There was a man they released after forty years, one rolled out in a wheelchair. He said on the news, “I can’t think about the lost time because guess what, time doesn’t work backwards anyway. I got what’s in front of me, same as you.” They invited him to Camden Yards and lifted him so he could feel the grass beneath his feet.
After the show, I went back to Fran and Anne’s for an afternoon beer, which turned into three.
Fran was the one who showed me the video online from that morning: Amy March outside the State Prison, her face exhausted but her eyes fierce. She said, “The victory we’ve achieved is that Omar knows there are so many people who believe him. He told me that’s what he’s thankful for: the growing number of people who understand his innocence, who will continue to fight for his freedom. He’s ready for the battle ahead. You have to remember that he’s an athlete; he knows about endurance.”
Fran rubbed my shoulders while I watched it. She said, “So we do it all again, right?”
I’d been foolish enough to wish Omar a few more hours of hope, but what else had he lived with all this time aside from hope in its purest, most undiluted form? Next to him, I knew nothing about hope.
The boys wanted to show me their backyard ninja course, and thanks to my buzz they successfully got me to try the zip line.
I decided to walk off the beer before Fran and I did the thing we had to do. I wanted to be sober for that.
I didn’t particularly feel the need to circle the whole campus; it was all fresh from my stay in ’18. So I walked over North Bridge, and back over Middle Bridge, and then halfway over South Bridge, where I stopped and sat with my legs dangling off, under the bottom rail. The tree branches were just barely unfurling the softest, smallest leaves, pale yellow-green, but down below, the forest floor was already lush and crowded—moss and shoots and creepers, a few violets and primroses—and the little creek at the bottom of the ravine burbled high with what must have been spring melt from the mountains.
I was thinking about Carlotta. Who knows if you even remember her. Maybe you remember her as a girl too prickly to close in on. Maybe she was forgettable background noise to your obsessions. In any case: She meant the world to me.
What I haven’t told you, what I hadn’t fully wrapped my mind around, is that I had come to Granby so that later that evening, Fran and I could sprinkle an eighth of Carlotta’s ashes into the Tigerwhip. Carlotta had wanted this. She loved the place.
On the bridge, I told myself again that it had happened, that we’d lost her three full weeks ago. I couldn’t let myself think about her children, not yet, but I could imagine her here with me, free now to go wherever she wanted. She’d been forty-five. Now she was seventeen again, too. Not in the horrible way Thalia would always be seventeen; remembering Thalia at seventeen was remembering someone on the steepest precipice. Picturing Carlotta young was picturing someone soaring through the sky, someone with everything to look forward to. Someone living more in genesis than aftermath.
I thought about how junior spring, Carlotta and Fran drove out to surprise me when we rowed at Kent on the Housatonic. As we passed, Fran cheered and chanted my name; Carlotta turned around and mooned me. I laughed and almost lost my rhythm, but I loved her for it.
Something I remembered only then: Maybe that day, or maybe another—Omar, there for icing and taping our joints into submission, turned up jogging along the very last stretch of the river. The water was a choppy mess, and we had two seniors out with the flu so a terrified sophomore was in the stroke seat for the first time, and we’d never rowed so badly. We’d fallen hopelessly far behind the competition, but Omar decided he was the one we were racing. As soon as we passed him, he started sprinting behind us; and although we were so slow that he likely could have caught up, he never quite did—slowing down, pretending to be winded when we struggled hardest against the unkind water. Five yards from the finish, he doubled over as if he couldn’t go a step farther—the whole thing a silly, throwaway kindness.
Why on earth, despite the leaden sadness of yesterday and today, I felt profoundly light right then—ready to float away—I’m not sure. I’d had three beers, as I said.
These plants below were lucky, the early arrivals. The ones born later to a choked summer ravine would have to fight for sun and space. Plenty would make it. Everything green is something that’s survived.
I could see Lower Campus from where I sat, could hear the shrieks that accompanied a cluster of kids tackling each other on their way down the quad.
I’d forgotten the names of most of the plants, but back in Dana Ramos’s class I’d known them all. I only lived four years in New England, but I noticed more and learned more about what was around me there than I ever had in Indiana, and more than I ever would in LA, where there’s constantly something new and impossibly technicolor blooming on my street. I could still tell you a few of them, the stalwart trees and ephemeral flowers of New Hampshire: painted trillium, bunchberry, hemlock, sheep laurel, white cedar, bloodroot.
Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made sugar out of nothing but light.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, a biographical note: I have lived for twenty-one years on the campus of the same boarding school that I attended as a day student in the 1990s. (For the curious: I met my husband in grad school and dragged him back to Chicago, where he applied for teaching jobs; the one he landed was at my alma mater. It was only weird for the first few months. No, I’m not a dorm parent and I don’t teach there. I do live in a dorm apartment.) I’m forever grateful to that school for both a singular education and generous financial aid.
It should be obvious to everyone who knows that school that Granby is a very different place. It should also be clear to anyone who knew me in high school that Bodie is not me, and I hope it’s equally evident that no one in the book is you. If I bent so far over backward on my characters that I accidentally came back around to any real-life similarities to anyone I know now or knew back then, it was in no way intentional. (The one exception: My class did, indeed, have an underwear thief.) You all know that if I wanted to write a book about real people I’d have a hell of a story, but it wouldn’t be this one.
The hugest of thanks to Stephanie Hausman, a brilliant and passionate public defender in the state of New Hampshire, who course-corrected and fine-tuned the legal parts of the book, taught me about the New Hampshire penal system, and was generally a great reader.
Additional thanks: Paul Holes gamely helped with luminol and blood spatter. Liz Silver answered some legal questions early on. Becky Findlay and Suzy Vaughn helped with the crew parts. Dr. Ciprian Gheorghe helped with emergency medicine. Any errors on those issues are mine alone.
Jordyn Kimelheim named Starlet Fever. My kids named the Dragons and chose their colors. Lacy Crawford’s brilliant memoir Notes on a Silencing (please read it!) shed light for me on institutional collusion. As I wrote, my student Rosemary Harp was also working on a boarding school novel (a brilliant one) that reminded me of the magic of a beloved space in the woods. The poet Kaveh Akbar gave a craft lecture that indirectly led me to the book’s closing images. The writer Omer Friedlander solved a Hebrew emergency.
I’m grateful to the two dozen people who gave their names to characters in this book—something I offered in exchange for supporting an indie bookstore a few years back. They were all meant to be peripheral characters, but some of them came to life in unexpected ways, and I hope no one is horrified by the result. Names hold magic for me, and these ones inspired me in unexpected ways.