Where You Are

by J. H. Trumble

  A sharp rap on the door, and I bolt upright. Another sharp rap.

  I grab for my phone on the end table next to the futon. Three AM. My first thought is Kiki. Heart pounding, I flip on the lamp and open the door without even checking the peephole.

  Robert is standing there, his eyes slightly swollen and downcast, his hands stuffed into the front pocket of his hoodie. And all I can think to say is, “You shouldn’t be here.”

  He swallows hard and seems to grapple for something to say. Finally, he settles on, “Can I come in?”

  By way of answer, I step out onto the porch. He hesitates, then takes a step back, and I pull the door closed behind me. I couldn’t have hurt him more if I’d slammed the door in his face and called security.

  It’s chilly out and I hug my arms to myself. I feel exposed standing under the porch light, but I know that to let him in is to commit a far graver error. The paper Mr. Redmon handed me as I got up to leave, the litany of cautionary behavior that served as a warning, looms large in my mind:

  1. Maintain your boundaries.

  2. Don’t touch students to show affection.

  3. Avoid being alone with students.

  “Why?” he asks, faintly. “I thought we were friends.”

  I think about all the hours I spent in front of the computer this evening researching—the names, the faces, the charges, the lives destroyed by acts of indiscretion. Amy McElhenney, twenty-five, accused of having a sexual relationship with an eighteen-year-old student and charged with a second-degree felony. Randy Arias, twenty-seven, facing a twenty-year prison sentence if convicted of an improper sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old he planned to marry with her mother’s consent.

  The 2003 Texas law under which they were arrested was intended to apply to students under seventeen, but some self-righteous blowhards had fought to amend the law, making it a felony now for educators to engage in sexual relationships with students of any age.

  It’s a law that makes criminals out of consenting adults, and while not without its critics, it is the law. Amy McElhenney, Randy Arias, Mary Kay Letourneau, Rachel Burkhart—their names and their public records stand as beacons of caution about letting one’s baser desires overrule the strict code of conduct for teachers.

  The pain and confusion and, yes, maybe the anger in Robert’s face digs at my resolve, and I have to steady myself by imagining my name and mug shot on a site titled The Fifty Most Infamous Teacher Sex Scandals. I’m grateful that this happened now rather than later, when it might have been too late. Because if I’m being honest with myself, my relationship with Robert has not been as professional or as innocent as I claimed.

  I take a deep breath and determine to get this over with.

  “Mr. Redmon called me in today.” He looks up at me for the first time, surprise flickering in his eyes. “A parent told him we were in the parking lot Friday night.”

  “So? We were just playing around with my guard rifle. Didn’t you tell him that?”

  “It’s not what we were doing so much as the fact that I was with you at all.”

  “What does that matter? We’re friends. Didn’t you—”

  “No. Because I can’t be your friend.” I scrub my hand over my face, trying to clear my head. “Look, Robert, it’s a violation of the student-teacher relationship. The state calls it a differential of power.” I realize I’m parroting my research, that I’m talking down to him like a teacher to a student, but that is what we are, that is what we have to be. “I could lose my teaching certificate. I could even go to jail.”

  He looks at me like I’m making this stuff up. I don’t blame him; it feels that way to me too. “We weren’t doing anything,” he says. “They don’t fire people or throw them in jail for talking.”

  He’s right. But the way he emphasized doing reminds me how easily talking becomes something more if you’re not careful. I have a daughter who is proof of that.

  “It’s a public high school,” I say to him. “Mr. Redmon is right. Perception is everything, Robert. If it even looks like there might be something going on—”

  “Nothing is going on. Nothing.”

  His words slice through me, and Kiki’s voice echoes in my head: Silly Daddy. Yeah. No kidding. Shit. I feel like I’ve really let him down. All he wanted was a friend, and I’d screwed that up by imagining there was something more. And now there is no going back.

  “Robert. I’m your teacher. That’s all I can be. I can’t be your counselor or your therapist or your—”

  “I only asked you to be my friend.”

  “I can’t.”

  He glares at me like I’ve just shed my sheep’s skin and revealed the wolf beneath. “You could if you wanted to.” He huffs. “You just—”

  “I can’t have lunch with you anymore,” I say quietly. “I’m sorry. Ms. Lincoln—”

  “Ms. Lincoln doesn’t know me.” He looks away at the empty parking lot. A fine drizzle is just starting to fall.

  I don’t want to say what comes next, but I know I have to.

  “I need you to do something for me.” He tilts his chin to the sky and closes his eyes, waiting for the anvil to fall as he surely knows it must. “I need you to delete all my texts and any that you sent me.” His jaw clenches. “And I need you to delete my photo. I can’t text with you anymore.”

  He doesn’t respond. The drizzle gathers in droplets on his tense face and dampens his hair. It torments me to see him hurting like this and to know I’m the cause.

  “I’m still your teacher, Robert. I can still be there for you in that way.”

  He opens his eyes and blinks a few times. “If you’re worried about my Calculus homework, Mr. McNelis,” he says coldly, “don’t be. It’ll be on your desk tomorrow along with every other student’s.”

