What Has Become of You (20 page)

Vera got up and stood by the window, refilling her empty cup with a small amount of vodka and a large amount of orange juice. She could be fired if the school knew she was drinking with a student—a fifteen-year-old student at that. “Can I borrow one of your cigarettes?”

“Take the whole pack.”

Vera lit the cigarette with one of the matches left out on the table, pushing the window out so she could direct her smoke into the night air. She was deep in thought, trying to frame what she wanted to say to Jensen.

“I mentioned I could tell you some stories,” she said. “There’s one little story about a boy I want to tell you, if you don’t mind listening.” Her back to the girl, she spoke in the direction of the air, watching her smoke ribbon out and disappear.

“In high school I had a boyfriend named Peter. This was the late 1980s, and in Maine you didn’t see as many punk or alternative-type kids as you do today. It wasn’t normal to see kids with blue hair or T-shirts with skulls on them. Well, there were those Grateful Dead pothead kids, but that was different. That was dime a dozen. What I’m talking about was something quite unique and off-putting to most, and if someone looked like that, it actually
meant
something.” Vera went on, in her soft but full voice, to give Jensen a brief account of her relationship with Peter—about how he had gone to college halfway across the country. Of how she had found him online years later and begun a correspondence again.

“He had moved back to Maine years before, and he had a successful business. Maybe moving back to Maine wasn’t such a terrible idea, I thought. I wanted to redo my painful high school years, make them right and good. That, as it turned out, was an ill-conceived plan. He wasn’t the person I remembered. His rebellious streak was gone. He was a straight-arrow businessman, concerned about public image. He wanted someone to be a perfect little wife who could cook and clean and look poised at his little functions. That wasn’t me at all.”

“You don’t seem so rebellious to me,” Jensen said. “I mean, you’re a teacher.”

“You’re right,” Vera said. “I’m really pretty square. I’m not expressing myself very well. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that things don’t turn out the way you might expect. But even when things turn out differently from how we expect, we can still be okay.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and turned to face Jensen, who was watching her carefully. “Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to talk about me, even though somehow I keep doing so. I came here to talk about you.”

“Are you leading up to the ‘life is worth living’ speech? The ‘things will get better’ speech? People always promise that.”

“Not exactly what I’m getting at. Though that would be the expected song and dance.”

“What, then?”

“Jensen, have you ever read Mark Twain’s essay ‘Two Ways of Seeing a River’?”

“Not a fan of Twain.”

“He’s not all Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and boys being boys,” Vera said. “But anyway, listen, it’s a very short essay. You should read it. He talks about how he sees the river as this beautiful thing, this majestic thing, but the more familiar he becomes with the river, the less beautiful it becomes to him. He doesn’t see the beauty anymore, only the dangers and the pragmatic aspects of it.”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t lose sight of beauty.”

“I realize it’s easier said than done. But perhaps focusing less on the morbid and more on the beautiful would do you good.”

On the TV a new episode of
The Twilight Zone
was beginning. Vera couldn’t yet identify which one it was. A distressed-looking gentleman in a bow tie ran chaotically around empty, suburban streets.

“Do you know what I think is beautiful?” Jensen asked.

“What?”

“That part in
Catcher
when Holden talks about how he likes to light matches and hold them until he can’t hold them anymore. Then he lets them drop. That’s one of my favorite parts. And do you know what else I like? That part where he says he feels like he’s disappearing every time he crosses the street.”

“The matches,” Vera said, remembering. “And the street. Yes. Those are two beautiful moments. Small ones, but beautiful ones.”

“And then there’s the ducks in Central Park. How he wants to know where they go in the winter.”

The drinks Vera had consumed made her feel as though she were in a small boat, floating farther and farther away from the crisis that had brought her here. “Everyone remembers that part,” she said dismissively. She was stuck on the idea of disappearing—in particular, on the last chapter of
The Catcher in the Rye
,
when Holden is walking around Fifth Avenue and starting to worry every time he crosses the street. She thought of him thanking his dead brother every time he made it across the street to safety, still present, still visible, still
real
.

“I’m still having a hard time coming up with my essay topic,” Jensen said.

“Next week,” Vera said, “we can talk about it some more if you’re still stuck.” She drained her second drink and decided against pouring another. The calm person who had handled things earlier had come back, steering her gently where she needed to go.

