The Urban Hiker appeared the same day my cousin moved in, and any passerby would have rightly surmised they were both down on their luck. My cousin had rented my basement apartment; the Urban Hiker pitched a tent in the empty lot I could see through my kitchen window. We began to orbit one another loosely, like planets without a sun.
I owned a little place that I could claim was in Roland Park if I was feeling grandiose, or I could admit was actually closer to Charles Village. The basement had been set off as a separate apartment by the previous owners. It was dimly lit with a single, crusty window through which one might view the shoes of people passing outside. That there was a pervasive mouse problem went without saying—every rowhouse had a mouse problem. Mice crept, steadfast, legion, through the tiny crevices that linked all the rowhouses. They seemed to love my shadowy basement in particular.
But as soon as he saw it, my cousin said the apartment would be perfect. Just what he needed. When I asked what had happened with his previous living situation out in Boulder with a great-aunt, he’d simply shaken his head and muttered, “Big misunderstanding.” He referred to my basement as a “garden apartment” which implied, to my mind, azaleas, loveliness, and a willingness to overlook the obvious.
“Thanks, Doc,” my cousin said, clapping an arm around my shoulder and pulling me in so tight I couldn’t startle and pull away. I am not touched often and so avoid it reflexively. “Together again, right? You need anything, just stomp. I need anything, I’ll just tap a broom on the ceiling.” He laughed, and although it wasn’t that funny, I couldn’t help but join him.
My cousin and I had grown up together. He’d taken to referring to himself as my brother, or, my brousin. We even seemed to share a family face—the same long, thin-lipped visage I’d seen in photos of Appalachian holler-dwellers from the 1930s, although he wore it much better. We looked like people used to weathering hardship.
“Internet?” my cousin asked. This, he had explained, was essential to his business. He was a top-rated eBay seller.
“You can share mine. I’ll get you the password. It’s finicky, but I keep the door upstairs unlocked if you need to reset the router.”
My cousin beamed. He was wearing a crocodile tooth necklace, a fine frizz of brown hair forming a nimbus around his face, the rest pulled back into a ponytail. He remained as lean as he’d been as a teenager. When we were growing up together, my friends had found him irresistible. Brousins are off limits, I would tell them. The truth is that I was—am, always have been—territorial.
“You OK?” my cousin asked me, his face gone gentle now. He’s what my mother used to call a darlingheart: kind, solicitous, quick to check on other people’s feelings—a scam artist and grifter as well, but I’ve learned nothing if not that people are complex.
“Fine,” I said. “Just fine. Done and done now, so.”
And I left it there, feeling the muscles of my face stiffen into the protective mask I had perfected. Expressionless, detached even from myself. I had mastered this skill back in my previous life, but it had served me well recently.
“Gotcha. Shit happens.”
I nodded. That was when we saw the Urban Hiker settling in. He was a tall, grizzled man in suspenders. There was a stretch of brush directly behind the houses on my block, and we could watch him through the scraggly branches, arranging his meager belongings.
“Well, hello, there,” my cousin murmured in a speculative way. Admiringly, really. My cousin admired scrappiness and ingenuity. He was the sort of guy who felt pleased when certain people demonstrated a bit of cleverness, but also didn’t mind when others tripped up on their own stupidity. “Friend of yours?”
I blushed. I recognized the Urban Hiker, of course. I saw him in the neighborhood all the time: nursing a bottomless cup of coffee at the nearby café, reading books for hours on end at the Barnes and Noble. He bore an acrid odor, so strong it made my eyes tear, and so wherever he sat, he tended to clear the tables around him. But the café owners, as if bound by some covenant, never said anything. The Urban Hiker was quiet, respectful.
