We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  “Well,” Jamie said, not bothering to stop oversalting his sunflower-seed-encrusted cod, like it was a routine answer to a routine question that he had been expecting, “like most people, I love rain when I don’t have to go out into it, but hate it when I do.”

  Robbie didn’t even wait for Jenny or anyone else to rescue him this time, probably sorely missing Lucas by now.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “People only seem to think something’s a problem when it’s a problem for them.”

  * * *

  At the exact moment that Jamie was delivering his philosophy on rain, Linda Marcum’s 1994 Honda Accord was pulling up in front of the dorm the first-term men had been assigned to. Linda was the fifty-year-old program secretary, the top of whose head was far more familiar to us than her face, on account of the number of hours she sat cross-stitching pillows for her family in between her duties and shifts instead of making small talk the way the rest of the administrative staff did. Most of us would’ve identified her more quickly by name than by face anyway, since one of her main jobs was to send us emails about the state that the classrooms were left in after workshop, and the items that had been left there, or gone missing. We remember the emails even years later, not because they reunited any one of us with any valuable missing item, or even because we’re still not exactly sure about the extent of Linda’s role in the final act of this story, or how much she knew when, but because the emails hinted at a rich, playful inner life that was completely at odds with the drawn, humorless I’d rather not face she put on at anyone’s approach. Robbie and Lucas were later convinced that she wasn’t actually the one composing the emails and spent a considerable amount of time they could’ve spent writing trying to uncover the emails’ true author. One of Linda’s most notorious and memorable pieces of work was about a jar of mustard that had been found on one of the classroom bookshelves wedged in between the collected stories of Chekhov and Cheever. She attached a photo of the mustard, and in the line where she usually reminded us where these items could be claimed she wrote, “Not available for pick-up because it was nine months expired.”

  Lucas White was sitting on the front steps of the building when Linda’s car pulled up. We all know Lucas White is prone to exaggeration in addition to biting humor, but we also know that he sat on the same step of that front stoop every night at exactly the same time, even across future residencies, when he was assigned a room clear across campus, because it was one of the few places on campus that got perfect cell phone reception.

  We had all heard him on the phone with his wife enough times to know that she was not the person he was talking to there each night. When Tammy finally just asked him who it was in our final graduation term two Junes later, probably suspecting a long-distance affair, he said it was his mother, who’d been losing another piece of her mind to dementia every day for years, but was always strangely, suddenly more aware during that witching hour just before dusk. Even this was not somber or sacred enough material to keep Lucas from making a joke about it—he told us how he and his four older brothers had been manipulating the situation into later curfews and extra spending money for years. While the idea of five Lucas Whites was something we wanted to forget, we had known long before Tammy asked that whomever Lucas was talking to, it was someone he loved, and that a little piece of his mother’s mind was not the only thing that was lost each day. He never missed a single night’s call, and it was only when Jenny Ritter saw Robbie Myers carrying a peanut butter sandwich out of the cafeteria one night that we would later see Lucas eat that we realized that his mother’s hour happened to coincide with Fielding’s dinner. Seeing him on that stoop, once we knew who he was talking to, made us more inclined to forgive his most savage barbs than even spotting his limp halfway across campus, the only way to identify him from that far away.

  Because he was on the stoop that night, Lucas was there to see Linda get out of the car and walk around to the passenger side to open the door for Jimmy. Lucas said she left her door open so that it made that annoying pinging sound open car doors make, which, when he told us, seemed like a detail that only Lucas would remember—his stories were always bulky with backdrop and props that never went off, too much mood and context and not enough story. But by now all of us hear that pinging when we replay the conversation that followed. Lucas didn’t have much of a view of Jimmy—Linda was blocking his door—but from what he could see, Lucas said Jimmy was totally empty of agency or intent, a dummy of surprisingly realistic coloring and warmth.

  After she opened his door Linda didn’t make any effort to get Jimmy out of the car. She just leaned against the side of it and waited, as if she had asked him a question he was formulating an answer to. Lucas said she waited a good five minutes—which is longer than it sounds when it’s being filled by empty country air and that pinging door noise—before she said anything.

  “I may not know much about the books you people read here, but I’ve been alive long enough to know a few things.”

  She tried to make eye contact with him to see how receptive Jimmy was or wasn’t to the idea that she might know something he didn’t. Lucas said she seemed to take the fact that he was still mostly just an empty human body at this point as an indication that Jimmy didn’t mind being spoken to.

  “One thing I’ve seen time and time again is that most people who succeed in anything, whether it’s books or, I don’t know, Olympic horseback riding, seem to be a little different from the people around them, either by birth or by determination. I like to watch biography specials on the History Channel when I’m cross-stitching. You can just listen without watching and still get the gist of it. And that’s what the people around successful or famous people always say: You could tell from when they were very young that they were a little different. And while the fact that you didn’t come from the same schools as some of these people or haven’t had the same opportunities might make it seem like you don’t know as much as they do, or like they have a head start, it might be just the thing that makes you different. Or to make you see the world differently enough than the way they do that you might have something new to say about it.”

