We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  Which we suppose is when we started thinking we might have something to do with this story beyond witnessing it. That we might have some role in it or that—whatever it was that was happening, or whatever it would become—it belonged to us, too.

  * * *

  To be fair to them, once they learned that Simone might’ve had anything to do with what Jimmy did, Leslie and Hannah tried to handle it in a legit, on-the-books way first. They were both on friendly terms with Professor Pearl after their semester with him, and had less hesitation than the rest of us might have had in going right to him in his director role. They went to his office without making an appointment first, probably the very same day that Tammy made her confession.

  Joni Kleinman, Pearl’s official secretary and unofficial bouncer, wasted little time reporting this back to us. Joni had graduated from the program two years before we got to campus. During her second June residency, she had fallen in love with and married an undergrad professor who had stayed on campus for the summer. Professor Pearl had created an administrative job for her as his assistant-slash-secretary, despite the fact that even those of us who have never actually been in Pearl’s workshop know that he would rather watch E! News than have anyone do for him anything he might’ve done for himself, or worse, have someone meddling in his affairs. He grew to like her, though, once he learned the value of having someone hold all his calls and tell any impromptu visitors that he was unavailable.

  Joni had become a familiar fixture at all our social functions on campus. She was one of those women who wasn’t overweight, but had swollen fingers and wide ankles. Other women were always disappointed to learn how small a dress size Joni actually wore, thinking themselves much skinnier. She had a beautiful face, but it was from the wrong century. She would’ve made a great nun if she didn’t say fuck every other word she spoke. She said everything as if it were the best thing ever, so even though she could be dry and cutting, everyone thought of her as bubbly, which also meant she got away with saying things other people might not have. I fucking hate that fucking cunt sounded a lot like “Oh, don’t worry about her, you’ll be fine” coming from her. Despite the general goodwill we felt toward Joni, it wasn’t hard to see that she felt insecure about her spot as permanent student, part MFA candidate, part townie. She overcompensated for this by telling us things she probably shouldn’t have, including things like the private, confidential conversations students had with the director of the program.

  After ignoring Joni’s bright insistence that Professor Pearl wasn’t taking unscheduled calls or visitors that morning, and marching directly into his office with all the grace that the three-inch lift of Leslie’s platform snow boots allowed, the girls shut the door in Joni’s face before she could manage so much as a single fuck. Having the good sense to realize that Professor Pearl was far better equipped than she was to deal with whatever was brewing on the other side of the door that had nearly kissed her nose when it was slammed, Joni simply returned to her chair and stared at the phone, on the small chance that it might herald a distress call from Pearl.

  The door did a good job of concealing the first half of the conversation. There was some muffled crying from Hannah and some cursing from Leslie, all of it mostly incoherent. There were pauses that Joni suspected were filled with Pearl’s offering up a box of tissues, judging from the nose blowing that followed, and others that the girls used to compose themselves, either at Pearl’s urging or at each other’s. The first truly clear, unmistakable words came from Pearl, who, having spent half a career addressing classrooms full of people, was used to projecting his voice. When he sensed that the girls had said all they had come to say, and had given them the courtesy of listening to it with respectful eye contact and thoughtful posture—the only things he could really give them that day—he gave them the answer he no more wanted to give than they wanted to hear.

  “Well,” he said, sounding, Joni stressed, genuinely remorseful about the words he was about to say. “That wasn’t anyone’s intention. And I know—intentions, they’re a tricky thing. They mean so much less than their results.”

  It was difficult, when we heard that he said this, not to call up the picture of that sleepy-looking four-year-old playing in front of him while he worked, but maybe that is unfair.

  “But,” he went on, “you should know there are a whole lot of people who feel as sick about this whole thing as you do.”

  “That’s it?” Leslie asked, her voice raised now.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  To this, Hannah only opened the door and floated by Joni with an almost eerie levity that Joni’s eyes went wide at remembering when she told us. She said she looked up from the phone she was still staring at—still waiting for it to convey the missing pieces of the conversation she was already rehearsing to tell us later—just in time to see Hannah’s back for one wild, frozen moment before she disappeared around a corner and out of the building. In the middle of a long, awful silence that apparently even Leslie didn’t know how to fill, Joni stood and went to the doorway of the office, planning to ask Pearl if she should get coffee or water for his remaining visitor, a sort of code between them for “Do you need me to do anything?” But she was still a full step or two away from the inside of the office when she saw that Professor Pearl’s unfinished manuscript was spread out on his desk, and that Leslie was staring at it without bothering to pretend that she wasn’t, her etiquette gene switched completely, permanently off. She probably would’ve just gone on staring, unbothered by the silence, if Professor Pearl, gentleman that he was, hadn’t spoken. By then, Joni was back at her chair, where she sat in openmouthed panic she didn’t try to disguise, one hand that she normally used for happy, emphatic gestures over her lips to underscore it, trying to make herself as small as possible without missing a word. She said she was almost relieved when Pearl spoke, even if commenting on what was happening would make it harder to deny that it had happened later.

