My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  She stands back and lets me rifle through the garbage bag. I find an essay with Strane’s comments, a handout he gave us on Emily Dickinson. I clutch the papers to my chest, not wanting them to see what it is I’m saving.

  Dad zips my big suitcase, stuffed with clothes. “I’ll start bringing stuff down,” he says, stepping out into the hallway.

  “We’re leaving now?” I turn to Mom.

  “Come on,” she says. “Help me clean this out.” She opens my bottom desk drawer and gasps. It’s full of trash: crumpled papers, food wrappers, used tissues, a blackened banana peel. I’d filled it in a panic a few weeks ago right before room inspections and forgotten to clean it out. “Vanessa, for god’s sake!”

  “Just let me do it if you’re going to yell at me.” I grab the bag from her.

  “Why won’t you just throw things away?” she asks. “I mean, Jesus, Vanessa, that’s trash. Garbage. What kind of person hoards garbage in a drawer?”

  I focus on breathing as I empty the desk drawer into the trash bag.

  “It’s not sanitary and it’s not normal. You scare me sometimes, you know that? These things you do, Vanessa, they don’t make sense.”

  “There.” I shove the drawer back into the desk. “All clean.”

  “We should disinfect it.”

  “Mom, it’s fine.”

  She looks around the room. It’s still a mess, though it’s hard to tell what mess is mine and what is from packing everything up.

  “If we’re leaving now,” I say, “I need to go do something.”

  “Where do you need to go?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  She shakes her head. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here and helping us clean this room.”

  “I have to say goodbye to people.”

  “Who do you need to say goodbye to, Vanessa? It’s not like you have any goddamn friends.”

  She watches as my eyes smart with tears but doesn’t look sorry. She looks like she’s waiting. That’s how everyone’s been looking at me this whole week—like they’re waiting for me to break. She turns back to the mess, yanking open the top dresser drawer and pulling out fistfuls of clothes. When she does, something falls, slides across the floor between us: the Polaroid of Strane and me on the village pier. For a moment, she and I stare down at it, equally stunned.

  “What . . .” Mom crouches down, reaches for it. “Is that—”

  I swoop down, grab the photo and press it facedown to my chest. “It’s nothing.”

  “What is that?” she asks, reaching for me now. I back away.

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  “Vanessa, give it to me.” She holds out her hand like there’s a chance I might give it up that easily, like I’m a child. I say again that it’s nothing. It’s nothing, ok? Over and over, my voice rising into a panic until it reaches a scream so forceful Mom steps away from me. The high note seems to linger, ringing through the half-emptied room.

  “That was him,” she says. “You and him.”

  Staring at the floor, shaken from the scream, I whisper, “It wasn’t.”

  “Vanessa, I saw it.”

  My fingers curl against the Polaroid. I imagine Strane here in the room, how he’d calm her down. It’s nothing, he’d say, his voice soothing as a balm. You didn’t see what you thought you did. He could convince her of anything, same as me. He’d guide her to the desk chair and make her a cup of tea. He’d slip the photo into his pocket, a movement so subtle and quick she wouldn’t even notice.

  “Why are you protecting him?” Mom asks. She breathes hard, her eyes searching. It’s not a question of anger; she truly doesn’t understand. She’s baffled by me, by all of this. “He hurt you,” she says.

  I shake my head; I tell her the truth. “He didn’t.”

  Dad comes back then, his face sweaty. He hefts a duffel bag full of books over one shoulder and, as he’s looking for something else to carry, notices Mom and I in our standoff, my hand still pressing the Polaroid to my chest. To Mom, he says, “Everything ok here?”

  There’s a beat of total silence, the dorm at midmorning empty except for us. Mom lets her eyes slide away from me. “Everything’s fine,” she says.