“You asked me earlier why I didn’t tell your mom my concerns about you,” she said. “The reason I gave you is true, but beyond that there’s another reason why I’ve kept what you’ve written to myself. The reason is because I feel for you, Jensen, and I don’t want to betray you. I know what it’s like to want to look cool and competent and not like an emotional wreck. I do get concerned when you start talking about these girls who’ve been killed recently and how you want to be like them. But I know some of it is just blowing off steam, to use a phrase from one of your earlier journals.”

She thought, but didn’t say, that she felt Jensen had been mishandled on previous occasions when she’d tried to show a vulnerable side. Getting fobbed off on a psychiatrist who clearly hadn’t done any good—that couldn’t have been a picnic for the girl. And being rejected by Bret Folger, on one of the few times she expressed need—the girl needed an ally, someone unequivocally in her corner.

“For my discretion,” she went on, “and in exchange for the consideration I’m showing for you—I’d like to ask one thing. I’d like to ask that you please not do anything to harm yourself tonight. Can you assure me that you won’t?”

“I can,” Jensen said, “but tomorrow is another day.”

“I’d like to ask that you please not do anything tomorrow, either, but at the moment I’m most concerned about getting you through tonight. Do you think we could check you out of this hotel and get you home? We will have to walk. I’m afraid I don’t have any cash for a cab ride.”

“Oh, I have cash,” Jensen said. “But I can’t go home. I said I was doing a
sleepover
at someone’s house. No one leaves a sleepover in the middle of the night.”

Vera felt uncomfortable with the idea of leaving her there. She was tired—more tired than she had been to start with, drained from both her interchange with Jensen and what she saw as a degree of success in getting through to the girl. She could sleep there in the second bed, get up in the morning, and see her home in the daylight. What harm would it do? But somehow spending the whole night with her student seemed too aberrant—more questionable still than covering for her, than turning a blind eye while she drank alcohol, than drinking alcohol with her.

As though reading Vera’s thoughts, Jensen said, “I guess I could go back home. I can always make up some excuse to my mom. But could we stay a little longer and watch some more of this marathon? Please? At least the end of this episode.”

Vera agreed. The girl grabbed the remote control from the table between the two beds and turned up the volume. “No talking,” she said sternly, putting a finger to her lips.

They watched another episode and a half of
The Twilight Zone
without a word between them. When it was nearly eleven o’clock, Jensen got off her bed, put on her boots and her long black trench coat without prompting.

“You know, it’s misting out,” Vera said. “Kind of a half rain, half snow.”

“I don’t mind walking. I’d rather.”

Vera got up, too. She had never taken off her coat or hat the entire time; it had never occurred to her to do so.

She waited in the lobby while the girl checked out. They said little on the longish walk back to Jensen’s house. Vera fell into her usual habit of counting steps when she walked and trying to keep her breathing even; sometimes she counted in a whisper, aware that her moving mouth might look strange to passersby on the road, but she couldn’t help herself. The cold precipitation—somewhere between rain and snow and light hail—prickled her through her hat. She wondered what Jensen was thinking. The girl’s expression looked as serene as she had ever seen it.

Vera and Jensen walked through Dorset’s east end, up and down steep, sloping hills, past old houses whose charm was, to Vera’s thinking, enhanced by their need for some fixing up, past the tall embankments where Vera knew that wildflowers grew in the spring—the Queen Anne’s lace and the black-eyed Susans that she’d picked in her youth, growing up in Bond Brook. This end of town was quiet on a Friday night; only one truck passed them, then another, the second driver honking at the sight of two females. What did he make of them, Vera wondered, these two brunettes in their winter coats? Mother and daughter? Sister and sister? Two friends separated only by age? As they descended down Pine Street, Jensen said, “If it’s okay, I’d like you to just drop me off on Middle Street. My house is only six doors down. You can even see the roof from here—see the one with the chimney that’s missing a brick?”

Vera knew this to be true, for she had been keeping her eye on house numbers as best as she could in the dark. “Are you sure? I’d like to see you to your door.”

“Positive,” Jensen said. “You live close by, don’t you?”

“Maybe another ten to fifteen minutes’ walk.”

Vera decided to let the girl have her way. She imagined that she didn’t want to risk being seen approaching her house with her teacher, if Mrs. Cudahy happened to be awake and peering out a window; it would be easier to explain walking home alone than walking home with Vera.

