by Elise Juska
Outside, the backyard looked white, slightly misty, like the surface of the moon. In the kitchen, Maggie brewed a pot of coffee, drank two cups, and ate the stiff end of a loaf of bread. When she opened the back door, the air felt like winter. A Sunday, the first day of November, the sunrise a slow orange stain across the sky. Frost crunched beneath her boots. When she opened the barn door and stepped inside, the air was stale and dry and only slightly warmer than the air outside. She climbed the ladder to the loft, and at the top, confronted what looked like the scene of a crime: pools of ransacked papers, upended boxes. She allowed herself one pointless flare of regret—if only she’d never—then knelt amid the mess.
It took several minutes to locate the right box, the one containing Nathan’s classmates’ papers, but there it was. Maggie unfolded his essay and added it to the pile, tucked it beneath the roll book, and replaced the lid. Her eyes welled briefly. Then she turned to face the rest of the strewn pages and dusty folders. She began returning them to boxes, thoughtfully at first, then haphazardly, without regard for logic or organization. She paused sometimes to give one an extra-long look, but she knew that she would never see them again. This, she thought, was the sadness of teachers. Each semester is a contained little life—a relationship that begins, peaks, but always ends. They cycle in, cycle out, but you stay in one place. The teacher grows older, but the students never age. They are perpetually eighteen, twenty-one, lives always just on the cusp of beginning. You watch them walk off into the world, knowing you helped them become what they’re becoming. You suffer the same ending again and again.
By the time Maggie made her way back to the house, the sky was woolly, sunless and lightly snowing. The smell of a neighbor’s burn pile seeped into the late-morning air. She was tired and hungry. Fresh paper cuts on her fingers stung in the cold. As she neared the back door, she stopped—her garden had been destroyed. The fence was ripped down completely on one side, a trail of sharp deer tracks visible in the snow. Broad daylight, Maggie thought—the audacity—before she was overcome with rage. She strode to the garden, kicking hard at what remained of the fence posts. Her foot rang with pain. Then, from the front of the house, she heard a car rolling up the driveway. She paused, breathing hard, and listened: This time she was not mistaking the sound for something else. The car radio was blaring. It wouldn’t be Robert, that music. Too loud, too young. Her first thought was Gavin Newland—how many nights had she sat up marking papers, alert to the rumble of his truck as she waited for Anna to come home? Now, though, the engine shut off, music stopped. When she heard the car door slam, fear kicked in. Yesterday, she’d heard a car pull up and discovered four kids standing on her porch in costume—“Trick or treat!” they yelled as their parents sat idling in the drive. Maggie had forgotten Halloween, had had to quickly scan her cabinets and offer them oranges, face their disappointment, then shut off her lights and spent the rest of the night in the dark. But now it was Sunday morning. An ordinary Sunday, the first of November. There was no reason for anyone to be there. As she stepped into the kitchen, she heard an insistent knocking, and her mind raced with fresh and frightening possibilities—a reporter, an angry Internet commenter, a young man with a gun. Nothing seemed impossible. As she closed her hand around the knob, she considered the distance to her nearest neighbor, whether if she shouted they would hear her.
“Maggie?”
It took her a moment to register the girl on the porch, but when she did, she reached out and hugged her. “Kim,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.” She stepped back to get a look at her, saying, “You know you don’t need to knock.” In fact, Kim and Janie had been walking in and out of Maggie’s house for years, but she supposed it didn’t feel the same without Anna there. “You look terrific,” Maggie told her, and Kim did—slightly older, more confident, with different-colored hair. Maggie knew this shift well. She smiled. “College suits you.”
“Thanks,” Kim replied, but tentatively, and Maggie was suddenly aware of her own appearance, the dirt under her fingernails and the misshapen sweater, the dust on the knees of the sweatpants she’d slept in the night before. “Sorry to just stop by like this.”
“Oh, it’s fine. You know that. Anytime.”
“I knew I couldn’t find you on campus.”
