If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  For Arlen Mackey, the outing of this four-year-old essay is proof that Nathan Dugan’s violent tendencies had deep roots. “It shows the way his mind worked,” Mackey continued. “It shows he was already planning. He was thinking about this even back then.”

  Patricia Brooks, a psychologist who studies the pathology of shooters, says it’s not unusual for an inclination toward violence to emerge in written form. “There are almost always signs, if people are looking closely,” Brooks says. “Sometimes they are quite obvious. Writing that glorifies violence is certainly one place they can emerge.”

  Read the full text of Nathan Dugan’s essay below.

  Maggie felt a tunnel of adrenaline engulf her, legs to scalp. Her eyes jumped to the bottom of the article and there it was: “The Hunting Trip.” Not just the text but an actual scan of the physical paper, folds and all, that she had handed Robert a few days before. There was the drive to the woods, the litany of guns. Her handwritten comments in the margins, the noncommittal C+. She stared, disbelieving, at the screen. How had this copy ended up in this boy’s hands? It couldn’t have been Robert. After last week’s argument in his office, they’d both been carefully apologetic. When they spoke on the phone, a day later, Robert said he’d reread it, and that although in his opinion the paper seemed unhinged—his word—his advice was to do nothing. Practically speaking, there was no point. She had planned to retrieve the paper when they met tonight after class. Had he inadvertently left it sitting somewhere in public? In that coffee shop he liked? Maggie tried his cell phone. Voicemail. Tried his office. She heard laughter in the hallway and was reminded of the pending appointments with her students, then dashed off an email canceling the rest of her office hours, and class later that afternoon, and was just trying Robert’s phones again when there was a quick rap at the door. She held still, fearing the dean, but heard: “Maggie. It’s me.”

  When he stepped inside, Robert looked ashen, slightly winded. His shirt collar was dark with sweat. He shut the door, tossed his briefcase on the floor, and dropped to a chair, the one usually reserved for students. “It was Suzanne,” he said, then added, “My wife,” in case there was any doubt.

  Maggie held herself in place. Despite her panic, she remained acutely aware of the world outside: the students in the hallway, the Thursday taking place on the other side of her door. “You showed her,” she said, managing to speak calmly.

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, of course not.”

  “How did this happen then?”

  “She found it,” he said. “In my briefcase. And made a copy—that’s why I didn’t know. Obviously I would have told you.”

  “But why—”

  “When she saw it, she pieced it together. About us.” He grimaced. “Apparently she’d had her suspicions for months.”

  “But—” Maggie’s thoughts were careening in all directions. “You’re separated. Living together but separated.” She looked at him. “That’s what you said.”

  “In my head, we were, I guess,” he admitted. “More than in hers.”

  Maggie’s first response was fury, but mostly at herself. Living together but separated. These words, like so many, were permeable, fickle, open to interpretation, able to be bought. And here she was thinking Robert had been doing the right and responsible thing, being sensitive to his wife’s feelings. She had believed his story; she had wanted to believe it. Yet on some level, hadn’t she known? Maggie recalled sitting in his office just last week, the tender sound of Robert’s voice on the phone. She had either been naive about the reality of the situation, or chosen to ignore it, which was almost surely worse.

  “She just told me this morning,” Robert said. Slumped in the chair, eyes on the floor, he reminded her of an irresponsible student. “She found the paper and when she saw that it was his, and saw your name, she somehow put two and two together—remember I told you she was having a hard time? After the victims? The girl, the hairdresser—she knew her. That’s why she mailed it to her boyfriend.”

  He rested his elbows on his knees, and Maggie stared at his scalp, the rim of sweat around his hairline. “Fiancé, you mean.”

  “Right.”

  “Arlen Mackey,” she added. “He’s a student here, you know. A business major. A senior.” She knew it didn’t really matter, but for some reason it felt important that he have the details right.

  Robert looked up at her. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. She just did this because she wanted to punish me.”

  “Please.” Maggie let out a short laugh. “She wanted to punish me.”