  “I always thought it was ridiculous,” he said, “this idea that just because someone writes one decent book they’ll be able to write another. Every novel is a small miracle. At least one that does half of what a novel can do, at its best. To expect two in one life, well, that never quite made sense to me. It’s like people who date after they lose their soul mate.”

  “Well,” said Leslie, probably still staring at the manuscript, “maybe dating is better than sitting at home alone, watching cable news. Even if the people you go out with instead are only mildly good company. Sometimes you just need to hear your voice alongside someone else’s. And I’ve never met a single person who isn’t at least interesting, even if it’s only because of how ordinary they are. I could spend a Ph.D.’s worth of years trying to figure out how someone turns out ordinary.”

  “Is anyone really ordinary?” Pearl asked, which must have surprised Joni, who, like everybody else, probably assumed there was no question the man did not already know the answer to. “I’ve always thought of that as a word for someone you don’t know well enough to have found the strange spot in.”

  If what he said surprised Leslie, too, she didn’t show it. She had her own answer ready.

  “I mean, there’s the ordinary that turns out to have a closet full of skin suits and knows the location of every missing girl in their zip code from the past twenty years, sure—like, too ordinary for their own good or anyone else’s.” Leslie conceded this in a register Joni later told us was downright good-natured, especially by Leslie standards. “But I’ve been paying attention for a while now, and I think there’s also actual ordinary. People who never wonder if this is all there is, and have never gnashed their teeth at what a raw deal this whole thing inevitably becomes at some point or another, sooner or later. You know—like you either do it all alone, or you miss them when they go?”

  We like to think Pearl nodded here to show that he did know, even if Joni can’t confirm it.

  “And so they
never make some terrible decision they can’t take back, like cheating so blatantly on someone they love that it’s pretty clear they’re doing it mainly to get caught, or just deciding not to show up for work anymore, even though their job isn’t that bad, as far as things that pay the bills go. People who live for reliable television programming and their next meal. And honestly, that might be the most interesting person of all, don’t you think? I mean, can you imagine?”

  Joni didn’t hear anything for a few moments after that, and assumed they had lowered their voices, but then she caught some muffled sound she couldn’t quite place, even with the door open, until she realized it was the sound of Professor Pearl laughing, something she had never heard before, in all the hours of sitting outside his door.

  “Well, now,” he finally said. “I bet that’s one thing no one’s ever accused you of, is it? Being ordinary.”

  Leslie thought about it for a second or two before answering, even though the answer must’ve been pretty clear. “That’s true,” she said. “But it’s pretty much the only thing.”

  “It shows, you know,” he said. “In your writing. It’s highly unordinary. In a good way.”

  Joni was as surprised by this as she was by any other part of the conversation, knowing as well as anyone else that Professor Pearl was not in the business of handing out compliments outside of official, scheduled feedback, and even then he was sparing with them.

  “Thank you, I guess?”

  “Well, I mean it as a compliment, so, yes, you’re welcome. I hope you’ll keep writing. Not everyone does, you know, after the program. Sometimes just graduating is enough. But I hope it won’t be for you, and I suspect it won’t. You seem to be someone who always wants a little more. And in this way I think it’ll serve you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “More is good. And I will. Keep writing, I mean.”

  Joni couldn’t help but notice the words Leslie chose, and paused to linger on them when she reported this part of the conversation back to us. I will. Not I hope to or I plan to, the way Joni might’ve said, had she been the one talking to Pearl.

  And Leslie did keep writing, even long after all this happened.

  While Professor Pearl had no small hand in that, that wasn’t why Leslie had gone to his office that day, which she must’ve remembered at this point in the conversation. She stepped out of her slouch and back to attention to reroute Pearl’s focus to what she had come to discuss with the kind of clarity and directness all the best teachers try to coach into their writers.

  “Look, I bet your book is better than you think it is, and I hope I get to read it one day. And I’m grateful for our last term. However good a writer you are or aren’t, you’re a really good teacher. But you and I both know that if you’re not going to do anything about what happened, someone else is going to have to. And we’d probably both be a little disappointed, once all is said and done here, if I didn’t see to it that someone does.”

  All of which was another pronouncement she made good on.

  Whatever wisdom Pearl might’ve had ready for this, Leslie didn’t stay to hear it. She turned and walked out of his office without any good-bye or formal parting right past Joni, who didn’t even have time to pretend to be doing anything other than eavesdropping, having been given no indication from the conversation that it was about to end.

  * * *

  Joni’s story confirmed what we all already assumed but hadn’t been able to verify just by watching the girls: that they felt some personal stake in what had happened to Jimmy. As certain as we all were that Jimmy’s friendship with the girls had been real, rather than something we had magnified retroactively, the girls’ conversation with Pearl was the first tangible reaction we got from them.

  Having heard the story, we immediately started searching for more evidence of an off-campus friendship between Jimmy and Hannah and Leslie, which proved nearly impossible given that neither Jimmy nor Hannah had social media accounts, and that Leslie, who we only then realized hadn’t accepted any of our Facebook friendship requests from the semester before, hadn’t posted anything in three years. Her last post had been about a British folk band that none of us had ever heard of and her page felt almost hostile in the lack of real information it provided.

