The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  “He told you all this?” Dave said. “That’s amazing. I knew he was keeping some secrets, but I put him down as the kind of guy who’d take ’em with him to the grave.”

  They heard a rumbling noise when the furnace started up, and through the window they saw lights flash back on in the house across the street.

  Gloria was disappointed. She would’ve preferred the night remain dark. “He told me,” she said, “because I asked him what was wrong. Apparently, nobody else ever cared enough to inquire.”

  kristin hadn’t left work until six fifteen, by which time there were just a few flurries. The roads were mostly clear or at least passable, and the bus deposited her in Andover only a few minutes behind schedule. Still, she missed her train and had to sit on the platform and wait for the next one. Around seven thirty, the LED sign informed her that the seven thirty-five would be delayed half an hour. At eight o’clock, it said it would arrive in ten minutes, and at eight ten it said it would arrive at eight thirty-five.

  She hadn’t heard from Cal, so who knew what he thought she was up to. Once or twice she started to call and explain, but other, more serious explanations might need to be offered later, and she decided it was best to get through all of that at once and then see what remained of their marriage. To her surprise, she didn’t hear from Matt either. She’d sent him a text around four that afternoon, but he didn’t write back.

  Sitting alone on the platform, hugging the down coat to her body, she recalled how her mother looked when she went home for Thanksgiving the year she met Phil. Her mother was often in her bathrobe and, in Kristin’s recollections, even when she was talking on the phone to one friend or another, the hand that wasn’t holding the receiver always seemed to be pulling the robe tightly to her body, as if she were freezing, though the house Kristin grew up in stayed warm no matter how cold it got outside. This was the period when her mother was reaching the decision to let it all go, to forgive both her father for his betrayal and Sarah Connulty for her part in it. In their last years, after Kristin’s father died, the two women once again became inseparable. When her mother called to tell her she’d found Mrs. Connulty facedown in the snow, Kristin attempted to soothe her by remarking that it was wonderful they’d repaired their friendship. To which her mother replied, “That wasn’t ever really in question.” Only then did Kristin understand that her mother had to forgive her father in order to forgive her friend, for whom she must have felt a deeper, more satisfying love than she ever had for him.

  By the time the train finally pulled in, it was eight forty-three. Nobody else was waiting. The other would-be passengers, a woman in her early thirties and an ill-shaven guy wearing a Bruins cap, had already given up. She called somebody to come get her, and he finally walked off into the night.

  On the short ride to Cedar Park, she worried about making it up the hill into Montvale. Articles in both local papers had questioned whether enough money had been allocated for snow removal, pointing out that the Farmers’ Almanac was predicting an especially tough winter. And according to the Globe, the Almanac almost never got it wrong. She hoped she, too, wouldn’t end up half buried in white powder.

  When the train reached her stop, the parking lot was almost empty, and the few cars that remained were scarcely identifiable. They looked like giant snowdrifts. Over in the corner nearest the street, one vehicle waited with its lights on, smoke billowing from its exhaust pipe. It had backed into the spot, so she couldn’t tell what make or model it was but hoped that perhaps Matt was waiting for her in his rental, despite her request that he steer clear of her for at least a few days. Then she wouldn’t have to walk home. And maybe, if only for a moment, they could embrace. She’d gotten scared after her meeting with Joanne Bedard and Norm Vance. By refusing to talk to Dilson-Alvarez, she’d been negligent, letting feelings and personalities influence her decision. In her job that was the cardinal sin. And if it made her feel more fully human, it also left her wondering if she hadn’t just handed the provost a blank pink slip on which she could write the name Kristin Stevens.

  As she neared the street and saw the familiar circle and arrow on the grille of the car belching smoke, she realized it was her own Volvo. Cal opened the door and climbed out. He was wearing a heavy flannel shirt, one with lots of padding sewn into the lining. Above his forehead, as though purposely aligned with his nose, was a ridiculous-looking streak of cream-colored paint. She didn’t know it yet, but he’d spent the better part of the day painting the living room and priming the walls in the dining room and den. By the weekend the house would look like new. It would no longer seem like a set of walls they’d tried to fit themselves into because they had nowhere else to go.

  “Hi,” he said in the same bashful tone she’d first heard at the crossroads grocery, “could I interest you in a lift?”

  There in the parking lot at the Cedar Park station, on a night when an early season storm dumped between eighteen and twenty-eight inches of heavy, wet snow over New England, at the beginning of a long hard winter that would throw every municipality in eastern Massachusetts even further into the red, her affair with Matt Drinnan came to an end. It would be a couple days before she knew it, and a couple more before she said it, and on a Saturday night in February, when Cal and Dave went to Framingham for an annual bluegrass festival honoring some long-dead friend of Dave’s, she and Matt would meet for dinner, and afterward he’d suggest they visit Penny Hill Park one last time. Saying no would almost kill her. She knew that when she returned home and went into the bathroom to wash off her makeup, she’d see the face of a woman for whom life held no more surprises.

