Young Kim looked up, met my gaze, started to smile, and then looked nervously away. She ducked her head and whispered something to the girl she was with and they both moved a few feet away. Maybe they were just shy around professors, I thought, or embarrassed to see me out in casual clothes, a ridiculous bouquet of crushed carnations under my arm—
—or maybe they’d read that I was a suspect in Leia Dawson’s death.
When the bus came I got on and moved quickly to the back. I sat down in the last row behind a familiar-looking porkpie hat. It was the aging hipster. What was he doing riding back toward the college? Maybe he’d forgotten something in some girl’s dorm room.
I checked my phone to see if I’d been given access to the site, but my request hadn’t been granted yet. Maybe I wasn’t being allowed on the site because of the story about me.
Just before the bus started another student got on. I recognized Troy Van Donk despite his sunglasses and hoodie pulled low over his head. He headed toward the back of the bus but when he saw me changed his mind and took a seat in the middle, next to Young Kim, who moved over to make room for him. Was even Troy avoiding me? Well, I’d had enough of being a social pariah. I got up and took a seat on the other side of Troy.
“How are you doing, Troy?” I asked. “I was worried about you after I saw you coming out of Professor Janowicz’s office. And then I didn’t see you at Leia’s vigil.”
“I’d had enough of people singing praises to Saint Leia.”
“I thought you were friends with Leia. I saw you with her at the faculty party.”
He turned to me but I couldn’t see his expression behind his dark sunglasses. “Sure, Leia was all right, but people are making her out to be a saint and she wasn’t that. She was . . .”
His gaze drifted over my shoulder. I turned and saw that the aging hipster had gotten up and taken a seat closer to us.
“Human?” I asked, looking back at Troy.
He stared at me as if he’d lost track of what we’d been talking about. I wondered if he was stoned, but when I breathed in, trying to sniff for pot without being too obvious, all I smelled was woodsmoke and motor oil.
“It’s not just that she had flaws,” he said, “it’s that she put on a different face for different people. She told me once that every time her folks moved she’d try out being a different person. She said it was like practicing to be a writer, making herself into a new character to fit her surroundings.”
I remembered Ross saying that Leia was volatile. “Don’t we all do that to some extent?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Troy said, “but that doesn’t make it hurt any less when you realize you’ve been lied to.”
I was taken aback by his bitterness but when I started to ask what Leia had lied to him about the bus came to a stop and I saw we were at Orchard Drive.
“I think this is where you get off, Prof,” Troy said, his voice thick with sarcasm.
“Yes,” I said, getting up, “but if you want to talk more . . . I know what it’s like to lose someone.”
For a second the hardness in Troy’s face seemed to soften. There was a quiver in his chin that I thought might be a prelude to tears, but then he swiped angrily at his face and leaned back, his arms spread over the back of the seat, his ankle crossed indolently over his knee. “Sure, Prof, I’ll come by. I know where you live.”
I thought I heard Young Kim titter behind her hand. I turned and got off the bus, angry that I’d let Troy Van Donk get to me. When the doors closed behind me I turned to cross the road and saw Troy through the bus window. He’d gotten up and moved to sit next to the aging hipster, probably to share ribald jokes at my expense.
I trudged up the hill and through the melting snow in my driveway. The clink of metal in my pockets reminded me I’d forgotten about Hannah’s poor cat. It could be starving to death. Another soul on my conscience. By the time I got inside my feet were soaked and cold and I just wanted to crawl under the afghan on the couch with a bottle of bourbon—only there wasn’t any more, I reminded myself, regretting now that I’d poured out the rest of the Four Roses—but I sat down at my desk instead and opened my laptop. “Overheard at Acheron” had accepted my request to join their group. I followed the link to their page—and found my photo next to Hannah Mulder’s. The subject line read “She thought it was a cat.”
CHAPTER TEN
I awoke the next morning to the thump of a newspaper hitting the front door—which was startling because I didn’t get a newspaper. Sometimes I got local circulars and free editions of the Acheron Gazette, but mostly no one wanted to bother driving up my steep driveway, especially not in the snow. But we used to get a newspaper—Evan read the Times—and I remembered the sound of compressed paper hitting the front door.
I sat up, dislodging Oolong from my chest and my computer from my lap. I’d fallen asleep watching the comments accruing on “Overheard at Acheron,” and public opinion seesawing from cautious censure (If she hit her own student and left her to die on the road that would be really awful) to the frenzied cries of a lynch mob (Nancy Lewis should burn in hell for what she did to Laya Dawson!). By two in the morning there’d been over a hundred comments. I refreshed the page now and found that the thread had been closed down. “In respect for the memory of Leia Dawson” it read in flowery script across a photo of a muted seascape. I should have felt relieved but the idea that hatred for me had run so deep that someone—Ross, I suspected—had had to step in and shut down the thread was somehow more unsettling. All that animosity was still out there—it would find another outlet.
