River Road

by Carol Goodman

  “You must have been close to Leia,” I said.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’m the one who always says not to get too close to the students. But Leia—” There was a catch in her voice, a tiny hiccup that I realized was a sob. “Leia was special. We worked together on the prison initiative, you know.”

  I nodded. The prison initiative was Cressida’s pet project. She recruited only the best students for it. Leia had been thrilled when she was selected.

  “And when you share an experience like that you can’t help but grow close. I wish you had agreed to teach there.”

  Cressida had often tried to get me to teach a class at the prison, but the last thing I had wanted to do was step foot in the very place where Hannah Mulder was serving out her sentence. Only, Hannah wasn’t there anymore, I reminded myself, rubbing the pink barrette in my pocket.

  “Why?” I asked suddenly. “Would I have gotten tenure if I had?”

  Cressida blanched and I instantly felt ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry,” I began.

  “No,” Cressida said, “you’re right. I think it would have made a difference. Not just for the tenure decision. I think it would have helped you to get outside of yourself to see what these women deal with. Maybe you would have been able to channel your grief into something productive and creative.”

  I bit my cheek. As if my grief for Emmy was so slight it could fit into something as narrow as a channel when it was as wide as an ocean. Try to channel an ocean, I could have told Cressida, and you wind up with a deluge. This is why I hadn’t felt like talking to Cressida this morning, but I realized she was only trying to help in the best way she knew. Writing my memoir, she often said, gave a voice to my silenced pain. Writing, especially confessional writing, was like a religion to her.

  “You’re right,” I said, and then, looking for a way to make up for snapping at her, my eyes lit on the stack of glossy books on her desk. “It’s worked for you. Is this the new book?” I picked up a slim volume. The title The Sentences was printed on a graphic design meant, I guessed, to represent prison bars. I remembered that when Cressida was up for tenure last year, she’d gotten this book contract just in the nick of time to present to the committee.

  “This is the advanced reader’s edition. I’ve dedicated it to the women I worked with in the prison, but I think there’s time to add a dedication to Leia. I had also planned to do a reading series incorporating some of the inmates’ writing and I was thinking now that I could use some of Leia’s work as well. That’s why I called you in here. I was wondering if you had any work of Leia’s you think would fit.”

  “She wrote a fantasy story for my fiction workshop.”

  Cressida wrinkled her nose. I knew she didn’t like fantasy. “I was looking for something more realistic, perhaps about her time working at the prison?”

  “No, she wasn’t writing anything like that,” I said. “But I can look through old papers she gave me in previous classes if you like. Do you need help with the reading series?” I was so relieved that Cressida didn’t know about the police yet that I was willing to agree to anything. “I’d really like to be a part of it.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Nan,” she said, leaning forward and taking my hand. She squeezed it so tightly I could feel her rings cutting into my skin. “Maybe the tenure thing will be a wake-up call for you. Maybe you’ll use this opportunity to take some time off for your writing—and yourself. You know . . . do a detox maybe?” She raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow and I felt the blood rush to my face. Was she suggesting I needed to stop drinking? Before I could protest she added, “Even my prison students say that their time there has been a gift!”

  * * *

  I checked back in the main office but Dottie wasn’t at her desk and Ross’s door was still closed. I hoped he came back soon. I didn’t know if I could bear talking to anyone else today. I walked down the hall to my office feeling dazed by Cressida’s suggestion about detox and that I look at not getting tenure as a gift. Crap. Did that mean I was supposed to quit and skulk away? Would the department fire me? I knew that the protocol was to leave when you didn’t get tenure—but leave to go where? It was all well and good for Cressida Janowicz, heir to Dave the Duke of Diamonds, to look at losing a job as a gift of time, but I was barely making do on my salary as it was. State schools did not pay what private colleges paid and the house—the quaint, adorable farmhouse that Evan and I had bought when I got the job here—was a money pit. I’d had to take out a loan last year to have the roof fixed. Of course the smart thing would have been to sell it—

  “Nancy? Isn’t it awful?”

