If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  Anna dreaded swimming. Instead of keeping her outside her head, it only sucked her in deeper. She had started going to the pool at all hours. She wished she could stop going, but she had to go, couldn’t not go, even though she hated the repetition, the smell, the black lines, the near-inability to climb out.

  She was so hungry that her throat hurt. She pictured her throat screaming for food and this made her feel pleased for a moment before she remembered that herself and her throat were the same thing.

  Text Message Kim: I’m really starting to get worried

  The rug was unbearable. She rolled it up and shoved it under the bed.

  Text Message Dad: Happy Halloween!

  Anna had forgotten about Halloween, hated Halloween: an excuse to scare people/dress like sluts.

  As she was leaving the fitness center, she heard: Hey. She stopped. Forty-eight laps and her legs were gone. Over here. It was James. He was walking by, walking toward her. He looked remarkably unchanged. Jeans, boots, sunglasses. What are you doing here? Anna said, dropping her hand. She’d been picking at her lip. Her first thought: Had he seen her picking? Second: Was he going to the fitness center? He never went to the fitness center. If James started coming to the fitness center it would throw off her entire routine. Third: Was he spying on her? He was looking at her sadly. Oh, Anna, he said.

  When she returned to the room, the rug was back. She stood on the very edge. She had rivers in her veins. Outside, kids were heading to the dining hall. Anna clenched her stomach in/out, in/out. She was starving. Literally empty. What she wouldn’t give for a slice of the cold pizza Alexis had left in their mini-fridge. Just one. She would savor it, revel in it, make it last an hour. Don’t you dare.

  She closed her eyes, wishing it were later. Wishing there were an off/on switch in her stomach/brain. She missed Kim and Janie. Missed Alexis. Missed home, though it no longer felt safe—she couldn’t even feel homesick anymore. She thought about calling Kim or Janie, but it was dinnertime, and a Saturday. They were probably furious with her anyway. Probably eating/drinking with Brian Tucker/the basketball team. The night gaped before her, a cave in the woods. There was a party at Alexis’s sorority later, for Halloween. Anna dreaded parties: rooms of arms and legs. But that morning Alexis had asked if she was going, and when she said yes, answered, Cool. See you there. Anna was happy that she’d asked. She’d sounded sincere. And though the prospect of the party was overwhelming, the thought of staying in the room alone was worse: the rug, the pizza. She didn’t think she could survive it.

  At seven, she poured herself a Diet-Coke-and-vodka. An hour later, she’d had four. She changed into jeans and a strapless black shirt and penciled on eyeliner whiskers, then stepped inside four red squares and left the dorm. As soon as she hit the air, her head began spinning. It was cool, too cool for strapless, and a little early, only eight thirty, but Alexis, she knew, would already be there. The night smelled sad but also crisp and slightly smoky. Dry leaves crumbled beneath her feet. She was a full block away from the sorority house when she felt the thump of music from the basement. Her lungs shivered. When the house came into view, lights blazed in every window, but as she walked inside, there was hardly anyone there. She was too early. She scanned the room and spotted Alexis, playing beer pong with Esme. They were dressed as matching Starbucks baristas. When Anna started toward her, Alexis looked up and turned to Esme and said distinctly: She came. Anna paused midway across the room. Somebody knocked into her elbow, said sorry. When Alexis met her eyes, she looked guilty, and Anna spun around and headed for the door. Vaguely: Anna, where are you going? But she didn’t stop, and Alexis didn’t chase her. She walked home, sky blurring into the trees. Past the fitness center, the English building, the pair of benches: the one where she’d met James, the one where she’d spilled her guts to James four weeks/four hundred years ago. When she arrived at the dorm, it felt deserted. The silence pressed into the stairwell, the entire building, the half-empty bulletin boards and harsh strips of dry fluorescent light, every pore of campus between the throbbing sorority house and the lip of the rug where she now stood as if toeing the edge of a diving board.

