If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  But to remember it now only filled her with grief. How young she had been, how trusting. How filled with hope.

  Five

  By the time Maggie returned to her car in the parking lot by the English building, the gray sky was purpling into evening. The rain was persisting. The landscapers were gone, the bushes trimmed and squared alongside Tilghman Hall. A few students—orientation leaders, athletes—moved across the quad in sandals and bright windbreakers, hoods drawn, unhurried despite the rain. Maggie sat behind the wheel, drops drumming on the roof, the canvas bag like an accomplice beside her on the seat.

  It would be different, she reasoned, replaying the scene in Bill’s office, if she felt the paper were unambiguously alarming.

  If she truly believed it were a vital piece of missed information.

  If Nathan Dugan were still at large, still living.

  Or, regardless, if the information in the paper could change anything—for Nathan, or for his victims.

  Maggie swallowed a wave of nausea. She fixed her eyes on a tall white spruce, glimpses of its pale trunk visible through the green. For a moment, she considered the unbearable possibility that she may in fact have overlooked something important, in Nathan’s paper or his person. That her concerns had been focused in the wrong direction. She grabbed her phone from the cup holder and, before she could rethink it, called Robert’s number. She’d texted him briefly that morning about the Facebook post, the pending meeting, and the prospect of talking to him now was reassuring. He would be practical, decisive. She would unload everything and ask his advice. If he instructed her to walk back inside Bill’s office, come clean, she would do it. But the phone kept ringing. A Saturday, five thirty—he was probably at home with Suzanne. Still, Maggie stayed on the line, hoping he’d be so surprised to see her calling that he’d find a way to answer, when the front door of Tilghman opened and Bill stepped out into the rain.

  Maggie kept the phone pressed to her ear, pretending to be talking, not wanting Bill to wonder why she was still sitting there. He walked quickly toward his car, shielding his head with a thin briefcase. It wasn’t until he had climbed into the front seat and wiped the rain from the case that she saw him look up and see her there. She waved. A pause, a wave in return. Then he started his car and eased out of the lot, wipers flapping, down the hill to the main road.

  Maggie hung up the phone and squeezed it in her lap. She registered the pressure in her chest and realized she wasn’t breathing. With an exhale, she turned the key and switched her headlights on. She’d feel better once she was home, with the commotion of the girls upstairs. Kim and Janie were no doubt already there, helping pack the last of Anna’s things. As she drove, the brake lights in front of her beamed a watery red. The blacktop shone. She proceeded slowly down University Row, under banners draped between wrought-iron lampposts—WELCOME NEW STUDENTS and HOME OF THE EAGLES!—the rain falling in sharp darts past the streetlamps’ glow. Approaching the next intersection, she pictured just in time the scene outside the mall—the crowd of media and mourners, the road choked with police cars and flashing lights—and turned the wheel hard to the right, back the way she’d come: past the march of grim stores on Standish, their lit signs now flickering, and into the maze of humble back roads, cluttered yards and dripping gutters, until she saw, up ahead, the small lemon-yellow house.

  The reporters had dispersed, the neighbors gone. There was surprisingly little evidence of the crowd that had so recently been there. As if on autopilot, Maggie eased the car onto the other side of the street, the wooded side, and turned the engine off. She clutched her hands in her lap. The yard was patchy, bald in places, in others overgrown with weeds. A Ford, hemmed with rust, was parked in the driveway. A single dim light shone behind the faded flowered curtains drawn across the living room window; one of the panes was broken. On the news, Nathan’s home life had been described in dramatically gray tones—a working-class neighborhood on the fringes of a college town—and Maggie had thought it a lazy cliché but was struck now by how depressed this house felt. Whenever she imagined her students in their lives outside her classroom, it was always in campus spaces—the dining hall, the library and dorms—yet this, here, had been Nathan’s other life. She pictured him climbing onto this broken porch, books dumped by the front door, TV on, big booted feet twitching on the carpet. From this angle, she could see that the yellow paint—so incongruously hopeful, bright against the stone-colored sky—stopped halfway down one side of the house; it was as if the job, a burst of optimism, had been abandoned halfway through.