  Robert dropped his hands, let them hang between his knees. He seemed to have lost some of his physical clarity, features gone blurry, indistinct. “Have you talked to anyone yet?” he asked.

  “Like who?”

  “Bill? The newspaper? In the article, it said they tried to reach you.”

  “They did but—”

  “You ignored it again.”

  “No,” she said tightly. “I didn’t ignore it again. I didn’t get the message. Not until just now. Today. I guess it doesn’t occur to them, if you don’t call right back, you didn’t get it. That not everyone is attached to a phone twenty-four hours a day. That you should wait until you actually speak to someone before you assume they have nothing to say.”

  Robert gave her a deliberate look, but said nothing.

  “Where is it?” she asked him.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The paper. The original. You said she made a copy—”

  “It’s right here,” he said, gesturing to his briefcase.

  “I want it back,” she said.

  Maggie felt her jaw clenching as Robert reached for the briefcase, unzipped the pocket, and handed her the essay. It was still unfolded, one corner bent, crumpled slightly—she felt a spasm of protectiveness as she pressed it flat.

  She opened her desk drawer and slid the essay inside, just as the office phone began to ring. She looked at the extension. Bill again. Last week, after the article in the Sentinel, Bill had been mostly sympathetic—he’d acknowledged that the story had gone too far—but he hadn’t been pleased to learn that Maggie had ignored Julie Brody’s attempts at contact. Please pay attention to the students, he’d said. She could hardly bear to face him now.

  “That’s Bill,” she said, but made no move to answer. Robert didn’t seem to expect her to. She shut the desk drawer, and they sat in silence until the ringing stopped. Then Robert said, “He’ll want to know how it got out.”

  The apprehension on his face was undisguised, brow creased with worry, for it was easy enough to imagine where that conversation could lead. “I already told him I didn’t have it,” Maggie said. “I told him it was lost. Damaged, in a storm.” A ridiculous story—she felt ashamed to recall it. “So to admit to him now—”

  Robert nodded, as if confirming her assumptions. “It wouldn’t be good,” he said, and rubbed at a spot between his eyes. “Look,” he said. “It could have been another student who still had a copy. Maybe it was this other kid, the Facebook kid. Or maybe it was in Dugan’s house. Maybe it was the mother—”

  “No one would believe it was the mother.”

  “Well,” Robert said. “Regardless.” He sat up straighter, and she could sense his energy returning. He swept one hand through his hair. “It’s not your job to know. As far as you’re concerned, your student wrote a paper four years ago. Maybe you should have acted on it, maybe not. That’s a moot point. But to tell Bill you found it, and lied about it—don’t jeopardize everything over this.”

  It was the word lied that jarred Maggie the most, although there was no denying it was the correct one. That was what she had done, what she would do again. For the alternative was impossible to imagine, the permanent damage to her reputation. She hated that she’d done it, but couldn’t undo it: another lie, or the same lie, growing deeper and wider, like the rings of a tree.

  From the hallway, there was a burst of noise—cla
ss being dismissed on a Thursday; for some, the unofficial weekend beginning—and seconds later, a knock at the door. Robert’s eyes locked on hers, but she knew it wasn’t Bill. The knock was too hesitant. A student, she thought, one who’d been in class and didn’t know that office hours had been canceled. Without discussion, they both stayed quiet, listening to the choreography of sneakers shuffling, pack unzipping. A paper appeared like a receipt slid beneath the door. Maggie bent to retrieve it. “The Importance of a Ballfield” by Adam R. Gillis. A title page, even a middle initial. The fact that this neatly typed, correctly formatted paper was from Adam, of all people, made her feel like breaking into tears.

  The sneakers retreated, melting into the commotion on the other side of the door. But when Maggie looked to Robert, his attention had gone elsewhere. “There’s something else I haven’t told you,” he said. “About Suzanne.”

  It alarmed Maggie, how quietly he spoke. She braced herself, tried to detach herself from the moment, but was helplessly rooted in her own skin. “Okay,” she said.

