You Kill Me

by Alison Gaylin

  Yes, he had a quick costume change. And yes, I was the stage manager. But that look—the look he gave me in the darkened wing of Stanford University’s Pigott Theater, with one worklight pouring over the sculpted length of him—had nothing to do with stages or managing. A subtle lift of his eyebrow, and I was at the top of a roller coaster, staring ahead at the plunging track. Hold on tight and get ready to scream.

  It was some look.

  And there it was again, in front of my boss and my best friend and a bunch of four-year-olds I’d never met before, years after Nate had hurt me so much I’d vowed to hate him forever.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Versatility,” said Yale, who was not in any way referring to Nate’s talent as an actor on the daytime soap opera Live and Let Live.

  “Mr. Gundersen!” said Ezra. “He’s my uncle and he’s a star!”

  “Real uncle or Mommy’s special friend?” said Yale. “Or perhaps you’re Daddy’s spec—”

  Luckily I was standing close enough to kick him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Yale, right?” There goes that damn eyebrow.

  I glanced at Yale. He was actually blushing.

  “Very nice to meet you both.” Terry glared at me. “This is Samantha, Ezra’s teacher, who I’m sure intended to introduce herself, didn’t you?”

  “Samantha and I know each other,” said Nate. “In fact, that’s why I convinced Jenna to let me drop off Ez.”

  “Jenna Sargent—the actress,” said Yale.

  “That’s right,” said Nate. “She’s not my real sister, but she plays her on TV.”

  “You’re on television?” said Terry.

  “I’ll say!” said Soph. “I watch you every day, and I can’t believe you’re babysitting Blythe’s son after she tried to murder you!”

  “Blythe is just a character, you ignoramus,” said Ezra.

  “Soph is not a ickeranus!” yelled Harry. Then both twins flew at Ezra like avenging bats.

  The first fight of the school year and no one even had their name tags yet. This must have been some kind of Sunny Side record—one I knew Veronica Bliss would take great pleasure in gloating over as soon as she found out. But as Terry, Yale, Soph and I struggled to pry the kids apart, with Ida Burroughs and her mother saying, “Oh, my God” at the exact same time and Nate apologizing to someone (I wasn’t sure who), I realized I was glad for the fight. I was glad to have something—apart from my ex—on which to focus my attention.

  Because, the truth was, I hadn’t said a word since his name. And when I did—if I did—who knew what that word would be?

  As it turned out, it wasn’t a word, but a noise—the kind someone might make if they’d been raised by wolves and had eaten bad carrion.

  “Hello, Green Eyes,” said Nate.

  “Uggghhhmmph.” At least I hadn’t said it was good to see him.

  We were standing just outside my classroom door. Inside, Terry was lecturing Ezra and the twins as more kids started to show up. I could hear Yale introducing himself as “the temporary teacher’s aide.” I knew I had to get back inside soon.

  Over Nate’s shoulder, I saw Veronica stick her head out of her classroom door, then pull it back fast, like a huge toe testing cold water.

  Why was Nate Gundersen smiling? Did he think that what he’d done to me didn’t matter anymore? Did he honestly believe there was statute of limitations on bisexual cheating?

  “It’s so weird,” he said. “I had this dream about you the other night. More of a memory, actually, from when we were driving cross-country on our way to New York. We were at that sleazy little motel just outside of Phoenix, remember? With the caved-in bed? You called it—”

  “The Grand Canyon.”

  “Right. And we slept in it. Took us a long time to work everything out so we were comfortable in that pit without crushing each other. But never once did we think about switching rooms. That’s how young we were.”

  Now it was Yale’s turn to stick his head out the door. “You all right, Sam?”

  “I’m fine.” You had sex with Susan, the commercial agent, every weekday between ten and noon. Gregory, the theatrical agent, was Monday, Wednesday and Friday at six. God knows who you penciled in for afternoons, for weekends.

  Nate said, “Ever feel older than you are? Sometimes I think this city has aged me in dog years.”