I untangled myself from the afghan and warily opened my front door, half expecting a crowd of angry students and reporters in my driveway, but there was only a copy of the Acheron Gazette. I picked it up, scanning the front yard for anyone hiding behind an apple tree, but the only sign of life I saw was a pair of deer picking their way through the old orchard, foraging for windfall apples under the snow.
I went back inside, locked the door, and retreated into the kitchen before opening the paper. Leia’s wide blue eyes, solemn and accusing, stared out at me from above the fold. I guessed from the short haircut and the angular line of her cheekbones that it was a recent picture. I wished they had chosen an older picture with her smiling and the lines of her face softened.
“Leia Dawson, 21, SUNY Acheron student, killed in hit and run. Police are still looking for the driver. . . .”
At least the Acheron Gazette wasn’t trading in unsubstantiated rumors. I scanned the article, skimming through all Leia’s accomplishments, and was relieved to see I wasn’t mentioned on the first page. I flipped impatiently through the paper, past ads for Christmas turkeys at the local Hannaford’s and a two-inch piece on a Poughkeepsie woman found floating in the Hudson and a story about a Pine Plains resident who used over two thousand Christmas lights to decorate his house, and found my name on the bottom of page 11. “Nancy Lewis, one of Leia’s teachers, has been assisting the police in their inquiries. Ms. Lewis was at the party where Leia was last seen alive. . . .”
So were half a dozen other teachers, I wanted to scream. Why had the Acheron Gazette singled me out? But at least I wasn’t accused of the crime here and it was only a local paper. No one I knew outside of Acheron would see it. Ten minutes later while I was making coffee my phone rang. As soon as I saw my mother’s name on the screen I knew that wasn’t true.
“Why are you helping the police with their inquiries?” my mother said by way of hello, her anxiety practically making my phone vibrate. “Isn’t that code for being a suspect?”
“Not necessarily,” I said cautiously. But not cautiously enough.
“Oh my God, Roberta Matheson was right—you are a suspect!”
“Roberta—”
“A woman in my yoga class. Her son goes to Acheron and he read on the internet that a Professor Lewis got drunk at a party and ran over that poor girl. Oh, Nan! I offered to send you to Betty Ford last year!”
“I??
?m not an alcoholic,” I told my mother, thinking that there was no way to say that sentence without sounding like one. I didn’t even have a drink last night, I wanted to add, but I didn’t think that would help my case any.
“You had a lot of wine at Thanksgiving—”
“I spent the day listening to my stepsisters lauding their children’s triumphs and pointing out that I was still young enough to have another child and start over. As if Emmy were replaceable. I could be excused an extra glass of wine.”
“An excuse is worse than a lie—” she began.
“For an excuse is a lie, guarded,” I finished the quote for her. “I wasn’t making an excuse, Mom, I was speaking figuratively.”
“As we do when we want to cloak the truth,” she said.
I sighed. My mother distrusted fiction, believing it was a thinly veiled excuse for lying. “I wasn’t drunk at the faculty party. And I didn’t hit Leia Dawson. I hit a deer. The police questioned me because my car was damaged.” I paused, but she remained silent, a technique I knew she used with her patients to elicit deeper confidences. She would have made a good detective. “And because they found blood on the tires. I-I may have backed over Leia when I left the scene, but she was already dead—”
“Oh my God, Nancy, do you have a lawyer?”
“Yes, Anat Greenberg.”
“Anat’s a lovely girl,” she said, “but you need someone with more clout. Philip will know someone. We can talk about it when you get here this afternoon.”
Crap. I’d completely forgotten that tonight was Christmas Eve. And I’d forgotten to call and say I couldn’t come. My mother and stepfather always hosted Christmas Eve so that the children—meaning my two stepsisters—could spend Christmas Day at home with their children. And I suspect because the furor of kids opening presents was too much for my mother’s nerves.
“About that, Mom, the police still have my car—”
“You can take the train. You shouldn’t be driving anyway. Text me when you know what train you’re on and I’ll send one of the girls to pick you up.”
I tried to protest, to come up with an excuse for not being able to go, but she had already rung off. It was just as well. She would have only quoted to me another aphorism on the futility of making excuses. Right now I was remembering the one that went “Excuses are the nails used to build the coffin for lost dreams.”
* * *
The last thing I wanted was to get back on the Loop bus but it was the only way I had to get to the Poughkeepsie train station. I wore a hooded parka and dark sunglasses but the bus was mercifully empty save for a student so immersed in a video game on his phone he didn’t look up when I got on. I stared out the window at the road as we passed the entrance to the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. Life Is Worth Living, a sign proclaimed. The signs had gone up after a student jumped from the bridge. I sometimes wondered, though, if the signs didn’t give people the idea that it was a place where you could kill yourself.
The train was crowded with holiday revelers on their way into the city for Christmas Eve—families on their way to Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, which meant dozens of little girls in their best wool coats, white tights, and black patent leather Mary Janes. Dozens of shining blond heads with neat braids and red and green ribbons. The whole car smelled like candy canes. “She’s too young,” I’d told Evan when he suggested we take Emmy to The Nutcracker. “We’ll take her next year.”