  “A lift,” she told her husband in front of the idling Volvo, “is exactly what I could use.” He’d driven a car into a pond for her. If need be, he’d drive one off a cliff.

  on the final day of exams, after most students had already left for the break, Donna stepped into Kristin’s office and placed a Christmas tin on her desk. “It’s just some homemade fudge,” she said. “But I think it’s pretty good. Charlie says so, anyway.”

  “Thank you. I should’ve brought you something, but I forgot. You’ll have to forgive me.”

  Rather than leave, her assistant asked, “Mind if I sit down?”

  She did mind, but she said of course not and gestured at a chair. Donna knew she had a meeting with the provost in half an hour, and she also knew Kristin was concerned. The university’s general counsel would be there; the presence of a lawyer meant someone was in trouble, and Kristin couldn’t rule out the possibility that in this case it might be her. For the first time since becoming an administrator, she’d behaved unprofessionally. She should have interviewed Dilson-Alvarez. He was a liar, certainly, but deserved the chance to lie to her.

  “Your eyes are a little red,” Donna observed.

  She cried in the office so she wouldn’t cry at home. This past Saturday, on a trip into Boston for Christmas shopping, she and Cal got off at the wrong subway stop and had to cross the Common in freezing rain to reach Newbury. She saw an elderly black man sitting under a tree, one hand holding up an umbrella with broken spokes, the other squeezing a 7-Eleven cup. Jangling the coins he’d collected, he forecast the weather. “Thirty-four degrees, ladies and gentlemen, a compact low-pressure cell tending ever eastward. Gusty winds arriving ’round about midnight as the rain is transmogrified into frozen particulates. Roads may ice up and bridges become treacherous, the power may go off and darkness descend. But everybody must remember that the spring will come again. Winter’s got a shelf life just like everything else.” She dropped a five into the cup and held her tears until Monday.

  “I’ve been having some allergies,” she told Donna. She opened her desk drawer, pulled out the Visine that she’d picked up yesterday at CVS and squirted a drop into each eye, then capped the small bottle and put it away.

  “It’s good you’ve got that,” Donna said. “You wouldn’t want the provost to think she’d gotten under your skin and made you cry.”
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  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Especially since I don’t think there’s anything that woman could do to make you cry.”

  “No, there really isn’t.”

  “If she could, she would.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But she can’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So it must’ve been something else. Because you’ve definitely suffered some water loss, Kristin. And I think it left through your eyes.”

  She’d parked on the street across from the deli one evening last week, a few minutes before it closed. Matt and the owner finally stepped out of the door together. The other man locked it, and they chatted a moment, then his boss slapped him on the back and walked away. When Matt headed toward the municipal parking lot, she put her car in gear.

  He was fussing with his key ring when she pulled in behind his rental. He stopped and stood watching her, his coat collar up. She got out of the Volvo but left the motor idling. Later, when she realized she hadn’t shut the car off, it bothered her. She hoped he would understand why she hadn’t—that she didn’t want to give herself a chance to settle in, not even in a public parking lot on a cold December evening.

  She leaned against him. “Hold me for a minute,” she said, and he did. “You smell like liverwurst,” she told him. He didn’t say a word, just clung to her, and she knew he was preparing to let her go for good. So without wasting any time, she said what she had to say, offering up all the predictable clichés: that she couldn’t go on deceiving her husband any longer, that he was a good man who didn’t deserve to be lied to, that the last few weeks had meant more to her than Matt would probably ever know, that he was a fine person too and she hoped he’d find the happiness he deserved with someone else. He turned loose of her then and said something that made little or no sense. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you,” he told her. “But I’m going to figure it out. Everything you never got around to telling me? I’ll be down the street imagining it. You’ll see the light on in my window, and you’ll know that’s what I’m up to. I’ll be imagining you. In fact, I’ve already started.”

  She knew Donna was trying to be her friend. Yet even in the absence of any other candidates, she couldn’t share her secrets. She wasn’t a storyteller and never had been. “I’m all right,” she said. “It’s been a year of upheaval. First I lost my job, then we had to move. It’s taken some getting used to. And I feel a little handicapped because there’s so much traffic here, and I can’t drive very well.”

  Donna wasn’t buying it for a minute, but she didn’t dispute her right to offer it for sale. “Well, if you ever need to talk, I’m around to listen. And I keep my mouth shut.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Because let’s face it,” the older woman said. “Given everything I’ve done, a person has to.”

  “There’s a history here,” Joanne Bedard stated, tapping the stack of manila folders that lay on the table in her private conference room. “But since all three of us know what that history is, I don’t think we need to delve too deeply into it, even though the people whose careers are at stake happen to be historians. We’re here to bring things to a speedy conclusion, because what we have to keep in mind—first, last and always—is the good of the institution.”

  There were three files in the stack, each with a tab on it. The top one said Plagiarism Investigation. The next one said Gwendolyn Conley, and the one below it said Robert Dilson-Alvarez.

  The provost turned to the school’s attorney, a woman about Kristin’s age with whom so far she’d had few dealings. “Could I ask you to go ahead and summarize your findings and the actions we’ll be taking?”

