The Year of Needy Girls Page 18

  She grabbed a jacket from the hook in the hall, felt in the pocket for her keys, and stormed out the door. Gone were the immediate worries about Anna and Frances Worthington, Deirdre’s job, finding a lawyer. What the hell was going on with SJ? The police couldn’t have been interested in their impressions of Mickey Gilberto only because he was their mover; there had to be much more behind their questions, and Deirdre needed to find out what.

  Outside, the afternoon air was chilly despite the bright sun. Deirdre tried buttoning her jacket and noticed her hands were still shaking. She struggled to unlock the Honda and took a deep breath. She wanted to cry and scream at the same time. If SJ were here, Deirdre might very well throttle her. She unlocked the car and climbed in. What exactly did she think she was going to do? Barge into the library and demand to see SJ immediately? Deirdre bit her lip. What if she didn’t really want to hear what SJ had to say? Just days before, SJ had come home to announce she was moving out, had even found an apartment. But then for a couple of days now, Deirdre had felt a kind of reprieve, a growing sense of calm. She had even started to go as far as to imagine how things between her and SJ might be even better than they ever had been. How stupid. She started the engine, checked the rearview mirror, and pulled out from her parking spot.

  At the intersection in front of the town hall, Deirdre made a left and headed east. She passed Most Precious Blood Elementary and felt her heart pound at the sight of all those flowers, most of them yellowed and browned, stuck in the metal fence. The blacktop was empty now. Deirdre glanced at the clock on her dashboard; school would have let out awhile ago.

  There were signs of Leo Rivera everywhere, including the store window here on 17th, an old flier with Leo’s face still stuck there, promising a reward for his safe return. At Leo’s grandmother’s, Deirdre knew from the scenes on the TV news, there had been more flowers and teddy bears and notes covering the chain-link fence. It was hard to look back and know what you were missing; Deirdre understood that. It was harder still to say goodbye to something you weren’t ready to leave behind.

  Deirdre passed the closed-up factories and turned into the neighborhood of triple-deckers. She could see now how her students had felt back when they had driven through the East End for the field trip. Already that trip felt like it had happened years ago, in another lifetime. Funny to think that she had been so excited to bring her students to the gallery, show them examples of Dogon art. Why would they care? Why did it matter, ultimately? They all would have been better off if Deirdre had been content to work more diligently on drilling the conditional tense or direct and indirect pronouns instead of bringing them to the East End.

  The afternoon sun shone through the driver’s-side window. Deirdre unbuttoned her jacket and cracked the window. Dry leaves were piled everywhere, heaped alongside the street in the gutters. It hadn’t rained in weeks. Maybe she had been too hard on her students back then. She glanced out the window and with her students’ eyes she saw the peeling paint, the clutter (the trash) piled on porches and in the spaces between houses. She saw the blinds hanging unevenly, haphazardly, neglected. Now, at a traffic light, Deirdre noticed in the house to her left that there weren’t curtains in the windows at all but what looked to be towels hanging there, upstairs.

  Deirdre didn’t get how people could live like that. Couldn’t people see how messy their houses looked from the outside? If they could, they might understand how messy their entire lives seemed, how judgment was a normal reaction. It was the same thing with her students. In her early days of teaching, before her reputation preceded her and the girls arrived in her classes knowing that neatness mattered, Deirdre often had to give them “the talk.”

  “I can’t follow you home. I can’t see how much time you spend on your homework. All I can see is what you hand in. If it’s a mess, if the paper is torn or the handwriting smudged, or if there are cross-outs or misspellings, what else am I to think? What else am I to assume except that you don’t care about your work? I can only judge your effort by what I see.”

  And so it was with the way people lived. If there were broken bed frames stacked on the porch, if there were no curtains in the windows, only blinds hanging crooked or blankets stuck there to block the view, if there were weeds and crabgrass and sagging porches, what were people supposed to think? That you cared about your neighborhood?

