River Road (36 page)

“Wake up, Mommy,” Emmy said, shaking me.

I tried to keep my eyes open, taking in every millimeter of her, but that black water was rising—

She shook me. “Wake up, Mommy, and look!”

She was pointing at something. I didn't want to look at anything that wasn't her but her voice was imperious. I looked where she was pointing. The gun lay a few feet away on the ice.

“You have to get it,” she said, shaking me again.

Her touch seemed to rouse me. “Okay, honey,” I told Emmy, forcing my eyes open and making myself turn over on the ice. “Mommy's getting it.”

I crawled across the ice, dragging myself with my arms because I couldn't feel my legs, digging my fingernails into the ice, until I reached the gun. The cold, hard reality of it shocked me awake.
This
was real. I tried to wrap my hand around it but I couldn't grip. Then I felt Emmy's small hand on mine steadying me. I grasped the gun and turned to find Cressida and Troy. They were a few yards away in a patch where the ice was broken. Cressida was on top of Troy, pressing his face down into the water, drowning him. I pointed the gun at Cressida, Emmy's warm hand steadying mine, and fired.

Cressida was knocked back so hard that the ice below her broke off and floated free. Troy struggled to his knees, watched her go, and turned toward me. I felt Emmy's hair brush against my ear, heard her sweet, happy voice.

“Bon Boy-Osh, Scuffy!”

I started to laugh. Blood bubbled from my lips instead. I turned to find Emmy, to see her face once more—

But she was gone. The only trace of her the red lights of her sneakers retreating to the riverbank. “Come back!” I cried.

And she did. The lights stopped and then came toward me, growing larger, joining with the roar of an engine and a familiar voice. It was Joe on a snowmobile, bringing Emmy back to me. She'd be safe now. I closed my eyes, content, and let the black water rise up to take me.

J
oe told me later that when he reached me I had no heartbeat and wasn't breathing. He administered CPR there on the frozen river, the ice breaking up around us, Cressida floating down to the sea, Van busy getting his son out of the water, until I drew in breath.

“That ice could have broken underneath us,” I scolded him from my hospital bed. “You could have drowned trying to save me.”

“And you could have died stepping in front of a bullet meant for Troy Van Donk. We make quite a pair.”

He'd given me a smile that told me he meant us to remain a pair. He visited me every day for the next month, bringing flowers, books, and, one day, news from the aftermath of Cressida's death. When her house was searched the police found a glove with Leia's blood on it—presumably the one she used to spread blood on my tires—and a journal that Leia had kept when she was doing the prison class.

“So much for Cressida's eidetic memory,” I said, glad of the distraction from the pain in my chest. The bullet had punctured a lung and narrowly missed my heart. “And all that about Leia's words
leaking
into her own work was a load of crap.”

Not that I didn't have plenty of visitors to keep me distracted the rest of my hospital stay. Dottie came nearly every day bearing
fresh-baked cookies and departmental gossip. Ross had agreed to step in to handle the fallout from the news story that one of the school's tenured professors had plagiarized a student's work and then killed her to keep her quiet. Dottie worked full-time through the intersession with him, answering emails, writing press releases, arranging interviews. For a while it looked like the publicity would destroy the college. If Chad and Marie Dawson had chosen to sue it might well have, but instead, just before the spring term began, they issued a statement that they were satisfied that their daughter's killer had been brought to justice by another Acheron English professor, Leia's favorite teacher, Nan Lewis.

“You're a hero, Nan,” Dottie told me, her sewing needle flashing over a square of bright blue cloth.

“You're the hero,” I countered. “If you hadn't called Joe . . .”

When I had left the chapel Dottie had sat there thinking about the first line I had read of Leia's story. “I knew it sounded familiar,” she told me later. She opened the copy of
The Sentences
, which she'd looked at before the reading began, and read the first chapter. She said she heard Leia's voice behind the words as she sat in the chapel reading it.

“I just knew Leia had written it. She talked to me about that quilting circle all the time. I recognized things she had said to me about it and I heard her love and passion in it. I knew Cressida didn't have that kind of love for her students.”

She called Joe right away and told him her suspicions. He was driving back from Poughkeepsie, the anonymous lead having dissolved into thin air, and gunned it back to my house. When he saw I wasn't there he went straight to Cressida's house. He'd walked around the dark and empty house, frantic, a bad feeling rising in him. Then, as he stood on the hill overlooking the river, he heard a voice in the distance say his name. He recognized it as my voice.

“At first I thought I was going crazy. It was like that part in
Jane Eyre
when Jane hears Rochester calling her name—”

“You've read
Jane Eyre
?” I interrupted.

He looked at me like I was crazy. “I read it in your class. Don't you remember? You said it was your favorite book, so . . .”

I told him then that I loved him.

“Because I've read
Jane Eyre
?” he asked incredulously. “Not because I realized the voice really was yours and ran down the hill to find you?”

“Both,” I told him. “But mostly because of
Jane Eyre
.”

Hearing me say his name hadn't been the only bit of luck he'd run into that night. He'd almost collided with Troy Van Donk Sr., out on his snowmobile, still looking for his son. Van took him to the boathouse and was able to get Troy out of the river while Joe resuscitated me.

“If Van hadn't been there with the snowmobile I don't know how I'd have gotten you up to the road and to the hospital in time.”

“Remind me to thank Van,” I'd said.

