“Sure, he was only here a year or two.”
“Three years,” Fran said. “I remember because he came when we were sophomores, and he got some going-away prize at Senior Day.”
I said, “They gave him a prize for leaving?”
“Oh,” Dana said, “he was off to teach in Russia. No, Bulgaria. I’m sure they gave him a Granby scarf or something. That poor wife.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just—well, who wants to move to Bulgaria?”
I’d somehow forgotten that you’d moved to Bulgaria. Bulgaria! At the time it hadn’t seemed any stranger than seniors heading to college in California or Colorado or even Scotland, all of which sounded exotic to me.
Dana steadied herself on our table with one tented hand. She said, “I remember he left us in the lurch. Have the good grace to announce your departure in January, for the love of Pete, so we can get a decent replacement. The woman they found was just awful. But that’s who’s looking for a job in May.”
“In May,” I said dumbly, and I did remember you telling me right before graduation that you were “graduating too,” surprise, surprise.
Dana said, “Then he came back and was teaching in Providence, and I don’t know after that. Gordon Dar was in touch with him, but then Gordon retired. Those young teachers come and go so fast. Faster than the students, sometimes!”
“His kids must be grown,” Fran said.
Dana said, “He was a funny one. I remember he taught that opera course. I couldn’t believe kids signed up.”
Fran said, “Did you ever find him a bit sketchy? Regarding the students?”
Dana took her hand off the table, stepped back and likely regretted it, pitching forward again to support her weight on the back of Fran’s chair. “Nooooo! Denny Bloch? No, not at all! Oh, he was a sweetheart. I think,” she said, “I think it’s become so trendy, don’t you? To accuse people of things.”
Fran locked wide eyes with me, a look I’d known since 1991: trying not to laugh and trying not to scream. And a small part of me said, silently, “Yes, Dana, I agree, because since when is a thirty-six-year-old consensually dating a twenty-one-year-old grooming or assault?” and a larger part of me said, also silently, “You don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m increasingly concerned that Mr. Bloch was having sex with Thalia Keith from 1994 to 1995.” What I said aloud was, “Tell me about the desserts here. Do you have a favorite?”
Dana eventually tilted back to her own table, and we ordered baklava and an ill-advised second bottle of Sangiovese.
Fran said, “Just promise me you aren’t bringing him into this.”
“Who?”
“Denny Bloch. Into the podcast. That would be really dumb.”
“I told you, I’m not accusing him of anything.”
“You just think Thalia was sleeping with Robbie and Omar and Mr. Bloch. That’s a lot of people for someone kind of straightlaced.”
“She was never sleeping with Omar,” I said.
“Interesting. So you don’t think he did it.”
I said, “He could have done it without sleeping with her! And there are other possibilities, anyway. There’s the guy who killed Barbara Crocker in the ’70s, for instance.”
I was a little drunk. Maybe a lot drunk.
I was also starting to wake up to the fact that, in my mind, for the past twenty-three years, Thalia Keith had been stalled out at seventeen as someone more sophisticated than me. But I was a mother now, for Christ’s sake, and in ten years Leo would be as old as Thalia had been when she died. I was working with these sweet students, and they were brilliant, but they were also babies. And Omar—Omar had been a baby himself. I needed to stop seeing him as the worldly guy I’d perceived at the time, someone who surely could have handled himself in the face of police interrogation.
I said, “There was so much evidence against Omar. It’s just that there have always been unanswered questions, too. Don’t you think?”
What if, for instance, none of her friends had known about you and her? What if they’d been so invested in the romance of Thalia-and-Robbie that they couldn’t see what her life was? It was possible—it was possible!—that I knew things they hadn’t.
Fran said, “Right, but it’s not Perry Mason. We’re never gonna have some flashback scene.”
“Do you ever think about Omar in prison? Like, as you’re living your life, do you—”
“I think about Thalia in the ground,” she said. “My first year at Reed, that whole year I kept wondering how long it takes a body to decompose. I kept wondering if her skin was gone yet.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s what I think about. Forgive me if I don’t have a ton of sympathy for the guy whose DNA was all over her.”
I tried my hardest to change the subject.
“I wonder what happened to the Dick List” was what I came up with. “We should donate it to the archives.”
“They should put it in that display case in the admissions office!”
“They should at least publish it in the alumni magazine.”
Fran said, “I bet Carlotta still has it. We should put it up on one of those creepy-ass websites about Thalia. Hey, here’s some relevant info about dick size!”
“I wonder,” I said, maybe too seriously, “if someone still has the Thalia Bingo sheet.”
Fran stopped laughing. “You’re obsessed. You’re getting obsessed.”
“I was trying not to. But is it such a bad thing? You know when the time was to pretend not to care? Adolescence. That’s when I had the energy to pretend I didn’t care.”
“Do you think—”
“What.”
“Nothing. Just, do you think—I know you had some crazy trauma in your childhood. And then you got here, and senior year was such a nightmare. I feel bad that I wasn’t sensitive to how hard it must have hit you. I just thought, since you weren’t friends . . . Like, I assumed you going off the deep end senior year was about your family. But Thalia’s death must’ve felt personal.”
I wanted to shout that she was wrong, and I also wanted to melt to a puddle and tell her she was right.
I said, more calmly, “I appreciate that. But honestly? I think that’s the reason I didn’t let myself care. I’d already had personal tragedies, and this was not a personal tragedy. It belonged to other people. When, Fran—what if I should have cared more? What if it would have made a difference if I cared more?”
“You mean if you told the police they should look at Denny Bloch?”
“No, just—I could have mentioned Thalia Bingo, which—not that it was illegal, but wouldn’t the police want to know something like that? I could’ve—”
And then I remembered what I’d realized the night before, that perhaps I’d already done too much, that sharing that detail about Thalia circling the dumpsters might have been an overstep.
Here was the waiter, finally, having realized things weren’t going to calm down at our table. I shooed Fran’s hand from the bill and gave him my Sapphire card, a weird power play. I needed water.
Fran said, “I don’t think Thalia Bingo would have helped. It would’ve been a huge distraction. Can you imagine? I’m . . . Lester Holt.” It was a good impersonation, both serious and Kermity. “And this . . . is a sexual bingo card.”
I laughed, my steam gone.
Fran and I realized neither of us should drive back, even that short distance, so she texted her friend Amber, a Latin teacher. We waited for her in the Supper Club’s vestibule.
Fran had wrapped herself already in her scarf, parka, mittens, hat. Through her scarf she said, “Here’s my concern about Britt. I know the better narrative is that Omar was the victim of racist cops, but sometimes—it’s Occam’s razor, right? The guy who was stalking her is the one who killed her.”
“How do we know he was stalking her?” I had a mint disc in my mouth from the hostess stand.