  I looked around, embarrassed to have been caught worrying about money on such a day, and found Joan Denning standing behind me at the door to the adjunct offices. She had a stack of papers pressed to her chest and a rolling suitcase in tow.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “I had Leia in Composition her freshman year. What a bright girl! And I’ve heard her at the faculty-student readings.” Joan always came to the readings and read a poem. They were good poems. At one of the Christmas parties she’d told me that she had won a PEN award in her twenties. But she was in her fifties now and had left it too long to get a full-time academic job. She loved teaching, she told me, but she had to teach at three colleges to make ends meet. Looking at her—graying blond hair scraped back in an unflattering ponytail, twenty pounds overweight because she didn’t have time to exercise, hunched over from dragging reams of composition essays from school to school—I realized that this would be me in ten years if I didn’t get tenure.

  “Leia told me she liked one of your poems,” I said. “The one about the moth.”

  “She did?” Joan’s heavy face was transformed into beatific bliss. “Maybe I’ll read it at the candlelight vigil tonight.”

  “I think that’s a lovely idea,” I said. I gave her an awkward hug, the papers in her arms crinkling against the ones in mine like dry tinder catching fire, and hurried on to my office, wiping my face, not wanting anyone to see me cry. I just wanted to close the door and wait for Ross—but when I got to my office I found three students sitting cross-legged on the floor outside my door, hugging each other and weeping.

  “Come on in,” I told them.

  * * *

  I spent the next few hours handing Kleenexes to students and listening to their memories of Leia. Leia had been their lab partner, in their study group, in the same play. She had stayed up all night with one boy when he’d broken up with his boyfriend and had always let in another girl when she’d forgotten her ID at the cafeteria (apparently Leia had worked three jobs while managing to keep up a 4.0 average). I was surprised at how many students were still on campus, but several told me they had delayed leaving to attend the candlelight vigil tonight. I also wondered why they were all coming to me and not the counseling center until Aleesha Williams, who’d come by to check I’d gotten the paper she’d left in my box late yesterday, said to me, “It’s like that thing you always told us in writing class, you know? About how writing helps you climb out of the dump?”

  “ ‘Writing is a very sturdy ladder out of the pit,’ ” I quoted. “Alice Walker said that.”

  “Yeah,” Aleesha said. “You always made me feel like I could talk about anything—” Her lip trembled. I plucked the last Kleenex out of the box and handed it to her.

  “I guess this class was closer than I realized,” I said.

  Aleesha blew her nose and looked up. Her eyes were bloodshot, her light brown skin sallow in the bright sunlight pouring through the window. She was wearing a SUNY Acheron sweatshirt and torn jeans. All semester she’d come to class in bright, swingy skirts and soft blouses—styles I often recognized from the Target in Poughkeepsie—and always alert, excited to talk about the story I’d assigned even when she thought it was “messed up.” Today, though, she looked dazed. I felt a pang that Aleesha Williams, who had enough on her plate already raising a child on her
own, was so upset about Leia.

  “I didn’t just know Leia from class. You know she spoke up for my cousin Shawna at her parole board.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah, they met in that class the college runs down at the prison in Fishkill. At first I was kind of mad, Shawna getting to take classes for free after she got arrested for dealing while I’m working two jobs to pay for my classes . . .” Aleesha’s lip trembled again. “But then Shawna only got in trouble because of that no-account boyfriend of hers, so I guess it all evens out in the end and I don’t begrudge anyone a chance to make something better of themselves, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “So Leia went to Shawna’s parole board?”

  “Uh-huh. She even read aloud from some paper Shawna wrote. I think it impressed them—a nice college girl like Leia speaking up for Shawna like that—it was a really decent thing Leia did. I wrote about it in that paper I left for you.”