And the Urban Hiker knew me, too, it seemed. I’d been aware of his eyes following me, his little, private acknowledgements—the way he’d nod when I ordered my cappuccino. I could sense his presence in the café or bookstore even before I detected his familiar smell. And if I were to admit it—and this pains me, because it feels like vanity—there was a way his gaze fell on me. It was the way a man observes a woman. Even when I’d been younger, I’d sensed this only rarely, moving through the world with the invisibility afforded plainish women, simultaneously a privilege and an insult. But now, at thirty-nine, I’d almost completely forgotten that sense of being beheld. Unlike the other women I saw traversing Roland Park with their mesh-paneled workout leggings, I was relatively untended to, a plot gone to seed. I wondered if perhaps the Urban Hiker saw in me the weedy signifiers of compatibility. He studied me like we might share an understanding.
“That’s just a homeless guy who hangs around here. He’s harmless.”
“Living off the fat of the land,” my cousin said. “Gotta respect it.” With that, he was off to his truck to begin moving his boxes.
The Urban Hiker looked up suddenly, as if, like a hunting dog, he’d caught the scent of something on the wind. We were too far away for him to have heard us talking, but he swiveled, looking directly to me and offering a little wave.
My cheeks burned. I turned to walk inside.
• •
The new job I’d taken was a long-term sub position at an elite boys’ school in the northern part of the city. They had been as desperate as I’d been when one of their teachers needed urgent surgery.
Dr. Elliott, the school director, wore round wire-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. He spoke with long, thoughtful pauses, resting his hands on his neat little paunch. He was sixtyish, balding, with the close-trimmed tonsure of a monk.
“A career change, I see?” he said thoughtfully—or skeptically, because who would not be skeptical when he saw my resume?
I sat across from him, trying to exude poise and calm. You see, despite it all, I have no criminal record. That was part of the agreement. A complaint to the board, yes, but no lawsuit, no newspaper headlines. For all Dr. Elliott knew, in every official sense, I remained an upstanding citizen. I truly am, in my heart, an upstanding citizen. I am too timid to be otherwise.
“Yes,” I said. “I love English literature. I got my Master’s in it. I originally planned to teach.”
He smiled evenly.
“Of course, it’s a substantial pay cut.”
I nodded.
“Will it sound trite if I say it feels like a calling? I’ve put my time in elsewhere,” I swallowed. “And I felt drawn to this opportunity.”
He smiled slowly, patiently, whatever questions he had smoothed over with his impeccable professionalism.
“Welcome, Ms. Linke,” he said, “to Chalton Academy. Or Dr. Linke? How shall I introduce you to the students tomorrow?”
“Ms. Linke will be very appropriate in this context.”
• •
Chalton Academy was a looming, gothic structure in gray stone with all the ornate foreboding of an old Kirkbride asylum, down to the glowering central clock tower. It felt like a place of serious moral instruction. At least half the instructors had PhDs. The boys themselves, the students, wore navy blazers with the Chalton crest sewn to the lapel.
That Thursday when I arrived at Chalton, it felt like starting a new life. I pictured myself as a solitary governess entering a gloomy, remote manse. I was trembling.
Here is the truth: adolescents terrify me. Boys in particular. The tenth grade class I walked into that morning was filled, as I’d expected, with beautiful, floppy-haired boys, boys of ease and grace and prerogative, boys raised on antioxidants and challenging Latin courses and lacrosse. They loped to their desks with such languid handsomeness it was excessive—decadent, really. Growing up, I’d gone to a country high school where the boys were no less terrifying, but differently so: rough-hewn and overt, with thick necks and loud voices. These boys, they were more subtle. Polite. Unfailingly polite. They glanced up at me with the gorgeous, sleepy-eyed indifference of grazing animals. Never have I felt so wrong-footed.
“Welcome, Ms. Linke,” one of them greeted me as I tucked my leather satchel beneath the desk in the front of the room. “We’re so glad to have you.”
He was the most strikingly beautiful boy in the room—glossy black hair, black-brown eyes, a ready smile. Samuel Chapman, I would later learn.
I stared at him, prepared for mockery, bracing for insult. But he just kept smiling. The rest of them took their seats, watching me, expectant.
“Dr. Elliott tells us you’re a writer yourself,” the boy offered, as if his classmates had nominated him ambassador.
