CHAPTER FOURTEEN

By midnight, everything had been more or less settled. I had packed an overnight bag and gone straight to Devante’s place, though I did pause to phone Caroline, who said she’d take care of the other necessary calls. The cops were at Devante’s house when I arrived. So were about twenty students, a few neighbors, and some adults I took to be parents. Devante was still talking to the police, his big athlete’s body looking wasted and small, as if all his bones and tissue had compacted down. One of his roommates, a normally arrogant in-your-face troublemaker, was sitting on a dilapidated couch with his arm around a sobbing girl. The smell of pizza wafted in from the direction of the kitchen.

“Oh, Ms. Kendall!” a voice cried, and in a few moments I was surrounded by a group of frantic students. Nancy Ortega, her girlfriend Simone, and most of the other kids from my comp class. Some were crying; some, like Devante, were just stunned and shrunken. My heart breaking for all of them, I looked around for someplace we could sit and talk.

This turned out to be the dining room. Devante and his buddies roomed in a large, rundown old house in Montrose, the hip-scary address of Houston, and they hadn’t done much to decorate it in the conventional sense. So this room offered no ordinary dining table; instead, a collection of TV trays and inflatable chairs and throw pillows served as the furniture. The room also held the entertainment hub, which featured an attendant array of speakers so huge and so numerous that I was surprised the students hadn’t all gone deaf.

I lowered myself into a translucent plastic armchair and they all disposed themselves around me. “Tell me exactly what happened,” I demanded.

Nancy, who had been weeping when I arrived, had gained some self-control, though she seemed unwilling to move more than a foot or two away from me. “We thought Evan had been doing better. We all went out Friday night after the exam. He thought he’d done well on it. You know, so it wasn’t like he was worried about flunking out or anything—”

“What about his classes? He was a little behind in my course—how was he doing with his other teachers?”

“They all knew,” said Simone. “You know, that he was depressed. They were all giving him wasting room.”

Wasting room. One of those strange phrases you hear around campus and never know exactly how to define. “What about his parents?” I asked.

Nancy and Simone exchanged glances. “They used to be kind of tough on him, but once he spent time in the clinic, they pretty much backed off,” Nancy said. “I don’t think—that wasn’t it.”

“And the ex-girlfriend?”

“He never talked about her anymore,” Simone said. “We all thought he was okay about her.”

Did it really matter what had set him off? What had pushed him beyond his level of endurance, what had broken his heart? “So what happened? What did he do to himself?”

The girls started crying. Dave Zirster said flatly, “Climbed in the shower and cut his wrists. And turned on the water so all the blood would wash away. Devante found him, but he was already—all the hot water was gone, he was just there in the cold shower, and he was dead.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay,” I said. “I feel just as bad as you do, so I don’t know anything to say to make it any better. But let’s talk about it as long as you want.”

Which was until midnight, and even then, I think some of them would have stayed longer, going over the same few details again. All of us thinking, What signals did I miss, what words could I have said that I failed to say, how could I have altered events? The truth is, you rarely get a chance to save another life, and to miss your chance, to blow it so spectacularly, cuts you deep.

I began feeling a little more sympathetic toward Bram Cortez and his heroics. Saving one life might have made it a little easier to lose another.

“It’s late—everyone go home now,” I insisted. “And those of you who consider this home, you go to bed. And you get some sleep.”

“Don’t leave,” Simone said. “I mean—can you come back early tomorrow morning? I don’t—tomorrow afternoon seems so far away.”

“I’m spending the night at the teacher’s dorm,” I said. This was a utilitarian collection of studio apartments set aside for the use of commuting teachers who got trapped on campus, or visiting professors who did not want the trouble of hunting for lodging for eight weeks, or seminar speakers who would be in town overnight. I’d only made use of it half-a-dozen times, but I had to admit it was handy. “I’ll be here bright and early. Want to go out to breakfast?”