  “It’s the reason she’s been kind of irrational lately,” Robert said, then ran one hand roughly down his face. “She’s been sick.”

  “Sick,” Maggie repeated. “You mean the depression,” she said, understanding as she said it that it must be something more.

  “She’s fine,” Robert said, the way one preempts news of a car accident. “But she had cancer. Breast cancer.”

  “Breast cancer.” A low sound, a buzzing, climbed into her ears. “When?”

  “She’s going to be fine,” he said again. “It’s in remission.”

  “When was she diagnosed?”

  “The drugs, though. She hasn’t been herself. She’s been very emotional. Her attachment to this girl, for example—”

  “Robert,” Maggie interrupted. “When?”

  He forced himself to look at her. His eyes were a sharp blue, the lashes stuck together in wet points. “March,” he said.

  “March.” She stared. “So she had cancer when we—”

  “She asked me not to tell anyone.”

  “Well, wasn’t that noble of you,” Maggie snapped. Her anger felt swift and sure, oddly light. She didn’t bother pointing out the flaws with this code: that he was upholding his ethics, keeping his promise to his sick wife, even to the woman he was cheating on her with. “You should have told me,” she said. “Then at least I could have known what I was doing. I could have made a decision—”

  “She asked me not to tell anyone. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone. She didn’t want people knowing.”

  “And who would I have told? I didn’t exist.”

  “Maggie,” he said, and shook his head. “That isn’t true.”

  “Now I’m not only a woman who was involved with a married man, I’m a woman who was involved with a married man whose wife has cancer,” she said. Her voice shook with anger. “You turned me into something worse than I am.”

  Robert rested his head in both hands. He looked genuinely remorseful—whether because he’d stayed with his wife or cheated on her, Maggie couldn’t say. “What I told you about our marriage,” Robert said hoarsely. “All our problems, it was true. They were all true. But this is why I never felt that I could leave her,” he said, and for a moment Maggie thought this had all been preamble to his telling her that now that his wife was cured, he was free. But what he said was “I just wanted you to know this wasn’t like her,” and there it was: the irrevocable shift. Robert was pivoting toward his wife, protecting her, defending her. It was over between them, Maggie thought. Of course it would be.

  On a Thursday evening, Tilghman Hall was nearly empty. Walking the corridors, Maggie glimpsed classrooms in endearing disarray, desks pushed in random configurations, whiteboards covered in scribbles, trash cans piled high with empty coffee cups and plastic water bottles. The air smelled of sweat and berry lip gloss. When she entered the administrative annex, everyone had left for the day except Holly. Maggie walked past her desk, gesturing toward Bill’s office. Holly was scrolling through Facebook. “He knows you’re coming,” she said.

  Bill was standing by the window. His chin was down, glasses hanging from the chain around his neck. She heard a tinny clinking sound, like a quickly dripping faucet, and realized he was making a cup of tea. “Please,” he said. “Come in.”

  Maggie sat in the same chair she had last occupied six weeks ago. On that day, Bill had been shocked and disoriented, uncharacteristically unkempt. Now, as he returned to his desk and settled his cup on a coaster, his bearing was proper, sober, straight.

  “When we talked before,” he began, “you said you’d looked for Nathan Dugan’s writing but couldn’t find it.”

  The lack of preamble caught Maggie by surprise. “I did,” she said. “I mean—yes, well, not that I couldn’t find it. That I no longer had it.”

  “But obviously someone had a copy,” he said.

  “Yes.” She shook her head, trying to suppress the rising tide of guilt. “I can’t imagine who,” she said. “I wish I could.”

  Bill was frowning. “And why was it sent to this young man? Arlen Mackey? He’s a student here, you know,” he added, as if this made it all the more incomprehensible.

  “I know,” Maggie said. “It’s awful.” An insufficient word—it was more than awful. This boy’s life had collapsed at his feet.

  “I find this greatly concerning,” Bill said.

  “It is,” Maggie replied. “He’s so young—”

  “I meant the essay. Dugan’s essay. It’s very disturbing.”