  The general counsel hadn’t said more than a few sentences before Kristin reached a couple of conclusions. The first was that while she herself was not a lawyer, her demeanor, in most of the dealings she’d had with faculty down through the years, was remarkably similar to this woman’s. They used the same measured tone, so that no word or phrase appeared to mean more than any other, and they were careful, when reading from prepared materials, to establish eye contact at regular intervals. The second conclusion was that the general counsel had never entertained the possibility she might one day have to worry about her own inappropriate actions. Things like that didn’t happen to people like her. They happened to the less thoughtful or the impassioned, to those with an inborn penchant for shady conduct.

  “None of what we’ve discovered about Professor Conley or Professor Dilson-Alvarez can play a role in the tenure and promotion process,” the attorney said. “The material that the chair of the department brought to your attention was not in either professor’s file, and therefore we can’t retroactively call it to the attention of the departmental committee. And since the departmental committee didn’t have access to this information, neither the school committee nor the university-wide committee can have access to it. Strictly speaking, neither Dean Vance nor Provost Bedard should know about it either, and since you brought it to their attention, both professors could accuse you of attempting to bias the administration against their candidacies. But the dean and the provost have both assured President Randall and me that they won’t let it influence their decisions, no matter how they might feel personally about the faculty members in question.”

  She went on to explain that even though the information Kristin had collected couldn’t be used to determine tenure or promotion, the university had found both professors guilty of multiple lapses in judgment. To begin with, the article submitted under Gwendolyn Conley’s name should have listed Robert Dilson-Alvarez as coauthor. And both Conley and Dilson-Alvarez should have thoroughly checked their quotations. Their scholarly practices left “mush” to be desired, she said, then corrected herself—“I meant much”—and both of them would have to submit letters of apology to the journals that had published their work, as well as to the authors whose words, in their negligence, they had misappropriated.

  The charge that Dilson-Alvarez had plagiarized his book was without merit. The book had never actually been published, so the rights of the Finnish author and his publisher had not been violated. The person who perhaps should have taken action against him—Julian Blatchford—had chosen not to, due to perfectly realistic concerns: pursuing a lawsuit would have been costly, and even if the publishing house prevailed it was unlikely to recoup its losses, because Dilson-Alvarez was not wealthy. He had, of course, listed the book on his vita when he applied for his current position. But the university’s guidelines specified that only publications during the probationary period could be considered in the tenure decision. One could argue, if one wanted to, that North Shore State had not exercised due diligence when hiring Dilson-Alvarez, but any attempt to terminate him for an offense committed seven years ago would be traumatic for the institution, since he would certainly ask the faculty union to contest the effort.

  “Where that leaves us,” the attorney continued, “is that we sent letters to both professors, giving them three days to dispute our findings, which they chose not to do. Those letters are now part of their files. In Professor Conley’s case, we noted that she failed to acknowledge her coauthor and that she also failed to acknowledge the work of other scholars in preparing her paper for publication. She’s been warned that any future offenses of this nature, if they’re discovered, could lead to sanctions that might include termination. The letter we’ve placed in Professor Dilson-Alvarez’s file notes that he should have listed himself as coauthor of Conley’s article, and that when preparing both that article and his own for publication, he did not adhere to the school’s scholarly standards. He’s been informed that he can no longer list the book ‘To Shoot Down a European’: Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Therapeutic Violence on his vita, and it has been removed from his faculty page on the department’s website. He also received a warning about future offenses, with wording similar to that in the letter we issued to Professor Conley.”

  She closed the folder
she’d been reading from and popped the latches on her briefcase. When she opened it, Kristin saw that it contained several other files, and the tab on the top one said Kristin Stevens. “Did either of you have any questions?” she asked.

  “I don’t,” the provost said. “What about you, Kristin?”

  She understood that the general counsel was going to be excused the moment she made it plain she would not raise a fuss about the manner in which the university had chosen to deal with Conley and Dilson-Alvarez. And that if she did raise one, the attorney would stay. “No,” she said, “I think you’ve covered it.”

  The lawyer gathered all her files and placed them in the briefcase. The lid came down, and the latch snapped shut. “Happy holidays,” she said. “I’m off to another meeting. One of the custodians has been running a Ponzi scheme from plant ops.”

  When the door closed behind her, Bedard said, “She was ready to place a letter in your file too.”

  “I see,” Kristin said. “What was that letter going to say?”

  “That for whatever reason, you’d allowed your personal feelings to cloud your judgment and that this cloudiness, or whatever word she would’ve used, had led to the denial of due process for Robert. The language would have been mild but vaguely threatening, so if you made too much of a stink the school could distance itself from you, as well as the other two. But you know that perfectly well. You’ve played the game a long time, and you probably always played it well until now. I’m surprised you got emotionally involved. I was beginning to think you didn’t have any emotions.”

  Perhaps because her build was so robust, it had been easy up until now to forget that Joanne Bedard was nearly seventy. But this morning she looked her age. Her face was drawn, her complexion pale. Though never elegantly dressed, she usually took care with her clothing, yet today she wore a pin-striped jacket that clashed with her magenta-and-white polka-dot blouse. There was a coffee stain on one of her lapels.