About ten of them agreed, so we planned where and when to meet. I figured I’d be paying for everyone, so the inexpensive pancake house sounded pretty good to me. I shouldered my bag, said my farewells, and headed toward the door.

Nancy stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Ms. Kendall?”

I turned. “Yes?”

“My final paper. I’m going to write it on Evan.”

I nodded. “Absolutely. Any of you can. Essay—journal entry—it’s pretty much freeform, you know.”

“Poem,” she said.

*

The next forty-eight hours were, as I’d expected, dreadful, full of anguish and questions. Sorrow is bad enough without the what-ifs to complicate it. I had a couple of the mental health clinic’s grief counselors at class Monday afternoon, but the students didn’t want them there, so I let them go and led the discussions myself. Feeling woefully inadequate to the task.

But then, there is no easy way to dissipate sadness. It follows you and chases you and corners you in dark alleys until, one day when you least expect it, it grows tired of the sport and finds new prey. Emily Dickinson said it better, of course, in a slightly different context.

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away—

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy —

But we were a long way from that point.

The campus memorial service had been arranged for Tuesday afternoon, which obviously meant I would not make my appointment with Quentin. I called Francis Monday night to explain the situation. He expressed his condolences and asked if he could tell Quentin I would be there Friday as usual.

“That’s my plan,” I said. “How’s he doing? Is he home?”

“Yes. He doesn’t seem to have suffered any lasting ill effects from the collapse.”

“I’m so glad. I’ll see you all in a few days.”

I didn’t attempt to contact anyone else in the house.

The service was held in Sefton’s small, plain, nondenominational chapel. It had been organized by the students and featured mainly commentaries by Evan’s contemporaries. I had been invited to speak, but once I learned I had been the only teacher so honored, I declined. I thought it should be a chance for the students to express themselves, and for me and the other teachers to listen.

Dave Zirster opened the service, introduced each of the other speakers, and generally kept everything moving, and I thought he did a splendid job. About a dozen students spoke, some reciting tales of Evan’s sweetness, others describing a favor he’d done for them or an act of kindness they’d observed. Devante told a funny story about a trip to a bowling alley and a disastrous bout with peanuts that had everyone laughing and crying simultaneously. I mentally applauded him for the tale and the strength it took to tell it.

Nancy Ortega recited her poem in a quiet, firm voice, and the entire audience was in tears by the time she had finished. Everyone except Nancy. She gave us all a look of contained intensity. “Evan Stodley,” she said. “We will not forget him.”

She was the last one scheduled to speak, but all my students were turning in their seats to look at me, clearly expecting me to take my turn, despite my earlier decision. So I did, though I had nothing prepared and nothing in mind to say.

“I’ve never had to do this before,” I said, looking out at the sea of upturned faces. “Attend a funeral service for a student. If I’d practiced something to read, I probably would have picked a poem. The one that keeps coming to my mind is ‘Prayer to Persephone,’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay. In it, she talks about a young girl who has just died, and who therefore will be going on to the underworld—which, for those of you who don’t know your mythology, was ruled over half the time by Persephone, the reluctant wife of Hades.

“And so she tells Persephone about this girl, who will be ‘a little lonely child lost in Hell.’ And the last few lines of the poem have always seemed so comforting to me as she asks the goddess to care for the girl.” I spoke the final words in a quiet voice.

“Persephone,

Take her head upon your knee:

Say to her, ‘My dear, my dear,

It is not so dreadful here.’”

I paused briefly. “I don’t think it can be dreadful where Evan has gone. And death is a place we all will eventually go, and I do not think it will be dreadful for any of us. But what I want to say to you today is this. Don’t follow him there a day sooner than you have to. Hold on to your lives. Love your lives. Live them to the fullest. Realize what a gift every single day is. And never forget to love the people around you the best that you can for as long as you can. And don’t let it take a death to learn that lesson.”

I had nothing else to say. I stood there a moment, as if waiting for the inevitable questions from my class, then I quirked my hands up in a gesture of helplessness. As I stepped down from the podium, Dave Zirster moved forward and said, “Let’s all join in on the first verse of ‘Amazing Grace,’” and the hymn began. I was not the only one who found it impossible to sing.

*

Quentin still looked pale three days later when I arrived—pale and, somehow, shadowy, as if he had taken one step closer to Persephone’s dark and haunted realm. He was sitting in his chair, though, which was a decided improvement over lying in the hospital bed, and he was chattering like a convocation of crows when I first arrived.

“Hey, Taylor! Did you hear that Dennis moved? He and Gregory got a bigger place together, and someday he’s going to let me come see it. You know what? Bram says I didn’t get sick because I was outside at the lake and he says we can go back sometime, when you feel like it. But he said maybe we should drive and not teleport, he thinks it might be easier on me, but I like to teleport—”

More in this vein for the first thirty minutes of my visit. I tried to respond lightly and in kind—and I also tried to catch his wandering attention and get him to buckle down to a lesson—but I didn’t have much luck with either endeavor. I was surprised, then, when Quentin’s voice came to an abrupt halt, and he leaned forward to get a good look at me.

“Taylor,” he said, “you seem so sad.”

The unexpected sympathy made me want to cry again, and I had been crying too much over the past week. “I am sad.”

“Why? Did something bad happen? Francis just said you had an emergency at Sefton.”

Which is what I had asked him to say, but now I couldn’t think of any way to keep the truth from Quentin. “One of my students died over the weekend. And I miss him.”

“Was there an accident? Was he sick?”

I shook my head. “No accident. I guess he was sick—not like you are—sick in his heart. Depressed. I thought he was better, but he killed himself.” I shrugged slightly. “I didn’t want to tell you because—”

“Because you don’t want me to think about young men dying,” he said. “I know.”

I looked at him. “You never talk about it.”

He glanced out the window then back at me. “I think about it, though. I wonder what it’s like. I try not to be afraid, but sometimes I am afraid.”

“We all are.”

“Sometimes I think, well, maybe it’s better.”

“Better?” I choked on the word. “Why would—”

“You know. Like the poem. I’ve been trying to memorize it, but it’s pretty long.”

For a moment I didn’t know what he meant, but then I remembered how much he had immersed himself in Housman, and how I had hoped he never came across “To an Athlete Dying Young.”

I recited softly, “‘Smart lad, to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay . . .’”

He nodded. “‘Now you will not swell the rout of lads that wore their honours out . . .’”

“But, Quentin, that’s a poem that rationalizes grief. He’s not really happy the boy died. It’s not really better. No one believes that.”

“Yeah, I know, but I—” He shrugged. “And, really and truly, Taylor, I wouldn’t mind so much. It’s just that—I think about all the things I haven’t done. Places I haven’t seen. Things I don’t know. I’ve never even a kissed a girl. You know. What’s that like? I’ve never had—well. And, you know, I’ll be dead in three or four years. And I don’t feel like I’ve lived. And that bothers me.”

“Oh, Quentin,” I said. “Oh, honey.” And I crossed the room and knelt beside him and put my arms around his painfully thin shoulders. And though I was the one trying to comfort him, I was also the one crying. In the end it was Quentin who said those magical, meaningless words, “It’s all right”—although I, like anyone who has ever heard them, did not believe him.

*

When I got home that night, I called Domenic. “Are you free for dinner? I have a question that I’m reasonably sure you can answer.”

“Sure. Meet me someplace?”

“I’ll cook if you want to come over.”

He arrived about twenty minutes later, a wine bottle in hand. “I hear you’ve had a rough week,” he said and kissed me on the cheek.

“I think I should stop forming attachments.”

“That’s been my modus operandi,” he said. “What did you make? It smells good.”

I lit candles and poured wine and we sat down to dinner. Pasta and garlic bread and a fruit salad. “If you were trying to find a hooker to sleep with a nineteen-year-old boy,” I asked, “where would you start?”

Being Domenic, he did not strangle on his wine, or cough into his baked penne, or stare at me and demand, “Are you insane?” He took a contemplative sip from his glass and then began to pull apart his bread.

“Well, I wouldn’t go to a hooker,” he said. “Not a professional, I mean. Your best bet is probably one of the campus zydeco girls.”

“The what girls?”

He gave me that angelic smile. “Zydeco girls. They’ve got the rhythm but they don’t give you the blues. Cynics will tell you it’s the most successful work-study program at colleges across the country.”

“I think I need more details.”

“Students who need extra money to get through college hook up with other students who have more disposable income. I said zydeco girls, but of course both men and women participate. There are a lot of rules about consent and condoms and payment methods, and it’s all pretty transactional. The schools don’t officially sanction it, of course, but everybody knows about it.”

“I didn’t know about it,” I said. “I wonder if any of my kids down at Sefton—huh. I don’t think I want to know.”

“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “It’s just what some kids do.”

“Part of me is horrified,” I said primly. “And part of me says this is exactly what I need. How do I find one of them?”

“Usually a few bars where they hang out. You can go to one of them.”

“I’d think there’d be online forums or specialized dating apps.”

“Sure, of course there are. But it’s always been such a local, hands-on sort of venture, if you know what I mean, that a lot of times people just show up at one of the meeting spots when they feel like making a connection. You might post a notice in one of the forums, say you’ll be at such-and-such a place on Saturday afternoon, and set up interviews.”

“What sort of place? Where should I suggest?”

He grinned. “Well, if you’re trolling for Loyola girls, there’s a pizza parlor not far from the old L stop. Northwestern girls, there’s a hotel bar that gets a lot of traffic. U of Chicago—”

“How do you know all this?” I interrupted.

He opened his eyes wide, all innocence and charm. “People confide in me.”

“I mean, you’ve had girls hanging all over you your whole life. I can’t believe you ever had to hire anyone.”

“For many people,” he said carefully, “the attraction is the lack of emotional commitment.”

“Oh, well, then. You’re the ideal zydeco boy.”

“I’ve committed to a lot of things in my life,” he said, unruffled. “My career. My family. My friends. I’ve always been available any time you needed something, for instance.”

“That’s true,” I said. “It would just be good to see you settle down with someone nice and be happy.”

His eyes glittered in the candlelight. “You first.”

*

Three days later I was sitting in the bar of an upscale Evanston hotel, interviewing pretty young college girls with questionable morals. Every once in a while, when I realized exactly what I was doing, I was so dumbstruck that I couldn’t speak rationally for a few minutes.

Fortunately, my companions—all Northwestern students—were self-assured, articulate, and gracious enough to handle the conversational load on their own. Still, the topic was not designed to make any of us seem like intellectuals.

“I’m looking for an easy-going young woman who’d be willing to spend some time with a nineteen-year-old boy who has some health problems” was my opening pitch. I’d included the same basic information in the message I’d posted to the zydeco forum, so I figured I had already weeded out anyone who was repulsed by illness or disability. Still, as I have learned in my years as a teacher, it never hurts to repeat the salient points.

The first four girls were all acceptable—different from each other in looks, attitude, and charm, but acceptable. But Elise was a little too cool, a little too elegant for unsophisticated Quentin. Arcadia was too sympathetic, too inclined to say “that poor boy” when I related details of his situation. Emma was too clinical, wanting to know how often she would be expected to offer sex and if I paid by the hour or the act. Margot was too disengaged.