  She just wanted this night to be over: fall asleep and wake up, reset, start again. She made it to the dresser (three squares, blue), where she stood with both feet inside a square and dug the orange bottle from her drawer. She poured out three. No, five. Her hands trembled. Not the whole bottle, not even close, but enough to knock her out until morning. She made it to the door (four squares, yellow) and down the empty hallway to the bathroom (twelve steps, black and white tile, black tiles only, step out and your roommate might die, will die, maybe you want her to die—stop it, Anna, stop). She faced the mirror, pulse hammering. Only at nine thirty on a Saturday night would she ever find this bathroom empty. The sink ledge was crowded with tampon wrappers, shampoo bottles, beer cans. The air felt prickly and damp. She splashed her face, scrubbed off the whiskers. Then she stared at the mirror and forced a smile but it looked so sad and fake and small and fat that it made her feel like bursting into tears. The smile collapsed. She turned and lifted her shirt to examine her profile just as she heard the shuffle of footsteps and someone opened the door.

  Carly Smith, of course: the only girl who would possibly be here at this hour on a Saturday. “Hey,” Anna said, letting her shirt drop. If Carly had caught her examining her fat, she didn’t show it. She was wearing sweats, those ridiculous purple slippers. “I didn’t think anyone else was here,” Anna said. The pills were sticking to the inside of her fist.

  “You thought wrong,” Carly replied. The sarcasm surprised her. Carly’s slippers sloughed against the tile. She carried a plastic shower caddy, a shower cap, toothbrush in a plastic holder, and something about all of this struck Anna as so prim as to be almost brave.

  “What did you do tonight?”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “Yeah.” Her head bobbed. “Me too.” She thought Carly might be pleased to hear this, feel a spark of kinship, but she barely looked at her.

  “I seriously doubt that. You reek of alcohol.”

  “Well, yeah. That’s because I went to a party—”

  “Exactly.”

  “I know. I was there for literally ten seconds but I left,” Anna said, as Carly unscrewed a thing of moisturizer. A blue tub, the kind her mother used. “It wasn’t a good scene.” Again, nothing. Carly stuck her fingers in the tub and the smell made Anna’s eyes water. Anna had always felt bad for Carly but now she longed for Carly—to be friends with Carly, confide in Carly, maybe have her life. “And also, there are some crazy things going on at home.” Carly didn’t look at her and Anna snapped, “Do you just not like me or something?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to not like you,” Carly said. Her cheeks were two white moons. “But I do know you’re just talking to me because you’re drunk and there’s nobody else around.”

  “Like who? Alexis? I never hang out with Alexis anymore. I barely even see Alexis.”

  She snorted. “There’s a real loss.”

  “You’ve never even talked to her.”

  “I don’t want to talk to her. How about she talk to me?” She washed and dried her face. “They talk about you, you know,” Carly said.

  “No, they don’t,” Anna said. But of course they did. Quieter, she asked, “What do they say?”

  “You should probably ask her yourself,” Carly said. Then she walked into a stall and left Anna standing there. Her eyes stung. Screw her, then. Carly was a nerd, and not even a nice nerd. One of those nerds with an arrogant streak—the worst kind.

  Anna unclenched her fist, where the pills had stuck to her palm and stained her skin blue. She grabbed a bottle of warm beer, swallowed all five, and licked her palm. On her way out she grabbed the moisturizer—I dare you. It was done.

  Back in her room, Anna walked to the dresser (three squares, green), stashed the tub in her sock drawer, then made it to the bed (two squares, red). She
turned out the light. She swam in the darkness, waiting for the pills to tug her under. She pictured a long mirror, an endless march of faces. Kim and Janie and Alexis. And Carly. Laura Mack, in that dressing room, terrified, committing herself to memory. Alison Bower—hers was a face Anna had never actually seen. What she pictured instead was her mother, the night she came home from taking Alison to the crisis center and curled up on the other end of the couch. She looked pale, and shaken, as if she’d just had blood drawn. There was a close call tonight, she said.

