Fall Semester

by Stephanie Fournet

  Maren just had time to set the kettle on the stove, lay out two cups, and let Perry into the backyard before Helene’s car halted in her driveway. Maren met her at the door.

  “You are not going to believe the morning I’ve had,” Helene said, dropping her purse and keys on the floor and sinking into one of the dinette chairs in the kitchen. “So. Fucking. Weird.”

  Maren didn’t want to play dumb, so she went for it.

  “Jess?”

  “Jess.” Helene nodded and gave her a bewildered look. “He came over to my apartment this morning at freakin’ 7:30!”

  “What?!?”

  “Woke me up. Scared the piss out of me because who the hell knocks on the door at 7:30? And he wants to know if I’ll go to breakfast with him.” They both looked at each other with wide eyes.

  “Holy cow.”

  “I thought he was messing with me, you know, trying to fuck with my head when my guard was down,” she said, giving a sardonic laugh. “And my guard was down. I was in my pj’s—a tank top and shorty shorts, and I thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head. But when I asked him what he wanted, or more like yelled it, he got all nervous and stuttery.”

  The kettle started to whistle, so Maren went to the stove.

  “So, did you go?”

  “Hell, no! I stood in the doorway and yelled at him for waking me up, for embarrassing the hell out of me all week, and for being a general asshole.”

  Maren stifled a smile at that image, filled the teacups, and carried them to the table.

  “And what did he say?” she asked.

  “Well,…he just…stood there…and took it,” Helene said, and her eyes drifted down, pulling her into the memory of it. “So, finally, I stopped yelling. And just stood there for a second,…and he apologized.”

  Helene sounded awed. Maren felt sure that guilt was visible on her face.

  “What did he say, exactly?

  “He said…that he was sorry for embarrassing me and he was sorry for being a general asshole, but he wasn’t sorry for waking me up because he knew that he had gone too far and been a jerk, and he really wanted to take me to breakfast to make up for it….It was actually…kind of sweet.” Helene frowned at this point and stared at her tea.

  “But you didn’t go.”

  Helene’s eyes shot up at hers.

  “No way! But he kept asking, and I kept saying no. And he asked me why I wouldn’t go, and I said, ‘Quite frankly, Jess, I don’t trust you,’ and I swear, it was like he hung his head…like a little kid. And we just stood there…like forever…and, finally, I thanked him for apologizing and told him that he needed to go because I had to shower and start studying. So he left.”

  “End of story?”

  “Well, I thought so, but no.” Helene’s eyes went wide again. “He left, and after I confirmed that I, indeed, had not dreamt the whole encounter, I took a shower. While I was getting dressed, there was another knock on my door.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yeah, and I got a little pissed because what the hell? So after I was dressed, I went to the door and checked the peephole, but there was no one there. I opened the door to see if his car was in the lot, and on my doorstep was a grandé decaf caramel latte and a jumbo pumpkin muffin and this.”

  Helene thrust a folded scrap of paper in her face, and Maren took it and opened it.

  Helene,

  Again, I am truly sorry for being such a dick. I mean to earn your trust. I want to take you to breakfast one day, but in the meantime, please accept this.

  Jess

  “Holy crap, Helene,” Maren gasped.

  “I know!”

  “And this was Jess? Jess Dalton?”

  “The very same.” Helene started to smile.

  “So did you eat it?” Maren couldn’t help but grin.

  “Hells, yes! Nobody disses a caramel latte and a pumpkin muffin!” They burst out laughing, and when their laughter was exhausted, Helene eyed Maren meaningfully.

  “What I can’t figure out, Mare, is why the change of heart.”

  “Um.”

  “Um. What?” Helene leveled her with a raised brow.

  “Well,…last night while we were working at the conference…we argued a bit,” Maren started, nervously.

  “And?”

  “And it got pretty heated. He kept defending himself and saying that he was just teasing,” Maren stopped, not sure how to phrase the rest of the altercation.

  “Then what. Tell me, Maren,” Helene’s tone edged with irritation. Maren decided to lay it all out.

