We Wish You Luck Page 12

  We exchanged notes less often in January, and went to bed earlier, and even the married accountants planned their festivities with less evident relish, so that while the days felt shorter, the residency as a whole felt much longer.

  It wasn’t just the weather that had us down that January, of course. Even though we hadn’t known Jimmy well and even though we avoided talking about him at first, we were a small community whose most commonly held value was empathy. And though we couldn’t say that we missed him, since we had barely noticed him while he was there, each of us privately felt bad and befuddled about a human being we had shared patches of lawn with feeling so small and so alone that he did what he had done. And in the days following that terrible orientation announcement and our own complicity in downplaying it, we found ourselves unable to let it go, and turned our gaze—as silently and collectively as we had fallen silent on the subject—toward the only two people who might know enough to help us make sense of it.

  Hannah and Leslie had always been a source of intrigue, but across that January residency their pull grew into something more, from interest to fascination, and finally obsession. Not only because of Jimmy but because in the days immediately after learning he was gone and would not be coming back, they made themselves scarcer than ever. We looked for them without meaning to, and without realizing we were.

  At the times when we were almost guaranteed to see them—mandatory lectures, and walking into and out of workshops—we watched them while trying to pretend we weren’t, the way New Yorkers try not to smile or do a double take at celebrities on the subway. We studied them even more closely than we had that first June. Our gazes were particularly unsparing and unapologetically intense when they fell on Hannah. We weren’t being grief whores; we just knew that to write about anything really well you had to be able to picture it. You had to know the feel of it in your hand, and the effect a setting sun’s light would have on it. You had to be able to replay like a film even the parts of your story that happened just before and just after what was on the page. If it wasn’t real for you, there was no hope for your reader. We also knew that a person’s writing was never safe from the tragedies that inevitably find their way inside a life. That even if you never touched them, even if you wrote only of happy occasions—of first sightings of people you came to love and the exquisite poof of the sleeves of the purple dress you wore on your seventh birthday—the dizzy, disbelieving moment just after hanging up the call you least want in life will mambo between the lines of your page.

  We knew that everything Hannah would ever write would be at least partly about Jimmy, and we knew that sooner or later, she would have to try to picture it, to re-create the worst thing that had ever happened to her. The speed of his gait as he went first to the garage to fish out the old rope, and then to the attic, where he tied one end of it to a rafter. The color of the T-shirt he was wearing. The number of times he had gotten this far before without going through with it. If he had thought about taking the time to write a note, and if he would’ve stopped in his pursuit to field a call from a friend.

  We had no way of knowing how often they had spoken in between the first residency and his death.

  We scoured her work for him. The nine students in her workshop that term were the most popular people on campus. I’m not sure what we were expecting—a story about one lonely, unrequited kiss that haunts the rest of a life, or even something as simple and indirect as a depressed protagonist—but we never found it. He was as impossible to detect on her pages as any real evidence of whatever happened between them had been the previous June.

  You could see the effects of what had happened to Jimmy in Leslie’s work, but not in any of the ways we had been expecting to in Hannah’s. It wasn’t him specifically, but her stories became even darker. The nine students in her January workshop were grim in their reports on the story she had submitted for the residency. Despite the openness and irreverence with which bits of gossip were exchanged about Leslie—she had gained a level of notoriety by then that we felt entitled us to the details of her life the way a teenage girl might feel entitled to know who her favorite starlet is dating—these nine students respected the sanctity of workshop too much to actually let the rest of us read the story. But they would tell us that it was about a pair of terrible criminals who were either engaged or divorced but still violently in love, who tested people before breaking into their homes and robbing them, by force if necessary. They would send a mangy, sick old dog—the most hopeless one they could find at the pound, tumor ridden or blind—onto the property of their intended victims. If the owners of the house fed the dog, they would rob it after nightfall. If they didn’t, they would choose another house and another set of owners. Their thinking was that anyone who would feed and otherwise take pity on such a pathetic creature surely wouldn’t shoot a home invader. The story culminates in the memorable night when their theory is proven false in a very gory manner.

  The only observable fact about either girl that surprised none of us was how much time they spent together. Hannah and Leslie turned in to each other more directly and more tightly than before, if possible, like they were trying to seal up the crack Jimmy had left, or to protect themselves from any further injury by turning away from the world altogether, a trick Jimmy himself might have taught them. Either way, it was a hopeless pursuit. Jimmy was a different size and shape than any of us had ever known, leaving a cutout impossible to fill, and the kind of grief they must have felt, if they felt as bad as we did, will find you wherever you go.

  * * *

  In the end, we learned more about what happened to Jimmy not from all our Hannah and Leslie recon but from the ever reliable Tammy. Hers was the only cafeteria whisper that ultimately meant anything.