Jensen, having come to a standstill, fished around in her coat pockets until she found a roll of peppermints. “Want one?” she said. “It hides the alcohol smell.”

“I’m okay, thank you. I’ve no one to hide from.”

Jensen stood in place for a few seconds, looking at nothing particular, her hands thrust back in her coat pockets. The wind blew her hair half over her face. Vera thought of what Bret Folger had said about how she looked like a little rat peering out from under things. It didn’t do the girl justice at all.

“Thanks,” Jensen said. “For talking to me and . . . everything.”

“I didn’t do much. I don’t think I did much at all.”

“I really do feel a little better, though. I have a feeling that the next thing I write for you is going to be a lot less gloomy.”

“Then that makes me glad.”

Jensen turned around and continued heading down the street. Vera stood still and watched the girl’s straight back, saw the lightness in her step. From a few feet away, her coat began to blend into the darkness. Soon all she could see of her were her white hands and the whiteness of her exposed neck where her hair was scraped up in a rubber band. She watched until the girl crossed the street, until she couldn’t see the whiteness anymore, and then Vera turned to make her own way home.

Vera spent the remainder of the weekend in an unusual frame of mind. She kept seeing Jensen Willard as she’d left her: relieved and almost restored, as though she’d made peace with something. A different girl, practically. She kept seeing the lightness in Jensen’s step as she retreated down the hill to her house, the back of her neck pale and straight in the moonlight. She almost felt she could trust what she’d seen—that she could have full faith in the girl for the first time since she’d first read her journals.

Vera, too, felt lighter—freed from the heavy sadness that usually clouded her mood. She attributed this to a sense of fulfilled purpose. She had had a hand in circumventing disaster, had reached the girl in some meaningful way; it was not often that she felt her actions had any meaning or import. It did not counteract the irrational sense of responsibility and guilt she had felt ever since finding Sufia’s body, but it made her at least feel she had done something good and right by somebody for a change.

Returning to school on Monday morning, she had planned an introduction of the girls’ next required reading: Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
. Her original plan had been to teach Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, but she had changed her mind over the weekend, remembering how Jensen had said she’d liked Plath’s novel. She was prepared to begin class by telling the girls a little bit about Sylvia Plath, the all-American, overachieving college girl, and how her one novel thinly fictionalized her nervous breakdown and subsequent stay at the famous McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, years before her suicide.

Her intended focus was usurped, however, when Loo Garippa, of all people, came to class champing at the bit, wanting to share something that couldn’t wait. As soon as attendance was taken, she asked Vera, “Did you grade our
Catcher in the Rye
essays yet?”

“I haven’t. I’ve fallen a bit behind on the grading, but I’ll be catching up in the next day or two.” Vera gave Harmony Phelps a preemptive look—Harmony, who always gave Vera the stink-eye when work wasn’t returned fast enough for her liking.

“Well, you ought to read mine first. I think you’ll like my topic.” Looking exceedingly proud of herself, Loo said, “I came up with a really good theory of why serial killers like
The Catcher in the Rye
.”

Vera decided not to correct her once again on her misuse of the term
serial killer
. She glanced anxiously at the classroom door, hoping to see Jensen Willard making a late arrival. Her seat stood empty.

Stop looking at the door,
Vera told herself. Aloud, she said: “All right, Loo. What’ve you got?”

Harmony Phelps raised her hand and began speaking before Vera called on her. “Is it okay if we don’t talk about this? I don’t think it’s right after what happened to Sufia.”

“This has nothing to do with Sufia,” Loo shot back.

“It’s in
poor taste
to talk about stuff like that now.”

Almost merrily, Loo said, “But check this out—it comes right from the book’s title. Holden mentions how he wants to be the catcher in the rye after he hears this poem that goes, ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye.’ Get it? Catch a
body
?”

Before Vera could stop her, Harmony, lips pressed together and shaking her head in disgust, scraped away from her table and exited the classroom, slamming the door behind her to underscore her point.

“I’ll go get her,” Cecily-Anne said, already starting to rise from her seat.

“Would you, Cecily-Anne? Thank you,” Vera said. She knew she had to regain control of the classroom somehow before things got worse. Turning to the rest of the girls, she said, “Let me clarify something that might make you all feel a little bit better. The poem Holden refers to is by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, and Holden misunderstands its meaning. It’s about a man coming through the rye—you could think of it as wheat—and stealing a kiss from a girl he knows, who’s presumably wet from walking near the river.” She turned to the computer to find the poem on the Internet, turned on the overhead projector, and read it aloud to the class from the movie screen, ruing her lack of a Scottish brogue:

O Jenny’s a’ weet, poor body,

Jenny’s seldom dry:

She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie,

Comin’ thro’ the rye!