  Her phone buzzed. Robert: Can’t talk. S not good. Everything ok?

  Maggie returned the phone to the cup holder. If she told him where she was, he would surely tell her to drive away. She looked once more at the house, drizzle filming on the glass. Then the image came suddenly to life, the porch light snapping on as the front door opened and a shout sounded from the doorway: “I see you!”

  Maggie stiffened. The words were muted by the window but impossible to mistake. A woman had stepped out onto the porch. Maggie fumbled to put the car in drive but as her hand closed around the keys, another shout came: “Hey!” She was waving one arm in a wide, slow arc. “I see you! Do you think I don’t see you sitting there?”

  The glass was fogging over with rain and breath. Maggie squeezed the wheel, staring straight ahead.

  “This isn’t some kind of tourist attraction!” the woman called out.

  Maggie was tempted to just leave, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. It would be cowardly, her second indefensible act of the day. Besides, she was the one who had chosen to drive there, sit there ogling this woman’s house. A woman who, no matter the circumstances, had lost her son.

  Maggie gazed ahead for another minute at the empty road—she would offer her sympathies briefly, she thought, then leave—and swung open the door. Gripping her bag, she stepped onto the woods’ edge, soft with mud and pine. An empty plastic bottle, a shred of yellow caution tape. As she crossed the street, she kept her head down to avoid the woman’s gaze, looking up only as she neared the porch. “Hello—”

  “I’m done talking to reporters.”

  Maggie paused on the bottom stair. The woman was now back behind the door. It was open only about a foot, secured by a short metal chain. The thought crossed Maggie’s mind—fleeting, oddly matter-of-fact—that she could be holding a gun.

  “I’m not a reporter,” she said. “I was Nathan’s teacher. My name is Maggie Daley.”

  Marielle Dugan kept one hand on the door and one on the frame, the metal chain stretched taut between them. Through the narrow gap, Maggie could make out denim shorts, a white T-shirt, brown canvas sandals. The ribbon of face revealed bleached and cropped blond hair, a blurred line of blue eyeliner beneath each lid. She was tall, taller than she’d looked on the news—at least six feet, to Maggie’s five-three.

  “I apologize,” Maggie said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “What teacher?”

  “English,” Maggie said. “His freshman year.”

  “He never took English.”

  “He did,” she said. “The freshmen. They all do.”

  “Well, he never mentioned you.”

  “Well,” she said, and nodded. She wasn’t surprised. “I remember him.”

  Marielle’s face looked fleshy and slack, smooth except for the deep lines around her mouth and nose. In the flatness of her expression, Maggie was reminded of Nathan, though the specific features—a long face, wide eyes—bore little resemblance to her son.

  “I didn’t mean to bother you,” Maggie repeated, fishing for the right words. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  Marielle Dugan said nothing, her expression unchanged. A soft brown basketball, like a piece of rotting fruit, sat on the porch by the door.

  “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” Maggie clarified. The woman continued looking at her, making Maggie uncomfortable. Still, she felt she needed to offer something el
se. “And,” she fumbled, “I’m sorry if there’s anything more I could have done for him.” She turned to leave, as Marielle asked, “Like what?”

  Maggie shifted on the stair, the old weak wood creaking beneath her feet. She was getting rained on but thought it better not to step onto the porch. Somewhere in the near distance, she heard the rev of an engine, a roar that abruptly surged then faded, melting into the damp air.

  “Well,” Maggie said. “I just meant—for Nathan. If I could have done something more to help him.”

