top sat a blue roll book with raised gold letters: TEACHER’S PLAN BOOK. It was the old-fashioned kind she’d always used, despite the pressure to migrate everything online. The names scribbled inside were too recent, but still Maggie browsed through the pile of revised, polished final essays underneath. She knew instantly they were a comp class—while students in her upper-level courses submitted formal, plain-faced final papers, the freshmen tended toward brightly colored folders, collages assembled from magazine pages. Some had price tags intentionally affixed, evidence of how much they cared. As Maggie picked through, proud, inspiring titles went flashing by. One Writer’s Journey. From Cowardice to Confidence. A few handwritten notes fluttered loose from the pages. Thank you for all your help! This was my favorite college class!!!

  These papers served to reassure her. This, she thought, was the teacher that she was. Her best self—for years, it had been part of her rationale to Tom for the long hours, the devotion to her students. She moved on to the next box, which was visibly older, cardboard furred at the corners. The papers inside were browning at the edges. Still, Maggie remembered every one. Sifting through the contents, she wondered what Anna would write about if given the assignment. A significant personal experience. There were so many difficult stories to choose from, so many unflattering lights—unshakable, naive, distracted—in which the mother character could be cast. Or perhaps Anna’s most significant experiences were ones in which Maggie didn’t even appear, feelings she’d never known her daughter felt. She recalled how, after Anna started seeing Theresa, she’d encouraged her to keep a journal, an idea Maggie liked; Anna had always loved to write. Maggie had allowed herself to peek inside the clothbound book only once—flipped through a few pages skimming lines about Gavin and Kim and Janie, convincing herself it wasn’t an invasion of privacy if she wasn’t actually pausing to read anything, until she alighted on think Mom could have tried harder to make him happy—then, startled, put it back.

  Maggie paused now to swipe the back of her neck. The loft was suffocating; the windows didn’t open, making the barn a greenhouse on a sunny day. When she and Tom had argued in here, it had been winter, and they both had been standing, boxers in a ring. She remembered the deep cold—the barn wasn’t heated—and how they were screaming at each other, absurdly, dressed in their hats and coats. Even now, Tom’s words echoed in the walls, pulsed like old injuries in bones. Are you blind? Have you even noticed how miserable I am? She remembered her shock at what he said, and at how he looked as he said it, pacing the old beams, face swollen in anger. It was a side of him she’d never seen before, never even known was there.

  She twisted her hair off her neck, tying it up with a thick, slightly gummy brown rubber band, and lifted the lid from the next box on the pile. The pages inside were stiff, pinched with flaking metal paper clips. A small brown spider scurried down one side. As Maggie kept digging, one old essay after the next, her sense of fondness gradually began to morph into a kind of sadness—how aged it all seemed. All the old courage and optimism, the passionate opinions and personal stories—stories that at the time had felt so urgent and necessary, full of unleashed feeling—written by eighteen-year-olds who were now adults with children and spouses, relegated to these boxes, wilted and dank.

  A headache was migrating across her scalp. Her knees ache
d. She picked the lid off the next box, velvety with dust, and when she opened up the roll book, her breath caught—Dugan, Nathan. Spring 2012. Carefully, she slid one finger along the row of boxes and check marks. B-, C+ on his major papers. Absent three times, never late.

  For a minute, Maggie looked up and watched the dust drift in the sunshine. Of course he was there; she had known that he would be. The three absences surprised her—she would have guessed more, so palpable was the memory of her relief when Nathan wasn’t there. She was afraid suddenly of what else she might have misremembered, what she might rediscover once she started looking. She was seized with the urge to abandon the mission entirely, close the box and return to the house—but no. She took a breath and resumed her task. And there they all were: that basement classroom, 14C. Hannah Chaffee’s abortion. Meredith’s lament for her brother. Luke Finch: a plain manila folder, an essay about his grandfather. My grandpa was a kind man: The plain language that on Facebook had felt appropriately spare, even respectful, in class—and perhaps especially that class, dominated by outspoken young women—might have been so understated it disappeared.

  She returned Luke’s folder, and already was nearing the bottom. She fantasized that by some twist of fate Nathan’s work hadn’t been saved with the rest of them—she could tell Bill that, unlikely as it sounded, it simply wasn’t there—but just as she allowed herself a premature flicker of hope: