Chapter Thirteen
All in one place
We didn’t talk much on the drive to my apartment. The rain was back, and droplets pilled across Jess’s windshield, streaking with each swipe of the windshield wipers that seemed just as frail and dried as mine.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think there was ever a moment in that entire month of January that the rain really let up. Oh, the actual precipitation would stop on occasion, the clouds might even part and let the sun slip through, but it was never actually enough to take the dampness from the floormats of my car, never enough to make it reasonable to throw open the windows and take a deep breath. Not before, and not since, have I felt as though I was swimming through daily life, barely avoiding taking in lungs full of water, the way that I did then.
“Is this it?” she said, turning into the little parking lot without waiting for me to answer.
“It is.”
“How’d you find this place?”
“Funny thing,” I said, as she turned the car off. “There aren’t a whole lot of options for month-to-month leases right around the holidays. These were the first people who said yes.”
“How many places did you call?”
“It was an endeavor,” I said. “I got a motel room for a couple of nights and basically sat with Craigslist open in front of me for forty-eight hours. There were a couple near-misses.” And a couple that were rooms in larger houses with creepy older guys who might as well have had ULTERIOR MOTIVES tattooed across their face. “I almost went with the back bedroom in a place with a single mom and two kids, but I didn’t think that I could realistically get much work done there.” We got out of the car, and Jess began to scan the parking lot and the gate. “And then I found this place. Someone broke their lease. Not too many people looking for places over the holidays, either, so that worked in my favor.”
That and presenting like a financially-solvent white professional woman. They didn’t ask for a whole lot of paperwork or proof of income, beyond the first month’s rent. I figured that was part of what would let them jack the rent up in February or March once they realized I couldn’t pay, nice and easy way to get me out and someone else, someone looking at a more traditional time of year with a more traditional job, in.
We half-jogged to the gate, neither of us bothering to pull out umbrellas. I flipped my hood up, and Jess pulled her scarf up over her hair, and walked briskly down the courtyard path, past my neighbor’s little blocked-off patios, until we reached the one I called mine.
“Not bad, actually. And hey,” she said, pointing to the small front window, where Kierkegaard had slipped himself past the vertical slats and sat, a chubby orange presence, glaring at us, “I didn’t realize you had a cat.”
I sighed. “If he doesn’t stop ruining things I can’t replace, I might not have him much longer.” Those stupid vertical slats were going to be the death of me, if the rent didn’t get me first. Kierk, not being the most graceful of creatures, had already managed to snap a couple, and I nearly had heart failure when I looked up how much each cost to replace.
I walked up to my front door and turned the knob several times. Still locked, as securely as it ever had been. I glanced around the empty patio. “I don’t see anything out of place here,” I said.
Jess gave the window a quick once-over. “No signs of anyone trying to break in. Let’s check out the apartment.”
I must have paused. In fact, I know I paused, because I don’t know that I’d ever heard the particular tone that Jess took before that evening.
“Katie,” she said, her voice a potent mix of empathy and exasperation, “you never saw the kinds of places I lived before my great aunt died. There’s nothing in there that you’re going to surprise me with.”
“Fine,” I said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” And I unlocked the door.
There’s a strange alchemy that happens when you bring someone home—and I don’t mean in the romantic sense, because at least in those situations they’re far more interested in you than in how many bookshelves you have and whether your mail is sorted or heaped in a pile. No, what I’m talking about is what happens when you bring someone who knows you reasonably well, but only in a public or semi-public space, into your own space. I always find that it forces me to see my own habitat with outsider eyes.
What I saw in front of me, this time, was sparseness. I’d been worried about clutter, both because I couldn’t remember what I’d left where, and because Sam was always on me about clutter, even though I’m probably only a five or six out of ten on The Grand Clutter Scale. But with Jess that evening, I saw just how much beige, stained carpet was open. I saw how small a footprint my one chair and wobbly card table made in the tiny kitchen dining area. And I saw that the pile of papers on the living room floor that I’d been so concerned about her judging really only took up about as much real estate as half my suitcase, certainly not as much space as the pillow-blanket nest in the corner I’d cobbled together from goodwill and the Target sale aisle. I was struck by sadness for the person who lived such a small, insignificant life, and it lasted a whole second before I remembered that that person was me.
“Anything out of place?” Jess asked.
“I really don’t think so,” I said. “Welcome to my humble abode, by the way.”
She didn’t bother to answer me, instead opening every single door I had and sticking her head first into the bedroom, then the bathroom, then the one closet. “Looks okay, I guess. And we didn’t see any sign of someone messing with the door or the outside window, but you should really put some wooden dowels in all of your windows.”
I nodded, the exhaustion from the evening, the week, the entire ridiculous month, finally deciding to settle onto my shoulders. When we first pulled into the lot, I couldn’t imagine letting her leave me alone with a potential murderer out to get me. Now, I couldn’t push her out the door and collapse into sleep quickly enough.
“You look exhausted,” she said.
“That sounds right.”
“I’m going to get out of here.”
“Thanks for coming by.”
“Promise you’ll call me if something weird happens again?”
I yawned. I couldn’t help it. “I promise.”
“Good. Get some rest.”
As soon as she’d left, as soon as I’d locked and triple-checked the door, I made my way to the bedroom, shedding my clothes as I went, and collapsed on my air mattress into a deep, thankfully dreamless, sleep.
*
I spent the next day, Sunday, in a haze of hyper focus, going back and forth between my written application materials, my teaching demonstration, and google searches on members of the hiring committee, all while listening to the rain. I don’t know that I actually made any changes or improvements to what I was prepared to offer the committee; I do know that it mostly kept me from thinking about anyone who might potentially wish me harm.
That said, I kept the door locked, the windows fastened, the shades pulled, and I didn’t leave my apartment.
By the evening, however, after I’d scrounged together dinner, I no longer had strength to resist. I opened three tabs and conducted four searches: Lucy Alvarez, Charles Liu, John Anderson, and Andrew Nguyen.
I learned a decent amount.
In college, at San Diego State, Charles ran track, 400-800 meters, and was a jazz clarinetist. He was easily fifteen years older than me, based on graduation dates, which was something I’d never quite realized. It wasn’t just that he was a bit baby-faced; he presented significantly younger than he was. He’d worked at a few other community colleges before ours, all out of state, and always as a contingent, non-tenure track employee. As far as I could tell, this was his first shot at tenure, and it was completely reasonable to assume that he didn’t want to screw it up. He didn’t seem to have any social media to speak of, or he was better at locking it down than I was at digging it up. Whether he was also the Charles ____ who won third place in an SF-to-LA AIDS ride way back in the late ‘90s was unclear, as there was no photo preserved. I was pretty certain that he was not the Charles ______ who won first place in an essay contest held by the Daughters of the American Revolution on the subject of “My Ancestors, Our America,” if only because the ancestors that Charles wrote about seemed to have fought for the losing side in the Civil War. Though, I suppose, I was making assumptions there. Maybe it really was him, and I’d know if I’d only thought to sit in his 19th Century US Lit course.
Lucy had a wide open Instagram account and a Facebook page that seemed to be updated, as far as I could tell without friending her, at least weekly. She mostly shared articles about equity in education, children’s dance classes, and pressure cooker recipes. Her Instagram was a combination of her dog against various backdrops of grass and concrete, which she only ever seemed to take photos of at severe angles (it was a tiny dog, apparently a chihuahua mix, if her hashtags were to be believed), and a girl of about ten or eleven performing in a sparkly leotard who I assumed must be her daughter. She looked a lot like her mom, dark hair slicked back into a ponytail or high bun, striking eyebrows, big brown eyes. Every once in a while there’d be shot of her posing with a ribbon—never blue, but always large and fancy. Her kid was cute, even if she topped out at participation trophies.
The rest of the search results that were clearly this Lucy Alvarez had to do with the school. Her name was on a list of speakers at a campus diversity conference for district faculty, an event which I’d attended. She’d helped create the scaffold for the newest approach to the most recent iteration of the state-mandated learning outcomes reflection on goal-setting project, a thankless task if there ever was one. She’d taught all throughout the department, done some inter-departmental collaborations with transfer-level composition classes (my favorite that I found, ‘Writing Place and Writing People: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Urban Geography,’ was cross listed with the sociology department). She was listed as a club advisor for Latinas for Decolonization and a faculty participant in our regional community college gathering of first generation students, something that she actually didn’t talk about all that often, or at least not to me. (She also, apparently, was on the winning team for the event’s costumed relay-race. In the photo, she had on a hot pink wig, giant sunglasses, a rainbow tutu, and a cape, but it was clearly her.)
I came away liking Lucy a little bit more, though I didn’t want to. She was my direct competition, already an asset to the college, and I personally thought that people were a little too quick to write her off. She clearly loved her students, she clearly loved her work, and she was demonstrably good at it. Which meant, much as I didn’t want it to, that she was probably most likely, at least as far as what I knew, to want me out of the way. Being a decent person only goes so far in our line of work; what unsettled me the most was that it was easier to imagine a truly sincere person being twisted up into a tight spot by the contradictions and conditions that shape campus politics. The good ones hope blindly until they break, taken in by the platitudes and mission statements, while we cynical ones assess each situation with slightly less attachment to the motives or outcomes. Researching Lucy left a weight in my stomach that did not dissipate with time.
John Anderson had a history on our campus going back fifteen years, not quite to the start of the place’s online presence, but close. Not too many photos; not too much that stood out; just his name, on various projects and committees, through about 2008. After that, results that weren’t tied to the staff listings or course catalog were minimal—that is, until he published his book in 2012. Far as I could tell, he’d started a blog at around the same time, with just a handful of posts, most of them ending with a link to buy his book. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. It felt like, if he really did have the adjunct life as figured out as he claimed, he should have had time for a second volume.
