What Has Become of You (36 page)

Her apartment lobby was empty when she arrived at home. Next to the mailboxes in her lobby, a roach the size of a small mouse lay crushed on the floor, its head missing but its legs still waving. Vera shuddered and took her mail out of her locked mailbox, carrying it up the three flights of stairs to her studio. She let herself in and glanced at the mail with little interest. Her electricity bill. A subscription offer for the
New York Times
. A letter from Princeton’s alumni relations coordinator asking for donations. An envelope that looked as if it might contain a greeting card.

She pried at the envelope’s seal with her bitten-off fingernails, wondering about the sender of the card; her fortieth birthday had come and gone the month before. She tugged at the edge of the card inside until it came out; as soon as she saw what it was, Vera physically jumped back, and both envelope and card drifted out of her hands.

The card stared faceup from her hardwood living room floor. She looked down at a portrait of Mark Twain, and the quotation produced below his image:

No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish . . . Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease?

—Mark Twain, “Two Ways of Seeing a River”

She bent down until she rested on her haunches and lifted the cover of the card with the tip of one finger. The handwritten message inside contained no greeting for Vera at the top, no warm salutation; instead, the text got right to its point, as though the author had no time for niceties.

I told you the next time you’d hear from me I’d write something less gloomy, so here it is: Things are all right. Yes, I said that things are all right. Life is about learning, isn’t it? If you’re not learning, you’re not living, and sometimes part of living is figuring out what your limits are. Have you ever done something just to see what it would feel like and so that you could say you’ve done it and then not have to worry anymore? And if you’ve ever done something like that, have you ever decided that it wasn’t something you felt like doing again? Even though you sort of have to?

I hope things are okay with you these days. It’s too bad you aren’t teaching anymore because I think you were pretty good at it. I’m still sorry that I didn’t get to finish reading “
Catcher”
with you, though, of course, I already know how it ends.

I won’t be needing this anymore.

Vera had no doubt who had written this card: Jensen Willard, that unhappy being who had long lived in the land of monsters. She looked again at the final line of the unsigned note, wondering what it meant. What was it that Jensen wouldn’t be needing—the card?
The Catcher in the Rye
? Life itself? Something occurred to her, and she looked in the envelope that had landed a few feet away from the card. She saw its postmark—California—and as she bent to pick it up, she saw a flash of something folded in the bottom of it—something purple, like a ribbon. But not a ribbon. A shoelace.

She extricated it and held it in her open palm.
Jensen’s bootlace,
she thought, but then she remembered that Jensen had never worn purple laces in her combat boots. And this lace was too short, anyway, to be a bootlace. What was the significance of a purple shoelace? Why did she feel as though this were something she should know the answer to?

She sat down on the edge of her bed, still holding the envelope and the shoelace, when it came to her. Angela Galvez with her purple-laced sneakers and their silver detail.
You have to wonder what happened to the other one and why someone would think that was a good trophy to keep, out of all the trophies one could keep.

Vera looked at the envelope and the shoelace again.
No,
she thought.
No.
The shoelace looked new and clean—even smelled clean; its plastic tips felt cold and hard against her hand.
It could be newly bought,
Vera thought.
It might not mean what I’m meant to think it means.

But then again, it could.

She sat there for what felt like several long minutes, listening to the sounds outside her window: the wail of police sirens, the conversational voices on the sidewalk below. She got up and opened her closet, took down a shoebox containing office supplies she’d pilfered from work, and picked out a folded manila envelope and a packet of Post-it notes.

On the topmost Post-it note, Vera wrote the following:

Detective Ferreira,

I received the enclosed correspondence in my mailbox at my Dorset address. I ask you to make of it what you will. You’ll hear nothing further from me unless you seek me out, but please feel free to do so if you want. I’m still trying to be good.

Sincerely,

Vera Lundy

She looked up the address she wanted, filled out the front of her envelope, affixed what she hoped was the correct postage, and slid the card and its envelope inside it and, last of all, the shoelace, now warmed from the bed of her palm.

Exiting her apartment, she walked down the street until she reached the mailbox on the corner. The hinge of the old mail chute whined as she pulled it open, and she tossed the envelope into this dark mouth, imagining it float down, down, down into the darkness, where it would it would rest on other messages and missives and bills and pleas and snugly enclosed secrets.

She closed the door to the chute and turned back in the direction of her apartment. A breeze had picked up outside; her hair blew into her face, tips of it sticking to the residue of lipstick on her lips, but she did not brush them away. Though the police sirens had died, the foggy neighboring streets of Dorset still showed signs of life. She could hear someone drunkenly singing a soft ballad from an open upper-story window, and on the corner before the mailbox, two young men teased two young women who looked as though they’d all come stumbling from the tavern together. As Vera passed them, they looked up briefly to see who had come and gone, took note of the woman with her straight and determined walk, and then went back to their negotiations and their banter as the last chorus of the window singer caressed them all and disappeared into the mist.

I would like to thank my agent, Denise Shannon, for her representation, persistence, and consummate professionalism always. And I would like to thank my editor, Denise Roy, for her brilliant grasp of narrative and for giving me permission to take this novel where I secretly wanted it to go. A great thanks, too, is extended to all of the folks at Dutton who had a hand in bringing
What Has Become of You
to life.

This novel is partly a detective story, but the idea for it sprang from my love of teaching and from my love for many teachers—some of whom are no longer with us, and many of whom are very much alive—who have inspired me and encouraged my writing along the way. Specifically, I would like to acknowledge Helen Jackson, Deborah Barnes Carey, Lillian Huntington, Lewis Hillier, Yvonne Farnsworth, Wesley McNair, Patricia O’Donnell, Bill Roorbach, Elizabeth Cooke, Joyce Johnson, Rebecca Goldstein, Helen Shulman, and Mary Gordon. An equal thank-you is owed to my teaching colleagues, past and present, for their support.

Finally, I’d like to thank my mother, Corris Cammack, and my stepfather, the late Robert P. Cammack, for not dissuading me when I told them, at age six, that I wanted to be a novelist.

Jan Elizabeth Watson received her MFA from Columbia University. Her first novel,
Asta in the Wings
, was published by Tin House, a small literary press. She lives in Maine.

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