Jensen cocked her head to the side as though processing this. Then she nodded a slight, acquiescent little nod.
Taking a deeper breath, Vera asked, “Is it because of the girls who died? The ones who got murdered? I know you said you envied them. I hope you aren’t trying to follow in their footsteps.”
Jensen smiled in a cagey sort of way as though Vera had said something that secretly pleased her. “You know what’s funny about Sufia Ahmed? I used to see her walking around my neighborhood all the time. She’d go to the halal market, and sometimes I’d see her in the regular corner market, translating things for her mother. Her mother didn’t speak much English. Outside of school Sufia spoke—what language do you call that? African? She was so American in some ways, though, with that phone she was always carrying around. And sometimes I saw her wearing jeans under that drapey stuff she always wore to school.”
“I imagine what you were hearing them speak was Somali. Possibly Arabic. But you didn’t answer my question.”
“Somali, right. What was the question? Am I trying to follow in her footsteps? No. Do you think I’d want all those people coming to my funeral? That was all so disgusting.”
“What about Bret? Does he—or your recent conversation with him—have anything to do with you coming here tonight?”
Jensen shrugged.
“I’m just checking,” Vera added. “If Bret has something to do with this, I don’t think you should find fault with yourself. Believe me, I know what it’s like to want to be cared for by someone who doesn’t deserve your affections.”
Jensen turned toward Vera, holding out her cup. “Ugh, I can’t finish this. Do you want it?”
“No,” Vera said. Then: “Yes.” She was thinking of police interrogation techniques and wondering if she could use what little she knew of them for her own purposes. Detective Vachon had spoken to Schlosser on his own level to get him to relax, making jokes about how women were bitches and how teenage girls were the worst cock-teases of all; it was all a ruse, of course, but Schlosser had bought into it. If she shared a drink with her student, would that foster trust? Vera accepted the cup before she knew she was going to. She took a small sip; it was nearly undrinkable, but not entirely. She took a larger swig and swished it around in her mouth.
“Didn’t you say you used to live in New York City?” Jensen asked.
“I did,” Vera said, “for almost ten years. Then I came back here. Maine is where I was raised. People always told me that everyone who leaves Maine comes back to it eventually. I swore I wouldn’t be one of those people. What makes you bring that up?”
“Sometimes I thought I’d go down to New York to live with Bret. I was thinking that especially when we were reading the book. You know, Catcher. I printed up this map once of all the places Holden visits in New York, thinking I might go there sometime. Maybe I still will. But I guess a lot of those places aren’t around anymore. When I went to visit Bret that one time, I only got to see Morningside Heights.”
“Some of the places are still there. Most of the hotels aren’t operating as hotels anymore. But all the big places . . . Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Radio City ice rink . . . they’re right where they’ve always been, naturally.” Vera noted, but did not mention, that the girl had used the future tense—maybe I still will. A slip of the tongue on Jensen’s part, or a small victory on Vera’s? She finished her drink in one concentrated gulp.
“I really did feel embarrassed writing all that stuff about Bret,” Jensen said. “I don’t want to be thought of as the kind of girl who goes all crazy over a guy. It’s not Bret. It’s people who make me crazy.”
Vera got up and stood by the window, refilling her empty cup with a small amount of vodka and a large amount of orange juice. She could be fired if the school knew she was drinking with a student—a fifteen-year-old student at that. “Can I borrow one of your cigarettes?”
“Take the whole pack.”
Vera lit the cigarette with one of the matches left out on the table, pushing the window out so she could direct her smoke into the night air. She was deep in thought, trying to frame what she wanted to say to Jensen.
“I mentioned I could tell you some stories,” she said. “There’s one little story about a boy I want to tell you, if you don’t mind listening.” Her back to the girl, she spoke in the direction of the air, watching her smoke ribbon out and disappear.
“In high school I had a boyfriend named Peter. This was the late 1980s, and in Maine you didn’t see as many punk or alternative-type kids as you do today. It wasn’t normal to see kids with blue hair or T-shirts with skulls on them. Well, there were those Grateful Dead pothead kids, but that was different. That was dime a dozen. What I’m talking about was something quite unique and off-putting to most, and if someone looked like that, it actually meant something.” Vera went on, in her soft but full voice, to give Jensen a brief account of her relationship with Peter—about how he had gone to college halfway across the country. Of how she had found him online years later and begun a correspondence again.
“He had moved back to Maine years before, and he had a successful business. Maybe moving back to Maine wasn’t such a terrible idea, I thought. I wanted to redo my painful high school years, make them right and good. That, as it turned out, was an ill-conceived plan. He wasn’t the person I remembered. His rebellious streak was gone. He was a straight-arrow businessman, concerned about public image. He wanted someone to be a perfect little wife who could cook and clean and look poised at his little functions. That wasn’t me at all.”
“You don’t seem so rebellious to me,” Jensen said. “I mean, you’re a teacher.”
