“I won’t say anything.”
It had somehow not occurred to me that our window to help Omar might be small. I’d imagined a long life for him. Hadn’t he always been brimming with health? Idiotically, I hadn’t considered how easy it was to die in prison.
I said, my voice thin, “Maybe—if you’re willing to chat with my students sometime, if it goes well, and once he’s better, assuming he’s okay—maybe you’d be willing to make the introduction, vouch for them. They’re not trying to make trouble. They’re great kids.” I chose my next words carefully, aware that Vanessa, despite her visits to Concord, still believed—unless I’d just convinced her otherwise—that Omar was guilty. “If there are unanswered questions, maybe they could put some of them to rest.”
She closed her eyes and half smiled, made the slightest dip of her head. It didn’t particularly mean anything, but it was an end to the conversation, or a bookmark at least.
How odd it must have been, to meet Vanessa in a regular way—as a colleague, a neighbor—and learn only later that she’d been cast in this lifelong role of surviving sister. At first you’d simply think she had a strong center of gravity, just had tired, penetrating eyes, and then you’d realize she’d been exhausted her whole life. Although, I reminded myself, she wasn’t always like this, wasn’t always meeting someone who was attempting, in the corner of a coffee shop, to undo any peace she’d found.
On my way back to the car, every person I passed emanated waves of grief. Every person was someone’s uncle or niece or babysitter sitting on an overstuffed sofa, telling the camera what it was like to find the body, or not find the body, or hear the voicemail, or find the purse she never would have left behind. What woman leaves a purse behind? What woman has ever left her purse?
The lady taking up the whole sidewalk with her stroller looked happy, if tired, but she couldn’t be. She was late for walking Lester Holt around the scene of the crime. She needed to show Lester Holt the spot where she’d looked into the snowbank and saw what she thought was a mannequin. She needed to take Lester Holt into the ravine, where he would step so carefully over the fallen logs with his Italian shoes. She needed Lester Holt to see the bed, the pillowcase, the broken curtain rod, the hairbrush.
Look, Lester Holt: This was her wallet. Who would leave a wallet?
#8: YOU
Let’s go there, at last. Let’s picture it.
You make sure you’re onstage at the end of the show. It’s not so much about being seen but about looking calm, happy, paternal on tape so people will look back and think, This is not a man who’s about to kill someone.
Thalia has said she thinks she’s pregnant, although there’s no way, you’re too careful. Every couple of months she’s sure she’s late. You tell her she needs to keep better track of her periods, and she says, “You sound like Bodie Kane. She had this whole system.” You aren’t aware that Thalia has followed that system for the past year, knows damn well she’s not pregnant. As far as you know, Thalia isn’t meticulous about anything: calling when she says she will, taking the pills you pay for, keeping things secret from her friends.
Your wife keeps asking her to babysit, and she keeps saying yes. At first the babysitting was a ruse so you could walk her home at the end of the night, but you’ve come up with better plans, and now you tell Thalia to say no when Suzanne asks, but there she is at your house on a Saturday as you and Suzanne head out to dinner with friends in Hanover. That Monday, she sits in your office and pouts and asks where you and your wife honeymooned, and it becomes clear from her follow-ups that she’s looked through your photo albums. Later that week, Suzanne can’t find her blue nightgown. A few weeks later Thalia babysits again, and that night as you climb into bed you find her silver teardrop earrings on your own nightstand, as if you’d bedded her right there, as if Suzanne were supposed to find them, as if Thalia had copied the moment wholesale from some movie. You scoop them deftly into the pocket of your pajama pants, where, at two in the morning when you roll over, they stab your thigh, thankfully just your thigh.
You’ve tried three times now to break things off—not because you want to, but because as graduation looms, you worry Thalia’s planning to go out with a bang. She’s told you about a girl she knows of at Andover. The girl and her math teacher were madly in love, and as soon as commencement was over he quit his job, he picked her up in his arms in front of everyone, and they left in his car, her parents aghast. She’s told this story multiple times. She’s said that her yearbook quote is all about you, just wait till you see, joked that she’ll get up at Senior Talent Night and dedicate a song to you. She’s asked how you can live with a woman you don’t love, brought you brochures for UMass Amherst’s graduate programs, developed a loathing for your wife that scares you. Suzanne goes to a Saturday afternoon yoga class in town, and Thalia has started attending it, too.
Three times you’ve tried, said she’ll want freedom at college, said Amherst will be a world of possibility. On your second try, she says, “The only way I could get through this without hurting myself is if I went to a shrink. I need to talk to Dr. Gerstein.” And Barry Gerstein, while he might be bound by confidentiality, is also a contractor at Granby. He knows your colleagues, your administrators, you.
The third time you tried, she began hyperventilating, heaving into her knees on your office couch, and she said, “I need to talk to my mom. I need to go home and just—I need to tell her everything.” And you rubbed her back, told her she was misunderstanding, that you could work everything out.
Let’s take this the rest of the way:
You’ve asked Thalia to meet behind the gym, but first you stop home, tell Suzanne you’ll be in your basement office awhile. It’s 9:45 and she’s heading to bed, exhausted from the kids. You hand her a Unisom, talk about how much work you have. You go down, start a long print job （the screenplay a friend asked you to read）， close your office, exit through the storm doors. You wear your Granby sweatshirt and Granby ski cap so that you could, from a distance, be anyone, teacher or student.
Thalia tries to kiss you, but you stop her; you don’t want your DNA on her. You give her one more chance. You say, “Thalia, we need to end things, and I need your word that you won’t say anything ever to a living person.”
Even if she said yes, you wouldn’t believe her. But she makes it easier on you by hurling her backpack to the ground, bucking back against the wall, crying so loud you have to clamp your glove over her mouth. She obviously can’t handle this, and so many lives would be collateral damage. Her own, too, though she doesn’t understand that. What life will she have if this gets out? What life will her parents have? There’s you, and Suzanne, and the kids. There’s Granby itself. Granby’s good at hushing things up, but only when everyone involved is determined to stay quiet. Thalia will scream about it, just like she’s screaming now, and it’s not hard for the hand over her mouth to turn to a hand that’s slamming her head back, two times, three times, not hard for your other hand to find her throat. As it turns out, it’s not so much that you’re capable of this, but that you’re capable, having started, of needing it to be over as quickly as possible. Your urgency becomes physical strength, and while you didn’t mean for her to bleed, just meant to knock her out and get her into the pool, your fingers find her neck slick. The blood tells you: This is final and real. The Rubicon crossed.