What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  To Vera it wasn’t a bad idea at all. She could imagine herself living somewhere in the outer boroughs—Queens, perhaps—and taking the train to night classes after putting in her shifts at some quiet editorial job. She would not mind living modestly, in another cramped space; she could imagine herself walking back from the train at night amid the sound of police sirens and cheerfully drunken Irish immigrants calling to one another outside the neighborhood taverns, and this thought warmed her all through. As soon as I can, she thought, I will request an application from Queens College. Maybe I could get a scholarship. If she could not teach impressionable young minds anymore, then at least recommending books to these same young people might give her some sense of fulfillment. She imagined herself one day working in the young adult section of the library, suggesting titles to those who were betwixt and between—neither adults nor children—as well as to those adults who felt similarly in limbo.

  But this would take time. It might be too late even to apply for the fall semester. Nevertheless, this possibility of reinventing herself gave her the fortitude she needed to get up and face her job and her empty life over the next few months.

  In the meantime she took a metro bus to South Portland each day, seeing the usual mix of college students, local drunks, and working folks who were either too poor to buy a car or tired of the hassle of finding a place to park in the city. One drizzly morning, as she boarded the bus, she took one of the only empty seats and hoped there would be no new passengers to take the space next to hers—but during a busy, rainy-day commute, this was an unrealistic hope. At the Park Avenue stop near the post office, an entire Latino family, an old man in a motorized wheelchair, and several young professional types waited to get on. Vera guessed that the girl in the sundress and the white linen jacket might ask to share her seat, but she took a seat closer to the back, next to a boy wearing headphones. “Is it okay if I sit here?” said a tall young man at her elbow, a man in a dark-green server’s apron, and of course Vera had no choice but to say that it was perfectly okay.

  The man settled in beside her, not taking up too much space as men often did, and carefully unfolded a newspaper in his lap, turning to the crosswords page and taking a pen out of his shirt pocket. The crossword was half filled out already, with several scratched-out words that had failed him. Vera glanced at the crossword, then at the light hairs on the man’s exposed forearms under his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and then, with a sudden dawning, at the man’s profile. His rather sunken cheeks, high forehead, and thinning hair all seemed familiar to her.

  She was sitting next to Ritchie Ouelette. She was sure of it. She wanted to say something to him, but she did not know what there was to say.

  “Are you good at crosswords?” Ritchie Ouelette suddenly asked without actually looking at her.

  “Sometimes,” Vera said.

  “This one’s a bear. Do you know of an eleven-letter word that means ‘to lie’? I don’t know if they mean it like lying down or if they mean it like telling a lie.”

  “Try prevaricate,” Vera said after a moment. “See, that has to be it. The V fits with vermilion, which is what you’ve got for fifty-six across.”

  “Thank you,” Ritchie Ouelette said. “I didn’t think of that one.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He seemed so studious, bent over his puzzle, and had such a gentle, almost shy way about him. He must be working at one of the chain restaurants around the mall, based on the looks of his uniform. The accountant job, the numbers-crunching job, hadn’t been there waiting for him when he’d been released from prison. In a way, they’d both been demoted. They had this in common.

  For the next fifteen minutes Vera wanted to say something else to him. She wanted to tell him she knew who he was, that he and she had something else in common, too—a close connection to the crimes in Dorset, though both were essentially innocent bystanders who had stepped too close to the flame. She had a feeling that Ritchie would be embarrassed to be recognized, hunched as he was over his newspaper, and that it would be better to say nothing at all. He was wearing a light, woodsy cologne, and she was close enough to see a few small scrapes on his chin where he had shaved himself too closely.

  “Have a nice day, now,” he said to her, getting up at the stop before the mall.

  “You, too,” she said, watching him go. The soft cadences of his voice stayed with her, and she smiled to herself as she watched him cross the parking lot toward the restaurant; those cadences were like snow, a gently falling snow that mirrored the soft rain outside the window and something even softer inside her. She thought, I could have fallen in love with that man’s voice, and she wasn’t ashamed. She remembered how she had once told Jensen not to lose sight of the beauty in things. She had been right in giving that advice, whether the girl had taken it to heart or not. It was good to know, after all was said and done, that one could be right about something.

  • • •

  As the days and weeks and months passed by, the more stagnant and predictable Vera’s existence became. Things continued around her and without her during the quiet days that she later would see as a convalescence of sorts. She read on the Wallace School website that Tim Zabriskie had been promoted to associate dean. She saw a newspaper article saying that The Catcher in the Rye was banned in several southern Maine high schools; according to one teacher at Millbank Academy, “It’s not so much a question of censoring a book because it’s controversial, but honestly, this isn’t a book that speaks to teenagers anymore.” This would have hurt Vera if she’d still had the capacity to feel hurt by such things.