  “Really? Professor Janowicz is putting together a reading series about Leia’s work at the prison. I could pass it on to her.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “There’s a lot in there about the drugs Shawna’s done—”

  “But she’s clean now, right?” I asked, remembering a poem Aleesha had handed in a few weeks ago about seeing her cousin for the first time after she got out of prison.

  “As far as I know . . . tell you the truth, I haven’t seen Shawna in a few days. . . . Anyway, I wouldn’t want to jinx her, you know?” She’d twisted the Kleenex in her hand into a knot. I tried to think of something reassuring to say.

  “Maybe if she saw how proud you were of her recovery it would help.”

  Aleesha bit her lip, which was chapped and peeling. “Yeah, maybe, only—” She stopped at the sound of a deep, booming male voice in the hallway.

  “Oh, there’s Professor Ballantine,” I said, getting to my feet. “I really do need to talk to him . . . about something to do with Leia . . . do you mind?”

  “No problem,” she said, quickly grabbing her backpack off the floor and getting to her feet. “I’ll see you at the vigil thing?”

  “Sure,” I said, although I had no intention of going to it.

  Ross was just passing my door when Aleesha opened it. “Thank God!” I said, more dramatically than I’d meant to. “I need to talk to you.” At the sight of him—the strong, clean line of his jaw, the touch of gray at his temples that only made him look more professorial, the hooded eyes that seemed to convey an intimate knowledge of grief even on good days and that now looked haunted—I wanted to rest my head on his broad, oxford cloth–covered chest and weep. All the anger I’d felt last night had fallen away.

  “Nan,” he said, managing to inject a wealth of sympathy into the single syllable. “I know how awful this must be for you. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  He had? I was about to tell him that I’d been right here waiting for him, but he took my elbow and angled his body so I could see the two people behind him. Although the man was large, he was hunched over in a way that made him seem small, his broad, pale face ghostly in the fluorescent hall lights. He was leaning protectively over a tiny brunette.

  “I’d like you to meet Marie and Chad Dawson,” Ross said. “Leia’s parents.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I could only hope that the Dawsons thought the horror on my face was at what had happened to them—not that I was being introduced to the parents of the girl the police suspected I had killed.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said woodenly, recalling how empty those words had sounded when people had said them to me. As if I’d misplaced Emmy. Carelessly. “Leia was a remarkable young woman and a talented writer.”

  Marie dabbed her eyes, which were red but still lovely. “You must be the writing teacher she was always talking about . . . Ms. Lewis?”

  “Nan,” I said. “It’s been a great privilege to teach Leia, Mr. and Mrs. Dawson. She was an extraordinary young woman. I can’t imagine—”

  “Leia said you lost your little girl when she was only four,” Marie said, clasping my hand. “So you do know. You know that we have to be grateful for the time we had them.” She drew in a shaky breath and I suddenly realized how little was holding this woman together. Chad put his arm around her and murmured her name. “I bet you see your little girl’s face every day of your life, don’t you?”

  I nodded, unable to speak, and clutched the barrette in my pocket until it dug into my skin.

  “Well, Leia’s with her now,” Marie said. “I just know my girl will be looking out for her.”

  Whenever well-meaning sympathizers had reassured me that Emmy was in heaven I’d wanted to scream at them that even if I believed in heaven it was no comfort to think of Emmy there. Now, however, I thought of Emmy and Leia both killed on the same spot and thought maybe there was something to it. Maybe that’s why I had found the barrette. Maybe it was a sign that Emmy was with Leia.

  “That’s a lovely thought, Mrs. Dawson,” I said. “I can see where Leia got her generosity.”

  Marie squeezed my hand and looked up at her husband, whose bland, washed-out face lit up with love for his wife. For an awful moment I almost envied them. There would be no recriminations between them, no accusations that Marie hadn’t been watching when her daughter had strayed down the hill and wandered onto the road—

  “Will you walk with us to the candlelight vigil?” Marie asked. “We can say a prayer for Emmy too.”