  Deirdre turned on Q and made a right on 21st. She drove the length of the street, to the intersection with the fire station and on to the East End branch of the public library. She took a left into the parking lot and drove around the building. Florence’s Mercedes was there, but not SJ’s Volkswagen. Deirdre pulled into an empty spot along the shaded side of the building and turned off the ignition.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes. When you were a kid and you pictured yourself living an adult life, it never included things like getting fired from your job, or having the police at your house because they think your partner is somehow involved with a murderer. You didn’t necessarily think of yourself in that old American Dream sort of way, but you thought of yourself as successful. You saw yourself with friends and throwing parties. You thought of rushed goodbyes in airports, late nights with a fire and good books, some music, maybe jazz, in the background. You thought of Sunday brunches. Drinks on the patio and weekend morning jogs.

  Deirdre had never gotten as far as the imaginary married life. Or having children. Being gay changed that scenario for her. But she never imagined having to deal with anything like this. She had been half-kidding but she also meant it when she’d told Paul there ought to be a course on how to grow up and survive disaster.

  “No one tells you about it,” she’d said on their last run, a week earlier. “Seriously. Did you feel prepared for being a parent?”

  Paul had laughed. “There’s no way you can teach anybody that,” he’d said and run ahead.

  You didn’t ever get prepared for the hard things. She remembered thinking that no one taught you how to leave college. They did all kinds of things to get you settled upon arrival, freshmen orientation programs that included, these days, outdoor adventure games, group exercises, and trust-building scenarios. They organized an entire week or more with the newly arrived student, but when you were a senior, where was that same attention? Who was there to tell you what it was going to be like when you left college and no longer lived surrounded by hundreds of people your age, people who, for the most part, were happy to meet you and interested in similar things? Who told you what to do when you had to live out there, when you had to find a job and meet new friends? When you were struggling as a new teacher and weren’t sure about the boundaries? And those weren’t even the hardest things. You knew the term “ivory tower” but you didn’t think it applied so much to you, because you were of the “real world,” with blue-collar parents who had blue-collar aspirations for their kids. You weren’t deceived into thinking the world owed you anything, and yet, even you were surprised by the disappointments. Imagine what people like the Riveras thought.

  Deirdre opened her eyes and took a deep breath. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a girl who looked an awful lot like Anna Worthington skipping down the library steps. Deirdre sat frozen. The long blond hair. The shoulders and hips.

  “Anna!” Deirdre yelled and climbed out of the car. She let the car door shut and watched as the girl spun around, then noticed who was calling her name. “Anna, wait!”

  Anna stood glued to the stone step. You could see the way she wanted to turn back and hurry inside, the way she was searching for what to do. She clutched the book to her chest and looked at Deirdre once, then away.

  “Anna.” Deirdre hurried over and caught her breath. “I . . . How are you?”

  Anna looked over her shoulder up at the library entrance.

  Deirdre followed her glance. “Your mother—she’s not on her way out, is she?”

  Anna shook her head and blushed a little. “I’m on my own,” she said.

 
; “Look, can I talk with you for a minute?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Anna peered out toward the street and glanced quickly at Deirdre, then away.

  “It’s kind of chilly in the shade,” Deirdre said and buttoned her jacket. She was suddenly conscious of how unkempt she looked—unwashed hair, no makeup, old flannel shirt, worn jeans. “I’m a bit of a mess today,” she said. She didn’t know how to start this conversation. “How are you doing?”

  Anna toed the gravel, shrugged.

  “I’ve wanted to know how things are going for you, but I can’t call, didn’t know how to get in touch.” Deirdre rocked on her heels. “Is everything okay?”

  Anna tried to keep her face looking neutral, disinterested even, but Deirdre could tell that the girl wasn’t unhappy to see her. All those years of working with adolescents and Deirdre knew when to push, when to hold back. “Are they pressuring you?”

  A piece of Anna’s hair fell in front her eyes. “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Your mother? Mr. Loring? Are they putting pressure on you?” Deirdre tried to keep her voice soft and reassuring, but her stomach was still in knots. She was afraid her voice sounded shaky.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Anna said.