  It was Jenny Ritter who finally pointed us to the only bit of off-campus activity we’ve ever been able to find. When she told us about the picture and where to find it on the internet, we were surprised that she hadn’t mentioned it earlier. She’d been present for at least half a dozen conversations about fruitless online searches the rest of us had made. To our indignation she said only “You never asked” in that mom voice she sometimes used, and we all silently remembered our own mothers’ aversion to anything resembling gossip, regardless of the degree to which they partook of it themselves.

  The picture was on a photo-sharing site that was more private than the earlier and more prominent forms of social media. You had to grant other people access to each individual album you posted. Jenny had searched for all of us there after that first June, after having had to tell us all that, no, she wasn’t on Facebook, and Hannah was the only one she had been able to find. Intrigued, having assumed Hannah would be one of the savviest members of the class when it came to social media, Jenny had searched for her occasionally in the months between our first and second residencies. She got only one result, an album entitled “Jimmy, October” that Hannah posted just before Halloween. Jenny had been excited to discover the album and flattered when Hannah’s avatar granted permission for her to view it, but then disappointed to discover that it contained only a single picture.

  Knowing how fishy it would’ve looked if we all individually asked Hannah for permission to access this single-shot album, Jenny sent us her account information so that we could sign in as her. We had expected her just to send us a screenshot of the image, but it was apparently not one of the “computer tricks” her children had taught her. We felt a little guilty signing in as her at first, given how easy it would have been to just teach her ourselves how to take the screenshot, but the site was uncontroversial, we assured ourselves—mostly mom accounts, we quickly saw, which made sense, since children were the best and only reason we could think of to forgo the friendlier, more social sites the rest of us had grown up on for additional privacy. We felt a little voyeuristic as we tried not to look at the pictures Jenny herself had posted, of her husband and daughters, a feeling that dimmed a little when we saw how happy and at ease she was in all of them. We had thought her family was to blame for some of her more uptight, uncomfortable mannerisms. The burdens of a life spent taking care of others, we assumed. When we realized that something else must have accounted for them we felt a little bad for not inviting her to our more casual dorm gatherings, thinking she would be too old for them even though she was younger than most of the married accountants.

  We forgot about all that when we finally clicked through to the photo of Hannah, though.

  The only trace of Jimmy was in the album’s title, so we assumed he had been the one to take its lone picture. In it, Hannah’s sitting on the edge of a pool, surrounded by light so thick and present that it might as well have been a second person, her face both quizzical and amused in the moment before she opens her mouth to address the person behind the camera. It’s such a good, active, unscripted shot that it’s impossible to look at it and not see all the moments that led up to and away from it. Her open, unguarded playfulness made her unrecognizable at first glance, a new identifying mark on a face we thought we knew by then.

  There are very few details to pull from the shot other than the girl and the evident joy the picture’s taker gave her—not a single palm tree or license plate in the background to follow. It was so empty of anything to hang the picture on that we associate it with the month of October as much as anything else. It was not uncommon, in the years after we discovered it, for email chains between us that had s
at dormant across springs and summers to be resurrected in mid-October, our own unofficial holiday stretch before the real one began.

  The picture could have been taken anywhere, we know, a gap in the story that normally would have frustrated us, but that worked in our favor here, because it meant it was taken everywhere, and that the golden moment it immortalized belonged to all of us. We all remember a picture from a different place in the world.

  For Tammy it was Mexico, a small, rural city in a part of the country where they don’t serve drinks in coconuts or have restaurants with white tablecloths. We’re not sure if she couldn’t remember the name of the town or just didn’t want to tell us. We had trouble picturing Tammy in any state of true repose, busy as she kept herself even during the quietest periods of the residency, when we would see her long white legs below a New York Times or Wall Street Journal spread all the way out, obscuring the entire upper half of her body. It always looked like she was too engrossed in whatever story she was reading to think to fold the paper, which was endearing unless you were sitting next to her in the auditorium. It took several follow-up questions that only Jibs would have been bold enough to ask to learn that she had taken this trip with the man she came the closest to marrying, and while we can’t remember his name, either, we all remember how she wouldn’t make eye contact with any of us when she said it.

  For Lucas it was Hilton Head Island, where his mother took him and his siblings for the last two weeks of every summer. His father would join on the weekends, but that’s not what he or any of his four brothers remembers about these trips. It was that the light stretched itself long enough that they could play in the pool of the gated community they stayed in until almost nine every night. They’d know it was time to come in only when their mother’s minivan pulled into the parking lot that ran alongside the pool. They’d pretend not to notice, and so she would have to put the car in park and get out to summon them, leaving her open door pinging as she hung over the pool’s gate and said, “Come home, come home, my sweet men—another night has come.” He told us that that pinging sound would always make him think of the smell and sting of chlorine, skin the color of tree bark, and the taste of the greasy grilled cheese sandwiches they’d get at the snack shack down the road that left hand-shaped smudges on everything. After he told us that, we all felt a little bad about having rushed him through the pinging-door detail of his story about Linda and Jimmy. Linda and Jimmy’s conversation had always played against the pings he had described for us when we pictured it, but we let them play a little louder after that.