This was only partially true. I had once published a poem in a tiny journal few read. I’d mentioned this in my application, and Dr. Elliott had made much of it. Now it felt like a foolish indulgence, like wearing a peacock feather in my hair.
I nodded stiffly to the boy, still waiting for the edges of their laughter to emerge. They, in turn, waited for me: to take charge, to start teaching, to do something. I scanned the room, their faces the faces of noble genetic lineages, these dewy sons of professionals and entrepreneurs—all of them except for the one boy in the very back. He was skinny, under-developed, his pale face decoupaged with angry red clusters of acne. He stared intently downward at something on his desk: reading a book, I realized. I let out a small breath. In this boy, at least, I saw a silent ally.
The talkative dark-haired boy stood from his desk and approached mine.
“Look,” he said, pointing, and I saw now there was a red rose lying on my desk. I could feel a heat rising up from my chest, awaiting their snickering. I saw myself before them, nakedly spinsterish, risible. The skinny boy in the back coughed, and I interpreted this as a warning. I tossed the rose into my trashcan as if it were a used tissue.
There was an uncertain hush now. If anything, the boys appeared to be confused. I could feel all their eyes on me, all of them, that is, except for my kindred spirit in the back of the classroom, watching me with interest. These were boys unaccustomed to having their charms rebuffed. This, I thought, was their true gift. They had no need to establish themselves before me, the sub, so fully were they lords of this manor.
“Let’s begin,” I said, my hands shaking as I pulled out the desk copy of the anthology they were using, “where you left off with the Romantics. I am, as you have already guessed, Ms. Linke, your substitute.”
• •
By the time I walked home that first day, it was evening. I’d stayed late to organize the classroom to my liking and go over the syllabus that my predecessor had left. I hummed to myself, pleased at my own bravery, skipping over a dwindling puddle from the last rain storm. It was still warm out, summery, though autumn.
“Grace!”
My cousin waved to me from my front stoop, raising a glass bottle in greeting—nonalcoholic beer, I had to assume. He was sitting next to someone.
“Welcome home,” my cousin said. “Meet our neighbor.”
The Urban Hiker was sitting next to my cousin. He took a sip of his nonalcoholic beer, raising his eyebrows at me, and then he smiled. He had surprisingly good teeth.
“Grace, this is Richard,” my cousin said. “Richard, Grace.”
I nodded to the Urban Hiker, Richard, as formally as I could. Splotches were blooming ruddy on my neck, I knew. A terrible tell.
“Richard’s a mathematician,” my cousin said. “Or was. He left academia. Taught at Berkeley, if you can believe it.” My cousin whistled appreciatively at his own recital of these facts.
“What did you study?” I asked him.
“Oh, you name it. Cardinal invariants, determinacy, set theory. All sorts of things.” He gestured, drawing a sort of lazy figure-eight in the air.
My cousin nodded eagerly.
“Smart guy,” he said. “But he needed to step away from it all. Reassess.”
The Urban Hiker shrugged, taking a sip of his beer.
“Started to feel inauthentic,” he offered, as if this were an explanation. He tilted his head toward my cousin, lifting his nonalcoholic beer up like he was
toasting the ghost of his previous career.
“We may end up doing a little business together,” my cousin offered.
I raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t want to know about it,” I said lightly, like I was joking, although I meant it. Better not to know when it came to my cousin.
He laughed.
A silence fell then, followed by the click and pop of street lamps turning on. I could feel the Urban Hiker’s eyes, the familiar way they’d started to roam over me.
“Big life change,” my cousin finally said. “Grace knows all about that. You two have that much in common.”
• •
The history of my profession is not a proud one. Take Nazi Germany, where psychiatrists assisted in planning sterilization and mass extermination. Take the lobotomy. Or the days in which psychiatrists, all men, could involuntarily commit their wives and sleep with their patients with impunity. When homosexuality was, up until fairly recently, treated as a disease. Take the darkest aspects of institutionalization—or, worse still, the darkest aspects of deinstitutionalization. Take any television show or horror movie or book—rarely, if ever, are psychiatrists heroes. Rarely, if ever, are we even benign. Bumbling phrenologists at best, authoritarian torturers at worst.