  The only story that remained at a standstill was the story of Jensen Willard.

  The search of the river had yielded nothing. And then, gradually, the stories about her stopped altogether. At the six-month mark of her disappearance, the attention had vanished as completely and utterly as Jensen Willard herself; there was one article in the Journal telling how her parents still “held out hope” that their daughter was alive, but this sentiment was not echoed by the local police or, it seemed, by anyone else.

  Vera did not know if she held out hope. After the first few weeks, she had stopped being entirely afraid and once again allowed herself some curiosity about the girl who had aroused her curiosity from the very beginning.

  When she worked on her writing during her favorite predawn hours, her mind would, on occasion, wander back to Jensen Willard. On such occasions she could not help entertaining the possibility that the girl was alive somewhere and poised to come back. As she toiled over the flow of her sentences, she wondered if Jensen was somewhere not so far away, writing works of her own—but who was her audience now, she wondered? Whom could she possibly find to take Vera’s place?

  She wondered if Jensen would continue her education someday and maybe go on to college. She wondered if she would ever have a teacher who appreciated her talents and handled these as they should be handled. She wondered what the girl would think of herself ten or twenty years down the line, when adolescence had lost some of its sting but none of memory’s potency.

  If, that is, she lived to remember.

  If she was alive—and if she did remember—Vera hoped Jensen would one day see her in a kind light, and as something other than what she now knew Jensen had seen her as: a weak scapegoat serving the girl’s temporary purpose. But a time might come when the girl truly would see something good of herself in Vera, just as Vera had seen something of herself in the girl.

  She hoped, either way, that Jensen Willard might think of her in the future and remember that someone had identified with and cared about her and had not given up so easily—even if that realization was a long time in the making and came without regrets.

  • • •

  Just a few months shy of the one-year anniversary of the day she had first met Jensen Willard, Vera bused home from her evening shift in junior formals and reread the handwritten te
xt in the notebook on her lap. She was putting the finishing touches on her rough draft for the essay portion of her application to the Queens College library science program; the rest of the application was filled out at home, and tonight, she thought, she could put the essay in a Word document and have the whole packet ready to send out in the morning.

  It was a wet and foggy walk back to her studio, but Vera didn’t mind these things. She felt as though she were taking the first real step to metamorphosing, or perhaps settling in to the self she’d been meant to be all along. Reinvention—so wonderfully American, she thought. As music blasted from a car at a nearby stoplight, she tried to hum along to the tuneless hip-hop, bobbing her head a little as she sought out a beat.

  Her apartment lobby was empty when she arrived at home. Next to the mailboxes in her lobby, a roach the size of a small mouse lay crushed on the floor, its head missing but its legs still waving. Vera shuddered and took her mail out of her locked mailbox, carrying it up the three flights of stairs to her studio. She let herself in and glanced at the mail with little interest. Her electricity bill. A subscription offer for the New York Times. A letter from Princeton’s alumni relations coordinator asking for donations. An envelope that looked as if it might contain a greeting card.

  She pried at the envelope’s seal with her bitten-off fingernails, wondering about the sender of the card; her fortieth birthday had come and gone the month before. She tugged at the edge of the card inside until it came out; as soon as she saw what it was, Vera physically jumped back, and both envelope and card drifted out of her hands.

  The card stared faceup from her hardwood living room floor. She looked down at a portrait of Mark Twain, and the quotation produced below his image:

  No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish . . . Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease?

  —Mark Twain, “Two Ways of Seeing a River”

  She bent down until she rested on her haunches and lifted the cover of the card with the tip of one finger. The handwritten message inside contained no greeting for Vera at the top, no warm salutation; instead, the text got right to its point, as though the author had no time for niceties.

  I told you the next time you’d hear from me I’d write something less gloomy, so here it is: Things are all right. Yes, I said that things are all right. Life is about learning, isn’t it? If you’re not learning, you’re not living, and sometimes part of living is figuring out what your limits are. Have you ever done something just to see what it would feel like and so that you could say you’ve done it and then not have to worry anymore? And if you’ve ever done something like that, have you ever decided that it wasn’t something you felt like doing again? Even though you sort of have to?

  I hope things are okay with you these days. It’s too bad you aren’t teaching anymore because I think you were pretty good at it. I’m still sorry that I didn’t get to finish reading “Catcher” with you, though, of course, I already know how it ends.

  I won’t be needing this anymore.