  “He kept asking why it mattered, and I told him he was an idiot, and he wanted to know what that meant, and he kept asking me, and he grabbed me—”

  “He grabbed you?!?” Helene cried, leaning forward.

  “Yes, and then Dr. Vashal completely freaked out. I swear, I thought he was going to hit Jess—”

  “Fuck. Me.”

  “Yeah, and Vashal sent Jess upstairs, I guess, to give him a chance to calm down, and it was just weird and silent the rest of the night. I’m telling you, Helene, I was so embarrassed.”

  “Oh, God. How awful….Wait….” Helene’s face transformed from shock and disbelief to suspicion.

  “What did you mean? When you said he was an idiot?”

  Maren sighed. She regretted, sometimes, that she was an honest person. That honesty was important to her. That everything was made better when you just told the truth.

  “I meant that he was an idiot not to see how it hurt you.”

  Helene’s eyebrows drew together.

  “I never came out and actually said that, but I guess he figured it out,” Maren added, clasping her own fingertips nervously.

  Helene was motionless for a second. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “I don’t know whether to thank you or throw my shoe at you,” she said, finally.

  Maren bit her lip.

  “You’re welcome?” she ventured, meekly. Thankfully, Helene laughed.

  “I’m so glad I didn’t go to breakfast with him this morning.”

  “Are you really?” Maren eyed her.

  “Yes. Maybe the balance of power has been restored now, and we can get past this.”

  “But you still like him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, I still like him…maybe even more after that adorable display on my doorstep.” Helene’s mouth quirked up, and her eyes sparkled. “But he doesn’t have to know that. I just want things to be normal.”

  “You never know,” Maren sang.

  “Shut up.”

  After Helene left, Maren stacked the table with all of the reading she needed to tackle over the weekend, along with her poetry journal. She picked up the English Romantic Writers again. Maren pictured Dr. Vashal reading Christabel, and a warm rush coursed through her.

  Well, that won’t do, she told herself.

  He was a professor, after all. Any crush she may have been developing for him could go nowhere.

  So there’s no harm in secretly enjoying it, she argued back.

  Secretly was the operative word. She couldn’t even tell Helene, who thought that Dr. Vashal was evil incarnate. But he wasn’t. Yes, he could be gloomy, fractious, and even a little imposing, but that was really just on the surface—only there if you missed everything else. He was fragile. He suffered at his own hands and at the hands of others. Maren was sure she had seen both that night at Bisbano’s. He was protective. Obviously. Maren remembered the baleful look in his eyes when Jess grabbed her. He was gentle. He had tried to comfort her after the incident. He was kind. He certainly didn’t have to try to help her with Christabel. He was funny. So funny. Maren couldn’t count the times he had made her laugh with his humor, biting though it may be at times.

  It felt good to like him. The warmth in her chest expanded. It felt good to have a secret, to be the one who knew that there was more to him. Even if nothing ever came of it, crushing on Malcolm Vashal was something lovely.


  She let the feeling spread through her and then got down to work.

  At noon the next day, she was due at her parents’ house for lunch. Her mother and father had come back from their trip to the lake house the night before, and Maren’s brother Lane and sister Laurel would be there. Lane, 22, had graduated in marketing in May and weeks before had started a job with an oilfield tool company in sales. Maren was relieved about this because her father had been relieved. Laurel, the baby at 18, had just started college at UL in journalism and was the only one still at home. Maren knew that it weighed on her father now that his two daughters still had years of school ahead of them.

  Even though Maren hadn’t asked her parents for money in years, they had sent her checks at the beginning of each semester when she was in Denver. She had a fellowship at UD that covered housing, so she had managed to save most of what they had given her. Maren had kept to herself the student loan she had taken out to pay for the portion of her tuition that her teaching assistantship didn’t cover after her transfer, and the TA stipend gave her just enough to pay her half of the rent and groceries. If she was careful, what she had in savings could stretch out a few years to allow her to buy clothes and have a little spending money. Not having a car and the expenses that came with one suited her just fine.