Of course: Kim would know she was no longer teaching this semester. Maybe this was the reason for her visit, for the hesitation in her voice.
“Right,” Maggie said brightly. “Well, come in, come in. I was just doing some work outside.” She widened the door and began switching on lamps in the dim living room. “How’s your first semester going?”
“I’m liking it,” Kim said, but by the sudden light, Maggie fully registered the emotion on her face. She looked pale, almost frightened, and Maggie felt the air leave her.
“Kim,” she said. “What is it?”
Kim’s eyes grew abruptly teary. “I tried calling but no one answered,” she said. “But I know I should have called you sooner,” she told her, and suddenly it was three years ago, and Maggie was back in her office on campus, Kim and Janie telling her they were worried about Anna, that she would kill them, but they didn’t know what else to do.
Maggie made the four-hour drive in three hours and fifteen minutes. She didn’t listen to the radio and didn’t stop. When she’d spoken briefly on the phone to Anna, her daughter immediately started crying. “I’m coming,” Maggie said. “Right now.” Then she made her put Alexis on the line, and instructed: “Do not leave her side.”
As she drove, Maggie replayed the story Kim had told her, over and over. How, when she’d called Anna at eleven that morning, it was Alexis who picked up the phone. She’d said Anna was still sleeping, then started telling Kim how strangely she’d been acting lately—the dieting, the swimming—and Kim had made her wake Anna up and check that she was okay. Half an hour later, she’d shown up at Maggie’s front door.
Now, as Maggie sped past Portland, she thought of calling Tom and telling him to meet her at Anna’s dorm, but she was too upset, too angry. He’d seen Anna only a few weeks ago. He’d gone to check on her—it was the very reason he’d gone. He’d actually said she looked healthy. How had he not seen it? How hadn’t Alexis? Because she was spoiled, self-centered—Maggie had disliked her from the start. What about that teacher, then, the grad student Anna loved so much? She felt like weeping and like kicking something at the same time. Blame splayed in all directions, like a brushfire, but when she arrived at the dorm and saw her daughter, it narrowed onto Maggie in a point of almost unbearable pain.
Anna had slipped backward three years. Sitting on the bed, knees drawn, she was a history of moments collapsed into one. She had lost weight, Maggie thought, fifteen pounds at least. But it was the look in her eyes that alarmed her. Maggie could see how distracted she was, how removed from herself, her mind a buzzing hive. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said, and started crying, a flat, defeated sound.
Maggie sat beside her, put her arms around her, and stayed there. “Are you okay?”
Anna nodded, a rustle against her shoulder.
“Did you take them on purpose?”
A nod again.
Maggie pulled back, heart thumping, and looked at her daughter. “Were you trying to commit suicide?” she said, and though it felt impossible to even ask the question, the directness of it kept her afloat.
Anna whispered, “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Okay.” She felt like she might collapse but told Anna to call Theresa and leave a message. Tell her it was an emergency. Anna brushed at her eyes and reached for her phone. It was only then that Maggie registered Alexis’s presence. She was sitting cross-legged at her desk. At first, the very sight of her made Maggie want to boil over, but she could see that the girl was scared. It was she, after all, who had finally tracked down the RA on duty, gotten Anna to the health center. She glanced at Maggie, sensing her attention. “Thank you,” Maggie said. “For helping her.”
>
Alexis shook her head. “Honestly, I didn’t know it was this bad.”
Anna was saying, “I’m sorry to call you like this but—”
“I mean, I knew something was wrong,” Alexis continued. “I told her she should talk to someone a while ago.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“A month?” she said, and Maggie felt a flash of despair. “There was this guy she was seeing. I think it all started around then.”
“Guy? What guy?”
Anna had hung up the phone. “He was older,” Alexis was saying. “He was intense.” Her eyes moved to Anna. “He was kind of political, right?”
“He’s the one who made that YouTube video,” Anna said.
