If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  Nathan Dugan

  Final Paper

  May 3, 2012

  Professor Daley

  Freshman Composition Section 19

  Maggie removed Nathan’s paper and set it gently on her knees. Something about the actuality of it was startling: The same boy who would later walk into a mall with guns in a duffel bag, who would end his own life so gruesomely, had stuffed these very pages into his knapsack one morning before school. That same boy had sat in front of his computer and typed her name. He had been sitting in her classroom for an entire semester, within reach of her other students, of herself—it was not unrealistic to think something could have set him off. Maggie’s reprimand after he criticized Meredith’s essay? One of the quick looks she’d shared with the girls? She recalled the manager from the Walmart, saying he’d made people uneasy. Maggie had observed the same quality in Nathan but she had never confronted him, had avoided confronting him. If she had, might she have gotten to him in time? Steered him toward help? Or was it possible that, in this instance, her rare lapse in professionalism might actually have kept her students safe?

  She stared at the title page, damp fingertips puckering the margins. Unlike the others, Nathan’s paper had no cover, no clever title or colored binder. It had been typed on an old word processor, judging by the square font and green tint. A single staple was centered in the upper left-hand corner. Confusingly, when Maggie turned to the first page of his essay, she saw that this was the original draft, the version with her comments on it—Nathan had not bothered to revise it for the final. Not only that, he hadn’t even made the superficial gesture of printing off a fresh copy. At the top, in a quick flourish, Maggie had scribbled: C+. The most neutral of grades, the most noncommittal. The look of the pages was much as she remembered—long unwieldy paragraphs, narrow margins—but when she turned back to the beginning—

  The Hunting Trip

  Maggie held very still. She stared at the sunlight that had crept over her knees.

  On a Saturday morning in October my dad and me decided to go hunting. We left the house at 5:00 a.m. My dad was a corporal in the US Army. It was a ritual we had.

  So Nathan had, in fact, written about his father. Maggie was comforted that—in this detail at least—her memory was correct.

  My mother packed our lunches and said for us to be careful. My dad said women always worry too much.

  She flinched at the casual disparagement of women, then reminded herself this kind of gender bias was not terribly unusual. It was something she encountered occasionally in her students—and challenged when she could, encouraging these teenagers to think more deeply about their worlds—but was a perspective difficult to isolate, it was so deeply ingrained.

  My dad and me loaded the truck and drove to the woods off of Route 70 near the intersection of Route 70 and Route 18. We wore camo pants and vests and face paint and carried daypacks which included: compass, hunting knife, lighter, GPS, ammo, two rifles and a AR-15.

  Maggie wiped her palms on her jeans. She reminded herself that these were kids from the country, kids who grew up hunting—certainly this was not the only hunting essay she’d received. Obviously hunting didn’t make you dangerous. Take the locals who converged on Dead River Market on November mornings, filling their thermoses with coffee, dressed in neon hats and jackets, guns stowed in truck beds. Take Dick Newland, some kind of pharmaceutical rep who hunted on the weekends; Anna had once mentioned that Gavin’s house was full of mounted heads.

  But as she kept reading, there were other things, smaller things. Bits of language—always, it was in the language. The clinical specificity of all the ammunition Nathan had carried into the woods with his father (featureless, except for his rank, and a brown Mazda B-Series truck). And the guns.

  I have hunted with many different types of weapons including: pellet guns and BB guns, bow and arrow, single shot 12 gauge shotguns, 22 gauge shotguns, 12 gauge auto, pump action shotguns, bolt action rifles (sniper rifles), big game rifles, AR-10s and AR-15s. Some people have no respect for using semiautos to hunt with or say it’s not PC but in the right hands they can be your best friend.

  Her breaths were light and careful. For the next two pages, the paper continued in this vein: a glossary of different weapons, different uses and specifications. Guns for hunting, for combat, for sandstorms, survivalist scenarios—pointless tangents as far as the essay was concerned. The guns weren’t on the page because they were relevant, or even because Nathan was trying to fill the required five pages, but because—Maggie sensed it in the quality of the sentences, the tunnel-like repetition, the tinge of relish—he simply liked thinking about them. He couldn’t help but think about them, like the student with an eating disorder who lapses into lush digressions about food.

