I wanted to play with the syntax of her question, change it to: “What has brought Tarble back to you?” Because it was the suitcase and Beth Richards and A Room of One’s Own and Mark that tempted me to return to campus, not an innate desire to relive the good ole’ days of college.
“Friends,” I told her instead. And as if I needed another excuse, I added, “I’m going to the vigil on Sunday, the one for the missing girl.”
“Yes, Beth Pritchard?” She gestured to a piece of paper on her desk. It looked like a memorandum from the president about the vigil.
“Richards,” I corrected.
“Sorry.” She cringed at her faux pas. “Were you friends?”
I shrugged, wondering if Beth had known about me. Had she found pleasure in stealing Mark from under my nose?
The water began to steam above the hot pot then, and Professor Barnard went about pouring my tea into a massive ceramic mug. She dunked the ball into the water several times before handing the cup to me with two hands, gently so as not to spill the hot liquid.
As I sipped the tea I watched her remove a file folder from her bag and from that, a blue book, my blue book from the day before. She didn’t hand it to me at first. Rather, she began flipping through the pages.
“How do you like the tea?” she asked.
I nodded my approval.
She concentrated again on my essay. “Your friend Heidi was right; you are modest.” She turned the pages slowly, like a mother might stir a pot of chicken soup at the stove while she solved the problems of her children seated at the kitchen table. “Because this is brilliant, Ruby. Yes, you started slow. Reserved. Afraid, even. But by the end, it was the best analysis I’ve seen from a student in a long time.”
I leaned forward to glimpse my handwriting on the page. It looked foreign. Sloppy and dark, as if I had pressed on the tip of the pen with my whole weight.
“Thank you,” I said. “But I don’t even remember what I wrote.”
She handed me the blue book then, as if to jog my memory. I flipped through the pages just as she had.
“It’s unfortunate I wasn’t teaching here while you were still a student,” she said. “I would have been honored to have someone so insightful in my class. I assume you’re in graduate school?”
I shook my head no.
“Teaching? Secondary education perhaps?”
“I work for a newspaper in Chicago.”
“A journalist?”
I nodded from behind the blue book. “More or less.”
“Well, I was particularly impressed by your ability to step inside the author’s mind, to feel what she felt, to see things as she saw them,” she continued. “I am a big fan of Teasdale and her poetry, and I found your essay eerily intuitive, almost as if you were channeling Teasdale’s spirit.”
She pointed to her corkboard then, at a photo of a woman wearing a wide brim hat and scarf. Sara Teasdale. I recognized the poet from my research the year before. I set my essay on the desktop then. Uncontrolled, my fingers shook.
She noticed. “Ruby, what’s wrong?”
“I’m the girl they were talking about yesterday in class,” I said. “The one who tried to kill herself last year.”
The professor’s lips parted but no words came out.
“So that’s why my analysis was so good,” I added. “I wasn’t writing from Teasdale’s point of view, but my own.”
She shook her head in self-chastisement. “I apologize, Ruby. I had no idea. Writing this essay must have been very painful for you. I feel terrible.”
“How could you have known? Besides, it felt good to read, to think, to write again. Obviously, I needed to get some things off my chest.” I gestured at the blue book. “I should consider it free therapy.”
“But all of that talk yesterday about the recent suicide attempt . . . you must have . . .” She let out a deep sigh. “The girl, Julie Farris, is one of my protesters. I’m quite fond of her. And I didn’t want to just sweep it under the carpet,” she tried to explain.
“I understand.”
She gave me a small smile. “If you don’t mind me asking, did something trigger it? Your suicide attempt? Was it a traumatic event or unexplained depression?”
“My father died the year before,” I explained.
“I’m sorry to hear that. The death of a loved one is an unbearable pain.” Her eyes fell to my essay, still on the desktop. She stared at it. “Was there something else, though? Besides your father?”
My heart started to beat in my throat. “Why do you ask?”
“Your essay,” she said. “Now that I know you were writing from personal experience, I see it differently.” She opened my blue book on the desktop and spread it out with her palms as if it were a map. “You’re angry.”
“I am?”
“And I can’t imagine you harbor such rage for your father. So I’m guessing it’s like William Congreve said: ‘Nor hell a fury like a woman scorn’d’?”
I nodded. I was a woman scorned. “I didn’t know I was angry,” I said.
The professor laced her fingers. “Ah, that is the miracle of the written word. It beckons our unconscious out of hiding. It tells us things we need to know, sometimes things we don’t want to know.”
“I don’t want to be angry.”
“Anger isn’t such a bad thing, Ruby. It moves obstacles. Nothing would happen without anger. It’s the catalyst for change.” She paused. “He hurt you, didn’t he?”
“He broke my heart. I dropped out of school. I didn’t graduate.”
“But you still love him?”
“I think I’ll always love him, even though I know he doesn’t love me, and that maybe he never did. Why is that?”
She leaned toward me, her voice soft. “Because women love differently than men. We can love without being loved in return. We can love beyond the truth, and even in spite of it.”
“When he ended things, I blamed myself,” I divulged. “I thought I drove him away. But I know now that’s not true. I know better.”
