I STOOD IN THE DARK kitchen making a turkey sandwich, humming quietly under my breath. I’d been humming a lot since the kiss with Nick, and the cool linoleum felt good underneath my bare feet, in harmony with the act of making a covert sandwich.
After I finished, I bagged up the sandwich and hid it in the usual place behind an oversized jar of homemade pickles.
As I closed the fridge door, my dad appeared in the doorway, wearing his plaid pajamas. The top button of his shirt hung loosely by a single thread.
“Honey, what are you doing?”
I was tempted to lie, out of loyalty to Mom. I was tired of lying, though, so I told him the truth.
“Making my lunch for tomorrow.”
He blinked, and scratched his neck.
“I thought Mom did that for you?”
“Sometimes she forgets parts.”
He started to smile. “Ah, yes. I myself have received a lettuce sandwich or two, and once a pita with mayo. Only mayo.” He mock-shivered in revulsion.
I smiled back. Dad’s hatred of mayonnaise was legendary in this house.
“I haven’t had the heart to tell her either. She really wants to take care of us, so it feels only fair to try to let her.”
“She’s been doing better recently,” I said. “Mostly the sandwiches are okay now.”
“I think you’re right. But I still worry about her.”
I made myself sag against the counter, relaxing the pressure on my left knee. In reality, there was nothing wrong with it, but I’d told my parents that I’d been getting sharp pains, used that as my excuse to continue to skip track practice. I missed running, but I couldn’t go back. I had that much self-preservation, at least.
“If it makes you feel better,” I said, “Mom never made great sandwiches. Anna and I tolerated it for as long as we could, but after she made us hot dog sandwiches, we told her we were old enough to start making our own lunches.”
He made a pained face. “Hot dog sandwiches? That sounds terrible.”
“They were truly atrocious.”
We stood there, basking in the normalcy of the moment. Just a father and daughter making fun of Mom’s cooking. It felt like how we were supposed to be together. Felt like family.
“I’m sorry about hiding the box of Anna’s stuff from you guys,” I told him. “I am. I want to say that to Mom, but I don’t know how.”
“I know, sweetheart. And your mom knows that as well. It’s just that we miss her, too. The two of you were always so close that we felt shut out sometimes. And it feels like you’re still shutting us out, and she worries that’s how it will always be.”
“Oh.” I’d thought it was all about the box. Or rather, all about Anna. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“It’s okay. We’re all still a mess, really. It’s going to take us some time to figure out how to move forward. How to handle the fact that she’s not coming back.”
I nodded and then looked away, staring at the moon through the kitchen window.
The furnace kicked on and we were surrounded by white noise, its static forming a cloud around us.
Dad stretched his arms and yawned. “Well, I’m going to head back to bed—go to sleep soon, honey.”
“All right, Dad.”
He waved. I waved back.
MOVING FORWARD. CONCENTRATING ON MY own life. That was what I wanted to do. I needed closure, though. And since I wasn’t going to get that from Mr. Matthews himself, I wanted something else. And I decided that what could suffice were Anna’s English papers—the version with Mr. Matthews’s ink on those pages, his words. They were, I knew now, probably as close as I was going to get to hearing what she had meant to him, and it was important to me to have them. Then I could move on.
The door to his classroom was unlocked, just as it had been before. When I got to his desk, I looked out at all the empty chairs and wondered where she’d sat. Did you sit in the very front? I wondered. Or did you sit toward the back, wanting him to search for you through a sea of faces? Would I have seen what was between the two of you if I’d been in class with you? I might not have. I was so very good at not seeing things back then.
I turned my attention back to the desk and opened the drawer. The thin file at the back was still there. Only the two from Anna remained. Maybe he planned to give them to us, in time. Or maybe he had no intention of letting them go—maybe they were important to him, all he had left. I began to take out the whole folder and then I stopped, remembering him crying on his couch, how he’d underlined in his note. I released the folder back into the drawer and instead took only one paper, the one with the long note.
Then I heard voices outside the door and the rattle of the doorknob turning. I dove under the desk even as I tried to tell myself I wasn’t really doing anything wrong, that I had a perfect right to what I was taking.
“She left her notes for biology at home,” a man said. “I found them when I went home for lunch. She’s been studying for weeks—you should see the crib sheet she made.”
“I’m sure she’ll appreciate you bringing them to her,” Mr. Matthews replied.
“You know how Sarah gets when she’s nervous about a meet—she’s been even worse about this test.” I sneaked a quick look from beneath the desk and saw that the man talking was Mr. Hinter, Sarah’s dad.
There was the gentle sound of the door swinging closed, the soft snap of the latch.
Then there was silence for a long time. Long enough that I wondered if they’d left the room again, gone back into the hall, leaving me crouched under the desk for no good reason. I shifted forward and peered out again. They were both still in the room, simply standing there, looking at each other.
“Why are you here?” Mr. Matthews asked quietly.