By the time the train pulled into Tarrytown I was sorry I had gotten rid of Hannah’s bottle of Four Roses. Maybe if my ride was late I could nip into the liquor store across from the station. I could buy my own fifth and not have to depend on my mother’s parsimonious allotment of alcohol. If you think that means I’m a drunk, I explained to an imaginary Sergeant McAffrey, then you haven’t met my family.
But my stepsister Amy was waiting outside in her Ford Escalade with its My child is an honors student at The Hackley School bumper sticker and the stick-figure-family decal on the back window that showed she had three kids and a dog. Whenever I saw one of those decals I thought of the story of Niobe, who bragged that she had more children than the goddess Leto and paid by having all fourteen of her children shot down by Apollo and Diana. In her grief she became a stone that wept.
“Hi, Amy,” I said, climbing into the car. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“I was glad for an excuse to get out of the house for ten minutes. The kids are riding my last nerve—” She looked nervously away and turned red. Amy treated my bereavement as an embarrassment, whereas her sister, Charlotte, saw it as a failing.
“The twins are nine now, right? Is Casey still into soccer?” I peppered her with questions about her children on the ride to the house to overcome her embarrassment—and to keep myself busy as we drove through my old neighborhood. Two years after my father died, during my sophomore year of college, my mother had married our family dentist, Philip, and moved into his (bigger) house just down the street from our old house. I was happy for her—and maybe a little bit relieved that I wouldn’t have to worry about her as I embarked on my postcollege life—and Philip had always been scrupulously welcoming of me, but I had never felt comfortable in that house. My father and I had been “the dreamers,” as my mother called us. He’d been an artist who ended up working at an ad agency. Without him I felt like I’d lost my ally in the family, the one who understood me. My mother thought that was why I’d married an artist, but I was pretty sure that Evan’s draw had been how much he wanted children. I had wanted to start my own family as soon as possible.
The white colonial, with its glossy black shutters and red door, looked like it belonged in a Martha Stewart shoot for holiday decorating, complete with a modest dusting of snow (it had snowed less down here), tasteful white fairy lights trimming the eaves, and a fat evergreen wreath on the door. As I followed Amy up the meticulously shoveled brick path I glanced at my watch. Two hours, I told myself, I just have to get through two hours and then I’ll say I have to catch the 4:34 train or I’ll miss the last bus home. I can get through two hours.
My mother and stepfather were standing in the foyer when we came in, shoulder to shoulder, in matching plaid sweaters, which I suspected were part of some family photograph scheme. They looked like they were standing on the reception line after a wedding—or a funeral. They must have heard Amy’s car and rushed to the front door to greet us. I felt a pang of unexpected gratitude at the gesture and heard my father’s voice in my head telling me, “Of course your mother loves you, Nan, she just has her own way of showing it.”
Right now she showed it by holding out her forearms, her elbows pressed to her waist, in a sort of truncated welcome. I stepped in between her stiff arms and leaned down to kiss her cool, powdery cheek. Her hands patting my back felt like moths battering against my down coat. When I straightened up she grasped my elbows and looked me in the eye. “Philip has found you the best lawyer in Westchester. You have an appointment with him on Wednesday.”
“Mom, I’ve got Anat—and I probably won’t even need a lawyer. They’ll find traces of the deer I hit on my car and then they’ll find out who really hit poor Leia.”
Philip made a dismissive sound. “Those small-town cops couldn’t find their asses with their elbows.”
“Phil!” my mother tsked.
“Well, it’s the truth!” Philip’s pale balding head turned bright pink. “Saul Bledsoe said as much when I told him about the case.”
“I don’t think we should discuss it now,” my mother said in a hushed whisper. “We’ll upset everyone for nothing.”
There was an edge to my mother’s voice that I remembered well from childhood—when I spilled my milk at the dinner table, when my father lost his job at the ad agency, when anything threatened the careful order of the household. People often thought that because my mother was a therapist I had grown up in an atmosphere of openness, but I had realized a long time ago that my mother had become a therapist to cope with her
own crippling anxiety.
“I agree,” I said quickly. “Where are the kids? I have presents.”
At the word a small face ringed with black curls appeared between the banister spindles on the stairs. It was my stepniece Amanda, Charlotte’s youngest. She was eleven, born the same year as Emmy. She came running down the stairs, sneakers squeaking on the hardwood, black curls bouncing. She was wearing a green velvet tunic over red leggings and looked like a Christmas elf.
“Do you have something for me, Aunt Nan?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to wait for Christmas morning to open it.”
“But then you won’t get to see how much I like it,” she replied, poking at the large canvas bag I carried. “And that would hardly be fair to you.”
I laughed—and realized it was the first time since hearing I hadn’t gotten tenure at the faculty party. “That’s a good argument. I’ll have to give out everybody’s presents, then. Could you take me to where they’re all hiding?”
Amanda led me through the kitchen where her mother, Charlotte, was putting the finishing touches on the Christmas buffet. She kissed me primly on the cheek and told Amanda not to pester me. When I explained I was going to find the other kids to give out presents she shook her head.