River Road (6 page)

In the main office Ross's door was also closed but that wasn't unusual. I knocked at it, and then Dottie said, “Oh, he's not in. He's driving to the train station to pick up Leia's parents. Poor man. He looked
like death when he came back from identifying Leia at the morgue. He adored her . . .” Dottie dabbed her eyes and shook her head, making her gray curls bounce. “He made the call to Leia's parents himself.”

“That must have been hard,” I said, “but I do have to talk to him. Could you tell him I'm in my office and that it's very important?”

“Is it about what you were talking to the police about?”

I nodded, hating that I couldn't tell Dottie everything. What a relief it would be to pour out the whole story to her! But then I thought about all the stories Dottie had told me over the years about people in town and teachers who had been at the college before me. She knew everyone. I couldn't be sure she wouldn't “share” my situation with someone else. Even if Dottie thought I was innocent—
she would, wouldn't she?
—the story could be all over campus by the end of the day.

“It's just really important I talk to Ross as soon as possible.”

“I'll let him know,” Dottie said.

I went to my mailbox, pulled out a stack of late papers, and was heading out the door when I heard angry voices coming down the hall from Cressida's office.

“I don't like the sound of that,” Dottie said. “I'm going to buzz her to see if she's all right—”

Before Dottie could use the intercom, Cressida's door burst open and Troy Van Donk stormed out and headed down the hall straight toward us. He looked terrible. Curly black hair writhing around his head like Medusa's snakes, face unshaven, blue eyes bloodshot and swollen. He brushed past me, bumping into my shoulder, without any sign that he even recognized me and pounded on Ross's door.

“He's not in—” Dottie began, but Troy silenced her by lifting his middle finger and backing out of the room. Dottie's hand flew to her chest as if she'd been struck. I was as shocked as I had been by anything else today. No one gave Dottie the finger!

“Are you okay?” I asked, afraid that the outrageous rudeness might actually give Dottie a heart attack.

She nodded, speechless, and sank into her desk chair.

Cressida came down the hall, braids swinging, two red splotches on her pale face, and looked at Dottie. “Call campus security now and tell them that boy should be escorted off campus and not allowed back on.”

“Did he threaten you, Cressida?” Dottie asked.

“He had the nerve to say it was my fault that Leia was dead because I upset her at the party.”

“Why did he think that?” I asked in as neutral a tone as I could. Cressida was my friend but I knew she sometimes intimidated students. Nearly six feet tall, her white-blond hair twisted into a bewildering array of braids threaded with beads, she resembled a Viking shield maiden.

“Leia was upset about something at the party, but it had nothing to do with me.” She blinked at me and her face softened. “She came out of the kitchen upset after you went in there to talk to Ross. Did you tell her about the tenure decision?”

“Of course not,” I said. “That would be unprofessional.”

“Yes it would . . . sorry.” She shook her head and her braids rattled like wooden battle spears. “It's been a rough morning. Actually, I wanted to talk to you, Nan.”

“Can it wait?” I asked, holding up my armful of papers. “I want to get my grades in as soon as possible.” Although I usually enjoyed talking to Cressida she could be a little . . .
judgmental
and I didn't feel up to her brand of tough-love advice this morning.

“It's about Leia,” she said simply, a trump card I couldn't dispute.

“Oh,” I said, feeling the blood rise to my face. Did she know that the police had brought me in for questioning? I couldn't imagine how, but Cressida often found out things before anyone else.
It pays to stay in the loop
, she was always telling me. “Of course.”

I followed her down the hall and into her office, giving Dottie a backward glance and mouthing Ross's name to remind her I needed to speak with him. If Cressida already knew it was only a matter of time before Ross heard. I sat down in the hard, straight-backed chair, which
I suspected Cressida had picked out to discourage students from lingering, preparing to explain to her why the police had it all wrong. But instead of demanding an explanation, Cressida perched on the edge of her desk, leaned forward, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Poor Nan,” she said, “this must be terrible for you. It must make you relive what happened to Emmy.”