  We pack up the rest of my room. It takes four trips to bring everything down. There’s a moment before I get in the truck when my feet burn to run—across campus, down the hill into downtown, to Strane’s house. I imagine breaking in, climbing into his bed, hiding beneath the covers. We could have run away. I said that to him last night before I left his house. “Let’s get in your car right now and drive off.” But he said no, that wouldn’t work. “The only way to get through this is to face the consequences and do our best to live through them.”

  As Dad lifts the last garbage bag into the truck bed, Mom touches my shoulder. “We can still go tell them,” she says. “Right now, we can go in—”

  Dad opens the door, hoists himself into the driver’s seat. “You ready?”

  I jerk my shoulder out of Mom’s grasp and she watches me climb into the cab.

  The whole drive home, I lie across the back bench seat. I watch the trees, the silvery underbellies of leaves, the power lines and signs for the interstate. In the truck bed, the tarp covering all my stuff flaps in the wind. My parents stare straight ahead, their anger and grief palpable enough to taste. I open my mouth to let it all in and swallow it whole, where deep in my belly it turns into blame.

  2017

  Mom calls as I’m walking home from the grocery store, my bag weighed down with pints of ice cream and bottles of wine. She asks, “Do you want to come home for Thanksgiving?” sounding exasperated, as though she’s asked me this many times before when we haven’t spoken about the holiday at all.

  “I assumed you would want me to,” I say.

  “It’s up to you.”

  “Do you not want me to come?”

  “No, I do.”

  “Then what is it?”

  A long pause. “I don’t want to cook.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It won’t feel right if I don’t.”

  “Mom,” I say, “you do not have to cook.” I adjust the grocery bag on my shoulder and hope she can’t hear the clanking bottles. “You know what we should do? Get some of that frozen fried chicken that comes in the blue box. We can just eat that. Remember how we used to have it every Friday night?”

  She laughs. “I haven’t had that in years.”

  I walk down Congress Street, past the bus depot, the statue of Longfellow staring down every passerby. I can hear the news playing in the background of the phone call: a pundit’s voice, then Trump’s.

  Mom groans and the background noise is gone. “I mute him whenever he comes on.”

  “I don’t understand how you can watch that all day.”

  “I know, I know.”

  My building comes into view. I’m about to wrap things up as she says, “You know, I saw your old school in the news the other day.”

  I don’t stop walking, but I stop thinking, stop looking. I walk past my building, cross the next street and keep going. I hold my breath and wait to see if she’ll push further. She only said your old school, not that man.

  “Well anyway,” she says with a sigh, “that place always was a hellhole.”

  In the wake of the article about the other girls, Browick suspends Strane without pay and opens another investigation. This time the state police are involved, too. Or at least I think these things are true; they’re morsels I’ve picked up from Taylor’s Facebook posts and the comment section of the article, where pieces of seemingly legitimate information hide among rumors, rants, and hand-wringing. People screaming, IT’S SIMPLE, JUST CASTRATE ALL PEDOPHILES; others giving a more subdued benefit of the doubt, stuff like, Shouldn’t we all be innocent before proven guilty, let justice run its course, you can’t always trust these accusations, especially when they come from teenage girls with their vivid imaginations, their emotional unreliabili
ty. It’s head spinning and endless, and I don’t really know what’s going on because Strane hasn’t told me. My phone sits silent for days.

  It takes all my self-control not to reach out. I write him texts, delete them, and write them again. I draft emails, bring up his number and poise my finger to call, but I won’t let myself. Despite the years of deferment, of allowing him to lecture me on what’s true, what’s puritanical hysteria, and what’s blatant lie, I do still have a grasp on reality. I haven’t been gaslighted into senselessness. I know I should be angry, and though that emotion sits on the other side of the canyon, far out of reach, I do my best to act as though I feel it. I sit and stay quiet, let my silence speak while I watch Taylor share the article again and again, captioning it with raised-fist emojis and words that read like nails in a coffin: Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.

  When he does contact me, it’s an early-morning call, the phone ringing beneath my pillow, sending a vibration across the mattress that sounds in my dream like the drone of a motor on the lake, the rough muted hum I’d hear when swimming underwater as a speedboat passed. When I answer, I’m still in the dream, tasting lake water, watching the sunrays cut through the dark, all the way to the rotten leaves and fallen branches, all that endless muck.