The mind is, as ever, a black box. People do what they do. We offer merely hubris and neuroleptics.
There was a time I didn’t think this way. Maybe everyone says this after the fact, but I originally went into psychiatry with the best of intentions. Maybe that’s always the case.
• •
My fifth week at Chalton, Dr. Elliott called me into his office during my planning period.
“You’re acclimating, I trust?” he asked me. He wore a new bowtie today, blue check, and I noticed that he had a matching pocket square. His desk was neat, the stack of papers and the stapler arranged exactly 90 degrees from the small vase of flowers. Hints of obsessive-compulsive personality, I thought—not to be confused with obsessive compulsive disorder, of course, as the former is egosyntonic and unbothersome to the person in question, merely an extreme rigidness of personality with which I am also familiar.
“I am,” I said, picking up the pen on his desk, idly, as if without thinking, and moving it. Without breaking gaze, Dr. Elliott picked up the pen and moved it back to its rightful spot.
“Excellent,” he said, smoothing an invisible wrinkle from his shirt. “I wanted to speak with you about your experience in the classroom. How are you connecting with your pupils?”
“Very well.” This was a lie. I ran the classroom with machine-like efficiency. But we had made excellent progress in the anthology and were even further along in the syllabus than we needed to be.
“Here at Chalton, we value intellectual connection. We want educators here to engage with the students as young adults, as individual minds at work. Covering the academic material is necessary, but we aspire to more.”
I nodded, clenching a bit of fabric from my skirt and twisting it.
He sighed.
“The students have reported, umm, a noticeable coolness of demeanor,” he said carefully. “And of course I immediately understood that this must be a professional stance you cultivated in your previous career. Things are different here. Certainly you don’t need to be overly friendly in the classroom, but. . . .”
He lifted a hand into the air, a kind of gentle question mark.
“I understand.”
He nodded gratefully. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“I’ll try and connect with them,” I said.
Already I was rising from my chair, unsticking my skirt from the back of my legs, backing out the door.
“Good,” Dr. Elliott said, nodding. “Very good. . . . And I know how the first year can be.” He paused to clear his throat. “If you wanted to have coffee sometime, to discuss, or . . . .” A splotchy color like a rash was rising over the bald dome of Dr. Elliott’s skull.
“Thank you,” I said abruptly, exiting and shutting the door quietly behind me.
• •
Perhaps talking to a great many people has not made me any wiser about human nature, but it has led me to believe certain theories. For example, some people invite cruelty. Their weakness, their oddity, their obliviousness: it sets them apart and inspires in otherwise ordinary people the urge to poke, to shun.
My cousin protected me from this growing up. He was one year ahead of me in school—easy, effortless, up to his share of boyish trouble. The sort of guy that everyone liked. He had standing. When Jacquelyn Dwyer invites you to her slumber party, don’t go, he’d whisper. Or Joshua Brenner is only joking about those tickets to the homecoming dance. Walk by and don’t answer him. I would nod to him, grateful, thus slipping through high school and avoiding the greatest humiliations that might have been awaiting me. Don’t wear that skirt to school the Friday of the pep rally. Avoid the back parking lot until at least twenty minutes after the final bell. If Chad Rice asks what you’re doing Saturday night, just ignore him. A series of mysterious instructions provided to me by my cousin. Oracular pronouncements that no doubt saved me, and so I was not picked off from the herd. I was ignored.
But I must still carry it with me, this thing, whatever it is, that invites mockery. An awkwardness of gait? A nervous way of looking up when someone calls my name? I don’t know. This must be why, as a student of human nature, I failed.
• •
When I walked back into my classroom after my meeting with Dr. Elliott, I found it waiting for me: my surprise. The young men of Chalton Academy were perhaps not so subtle after all.