Sympathy from Cressida undid me in a way that it hadn't from Dottie. A sob escaped from my mouth. Cressida leaned back and plucked a Kleenex from a box on her desk and handed it to me. She waited a moment for me to control myself, lifting her eyes up—a trick that she'd once told me kept her from crying. “Men will judge you if you cry,” she'd told me. “They'll think you're a hysterical female and you won't get tenure.” Is that why I hadn't gotten tenure, I wondered, because Ross thought I was hysterical and weak? When I'd blown my nose Cressida clasped her hands and looked down at me.

“I think I understand you better now,” she said. “Losing Leia—well, she was like a daughter to me.”

I looked up, not sure what surprised me more, that Cressida felt that way about Leia, or that she thought losing a student, even a beloved one, was the same as losing your own child. But then I realized how judgmental that was. I hated when parents—like my stepsisters—acted like single women without children were somehow less worthy than those who had wedded and procreated. Cressida had endured her own hardships. Although she'd grown up in a wealthy Long Island family (her grandfather was a Polish immigrant who had founded a successful diamond business and appeared on local TV as Dave the Duke of Diamonds), her mother had suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and subjected Cressida to alcoholic rages, and harried her into a grueling career in ballet. I knew all this because Cressida had written a memoir about her struggles with anorexia and bulimia and her time in the ballet world called
Raising the Barre.
She taught classes on body image and gender roles that were especially popular with the female students. I'd often seen Leia talking to
her, and I remembered now that she'd been coming out of Cressida's office before she'd come to my door yesterday. Maybe Leia had some body image issue (she
had
lost weight recently) she felt more comfortable talking to Cressida about. I felt an absurd pang of jealousy at the thought that Leia might have been closer to Cressida than to me.

“You must have been close to Leia,” I said.

“Ironic, isn't it?” she asked. “I'm the one who always says not to get too close to the students. But Leia—” There was a catch in her voice, a tiny hiccup that I realized was a sob. “Leia was special. We worked together on the prison initiative, you know.”

I nodded. The prison initiative was Cressida's pet project. She recruited only the best students for it. Leia had been thrilled when she was selected.

“And when you share an experience like that you can't help but grow close. I wish you had agreed to teach there.”

Cressida had often tried to get me to teach a class at the prison, but the last thing I had wanted to do was step foot in the very place where Hannah Mulder was serving out her sentence.
Only, Hannah wasn't there anymore
, I reminded myself, rubbing the pink barrette in my pocket.

“Why?” I asked suddenly. “Would I have gotten tenure if I had?”

Cressida blanched and I instantly felt ashamed of myself. “I'm sorry,” I began.

“No,” Cressida said, “you're right. I think it would have made a difference. Not just for the tenure decision. I think it would have helped you to get outside of yourself to see what these women deal with. Maybe you would have been able to channel your grief into something productive and creative.”

I bit my cheek. As if my grief for Emmy was so slight it could fit into something as narrow as a channel when it was as wide as an ocean. Try to channel an ocean, I could have told Cressida, and you wind up with a deluge. This is why I hadn't felt like talking to Cressida this morning, but I realized she was only trying to help in the best way she knew.
Writing my memoir
, she often said,
gave a voice to my silenced pain.
Writing, especially confessional writing, was like a religion to her.

“You're right,” I said, and then, looking for a way to make up for snapping at her, my eyes lit on the stack of glossy books on her desk. “It's worked for you. Is this the new book?” I picked up a slim volume. The title
The Sentences
was printed on a graphic design meant, I guessed, to represent prison bars. I remembered that when Cressida was up for tenure last year, she'd gotten this book contract just in the nick of time to present to the committee.

“This is the advanced reader's edition. I've dedicated it to the women I worked with in the prison, but I think there's time to add a dedication to Leia. I had also planned to do a reading series incorporating some of the inmates' writing and I was thinking now that I could use some of Leia's work as well. That's why I called you in here. I was wondering if you had any work of Leia's you think would fit.”