  She had anticipated Bill’s concern, but not this level of candor, of sureness. “I suppose it is,” she said. “It is now, certainly—”

  “I fail to see how, at any point, this essay wouldn’t have raised alarm,” Bill interrupted. “A student wrote about weapons, Maggie, in elaborate detail, and you ignored it.”

  “Well, no,” she said. “I didn’t ignore it. I guess, at the time, I just didn’t find it that—disturbing.”

  “Well, then, that concerns me greatly too,” Bill said.

  Maggie was trying to regain her equilibrium. On the quad outside, students passed by, laughing, on their way to dinner. She was overcome with emotion—tenderness and terror—feelings so acute they left her paralyzed. “I understand it looks bad,” she managed. “But please know I take this very seriously. I can assure you, contrary to what you’re probably thinking, I’m actually quite good at recognizing students who need help.”

  Bill seemed not to have heard her. He was studying his tea. “We’ll be instituting a set of new policies,” he said.

  Maggie blinked at him. “Policies?”

  “From now on,” he said, “if a student writes about any inflammatory subject, faculty must report it.”

  “Inflammatory subject,” she repeated. “Such as?”

  “Any material that alludes, directly or indirectly, to feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, violence, hopelessness—”

  “But that’s every student, Bill. Every paper.”

  “That’s the policy,” Bill said.

  Maggie’s mind swam with half-formed objections. Such a policy would be imprecise, reductive, impossible to put into practice—and if a paper didn’t check at least one of those boxes, could it possibly be worth writing?

  “I am deeply sorry,” she told him. “If I underreacted. With Nathan. Certainly any paper that mentions guns, or implies any sort of violent behavior—I’ll be much more aware. But I don’t see how we can possibly—if students know we’re reporting every paper that hints at any kind of trouble, anything painful or personal, they’ll stop opening up, stop caring—and I wouldn’t blame them. That’s not a classroom that’s safe, Bill. It’s sterilized. I can’t teach that way.”

  But Bill appeared unmoved. He said only “We can’t take any chances.” Then he examined his hands, palms down on the desk. “I’ve always respected your dedication to your teaching, Maggie,” he said, and she felt a perempt
ory dread. “But I think you might consider taking some time.”

  Maggie looked up, stunned. “What do you mean?”

  “An administrative leave of absence,” Bill said. “I won’t require that you take one, but I’m urging you to consider it seriously. I’ve always liked you, Maggie, but we all need to get out from under this. For the school, and the students. And for you.” Perhaps registering her shock, he added, “It wouldn’t be permanent. But I believe it’s the right thing to do.” He paused. “Give it some thought,” he said.

  Maggie didn’t need to give it some thought: The proposal was out of the question. To leave midsemester, even voluntarily, would be an indictment, an admission of something. Lack of fitness, lack of judgment. An embarrassment in front of her colleagues, her students—how could Bill possibly think it would be better for her to abandon them halfway through the term? There was no way she’d agree to it, but the very fact that Bill considered it a reasonable course of action left her shaken. As she exited the building, Maggie was reduced to a handful of objectives: get across campus and into her car without falling apart.

  In the parking lot, she placed her bag on the seat and fumbled the key into the ignition. As she followed the eleven-mile road home—the stretch of campus, the mall, the road narrowing with trees—it all looked familiar and foreign at the same time. Destabilized: This was the word Theresa Massey had used to describe Anna when she first met her, and it seemed the right word now, the world having lost some essential reliability, its balance tipped, foundation gone. Even if Maggie had made an error in judgment—at this point, she was willing to admit this was true—a leave of absence was the sort of punishment leveled at a teacher who was untrustworthy, a liability—a Hank Dow, she thought. Some years ago, Hank had taken a leave after a student accused him of sexual harassment. He hadn’t come back; it was not the sort of thing from which a reputation recovered. Unthinkable, that Bill would put her in such company. Maggie had devoted her life to her teaching, to her students, often at the expense of other things—it needed to have been worth it. It was incomprehensible that she would be accused of not doing enough.