Gin a body meet a body

Comin’ thro’ the glen,

Gin a body kiss a body

Need the warld ken? . . .

The poem’s last syllable was still ringing when Loo said, “Yeah, but even so, Holden
thought
it was a body, and he wants to stand there at the end of a cliff catching kids’ bodies. That’s what he wants to
do
with his life. It’s like he wants to be a child killer. Or maybe a future child molester. Or maybe
both
.”

“Can we
please
just change the subject?” Autumn Fullerton said. “
Seriously.
”

Vera saw that Autumn and Harmony weren’t the only ones bothered by this turn in the discussion; almost all the other girls looked worried. Only Loo Garippa remained unperturbed.
Under different circumstances, Loo Garippa and I might have been friends,
Vera thought.
She
may be a poser and an undercover pill-popper, but she’s got spirit.
“I agree about changing the subject,” she said, “but let me just make a few more points for your consideration before we put a lid on this.”

Vera spent the next ten minutes trying to disabuse the class of this distressing notion Loo had put forth, citing instead Holden’s own childish nature and his unrealistic desire for heroism—a would-be savior to children rather than a destroyer of them. But at least half the girls seemed stuck on the other interpretation, as though
catcher in the rye
might be a synonym for
bogeyman
. Frustrated by her failure to contain the discussion and increasingly worried when it became evident neither Harmony nor Cecily-Anne was coming back and that Jensen Willard was not going to show up at all, Vera let the class out ten minutes early.

She was nearly an hour into correcting papers when someone rapped on the door frame of her open classroom. The force of the rap caused her to look up with a start. Without waiting to be invited in, a man had already advanced halfway to Vera’s table.

He wore a spotless white collared shirt and dark-colored pants and carried a clipboard and some folders under his arm; for a minute Vera entertained the idea that a Mormon missionary might be making the rounds, intending to convert the Wallace School teachers one by one. Did that actually happen? She had heard stories of incensed Christians showing up at the school in the past, protesting the inclusion of an elective class called the History of Paganism.

The man had reached her table before she had decided if she should stand up or not. There was something about the way he walked toward her, something purposeful in his stride, that suddenly gave her a sense of real trouble.

“Vera Lundy?”

“Yes?”

He reached into his pocket, took out what looked like a leather wallet, and opened it matter-of-factly, flashing a police badge and replacing it before she could feel anything other than stunned. “I’m Detective Ray Ferreira with the Dorset Police Department. I understand you have some time between classes right now.”

Another figure appeared uninvited into the classroom then—a woman. Vera had just registered the newcomer’s impressive height and her faded red hair, which pointed wildly in all directions, when Ferreira said to this newcomer, “There you are. What took you so long?”

“I got waylaid talking to the department chair,” Detective Helen Cutler said. “Chatty little thing, isn’t she, Vera? Hope I didn’t miss anything good here. I take it you’ve met Detective Ferreira.”

“Yes,” Vera said. “Is this about Sufia again? I still don’t remember anything other than what I’ve told you. But please . . . please have a seat, Detective. Sit down, both of you.”

Cutler shut the classroom door while Ferreira pulled up a chair across from Vera’s table, then a second chair for his partner. Sitting there, Ferreira looked like an aging, oversized student with an adult man’s face; Vera wondered how she could ever have mistaken him for a clean-scrubbed missionary. His features were far too angular and knowing for that. As for Cutler, her complexion looked like she exfoliated with sandpaper. The bemused twitch of her lips that had been present during the school assembly was nowhere in sight.

Clearing his throat, Ferreira said, “Jensen Willard is a student in one of your English classes, is that right? I understand you’ve only been subbing a short time.”

“That’s right. I just started.” Stricken, Vera realized that somehow, deep down, she had known as soon as he’d flashed his badge that this would not be about Sufia but about Jensen Willard.

“When was the last time you saw Jensen in class?”

“Last Friday.”

“That squares with what’s on the attendance records. Any chance you saw her after that? Outside of class?”

