I did. They seemed utterly themselves, laughing loudly, filling tall glasses with chocolate milk. The Dorian Cullers of 2018 would be out of their minds to mess with them.
As we stood with our dishes, Mr. Levin said, “You know, I always knew you were going to be okay.” I felt like crying—out of bitterness? out of tenderness?—because if that was true, he was the only one who’d ever thought so. I certainly hadn’t thought it myself. He said, “You were always going to be just fine.”
11
That night, I told Fran about Britt’s podcast.
“I don’t want people thinking it was my idea,” I said. Anne had taken the boys home for their bath; Fran walked me back to check out the new guesthouse, stayed for wine.
“Nah.” She was opening and closing each cabinet, each drawer. “No one would even, like, put it together that you knew Thalia.” She was talking about what the faculty would think, when I meant everyone: our classmates, Thalia’s family, the world. “If you’d been best friends with Thalia, maybe they’d remember. If you were Robbie Serenho or someone. But like I was saying at dinner—what kids were here together, it’s a blur.”
My housemate came out into the kitchen and introduced himself to Fran. Oliver Coleman. I was grateful for the reminder, repeated his name in my head. Oliver-Oliver-Oliver. I asked how his first day went.
“They’re smart,” he said. “You were right. And respectful. I kind of thought—I don’t know. I thought they’d be more entitled.”
“They’re plenty entitled,” Fran said, sitting down at the island with her wine. “Most of them. They just hide it.”
“I thought there would be more sweater vests involved.” He said it deadpan, but then he grinned—dimples and eye crinkles.
Oliver clearly wanted to hang out. He got a box of crackers from the cupboard and poured them into a bowl, asked Fran what it was like living here, if kids came knocking at all hours with their problems. He was cute, and if I’d been closer to his age, I’d have eyed Oliver as more than an interloper.
“I’m only on duty one night a week,” she said. “They knock at my door any other time, I spray them with a hose.”
I got the feeling these were the small-talk questions Fran fielded constantly, so I changed the subject.
“One of my students,” I said, “wants to do a podcast about a girl who died when Fran and I were seniors. I think she sees 1995 as ancient history. Like, old-time spooky.”
Fran asked Oliver how old he’d been in 1995.
“Um—” He thought a second. “Six.”
Fran said, “Good God.”
“I was doing the math,” I said, “and we’re as far from 1995 now as 1995 was from 1972.”
Fran shook her head. “That’s just rude.”
“You know what’s weird,” I said, “is the memories don’t dim. I have fewer memories. But the strong ones don’t go anywhere.”
Oliver said, “Wait, was this the swimming pool thing? The one—when I googled Granby after they invited me, I saw there was a whole Dateline.”
I said, “That’s the one.”
“Should I watch it?”
“It’s cheesy,” Fran said. “Every time they cut to commercial they have her picture floating underwater.”
I’d only seen it twice: in 2005, when it first aired, and then again during my rabbit-holing episode. What had seemed clichéd in 2005 was downright cringeworthy more than a decade later.
Let’s pause and acknowledge that in my twenty-four hours at Granby, I’d had three separate conversations about Thalia Keith. Last night and just now, I’d brought it up myself. And while Britt had found the story on her own, that didn’t change the fact that I’d put it right in that emailed list. If Thalia was following me around, it was in the way bees follow someone who happens to have slathered their hands in honey.
I managed to wonder why I was doing this.
Maybe because that mouthed What? kept replaying in my head, a question with no answer. When Jerome got stuck on a painting, I’d ask what exactly he was stuck on and he’d roll his eyes. “If I knew,” he’d say, “I wouldn’t be stuck. If I knew, I wouldn’t have started this painting to begin with, because there’d be no sticking point.”
Thalia’s question seemed not just for the person offstage, but for me: What? What’s your problem? Why are you back here? What’s bothering you so much? Why now? What? What? What?
My phone buzzed with a text, not from Yahav but Jerome: You haven’t been on Twitter, have you?
If he was asking, it was likely because some news story I wouldn’t handle well was making the rounds. He was good at hiding specific issues of The New Yorker from me, telling me not to click certain links, getting me to stay offline for a day or two. My insomnia still affected him, even if we lived on opposite sides of a wall now. If it were good news—the resignation of a loathsome politician—he’d have led with that.
I texted back a question mark.
“Is it unsolved?” Oliver was asking.
“No,” Fran said, “they caught the guy right away. Omar Evans, this athletic trainer. He worked in the weight room, and he was the guy who’d tape your ankle if you twisted it. He’d been kind of stalking her. Or they’d been dating. Or both.”
“She was not dating him,” I said.
“True,” she said. “She was too busy. She was hanging around Mr. Bloch all the time.”
“Right, but that wasn’t—”
“Mr. Bloch was a creeper.”
I didn’t remember Fran talking about you that way, back then. She sang for you in Choristers and musicals and Follies. She won the arts department award for overall involvement, hugged you onstage when you handed it off.
I said, “Wait, hold on, that’s not true.”
Fran rolled her eyes and said to Oliver, “Bodie is fiercely loyal. Like a cute pit bull. It’s her best and worst quality. And Mr. Bloch was her favorite. But Bode, he was a creeper.”
Maybe it hit me harder because you’d been on my mind. I didn’t object again, because I didn’t want to hear her double down.
Fran said, “She had a real boyfriend, a student, and Omar was, what, twenty-three?”
“Twenty-five,” I said.
“Did he seem like the type?” Oliver asked.
“No,” we both said.
“He hung around the students a little too much,” Fran said, “but in retrospect I think that’s because as a Black guy, like—this is a white-ass town in a white-ass state. He maybe felt more comfortable with the Granby football team than at some bar down the road.”
“We really liked him,” I said. “He kept trying to teach us all yoga.”
Fran said, “He was a Pisces. You can never read them.”
“So wait,” Oliver said, “should I watch it or no?”
I said, “Only for fun. Don’t take it seriously.”
That was essentially the end of the Thalia conversation. Oliver wanted to go into Dateline fresh, so the only other thing we told him was that Lester Holt mispronounces her name.
“Oh,” Fran said, suddenly beaming, “and near the beginning, when they show a guy in a white shirt writing on a chalkboard? That’s my dad.”
We stayed up late talking, my phone resting on the island as my kids sent animal emojis and close-ups of their nostrils, and I sent back hearts and asked if they’d remembered their inhalers. Leo was seven that winter and Silvie was five. Leo was into sharks and LEGO Star Wars and baking, and Silvie was in a horse phase—as in, constantly pretending to be a horse.
Yahav texted, finally finally finally, about Wednesday: I have to see. I’ll let you know. Please believe me that I want to!
After Fran left I asked Oliver, “Do you check the news? Was there anything big today?” I was itching to check Twitter, but if Oliver could just tell me what had happened it would be better. It was important that I got sleep. Instead, though, he scooped up the remote and turned on the big TV in the seating area.
And there it was, the reason Jerome had warned me off the internet: Anderson Cooper with new developments on a story I’d found particularly disturbing.