“And knowledge is power.”
“Is it? Then why do I feel so powerless?”
She shook her head. “I said knowledge is power. I didn’t say it makes you powerful. Knowledge is like talent, Ruby. It means nothing unless you do something with it. You feel the power later, like an aftershock. You feel it when you figure out what that thing is.”
We sat silent for a moment, and I stared at my lap. When I looked up again, I caught the professor watching me in awe, as if she saw some aura, some color field of pinks and reds and oranges.
“Do you know much about stars?” she asked.
“You mean, in space?”
She nodded. “Many of us forget they are light-years away. The stars we admire now in the sky are actually light from the past, from thousands of light-years ago. We’re just now seeing the image of shimmer. When ships navigated the seas by the stars, they literally sought the future by their understanding of the past.”
“That’s interesting.”
She shook her head, as if to say she wasn’t even close to making her point. “The past is a funny thing, Ruby. It is nature’s most underestimated ghost. It is still very much alive. Its heart still beats. It haunts. And it is always impacting, always dictating the future, which eventually becomes the past. You see, it multiplies, this enigma. It grows larger and larger until at the end, it swallows your entire life. Every day, every moment becomes the past.”
I said nothing this time, waiting for her to finish.
“I think the real travesty happens much earlier, when we are young, when we become so aware of this future, this daunting day when our past consumes our life, that we stop living altogether. When we simply give up.”
She lifted my essay from her desk and handed it back to me like a torch.
“It is the fight against the past that keeps the spirit alive and well,” she said.
I regretted leaving Professor Barnard’s office as soon as
I shut the door. The four walls of her simple space, her home away from home, had embraced me long enough that I’d grown accustomed to their warmth, and the hallway now felt cold and barren. Gwen’s office had never had that effect on me. In fact, I always left our Thursday night sessions fluttering for freedom, like a butterfly let go from the trap of a Mason jar. In a mere twenty minutes, Professor Barnard had done something Gwen had never been able to do during ten months of therapy.
She’d empowered me.
I walked back down the spiral staircase into the lobby of Langley Hall—the blue book still rolled up in my hand like a torch—and found myself right where I’d started that morning, just outside the library doors. I stood there a second, unsure of where to go or what to do. The pseudotorch, now growing wet with perspiration from my palm, shed no light on the subject.
And then I saw her—myself. The me before Mark, before my father died. Two years younger, she is fresh-faced and confident, an auburn-haired senior with a backpack slung on her right shoulder. There’s a bounce in her step, a calm but almost mischievous smile at her lips. She knows where she’s going and where she’s been. Her future is unwritten, but that doesn’t seem to faze her. In fact, she’s empowered by the thought of everything that can be. Her whole life is in front of her, a blank page full of promising stories. And so I followed her—this memory of myself—out the front doors of Langley Hall into the clean, crisp air of late morning.
From a distance, I saw campus drive was blocked from the parade; onlookers, some standing and some couched out on collapsible chairs with cup holders, flanked both sides of the street. Avoiding the crowd, I headed toward North Hall, the northernmost dormitory on campus, hence the name. As I neared the thin, angled building, my eyes traveled up its ivy-covered facade to the third floor, finding the fourth window in from the right. The curtains were open in room 318, but I could picture only darkness in my old dorm room.
Fortunately, the side door had been propped open with a brick, something students did from time to time to skip the hassle of swiping an ID card, and I entered with ease, walking through the first-floor hallway with stealth, as if coming in past curfew. When I reached the front lobby, though, I was stopped by the smell—the unmistakable scent of women’s perfume laced with bleach. The lobby sat empty and quiet that morning, and yet I saw it bustling with students, saw my resident assistant at the front desk, and saw that younger version of myself round the corner and disappear into the stairwell. Standing there in the lobby of North Hall, surrounded by the familiar smell of my youth, I wondered if somehow, I could bring that girl back from the dead.
Could I save Ruby Rousseau? Even if I could no longer save Beth Richards?
I climbed the stairwell to the third floor, where I passed room after room in decreasing sequence, 330, 328, 326, and 324. The students’ names were written on red and orange construction paper leaves sprinkled with gold glitter, something the RA must have crafted in her spare time.
I stopped first in front of room 324. It had been Beth Richards’s room, the one she’d shared with Sarah Iverson. The last time I’d seen Beth she was outside that very door, the day I borrowed the luggage. I paused there a moment longer, as if the door were her tombstone.
Just a few doors down, I came to room 318. It was now Sheila and Lisa’s room, according to the names on the door. I brushed a fingertip across the brown wood, then laid my hand flat on the door. I expected to feel heat, some sort of high-voltage energy, but instead it felt cool under my skin. Inhaling and exhaling, I tried to blow a sudden sick feeling out of my body, but after several heaves, the feeling formed a knot in my stomach and grew sour. And I couldn’t move. So I simply stood there, arm extended, palm on wood, breathing in and out.
“They’re not here,” someone said.
I sprung my arm from the door, as if it were actually hot to the touch, and saw a girl standing a few feet away. I didn’t recognize her. She was probably a freshman. I wondered how long she’d been watching me.
“Who?” I asked.