  If I had to choose one gun for home invasions I would go with a pump action shotgun because it can blast through anything so if I was positioned to annihilate invaders the penetration would give me the upper hand. If I had to choose one for hunting and SHTF though I would choose the AR-10 semiauto because it can disable a car engine and quickly neutralize multiple targets at close range.

  And that was the end. There were no conclusions made, no insights drawn, not even a tidy, insincere final paragraph. The dad—along with the opening scene in the woods—had disappeared. The rest of the paper was single-minded, narrow in its focus, oblivious to its audience: thoughts dumped from head to page. This, though, Maggie reminded herself, was the quality of everything Nathan wrote; it was the quality of Nathan himself. Perhaps the military father was the detail she’d remembered because its presence at the time had reassured her, provided some context for Nathan’s knowledge of weapons, cast him in a softer light. Proven that his oddly detached tone could apply to any subject, even a person he loved. Now, of course, in light of the past twenty-four hours, the lists of guns looked troubling, but back then they likely struck her as the work of a lonely kid who lacked imagination, who was prone to digressions, a kid whose writing—whose person—simply lacked awareness, lacked depth.

  Maggie drew a breath. Then she returned to the beginning, reading again more slowly. This time, she paid attention to her own comments penned in the margins. Where usually she smothered students’ papers with notes, these were sparse, only two or three per page; the weaker the essay, of course, the less there was to say. Add paragraphs to help organize ideas. Avoid generalizations. Most of her comments were broad, generic. She winced at the scribbled vary word choice, next to the word annihilate, used twice.

  At the end of the paper, Maggie had scrawled: Ultimately I’m not quite certain what this essay is saying about the title “hunting trip.” What is its significance exactly? MD. She regretted not writing something more—more thoughtful, more motivating—though presumably she’d realized by then that there was little point. That Nathan didn’t take suggestions, that there were other more dedicated students she could be giving her time to, that his essay would come back exactly as it had been turned in.

  “Mom?”

  “Anna!” Maggie startled, palm pressed to her chest.

  Her daughter paused halfway up the ladder. “Yikes.”

  “You scared me,” Maggie said. “I didn’t hear you.” She wiped her runny nose with the back of one wrist, smelled the sour tang of her own skin. “I didn’t realize you were even home.”

  “It’s almost eleven,” Anna said, clearly confused. “I was looking all over for you. What are you doing up here?” She stepped off the ladder, ducking under the gabled roof. “And why don’t you open a window?”

  “These windows don’t open,” Maggie said. “They’ve never opened.”

  “Well, that’s helpful,” Anna said. “It’s like a sauna in here.” She shoved her sleeves up to her elbows, slipped a purple elastic from her wrist. Briskly, she snapped her hair up in a quick, emphatic knot. “But seriously,” she said, glancing around the room. “What is all this?”

  Maggie took in the mess of loose papers and dusty box
es. “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “I was just going through some old files.”

  “What’s that?” Her gaze had stopped on Maggie’s lap.

  Maggie looked down at the pile of limp pages: the march of square green letters, the old staple bleeding rust into the corner.

  “Oh my God,” Anna said. “Is it by that guy? Nathan Dugan?” She looked at Maggie’s face. “You kept it?”

  “Well, yes,” Maggie said. She gestured vaguely around the room. “Obviously, though, I keep papers from all my students—”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Just—a day trip.”

  “What kind of a day trip?”

  “Just a day he spent with his dad,” Maggie said.

  Anna pinched her lip. “Does he sound violent?”

  “No.” Maggie paused. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Can I read it?”

  For years, Anna had been curious about her students’ essays—it fascinated her that they were allowed to write about such personal things for school—but Maggie had never let her read them. It would have been unfair to the students, and unhealthy for Anna. Now Maggie shook her head and said, “You know that wouldn’t be right.”

  “But this is different.”

  “I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” Maggie said, which was true. Until she’d discussed the paper with Bill, it was best to keep it to herself. Besides, she could tell by the look on Anna’s face that the paper’s very presence was upsetting her. “In any case,” Maggie said, and forced a smile, a change of subject. “Tell me about you.”