On my desk was a note with my name on it, and below it, a sheaf of images that might have, in any other circumstance, made me guffaw or roll my eyes. I am not a prude—oh, no. I did an entire rotation during my residency in a sexual disorders clinic, learning to sit, unperturbed, as I heard everything. But there was a well-chosen meanness here. The way the women’s eyes rolled back in their heads like scared horses, making no pretense at pleasure, the men rearing back bare-chested and wielding implements of discipline, a healthy dollop of coprophilia and pain, the agenda in each image crude yet precise—I knew these images had been carefully selected, for maximum effect.
I sank into my chair, balling everything up into my trashcan. I could feel a shakiness in my chest, just as they’d intended. And yet I wanted to laugh, almost with a sense of relief. Of course, I thought. Whoever he was, whoever they were—I knew these boys. I’d known all along.
• •
When I walked home that evening, I knocked on the door to my cousin’s apartment, but no one answered. I knocked again, in case he was napping. Because I had my own key, I opened the basement door and stepped inside.
Already, the basement smelled like my cousin—a sweetish odor of skin and sleep and men’s deodorant. I turned on the light. The floor was covered in boxes, shipping supplies, tape. There were heaps of items grouped according to some indecipherable system: dolls, an old accordion, a hat rack carved to resemble a tree, necklaces, a dressmaker’s dummy, what appeared to be three brand-new, unopened car stereos.
Walking amongst these items gave me the feeling of being watched. But I continued to my cousin’s bathroom, where I opened the medicine cabinet. It was only then that I realized I was searching for something: Xanax, maybe, or Valium. This has never been my style, but there is a time and a place for everything. Or maybe I was simply curious. I knew my cousin was sober now, but I suspected his sobriety might only go so far.
Inside the cabinet, instead I found nothing helpful: lisinopril, metoprolol, ibuprofen. Disulfiram, acamprosate, naltrexone. So he was actually trying, my cousin. Good for him, one day at a time, etc. I closed the medicine cabinet and stepped back, moving back through the cluttered space, careful not to step on the splayed limbs of a blond-haired baby doll.
“Grace?”
I startled at the sound of my cousin’s voice and sank onto a musty brown couch.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to gasp. “I was looking for you. I was looking for something.”
“Hey, hey,” he said. I must have looked worrisome to him, frazzle-headed and faint. He moved toward me, resting his hands on my shoulders. I let my head drop. I thought, finally, that I might cry.
“I should have warned you,” my cousin said. He spoke soothingly, as if to a frightened child. “Selling online means accumulating a lot of crap. You wouldn’t believe what people will pay for stuff, though.” He gave a low whistle. “The trick is marketing it right. And obtaining it at a discount.” He winked at me.
Then, he was kneading my shoulders because my cousin remains a darlingheart in addition to being a bit of a scoundrel. I felt myself relax into his touch, a shiver running down the back of my neck.
Here is where I admit that the reason I avoid others’ touch is not out of dislike, but rather for fear of visibly liking it too much, like a thirsty woman gulping up water. Here is where I also clarify first that my cousin is not a true cousin, but rather a stepcousin, the nephew of my stepfather, and there was a part of me that has been in love with him since childhood.
And of course there was the inevitable moment growing up when I walked into our basement and found my cousin there with Jennifer Higgins, my best friend, my only friend, a loss that cut me to the quick, leaving me stunned and breathless at the bottom of the stairs. And here is where I admit that I stood there—at first simply because I was too stunned to move, but later, I kept standing there. I watched them, overcome suddenly by fascination coupled with an almost scientific disinterest, a cool but pressing need to see it all take place.
Later, Jennifer Higgins said nothing when I stopped returning her calls.
“Richard is firing up the grill,” my cousin said, pausing, his fingertips still warm and electric on my shoulders. “He invited us to have some hot dogs with him.”
“The Urban Hiker has a grill?”
“Well, it’s technically your grill. Your veggie dogs, too. I didn’t think you’d mind. He’s on the back patio.”
“OK,” I said, a small sigh escaping me when he lifted his hands.