  “How?” Marielle asked. Her eyes looked glazed, Maggie thought, a deep grief, or a medicated dullness. She considered the immense effort behind that bright-blue liner—the same spirit that had chosen the yellow paint, she was sure. Despite her unease, Maggie felt a stab of compassion for the woman standing before her. She thought of all the things she’d really like to know—had you been worried about him? Had any idea he was capable of a thing like this? Do you think there was anything you might have done to stop it? She imagined those were just the questions Marielle herself was asking, of herself and of the world.

  “What I meant was,” Maggie said, “looking back, I wonder if there were things about Nathan I might have paid more attention to. In my class.” It was painful to admit this, but to her surprise, doing so filled her with a sense of rightness, of moral alignment. If there was anyone to whom she owed an apology, to whom she should take some responsibility, this was she.

  Marielle Dugan, though, looked displeased. She moved one hand from the doorframe and settled it on her hip. “What things?”

  Maggie searched her brain for something to offer here—simple, truthful, but not blaming. “I just meant—indications that he was troubled,” she said.

  But this was the wrong thing. Maggie sensed it even before she saw the hard look cross Marielle’s face. She added, “That he might have needed—” as Marielle shut the door. Maggie thought she’d offended her but then the latch tumbled down and the door opened three feet. She could see Marielle more clearly: wide hips, belly round with middle age. The living room was dark behind her, except for the low light of a single lamp. On the mantel sat a gold-globed clock, a vase. Maggie was struck by the feeling of emptiness, the absence of any family or friends.

  “What, did he disturb your class or something?” Marielle said. One arm was resting loosely across her waist.

  “Well, no,” Maggie said.

  “Because he never got in any trouble in high school. Not on his own, anyway.”

  Over her shoulder, on the mantel, Maggie could faintly make out a framed picture of Nathan, looking younger and slightly thinner than he’d been that spring of 2012. Probably his senior portrait, Maggie thought: a tie, a buzz cut. The barest hint of a smile.

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t cause trouble.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well.” Maggie hesitated. The rain was falling harder now, leaking from her hairline. There was no simple way to explain Nathan’s presence in her classroom, not if his mother didn’t understand that about him already. She tried to think of something fact-based, concrete. “I might have noticed his interest in hunting,” she said.

  “Hunting?” Marielle jerked her chin dismissively. “Everybody hunts.”

  “Yes, but—” She paused. “Given what happened.”

  Marielle gave her an uncomprehending look, and it occurred to Maggie she might be in a state of denial, or shock, or some primal maternal protectiveness. She might be a gun enthusiast herself. Fourteen weapons had been stashed in a room just upstairs, not twenty feet from where they were standing. At this distance, it seemed impossible that this woman wouldn’t have known, that she could have avoided knowing.

  “It wasn’t just hunting,” Maggie said. “It was guns. How much he relished them.” Then she amended, “How much he seemed to enjoy them, I mean.”

  Behind her, a car was approaching, seemed to be slowing, and then started honking, unleashing long, angry blasts of the horn. Maggie looked quickly over her shoulder. The car honked twice more but kept moving, tires hissing against the wet road. When she turned again, Marielle’s eyes hadn’t left her face. Over her shoulder, the living room looked darker than it had before. The picture of Nathan still hovered over his mother’s shoulder, his expression more a smirk than a smile.

  “You know,” Maggie said, “I’d better be getting home—”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Right nearby,” she said. “Just down the road.”

  “Reed?”

  “Stafford.”

  “And you’re a teacher.”

  “A professor, yes.”

  “You have kids?”

  Maggie hesitated, but said, “I do. One.”

  “Boy?”

  “A girl,” she said. “A daughter.”

  “How old?”

  “Eighteen,” Maggie said, adding, “And she’s leaving for college tomorrow, actually, so I really should be—”

  “I guess you probably wouldn’t like it if strangers came around asking questions about her,” Marielle said.

  “No.” Maggie felt like she’d been slapped. “No, I guess I wouldn’t.”

  “Acting like they knew her,” Marielle said. Her eyes grew watery. She returned one hand to the doorframe, as if to bar Maggie from entering. “You don’t know my son.”