  Anna paused with her lip. “What?”

  “Your night. The sleepover. Was it fun?”

  She looked over Maggie’s head, seeming to consider the question. It was then that Maggie really registered how tired and tense her daughter looked—the black liner smudged beneath her eyes, the clothes she’d worn the night before. “Not really,” she said. “We went to a party, actually. At Gavin’s.”

  “Oh?” This was a surprise—not that Anna hadn’t told her they were going, but that she was telling her now. It was also disappointing. Maggie felt saddened, disproportionately so, about the sleepover.

  “But don’t worry,” Anna continued. “We’re not back together. It was just a lame party that Kim and Janie seemed to think I should attend.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” Maggie said, though she had to admit, she was glad to hear it. Anna looked at the floor, the bright white squares of sunlight. Maggie waited a beat, and when no more information was forthcoming, tried “Was it hard to see him? Gavin? Was it—”

  “It wasn’t Gavin,” Anna cut in, and when she looked up, Maggie saw there were tears standing brightly in her eyes. “It was just the whole thing. The whole night. Everybody was just—you know, freaked out.”

  She looked shaken, Maggie thought. She looked scared. She imagined the scene at the party, Anna’s classmates speculating about the shooting, telling the kinds of stories that might have set her off. “Well,” she said, careful. “That’s only natural. That’s understandable.”

  “I know that,” Anna said miserably. She looked back down at the floor. It occurred to Maggie to wonder if anyone at the party had mentioned Luke’s Facebook post—but if Anna didn’t bring it up, she wouldn’t either. Instead she ventured, “You didn’t tell them he was my student, did you, Anna?”

  Her head snapped up. “Why? Was I not supposed to?”

  “No, no, I just wondered—”

  “I mean, I told Janie and Kim.”

  “And that’s fine,” Maggie said. Her armpits were sweating, the backs of her knees. “But you know, about this paper, I think it’s best if we not mention it to anyone else.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just—it’s a sensitive situation,” Maggie said. “Okay?”

  “Fine.” Anna shrugged. “I mean, what would I even say?” Then she was picking at her lip, and Maggie had to restrain herself from telling her to stop. From outside, she began to take in the distant sounds of late morning, the rumble of the tractor at the Lyonses’ down the road and a truck rattling by on Route 18. It was their last morning together, the last day her only child would live at home with her. In twenty-four hours, she would be leaving for college. Maggie knew it was entirely likely Anna would never live here again. She felt a quick swell of—was it sadness? Fear? “You promise you’ll be careful, Anna, won’t you?”

  A mistake—she knew this as soon as she saw the stricken look on Anna’s face. “Oh my God. Like what? Like I’ll try not to get shot?”

  “No, no,” Maggie said. “That isn’t what I meant. I just want to know you’ll take care of yourself. And you’ll call me. If you need me.”

  Anna covered her face with both hands and inhaled through her fingers. “You’re freaking me out,” she said, then started for the ladder. “I need to pack.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “I have to run over to school later, but I won’t be long. I can help when I get back. And I was thinking, for dinner, takeout—”

  “Kim and Janie are coming.”

  “That’s fine. I assumed so. We could do Romeo’s, for old times’ sake.”

  “Right.” Anna looked at her palms, squeezed them into fists. “I’m going down,” she said. “It’s too hot up here to breathe.”

  “Agreed,” Maggie said, but her daughter had already begun to leave. She listened to her descend the creaky ladder, the gentle slam of the barn door, then the quiet. The essay in question still stared up from her knees—quickly neutralize multiple targets at close range. Maggie closed her eyes until they watered. Then she took a breath, folded the paper and stuffed it in her pocket, and made her way back outside.

  From her front porch to the steps of Tilghman Hall, the road to campus was a virtually straight line. Maggie had always liked the simplicity of her commute: eleven miles linking work and home. She knew the road in all its variations, the way it transformed in different seasons—the edges softened by cattails and violets in early summer, the cocoons that grew on the trees each August like thick spools of yarn. In winter, the snow that mounted on the roadsides, the glimmers of black ice that once sent her car sliding and crashing, almost gently, into the Kirbys’ wooden fence. She knew the exact point at which the old farmhouses yielded to the tackle shop, the dairy barn, the now-defunct general store, and the brief, garish stretch of commerce—KFC, Pep Boys, True Value, Taco Bell, the mall, the Walmart—before morphing into campus where, for six blocks, Route 18 was renamed University Row.