  The candlelight vigil was the last place I wanted to go. I could almost hear Anat’s voice yelling in my ear, No! Tell her no! You shouldn’t even be here! But how could I tell this lovely grieving woman that I wouldn’t go to her daughter’s vigil? “Of course,” I told her. “It would be an honor.”

  * * *

  As we walked from the faculty tower toward the Peace Garden, the Dawsons relived their terrible morning. I had the feeling they had been telling this story all day and that they would be telling it for the rest of their lives.

  “When the call came this morning,” Marie said, “I thought it was about Tad. He’s our eldest and he’s serving in Afghanistan. I’d been up since four. I knew something was wrong.”

  “Marie gets these feelings,” Chad said. “She knew when Leia had appendicitis before the doctors did. And when Lucy tore her ACL in soccer Marie called me on the cell before I’d even crossed the field and gotten to her.”

  “Chad coaches the girls’ soccer team,” Marie said.

  “I suppose that Tad and Travis won’t be able to come for the service,” Ross said, smoothly segueing from soccer practice to funerals and just as smoothly recalling the name of their other son. “Leia told me that Travis was in the Peace Corps. What about your . . . Lucy . . . ?” He’d been about to say your younger daughter and caught himself. They only had one daughter now. It was a tiny slip, but one I was surprised that Ross would make.

  “We left her with Chad’s sister. She’s making the arrangements at our church and the boys are coming stateside for the funeral,” Marie answered. “I made the calls from the train.”

  “Marie runs a tight ship,” Chad said with a look of pride. “We were stationed overseas for twelve years—switched countries every three years.”

  “Leia mentioned that you lived abroad,” I said. “She said it was one of the things that made her a writer.”

  “She said you’d made her a writer,” Marie said simply.

  I was unable to speak for a moment. Marie, seeming to understand, remarked on the candles set alongside the path in paper gift bags printed with ladybugs. Dottie’s idea, I imagined. “Why, they look just like the goody bags for Leia’s Sweet Sixteen!” she exclaimed. “I can tell how much Leia was loved here.” Chad took his wife’s hand and together they walked forward on the path, leaving Ross and me alone together. I realized that this might be my best opportunity to talk to Ross before the vigil.

  “Look, Ross, there’s something
I really need to tell you. The police brought me in today—”

  “The police,” he said, looking disgusted, “are clueless. They asked me a bunch of questions, too, about Leia’s and my ‘relationship’ as they called it, implying that there was something untoward about it. As if that would have anything to do with some drunk mowing Leia down on the river road.”

  I stared at him, shocked at his venom; he so rarely allowed himself to get rattled. He was always the strong, reliable one who stayed calm when all around him were losing their heads. Being accused of having improper relations with a student, though, would be the one thing that would unhinge him.

  “I’m sorry, Ross, that’s preposterous. I’m sure they’re just casting about. Still, I think you should know—”

  “Later, okay, Nan? I can’t take on one more thing today. I just need to get through this.” He flung his hand toward the crowd that waited at the end of the path in the Peace Garden and I noticed that he was shaking. It took a lot of strength to look as strong as he always did. He had once told me that he was exhausted after his classes. I’d been surprised because he always made teaching look easy. He was known for his relaxed, affable style in the classroom. When I had said that to him he laughed. “It’s a performance. That’s the only way to engage these students. You have to emote. Sometimes it just drains the life out of me.”

  He looked now as if he’d been drained. I couldn’t burden him with my own situation—at least not until after the vigil.

  We walked the rest of the way in silence on the candlelit path that meandered through a snow-covered field and a pine copse toward the Peace Garden. Before Acheron was a teaching college it had been part of the Blackwell estate. When the Blackwells lost their only child to a tragic drowning accident—and Charlotte Blackwell killed herself—the estate had lapsed into disrepair and was eventually sold to the state to become a teacher’s college and then a state college. The mansion had been turned into a classroom building, linoleum laid over hardwood floors, and acoustic tiles dropped under ornate plaster. Utilitarian brick buildings had sprung up around it in the 1930s and then even uglier cinder block constructions in the fifties.