“She wrote a fantasy story for my fiction workshop.”

Cressida wrinkled her nose. I knew she didn't like fantasy. “I was looking for something more realistic, perhaps about her time working at the prison?”

“No, she wasn't writing anything like that,” I said. “But I can look through old papers she gave me in previous classes if you like. Do you need help with the reading series?” I was so relieved that Cressida didn't know about the police yet that I was willing to agree to anything. “I'd really like to be a part of it.”

“I'm glad to hear that, Nan,” she said, leaning forward and taking my hand. She squeezed it so tightly I could feel her rings cutting into my skin. “Maybe the tenure thing will be a wake-up call for you. Maybe you'll use this opportunity to take some time off for your writing—and yourself. You know . . . do a detox maybe?” She raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow and I felt the blood rush to my face. Was she suggesting I needed to stop drinking? Before I could protest she added, “Even my prison students say that their time there has been a gift!”

*  *  *

I checked back in the main office but Dottie wasn't at her desk and Ross's door was still closed. I hoped he came back soon. I didn't know if I could bear talking to anyone else today. I walked down the hall to my office feeling dazed by Cressida's suggestion about detox and that I look at not getting tenure as a gift.
Crap.
Did that mean I was supposed to quit and skulk away? Would the department fire me? I knew that the protocol was to leave when you didn't get tenure—but leave to go where? It was all well and good for Cressida Janowicz, heir to Dave the Duke of Diamonds, to look at losing a job as a gift of time, but I was barely making do on my salary as it was. State schools did not pay what private colleges paid and the house—the quaint, adorable farmhouse that Evan and I had bought when I got the job here—was a money pit. I'd had to take out a loan last year to have the roof fixed. Of course the smart thing would have been to sell it—

“Nancy? Isn't it awful?”

I looked around, embarrassed to have been caught worrying about money on such a day, and found Joan Denning standing behind me at the door to the adjunct offices. She had a stack of papers pressed to her chest and a rolling suitcase in tow.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“I had Leia in Composition her freshman year. What a bright girl! And I've heard her at the faculty-student readings.” Joan always came to the readings and read a poem. They were good poems. At one of the Christmas parties she'd told me that she had won a PEN award in her twenties. But she was in her fifties now and had left it too long to get a full-time academic job. She loved teaching, she told me, but she had to teach at three colleges to make ends meet. Looking at her—graying blond hair scraped back in an unflattering ponytail, twenty pounds overweight because she didn't have time to exercise, hunched over from dragging reams of composition essays from school to school—I realized that this would be me in ten years if I didn't get tenure.

“Leia told me she liked one of your poems,” I said. “The one about the moth.”

“She did?” Joan's heavy face was transformed into beatific bliss. “Maybe I'll read it at the candlelight vigil tonight.”

“I think that's a lovely idea,” I said. I gave her an awkward hug, the papers in her arms crinkling against the ones in mine like dry tinder catching fire, and hurried on to my office, wiping my face, not wanting anyone to see me cry. I just wanted to close the door and wait for Ross—but when I got to my office I found three students sitting cross-legged on the floor outside my door, hugging each other and weeping.

“Come on in,” I told them.

*  *  *

I spent the next few hours handing Kleenexes to students and listening to their memories of Leia. Leia had been their lab partner, in their study group, in the same play. She had stayed up all night with one boy when he'd broken up with his boyfriend and had always let in another girl when she'd forgotten her ID at the cafeteria (apparently Leia had worked three jobs while managing to keep up a 4.0 average). I was surprised at how many students were still on campus, but several told me they had delayed leaving to attend the candlelight vigil tonight. I also wondered why they were all coming to me and not the counseling center until Aleesha Williams, who'd come by to check I'd gotten the paper she'd left in my box late yesterday, said to me, “It's like that thing you always told us in writing class, you know? About how writing helps you climb out of the dump?”