  Deirdre looked at Anna standing there, her sixteen-year-old athlete’s body, curved and lean. She inhabited that body with grace. Even now, caught in an uncomfortable situation, Anna could be posing for the camera, mouth pouting, neck pale and gorgeous, stomach flat and exposed where her long-sleeved T barely reached the top of her jeans, those long, long legs.

  Deirdre cleared her throat. “I . . . I guess I’m wondering what’s going on, you know? I mean, you’ve told your mother it wasn’t me, right? That I wasn’t the one who kissed you?” There, she had said it out loud.

  A red maple leaf swirled in the air and dropped next to Anna’s sneakered feet. She clutched the book against her chest.

  “You’ve got to know I’m in a lot of trouble here.” She thought of Detective Mahoney, his unfriendly stare and accusations.

  A dark-haired woman approached the steps, holding a little girl’s hand. She glanced at Anna, at Deirdre. The girl had wild curly hair—a rat’s nest, Deirdre’s mother would have called it, though secretly Deirdre had always wished for hair like that. The girl climbed the steps, two at a time. “One, two, three,” she counted.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble?” Anna said fiercely. The little girl peeked over her shoulder before her mother hurried her into the library. “I’m, like, basically grounded. I can’t do anything without my mother’s permission. Coming here—” she pointed to the library’s entrance, “is a major deal.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, shifted her weight.

  “Come to think of it, why are you here?”

  Anna flaunted the book. “Duh,” she said.

  “No, I mean here. Why not the main branch?”

  “Oh,” Anna said. “They, like, didn’t have this book? My mother called? It’s for my little brother’s report?” She rolled her eyes. She went on to say that her mother had a full schedule, that Anna had pleaded with her to let her ride her bike over to the branch library, that Anna was desperate to get out of the house, out from under her mother’s watch. “So, like, I pretty much begged her to let me ride over here?”

  Deirdre hated it when the girls spoke in that questioning tone, as if they were perpetually unsure of themselves. In class, she had always insisted on the correct French intonation, hoping it might carry over to English. But Deirdre knew better than anyone how you became a different person when you spoke another language. In French class, the girls were transformed into Ah-na and So-fee, Bay-a-treece and Ee-lair. They were different girls than the ones who hung out at the mall on weekends and complained about their mothers not allowing pierced navels. The French girls were smart. They were brainy. They relished plays-on-words. Rolled their Rs like they were the real thing. Deirdre longed to take them to Paris and show them off—see if the Parisians themselves could tell that these girls were typical American teenagers and not the jeunes filles sophistiquées their French suggested.

  “I’m surprised she let you ride your bike over here,” Deirdre said.

  Anna kicked at the gravel, jammed her toe into the bottom step. Again. And again. She was trying, Deirdre realized, to keep from crying.

  “How’re things at school?”

  “That place—” Anna kicked hard at the step, “totally sucks. If my mom weren’t the stupid head of the board, I’d be like out of there so fast . . .” She let her voice drop off, kept kicking at the step.

  “Talk to me,” Deirdre said. “Tell me what’s going on.” She was heading to that familiar place. She could feel it in her body, the way it stood poised, like an animal, ready to protect its young.

  “They’ve all . . . I’m, you know, lesbo, lezzie.” Anna waved her arm around. One tear spilled, then another.

  “Even Hilary? Doesn’t she stand up for you?”

  “She doesn’t, like, call me names or anything, but she’s . . . We’re not friends anymore.” Anna grimaced, wiping the tears from her face.

  Deirdre couldn’t believe it. For the past two years—for as long as she had known them—where there was Hilary, there was Anna. And vice versa. “I can’t imagine you not being friends with Hilary.” Deirdre didn’t know what to say, how to make things better. She reached out to touch Anna’s shoulder but the girl flinched. “You’ll make up with Hilary. You’re best friends.” Deirdre folded her arms.