“You’re right,” Vera said. “I’m really pretty square. I’m not expressing myself very well. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that things don’t turn out the way you might expect. But even when things turn out differently from how we expect, we can still be okay.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and turned to face Jensen, who was watching her carefully. “Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to talk about me, even though somehow I keep doing so. I came here to talk about you.”
“Are you leading up to the ‘life is worth living’ speech? The ‘things will get better’ speech? People always promise that.”
“Not exactly what I’m getting at. Though that would be the expected song and dance.”
“What, then?”
“Jensen, have you ever read Mark Twain’s essay ‘Two Ways of Seeing a River’?”
“Not a fan of Twain.”
“He’s not all Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and boys being boys,” Vera said. “But anyway, listen, it’s a very short essay. You should read it. He talks about how he sees the river as this beautiful thing, this majestic thing, but the more familiar he becomes with the river, the less beautiful it becomes to him. He doesn’t see the beauty anymore, only the dangers and the pragmatic aspects of it.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t lose sight of beauty.”
“I realize it’s easier said than done. But perhaps focusing less on the morbid and more on the beautiful would do you good.”
On the TV a new episode of The Twilight Zone was beginning. Vera couldn’t yet identify which one it was. A distressed-looking gentleman in a bow tie ran chaotically around empty, suburban streets.
“Do you know what I think is beautiful?” Jensen asked.
“What?”
“That part in Catcher when Holden talks about how he likes to light matches and hold them until he can’t hold them anymore. Then he lets them drop. That’s one of my favorite parts. And do you know what else I like? That part where he says he feels like he’s disappearing every time he crosses the street.”
“The matches,” Vera said, remembering. “And the street. Yes. Those are two beautiful moments. Small ones, but beautiful ones.”
“A
nd then there’s the ducks in Central Park. How he wants to know where they go in the winter.”
The drinks Vera had consumed made her feel as though she were in a small boat, floating farther and farther away from the crisis that had brought her here. “Everyone remembers that part,” she said dismissively. She was stuck on the idea of disappearing—in particular, on the last chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, when Holden is walking around Fifth Avenue and starting to worry every time he crosses the street. She thought of him thanking his dead brother every time he made it across the street to safety, still present, still visible, still real.
“I’m still having a hard time coming up with my essay topic,” Jensen said.
“Next week,” Vera said, “we can talk about it some more if you’re still stuck.” She drained her second drink and decided against pouring another. The calm person who had handled things earlier had come back, steering her gently where she needed to go.
“You asked me earlier why I didn’t tell your mom my concerns about you,” she said. “The reason I gave you is true, but beyond that there’s another reason why I’ve kept what you’ve written to myself. The reason is because I feel for you, Jensen, and I don’t want to betray you. I know what it’s like to want to look cool and competent and not like an emotional wreck. I do get concerned when you start talking about these girls who’ve been killed recently and how you want to be like them. But I know some of it is just blowing off steam, to use a phrase from one of your earlier journals.”
She thought, but didn’t say, that she felt Jensen had been mishandled on previous occasions when she’d tried to show a vulnerable side. Getting fobbed off on a psychiatrist who clearly hadn’t done any good—that couldn’t have been a picnic for the girl. And being rejected by Bret Folger, on one of the few times she expressed need—the girl needed an ally, someone unequivocally in her corner.
“For my discretion,” she went on, “and in exchange for the consideration I’m showing for you—I’d like to ask one thing. I’d like to ask that you please not do anything to harm yourself tonight. Can you assure me that you won’t?”
“I can,” Jensen said, “but tomorrow is another day.”
“I’d like to ask that you please not do anything tomorrow, either, but at the moment I’m most concerned about getting you through tonight. Do you think we could check you out of this hotel and get you home? We will have to walk. I’m afraid I don’t have any cash for a cab ride.”
“Oh, I have cash,” Jensen said. “But I can’t go home. I said I was doing a sleepover at someone’s house. No one leaves a sleepover in the middle of the night.”
Vera felt uncomfortable with the idea of leaving her there. She was tired—more tired than she had been to start with, drained from both her interchange with Jensen and what she saw as a degree of success in getting through to the girl. She could sleep there in the second bed, get up in the morning, and see her home in the daylight. What harm would it do? But somehow spending the whole night with her student seemed too aberrant—more questionable still than covering for her, than turning a blind eye while she drank alcohol, than drinking alcohol with her.
As though reading Vera’s thoughts, Jensen said, “I guess I could go back home. I can always make up some excuse to my mom. But could we stay a little longer and watch some more of this marathon? Please? At least the end of this episode.”
Vera agreed. The girl grabbed the remote control from the table between the two beds and turned up the volume. “No talking,” she said sternly, putting a finger to her lips.
They watched another episode and a half of The Twilight Zone without a word between them. When it was nearly eleven o’clock, Jensen got off her bed, put on her boots and her long black trench coat without prompting.
“You know, it’s misting out,” Vera said. “Kind of a half rain, half snow.”
“I don’t mind walking. I’d rather.”
