by Elise Juska
In the dining hall Anna ate an apple and drank a Diet Coke and didn’t mention the article to Alexis. Because if she knew, they couldn’t not talk about it, and she didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want Alexis spreading the gossip to her hallmates who might start whispering about her mother or looking at her strangely. Anna needed to keep the two things separate: school life, real life. Let the two intersect, and no good could come of it.
Text Message James: The paper is pretty incriminating
Text Message James: Now we know why she didn’t want you seeing it
Anna waited to call her mother until Alexis was in the shower. “Don’t worry about any of this,” her mother said, hilariously.
Text Message James: Did you talk to her? What did she say??
Anna didn’t respond. She knew it would only encourage him. Then Alexis burst in, swathed in a giant towel, two beers in each hand. Not low-calorie, but who cared. Anna chugged three. She hadn’t eaten since lunch. She was buzzed before they left the room. She was wearing her favorite of Alexis’s shirts, purple satin with spaghetti straps. As they were walking across the quad, bare-armed, goose-pimpled, elbows linked, her phone rang. Alexis glanced at the screen. “Seriously,” she said. “Is that James again? He’s starting to freak me out.”
The next day Anna sat through poetry, half paying attention, then spent the rest of the afternoon in the library, on the quiet floor, buried in her homework and hiding from her phone. It was only once she left that she checked the screen: sixteen new text messages, splash of light in the dusk.
Text Message James: So I guess you’re just not responding?
Text Message James: You can’t just keep pretending unpleasant things don’t exist anna
Text Message James: You have to admit this paper is fucked up
Text Message James: It proves this guy was unstable and your mother knew it
When Anna stepped into her room, Alexis took one look at her and said: “Oh God. What now?” Anna opened her mouth but was stopped by the expression on her roommate’s face: eyebrows arched, stiff and wary. Anna knew this face. It was expecting her to be in crisis, braced for it, and weary of it. Alexis crossed the room, removed the phone from Anna’s hand, and studied it for less than a minute. “You’re blocking him,” she said.
For the rest of the night, Anna didn’t hear from him. Like magic. He was gone. She and Alexis split a pizza and Violet brought over rum-and-Cokes and by the time they got to the campuswide, Anna was wasted enough to hook up with a guy called Smitty who stuck his tongue down her throat. Alexis chuckled at the story before they went to bed, munching on a Pop-Tart, but mused: “Be careful.” Her voice floated from the bunk above. “You don’t want to seem like a slut.”
The next morning, Anna woke early, with a roaming sense of panic. It took a moment for it to sharpen into focus: the essay, her mother. James. She checked her phone but the only new text message was from her dad. Hey, how about we do lunch soon? Anna stared at the bottom of Alexis’s mattress, moving slightly as she breathed. She felt bloated, disgusting. Her head was a brick. Her face was huge. She cast her eyes around the room—the empty bottles and cans, the pizza box—then got up and dug her bathing suit from the dresser and slipped out of the room. Outside, she followed the path through the woods from the quad to the fitness center. The morning was cloudy. Her steps were almost silent, the ground padded with pine needles and purple leaves. The center was deserted at that hour, especially on a weekend. The locker room empty, the air thick with the sharp smell of sweat and chlorine. She inhaled deeply, and her heart clutched, flooded with the memory of swimming—to disappear underwater and forget yourself, trace the black lines on the pool floor until your eyes hurt. She took off her sweats and stepped on the scale in just her bathing suit. It was the kind they had at doctor’s offices, with the little sliding weights on top. The scale stood next to a long mirror, a thin mirror (smart, Anna thought, for a locker room full of girls). She nudged the weights until they were lined up evenly. Her weight: 152. Her image in the mirror: repulsive. Even in a thin mirror, especially in a thin mirror. The soft slope of her lower back, bulge under her arm, rim of fat wherever the elastic of her suit hit skin—she’d had no idea it had gotten this bad. She’d been trying so hard to be normal, be happy. Happiness is fattening: It was another of Alexis’s truisms, cast off airily as ash from a cigarette as she ironed her hair or stuffed food in her mouth—which she could afford to do, because even happy and in love Alexis would never gain a pound.
Her head was bleating in her ears. Stop it, Anna. Stop. She closed her eyes then opened them and attempted to smile at herself, but it made the flesh bunch up around her cheeks. Which made sense—the drinking, the pizza, the pasta. Of course she was fat. Since coming to college, people wouldn’t stop making her fucking eat.
Seventeen
If anyone had asked, she would have told them there was no hunting trip. There was no father. The paper was a made-up story. That was the truth.
