by Laura McHugh
“My sisters’ names on your skin?”
Josh’s lips pressed into a tight, bloodless line, and he sat down next to me on the steps. “I got the tattoo when I was eighteen. I might not make the same choice today, but I don’t regret it. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing—it means something to me. Each one of those names was a lost person that I didn’t want forgotten. My brother ran away, and yeah, maybe that made me a little obsessed. I can’t help but want to make sense of things, find answers. Some people might think it’s strange, but I’m a normal guy. It’s just that this is the thing that drives me. And I want to understand what drives you, too.”
“How come you never told me what really happened when your brother disappeared?” I asked. “That you were there?”
Josh was silent for a minute, his jaw twitching. Finally he shrugged. “I figured you’d find out if you wanted to.”
“Ben told me.”
“What did he tell you? Did he tell you that Paul only took me camping with him because he knew that was the only way our parents would let him go? That he had planned the whole thing just so he could run off, that he left me alone in the woods overnight, with no supplies, no way to get home—not caring what would happen to me, what people would think? He told me he wanted to spend some time with me before our parents sent him away. I believed him. Even after he was gone, I kept thinking he’d come back to see me. Sometimes I’d rather think he’s dead than think he’s out there living his life, not even missing me.”
“You could have told me all of that,” I said. “You already know everything about me. It’s not fair to hide so much of yourself.”
He glanced over at me, studying my face. “So you knew. And you weren’t worried I’d killed my brother and left him in the woods like everybody was saying back then?”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t. I was thinking how scared you must have been, waking up alone, trying to drive back, the accident.”
“Then you know me better than you think you do. We have something terrible in common, Arden. Whether you like it or not, or want to believe it or not, we get each other. We do. I think there could be more, if you want there to be.”
My heartbeat was audible, thrumming in my skull.
Josh reached out and lifted my hand from my lap, turned it palm up, and slowly, gently, used his thumb to push my sleeve above my wrist to reveal my scars. “You didn’t hide these,” he said. “But you didn’t talk about them, either.”
I snatched my hand back. I opened my mouth to speak, but I didn’t know what to tell him. “I didn’t try to kill myself,” I said finally, “if that’s what you’re thinking. I did something incredibly stupid. I broke into someone’s house and cut myself going through the window.” He looked a bit uncertain, and I couldn’t tell if he believed me. “And I think we should forget about what happened last night. Nothing has to change. We can still stay in touch about the book. You can call me if anything new comes up.”
He nodded slowly, biting his lip. “If that’s what you want.”
“Yeah.”
“So we’re okay?”
“We’re okay.”
As I turned to go back in the house, a shadow slipped away from the door. Heaney, watching, keeping an eye on me.
CHAPTER 16
* * *
I’d switched off the ringer on the house phone, tired of receiving unknown calls, and when I finally checked the messages to get rid of the furiously blinking red light, all of them except for one were dead air, the caller waiting to see if I would pick up and then hanging up when I didn’t. The only actual message was from the lawyer, reminding me that I needed to sign and return a form from the packet he’d sent.
It took me a minute to remember which drawer I’d shoved the papers into, and once I found it, I had to read through everything to figure out what exactly I was signing. I sat at Granddad’s desk, and the more I read, the more confused I became. There was a summary of charges from earlier in the year, before I had come to Arrowood, including things like utilities and property taxes. Most of the items, however, were listed in vague categories such as exterior maintenance and repair, so I couldn’t tell exactly what the trust had been billed for. It seemed that I had not only overestimated the Arrowood fortune, but also underestimated the cost of keeping the place in good repair. I wrote a note to the lawyer, asking for further documentation, including copies of the invoices if possible.
I set aside the trust documents and attempted to straighten up the desk, putting the old photos in the drawer and stacking all my notes and books in piles. As I returned my mother’s medical file to the box I’d brought down from the third-floor powder room, I noticed a familiar name on the very last tab. I plucked out Julia Ferris’s folder, and while I knew what an intrusion of privacy it was to look at someone else’s medical records, I barely hesitated before opening it.