According to one large survey, 45 percent of the homeless population have some mental illness. Twenty-five percent have a serious mental illness. I wondered what might be wrong with the Urban Hiker. Mental illness or no, my theory is that we each carry within us, like a fault line, the seam of our own destruction.
We ate veggie dogs on the back patio, the Urban Hiker, my cousin, and I. I got a little bit drunk on cheap chardonnay. My cousin and the Urban Hiker were singing old Crosby, Stills, and Nash songs my cousin strummed on his guitar. The sky had darkened, and bats darted overhead. I felt a lazy drowsiness fall over me, and I let myself be careless, brushing against my cousin, letting my hands fall on Richard the Urban Hiker’s arm. My limbs felt loose and lovely, weightless. I didn’t care. My cousin must have let the Urban Hiker shower in my house, I remember thinking before I collapsed into my bed that night, spinny-headed and outside myself. Because he didn’t stink anymore. He smelled pleasantly of my own deodorant.
I dreamed that night of my cousin, the Urban Hiker, dark-eyed Samuel Chapman—an innocent dream, really. Chaste. Hands clasped warmly in mine, understanding smiles.
• •
I continued to find things left for me on my desk at work: a crude drawing of a penis with elaborate pubic hair, a photo of a bellowing hog going to slaughter with “Miss Linke” written on it, a large-breasted woman being shocked with a cattle prod, her mouth forming a dainty, artificial “O” of surprise. I found these items pleasingly unoriginal, satisfying in their banality. Is the mind of the brutal young male really so predictable? I will confess: the thought satisfied me. I was not put off. Instead, I grew more confident.
As I lectured them, I studied each boy’s face when they answered my questions. Was it you, Curtis Walters, III? Or you, Oscar van der Sloot? Or you, Samuel Chapman? I put the rest of them on the spot regularly, but I rarely called on the skinny boy. Sometimes, when I needed an example of an essay done well, I would read excerpts from his essays anonymously out loud. I wondered if this pleased him, but any time I tried to catch his gaze, he’d look away, inspecting the tip of a pencil, or studying a crack in the wall. Peter Buttersworth was his name—such an unfortunate name it made me like him all the more. Peter never volunteered to answer a question. The other boys seemed to leave him alone. Samuel Chapman was one of the leaders. He was the black-haired boy who’d approached me the very first day, and I was tough on him especially. I was tough on all the boys. Relentless. I made them earn their every B- or C+.
It wasn’t until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving that the culprit made his first original move. I walked into the classroom and found this written on my dry erase board:
“IN THE MATTER OF GRACE LINKE, MD, BEFORE THE MARYLAND STATE BOARD OF PHYSICIANS.”
My vision grew swimmy. I saw then printed pages scattered on all the desks. My case before the board. I plucked one page, and then another, although I already knew what they would say.
He, whoever, he was, had found the grounds for my state medical license being denied. This is a thing that is findable if one knows to look for it. There, in professionally exacting language is the PDF with all the details laid out against me.
Shall I even say it was not my fault? That I was seduced? Would that matter? If I tried to explain the disjuncture between the way that it happened and the words available to describe it?
EB was my patient. Although she was not exactly beautiful, she was a presence, enveloping whatever room she was in, absorbing every particle of light and energy. She wore dramatic makeup, big earrings, scoop-necked shirts, and spoke quietly, her voice husky and warm, so one had to lean in close to hear her. Fine white lines scored her forearms beneath the bangles she wore—she’d been cutting herself since adolescence. She’d struggled with bulimia, pills, what she described as “an addiction to violent men.” Multiple suicide attempts. A failed marriage. On the day I met her, she wept on my couch for the first five minutes of the session, but by the end of the hour, she had us both laughing to the point of tears. She could do this—move from lamentation to laughter—faster than anyone I’d ever known. Of course I recognized that she was borderline, the most charming sort. Of course I knew.
And yet, I was drawn to her need. Maybe I had helped others in the past, but rarely before had I felt so indispensable. Never had I known my psychological instincts to be so sharp, my every response so perfectly calibrated and on point.