  That evening Method acting class that kept running late. The hang-ups on the answering machine. Those flowers, from Gregory, with the note: “For a job well-done.” “What job?” I asked you, hating the way my voice betrayed me by cracking.

  “You know, you’re the only woman I’ve ever met who could beat me in a staring contest.”

  “Okay. I give up. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Samantha.” He said my name like it was his favorite dish.

  I gritted my teeth. “You’ve got ten seconds.”

  “Babe,” he said, “you’re not making this very eas—”

  “One, two, three…”

  “I came to ask forgiveness.”

  I should’ve known from the way he’d phrased it. Nate never said things like “ask forgiveness.” Nobody did. It sounded to me like a memorized line from a tired old script—which, in all reality, it was. Nate—the reason why I’d moved from California to New York, the man who had once said, “I can’t wait until we’re old and retired so we can spend all day in bed together”—was twelve-stepping for sex addiction.

  And I was step seven.

  I wasn’t quite sure what annoyed me more: the fact that Nate was such a slut that he had to join an organized program just to keep his dick in his pants, or that he’d come to my preschool classroom to tell me about it.

  Two hours after I’d asked him to get out of my workplace and never come back, my jaw was starting to ache from all the stored tension.

  Still, I was trying to focus on my class, which was now hard at work on “All About Me” collages. Veronica Bliss had told me about the collages the previous fall. She’d gotten the idea from a teaching magazine, and had found them a creative way to get to know her kids, plus ease them back into school after 9/11. It was the first (and last) time she’d given a helpful suggestion that didn’t have the dual purpose of insulting me, which gave it an added resonance.

  Immediately, I started saving magazines for this year: more or less every non-X-rated publication from my neighborhood newsstand that didn’t feature pictures of burning towers. By now, I’d accumulated close to two hundred, which I’d stacked in piles on the floor of the bedroom closet, between my four pairs of shoes and the small, squat safe where Krull stored his service revolver.

  With his help, I’d brought them here days earlier, and he was clearly relieved to be rid of them. One August morning, the two tallest stacks had fallen on Krull’s head while he was working the combination on the safe, causing something close to a mild concussion. After I dug him out of the wreckage, he’d said, “Sam, when you take an idea and run with it, you have a tendency to run a little too far.”

  “I’m sorry, honey, but the kids need a choice.”

  And a choice they now had. Charlotte Weiss—who wanted to be a firefighter/princess when she grew up—was paging frantically through several issues of Disney Adventures magazine, using one of the dull pairs of scissors to free every available rendering of Beauty and the Beast’s Belle. Abraham Cooper, on the other hand, favored Car and Driver and TIME’s space-travel issue, while Ida Burroughs had covered her entire piece of construction paper with cat-food ads.

  I’d made my own “All About Me” collage earlier and stuck it to the wall as an example. Green construction paper (my favorite color) with glued-on pictures of a California beach scene, the New York City skyline, a scoop of chocolate ice cream, a still from my favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz, and a newspaper photo of the Central Park Zoo polar bear, sleeping peacefully in a snowstorm. Nothing gave me more hope than that picture. If that bear—hundreds of thousands of miles away from his na
tural habitat on a patch of fake land too small for him even to run across—could find contentment in a lousy blizzard, then there were endless possibilities for the rest of us. To my class, though, I’d simply said, “I love polar bears.”

  I glanced at Ezra, who had appropriated a February Entertainment Weekly and was cutting out a full-page photo of an Oscar.

  Not surprisingly (if you know four-year-olds), Ezra had quickly made peace with the Weiss twins. In fact, he was now sitting next to Harry W., the boys having bonded over their mutual admiration of Thomas the Tank Engine.

  Why couldn’t grown-ups forgive and forget like kids? Because kids never pick up a phone in the middle of the night to hear some strange woman’s voice, sobbing, “He told me he was single.”

  Should I tell Krull about seeing Nate today? I closed my eyes, tried to visualize his response….

  “I’ve always hated Nate Gundersen.”