The fifth woman I interviewed did not at first seem to be a promising candidate. She slid into the booth across from me as nonchalantly as if she were meeting her best friend and gave me a casual “hi.” She had short straight blonde hair, cut raggedly around her face and adorned, in odd places, with beads and gold thread and tiny dragonflies. Her clothes were colorful, tight, and revealing. She wore almost no makeup, so her fine translucent skin impressed me with its natural glow, but she had taken to extremes one recent beauty trend that I absolutely could not fathom. She had had rows of diamonds inset into each of her cheeks, tracing a sparkling arc down the curve of bone, and she had accented her extremely blue eyes with sapphires at the outside corners of both lids. A few of my Sefton students had taken up this fashion as well, but mostly they confined themselves to an onyx beauty mark next to one eye or a ruby set at the corner of their lips. These were surgically implanted, mind you—permanent and, at least at the installation stage, painful. I could not help but wonder if this girl’s jewels were real.

“Hello,” I responded cautiously. “I’m Taylor Kendall.”

“I’m Bordeaux.”

Of course you are, I thought. It’s the name du jour for all the young girls coming into my classes. I had had three of them last year and four the year before. A few years ago, it had been Colette. In my day, the popular name was Azolay; Marika and I once counted twelve in our senior class alone.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “As you know, I’m looking for a friendly young girl to be a companion to a nineteen-year-old boy who has some health problems.”

On top of everything else, she was chewing gum. “What kinds of problems?”

“He’s got a degenerative muscle disease that causes him pain and requires him to use a wheelchair most of the time.”

“Really? What is it?”

She was the first candidate to ask for more details about the illness itself. “It’s called Kyotenin degradation.”

To my astonishment, she nodded. “Yeah, I knew a guy in high school who had it. He died last year. It was really sad.”

“I think it’s pretty rare” was all I could think to say.

She leaned her elbows on the table with complete unselfconsciousness. She had rose-and-thorn designs tattooed around each wrist, and rubies were inset into a few of the petals. “He tried some of these really rad cures, but nothing worked. They had this big drive at the high school to see if anyone had a matching blood type so they could do some organ reconstruction, so we all went in to be tested. I donated blood and tissue for about three years, but it didn’t do any good.”

Every word she said just made me want to goggle at her—and I absolutely hate the word goggle . “That was pretty generous of you,” I said.

“Well, you know. He was a nice guy. And you’d like to think if you were dying of some weird muscle thing, people would try to help you out. I used to go hang out with him till he got so sick he didn’t remember me.”

“How old was he when he died?”

She blew a bubble and popped it. “Twenty-one.”

“Quentin’s nineteen. I guess I said that already.”

She nodded. “What’s he like? Robbie was a little goofy, you know, like a big kid. Like his brain didn’t grow as fast as everyone else’s did. I always figured it was because of the disease. But he was smart. He read all the time and he would help me with my math homework and he always beat me at chess.”

I could feel myself smiling. “You play chess?”

“Oh yeah. All the smart guys love chess, so I figured I better learn it if I was going to be at the big purple-and-white.” She gave an exaggerated headshake when she named the Northwestern colors, and it was pretty clear that she was awed by neither the school’s reputation nor its current crop of students. “I’m not too good at it, but that doesn’t seem to matter.”

“Quentin’s never slept with a girl,” I said. “And he doesn’t know I’m hiring someone. I’m going to tell him you’re a student of mine who needs a little extra tutoring. I’m his English teacher, by the way.”

“Jazz,” she said, nodding.

“And if he likes you and you get along and you want to see more of each other, great. In fact, that’s what I’m hoping for. But if that’s not the way it works, I don’t want you to force anything. I’ll pay for your time regardless. I just want him to have—” I gestured inconclusively. “Some normalcy, I guess.”

“Yeah,” she said, brushing a hand across her sparkling cheek to push back a wayward lock of beaded hair, “don’t we all want that.”

I was planning to offer her the job anyway, but the complete sincerity with which she made that absolutely ludicrous reply won my heart. Of course, it’s always risky to play matchmaker, but I had to believe I had found the perfect girl for Quentin.

“I usually go over on Tuesdays and Fridays,” I said. “When can you start?”

“Tomorrow’s Tuesday,” she said. “That works for me.”