Vera got up, too. She had never taken off her coat or hat the entire time; it had never occurred to her to do so.
She waited in the lobby while the girl checked out. They said little on the longish walk back to Jensen’s house. Vera fell into her usual habit of counting steps when she walked and trying to keep her breathing even; sometimes she counted in a whisper, aware that her moving mouth might look strange to passersby on the road, but she couldn’t help herself. The cold precipitation—somewhere between rain and snow and light hail—prickled her through her hat. She wondered what Jensen was thinking. The girl’s expression looked as serene as she had ever seen it.
Vera and Jensen walked through Dorset’s east end, up and down steep, sloping hills, past old houses whose charm was, to Vera’s thinking, enhanced by their need for some fixing up, past the tall embankments where Vera knew that wildflowers grew in the spring—the Queen Anne’s lace and the black-eyed Susans that she’d picked in her youth, growing up in Bond Brook. This end of town was quiet on a Friday night; only one truck passed them, then another, the second driver honking at the sight of two females. What did he make of them, Vera wondered, these two brunettes in their winter coats? Mother and daughter? Sister and sister? Two friends separated only by age? As they descended down Pine Street, Jensen said, “If it’s okay, I’d like you to just drop me off on Middle Street. My house is only six doors down. You can even see the roof from here—see the one with the chimney that’s missing a brick?”
Vera knew this to be true, for she had been keeping her eye on house numbers as best as she could in the dark. “Are you sure? I’d like to see you to your door.”
“Positive,” Jensen said. “You live close by, don’t you?”
“Maybe another ten to fifteen minutes’ walk.”
Vera decided to let the girl have her way. She imagined that she didn’t want to risk being seen approaching her house with her teacher, if Mrs. Cudahy happened to be awake and peering out a window; it would be easier to explain walking home alone than walking home with Vera.
Jensen, having come to a standstill, fished around in her coat pockets until she found a roll of peppermints. “Want one?” she said. “It hides the alcohol smell.”
“I’m okay, thank you. I’ve no one to hide from.”
Jensen stood in place for a few seconds, looking at nothing particular, her hands thrust back in her coat pockets. The wind blew her hair half over her face. Vera thought of what Bret Folger had said about how she looked like a little rat peering out from under things. It didn’t do the girl justice at all.
“Thanks,” Jensen said. “For talking to me and . . . everything.”
“I didn’t do much. I don’t think I did much at all.”
“I really do feel a little better, though. I have a feeling that the next thing I write for you is going to be a lot less gloomy.”
“Then that makes me glad.”
Jensen turned around and continued heading down the street. Vera stood still and watched the girl’s straight back, saw the lightness in her step. From a few feet away, her coat began to blend into the darkness. Soon all she could see of her were her white hands and the whiteness of her exposed neck where her hair was scraped up in a rubber band. She watched until the girl crossed the street, until she couldn’t see the whiteness anymore, and then Vera turned to make her own way home.
Chapter Eight
Vera spent the remainder of the weekend in an unusual frame of mind. She kept seeing Jensen Willard as she’d left her: relieved and almost restored, as though she’d made peace with something. A different girl, practically. She kept seeing the lightness in Jensen’s step as she retreated down the hill to her house, the back of her neck pale and straight in the moonlight. She almost felt she could trust what she’d seen—that she could have full faith in the girl for the first time since she’d first read her journals.
Vera, too, felt lighter—freed from the heavy sadness that usually clouded her mood. She attributed this to a se
nse of fulfilled purpose. She had had a hand in circumventing disaster, had reached the girl in some meaningful way; it was not often that she felt her actions had any meaning or import. It did not counteract the irrational sense of responsibility and guilt she had felt ever since finding Sufia’s body, but it made her at least feel she had done something good and right by somebody for a change.
Returning to school on Monday morning, she had planned an introduction of the girls’ next required reading: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Her original plan had been to teach Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but she had changed her mind over the weekend, remembering how Jensen had said she’d liked Plath’s novel. She was prepared to begin class by telling the girls a little bit about Sylvia Plath, the all-American, overachieving college girl, and how her one novel thinly fictionalized her nervous breakdown and subsequent stay at the famous McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, years before her suicide.
Her intended focus was usurped, however, when Loo Garippa, of all people, came to class champing at the bit, wanting to share something that couldn’t wait. As soon as attendance was taken, she asked Vera, “Did you grade our Catcher in the Rye essays yet?”
“I haven’t. I’ve fallen a bit behind on the grading, but I’ll be catching up in the next day or two.” Vera gave Harmony Phelps a preemptive look—Harmony, who always gave Vera the stink-eye when work wasn’t returned fast enough for her liking.
“Well, you ought to read mine first. I think you’ll like my topic.” Looking exceedingly proud of herself, Loo said, “I came up with a really good theory of why serial killers like The Catcher in the Rye.”
Vera decided not to correct her once again on her misuse of the term serial killer. She glanced anxiously at the classroom door, hoping to see Jensen Willard making a late arrival. Her seat stood empty.
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