  When Lucas first told us about this part of what Linda said to Jimmy, we occupied whole days and email chains trying to figure out how they knew each other well enough for her to know anything about where he came from. It was only long after that we realized some of the things that happened in this story can be explained by the simplest answer, and that Jimmy was probably just another lost item left behind in a classroom Linda was tasked with clearing. He was in her car not because of any prior relationship they had, but because when she went to tidy Simone’s classroom and found Jimmy still slumped forward in his chair, she knew that if she didn’t get him back to his room, nobody else would. And she probably gathered her insight into what Jimmy had or hadn’t had in life up to this point the way we all did—from a single look at him. She had been working here long enough to know what happened in the classrooms she managed, and why someone might feel the way Jimmy looked after class.

  Linda gave him another minute or so to either contribute to the conversation or indicate that he didn’t want any part of it before she continued.

  “And if anybody makes you feel bad about who you are or where you come from, it may be because they already know what I’m telling you. As proud as they may be of the lives they’re living, they know there are only so many snapshots you can take of a path as well traveled as the one they’re on. And maybe I’m overstepping here, but it feels to me like the forest you’re trying to make your way through isn’t on a map, never mind a path to guide you through it.”

  Lucas said that by this point it was dark enough that the little light in between the driver and passenger seats that comes on when the door is open illuminated half of Jimmy’s face. He still didn’t say anything, but he turned to Linda just enough that Lucas is confident he didn’t imagine it,
which Linda seemed to take as a question about how she knew all this. Because the last thing Lucas heard Linda say before Jimmy finally got out of the car like it was nothing and walked right up the steps Lucas was sitting on just as he and probably Linda had given up on Jimmy ever moving again was, “Like recognizes like, son. And even if you’re the only one in the forest you’re in, the world is full of lonely forests not on any map, and none of them are empty.”

  * * *

  Jimmy was in hiding for a full nineteen hours before anyone realized he was missing. Leslie and Hannah went looking for him after lunch instead of going to the 2:30 faculty lecture, and found him in the first spot they looked, his room. They had half expected him to have disappeared off the face of the earth entirely, without any evidence that he had ever been there, but also knew that when a person like Jimmy, who already spent most of his days hiding in plain sight, really wanted to get away, he’d do it in a place with a lock that only he had a key to.

  His face was as mangled as accident wreckage so twisted and broken that you knew it contained at least one fatality—swollen with tears and panic and resignation at the same time. That’s the way Leslie would describe it later, at least, defending what they eventually did. You’d think that having lived a life like the one Jimmy had, it would take a lot more cruelty than a one-hit-wonder novelist like Simone was capable of to create that kind of anguish. But that would be true only if Jimmy was the kind of dog who became mean after all those kicks, instead of the kind that keeps its head down, pulling a little farther away every time it’s hit.

  When we picture him coming to the door to answer the girls’ knocks, his head is down, as if he were too ashamed to look at them, or couldn’t face the terrible news he had to tell them.

  “Ummmmmm, can we come in?” Leslie asked, trying to look around him for clues to what was happening behind him, deeper in the room, which smelled like clean sweat and clothes that had been in storage for more than one season.

  He held the door open but still wouldn’t look at them. Hannah probably would have had to stop herself from hugging him—what she would’ve wanted from him if their places had been reversed. It was probably only because she already loved him by then that she was able to resist the impulse, and give him what he needed instead of what she wanted to give.

  “Whatever happened, it’s going to be okay,” she said instead. “I promise. I don’t know what’s going on, but I promise you that.”

  “Yeah, if somebody died I’m sure they’ll let you outta here. They’d probably refund your money, too,” Leslie said. “And then you’d be up a few dozen meals, so you’d be ahead, minus the dead person.”

  “I screwed up,” he said, hitting his forehead with his open palm more than once, a caustic, echoing series of smacks. “It’s no one else, it’s me. I did something terrible.”

  “Do tell,” said Leslie at the same time that Hannah said, “I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”

  When he recounted what had happened, Hannah, at least, probably tried to seem concerned and reflect the gravity that Jimmy seemed to think the situation held, while Leslie probably didn’t even try to not seem confused, and maybe a little disappointed, the interest in her eyes shrinking with every word until she started waving him off before he even finished. We’re pretty sure that only both reactions at once was the exact right thing.

  “Duuuude,” said Leslie, cutting anything Hannah might have had to say about it right off. “You’re seriously surprised that the fancy New York lady is a gaping cunt? Everyone here knows you’re smarter than that, Jimmy-o. We’ve all read your work. And having someone like that come for you is a badge of honor—it means you have completely opposing worldviews, which is a good thing.”

  “I can’t believe she said that to Carter,” said Hannah, probably sounding genuinely sad. “What a—”

  “Gaping cunt?” Leslie asked. “Yeah, we covered this already. Let’s move on. Who has time for her? Let’s go do something.”

  “But, I mean, she’s a teacher. She’s my teacher. She’s not going to forget this.”