  On the fourth morning of the residency, Tammy, Bridget, and Jamie decided to skip the graduate lectures that fell after breakfast and before workshop. Though they were the only lectures that weren’t mandatory, we usually went to them anyway, both because we were friendly with some of the graduates and because we knew the time between now and our own final lectures would move like time travel, and we wanted to be prepared. So the three of them were three of the last people in the cafeteria that morning, making quiet, idle chitchat as the cafeteria workers cleaned up after one meal and set up for the next one. They hadn’t noticed Simone reading workshop samples at the big round table in the corner of the cafeteria, though it wasn’t a surprise that she was there. Since she hadn’t been teaching long enough for any of her students to be graduating, and professors normally attended only the lectures of students they had worked with, Simone hadn’t gone to a single graduate lecture yet.

  When she walked by their table, Bridget and Jamie exchanged polite nods and small smiles with Simone, and it was only after she’d placed her tray on the conveyor belt for dirty dishes and walked out into the main serving area that they noticed Tammy hadn’t done the same. Instead, she was looking down at her plate with the sort of resigned despair people normally reserve for exchanges much more significant than the one they’d just had. Bridget and Jamie both say that when Tammy finally spoke, it was like a confession at the end of an eight-hour interrogation. Because Tammy was one of the few real adults among us, there were no histrionics. There were no tears or even a raised voice. She said what she had to say to the plate, so quietly that they both had to lean in.

  “She was going to fail him.”

  “Who?” Jamie asked, at the same time that Bridget said, “Simone?”

  “He called me. Jimmy did. Three weeks before he . . . you know.”

  Bridget and Jamie nodded solemnly in sync, careful not to move any other part of their bodies for fear that it might scare away whatever else Tammy had to say.

  “He had gotten into some more trouble with Simone after we left campus. He wasn’t going to be able to finish the semester—she told him his packet work was either unsatisfactory or incomplete. I forget which w
ord he used. I couldn’t find any terminology about it in our handbook when I looked it up later.”

  “Meaning?” Bridget asked, hopefully, probably, knowing her the way we do now.

  “She was going to fail him. Even after four months of sent packets. He called me about withdrawing from the term and coming back in January as a first-year again.”

  “I didn’t realize you guys were close,” said Bridget, in a way entirely unlike the way Margaret Jibs would’ve said it. As a question instead of an accusation.

  “We weren’t. I mean, not really. I liked him fine. He seemed like a nice kid. A little sad, but nice. He called me because he was here on an education stipend from the state of Michigan. Former wards of the state that get into secondary education programs are eligible for funding. It’s not much, a few grand per term maybe, plus some coverage of your expenses—books, that kind of thing. But it would’ve helped.”

  “So he called you to talk about funding?” Jamie asked. “That’s what he was worried about?”

  Bridget had been about to ask if ward of the state meant what she thought it did, a term she paired with foster homes and all their terrible associations and Oliver Twist tragedies. But she realized the answer to Jamie’s questions were probably more important. And also that if she didn’t ask, she could pretend the answer would’ve been no—ward of the state actually meant something far less sad and lonely than what she was imagining.

  “He wanted to know if he could keep the money he had been given and apply it to the next semester, or if he’d have to give it back. I told him he should check with whoever had helped him get the money in the first place. Nothing I could find online said one way or the other, and these kinds of guidelines vary from state to state. Michigan might as well be the moon, as far as Virginia’s concerned.”

  Bridget and Jamie are two of the nicest people in our class. It’s part of why we felt so bad about their milk incident—we knew it was beneath them both, which somehow made it worse. We like to think that the fact that they were sitting in so small a group together means they had put it behind them by then. If Jamie hadn’t already been married to his high school sweetheart at the age of twenty-seven, and Bridget hadn’t just agreed to marry the boyfriend who took her to that B&B after the first term, we might’ve even speculated about them getting together the way we did Melissa and Tanner. It’s probably because they were two such obviously good people, and because their faces probably betrayed how sad this information made them both, that Tammy felt the need to defend herself, now that she had revealed what she had and hadn’t done, even though we all knew Tammy was pretty good herself.

  “The thing is, those stipends are almost impossible to get, because people don’t know about them, and because by the time former wards are old enough to go to secondary school, they’ve long lost touch with their caseworkers. Not to mention that they almost never graduate high school, never mind anything beyond that. I figured if he was still in touch enough with whoever helped him apply for the money, he was in good hands. Most caseworkers are barely available to their active clients, much less their old ones. So I assumed this was someone with a special interest. Someone who understood that he had a talent. I mean, I never read his work myself, but . . .”

  Neither Bridget nor Jamie would’ve hesitated before nodding at the silence that Tammy’s sentence trailed off into. They had heard the glowing, awestruck things that even his most cynical classmates had to say. We all had.

  “I thought it was just directing the question to the right place.”

  “Of course,” said Jamie. “That makes sense.”

  Bridget put her hand on Tammy’s arm, but looked over at Jamie to make sure he felt the full weight of all this. He had done a remarkable job of keeping his voice light when he confirmed that Tammy’s logic had been sound.

  “I found out later, though, that his biological father had only let him move back in with him when he found out about the stipend, and kicked him out again when he realized there were complications with the funding. Basically that there wouldn’t be any more of it to steal. He was a real monster apparently, even by industry standards, which I assure you are high. I only found that out after, though.”