  “I’m surprised you remember his name.”

  “How could I forget the name of that moron? He had the most wonderful woman in the world and blew it. How could he cheat on you? I would never cheat on you—never, ever, ever, ever.”

  Krull has changed out of his work clothes, locked his gun in the safe. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and those tight jeans with the hole in the knee, and he’s lying on the bed, looking up at me. “You know where I was last night?”

  “Where?”

  He rips off the shirt.

  “Walking around Manhattan, thinking about how I don’t deserve you. Unfortunately, it was late and no jewelry stores were open, but…” Off come the jeans and boxers as one.

  “Let me make it up to you now. Let me give you what you deserve.” He pulls me onto the bed and pins me down while his lips seek—

  “Ms. Leiffer, I need more kitties!” said Ida.

  “And I need more Academy Awards!”

  “Oh…sure,” I thumbed through one of the stacks, searching for unnoticed issues of Cat Fancy and Premiere, all the while thanking God that kids couldn’t read minds.

  “Are you hot?”

  I looked up, and there was Veronica, hovering just behind my head like a swarm of gnats.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Terry needs to do something about the air-conditioning, don’t you think?”

  “Oh. Maybe. Are you guys hot?”

  A few of my kids shook their heads, but Veronica didn’t bother looking. “Speaking of hot. I happened to notice Nate Gundersen.”

  Did it take her two whole hours to come up with that one? “Yep.”

  “He was here.”

  “Yep.”

  She glanced at the kids, then leaned in close. “But he dumped you,” she stage-whispered.

  “Actually, that wasn’t the way it happened,” I whispered back.

  “What does dumped mean?” said Charlotte.

  Her brother replied, “It means poo-poo.”

  A few predictable giggles.

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Ezra.

  “Yes, it does.”

  “No, it doesn’t!”

  I grabbed a November People and threw it in front of Ezra. “Look! Emmys!” I pulled Veronica toward the door. “Thanks for the idea,” I said, while trying to ease her out.

  “Idea?”

  “The ‘All About Me’ collages. The kids love making them.”

  Veronica swatted the words away, then suddenly leaned in so close that all I could see were reflections of my face in her glasses. For half a second, I was terrified she might kiss me. But instead she said, “Be careful.”

  Oh, please. The day Nate “dumped” me was three months after I’d started teaching at Sunny Side. He’d been due to meet me there for lunch, after my class let out. But he never showed up. Half an hour after my last kid had gone home, I’d called our apartment from the pay phone outside Terry’s office and started leaving a message for Nate on our answering machine.

  “Hi. It’s me, and I’m wondering where—”

  Click.

  “Sorry, but Nate can’t come to the phone right now.” The voice was female, filled with laughter and breath.

  I let the receiver drop from my hand and stared at it, dangling from the thick silver cable. I could hear Nate’s voice struggling out, small and desperate as the voice of a shrunken man in a science-fiction movie. “Samantha? Samantha!”

  I wanted to choke the life out of the cord, to slam the receiver against the wall. “Fuck you, Nate.”

  “Did you just say the F-word?” Veronica was standing behind me, but at the time I knew her only as the Nine-to-Five Teacher. And all I knew about her was that she made more money than me, and had two aides. She was wearing a white blouse with a playing-card pattern. I couldn’t stop staring at the queen of hearts—so smooth featured, so smug.

  “No matter how upset we are, we must watch the potty talk,” she said. “Little ears are always near.”

  If the queen of hearts had a voice, I thought, she would sound exactly like the Nine-to-Five Teacher.

  “Believe it or not, I’m actually over Nate Gundersen, Veronica.”

  “Miss Leiffer! Ida took my glue!”

  “I mean it. I don’t give a flying fudgecake about him anymore, so…see ya.” But Veronica stayed still, and I began debating whether or not it was against some kind of school code to physically push a fellow teacher out of my classroom.

  Bless her, she budged. But just as I was about to close the door, Veronica gave me a look—her eyes glinting with an emotion I’d never seen in her. “I didn’t mean be careful of Nate Gundersen,” she said. “I meant…be careful.”