  The Gardners lived in the same two story Acadian-style house on Corona Drive in River’s Bend for the last 18 years. Maren pulled her mother’s 10-year-old gray Jetta into the driveway next to her father’s six-year-old black Touareg and entered the side door to the kitchen, finding Erin and Mark Gardner side by side at the island making a salad together. In a fraction of a second, Maren could see that they existed solely for each other and that the approaching separation was breaking both of their hearts.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.” She crossed the kitchen and gave each a kiss and a squeeze. Both hugged her a second longer than usual.

  “Miss Merry Maren,” her father chimed, opting for cheerfulness with his favorite nickname. “How was your week?”

  “Busy, but good.” She leaned against the counter and studied her dad casually. He had lost all the black and gray hair that she loved. Jet black all over except a gray outline over his face and temples. But now a stubble matching the exact color pattern covered his scalp. And he looked a little stronger, maybe even not quite so thin today.

  “How was your reading?” her mother asked, a hint of guilt tugging at her blue eyes.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” Maren batted it away, not wanting her mom to regret any part of her last romantic getaway. “Two poems, but it went well.”

  The door opened then, and Lane, still looking every bit the college kid in shorts, flip flops, and a Life is Good t-shirt, bounded in. His dark, unruly curls were clearly slept on and unshowered.

  “Hey-oh!” he bellowed, his usual greeting. Maren was instantly glad to see him. He kissed each parent and fist-bumped his older sister. “What’s for dinner? Smells good!”

  “Pork chops, mashed potatoes, salad, and baked apples,” Erin answered.

  “Mmmm…mmm! When’s chow time?” Lane’s appetite always dictated mealtimes when they were growing up, but Maren knew that he was making an effort to keep the mood light and familiar by playing himself.

  “As soon as you set the table. Maren, would you call your sister down from upstairs?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  Maren stepped into the hall to the foyer and climbed the stairs, reaching the room that she and Laurel had shared until she’d gone to college. She knocked on the door.

  “Come in!”

  Laurel slumped on her bed with books spread out around her, her iPod docked, and The Killers’ “Believe Me Natalie” playing at a study-friendly volume.

  “Hey,” Maren said.

  “Hey.”

  “You ok?” Maren did not envy Laurel the fate of being the last one at home at this point in their lives. She tried to check on her as much as she could, even if it meant just sending a text every other day.

  “Yeah, they seem a little more relaxed right now,” Laurel said, sitting up. She was two inches shorter than Maren, and although their hair was the same dark brown, Laurel’s was curly like their mother’s and Lane’s, and curls spilled over her shoulders. “Dad feels better now that the chemo has stopped….It won’t last long,” she added softly.

  “Well, let’s enjoy it while it does,” Maren said, manufacturing a strength she really didn’t think she had. Laurel nodded, unable to say anything.

  “Come on. Dinner’s ready, and Lane is starving.”

  “Big surprise,” Laurel rolled her eyes, but smiled and climbed off the bed.

  Sunday dinner was comfortable. Not exactly like old times, but close. Maren’s father had an appetite, which everyone knew would not last, but Maren could see the relief in her mother’s eyes as she watched her husband enjoy seconds. And the food was delicious. After living in dorms and apartments for the last five years, Maren definitely appreciated coming back home to her mother’s kitchen.

  After dinner, Maren’s father wanted to rest in his recliner, and Laurel begged off to get some studying done, so she and Lane helped her mother clean up. Lane was all talk about a pharmaceutical rep he’d met at the gym and gone out with the night before.

  “Robin is like…” He searched the ceiling for a metaphor while he scrubbed a cast-iron skillet. “Like the love-child of Mila Kunis and Jessica Biel.”

  Maren burst out laughing, stacking the containers of leftovers in the fridge.

  “Well, I don’t know who either of those people are,” Erin said, shaking her head. “But I’m sure she’s lovely.”

  “She’s hot. And she can dance.” Lane dropped the skillet into the sink and grabbed Maren with wet hands. She screamed. “And we danced the night away.”