But it was Van who spent the rest of the winter thanking me. After Troy told his father that I'd stepped in front of a bullet meant for him, my driveway was miraculously plowed after every snowfall. When I brought my car in for its inspection (late, since I'd been in the hospital when it expired), it came back with a new bumper to replace the one dented by the deer. More than free plowing and auto care, Van spread the word throughout the village that I had saved his son's life. It turned out that Van's word in the community was stronger than any internet gossip. By the time I was released from the hospital my reputation was rehabilitated. The checker at the supermarket smiled at me and double-bagged my groceries, the proprietor of the Acheron Baking Company gave me free pie whenever I had lunch there, and when I ordered a latte at the café it was delivered with a heart inscribed in the foam. When I went to my first AA meeting in the basement of the Lutheran church, people came up to me and squeezed my hand. “Maybe they always do that at AA meetings,” I told Joe afterward.

“Nah,” he replied, “you're a local hero.”

But I still wasn't sure about going back to the college. As hard as it had been to stand up in front of a group of strangers and tell them I
was an alcoholic it seemed even harder to stand in front of a classroom of students knowing that the events that had led to Leia's death had at least partly come out of my writing class. Truthfully, I didn't even know if I believed in teaching writing anymore.

Can you even teach writing?
My stepbrother-in-law Cooper liked to hector me over holiday dinners with that old chestnut.

I'd always thought it was a stupid question. No one asked if you could teach the violin or how to play basketball. But now I found myself asking another question:
Should I teach writing when I haven't written a word of my own work for years?
Writing hadn't pulled me out of the pit. The people who loved me—Joe, Dottie, Anat, the Van Donks—had. Could I really stand in front of a class of twenty students and tell them writing could save their lives?

I was no closer to an answer the first week of the spring term when Ross came to my house to plead with me to take my creative writing section along with Cressida's and her memoir workshop. “We're a teacher short,” he told me. “We can't afford to lose you. Abbie has ordered a review of your tenure decision next year on the grounds that your leading detractor tried to kill you. I'm sure it will go better this time. Please, Nan, those students are lining up to get into your classes.”

I suspected that most of those students had been drawn by morbid curiosity—Come see the professor who stopped a speeding bullet!—but I gave in to Ross's request, if only because Dottie said she didn't know how they would manage the schedule if I didn't.

“I'll teach this semester,” I told him, “but I can't promise anything after that.”

So I dove into teaching a full load—two creative writing workshops, Cressida's memoir class, and an advanced fiction seminar. After a week of silly questions—
Did you really say a writer should experience everything? Have you sold the movie rights to your story yet?—
we settled into learning the craft of writing by example and practice. We read Chekhov and Carver, Hemingway and Junot Díaz. We talked about voice,
characterization, dialogue, exposition, chronology, narrative arc, and revision. My students wrote stories about their childhood pets, their parents' divorces and deaths, their bad breakups, their fears and hopes for the future. One young man wrote a story set in the Middle Ages about a blacksmith's son who is blinded when he witnesses his sister being killed by a wandering apprentice. An exchange student wrote a funny, irreverent piece about growing up Mormon in Scotland. One girl wrote a story about a boy who returns to the site of his twin's drowning in the Colorado desert that took my breath away with its mastery of setting and mature vision. I was so busy and engrossed with my students' work that I didn't think I could add one more thing to my schedule, but then in March Dottie handed me a phone message from Cressida's editor.

“What could she be calling me about? Do you think they blame the department for Cressida's plagiarism? Shouldn't Ross handle this?”

“She especially asked for you,” Dottie told me.

I waited two days and then called her after classes on a Friday. She told me that the publisher had, of course, pulled Cressida's book.

“Such a shame,” she said. “It was a beautiful book.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “
Leia
was a good writer.”

“Yes, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.” She'd heard that the police had found Leia's original journal and she wondered if it wasn't possible to sort out what was Leia's from Cressida's and do something with
that
.

“I suppose . . .” I began.

“The thing is, I need someone with a sensitive touch, a good sense of narrative—I loved your first book, by the way . . .”

When I realized she was asking me to edit Leia's work I told her I couldn't possibly. We'd have to talk to her parents—

But she'd already spoken with the Dawsons, who had agreed on two conditions—that half the proceeds of the book go to a drug prevention program and that I be the editor.

“They say that Leia trusted you.”

I got off quickly, saying I'd think about it. I told Joe that night that I planned to say no. “Yeah, I can see that . . . but Leia's journal's been released to the Dawsons and they said they planned to send it all to you.”

The next day I got a package from the Dawsons. It contained a black-and-white marbled composition book that Leia had kept as her journal while teaching at the prison. I stuck it on my desk, where it was soon buried under a stack of student papers. While I was straightening up over spring break, though, I noticed it and felt a pang of guilt. I should at least read through the journal and write back to the Dawsons.

I sat down at my desk one rainy morning and started reading and kept reading all day. I could hear Leia's voice as I read—funny and posturing at times as she took in the experiences of teaching at the prison, and vulnerable and scared at others.
A woman told me today that if only she'd gone to school instead of ditching the day the police raided her boyfriend's apartment she'd be in college now instead of prison. It made me wonder how many mistakes I'll make along the way and what price I'll pay for them.

I looked up from the notebook into my own reflection in the darkened glass. I wanted to tell Leia that she'd paid too high a price for the mistake she'd made—and because I'd been hearing her voice in my head all day long I thought I heard her say:
So did you.

I called up the editor the next day and told her I'd help her edit Leia's journal. “Great!” she said. “Have your agent get in touch with me and we'll work out a deal. Can you have it for me by June? And can I get you to write a foreword?”

I told her I'd have it for her by the end of my summer break. Then she asked me a question that I had been asking myself for the last few months. “What do you think Cressida was
thinking
when she was copying her student's writing into her own book? I mean, did she think Leia wouldn't recognize her own work and complain?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “I read
The Sentences
last night. It's not
all
Leia's work but bits of Leia's writing are all over it. Maybe it really was
unconscious borrowing—or maybe Cressida thought she could bully Leia into keeping quiet about it by giving her a good recommendation for grad school. I don't suppose we'll ever really know for sure.”