  “Um, I’m pretty sure she already has, and so should you,” Leslie said. “Plus, she’s a teacher at a low-residency MFA program, not Oxford or something. Like, let’s keep it all in perspective.”

  “No offense intended, though, right?” Hannah asked, taking a break from comforting Jimmy to scold Leslie with her eyes, even though, as the only one in the room and probably the entire campus who had actually gone to Oxford, she was the only one outside of the insult.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Leslie said. “This place is claustrophobic. There are not enough windows in the world to air it out right now.”

  We don’t know what they did when they left campus. The high school junior who sold Patrick the weed he and Carter smoked at the athletic center that night (and the rest of that residency and probably every other residency) also worked on the horse farm fifteen miles off campus, and said he had seen the girls there once that June. We can’t think of any other time they were unaccounted for long enough to go. He doesn’t remember Jimmy, but that doesn’t really mean anything.

  When he gets stoned, the junior likes to talk about the cats on the farm. There’s the one that catches half a dozen mice a day and plays with them before he kills them. Not with any evident malice—it really looks like he just wants to play. There’s the three-legged one, and the one that’s entirely black—black eyes, black fur, black little lizard tongue. Best, though, is the cat who thinks it’s a horse, who lines up when all the other trail horses do, and never drops pace or falls out of line, no matter how far they ride. He apparently had the other horses convinced that he was one of them. He even had his own stall. The cats practically run the place, the junior insists, so it’s safe to say they were roaming freely that day, hard to miss. Leslie probably had some showdown with at least one of them. The fifteen miles you go to get to the farm are pretty much straight north, so though it’s hard to picture, the farm is closer to falling off the edge of the earth than even the campus is, and the sun rises there earlier and sets later, so the light was probably something, that day, two days from the longest day of the year.

  The funny thing is, the junior says Professor Pearl was there that day, too. He was as much an honest-to-God townie by then as he was an acclaimed novelist, so it doesn’t feel like a stretch to think of him engaging with the small local businesses—maybe he even had a horse or two of his own that he kept at the stables. What we can’t figure out is what he was doing with three students off campus during the exact hour and a half they were supposed to be in a faculty lecture about postmodernism in the wake of David Foster Wallace. Rebel though Pearl is, it feels like a stretch to think he would have aided and abetted such wanton disregard for the schedule. Our best guess is that when he saw them there, where they weren’t supposed to be, he saw some remnant of the disaster on Jimmy’s face and left, abandoning whatever business he had gone to the farm to conduct, not wanting to have to yell at them, and not wanting to condone what they were doing by letting it go unremarked upon. In some ways Professor Pearl is as much a mystery to us as the others—Simone and Hannah and Leslie and Jimmy—but we feel we know him well enough to say that he would have understood. He was the sort of man who loved and respected the books he taught, which he reread every time he taught them, knowing there would be some new thing every time. He loved them enough that he knew the things these books could teach a person, and the way they could shape and improve a life, but also all the things and ways they couldn’t, which would have to be shaped and improved by other things, like the sun, and strange little half-wild cats, and people who would break the rules for you. To really love something, you have to know its shortcomings and dull bits.

  He probably knew from the way that Jimmy was sagging into his horse, and the fact that Leslie and Hannah put him in the middle of their own horses, sandwiched between them as if to keep him on the
trail, even though most of the talking they were doing was to each other, and from their overcompensatory laughter, which felt too bright, like canned studio laughter, that although this was a rebel mission, it was also a desperate one. He was the kind of man who knew that, mandatory or not, there were some things in life more important than classes, and some virtues—like kindness and spontaneity and loyalty and escape—that can’t be taught from a book.

  * * *

  Jimmy wasn’t the only person who saw something that June residency that he wasn’t meant to see. And Hannah and Jimmy and Leslie weren’t the only ones who had blown off the late-afternoon lecture on poor DFW. Margaret Jibs was spread out in the strangely secular pew on the second floor of the “barn,” where most of the workshops were held, which looked out over the quad all the way to The End of the World. The barn was a giant, cheerful red building that greeted visitors as soon as they arrived on campus. Its architecture was one part old schoolhouse, one part old firehouse, one part actual barn. The pew was often where people met to discuss the workshop they had just finished on their way out of it—a place for impromptu teacher-student conferences, and conversations that began “That thing you said about x reminded me of this essay I once read by y.” It could fit half a dozen people, but Jibs is an only child and doesn’t have a great sense of space, never having had to share it, so her things had probably filled the entire area that her reclining body didn’t. She always brought too much with her wherever she went, in order to maximize her comfort—she was a carrier of tissues and eye masks and extra layers of clothing, which would’ve made her handy to have around if she ever shared those things. She had just looked down at her watch and realized that the lecture was probably close to finished, and that if she started packing up her considerable pile of things now she might get the first drink at cocktail hour, when she looked up to see two tiny people meet at the very last patch of grass before the drop-off at the end of the lawn. They looked like the last two people on earth, and probably felt like it, too, given that everyone else had circled that lecture in their schedule as something not to miss, mandatory or not.