  I wince a little at his formal address, but I nod. He has a right to his anger. I’m the adult; I let this happen. I reach behind me for the doorknob.

  “Be careful driving home. I’ll see tomorrow.”

  He begins to turn away, then pauses. “My dad died. A couple of hours ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying to imbue my words with more meaning than simple sympathy for his loss.

  “Yeah. Me too.” He turns and walks, then jogs to his car across the lot.

  Robert

  The driveway is empty when I get home, but the house is ablaze with lights.

  I ease past the oxygen compressor that’s now blocking the path to the garage door and let myself in. The dryer is tumbling, and the washing machine next to it is filling with hot water. I open the lid and recognize the sheets from my mom and dad’s bed. The smell of bleach is strong.

  I make my way through the otherwise quiet house. There are no dishes in the sink, no throw pillows on the floor, no crumbs on the couch.

  I find Mom in her room. She’s managed to dislodge the king-size mattress by herself. It’s lying half on the second box spring and half on the carpet. The box spring that sits closest to Mom is out of the frame and leaning against the highboy.

  “Where have you been?” she asks softly, looking up at me from her kneeling position on the floor.

  “Just driving.”

  “I wish you would have called or answered your phone. I’ve been worried. You okay?”

  I shrug. “What are you doing?”

  She sighs, then tucks a loose strand of hair that’s freed itself from her messy ponytail back behind her ear. She looks around the room like she’s never seen it before, then she leans back over the bed frame and applies the Phillips head to a screw.

  “I’m just cleaning up.”

  What she’s doing is removing all traces of disease and death that have slowly taken over her bedroom over the past year or so, starting with the oxygen compressor and the sheets. And now she’s moved on to the side rail bolted to the bed frame.

  “Let me do it,” I say, taking the screwdriver from her. She drops back on her butt and scuttles backward until she’s leaning a
gainst the fish tank.

  I remove the first of the screws and lay it on the carpet. From the corner of my eye, I see her pull a trash bag from a roll sitting next to her chaise. She opens the cabinet below the tank and starts dumping everything into the bag.

  The second screw is only half out, but I stop and watch her for a moment.

  “Mom, what are you doing?”

  I start to ask what she thinks the fish are going to eat when my eyes stray upward, and I realize there are no fish swimming in the tank. The water still bubbles from the various filters, the live plants still sway in the current, but there is no other sign of life. Then I notice the large net lying on damp carpet next to the tank. I quietly lay the screwdriver on the lip of the bed frame and go to the kitchen.

  Dad was meticulous about caring for his fish. The tank was always spotless, the water clear, the fish colorful and healthy. At the first sign of ick or any number of ailments that fish tend to get, he’d isolate the sick fish in a separate tank and treat it with antibiotics or whatever fish medicine his amateur diagnosis pointed him to. Sometimes it recovered; sometimes it didn’t.

  When it became clear that a fish wasn’t going to make it, he’d scoop it into a Baggie with a little water and put it in the freezer, where he believed it quietly and humanely froze to death.

  I pull open the freezer door. A large Ziploc bag, a gallon size, sits on a shelf, the fins and eyeballs of thirty or so fish pressed against the plastic, frost just forming along the amorphous outline.

  I close the door and gag into the kitchen sink.

  Then I get a garden hose from the garage. In the bedroom I unplug the filters, then drop one end of the hose into the tank and draw the other across the room. I open the window, lift out the screen, then suck on the hose just as I’ve seen my dad do so many times. Just as I feel the water bubble up to my lips, I hang the hose out the window and let the air pressure on the surface of the tank push the water through the hose.

  As the hose siphons off the tank, I take the trash bag and dump it in the container in the garage.

  We don’t say a word.

  After I remove the side rail, we maneuver the box spring back onto the frame, then heave the mattress on top.

  Mom runs her hand across the bare mattress. A stain darkens the quilting on Dad’s side, blood from a bad jab or maybe just a cut. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

  I sit on the floor, suddenly exhausted, my eyes grainy. I pick up the small notebook on the bedside table and turn it over in my hands, but I don’t open it.

  “Why did you marry Dad?” I ask. “I mean, I know you were pregnant with me, but you still didn’t have to marry him.”

  Mom takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, then lies back on the bed. Her bare feet dangle over the edge.

  “He was handsome and charming and boyish. He was from a good family. He had a great future ahead of him.” She shrugs. “And he asked me.”

  “Are you sorry you did?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I was really bad for him. Not that I was a bad wife, that I didn’t do enough, but that, I don’t know, that I did too much. He went from being the baby of the family to being my baby. I think I was too willing to take the reins when he wouldn’t, to make decisions, to be both mother and father to you. Maybe if I hadn’t, he would have.”

  “Did you hate him?”

  “Wow. Is that what you think?”

  “I think that’s what those fish think.”

  She gets quiet and curls her toes tightly. Then she sighs heavily and flexes them. “I shouldn’t have done that. Yes, maybe I did hate him. Or maybe I just hated what I became after I married him. He was like a child. I think that’s partly why I fell for him in the first place. He needed me; I took care of him. I think maybe he resented that, even though he had no choice, and I resented him for not loving me for it.”

  “Did he love me?”