Mrs. Ferris was anemic. Her cholesterol levels were normal. She had needed an inhaler for a lingering case of bronchitis. It was all perfectly mundane, and I felt ridiculous for reading it, until I reached one entry that stood out. In the summer of 1992, Mrs. Ferris had undergone a D & C. I knew what the procedure was, and that it could be performed for various reasons. I flipped the page and saw that she had had a positive pregnancy test just prior to the procedure, four years after Lauren was born. That meant that Mrs. Ferris had either lost or terminated the pregnancy. Based on the dates, this would have happened during the same time that my mother was pregnant with the twins.
It wasn’t fair, I knew, to assume anything about Mrs. Ferris’s situation. One way or another, she had suffered the loss of a child. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if my father had been involved—if Mrs. Ferris had thought the child was his. Was this what she had not forgiven my father for, the thing she told him he would have to make up to her? Had he pressured her to end the pregnancy, or abandoned her after a miscarriage? I could understand her anger, losing a child while my mother went on to have twins. Could that have been enough to push her to hurt my sisters? It wasn’t something I could ask Mrs. Ferris, and even if I did, I wouldn’t expect her to tell me the truth. I wondered if Josh knew about this, if it was the sort of thing he might consider a believable motive.
Later that night, while soaking in the tub, I examined the pink lines on my arm, trying to decide if they were fading. They were mostly hidden on the underside, and when visible, they weren’t severe enough to draw stares, except maybe the thicker one at the base of my wrist. The scars might become less noticeable over time, though they would always be with me. I’d be an old woman with my skin hanging down like curtain swags, and the scars would still be there, concealed in the folds.
Josh had been wrong, in a way, comparing the secret marks on our bodies. He had chosen his tattoo. Scars, too, were reminders of the past, though we rarely got to choose them, and most likely preferred to forget whatever it was they commemorated: an accident, a surgery, a mistake. It wasn’t the marks on my arm that bothered me, it was what they reminded me of, the reason I had left school without finishing.
When my mother came to Colorado to get me, to take me back to Minnesota with her after my accident, she wouldn’t listen to my explanations. She was convinced that I had tried to kill myself over a relationship with Dr. Endicott. That was one of the most shameful parts; despite what had happened, I could never think of him as Charles or Chuck. Even when we were intimate, I had thought of him as Dr. Endicott.
My original adviser, Dr. Browning, had suffered a stroke after my first year in the program and had to take an indefinite leave, at which point I was switched over to Dr. Endicott. I’d taken one of his courses and admired his work. He was the professor who would gladly join students for happy hour, or hold class outside on the quad when the weather was nice. He was in his forties, with dark, heavy brows and wavy hair and a constant five-o’clock shadow. He had a stubborn paunch, which drove him to try every new fitness fad, and while he wasn’t especially handsome, he was confident and cha
rming, and that made him attractive. The undergrads that crowded around during office hours had crushes on him.
I felt lucky to have Dr. Endicott as my new adviser, though he was not initially a fan of my thesis topic. Nostalgia didn’t interest him. I thought it was unusual that, as a history professor who spent most of his waking hours absorbed in the past, he found little emotional attachment to it.
He liked to have our meetings somewhere other than his office, at the pizza place or coffee shop or pub at the edge of campus. I liked talking to him, though most of the time I was listening, and sometimes our meetings would stretch on much later than necessary, which I didn’t particularly mind. One day he asked if we could meet at his house, since he would be at home grading papers, and we sat in his backyard roasting marshmallows in the fire pit and talking about things that were not at all related to my thesis. After that, we always met at his house, and we met when we didn’t need to.
As our discussions grew more personal (I knew, for example, that Dr. Endicott had fallen out of love with his wife and was going through a divorce), he asked me about the kidnapping and what my life had been like after, and I did my best to explain the things that I had a hard time putting into words. I hadn’t talked to anyone about it in a very long time. It was rare that anyone asked. He took my hand as I spoke, his fingers sliding between mine, a jolt of unexpected intimacy that gave me a weightless feeling, like I had stepped into a rapidly descending elevator.