Still, I maintain that I helped her. At least, I did at first. She came every week, sometimes more than once. Always the last appointment of the day. And she was charming, even in her moments of misery—quick with a wry observation or a subtle joke. It began to feel (and here is the greatest danger in outpatient psychiatry) that we were friends.
One evening she began weeping again and begged me to hold her. I have never known myself to be attracted to a woman. I have always been a firm, if theoretical, heterosexual. But then she was kissing me, her mouth warm and sudden. I fell back against the couch, and she pressed against me, all the hard and soft parts of her, the jangle of her bracelets obscuring our quiet sounds, the sweet cloud of her breath at my neck.
It is like a dream to me, all that followed. It rendered me temporarily sick with love. Something had struck me: thunder and revelation. A giddy bliss.
Things continued like this—a fever, a delirium—for weeks, a couple months.
As inevitably happens, however, she turned against me. Maybe it was a medication request that I gently denied. Maybe the luster of my clinical wisdom had worn thin. Maybe, having shucked any mantle of authority, I had lost my peculiar allure. Whatever the reason, when it happened, it happened all at once. She filed the complaint with the board herself.
All of which, of course, resulted in where I stood at that very moment: Chalton Academy, sponging sweat from my forehead, clutching the pile of papers that testified to my notoriety against my chest.
• •
It was still early, well before the students were due to arrive. I gathered the pages from my classroom, and now I ran with a sinking certainty to the hallway.
Like the mice that bred in my rowhouse, the papers had multiplied. I saw them—taped to walls and lockers. One fell and drifted loose to the floor. I grabbed it, almost stumbling. The papers had not been here minutes earlier, which meant the culprit was still at work. The hallway looked like the aftermath of a parade, papers taped and strung and tossed here and there.
I ran down the hallway, turning toward the stairs. I wanted to find this boy, grab him by his arm and wheel him around. I wanted to see terror in his beautiful dark eyes. I would jerk him to the director’s office by his glossy black hair—for I knew who it must be. I’d known who it was all along. And I did not care in that moment if it meant that Dr. Elliott would see the pages—not so long as it meant punishment, expulsion for the boy.
And there, toward the end of the downstairs hallway, I saw him turning a corner—black hair, red windbreaker. I ran toward him, screeching his name.
“Samuel! Samuel Chapman, you stop!”
But the boy did not stop, and I was chasing him down the gothic hallways of Chalton. I gained on him a few times, but he was too fast, changing directions, sliding down a bannister. I couldn’t quite make out his face, and it occurred to me that maybe he was not Samuel Chapman after all. The skinny shoulders, the rabbity glances over his shoulder—Peter? Peter Buttersworth? My quiet ally?
The boy seemed to dart down two hallways at once, or was it two boys? Three? Possibly it was a team of them. I was breathing hard then, dizzy, no longer sure who my adversary was. I turned down the rightward hallway, toward the main administrative offices.
And I ran directly into Dr. Elliott.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was flushed, breathless, holding the papers detailing my shame tighter to my chest.
“Ms. Linke!” Dr. Elliott said mildly, as if we’d bumped into one another at a pleasant party. “In an awful hurry this morning, I see?”
“Yes,” I gulped. “I forgot something.”
Dr. Elliott smiled, almost to himself. He placed a hand on my shoulder, his thumb lightly touching the curve of my collarbone. It was a professional touch still, just so.
“I spoke with some of your students,” Dr. Elliott said, his voice dropping, growing warm and honeyed. “They say you’ve really started to warm up and connect with them. That you are passionate about the material.” His thumb stirred ever so lightly over my collarbone, the lightest of movements, moving slightly downward toward the warmth of my chest. “A passionate woman,” he whispered so quietly it was almost like he’d said nothing at all.
I stepped away, leaving his thumb flickering there in midair. I nodded as if he’d merely commended me for my good work, walking back slowly to my classroom.
It occurred to me then that Dr. Elliott had likely been aware of the circumstances behind my teaching application all along.