  Then she reached into her pocket and removed something small enough to disappear in her closed fist, which she held out to me tentatively.

  It was one of those rare times when I didn’t just believe I was psychic; I knew it. Because, in those few seconds before she opened her hand, I knew what would be in it. I found my voice again just as her fingers stretched out like thick petals, and if nothing else, you had to admire how synchronized it all was. “Did a foreigner give you that?” I said, at the exact moment it revealed itself at the center of her palm…a white piece of paper, folded into a tiny, tight triangle.

  3

  Reverie

  He’d given the note to Veronica that morning, she explained. She’d been busy unlocking the school’s front door when someone had tapped her on the shoulder, sending a shock through her nervous system, the remnants of which would most likely stay lodged in her lower spine for weeks.

  “I just know I’ll have to go to the chiropractor again, and insurance won’t even cover it!” Veronica said, eyeing me in a challenging way, as if she planned to sue.

  “When did you say he came?” That’s what interested me most. The time frame.

  The stranger had tapped her on the shoulder a full hour before I arrived at Sunny Side. Which meant he’d probably gone there directly from Starbucks. Which meant he hadn’t followed me; he already knew where I worked.

  “He said, ‘Please give this to Miss Samantha Leiffer,’” said Veronica. “And…well, you know how I am. To each his own. Whomever you want to spend off hours with is your business, as long as it doesn’t affect the children, but—”

  “Veronica, I don’t know that man. I’ve only seen him once before, and that was this morning. In Starbucks.”

  “Miss Leiffer!” Ida shouted. “Abraham said my collage is the S-word!”

  “But it is stupid!”

  “Abraham, we don’t use that word. Apologize to Ida, please.” I looked at Veronica.

  “Well, he seemed to know you,” she said. “And that was bothersome, because he’s obviously…exotic. And when he looked at me, he had a lascivious gleam in his eye.” She glanced back at the kids, then lowered her voice. “I think he’s dangerous.”

  If ever there was an unreliable narrator, it was Veronica—a thirty-seven-year-old virgin who still lived with her parents and wouldn’t know lascivious if it took her out to dinner and jumpe
d her from behind.

  “He didn’t strike me as dangerous,” I said. “He ran away from John.”

  She gave me a long, appraising look, followed by a heavy sigh. “Open your eyes, Samantha,” she said, and headed for her classroom.

  Slowly, I walked back to my desk, placing the triangle on top without opening it.

  As I made my way to the long table where the kids were working on their collages, I noticed Ezra had been watching me. “Is that your fortune?” he asked, pointing to the note.

  You are in danger.

  Behind my back, I crossed the fingers on both hands, then crossed the wrists too, to make it an odd number—always luckier unless you’re talking thirteen. “I hope not,” I said.

  “Open your eyes, Samantha.” Veronica’s words looped through my mind for the rest of the afternoon. When the most sheltered woman in all of New York City patronizes you, it tends to stick.

  The note was in the back pocket of my jeans, but still I hadn’t opened it yet—hadn’t wanted to in class, though I wouldn’t have had the chance anyway.

  A glue fight between Ida and Abraham had turned very ugly very fast and, though I’d managed to separate them, I’d emerged with my favorite pale green T-shirt a gooey mess, and a clump of my hair epoxied to a collarbone.

  After enduring a series of suspicious looks from parents—not to mention Soph, who called me a “bloody horror show, if you don’t mind my saying”—I’d pulled my crusty hair back with a rubber band until the last parent (Ezra’s nanny, Soccoro) left the building.

  Then I ran to the new Gap across the street and bought the only shirt I could afford—a plain white tank top—which I wore out of the dressing room, ripping off the tags as I waited in line to buy it.

  “You know who you look like?” said the girl manning the cash register. “Dr. Sydney Stark-Leiffer.”

  I cringed. “She’s not a doctor.”

  Only then did I realize I’d left both my old shirt and my purse back in the dressing room.