“I told you,” Mr. Hinter replied. “To bring Sarah her notes.”
“That’s why you came to school,” Mr. Matthews said. “I want to know why you’re here.”
“You’re my daughter’s coach. I’m allowed to talk to you.”
“Your daughter’s coach? Really? That’s what I am now?”
Mr. Hinter took a step forward. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean…Christ. I don’t know what you want me to say, Ben. You called me, remember? Tell me what you want me to say.”
“I don’t want to have to tell you. That’s the point.” Mr. Matthews took a deep breath. “I thought we had plans. I thought that was what you wanted.”
“We did. It was. I’m sorry,” Mr. Hinter said.
“I thought we were going to leave this place together. Have a life—” His hands stretched out toward Mr. Hinter and stayed there for a moment before he let them fall back to his side.
“I know. But I can’t. I just can’t.” Mr. Hinter’s voice cracked. “I was living in a fantasy land—I wasn’t thinking. I don’t want to be one of those fathers who leave their families—who only see their daughter a few times a year.”
“It wouldn’t be like that.”
“Yes, it would. You know it would. And I couldn’t handle that. It took that poor girl’s death to wake me up, to make me see it.” He looked down. “You see someone else lose their kid and suddenly you get it. What it would mean to not have them in your life anymore. How fragile it all is.”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s not the same.”
Mr. Hinters shook his head. “Look, when you’re a parent—”
“Don’t. Just don’t. I don’t want to hear it. Not again.”
“I’m sorry.” He raised his hand as if to touch Mr. Matthews’s arm. Mr. Matthews took a step back and shook his head.
“I shouldn’t have called.”
“I shouldn’t have come here.”
Then they stood there, rooted to the spot, staring at each other. The man who I thought had been in love with my
sister and the father of my friend, husband of the most beautiful woman in town, the silence between them so loud it threatened to shatter everything in the room.
After that, I started to skip practice. I was so tired of pretending. Of lying.
And with him? It was not good. Let’s leave it at that.
I was in the well. The walls were slick. The water was dark.
I hope you never know what that feels like. I hope you never start having the kind of thoughts I had. About how much easier it would be…Never mind. I shouldn’t tell you that.
MY KNEE MADE A MIRACULOUS recovery. I told my parents that evening that all the sharp pains had disappeared. So I would be going on a long run.
They weren’t huge fans of the idea.
“You don’t want to stress it, sweetheart,” Mom said. “I’m glad it feels better, but you don’t want to push it too hard and end up injuring it again.”
Dad nodded. “It’s easy to get excited when you’re finally feeling better, but you should be careful.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
They looked skeptical.
I promised that I would mostly walk, and only gently, experimentally jog.
As soon as I was out of view of the house, I began running. It felt like rust was falling off my limbs, like they’d been waiting for me to use them properly again.
I wasn’t sure if I should tell Sarah about what I’d heard. On the one hand, he was her father—maybe that meant she had a right to know. On the other hand, whatever Mr. Matthews and her father had been to each other, whatever they still meant to each other, the relationship had obviously ended. There was no action to be taken, no change for her to brace for—no obvious anything for her to do with the information. Maybe the truth doesn’t always set you free.
As I ran along the uneven pavement, I kept seeing the two men standing together. And I felt so foolish. Because I couldn’t have been more wrong about Mr. Matthews and Anna. All the arrows that I thought pointed toward him were noise, not signal, all representing something different entirely. And I felt like the pervert for having seriously considered the idea of him and Anna in the first place.
But I was sad and confused for all the obvious reasons, all the logical fallout.
I was also sad for another reason. Sad that I would never again have an excuse to sit outside Mr. Matthews’s window and watch him wait for his tea, his cat curled up beside him. No reason to immerse myself in someone else’s quiet life for an hour, feeling connected without being asked for anything in return.
* * *
—
SARAH SAT BESIDE ME ON the bus, her eyes partway closed as she listened to her music.
I’d decided not to tell her. I’d wondered about it all the previous night, and in the end, I’d decided it was simply not my secret to tell.
Still, now that I knew for sure that Mr. Matthews and Anna hadn’t been involved, I wondered if Sarah might be able to shed light on part of the puzzle—why Lauren might have thought they were.
I tapped the back of the seat in front of her, my signal to get her to take off her headphones, something she seemed to tolerate, if not necessarily appreciate.
“When you were in cross-country, did Mr. Matthews ever give Anna special treatment?” I asked her.
She blinked, cradling her headphones in her arms. “Special treatment?”
“Yeah, someone said something about him treating her differently from the other girls.”
Sarah shrugged. “Not really.” She began to lift her headphones back up, and then she paused. “Well, actually I guess he did, a little.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, Anna started pretty strong in cross-country, but after a while she began struggling.”
“Struggling?”