  On the phone, Strane exhales a shaky breath, the haggard kind you take after crying. “It’s all over,” he says. “But know that I loved you. Even if I was a monster, I did love you.” He’s outside. I hear wind, a wall of sound garbling his words.

  Sitting up, I look to the window. It’s before sunrise, the sky a gradient of black to violet. “I’ve been waiting for you to call me.”

  “I know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I had to read about it in the newspaper. You could have told me.”

  “I didn’t know it was coming,” he says. “I had no idea.”

  “Who are these girls?”

  “I don’t know. They’re just girls. They’re nobody. Vanessa, I don’t know what this is. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to have done.”

  “They’re saying you molested them.”

  He’s quiet, probably taken aback to hear the word come out of me. I’ve been gentle with him for so long.

  “Tell me it’s not true,” I say. “Swear to me.” I listen to the white noise of the wind.

  “You think it could be true,” he says. It isn’t a question but a realization, like he’s taken a step backward and can now see the doubt that’s begun to sidle up alongside the limits of my loyalty.

  “What did you do to them?” I ask.

  “What are you imagining? What do you think I’m capable of?”

  “You did something. Why would they say this if you didn’t do anything?”

  “It’s an epidemic,” he says. “There’s no logic to it.”

  “But they’re just girls.” My voice cracks, a sob chokes out, and it feels like observing someone else cry, a woman playing the role of me. I remember my college roommate Bridget saying, after I first told her about Strane, Your life is like a movie. She didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to. She meant it as a compliment. Isn’t that what all teenage girls want? Endlessly bored, aching for an audience.

  Strane tells me not to try to make sense of this, that it’ll drive me crazy. “What is this?” I ask. “What is it?” I need a scene to slip into, a description of where they were in the classroom, behind his desk or at the seminar table, what the light looked like, what hand he used, but I’m crying too hard and he’s telling me to listen, to please stop crying and listen to him.

  He says, “It wasn’t the same with them, do you understand? It wasn’t like how it was with you. I loved you, Vanessa. I loved you.”

  When he hangs up, I know what’s next. I remember the threat I made to Ira when, exasperated with my inertia, he’d said he was going to report Strane himself. “Ira, if you do that,” I said, my voice steady and cold, “if you tell anyone anything about him, you will never see me again. I’ll disappear.”

  Staring at the phone, I tell myself the urge to call 911 is irrational, unwarranted, but really I’m scared. I don’t know how to explain any of this—who I am, who he is—without giving away the whole story. I tell myself it wouldn’t help, that I don’t even know where he is—outside, someplace windy. This isn’t enough to go on. Then I see a text from him, sent just before the call. You can do whatever you want, he wrote. If you want to tell, you should.

  I type a response, my fingers flying across the screen: I don’t want to tell. I never will. I watch the message deliver and then sit unread.

  I fall back asleep, first fitful and then deep like the dead, and I don’t wake up until quarter past eleven, when they’ve already dragged the river for his body. By five p.m., the Portland newspaper posts an article.

  Longtime Browick Schoolteacher Found Dead in Norumbega River

  NORUMBEGA—Jacob Strane, 59, of Norumbega, a longtime teacher at the Browick School, died early Saturday morning.

  The Norumbega County Sheriff’s Department reported that Strane’s body was found midmorning in the Norumbega River near the Narrows Bridge.

  “The gentleman jumped off the bridge. We recovered his body this morning,” the Sheriff’s Department stated. “We received a call at 6:05 AM about a possible jumper, and that person then witnessed the gentleman jump. There’s no indication of any foul play.”

  Strane was born in Butte, Montana, and taught English at the Norumbega boarding school for thirty years and was a well-known member of the community. Last Thursday, this paper reported Strane was under investigation after five Browick students came forward with allegations of sexual abuse against the teacher, the allegations ranging in date from 2006 to 2016.