  On a late Saturday afternoon in August, the sun was low and bright, the sky scudded with clouds. A few leaves were just turning—a flame of red, splash of gold. The car windows were down, the radio on. It was the first time Maggie had left the property since yesterday, and it felt disorienting to be outside. Here was the world, just as she’d left it. Her canvas boat bag sat on the passenger seat beside her, Nathan’s paper zippered into the inside pocket. Since that morning, she’d run the lines through her head multiple times, and still felt that her reasoning was sound. She hoped Bill felt the same.

  —victims in yesterday’s fatal shooting in Reed, Maine.

  Maggie made an involuntary sound, a small gasp, and reached to turn the volume up. As the trees swished by, under a beautiful summer sky, she listened as the county commissioner read the names of the dead. Betsy Crawley, from Reed, a mother of two small children. Frank Tremont, a high school math teacher in Essex County. Doreen Howard, from Millville, just nineteen. Joe Poole, mall security guard; he’d died that morning in the emergency room. Maggie didn’t know any of them—though she would recognize the guard, surely—and felt a momentary sense of relief. Then the grief struck her, heavy as a stone. A mother of young children. A nineteen-year-old girl. An interview was now playing with the girl’s fiancé. His voice was tearful and breaking. As she listened, Maggie could feel the weight of the tragedy subtly shifting: the shooting no longer a slow unknown unfolding before them but a terrible memory tak
ing shape behind them, facts disclosed and assembled, hardening into the past.

  As she rounded the bend in the road by Del’s Dairy Barn, caught up in her thoughts, she abruptly hit the brake. A column of traffic stretched before her as far as she could see—eight or nine cars, at least—before twisting out of sight behind the trees. Maggie stopped hard behind a white pickup truck, Maine plates. She lowered the radio to a murmur. Usually this sort of backup signaled a slow driver or meandering tourist somewhere up ahead bogging down the lane, but these cars were stopped completely. Maybe there was tree work, an accident. She strained to see a flagger up ahead directing traffic, but there were no cars coming in the opposite direction either. She noticed the truck’s engine was turned off—an ominous sign. Maggie turned hers off too. In the quiet, smaller sounds began surfacing. The chirp of crickets from the long grass by the roadside. Faintly, voices, a megaphone. She stepped out into the road, peering up ahead, and made out what looked like police cars, their sirens silently flashing, a scattering of traffic signs and orange cones.

  The mall, she thought, and her first instinct was panic—was it happening again? But of course the area around the mall would still be gridlocked. There would be media swarming the place; it had barely been twenty-four hours. Gawkers, maybe, or people leaving flowers and candles for the victims by the main entrance. She’d seen footage of the mounting pile on the news.

  She returned to the car, angry at herself. She should have anticipated this and allowed extra time. She cast an eye around the front seat, as if a solution might appear before her. To her left, Del’s was empty, a dirt parking lot with a scattering of wood-stump tables and chairs. A hand-lettered sign hung in the window: CLOSED. RIP. To her right, a plume of weeds, papery flutter of moths. Behind her, an SUV pulled up sharply, its silver nose filling up her rearview mirror. She checked her watch: three thirty-six. If she waited, inching her way past the mall toward campus, she would be unforgivably late. She wished she’d thought to bring Bill’s number; her flip phone wasn’t connected to the Internet. Still, she dug it from her bag and tried dialing Holly, the admin, a number she had memorized, but on a Saturday there was no answer. She tossed the phone in the cup holder. Her best option now would be to thread her way through the back roads behind the shopping plaza and reconnect with Route 18. She turned the car on, and the radio bounced back to life, seeming louder than it had before. It will take time for our community to heal from this senseless— She turned it off and eased onto the shoulder, raising an apologetic palm to the other drivers as she bumped along in the lopsided trench, carpeted with gravel, until a quarter mile later the first cross street appeared: Parrish Road.