But nothing of the sort existed, not even an updated edition of the first. I couldn’t find anything else that I was certain was him, not with that common of a name, save a photo of him in birdwatching gear, complete with giant hat and binoculars so large they’d bring the moon to his lap. He might have looked happy in that one; I couldn’t quite tell, not at the angle, not with the shade of the hat. The photo had been taken in 2009, at the opening of a new regional trail, and the only reason I was certain it was him was because the caption noted that he was “local professor, John Anderson.” No one else was there with him. If he had people in his life, they did not appear on his digital trail.
Andy Nguyen, or at least the Andy Nguyen who I could reasonably assume was the one I knew (there were thousands), had an internet presence that was fairly small, though I was in no way good enough to be seeing everything. Trying to actually research a college student means knowing a wide variety of usernames. But he showed up a few times in his high school newspaper, with pictures—a local school, not far from the college, in San Jose—for speech and debate, for mock trial. He’d graduated a few years before, so he was a little older than I’d initially assumed, but that wasn’t strange; he’d probably been working while going to school. Probably still was. He was listed in a few things that popped up from our campus—member of the AAPI volunteer team during last year’s campus clean up, interviewed once for one of those random student opinion pieces the newspaper was always doing (he did not think that the school should switch its beverage service from Pepsi to Coke), and apparently was a pretty decent amateur basketball player, at least according to the intermural score chart from last year. Nothing about him was particularly incriminating; he was still, as Jess and I had concluded, probably just a random kid.
Who kept on turning up a little too often to be called random at this point. I couldn’t quite write him off, nor shake my feeling of apprehension. When something happens often enough, you lose the ability to call it coincidental.
All the while, every time I heard footsteps pass by my front door, I flinched. Logically, I should be safer here, in an apartment that only Jess had ever seen, than I was on campus. Everyone knew how to find me on campus—Lucy, Charles, John, Andy, and even Sam.
Sam.
Did I really think that Sam would go through the trouble of finding me? I could imagine that he would, but it was equally easy to imagine that he would just…fade away. Or was I only projecting, imagining what I’d most like to happen, at least in the very short term?
I tried to think about it like an outsider, to lay it all out dispassionately, the way we’d done earlier. What were the applicable facts? I opened a Word document, since I couldn’t google myself, and started a list.
· Dated for four years
· Since I dropped everything and moved across the country to be with him, lived together basically all of that time
· Never actually got engaged, though we did talk about marriage
· We were mostly joking when we talked about marriage, or at least I was
· Still, I did love him, at least until I found out he’d been cheating on me, or trying to cheat on me
· He signed up for dating sites without telling me
· When I found out, I took all my shit and left, without talking to him
· I was planning to talk to him eventually, but it’s possible he wouldn’t figure this out, though he should
· He didn’t completely support me financially, but he was already living in his very expensive place when I joined him, and it was never 50/50
· I think this bothered me more than it bothered him. It definitely made me more focused on getting tenure
· He didn’t think I needed tenure, especially not if we had kids, and part time adjuncting would make more sense anyway
· I never exactly said no to having kids, but I never said yes. There was a lot I had avoided having to say
· I always thought we had more time to make these decisions
And that was just it—he clearly wanted to have made these decisions, with me, already. I couldn’t deny that, even if it was painful. It wasn’t even a breakup that had to be as traumatic as it was, I reminded myself, as I wiped away an errant tear. If only he had talked to me, instead of just putting his plan into play, I wouldn’t have had to cut and run just to make it through this interview process.
But the nagging thought in the back of my head, the one I couldn’t quite shake, was that he probably had no idea why I did what I did, because there was no way that he’d remembered about the interview process. Which meant that from his perspective, I’d just…vanished. With no farewell, no closure. It had to sting, I knew. It had to feel pretty damn awful.
How awful, though, did it have to feel for him to chase me down? How badly did he want closure, given that it was pretty clear he no longer wanted me? And had I hurt him badly enough for him to not only remember that the process was happening, but to interfere with it?
I didn’t have an answer for any of that.
So instead, I thought about Charles, watching and waiting and quietly working and only striking when someone threatened his tenure, a spider in the corner of a web. I thought about Andy, popping up anywhere and everywhere, begging for attention like an adolescent dog, good at tricks and training routines, but still eager for praise. I thought about John, alone in the middle of that trail, looking for birds; thought about Lucy, imagined her darting across campus, cleverly storing secrets like acorns in a cache; even the way she held her hands in front of her body sometimes evoked a squirrel. I considered each of them, over and over, what I knew from experience and what I had learned, like Jess had suggested I should. But I came to no conclusions.