  The Sheriff’s Department stated that while Strane’s death has been ruled a suicide, an investigation is ongoing.

  The article includes a photo from a recent school picture day, Strane sitting before a blue background, wearing a tie I recognize and even remember the feel of—navy with little embroidered diamonds. He looks so old, hair thin and gray, face clean-shaven and sallow, all loose neck and hooded eyes. He looks small. Not small like a boy, but like an old man, brittle and worn down. He doesn’t look straight at the camera but somewhere off to the left, with a puzzled expression, mouth slightly open. He looks confused, like he doesn’t fully comprehend what has happened or what he’s done.

  The next day, a box arrives in the mail postmarked the day before he jumped from the bridge. Inside I find Polaroids, letters, cards, and photocopies of essays I wrote for his class, everything resting on a bed of yellowed cotton—the strawberry pajamas he bought for me the first time we slept together. There’s no note, but I need no explanation. It’s all the evidence, every last bit he had.

  The story spreads across the state. Local TV news runs a segment with quick shots of the Browick campus, students walking on pathways shaded by pine trees, white clapboard dorms, the administration building with its columned facade. There’s a lingering shot of the humanities building. Then the same photo of Strane and, beneath it, his misspelled name: jacob strain.

  Time disappears as I scroll through comment sections, Facebook posts, Twitter threads, my phone dinging every so often from the Google Alert I’ve set for his name. On my laptop, I keep fifteen tabs open at a time, jumping from one to the other, and when I’ve caught up on all the comments, I watch the news clip. The first time I watched it, I had to run to the bathroom and throw up, but I’ve forced myself to sit through it so many times, I turn numb to it. No reaction when Strane’s photo flashes on-screen. When the newscaster says “allegations from five different students,” I don’t even flinch.

  After about twenty-four hours, the story travels south. It’s picked up by papers in Boston and New York, and then people start writing think pieces. In an attempt to complicate the current cultural trend of allegations, they give the articles titles like “Has This Reckonin
g Gone Too Far?” and “When Allegations Turn Deadly” and “It’s Time to Talk About the Danger of Accusations Without Due Process.” The think pieces feature Taylor alongside Strane, and out of her they craft an archetype of the overzealous accuser, a millennial social justice warrior who never stopped to think about the consequences of her actions. Some defend Taylor on social media, but the louder voices vilify her. They call her selfish, heartless, a murderer—because his death is her doing; she drove him to suicide. The host of a men’s rights podcast devotes an entire episode to the story, calls Strane a victim of the tyranny of feminism, and his listeners go after Taylor. They get her phone number, her home and work addresses. Taylor posts on Facebook screenshots of emails and texts from anonymous men threatening to rape her, to kill her and cut up her body. Then, a few hours later, she vanishes. Her profile goes on lockdown, all the public content gone. It happens so fast.

  Meanwhile, I keep calling out of work, days lost to my open laptop, my nightstand crowded with food wrappers and empty bottles. I drink, smoke, and study Strane’s photos of me as a baby-faced, thin-limbed teen. In them I look impossibly young, topless and grinning in one, holding my arms out toward the camera. In another I’m slouching in the passenger seat of his station wagon, shooting the camera a glare. In another I’m lying facedown on his bed, the sheet pulled up to my waist. I remember inspecting that last photo after he took it and thinking it strange that he thought it was sexy, but I tried to see it that way, too. I had told myself it was like something out of a music video.

  I grab my laptop, google “Fiona Apple Criminal,” bring up the video, and there’s teenage Fiona, sullen and lithe. She sings about being a bad girl, and I think of the divorcé asking me this in the alley behind the bar: Have you been a bad girl? You look like you’ve been bad. I remember Strane lamenting how I turned him into a criminal. I saw such power in that. I could have sent him to jail, and in my brattiest moments, I’d imagined it—Strane in a lonely little cell, with nothing to do but think about me.