Vera fell silent. “No,” she said. The word escaped from her before she premeditated the lie. All she could think was
Jensen’s run away. She’s found her own way to escape somehow, and she wouldn’t want me to let on that I know.
She looked from one detective to the other, wondering why Cutler was so quiet, why she was just taking notes while Ferreira did the talking. “Detective, please. What
is
this all about?”

“Jensen Willard hasn’t been seen since Friday night. Her parents have filed a missing persons report.”

“Does your niece know this?” Vera asked Cutler.

The female detective raised an eyebrow in response, still jotting something down in her notepad. “She doesn’t yet, although I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Chelsea will be told later today.”

“But . . .”

“But?” It was Ferreira’s turn to cock an eyebrow, wreathing his forehead in deep lines. His eyes held hers with an alertness that made her feel quite exposed. He wasn’t stupid, this detective—that much she could tell. She couldn’t assume that Cutler was stupid, either. Vera thought as fast as she could, sorting out fiction and fact and erring on the side of the latter.

“I called Jensen’s house on Friday night. Her mother said she was at a sleepover.”

Ferreira nodded. “Jensen’s mother indicated that you had called Friday night. I wanted to check in with you about that. What were you calling about on a Friday? Did it have anything to do with those journals she was writing for you?”

“No,” Vera said. “I mean, sort of. I did want to talk about her writing.”
He already knows about the journals,
Vera thought.
Maybe he’s even read them.

“And this couldn’t wait till Monday?”

Vera frowned. “I guess it could have,” she said. The stunned feeling was beginning to wash away, replaced by an engulfing sense of shame. She was thinking so many competing thoughts that no single, clear idea could emerge. All she could see was an image in her mind of Jensen waving good-bye as she crossed the street, her hands looking like small, white mittens in the dark. What could possibly have happened to her between there and her house, just a few yards away from where Jensen had left her? “Wow,” she said, beginning to realize the implications of it at last, “this is terrible. Is that why you’re talking to
me
? Because I spoke to her mother on the phone? Or is it . . . is it because of Sufia? Of me finding Sufia?”

“We’re asking some routine questions of some of her teachers, Vera, and we plan to speak to some of the students, too. You just happen to be first on our list.”

“I see,” Vera said. She didn’t buy it. “The other teachers—well, I don’t know that they’d have much insight to offer. Maybe you could try talking to Melanie Belisle? She was her teacher from September to February, and she might know more than I do.”

“She’s already on our list.”

“Oh, good. What about talking to Jensen’s friends? I know she doesn’t have very many. She used to be friends with a girl named Annabel Francoeur, who lives in her neighborhood. She had a friend named Scotty from her previous school. I don’t know his last name. Oh, and she had a boyfriend who goes to Columbia now.”

“Boy, you’re right on top of things, aren’t you, Vera?” Cutler said, looking up from her notes. “But you’re not ahead of us. You can be sure of that.”

Feeling herself blush, Vera said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to imply that you aren’t on top of things yourself. I guess I’m just trying to be helpful. Can I ask you something? Do you think—You can’t possibly think Jensen’s
dead
, do you?” Her shoulders jumped as the word
dead
came out of her mouth.

Both Ferreira and Cutler seemed to give this some thought, as though deliberating whether the question was worth answering. “Can’t really speak to anything at the moment,” Ferreira said at last. “We’ve taken the hard drive from her computer. Kid didn’t use the Internet much—no social networking stuff, which is rare for kids these days—but it turns out she wrote a lot. School files, poetry, stuff that might be fiction. Hard telling what’s what. Then there’s that journal. That’s the other thing we wanted to ask you about.”

Ferreira took out one of the folders he was carrying and, with a knowing glance at Cutler, tossed it in front of Vera. The gesture was intended for full dramatic import, she knew; he could have simply placed it in front of her instead of chucking it like that. She also knew what it was without opening the cover. She made no move to open it.

“Here’s the hard copy of something we found in her room. School assignment. I assume you’ve read it since it’s got your comments on it.”

“Yes,” Vera said. She made herself look at the folder, turning some of its pages. “Those are my comments. I wrote those.”

“Interesting little writing exercise. Fifteen-year-old kid writing about bombs . . . guns . . . suicidal thoughts. Any of that strike you as cause for concern when you were reading it?”

Detective Cutler wasn’t writing anything in her notepad now. She was staring Vera down. “The things you talk about in class might also be considered cause for concern. One has to wonder what place they have in an English class.”