  Twenty

  Maggie’s life had been emptied from the inside: no Anna, no Robert, no students. Even the strangers on the Internet were gone. Once on leave, her first act had been to call the cable company and have them disconnect the Internet. Disconnect the cable TV, while they were at it. Technology: monstrous as she’d always known that it was.

  Those first few days, her house felt unfamiliar, like a town after a hurricane, quietly wrecked. She called only Anna, wanting to tell her before she heard about it elsewhere, fearing that in this surreal new world in which the details of Maggie’s life were available for public consumption Anna might read the news online. To her surprise, her daughter’s response was: Should I come home? Maggie felt a sharp sadness—that Anna might think she needed to care for her mother—and though a part of her leapt at the proposal, she replied, in a tone that was shorter than she intended: Of course not. Why would you do that?

  It was disorienting at first, not having access to the Internet. Funny, since this had never mattered to her before. Now, though, she was aware of what might be out there that she was missing, the way you might wonder what was being whispered about you across a crowded room. Monday morning, she knew word of her leave would be circulating the department, but if the news landed she barely felt it, the plop of a rock in a faraway stream. As the day wore on, her thoughts receded. Late afternoon, she received a text from Robert—this is not legally enforceable—but didn’t bother to explain. That this wasn’t about rules, what they could and couldn’t do. She simply wrote back, my decision, and left it there.

  Mostly, though, the isolation felt like a reprieve. There was a certain bliss attached to being cut off from the world, to simply not knowing. She could no longer pore over the news, no longer wade through the opinions of strangers. No longer watch the video of Marielle Dugan, though in the past week she’d watched it so many times she had it memorized. Maggie’s only regular contact was with Anna. Since Maggie had been home, they’d spoken nearly every day. She supposed her daughter felt sorry for her, worried for her, though she never said so directly. Sometimes Maggie detected something in her tone that felt a little forced, a little fervent—although Tom had reported, after their lunch, that she seemed good. A little stressed maybe, but good, basically good. She looked healthy. Her RA seemed competent. And she ate? Maggie asked. She ate, he said.

  Beyond that, she deliberately limited her contact with the outside world. If she had to run an errand, she went early, when she’d be less likely to run into anyone. Time spent outdoors was restricted to the property around her house. In the morning, she worked in her garden. In the afternoon, she walked the driveway to retrieve the mail. If the phone rang, which was infrequent, the machine answered, messages slipping into its depths.

  For Maggie, though, to be alone in her house was not to feel lonely. Even during her divorce, especially then, the house had been a comfort, a constant. She knew the place as intimately as another person: the damp blisters of paint on the bathroom walls, the tricky faucet on the old claw-foot tub, the labored breaths of the hulking radiators as they tried to start on cold nights, huffing and finally catching like a struck match.

  When, late one afternoon, she heard a car approaching, she hurried onto the porch. Then stood there, arms folded, watching as the red Jeep pulled to a stop. “Does your wife know you’re here?” she asked.

  Robert seemed about to walk up onto the porch, but reconsidered and stayed where he was, hands in pockets, at the bottom of the stairs. He wore a tie and jacket; he must have come from campus. Maggie didn’t invite him in. She didn’t want the memory of him being there.

  “I just wanted to see how you’re doing,” he said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I text you, and you don’t respond.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not fine,” she said. He frowned, as if trying to evaluate the truth in this. Maggie pushed a quick hand through her hair. “So, am I a laughingstock?”

  His face softened. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Ah,” she said, with a quick laugh. “So I am.”

  “Nothing serious,” he said. “Nothing to lose sleep over.” But even Robert couldn’t make this sound convincing. She could have pressed the point but decided she didn’t want to know.

  “How’s Suzanne?” she asked, then clarified, “Her health, I mean.”

  Robert looked abashed, but said, “Better.” He squinted at the sky. “She wants to move back home—or at least, in that direction. It’s been sixteen years. So I’m going on the market,” he said, then looked back at her. “She hates the cold.”