  Anna blinked back tears, kicked at the gravel again. “Lydia’s still cool, but Hilary says it’s my fault you got fired.” She shook her head, let fall a lock of hair in front of her face.

  At least someone was taking Deirdre’s side.

  “She is so on my case about it,” Anna went on, her head down. “Well, she was. Until she stopped talking to me at all.”

  The sun moved out from behind a cloud and Deirdre unbuttoned her jacket.

  Anna looked up, shaking her hair into place. “You know what I think?” she said, her tone a challenge. Go on. Ask me.

  “Look, you guys will work it out—”

  But Anna cut her off: “I think she’s in love with you.” She smiled.

  “Anna!”

  “It’s totally what’s going on.” Anna was into it now, playing the role with complete confidence. “I mean, Hilary’s always like, Ms. Murphy this, Ms. Murphy that. Every other sentence is, Ms. Murphy, Ms. Murphy, she mimicked, overdramatizing Hilary’s voice.

  Deirdre was stunned into silence. She stared at Anna, unable to speak or move. There might have been a crowd gathering, a storm about to break. There might have been any number of things going on around them and Deirdre wouldn’t have noticed.

  “You’re the one who wanted to be friends with us. You’re the one who always told us how nice we looked, how much it meant to you when we did good in your class, stuff like that.” Anna’s tone was angry now; her face hardened. “You ruined everything!”

  Deirdre looked around the parking lot and noticed a car pulling up, heard another engine shut off. “Come on,” she said. “Calm down.”

  “Everything is totally your fault!” Anna snapped, tears welling, spilling, body tensed, skin flushed. “It’s true. Me and Hilary, we would still be friends. Everything would be okay if you hadn’t . . . if you hadn’t . . .” She wiped her face. “Everyone says so. My mother says it’s all your fault, my father says so, even the stupid lawyer agrees . . .”

  Deirdre’s throat suddenly went dry. “Lawyer?” Deirdre could see that as soon as she’d said it, Anna realized she’d gone too far. She’d said too much.

  “I’ve got to go.” Anna turned, hugged the book to her chest again, and walked quickly away.

  “Wait!”

  Without turning around, Anna said loudly, “My mother says you’re supposed to stay away from me. If you’d have stayed away from me in the first place, then none of this would’ve happened.” She hu
rried on.

  Deirdre stood and watched Anna unlock the old ten-speed from the bike rack at the end of the parking lot. She watched the girl toss the book in the rear pannier, hop onto the bike, and pedal off, hair flying, helmetless. Deirdre stood there until Anna passed through the intersection and took a left, away from the East End library.

  October 8

  To the Editor, Bradley Register:

  It is sadly typical that the Register is printing the same sort of liberal crap that we’re all too familiar with these days. Innocent until proven guilty is one thing, but let’s not dance around with words. Has anyone forgotten that a child has been murdered? Has anyone forgotten that Leo Rivera is the victim here, not the man in custody? Our sympathies should lie with the Rivera family, period. No amount of psychobabble can change the fact that an innocent child has been murdered. The fact remains: if Mickey Gilberto hadn’t come in contact with Leo Rivera, little Leo might still be alive. Isn’t that reason enough to be thankful this guy is off the streets?

  Frank McDougal

  Bradley, MA

  Chapter Five

  From the bottom step in front of the library, Deirdre sat and watched the afternoon light shift. Somber-hued trees, leaves dipped in gold. Shadows lengthening across the lawn. The sun shone brightly, ducked behind white cumulus clouds. The days were getting shorter and soon daylight savings time would cut afternoons in half, lob off hours of sunlight, or so it seemed. Maple leaves, even in this waning light, pierced the brightest. Sharp, sharp red.

  This is New England in the fall. New England at its best. Picture-postcard New England. Deirdre wanted to caption the scene: You, too, can be fooled.

  Finally she got up and went inside.

  * * *

  Deirdre walked past the front desk. She didn’t recognize any of the new student workers but through the window into the main office, she saw Sam, SJ’s “big boss.” He didn’t look up.