  Maggie looked down at the soaked porch stairs. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she said. “And very sorry for what you’re going through.” She gripped the bag against her shoulder, then turned and hurried across the lawn. Crossing the street, she felt eyes on her, and as she climbed into the car and drove away, back toward the familiar roads, she glanced once over her shoulder and saw Marielle’s silhouette still watching from the door.

  Six

  Anna had resisted taking her Ativan that morning: a kind of mission statement. On that day of all days, she wanted to not need it anymore. Now, though, as she sat in the passenger seat, anxious to leave, her mind kept wandering to the bottle in the trunk, wrapped in a sweatshirt inside her old swim team duffel bag. It should have been a moment of pure anticipation, but instead, she felt on edge.

  It was six thirty in the morning—because it was a Sunday, her mother was insisting on getting an early start to beat the summer people—and she’d planned on sleeping most of the drive to Boston but felt painfully awake. She grabbed her phone, texting Kim and Janie. Anybody up??? No response. The two of them weren’t leaving until midweek. Anna clutched her phone in her lap and stared out the window at the front porch with its chipping wooden rockers, the big curtainless bay window, the house she’d lived in all her life. She thought of all the times she’d ridden up this driveway in Gavin’s truck, a minute before midnight, mouth swollen from kissing, Gavin reeking of alcohol, lights blazing pointedly in that bay window as her mom waited up for her inside. She remembered standing on that porch, sobbing uncontrollably as her father drove away, her mother staring at her like she was an alien, beyond help.

  She picked at her thumb. She needed to leave already—what could her mother possibly be doing? She looked at her phone again and tried to distract herself by roaming online, but everywhere felt fraught. The shooting was still the only thing anyone was posting about. Instagram photos of the pile of flowers outside the mall’s main entrance. The candlelight vigil at Essex High, where Frank Tremont had taught. A Facebook post—it was written by another one of her mother’s old students—that had popped up in her feed a hundred times. Janie and Kim had both read it—Maggie has a cameo, they reported—but Anna didn’t want to, didn’t want it gaining traction in her brain. Now, though, here it was again, taunting her. She knew that Theresa would encourage her to read it. To demystify it. I dare you—Anna clicked. Instantly she regretted it. The comments were intense and sprawling—she thumbed down, skimming past something about gun control, Nathan Dugan’s YouTube video, the word FREAK.

  Quickly, she blocked the post from her feed. Then she exited Facebook, exited the I
nternet. She retreated to her photo library, a reminder of the relatively calm existence she’d led in the months preceding Friday afternoon. There was a goofy video of Kim applying her eye makeup, selfies of the three of them on the rocks at Meer Cove. There was one of her and Janie at the mall, in the food court, laughing—Anna felt like throwing up. The picture had been taken just last Tuesday. They’d been shopping for new jeans for college. They’d stopped to split a smoothie. It was the last time Anna had been there, the last time she would ever be there. Because worst-case scenario, you go to the mall and someone starts shooting people. She was never going there again.

  The front screen door banged shut. There, finally, was her mother, hurrying off the porch. She was gripping a thermos of coffee in one hand, her old scuffed boat bag in the other. She looked as tense as Anna felt. Anna knew her mother was concerned about her—yesterday, she’d basically said she didn’t think Anna was capable of taking care of herself at college, which had both troubled and infuriated her—and last night, when she finally got home, she was so distracted she’d forgotten to get the pizza. It’s not like Maggie to pass up an opportunity to watch you eat, Janie had observed, upstairs in Anna’s room. The three of them had agreed that she must have been freaked out about the shooting, about her old student, and Kim had floated the theory that she was nervous about meeting Felicia (in all the strangeness of the past two days, Anna hadn’t given this dreaded introduction the attention it deserved). Then they’d finished the last of Anna’s packing and agreed upon Kim’s Tucker-related strategy and shared a hug good-bye. See you around campus, Maggie! Kim had called as she was leaving, which made Anna feel inexplicably left out.