• •
When I got home that afternoon, I heard voices in my kitchen. The Urban Hiker and my cousin sat at the kitchen table, a plate of cheese and crackers before them.
“Grace!” my cousin said. “We thought you might want a snack with us!”
He gestured, generous, to the spread on the table. The cheese was a special favorite of mine—overpriced but delicious. It was a cheese I tended to ration to myself in delectable tidbits rather than eating enormous chunks as my cousin and the Urban Hiker were doing now.
The Urban Hiker took another bite and leaned back, satisfied, propping his feet up on one of the empty chairs. He smiled at me knowingly, like we were old friends. My cousin took a great gulp of sparkling water from the supply I kept chilled in my produce drawer.
“No,” I said. A sudden heat rose up in my chest. It had been such a long day. My voice grew louder. “No more, Kevin.”
“What’s wrong?” my cousin asked, wearing a look of genuine surprise.
“What’s wrong is you’re a thief. That’s what you are, Kevin. You steal things. I wasn’t going to say anything, but now I can’t find Grandma’s earrings. For God’s sake,” my voice cracked slightly. “I’m your cousin.”
It was true: for a while now, I’d been missing things—lots of little things, mostly. First it was mainly foodstuff: a loaf of bread almost completely gone, a new carton of orange juice with only a swig left, my favorite crackers, almost gone. But I hadn’t been able to find my little gold clasp bracelet for weeks now. And the pearl earrings from my grandmother? Where were they? I’d assumed at first I’d temporarily misplaced these items—I told myself this, at least. I knew my cousin occasionally helped himself to my kitchen, and that was OK, but now this?
“Please leave,” I said to my cousin, my voice shaking. “I want him gone too.”
I jabbed my finger toward the Urban Hiker, Richard, who flinched as if I’d slapped him.
“Grace,” my cousin said, “whatever’s missing I can replace.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I was crying now. “Leave me alone. And get this bum out of my house. Both of you. Now get out.”
The Urban Hiker was already rising from his chair, pushing it neatly into the table. I watched him as he took his plate over to the sink, polite, and rinsed it off. He tried to catch my gaze, and I saw that his face was pained, abashed. I looked away.
“Grace,” my cousin said, and it was his placating voice, practiced and smooth. Already, he was handing me a glass of sparkling water, brushing hair from my forehead, running a ticklish finger down the back of my neck. Because I was weak, I was letting him.
“I’m leaving,” the Urban Hiker said. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I should go.”
• •
Later, of course, after the school year finished, long after my cousin had disappeared, leaving me with a basement full of boxes and busted laptops and weird costume jewelry, his three months of rent unpaid, an FBI investigator knocked on my door.
“This was the last known residence of Kevin Michael Clarkson?” the man asked me. He wore dark Ray-Ban aviators, like an FBI agent from a movie.
I nodded. That was my cousin’s name. At least, one of them. It turned out he’d had several.
I let the investigator poke around the basement while upstairs, I fixed us both a cup of tea. He sat for a while upstairs, sipping tea wearily. He told me things that made me realize I would probably never hear from my cousin again.
I found a gold clasp bracelet I was certain was mine listed for sale on eBay. I placed a bid but didn’t win.
One day that summer, long after they’d both been gone, I thought I saw the Urban Hiker once again at my favorite cafe. There he was: the grayish curling hair too long down his neck, his big squareish shoulders, a pack tucked beside him on the floor. He was reading the paper, his back to me.
I approached, unsure what I would say: Offer an apology? Announce to him that we might, at last, be the friends we’d been destined to become. Declare that I’d gotten things all wrong, and that this had become the story of my life: I’d misread everything, mistaken enemies for friends and friends for enemies.
When I tapped his shoulder and he turned, he was someone else entirely, an unfamiliar man wearing a different haggard face. But it was too late then because I was already hugging him—hugging him so long and hard and with such abandon that anyone who looked at us just then would have thought I’d been waiting for him, and him alone, all along.
