Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sophie
Some part of me believed they wouldn't actually do it, right up until the letter is in my hands telling me they did.
It's not even a phone call.
After years in that building, after every late afternoon I stayed grading by the light of one lamp, after the laminated name tags and the reading nook I built with my own money out of a bookshelf I sanded down myself—they sent a letter.
I read it standing at Njal's kitchen counter with Hoagie leaning his whole warm weight against my shins.
The words don't do me the courtesy of being cruel. They're worse than cruel.
In light of the ongoing concerns, and following consultation with counsel, the Board has determined that continued employment is not in the best interest of the district or its students.
Not in the best interest of the students.
I taught those students to tie their shoes and sound out because and sit on the rug like a friend instead of a tornado.
I held a bucket while one of them threw up blueberry yogurt and told him he was brave for making it almost to the trash can.
And the district has determined I’m not in their best interest, on the strength of pictures a program made of a woman who doesn't exist.
I think about my classroom.
Somebody else is in it now, or will be by Monday—some substitute with a rolling cart, teaching my kids out of my lesson plans, sitting in the chair I duct-taped the wheel back onto.
They'll find the height chart on the doorframe where I marked every one of them in September and promised we'd measure again in May.
Nobody's going to measure them in May.
Nobody's going to explain to a six-year-old why Miss Crockett left without saying goodbye, and the kids will make up their own reasons, the way kids do, and some of them will decide it was something they did.
I set the letter down on the counter, very flat, very smooth, like it's a living thing I don't want to startle.
Then I go out to the porch because I don't want to be inside the house when I make the sound I'm about to make.
Njal finds me out there twenty minutes later.
I've stopped crying by then.
I'm just sitting on the top step with my arms around my knees, watching a wasp work the underside of the railing, feeling scooped out and strange, and he comes through the screen door and sits down beside me without a word and waits.
"They fired me," I tell the yard. "By letter. Not in the best interest of the students."
He doesn't say I'm sorry, because he's learned I don't want it, and he doesn't tell me it's going to be okay, because he doesn't insult me with things neither of us can promise.
"You loved that job," he says instead.
"I was good at it." My voice comes out flat and far away.
"I was so good at it, Njal. I'm not saying that to brag.
I'm saying it because it was the one thing in my whole life I never doubted.
I doubted God, and I doubted my family, and I doubted whether I was allowed to want anything, but I never once doubted that I was a good teacher.
And they took it away from me. They put it in a letter and decided it wasn't true anymore. "
His hand settles on the back of my neck, warm and heavy, and I lean into it without deciding to.
"It's still true," he says. "A letter from a coward doesn't make it less true. It just means they don't get you anymore. Those kids don't get you anymore. That's their loss, and it's a big one, and they'll spend years not knowing how big."
I sit in the warmth of his hand, and I want to lean my whole weight into it, to let him be right, to let one person's version of me be the true one for once.
But underneath the want is a cold flat current that's been building for days, and I feel it pulling at me now, and I'm too tired to swim against it.
* * *
The phone call from Dag and Esperanza comes that afternoon.
Njal puts it on speaker on the kitchen table, the two of us leaning over it like it's a fire we're trying to warm our hands at.
"First," Esperanza says, and her voice is the kind that's used to walking into rooms and changing the temperature of them, "I want you to hear me say this plainly, Sophie, because you've had a lot of people lately tell you ugly things in careful language.
So here's some careful language that's on your side for once.
They terminated you in writing, on the basis of fabricated evidence, after we'd already put them on formal notice that the evidence was fabricated and demanded they preserve it. Do you understand what they did?"
"They fired me," I say.
"They handed us a lawsuit." Dag's voice now, dry and certain.
"Wrongful termination. Defamation. They built the whole case for us and signed it.
The minute they couldn't produce a clean chain of custody on those images and fired you anyway, they stopped being a school board with a problem and became a defendant with a checkbook. "
"We're going to sue them," Esperanza says, "and we're going to win, and it's not going to be close. I've handled a dozen of these. This is the cleanest I've seen. By the time we're done, the number on the check is going to have commas in it that surprise you."
I should feel something. Relief, maybe. Vindication.
Instead, I just feel the cold current pull a little harder.
"What about who made the pictures?" I hear myself ask. "The actual person. Do we know who did this to me yet?"
A pause on the line. I watch Njal's jaw go still.
"We're working on it," Dag says, and the pause before it does more talking than the words do.
The one that means not in front of the client. "The production demand has a clock on it. When they fail to meet it—and they will fail—a lot of doors open. We'll know more soon."
"Soon," I repeat.
"Soon," Esperanza says, gentler now. "You hang on, Sophie. You've got more people in your corner than you think."
That's exactly the problem, I don't say. The people in my corner are what's killing me.
I make it through dinner.
I make it through Njal cooking again, through the careful normalcy of it, through Hoagie begging at the table and getting a piece of chicken he didn't earn.
I smile in the right places, and I hold it together right up until we're doing the dishes, and Njal says, easy as anything, "Bjorn's coming down this weekend. Wants to officially meet you. And Ma's been asking when she gets to feed you."
The cold current finally pulls me under.
"You should tell them not to come."
He stops with a plate in his hand. "Why would I do that?"
"Because—" I set down the dish towel. My hands aren't steady.
"Because look at me, Njal. Look at what I am right now.
I'm a woman who got fired by letter. I'm a name in a Facebook post that four hundred people shared.
I'm what they whisper about in the cereal aisle.
And you want to bring your brother down here, and your mother, and stake your whole family's name to mine like I'm not radioactive. "
"You're not radioactive."
"I'm a child predator, Njal!" It comes out of me too loud in the small kitchen, and I hear myself say the word and hate it. I keep going anyway because it's been building for days and it has to come out somewhere.
"That's what they think I am. That's what the whole town thinks, and the whole internet, and my own father.
And you want to drive your family straight into the middle of it.
Your club already took my case. Your president already knows my name.
What happens to all of that when this doesn't go away?
When it follows you? When somebody runs your club's name through a search and there I am, attached to it forever, the teacher who?—"
"Stop."
"—I won't do it." My voice breaks. "I won't be the reason you get dragged back down. You clawed your way out of somewhere most people don't come back from. You told me that yourself. And I’m not going to be why the world looks at you and sees the man standing next to a monster."
The kitchen goes silent except for the water running, which he reaches over and shuts off.
He sets the plate down.
He turns to face me fully, and his face isn't hurt, the way I braced for.
It's something steadier and harder than hurt.
"You done?" he asks.
"Njal—"
"No, I want to know if you're done, because I'm going to say some things back, and I need you to actually hear them.
" He waits. I don't say anything. "Okay.
First, you don't get to decide for me what's good for me.
There was a whole town and a whole family deciding things for you your entire life—what you could want, what you were worth, what kind of woman you were allowed to be—and I will not stand in this kitchen and watch you do the exact same thing to me in the name of love.
You don't get to protect me by making my choices for me.
That's not protection. That's just the old cage with your hands on the bars instead of theirs. "
I open my mouth. Nothing comes.
"Second." His voice drops, goes rough. "You think I don't know what radioactive is?
Sophie. I killed three men. I spent months on a locked ward not knowing what day it was.
The world had every reason to look at me and see a monster, and you want to know what my family did?
They drove an hour every week to sit with the monster until he came back to himself.
That's what we are. We don't run from the hard shit in life.
We sit down next to it. So, when I tell you my mother wants to feed you and my brother wants to meet you, what I'm telling you is they already know exactly what they're walking into, and they're coming anyway, because that's the whole point of having people. "
The tears are coming again and I can't stop them.