No one did, even after all the questions they did ask her. The reporters, the police, the people gathered outside her house. That first afternoon, when she got home, the street was filled with them. She’d been at work when the news broke—a shooting at the Millview Mall. One of the other cashiers saw it on her phone. Then the police appeared, looking for her; they’d been to her house, and a neighbor had told them where she worked. When they said Nathan’s name—we believe that he—she felt a thick, sickening dread. Silently, she rode with them in the police car. They tried talking to her but she couldn’t hear them. Couldn’t speak. She identified the body—a photo of his arm, an old scar. Do you want to go back home? they asked. Or somewhere else? Where else would she go? They took her back to her car in the Big Lots parking lot. Don’t leave town, they said. Twenty minutes later, when she pulled into her driveway, she kept her head down, moved as quickly as she could through the crowd of reporters and up to the porch. Did you know that he was violent? Why do you think he did it? She didn’t have an answer. She turned to the microphones, finally, said something—she couldn’t remember what. Inside the house, the police were turning everything inside out, but the disruption was almost a relief. It kept the strangers from coming right up to her door.
Ping: an email alert. For the past two months, the sound had gone off on her computer in the sewing room each time her son’s name appeared online. She’d get an email letting her know what was said about him and where. He must have set it up that awful morning, before he left the house. Marielle had wondered, again and again, why he’d done that. She believed, she needed to, that her son was trying to look out for her, make sure she wasn’t in the dark. Those first foggy days and hours, it was all headlines about what he’d done to those people. To himself. A video he’d put online. Interviews with his boss from the Walmart, the people from the mall. An interview with herself, standing on her own front porch. He’s a good boy, was what she’d said.
Was he at home when you left for work this morning?
There were two cops in her house, and two FBI, from a special task force in Boston. All men, of course.
Yes, he was home, she told them. The words felt mealy in her mouth. That morning, she’d left for work, ten thirty, like every Friday. She’d seen the stripe of light beneath his door.
What was his demeanor? How was he acting?
No different. Nothing out of the ordinary. The night before, he’d seemed actually kind of happy, more talkative than usual, but she didn’t mention this.
Did he say anything to you before you left?
She wished she could tell them different. But the truth was that he hadn’t. She’d tapped on his bedroom door, told him she was leaving. “Okay,” he mumbled from inside. She never even saw his face. She couldn’t tell them how much this hurt, later, that knowing what he was about to do, knowing he was leaving her, after twenty-two years together, he hadn’t said something more.
They searched his room, the entire house. Evidence, they calle
d it. A crime scene. They marked yellow tape around her porch. She stood in the living room as his things were walked out. His computer, his phone, the guns.
Were you aware that he was in possession of the firearms, Mrs. Dugan?
She had known he had a few, but not nearly so many. When she told them no, they gave each other a look they thought she couldn’t see.
Did you know he was fired from his job last week?
Yes, she knew. She wasn’t that clueless. He’d come home early that night, and angry, saying he was being unfairly blamed. He said it wasn’t his fault, she told them. He was in trouble for something he didn’t do.
There were things they didn’t take: his old skateboard. His fish tank with its dirty filter. In his top drawer, an index card with a single sentence on it. She’d seen it there once, doing laundry, and been surprised, pleased, that her son, who had struggled, still believed that things would get better. Greatness comes to those who wait.
Did Nathan have any contact with his father?
At that one she almost had to laugh. And good luck finding him, she said. But they did, right away. Ping: There he was. He lived in Florida. He had a girlfriend; the girlfriend had a little son. Marielle wondered if the boy was his. He said he hadn’t been in touch with Nathan in twenty years, and instead of making him sound like a deadbeat, the news made him sound like a hero. How she longed to set the record straight.
Ping. You’d think she would get numb to it, but each time felt like when you bang your funny bone. Ping. It went off faintly, from the sewing room, like he was in there playing video games. For every article, there were opinions from strangers. Everybody had their theory about him. That he hated girls because he never had a girlfriend, hated authority figures because his dad had left him, idolized the military because his dad was in the army before he was born. That he was trying to impress his father, resented his mother, had spent his life being ignored. But Marielle hadn’t ignored him. She had devoted her life to him, moved to be with him, but for this, too, people seemed to think she was a horrible mother. That she was enabling him, or in denial. There was that interview with that old neighbor of theirs from New Hampshire, the one who used to complain about Nathan’s dog barking too early, too late; she’d always had it out for them. Marielle remembered when they put Sergeant to sleep last spring. It was Nathan who sat stroking his head, asking how they did it, what they were giving him and how it worked. A drug to stop the heart: The body just shuts down.
There were things she couldn’t say: that this was a boy whose father had just up and left. A father who said he wasn’t cut out to have a family, that she was too smothering. Ever since then, it had been just the two of them, her and her boy. She used to bring men around sometimes, but saw how attached he would get, how crushed when they stopped coming. The last one had actually said Nathan was part of the reason—there’s something wrong with that kid. She’d burned with rage. Maybe that was because he hadn’t had an easy life. Maybe it was because of men like him. So she stopped seeing anybody, decided she could play both parts.
That first night, a rock came through her window. The crash woke her and then there were a few slow minutes, like clawing her way up out of dark water, almost peaceful, before it all came back.
There were other things: that one boy, the one with the birthmark, he hung out with freshman year of high school. They mostly played video games and BB guns, marching around the neighborhood. They went out hunting sometimes, with the other boy’s father. Once Nathan had come home excited, blood on his cheeks. He didn’t wash it for two days. Soon after, this boy stopped coming over. Marielle never knew why—when she saw his mother at the supermarket, she could have stabbed her with her eyes.