  Bridget and Jamie disagree on what happened next. Bridget swears the girls were suddenly there, as if they’d been hiding under their table the whole time, only adding to their legendary, almost supernatural reputations, Hannah making animal noises of anger and sorrow and Leslie demanding quick answers to pointed questions. Or maybe it wasn’t as late in the morning as Bridget had originally thought, and the girls were two of the flood of passing students on the way to the first graduate lecture. Jamie swears that the cafeteria was a mausoleum by then, that by the time Tammy had told them everything, even the cafeteria workers had fled to enjoy that golden slice of time in between meals. He says he remembers because he felt pressure to say something, to distract Tammy so that her guilt didn’t have time to expand any further in all that empty silence. But there was nothing to say. He admits that both he and Bridget recounted the conversation to more people than they probably should have that night at the student center, after the drinks they sorely needed following so despairing a morning. So Jibs eventually got hold of it, of course, which meant everybody did, including even Hannah and Leslie, who were still slinking around the outer perimeter of the student body then, far away from the cafeteria. Maybe it’s because Jamie’s eventually dropping out of the program meant that we kept on talking about that morning long after he stopped being here to represent his version of what happened, or maybe it’s because it makes a better story, but we tend to go with Bridget’s recollection even if Jibs’s big mouth rings true to all of us. It’s not difficult to picture the girls appearing out of nowhere like the ghosts we half believed they were.

  After Hannah regained speech long enough to say “I knew it was her” and Leslie assured Hannah and the table that “There’s no way she’s going to get away with this,” and the pair had soared out of the cafeteria on a cloud of rage that suddenly had a target, the most dangerous kind of rage there is, Tammy and Bridget and Jamie were left with a silence even more oppressive than before.

  Bridget and Jamie remember what Tammy said next exactly the same, which makes us sad enough to wish they didn’t, as much as we generally prize consensus.

  “I thought about inviting him to stay with me for a while but, you know, it just didn’t seem like a permanent fix. Felt a little like a Band-Aid on a brain tumor, which only gives it time and cover to grow.”

  Bridget and Jamie were so quick to offer assurance that of course none of this was Tammy’s fault, that there was nothing she could have done, that their words got all mixed up with each other, into one jumble of an invisible hand on Tammy’s back.

  “Ah, darlin’s, that’s sweet of you to say, but I know that. In my line of work, if you feel bad about the things that didn’t turn out the way you wanted them to despite your best intentions, you’d just be runnin’ around feelin’ bad all the time.”

  She said it like she might’ve said some rehearsed line—a mantra her daddy always said, or something cross-stitched onto a pillow. Some evidently true thing that had been said so many times it didn’t even mean anything anymore. So both Bridget and Jamie pretended not to notice that her eyes were flooded past the point of salvage when she said it.

  We don’t blame her for crying. This bit of news was hard on us, too. Both the reasons Jimmy might’ve had for doing what he did and the way they haunted Tammy, no matter what she said to Bridget or Jamie or herself. Tammy’s reveals that day became personal in a way the rest of what had happened up to then hadn’t been. They made us each think of some story or detail from our own lives that felt newly relevant to what we now understood was an unfolding story that we’d have to wait for the end of.

  Some of us remembered the lonely kids who had fallen through the cracks of our own hometowns growing up,
or the grand gestures we wished we’d made that we hadn’t, or some terrible situation we had done nothing to improve. That we shared these pieces of our past with one another was completely at odds with our normal standards of communication, by which most of what happened outside our time on campus didn’t exist.

  It’s Patrick’s response we remember most clearly. He told us that in a case study he read about in his last master’s program, they found how much more successful babies who were held regularly when they were small went on to be. How much happier they were. He said it was strange, how we were shaped by so many things we would never remember and had no control over. He said that after reading this he found a program online that let you volunteer to hold babies who had been abandoned or orphaned, or were waiting to be adopted. He said he was going to sign up—maybe he even did sign up—but never showed up to his first session, because he realized on the way to the first baby that needed holding that he had no idea how to hold a baby. We all laughed about this later, privately, because Patrick was the boy you always wanted to laugh with, but who always felt you were laughing at him. We could just picture him, too awkwardly large to hold something as tiny as a baby, all too-wide angles and good intentions left hanging unnaturally. Some of us cried about it, too, when we were finished laughing, because the fact that he hadn’t gone, in the end, made us almost as sad as what Tammy told us about Jimmy, because it seemed to be Patrick’s exact problem. He was a boy of many talents—he had multiple degrees from schools we’d never have been admitted to, never mind graduated from, and we’d all seen him play basketball. And he clearly wanted to use whatever gifts he’d been born with, because here he was, putting in the time and work at yet another program. Yet he couldn’t seem to find the best way to use any of what he had, these degrees and his natural intelligence or his brawn. Those of us in his workshop knew his habit of writing terribly dull, clunky stories with brilliant, clever little endings tacked onto the end of them. It seemed he had all these great ideas without any idea how to execute them. His anecdote about not holding the babies seemed to confirm that the same was true of the rest of his life, and we wondered what the weaknesses in our own work revealed about us.