I was no closer to an answer the first week of the spring term when Ross came to my house to plead with me to take my creative writing section along with Cressida’s and her memoir workshop. “We’re a teacher short,” he told me. “We can’t afford to lose you. Abbie has ordered a review of your tenure decision next year on the grounds that your leading detractor tried to kill you. I’m sure it will go better this time. Please, Nan, those students are lining up to get into your classes.”
I suspected that most of those students had been drawn by morbid curiosity—Come see the professor who stopped a speeding bullet!—but I gave in to Ross’s request, if only because Dottie said she didn’t know how they would manage the schedule if I didn’t.
“I’ll teach this semester,” I told him, “but I can’t promise anything after that.”
So I dove into teaching a full load—two creative writing workshops, Cressida’s memoir class, and an advanced fiction seminar. After a week of silly questions—Did you really say a writer should experience everything? Have you sold the movie rights to your story yet?—we settled into learning the craft of writing by example and practice. We read Chekhov and Carver, Hemingway and Junot Díaz. We talked about voice, characterization, dialogue, exposition, chronology, narrative arc, and revision. My students wrote stories about their childhood pets, their parents’ divorces and deaths, their bad breakups, their fears and hopes for the future. One young man wrote a story set in the Middle Ages about a blacksmith’s son who is blinded when he witnesses his sister being killed by a wandering apprentice. An exchange student wrote a funny, irreverent piece about growing up Mormon in Scotland. One girl wrote a story about a boy who returns to the site of his twin’s drowning in the Colorado desert that took my breath away with its mastery of setting and mature vision. I was so busy and engrossed with my students’ work that I didn’t think I could add one more thing to my schedule, but then in March Dottie handed me a phone message from Cressida’s editor.
“What could she be calling me about? Do you think they blame the department for Cressida’s plagiarism? Shouldn’t Ross handle this?”
“She especially asked for you,” Dottie told me.
I waited two days and then called her after classes on a Friday. She told me that the publisher had, of course, pulled Cressida’s book.
“Such a shame,” she said. “It was a beautiful book.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “Leia was a good writer.”
“Yes, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” She’d heard that the police had found Leia’s original journal and she wondered if it wasn’t possible to sort out what was Leia’s from Cressida’s and do something with that.
“I suppose . . .” I began.
“The thing is, I need someone with a sensitive touch, a good sense of narrative—I loved your first book, by the way . . .”
When I realized she was asking me to edit Leia’s work I told her I couldn’t possibly. We’d have to talk to her parents—
But she’d already spoken with the Dawsons, who had agreed on two conditions—that half the proceeds of the book go to a drug prevention program and that I be the editor.
“They say that Leia trusted you.”
I got off quickly, saying I’d think about it. I told Joe that night that I planned to say no. “Yeah, I can see that . . . but Leia’s journal’s been released to the Dawsons and they said they planned to send it all to you.”
The next day I got a package from the Dawsons. It contained a black-and-white marbled composition book that Leia had kept as her journal while teaching at the prison. I stuck it on my desk, where it was soon buried under a stack of student papers. While I was straightening up over spring break, though, I noticed it and felt a pang of guilt. I should at least read through the journal and write back to the Dawsons.
I sat down at my desk one rainy morning and started reading and kept reading all day. I could hear Leia’s voice as I read—funny and posturing at times as she took in the experiences of teaching at the prison, and vulnerable and scared at others. A woman told me today that if only she’d gone to school instead of ditching the day the police raided her boyfriend’s apartment she’d be in college now instead of prison. It made me wonder how many mistakes I’ll make along the way and what price I’ll pay for them.
I looked up from the notebook into my own reflection in the darkened glass. I wanted to tell Leia that she’d paid too high a price for the mistake she’d made—and because I’d been hearing her voice in my head all day long I thought I heard her say: So did you.
I called up the editor the next day and told her I’d help her edit Leia’s journal. “Great!” she said. “Have your agent get in touch with me and we’ll work out a deal. Can you have it for me by June? And can I get you to write a foreword?”
I told her I’d have it for her by the end of my summer break. Then she asked me a question that I had been asking myself for the last few months. “What do you think Cressida was thinking when she was copying her student’s writing into her own book? I mean, did she think Leia wouldn’t recognize her own work and complain?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I read The Sentences last night. It’s not all Leia’s work but bits of Leia’s writing are all over it. Maybe it really was unconscious borrowing—or maybe Cressida thought she could bully Leia into keeping quiet about it by giving her a good recommendation for grad school. I don’t suppose we’ll ever really know for sure.”