  She rolls over onto her stomach and shimmies around until she’s facing me, then rests her chin on the palm of her hand and studies me. “Yes. Of course he did.”

  I want to believe her.

  “Can I give you some advice?” she asks. “Never marry a man who loves himself more than he loves you.”

  I feel tears well up in my eyes.

  “Oh, baby.” She gets up off the bed and sits on the floor next to me, but she doesn’t pull me to her. “Nic is a nice kid. But he’s not the one for you. Date, have a good time, but don’t make the same mistake I made. When the right man comes along, it won’t be like this. You’ll know. Don’t settle for anything less.”

  When I finally quit bawling, Mom finds a rubber mallet in the garage, and together we knock out the safety handrails that were installed in the shower a year ago. We knock out a few tiles with them. It feels good.

  I wonder what my aunts will think when they see the demolition, and I realize that I don’t care. Their license to make decisions for this family has been revoked.

  Chapter 18

  Andrew

  My head is pounding, my eyes feel like someone dumped a bag of sand into them, and my mind keeps losing track of the problems as I work them on the board. From behind me I hear a snicker. I take a deep breath and write:

  3x2 + 8x + 4

  My intention is to show how to factor by grouping, but the snickering behind me distracts me to the point where I can no longer ignore it.

  I turn and lean against the aluminum rail below the whiteboard. Stephen Newman has his foot out of his athletic shoe, and he’s poking his socked toes under Kristyn Murrow’s thigh. She slaps at his foot and giggles while I watch, unamused.

  “Mr. Newman,” I bark. He draws his foot back and snaps to attention with exaggerated and annoying precision. He relaxes his face into a false expression of piety, but when giggles erupt around him, he cracks into a big goofy grin.

  “How would you solve this problem?” I ask, tapping the board with my marker.

  “I guess I’d tell me to shut up and get out,” he says, referring to the other problem in the room. More giggles.

  Ah, they know me too well.

  “Then shut up and get out,” I say.

  He stands and makes his way to the door, arms clamped to his sides, head down, the very image of shame, although I have no doubt that that child has never in his life felt a shred of shame. He does, however, know the game.

  I dart a look around the classroom, and the other kids get quiet, but the smiles remain.

  Stephen baby-steps out of the classroom and closes the door behind him, then immediately reopens it and steps back in. “I apologize for disrupting the class, Mr. McNelis. May I please return to my seat?”

  He doesn’t wait for me to answer, but takes his seat again, then flashes me a smug smile.

  God, save me from freshmen. I turn back to the board and get through the lesson as quickly as I can.

  In the last ten minutes, I get the kids started on their homework and collapse at my desk. I’m nauseated from lack of sleep and too much coffee and a double heaping of guilt.

  I scan my e-mail for the one I know will come today. And there it is, just below a heads-up for a fire drill scheduled for fifth period.

  To: Fabiola Cortez, Bob Benson, Annet Nguyen, Richard Gorman, Susan Weatherford, Andrew McNelis, Bette Flowers

  From: Lynn Lincoln

  Subject: Robert Westfall

  Teachers—

  I’m sad to inform you that Robert Westfall’s father passed away late last night. According to Mrs. Westfall, it was a peaceful passing. Robert will not be in class the rest of the week as the family deals with their loss. When he returns, he will need your support, your understanding, and your flexibility as he catches up with his coursework. Please keep the family in your thoughts. I will provide you with funeral details as soon as I receive them. Thank you as always for all you do for our students.

  Ms. Lincoln

  Twelfth Grade Counselor

  I lean back in my chair and close my eyes and
try to imagine what he might be doing right now. Do his fingers itch to text me the way my fingers itch to text him? Do I dare text him at least a word of sympathy, an acknowledgment that I’m thinking about him? Would he welcome my text? Would he even read it? Would I be opening a door that I’d only have to close again later?

  I’m mulling over these questions when someone farts loudly and the class erupts in laughter. God, I’m not in the mood for this. Fortunately, the bell rings and the kids hustle on to their next class.

  I poke around in my desk drawer for something to nip this headache, but all I come up with is a still-sealed box of Imodium, a little gift from the woman who heads the math department. The anti-diarrheal had been in my welcome basket last year, tucked among dry erase markers, Hershey’s chocolate Miniatures, pencils, and assorted notepads. There’d been a small bottle of Motrin also, but that bottle is long gone. I actually consider the Imodium for a moment before shoving it to the back of my drawer.

  Hey, Jen. You got some Tylenol or some Motrin?

  I have Midol.

  Good enough. I’ll be right over.

  “Kidding,” she says when I enter her classroom. She holds out a small gold pillbox with the lid flipped up. “Pick your poison,” she says, discreetly dumping the contents into my hand behind her desk. I have no idea what’s what, but I choose two matching pills and funnel the rest back into the box.

  “Gates open at six thirty,” she says as I toss the pills into my mouth. She hands me a water bottle. “You want me to pick you up or you want to pick me up?”

  I take a sip of water and use that moment to try and get my bearings. Gates?

  “Hey, Ms. Went!” a student in a Houston Texans hoodie calls from the center of the room. “Can I go to the bathroom?”