“Sheila and Lisa.” The girl gestured to the door. “Isn’t that who you’re looking for?”
“No. I used to live on this floor,” I tried to explain.
The girl eyed me closely then, neared me slowly, as if preparing to tell a fantastic ghost story. “You went to school here?”
I nodded. She came closer.
“Is it true?” she asked, once she stood before me. “What they say about that room?”
“I guess that all depends. What do they say?”
“I heard a girl died in there. She killed herself. Is that true?”
Thanks to Julie Farris’s suicide attempt, rumors had already grown like vines from mouths to ears, twisting truth. But she’s right, I thought. A girl did die in that room. The girl I used to be.
“She overdosed on sleeping pills,” I said.
“And?” the girl prompted.
“Not and,” I corrected. “But.”
“But what?”
“But she didn’t die,” I told the girl. “She lived to tell about it.”
Chapter 11
Heidi was still waiting for me outside Langley Hall when I walked up five minutes late.
“I wasn’t sure you were coming,” she said, her round, cherubic face lit with a smile.
“About earlier—” I started.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Much.” Thanks to Professor Barnard’s magic tea, the nausea was gone. What had she said was in it again?
“Then let me treat you to lunch,” Heidi said, linking her arm through mine, as if she’d already forgiven me.
The Lakeside Diner was a likely choice—it was where Heidi and I had always gone to study, talk, or cry over carrot cake. It had been our retreat, when things had gotten rough, as they so often did in college. It wasn’t gourmet or classy, but I found its location near the Kenosha harbor and subsequent nautical theme charming. A chalky, ocean blue ceiling contrasted the sky blue pleather booths. Watercolor seascapes of boats and seagulls flanked the walls. And it always smelled of deep-fried perch and lemon.
We filled our first minutes in a corner booth overlooking the water with simple things, like ordering coffee, reading the menu, and asking the server to explain the specials. We didn’t say more to each other than “The Thai chicken salad sounds good” or “Remember, for a dollar more, you can add a slice of pie.” We knew our conversation would have to go down that road: a twisted, bumpy one mired with feelings of abandonment and guilt. But for the moment, we set our emotions aside and indulged in mindless activities and friendly banter.
“I’m going with a cheeseburger.” Heidi flopped her menu down, then stretched her arms above her head and yawned, as if it were the end of a very long day. “You?”
I decided on the roast turkey, complete with mashed potatoes and gravy. I’d pay the extra buck for a slice of cherry pie too.
After we ordered our meals, we gorged on the bread basket, spreading butter on pumpernickel like it was jelly. I downed a whole slice before saying what needed to be said:
“I had an affair with Mark Suter.”
Heidi’s forehead initially creased in confusion, but soon her eyes grew wide with understanding. “Professor Mark Suter?”
I told Heidi the whole story then, about that afternoon in Mark’s office, our discussion about my thesis, the coffee shop in Racine, and the kiss in his Jeep. And New Orleans. But for all those moments of euphoria, there were those moments of shame, insecurity, and despair, and I shared those too. The disapproving look from the woman at Café Du Monde. The D on my thesis. The sleeping pills.
The visions of dead women writers—those, I kept to myself.
After I finished, I looked out onto the harbor and watched a boat sail on the horizon, and cross over the line between lake and sky. Heidi said nothing, and I held my breath.
“I’m not being quiet because I’m judging you,” she finally said. “I’m just trying to piece things together. I gu
ess the first thing I should say is thank you for trusting me.” She spoke slowly, as if still trying to solve a riddle. “He’s the reason you were so distant? Why you pulled away from me that semester?”
“You understand why I couldn’t tell you? I didn’t want us to get caught. I was ashamed.”
“Of course you were. I mean, not that you did anything wrong.”
“It was wrong,” I said. “He was married. Is married.”
“But he was your teacher. He took advantage of that.”
“I was a consenting adult, Heidi.”
“But he was in the power position. He’s twice your age. He should have known better.”
Heidi seemed to stare off at the same boat on which I’d been transfixed earlier.
“This makes a lot more sense now,” she said.
“You mean, my behavior?”
“Yes, that does make more sense to me in hindsight, but actually, I was talking about . . .” She checked the dining room for familiar faces or perked ears. “Look, you have to promise not to tell a soul. I could seriously lose my job over it.”
I traced an x on my chest.
“You know Julie Farris? The girl? The one who took the Tylenol? Well, just a few days ago, she made some allegations against Professor Suter. A sexual harassment kind of thing. She told President Monroe that he made sexual advances, and when she said no, he punished her with a bad grade.”
A chill tickled the back of my neck. “Did he deny it?”
“I’m not sure it went that far. It was still being investigated when she . . . you know.” She sighed. “Do you think that’s why she did it? Maybe she was embarrassed? She regretted coming forward?”
“Or maybe they were involved,” I offered. “And he broke her heart like he did mine.”
A wave of sadness crossed Heidi’s face then, and I realized she carried the burden of my near suicide with her as much as I did.
Just then the waitress arrived with our food, and we accepted refills on coffee and extra napkins and a bottle of Heinz for Heidi’s fries.
The Butterfly Sister Page 15