You can’t change the past, he said. You can’t go back. He kissed me then, and undressed me on his sofa, and we made love with a framed picture of him and his soon-to-be ex-wife and their children staring down at us from the mantel.
We were together, secretly, for the rest of the fall semester. I hadn’t been with a man before, not like that, though I wouldn’t have admitted as much to Dr. Endicott, who never asked if he was the first. I hid my initial discomfort and inexperience because I craved the warmth he provided, the weight of his presence, the way the air in a room felt different when he was there and I was not alone. When he held me against his chest, I felt a glimmer of possibility, like a train was approaching from a long way off, and while I couldn’t yet see or hear it, I could feel the vibration in the tracks. It made me wonder about my mother, if that’s how it had been for her, with my father and with Gary, and maybe even with Heaney—if she had felt less empty, if she’d thought it might somehow be possible to be full.
Dr. Endicott didn’t want me to leave any sign of myself at his house, or to show him any affection in public. It wouldn’t be wise, he said, because even though we were doing nothing wrong, he was still my adviser. If anyone in the department found out, it would make things awkward for both of us.
My father died in February, and while I didn’t want to believe that it had any impact on me, it was then, when I returned from his funeral, that my focus began to further deteriorate. I had struggled with my thesis all along, penning brilliant phrases in my head only to have them dissolve when I began to type. I loved history, but some days I wondered if I was fooling myself, if I had stayed in school for so many years to avoid facing whatever came next, pursuing a master’s only because there was still money in my college fund. I credited Dr. Endicott with what progress I’d made—I had forced myself to put words on the page because I wanted to please him—but after the funeral, whenever I opened the file, I felt sick to my stomach and closed it without writing anything.
I spent spring break in my tiny basement apartment, staring at my laptop screen, while Dr. Endicott went skiing in Breckenridge with his two grown children. I didn’t miss him, exactly, but I missed not being alone. The other graduate assistants, the ones who were usually up for happy hour or coffee or a movie at the dollar theater, had all gone to visit family or headed up into the mountains or driven a punishing number of hours to get to a beach. Instead of utilizing my free time to work on my thesis, I got out a notebook and pen, and I wrote a poem. I’d never written one before, though I had tried. I’d never been able to get the right words to come. This time, I just started writing, spilling my thoughts messily onto the page. I closed with an unattributed quote stolen from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which had never felt so true to me as it did on the long drive back west after Dad’s funeral, my heart clenched in protest as I traveled in the wrong direction: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there…”
I had promised Dr. Endicott that I would go to his house over break to water his houseplants. He had given me a key for that specific purpose, and I was to leave the key in the house when I was done. I had the poem with me, folded in my pocket, and while I was there, watering the philodendron in his home office downstairs, I slipped it into the middle drawer of his desk on an impulse, tucked beneath an address book and a thin stack of takeout menus. I hadn’t written the poem for Dr. Endicott, but for me. It was not for or about him. He hadn’t wanted me to show my feelings in public, hadn’t wanted me leaving any trace of myself behind. Now I had left a piece of my hidden self, exposed, and I was electric with the knowledge that it might possibly be discovered.
Dr. Endicott was fidgety when he returned from break and didn’t have much time for me. One night, as I was getting dressed to go back to my apartment after spending the evening with him, he confessed that he had been feeling guilty about our relationship and was no longer sure that it was a good idea. He wanted to break it off. We would go back to being adviser and advisee, and nothing more.
I didn’t feel anything at first, white noise, empty air. Soon after, when there was talk in the department that he was trying to reconcile with his wife, I remembered my poem, that piece of myself I had left behind. It had been stupid of me to leave it with him, and I wanted—needed—to get it back, without him ever knowing it had been there.
I drove to his subdivision when I knew he was teaching a night class, parked down the block, and walked to his house, sneaking into the backyard and onto the patio where we had once roasted marshmallows.
