Elaine, with tears in her eyes, explained to Caroline that she was late for the second class of the semester because of a problem with a faulty alarm clock and that was why she’d missed the pop quiz. “It’s not fair that I can’t make it up,” she said, for the second time.
“It was a pop quiz. It’ll be a very small part of your final grade.”
“I need to get an A in this class.”
“Tell you what, Elaine, I’ll give you a new pop quiz right now.”
Caroline pulled a piece of paper out of one of her notebooks and quickly jotted down three new questions on one of the Wordsworth poems that they hadn’t gone over in class that morning but which had been assigned. Caroline pushed the sheet of paper across to her student and told her she had ten minutes.
“This isn’t the same quiz,” Elaine said, two distinct lines appearing on her otherwise flawless forehead.
“No, it’s a new pop quiz.”
Caroline pulled out a book and pretended to read it while watching the girl bite at her lower lip so hard that she left little teeth impressions in it. “I didn’t know we were supposed to memorize dates.”
“Just do your best, and at least you’ll get better than a zero.”
Elaine hunched herself over the paper and scrawled some answers, and just before Caroline was going to announce that time was up, she pushed the paper across the desk. “I still don’t think it’s fair,” she said, but almost so low that Caroline couldn’t hear it.
“I’ll see you in class next week,” Caroline said, and Elaine left in a huff, her phone already in her hand. Caroline imagined she was texting someone about what a bitch her English professor was. It didn’t matter; there were twenty minutes left in her office hours. She glanced at her emails and there was nothing pressing to respond to, so she opened the email she’d received two weeks earlier from David Latour, the professor from McGill University whom Caroline had met when she’d delivered her lecture on Joanna Baillie at the Scholarly Theories Conference in Toronto over the summer.
He’d written to say how much he’d enjoyed her talk, but also to share a poem he thought she might enjoy by Louis MacNeice, called “Wolves.” Its opening line was “I do not want to be reflective anymore,” and Caroline had had that particular line trapped in her head ever since she’d read it. She reread the poem now, nearly wrote David to tell him again how much she loved it but stopped herself. It was enough that she’d written him once, and enough to think she might see him again at some further date and be able to tell him in person.
Her office hours over, she crossed the campus to where her Prius was parked, then drove to her two-bedroom cottage in the Water Hill section of Ann Arbor. She’d left Fable, her adventurous cat, out all day, and was relieved to see him waiting on the front porch for her, relieved also that he hadn’t caught and killed a bird and left it on her doormat. He followed her in, pinned his gray ears back, and bolted toward the food bowl in the kitchen. Estrella, her shy orange tabby, leaped up onto the dining room table to greet her. Caroline flipped through the mail she’d received, pulling out a white envelope, her address printed out on a mailing label in Courier font. A single Forever stamp with the American flag was in the right-hand corner. There was no return address.
Something about it seemed personal somehow, even though there wasn’t anything remotely personal about it. She set aside the excise tax bill, the solicitation letters from any one of the animal welfare nonprofits she got—Pet Smart had clearly sold her address to some sort of mailing list—and slit open the envelope with an unvarnished thumbnail.
Inside was a single piece of paper, computer printed, the font Courier, like the mailing label.
Matthew Beaumont
Jay Coates
Ethan Dart
Caroline Geddes
Frank Hopkins
Alison Horne
Arthur Kruse
Jack Radebaugh
Jessica Winslow
Caroline looked into the envelope to see if there was anything else, but there wasn’t. Just the single sheet of paper with the list of names, none of which was familiar to her, except for her own, of course.
Estrella tried to rub her cheek against the edge of the paper, and Fable loudly mewled from the kitchen, waiting for food. A horrible thought went through Caroline’s mind: It is a list of death. Someone has marked us for death. She thought this automatically, in the same way that she automatically thought that every time her phone rang it was news of some unspeakable tragedy. She read the list again, then laughed internally at how morbid she’d been. Of course, if it was a list of living people, they were all marked for death, sooner or later. It was eerie, no matter what, and reminded her of that Muriel Spark book, Memento Mori. Of course, she was reading too much into what was probably a list of no consequence. But that was what she did with her life, that was her profession—she read into things.