I put aside Leia’s journal, telling myself that I didn’t have time to work on it before summer break. Besides classwork I was helping Dottie arrange a dedication ceremony in the Peace Garden. At first I’d been leery of yet another memorial, but Dottie had coaxed me by explaining that it wasn’t a memorial exactly. The Friends of the Peace Garden had received a grant to restore one of the original statues. When Dottie showed me a picture of the statue I said I would help.
Dottie fretted over the weather forecast for the day of the dedication ceremony. It said rain. “We can set up refreshments on the chapel porch,” I reminded her. “And the garden will still be beautiful in the rain. The flowers this year are spectacular.”
They were. Perhaps it was because I’d shut myself inside during the last weeks of the spring semester for the last seven years—or maybe it was because I’d stopped drinking that my senses had become sharper. The orchards were thick with heavy pink blooms, River Road was edged with drifts of white hawthorn and wild violets, the beds in the Peace Garden were a patchwork of perennials. I often ate my lunch in it and I held my last class there. I’d read up on the history of the garden and so I was able to tell my students that Amos Blackwell had commissioned the garden as a memorial for his drowned daughter.
“I always thought it had been named the Peace Garden by some hippies in the sixties,” I told them. “But it’s the name Amos gave the garden. He meant it to be a place of quiet contemplation for him and his wife after they lost their daughter.”
“I guess it didn’t work for the wife,” one of my students pointed out. “Doesn’t the story go that she drowned herself and still haunts the place?”
“Well, that’s the thing about stories,” I told them. “They’re always changing, growing from one teller to the next, morphing to fit the time and needs of each new reader. Charlotte Blackwell did grieve for her daughter but according to her husband’s diary she fell through the ice because she was chasing after her dog.”
“Maybe he wrote that because he didn’t want anyone to know she’d offed herself,” another student said.
“I like the version where she kills herself better,” another chimed in.
“See,” I told them, “that’s what I meant. You hear the story you want to hear.” And maybe the one you need to hear, I thought.
* * *
The morning of the dedication ceremony was overcast but dry, ink-blue clouds massing over the mountains in the west. I drove to campus with my car windows open, inhaling the scent of hawthorn and apple b
lossom. The threat of rain seemed to bring out the color and scent of the flowers. When I walked into the garden I felt intoxicated for a moment with the heady mix of perfumes, as if I’d already had one of the plastic tumblers of pink champagne lined up on the refreshment table on the chapel porch. A little crowd was gathered around the new statue in the center of the garden. I saw Joe and Dottie, Ross and Abbie, John Abbot and his wife, Roisin. My mother was there too, with my niece Amanda, who was running around the garden with Aleesha’s daughter, Isabel, and a dozen of my students were there, including Troy, Aleesha, and Kelsey Manning typing on her phone. I started walking toward Joe but he tilted his chin in the direction of a lone man standing on the edge of the group, looking over the balustrade at the river. I smiled at Joe and held up my hand to tell him I’d be with him in a minute and he nodded back. I walked over to the lone man standing at the parapet.
“I didn’t know if you’d come.”
Evan turned around. I was startled to see gray in his hair and lines around his eyes. “I wasn’t sure if I would. I swore to myself I’d never set foot in this place again.” He looked around the garden. “But then I remembered how much Emmy loved it. Do you remember how we had a picnic here that time and she jumped in the fountain?”
“And we had to rush home because she was soaking and you drew her a picture of Emmy the Mermaid of the Fountain—yes, I remember,” I ended breathlessly.
He looked away, toward the river, his eyes reflecting the storm-gray in the approaching clouds. “I just couldn’t bear to stay here with all those memories.”
“I know,” I said. I also knew that it wasn’t just the place. When he looked at me he saw Emmy. I knew that because looking at him I saw her too. That day when I found him standing in the kitchen holding the Scuffy the Tugboat mug I hadn’t just known he was leaving. I wanted him to leave. It was too painful seeing Emmy in him. But now, seeing the storm-gray of his eyes, the shape of his ears, the way he moved—for a fleeting moment I felt her here, riding a gust of moist air that smelled like the sea and ruffled the summer dresses of the women, that caught in the happy laughter of Amanda and Isabel and snatched the pink paper napkins from the refreshment table and sent them spinning around the garden like apple blossoms. Evan took a deep breath and turned back to me, braced, and then something eased in his face. As if the breeze had stroked away some of the pain there. At least for the moment. I was finding that since I’d stopped drinking the pain came in waves. I still wanted a drink when it did. But if I rode that wave instead I would come out into these brief recesses that felt like stepping onto a clean, windswept beach at dawn. As if I’d ridden the pain to someplace worth being. I could only hope that those brief moments would become longer—for him and for me.
“So what’s this statue?” he asked.
I led him over to the statue standing in the middle of the garden. As if by prior agreement, the others drifted away from it as we approached so we stood in front of it alone. It was a sculpture of a cloaked and veiled woman.
