My Dark Vanessa(88)
She starts to say no, that isn’t true, but I cut her off.
“I know, I know—it isn’t my fault, I get it. But I’m the reason he had all these rumors attached to him in the first place. If he hadn’t already had the reputation of being a teacher who sleeps with students, I doubt Taylor would have accused him of anything, and if she hadn’t come forward, the other girls wouldn’t have, either. Once a teacher gets accused of this, everything he says and does is seen through a filter, to the point where even innocuous behavior is interpreted as something sinister.” I go on and on, parroting his arguments, the part of him left inside me suddenly risen and fully alive.
“Think about it,” I say. “If a normal man pats a girl on the knee, no big deal. But if a man who’s been accused of being a pedophile does it? People are going to react disproportionately. So, no, I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at them. I’m mad at the world that turned him into a monster when all he did was have the bad luck of falling in love with me.”
Ruby crosses her arms and stares down at her lap, as though she’s trying to calm herself.
“I know how this all sounds,” I say. “I’m sure you think I’m terrible.”
“I don’t think you’re terrible,” she says quietly, still gazing down at her lap.
“Then what do you think?”
She takes a deep breath, meets my eyes. “Honestly, Vanessa, what I’m hearing is that he was a very weak man, and even as a girl, you knew you were stronger than him. You knew he couldn’t handle being exposed and that’s why you took the fall. You’re still trying to protect him.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek because I won’t let my body do what it really wants—to contort itself inward, to curl so tight my bones snap. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“Ok.”
“I’m still grieving, you know. On top of everything else, I’m mourning the loss.”
“It must be hard.”
“It is. It’s excruciating.” I swallow down the tightness in my throat. “I let him die. You should know that, just in case you start feeling sorry for me. He called me right before he did it, and I knew what he was going to do and I did nothing to stop him.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ruby says.
“Yeah, you keep saying that. Nothing ever seems to be my fault.”
She says nothing, staring at me with that same pained expression. I know what she thinks, that I’m pathetic, intent on creating my own doom.
“I tortured him,” I say. “I don’t think you understand how much I contributed to everything. His whole life descended into hell because of me.”
“He was a grown man and you were fifteen,” she says. “What could you have possibly done to torture him?”
For a moment I’m speechless, unable to come up with an answer besides, I walked into his classroom. I existed. I was born.
Tipping my head back, I say, “He was so in love with me, he used to sit in my chair after I left the classroom. He’d put his face down on the table and try to breathe me in.” It’s a detail I’ve trotted out before, always meant as evidence of his uncontrollable love for me, but saying it now, I hear it as she does, as anyone would—deluded and deranged.
“Vanessa,” she says gently, “you didn’t ask for that. You were just trying to go to school.”
I stare out the window over her shoulder, at the harbor, the swarming gulls, the slate-gray water and sky, but I only see myself, barely sixteen with tears in my eyes, standing in front of a room of people, calling myself a liar, a bad girl deserving of punishment. Ruby’s far-off voice asks me where I’ve gone, but she knows that it’s the truth that has spooked me, the expanse of it, the starkness. It offers nowhere to hide.
2006
It’s early September, senior year of college about to begin, and I’m cleaning my apartment with the windows thrown open. The sounds of seasonal transformation drift in from the downtown streets below, the loudspeaker from the trolley tours mixed with the moaning brakes of a moving van, the final wave of tourists in town for the last of the warm weather and cheaper hotel rooms. The center of town has shifted toward campus, and until May, Atlantica will belong to the college. Bridget, my roommate, is due to arrive from Rhode Island the following day and classes begin the day after that. I’ve lived here all summer, cleaning hotel rooms for cash and getting stoned and wasting time online at night—except when Strane comes over, which he’s done only a handful of times. He blames the long drive, but really he just hates the dingy apartment. The first time he visited, he took one look around and said, “Vanessa, this is the kind of place people go to kill themselves.” He’s forty-eight and I’m twenty-one, and mostly it’s the same as it was six years ago. The big threats are gone—no one’s going to get thrown in jail or lose their job—but I still lie to my parents about him. Bridget is the only friend who knows he exists. When he and I are together, it’s either at his house or in my apartment with the shades drawn. He takes me out in public sometimes, but only places where there’s little chance we’ll be recognized—the secrecy, once a necessity, now seems a product of shame.
I’m in the bathroom wiping down the sides of the shower, something I only do when he’s coming, when my phone trills with an incoming call: JACOB STRANE.