  Vera had no doubt who had written this card: Jensen Willard, that unhappy being who had long lived in the land of monsters. She looked again at the final line of the unsigned note, wondering what it meant. What was it that Jensen wouldn’t be needing—the card? The Catcher in the Rye? Life itself? Something occurred to her, and she looked in the envelope that had landed a few feet away from the card. She saw its postmark—California—and as she bent to pick it up, she saw a flash of something folded in the bottom of it—something purple, like a ribbon. But not a ribbon. A shoelace.

  She extricated it and held it in her open palm. Jensen’s bootlace, she thought, but then she remembered that Jensen had never worn purple laces in her combat boots. And this lace was too short, anyway, to be a bootlace. What was the significance of a purple shoelace? Why did she feel as though this were something she should know the answer to?

  She sat down on the edge of her bed, still holding the envelope and the shoelace, when it came to her. Angela Galvez with her purple-laced sneakers and their silver detail. You have to wonder what happened to the other one and why someone would think that was a good trophy to keep, out of all the trophies one could keep.

  Vera looked at the envelope and the shoelace again. No, she thought. No. The shoelace looked new and clean—even smelled clean; its plastic tips felt cold and hard against her hand. It could be newly bought, Vera thought. It might not mean what I’m meant to think it means.

  But then again, it could.

  She sat there for what felt like several long minutes, listening to the sounds outside her window: the wail of police sirens, the conversational voices on the sidewalk below. She got up and opened her closet, took down a shoebox containing office supplies she’d pilfered from work, and picked out a folded manila envelope and a packet of Post-it notes.

  On the topmost Post-it note, Vera wrote the following:

  Detective Ferreira,

  I received the enclosed correspondence in my mailbox at my Dorset address. I ask you to make of it what you will. You’ll hear nothing further from me unless you seek me out, but please feel free to do so if you want. I’m still trying to be good.

  Sincerely,

  Vera Lundy

  She looked up the address she wanted, filled out the front of her envelope, affixed what she hoped was the correct postage, and slid the card and its envelope inside it and, last of all, the shoelace, now warmed from the bed of her palm.

  Exiting her apartment, she walked down the street until she reached the mailbox on the corner. The hinge of the old mail chute whined as she pulled it open, and she tossed the envelope into this dark mouth, imagining it float down, down, down into the darkness, where it would it would rest on other messages and missives and bills and pleas and snugly enclosed secrets.

  She closed the door to the chute and turned back in the direction of her apartment. A breeze had picked up outside; her hair blew into her face, tips of it sticking to the residue of lipstick on her lips, but she did not brush them away. Though the police sirens had died, the foggy neighboring streets of Dorset still showed signs of life. She could hear someone drunkenly singing a soft ballad from an open upper-story window, and on the corner before the mailbox, two young men teased two young women who looked as though they’d all come stumbling from the tavern together. As Vera passed them, they looked up briefly to see who had come and gone, took note of the woman with her straight and determined walk, and then went back to their negotiations and their banter as the last chorus of the window singer caressed them all and disappeared into the mist.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my agent, Denise Shannon, for her representation, persistence, and consummate professionalism always. And I would like to thank my editor, Denise Roy, for her brilliant grasp of narrative and for giving me permission to take this novel where I secretly wanted it to go. A great thanks, too, is extended to all of the folks at Dutton who had a hand in bringing What Has Become of You to life.

  This novel is partly a detective story, but the idea for it sprang from my love of teaching and from my love for many teachers—some of whom are no longer with us, and many of whom are very much alive—who have inspired me and encouraged my writing along the way. Specifically, I would like to acknowledge Helen Jackson, Deborah Barnes Carey, Lillian Huntington, Lewis Hillier, Yvonne Farnsworth, Wesley McNair, Patricia O’Donnell, Bill Roorbach, Elizabeth Cooke, Joyce Johnson, Rebecca Goldstein, Helen Shulman, and Mary Gordon. An equal thank-you is owed to my teaching colleagues, past and present, for their support.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my mother, Corris Cammack, and my stepfather, the late Robert P. Cammack, for not dissuading me when I told them, at age six,
that I wanted to be a novelist.

  About the Author

  Jan Elizabeth Watson received her MFA from Columbia University. Her first novel, Asta in the Wings, was published by Tin House, a small literary press. She lives in Maine.

  In 1864, E. P. Dutton & Co. bought the famous Old Corner Bookstore and its publishing division from Ticknor and Fields and began their storied publishing career. Mr. Edward Payson Dutton and his partner, Mr. Lemuel Ide, had started the company in Boston, Massachusetts, as a bookseller in 1852. Dutton expanded to New York City, and in 1869 opened both a bookstore and publishing house at 713 Broadway. In 2014, Dutton celebrates 150 years of publishing excellence. We have redesigned our longtime logotype to reflect the simple design of those earliest published books. For more information on the history of Dutton and its books and authors, please visit www.penguin.com/dutton.