That Saturday morning, the police were back on her porch. They asked about the broken glass but didn’t seem to truly care. Then they showed her the video: Nathan sitting in front of the computer in his bedroom, in front of the blue curtains she had made when he was little. He was holding a gun. It had been posted online at ten fifteen yesterday morning.
Ten fifteen—it might have been the very second she was knocking on his door.
She’d taken one of her pills that morning—they made her numb, tired—but still, as she watched, a pain began to grow.
Nathan was explaining what he was about to do: the layout of the mall, the timing. The exits, random targets. The people who didn’t respect him. After a while, she stopped hearing it.
Greatness comes to those who wait.
The video had been taken off the Internet, the police said, because leaving it there was like publicizing it, making them famous. And that’s what they want.
They—she understood, through the shock and the pain, she had no right to him anymore. He was no longer hers. He belonged to the world.
How did this kind of anger find its way into her son?
How could it get that bad, if he started out good?
If he’d always been loved?
She had nowhere to turn, no one to ask.
Ping. She’d thought, at first, he’d set it up to protect her, help her, but now it was starting to feel like a torment. Lately it was all about this article in the college newspaper, this boy from his English class. The boy had thought Nathan was strange—disturbing. All the kids did. But Marielle had always known kids like these. When Nathan was nine and ten, she’d sit on the bench at the park and watch the boys skateboarding—how maybe at first they’d talk to him, then start giving each other looks, and Marielle would stare at them, hoping for once he’d be folded into the group instead of shut out. She could remember it still: the sharpness of hope. The hate she felt when they walked away. Sometimes they shoved him, whispering and laughing, making sure the other kids didn’t play with him either. Junior high, he came home with his eye bruised—nothing, he said, and slapped her hand away. The kids from this English class were more of the same. They’d ignored him, and so had the teacher. She was the same one who had showed up at the house that day. A professor, she’d said. She lived in one of the nice houses up the road. Marielle didn’t remember all of it, but she remembered this. She’d said that Nathan had problems, that she should have done something for him, and this article said the same. Marielle had known that she was only apologizing to make herself feel better. No wonder Nathan had hated college so much, being around people like that.
Why did you decide to relocate with him when he went away to college?
Was this so hard to understand? She wanted to be near him. He was all she had.
She heard twice from her sister down in Exeter, once from one of the other cashiers, but that was it. Her boss called and said her working there was making customers upset. She didn’t have a funeral for him. She was afraid no one would come to it, or only reporters would, or protesters. She couldn’t bury him because they didn’t want him polluting the cemetery. His ashes were on her mantel, in her mother’s vase.
There had been times, lately, when she felt like she didn’t know him. Since starting college, he’d changed. He’d stopped smiling. He had bad acne; she got him medicine, but he said he didn’t want it. Once it scarred, he seemed to like how it looked. He started squeezing those stress balls with the smiley faces—he’d order them from Amazon by the box. Sometimes they’d burst and the beads would dribble into the floorboards, like the BB pellets she used to find back in New Hampshire, in the grass, the cracks in the wood. He was constantly on the computer. Sometimes she tried to get him to come take a walk like they used to, but it was like he didn’t even hear her, like something had swallowed him up. His grades were dropping. She tried to talk to him about it once but he got angry at her. He’d always been skinny, but all of a sudden got heavier. Whenever he asked for money, she gave him what she could, but finally told him he needed to get a job. He was angry about that too. He started at the Walmart. He started talking about enlisting. Last year he failed some classes and was put on academic probation; she’d already paid for the extra semester. She saw him sitting at
his computer once, smile on his face and mouth half open, as if he was deep in conversation, and wondered who he was talking to.
When the police told her about the victims—their names and faces—it was a hammer to her heart.
That her boy could have hurt these people. Killed these people. If she took a step toward it, it disappeared.
The body just shuts down.
Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. She would have liked to turn it off but couldn’t. It would have felt like she was rejecting him, giving up on him. But she only checked now on days when it went off like crazy, like today. KILLER’S HOMEWORK RAISES RED FLAGS. This one was about a homework assignment, a paper he wrote for an English class. When she saw the type, square and green, she recognized his old computer. The same one he’d used in high school, the one she used now. A few years ago she’d helped him buy a new one, a good one, the one the police took. On a Saturday morning in October my dad and me—
What she couldn’t say was that she hadn’t lost just this boy, she’d lost all the other boys he’d been. The boy who had always loved dogs; she guessed they were easier than people. The one who chose his own dog from the pound because of that one ragged ear, who named him Sergeant to make him tougher. The one who loved to play checkers. Who used to go on walks with her after dinner, scraping long sticks behind him on the street. But no one wanted to hear about those other boys; this last boy had erased them so thoroughly it was like they’d never existed. She was angry at him for taking them away. For making it so she couldn’t grieve for him. She wasn’t allowed to, not when he had taken other people’s children. A mother who lost her child—it was the very worst thing. You had to be a member of an exclusive club, for the world to have no sympathy for you at all.