“She seemed tired, and once in a while she missed practice. A lot of people miss the occasional one, so that’s not all that unusual, but I don’t know, he wasn’t as hard on Anna as everyone else. I mean, he likes me plenty, but if my times started to dip, he wouldn’t sugarcoat it—he’d tell me to cut it out and get back in gear. Tough love all the way.”
“Is that what he did for Lauren too? Tough love?”
“Oh Lord, Lauren. Was she the one spouting off about ‘special treatment’?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, well—he and Lauren never hit it off, and it didn’t exactly help when he reamed her out once when he found out she’d been skipping practice to serve on the prom committee. He apologized later, said he’d been too harsh, but Lauren is hardly the forgive and forget type, so she probably wasn’t pleased to see Anna get off so lightly. Probably thought it was a sign of favoritism or whatever.”
“God,” I said. “She made it sound—” I took a deep breath. “Whatever. Even for Lauren, that’s petty.”
“Yeah, it is.” Then she paused. “I don’t know if she was totally wrong about the favoritism, though. I think he was having a bad week when he yelled at Lauren, but I think he did have a soft spot for Anna. Sometimes they’d sit together and talk about books or poetry or whatever. And not even stuff he assigned in class. I think they just really liked each other.”
Mr. Matthews and Anna. Talking. Poetry. So easy to twist into something it wasn’t. So much easier to think there had been something inappropriate, something romantic, between them than to think that, in their own way, they’d been friends.
* * *
—
I WENT TO PRACTICE THAT afternoon. Mr. Matthews looked surprised when I rejoined the team, but he didn’t say anything. I was briefly hopeful that he would let the whole thing go, pretend I’d never accused him of having a relationship with Anna, that I’d never mentioned listening in on his call. It would be so great to never, ever talk about any of it.
That hope lasted until the end of practice.
“Hey, Jess,” he called out as I began to walk off the field. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
I looked longingly toward the rest of the team as they left. “I’m in a bit of hurry, so maybe—”
“Jess,” he said. He stood looking at me, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. He looked deeply uncomfortable but filled with resolve. “I’m glad your knee is feeling better, but we really need to talk about what happened.” He looked around and then pointed to the bleachers. “So let’s sit down.”
There wasn’t a question mark at the end of that. So, reluctantly, I nodded.
We trudged over to the bleachers. I noticed that he waited for me to sit down first and that when he sat, he left a notably large space between us. I couldn’t blame him.
“So,” he said. “I think you have some pretty confused ideas about me and your sister.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Oh. Good.” His shoulders relaxed a fraction. “You understand now there was absolutely nothing like that between us?”
“Yes. I was…confused.”
“All right,” he said.
I wondered if we could leave it at that. I really hoped we could. I hoped he’d get up and walk away and that would be it.
But then he took a deep breath, and I knew it wasn’t going to play out like that.
“I’m really glad you understand that there wasn’t anything between me and Anna. And I could let it go at that if you hadn’t referenced a phone call you had no right to listen to. A phone call that there is no way you could’ve overheard by accident.”
He took another deep breath and I braced myself for him to raise his voice, to yell. Instead, his voice grew quieter, more distant.
“I’m not going to ask whether that was the only time you eavesdropped on my conversations, because I don’t think I want to know the answer. And while I can understand how what I said might have sounded strange—taken wildly out of context—I’m not going to explain that conversation to yo
u either. Because that’s not something you need to know, not something I should have to tell you about. What goes on in my own home is private, and what you did, for however long you did it, was a huge violation.”
I looked down at my hands. “I’m sorry. I really am.” And I was. Because I hadn’t really thought about what it meant to do that to someone. Hadn’t really thought of him as a person, not in the fullest sense. Just a candidate, a possible answer to my question.
“Good. I’m glad you understand that.” Then he turned and looked at me, relief but also puzzlement on his face. “What I still don’t get is why you’d ever have thought there was something there. Why you’d even think to spy on me in the first place?”
I could’ve told him about all the things that had seemed so important at the time. How with so little to go on, I’d been grasping at straws and trying to turn them into a raft.
I didn’t want to tell him, though. Didn’t want to embarrass him by telling him about Lauren’s comment, and definitely didn’t want to say anything that might reveal how long I’d watched him for. So I shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense now.”
“There had to be some—” He caught himself and stopped. He sighed. “Look, I don’t mean to put you through the wringer with this. What you did really shook me, really upset me very deeply, but I know you’ve been through a lot. And grief can make people do strange things.”
So many strange things. So many hours of watching him.
And I thought of him with his cat, helping it down from the bookcase, thought of how I’d left Anna’s paper for him. And without meaning to, I found myself smiling.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I was thinking about the strangest part.”
He raised his eyebrows and waited for me to explain. I paused, unsure whether to say it. And then I went ahead, because if there was anyone who was already justified in thinking I was unhinged, it was him. “There were moments when I almost thought that, if things were different, you wouldn’t have been the worst choice for her.”
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