  Lane pulled Maren to him, soaking her shirt, and then twirled her until her back was against his chest before whipping her into a spin.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Maren shouted.

  “Come on, Maren, let’s two-step.” When Maren spotted the laughter in her mother’s eyes, she two-stepped to the Cajun rhythm her brother hummed for about 10 seconds.

  “Okay, enough!” Without missing a beat, Lane dropped his sister’s hands and caught their mother in a sashay and danced her around the island, singing Warren Storm’s “If You Don’t Want Me”. By the time he got to “Try to please me,” both women were in hysterics, wiping tears from their eyes.

  Their laughter had drawn Maren’s dad in from the living room, and he watched, beaming from the doorway. When Lane paused to catch his breath, Maren’s father cut in, and Lane quickly switched to Elvis.

  “Wise men say…only fools rush in…but I can’t help…falling in love with you,” he crooned and just kept going. Maren was half-amazed that he knew all the words, but she was mostly mesmerized by her parents, locked together, eyes looking into each other. Laurel had snuck downstairs, curious about the commotion, and stood in the hall, watching.

  “Like a river flows…surely to the sea…Darling, so it goes…some things were meant to be.” Lane sang beautifully, but he was watching his parents, too, and his voice caught on the next line.

  “T-ake….” Lane paused to swallow the lump in his throat with panic in his eyes, and Maren and Laurel jumped in.

  “Take my hand….take my whole life, too…For I can’t help…falling in love with you…”

  As three grown children serenaded their parents, five pairs of eyes spilled over with tears.

  Chapter 10

  Malcolm

  Sunday afternoon found Malcolm at the desk in his study, surrounded by crumpled wads of paper. He was in the habit of drafting by hand before giving a translation electronic life. He wanted evidence of the thing’s conception and gestation before it underwent dozens of invisible edits online.

  But the poem he grappled with now would not yield itself to him. Sister Alejandro wrote about lice. It was a brilliant poem about how the older orphans were received—initiate
d, really, by the rest of the children. “Piojosos,” or “Lice Heads,” was its title. This is what the existing children at the orphanage dubbed any new child out of infancy. The reason was obvious. Often such children did bring lice with them, so they were quarantined for a couple of days until their hygiene could be assured or their lice eradicated. But, as Sister Alejandro revealed in her triumph of a poem, one was a lice head until the other children collectively accepted him. And, for some unfortunates, the slur stuck for years.

  Malcolm loved the poem. It hurt and angered him to read it, so he worshipped Sister Alejandro in her mastery. She had crafted it with a sing-song rhythm, like a nursery rhyme, and one could almost hear the taunting voices of children singing it on a playground as they chased a doomed outcast.

  It was the rhythm that Malcolm couldn’t capture in English. He surveyed the expanding flotsam of crumpled papers and cursed. Under no circumstances could his translation be the lesser thing. His version in English had to be at least as brilliant as Sister Alejandro’s was in Spanish. Anything less was failure.

  “Fuck.” He scrubbed his fingers violently through his hair and stood up from the desk. Malcolm checked his watch and found that it was 2:00. He had been struggling with the poem for two hours. He needed a break before he lost his mind.

  Malcolm peeked out of his favorite tri-panel of windows to find that the day was overcast. The calendar declared that summer had ended, and the slant of light in the sky graciously seemed to agree. Malcolm checked his phone to see that the afternoon temperatures were in the upper 70s. A run was in order.

  In the few weeks since he had resurrected his running practice, Malcolm had made the affirming decision to outfit himself in new running shoes, shorts, and visors, and he pushed “Lice Heads” to the back of his mind as he changed clothes, strapped on his iPhone armband and his Garmin 220, and jammed in his ear buds.

  He hit St. Patrick Street at a warm-up pace to the sound of STP’s “Interstate Love Song.” A mild breeze held the promise that October was just a few days away, and the evenings and mornings would begin to cool, making it perfect weather for a longer run. So far, Malcolm was up to four miles, and it felt easier and more familiar. By the time Kings of Leon’s “Radioactive” started, he was at a 10:10 pace.