The sliding glass door was locked, so I scooted one of the patio chairs over, climbed up on it, and tried the office window. I kept jiggling the window long after I realized that it wasn’t going to open. I was growing frustrated and angry with myself, that I couldn’t do this one simple thing. I was so close to getting my poem back, but instead Dr. Endicott would find it and feel sorry for me, embarrassed. I imagined him reading it to his wife or putting it in my student file, things he wouldn’t likely do, but could, because I had laid myself bare on the page, and he had it in his possession to do with it as he pleased.
I took off my jacket and balled it around my fist, like I’d seen people do on television. The glass was flimsy in its frame, so I knew it would shatter, though not how easily. I punched with all my strength and my arm went straight through, so far that I fell forward. I stood there a moment, slightly panicked by what I’d just done, and then my adrenaline spiked and I knocked out the remaining shards and pulled myself through the window.
I was shaking as I opened the center drawer in Dr. Endicott’s desk and slid the poem from beneath his address book. Red drops spattered onto his pencils and Post-it notes, and as I looked for its source, blood dripped down my fingers, blooming darkly along the edge of the paper I clutched, threatening to blot out the words. Blood spotted my jeans and shoes and left a trail across the floor. I realized that I must have slit my arm on the broken window glass, and I was bleeding more than I had ever seen myself bleed before. I fainted then, more from the sight of all the blood than the loss of it.
A dog-walking neighbor had heard the window break and shined a flashlight in to see me lying on the floor in a puddle of blood. He called the police, and then Dr. Endicott, who thankfully didn’t want to press charges against me for breaking into his house. However, he did insist on calling my mother. The poem was still crumpled in my hand when I was found, and the officers had read it and shown it to him. He was certain that I’d tried to kill myself because he’d b
roken up with me.
I was admitted to the hospital for the night and given a psych evaluation, but I was released when my mother came for me the next day. She drove me back to Minnesota, sighing heavily every time she turned to look at me. When she finally spoke, I thought she would recite some Bible verses, tie everything back to God in the way that Gary had taught her. I was wrong. She shook her head. I thought if you learned anything from me, it was not to ruin yourself over a man.
I had told her twenty times that I hadn’t tried to kill myself, that I had cut my arm breaking in, and that I wasn’t breaking in to vandalize or steal, I only did it to retrieve something that was mine. Yes, the cuts ran along my veins, the smart way to do it, none of that wrist-slashing, cry-for-attention bullshit. But really, if I’d wanted to die, would I have bothered making shallow cuts up to my armpit? Would I have wanted to be humiliated, found dead on my adviser’s floor clutching a terrible poem?
This is temporary, she’d said when we pulled up to her and Gary’s ranch house. It doesn’t do any good to sit around and mope. Ironic advice from a woman who’d spent ten years swallowing pills in her bedroom.
Mom and Gary laid their hands on me and prayed that I would be saved from sin and born again through the Lord Jesus Christ. My Catholic baptism apparently hadn’t done any good, and there was talk of submerging me in the pool at Gary’s church. I pictured myself sitting in a dunk tank, Gary throwing Bibles at the bull’s-eye to get me to fall into the water. When Gary was home, my mother cooked and vacuumed and worked out on her elliptical machine while reading scripture, and when he was gone, she bought things from the Home Shopping Network and drank white wine in a coffee mug and ate chocolate chips out of the bag while she curled her hair.
I felt like an alien in their house. Mom would make unfamiliar meals, things she’d learned, perhaps, from watching so much Rachael Ray; and she and Gary would both crumble Nacho Cheese Doritos on top of their Mexican casserole, like it was the natural thing to do, and I would sit there and watch them eat, thinking theirs was not a family I belonged to. Each night at dinner, Gary lectured me on the importance of faith and belief, quoting his favorite televangelists and offering up Bible verses. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” You’ve got yourself stuck in a long, dark season, Arden, and it’s time to let in the light. As though it were as simple as opening up the blinds.