She was looking only at Maggie, as Maggie said, confused, “What YouTube video?” Her first thought was of the video Nathan Dugan had posted on that horrible morning, the morning that started it all. But Anna kept her gaze level, waiting for her to piece it together, and Maggie paused, and suddenly realized: the YouTube interview. The male voice asking questions offscreen.
“I told him about you, and Nathan Dugan,” Anna said. “And that paper. I know you asked me not to.” Then she started to cry again, tears dripping without sound. “Then I broke up with him,” she said. Maggie was stunned—not that Anna had confided in this person, but that she’d been involved with someone who had gone and done this. She was struck by all she didn’t know about her daughter; she had a life that was entirely her own.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” Anna was saying. She’d started picking her lip. “But I shouldn’t have talked to him about it in the first place. I shouldn’t have—”
“Listen to me,” Maggie told her, firmly. “Look at me.” She waited until Anna had lowered her hands, focused on her face. “You were right,” she said. “I found that paper. In the barn that morning.” She was aware of Alexis listening, and was tempted for a moment to stop talking, but she owed it to her daughter to admit it all. “And I lied about not having it,” she continued. “Which I never should have done. The anonymous person who sent it to the press, that was the wife of a man I was involved with—that I was having an affair with,” she confessed, watching as these truths moved slowly across her daughter’s face. “This is my fault,” Maggie told her. “No one else’s.” Then she stood up, retrieved Anna’s old pink duffel from beneath the bed, and started packing her things.
Part Four
Twenty-One
There was a period of time, the summer after his mother died, when Luke couldn’t leave the house. Not just that he didn’t want to, he couldn’t. Matt came by and sometimes they ventured across the street to mess around by the river and pretend they were explorers, but that was as far as it went. Mostly, Luke stayed inside, though he didn’t remember much of what he did there. Watched TV? Drew? He didn’t have a computer. Aunt Millie lived with them for part of that summer, and she’d frequently ask him to run errands with her—the supermarket or the shoe store, even tried to bait him with a stop at the Dairy Queen—but Luke didn’t respond, didn’t even look at her. His stomach seized at the prospect of deciding to go with her, and again at the prospect of deciding not to. The grocery store—was she insane? Either way, something terrible might happen. Eventually he said, Please stop asking me, and she’d looked surprised, but done as he asked. She resorted to giving him long worried looks. She made him drink Metamucil. Before she left, she bought him a computer, a gift from her and Uncle Dean.
By August, Luke lived mostly in his room. Brent must have been around, though he had no real memory of it, except for the time he discovered him in the bathroom flooding his eyes with a little dropper and threatening to kill Luke if he told. Told what? And who would he tell? His father wasn’t there—at least, he couldn’t have been there too often. Later, all Luke remembered of him was the feeling of his absence, his silence. The deep groove, like a quarter slot, that sank between his eyes.
Luke’s need to stay inside just grew bigger. His stomach started hurting all the time. By the end of summer, he could barely bring himself to leave his room, until the morning of the first day of sixth grade, when his father walked in and said: Get up. Luke was still in bed, covers pulled to his chin. He shook his head. Get dressed, his father said, yanking the covers off. Luke closed his eyes as his father started pulling clothes from his dresser and tossing them on the bed. Mom wouldn’t make me, he said, crying quietly. His father said, Oh yes she would, and it felt, impossibly, like he’d lost her even more. His father just looked at him until finally Luke wiped his nose and stood up. Fifteen minutes later, when he appeared in the kitchen, his father handed him a peanut butter sandwich and a limp backpack and walked him out to the truck. Luke saw his brother watching from his bedroom window; he would be taking the bus to the high school. As Luke’s father drove him to the junior high, he steered with one hand and pinched Luke’s elbow with the other, as if he might otherwise jump from the car. When they pulled up by the entrance, his father sat there waiting until Luke was on the other side of the door.