“It looks like a Saint-Gaudens.”
“The original was. Amos Blackwell commissioned it for his daughter. It came to be called Grief but it was originally called Compassion, modeled after a painting of the Buddha of Compassion. There’s something about it—” I stared at the marble veil rippling over the woman’s face, not sure why I was so drawn to it or if Evan would see what I saw.
“It’s the way grief feels, isn’t it?” he said. “As if a pall were hanging between you and the rest of the world.”
“Yes,” I said, relieved he saw it too and glad now that he’d come. “The veil separates her but it also protects her, doesn’t it?”
As if in answer another gust blew through the garden, strong enough that it might have tugged that marble veil away. It brought with it a curtain of rain that sent everyone scurrying, clutching their rain-sodden pink napkins to their plastic tumblers, laughing and crowding onto the porch. Ross gave a little speech about the garden and his hope that it would be a place where anyone could find peace and hear the voices of those they had lost. Then he said Leia’s name and turned to Aleesha, who said Shawna’s name, and she turned to someone else, who said “Nana Marcowitz,” and then my mother, who said my father’s name, and so on, each of us saying the name of someone we’d lost, all those names swept up in the rain and carried out onto the river and down to the sea. I looked for Evan when I said Emmy’s name and we said her name together.
The next time I saw him he was talking to Aleesha and I guessed she was thanking him for the college fund I’d transferred into Isabel’s name. I’d been nervous when I called him to ask if it was all right but from the look on his face when Aleesha hugged him, I was guessing it was.
I lost track of him after that, busy helping Dottie replenish champagne and strawberry tarts and then talking to Ross and Abbie about Leia’s book and then Joe came over to tell me he had to go back to the station and he’d see me later at the house. He kissed me and told me to be careful driving home in the rain. I told him I hadn’t had any champagne and that besides, the rain had stopped.
A sliver of sunlight appeared between the mountains and the rain clouds. It lit up the river and the garden and the face of the statue, turning her marble veil into a wave of gold light. It lit up the trees on River Road, turning the canopy of new leaves into a tangle of copper and the stone walls into amber lozenges. Mist rose from the fields, like a veil cloaking the apple trees. I was driving a bit too fast because I wanted to get home and get in a little writing before dinner. Although I hadn’t told anyone, I’d gone ahead and written the foreword to Leia’s book, and the day after I finished that I’d turned the page in my notebook and written: “She came out of nowhere.” It took me a day to write the next sentence and a week to write the one after that but now the sentences were coming quicker and quicker. I wasn’t sure where the story was going, but for now I was content to follow where the sentences were taking me.
I came around the curve before Orchard Drive a bit too fast and there she was. Luckily, Van had just fixed my brakes. The car screeched to a halt three feet away from her. She stood, regarding me, her breath misting the air, brown eyes solemn and unafraid, as if she had been waiting for me. As she turned her long neck I followed her gaze and noticed a long white scar along her flank . . . and then I saw the fawn following her. I waited while she led her fawn across the road and nudged her over a bit of broken wall into the orchard. I watched them until they vanished into the mist and then I drove home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the friends and family who listened to my first ideas for this book and read early drafts: Sarah Alpert, Nathaniel Bellows, Mike Kelly, Alisa Kwitney, Wendy Gold Rossi, Lee Slonimsky, Nora Slonimsky, and Maggie Vicknair.
Sergeant Patrick Hildenbrand of the Red Hook Police Department was generous and insightful in answering my questions. Any errors of police procedure are solely my responsibility.
Thanks to my editor, Sally Kim, for giving River Road and me a new home at Touchstone and thanks to my marvelous agent, Robin Rue, and the wonderful Beth Miller for finding that home.
Finally, I would like to thank my students and colleagues at SUNY New Paltz. Teaching writing, reading my students’ work, and listening to my students bravely and generously share their stories has been both an inspiration and a bulwark against the dark. I would especially like to thank Ethel Wesdorp, Secretary of the English Department, who has all of Dottie’s goodness but none of her flaws, for being a good friend throughout the writing of this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JENNIFER MAYS
Carol Goodman is the critically acclaimed author of fourteen novels, including The Lake of Dead Languages and The Seduction of Water, which won the 2003 Hammett Prize. Her novel Blythewood was named a best young adult novel by the American Library Association. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family, and teaches creative writing at The New Scho
ol and SUNY New Paltz.
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ALSO BY CAROL GOODMAN
The Lake of Dead Languages
The Seduction of Water
The Drowning Tree
The Ghost Orchid
The Sonnet Lover
The Night Villa
Arcadia Falls
THE BLYTHEWOOD SERIES
Blythewood
Ravencliffe
Hawthorn
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.