  Maggie did not betray the sadness she was feeling. That he was staying with his wife, that he was leaving—wasn’t this an old story? She was a fool for ever believing it might end differently.

  “She’s had a hard time, being here,” he said.

  “Well, that seems like the right thing to do, then,” Maggie said. She gestured toward the house. “I better get back.”

  Robert gave her a melting look. “You can call me, you know,” he said. “I worry about you,” he told her, and seemed about to step forward, maybe to hug her, but she thanked him for coming and turned to the door. Back inside, she listened, heart pounding, to his car driving away.

  Day by day, in her empty house, the absence Maggie felt most keenly was her students. Convinced as she’d been about the rightness of leaving, she had underestimated just how much she would miss having them in her life. Tuesday and Thursday, she imagined the freshmen gathering for class, considered where they would be at that juncture in the semester. Working on their next set of essays. Extra-tired, extra-caffeinated, preparing for the midterm grind. For twenty-eight years, Maggie’s life had been so shaped by the rhythms of the school year that without it, the days collapsed around her. This was not the short-term rigor of a sabbatical, nor the pleasant, temporary bagginess of summer. She had stepped out of life’s current, while that old life continued without her, eleven miles down the road.

  She tried to stay occupied. She made a to-do list of things around the house that needed freshening and fixing. The loose shingles on the barn. The cracks wrinkling the paint on her bedroom ceiling. She noticed the curling wallpaper in the kitchen, the shadowy water spots in the hall, things Anna had regularly pointed out but that Maggie, blinded by affection for the house, had quite literally never seen. The list was endless, but as the first week bled into the next, she had trouble doing anything; her initial motivation dissipated into aimlessness, vague fretfulness. At loose ends—suddenly clichés she’d always disdained made sense, were in fact the ideal expressions of how she felt. Time moved with the quality of simultaneous quickness and slowness she associated with being a new mother, the individual hours stretching on forever while days disappeared whole. Even the house itself, old reliable sanctuary, no longer felt like a comfort. She was newly aware of noises, small sounds that in her solitude grew distorted—the trickle of water in the pipes like a light rain, the rattle of the boiler a knock at the door. She wished for a television sometimes, if only for the blanketing distraction. In the evenings, she listened for creatures in the garden, and often threw open the back door, squinting into the dark. She never saw anything, but back inside she swore she heard them, tunneling beneath the fence.

  At night, she dreamed of trains. She was traveling alone, by a window, but when she turned to look at her reflection, her face was blank. She dreamed of teaching. Of standing in front of the classroom
, but the wrong classroom, filled with students she didn’t know. When she woke, heart racing, it was impossible to get back to sleep. She stared at the ceiling and remembered Anna’s childhood nightmares, the way she’d rush into their room having scared herself with a story of her own invention. It’s just in your head, Maggie used to tell her, and she saw now how unhelpful this had been, for the problem was exactly this.

  One early Sunday, Maggie dreamed the dream of the classroom and woke in a sweat. The bedside clock read just past five. It was still dark, and silent, the silence loud with many things. The thick rustle of wind, a lone branch scraping a window. She wished she weren’t alone. Wished that Anna were asleep down the hall. Wished, these years later, that Tom were in bed beside her. Her mind returned again to spring, four years ago, 2012. The spring her marriage ended, the spring she and her husband drove back and forth to a therapist’s office in Augusta. The spring there was a monster sitting in her classroom. The spring her child began to fall apart. It’ll be okay, Maggie had reassured her daughter, as panic had consumed her. She’d always been intent on making Anna feel safe, but maybe this determined optimism had bled into her own field of vision, made her blind to the actual danger that had been sitting in front of her.

  Daylight was sidling up the bedroom wall. It was pointless to try to sleep again, so she pulled an old wool sweater over her T-shirt and sweatpants and made her way to her office at the other end of the hall. Her canvas bag was still on the chair where she’d left it weeks before. She withdrew the essay, still seamed faintly with squares, then refolded it carefully, almost tenderly, slid it in her pocket, and made her way downstairs.