Ten years later, lying in April Peale’s bed, drunk after a party, Luke had told her a little about the summer he didn’t leave the house. Aw, Luke, she said, and Luke wondered if this would be the default thing girls would say about him for the rest of his life. April’s expression was sorry but also, he thought, sort of captivated, as if there was something about this tragic story that made him more valuable to her. You were just missing your mom, she said. You were grieving. But Luke knew that it was more than this. It wasn’t that he was just too sad to go outside; he was paralyzed. He literally couldn’t open the door. Then April told him about a reality show she’d seen where a person afraid of spiders was cured by having to sit in a bathtub full of spiders. Luke thought it sounded incredibly stupid, though he didn’t say so. Then the thing lost its power over them. April smiled. It was really pretty incredible, she said.
Luke heard through the online grapevine that Maggie had taken a leave of absence. He didn’t know if this meant quit or was fired, but it didn’t matter. She was gone. A few days earlier a video had appeared on YouTube, an interview with Nathan’s mother, who said Maggie had shown up at her house apologizing. It seemed, to Luke, like a nice thing to do—the kind of thing he should have done too—but it set off a fresh round of Internet blame. That Maggie should be fired. That Maggie could have stopped him, had obviously known about him. Even Nathan’s mother seemed angry that she’d come. I told you this wasn’t all my fault, she said.
Over the next week, Luke stopped going to work. A few times, he called to say he was still sick; then he didn’t bother calling. He woke up and acted like he was getting ready, said he was scheduled a little later or felt like riding his bike, then waited until his father’s truck had pulled off and returned to his room. He tried to stay off the computer—instead of bringing him relief, it was beginning to make him feel sicker—but he couldn’t resist for long. He left the house only to let the dogs out. The air smelled spicy. Late October—his favorite part of the year, maybe even his favorite week—but he couldn’t bring himself to venture more than ten feet from his back door. Back upstairs, back online. He stared through the window of the computer. Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube. He felt edgy, lonely. He’d deleted his original post—hey, where’d you go?! Katie had messaged him. He hadn’t replied, but still roamed constantly on Facebook. There was a picture of the fountain at the mall, normally filled with pennies but now choked with white flowers. There was Meredith Kenney, posting that today was her dead brother’s birthday; he would have been twenty-eight. I think about you every day, she wrote. A chorus of sympathy. Sending hugs Mer!!! <3 <3 <3 Occasionally he heard Brent and Mike and Layton come banging through the back door. He stayed in his room, drifting, unseen. Through the thin carpet, he smelled weed, heard the loose spills of laughter and slamming cabinets as they raided the kitchen, then the sound of tires tearing up gravel as they left. Silence again. Meredith Kenney’s brother. Nat
han Dugan’s mother. It was hard to picture Nathan Dugan having a mother, but everyone did. I loved my son. She was crying. I just wanted to be close to him. Luke watched it again and again.
Saturday, Halloween, was the first day of hunting season. His father had taken the day off from work. He always did. The night before, he’d asked Luke if he wanted to come, which caught him off-guard. His father had taken him out hunting lots of times, but it had been a few years since he’d asked; usually he went with Brent, or Ray from work. Luke understood that he wasn’t a good partner. He was a lousy shot, and worse, he was a wimp. They’re more afraid of you, his father used to say. This time Luke shook his head without even thinking about it, but his dad pressed the point. Why not? Luke had no good excuse. What came to mind was Nathan Dugan’s essay about going hunting with his own father—even though, in that interview, his mother said they never actually went. I just don’t feel like it, he managed, and his dad gave him a searching look. Luke waited, wanting his father to see what bad shape he was in, to call him on it. But he didn’t. Saturday morning, Luke stayed in bed until the truck roared off. He heard the engine dissolving, the faint clack of leaves still clinging to their branches, and closed his eyes. There was the world outside, an outdoors filled with woods and rivers and clouds, but visible, and vulnerable, and there was the world online, which was its own kind of landscape, edgeless and endless, where no one could stare back. He got out of bed, sat down at his computer and disappeared.
