Ellsbeth
She examined herself in the mirror before she got into the shower. Her eyes were watery and small in her swollen face. Her skin was sallow and pale, with recently discovered divots of cellulite clinging to her upper thighs. Her hair hung lank, several months past when it needed to be cut.
She had been tempted to text Rawlins, or better yet just show up at his house.
It was almost a physical impulse, to get away from her computer screen and dank apartment, from the take-out containers building into a precarious tower in her small trash can, away from thoughts of obscuration and from scanned photos that had long since blurred in her mind into meaningless strips of light and darkness.
She wanted physical exertion. She wanted a hand around her throat, a palm leaving the skin of her ass tingling and red.
She wanted to leave her body completely, to disappear into the control of someone else. She wanted Rawlins.
The second floor of the arcane graduate department was where the school’s endowment became visible.
The carpet was clean and plush, the bookshelves lining the lecture hall were thick cherrywood, and the hors d’oeuvres were being passed by university employees in pressed white linen uniforms. The lecture was taking place in the room they called the Library, although the leather-bound volumes lining every wall seemed to have never been touched.
“The real question is what he’s going to do now.”
A few other members of the cohort were gathered near the bay window to Ellsbeth’s left, standing with their heads huddled together. Gracie, Rachel, and Mary-Abigail. “I mean, it’s not like he’s ever going to get a job. He killed people,” Mary-Abigail said.
“Well, come on,” Gracie said, “It was an accident. It wasn’t like murder-murder.
And you’re pretending they didn’t convict him in the first place because there was a witch hunt happening against arcane stuff in general.
It’s not like that was Max’s fault. It was part of the zeitgeist. Magic maligned. He was a scapegoat.”
“No, no, no,” Mary-Abigail said, backtracking immediately when faced with Gracie’s challenge. “I mean, I think it’s a good thing he was paroled. I’m just wondering what he’s, like, going to do.”
“He can probably just get a normal job,” Gracie said, looking at her nails. “The academic job market is shit even for people who actually completed their DAAs. Like, good luck to any of us trying to find tenure-track positions somewhere other than Bumfuck, Nowhere.”
“And I actually heard Bumfuck no longer offers tenure.” It was Valentine. Ellsbeth hadn’t seen him standing behind the girls. They all laughed.
“But isn’t Maxwell, like, still a felon?” Rachel asked. “I know he got parole, but you still can’t get a normal job or whatever when you have a record.”
“Personally,” Valentine said, “I’m shocked they gave him parole at all. Have you seen photos of him? He looks like a creep.”
“Classic school-shooter vibes,” Gracie agreed.
Rachel was the fastest to pull out her phone. “Ohmygod, you’re so right,” she said. She flashed her screen toward the rest of the group, and Ellsbeth caught a glimpse of the photo. It was a mugshot of a teenage boy with dark stringy hair and familiar eyes.
“I’m just hoping he doesn’t show up here today,” Valentine said.
Rachel gave a mock-squeal and slapped his arm. “Why would he be here?”
“To see his mom, obviously! Of course Lennox is just doing this lecture like business as usual today. Ice-cold, that woman.”
“Did you know Rawlins was his adviser when Max was at Newlyn?” Gracie said. “They were apparently super close. I think Rawlins took a sabbatical after it all happened.”
“Well, yeah,” Valentine said. “So would I. If my student murdered someone.”
Ellsbeth stood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you talking about Maxwell Keene?”
They all turned to look at her.
“Yeah,” Gracie said. “He just got paroled, apparently.”
“Are you okay?” Rachel said. “I mean, no one has seen you outside of class for, like, weeks.”
“Oh.” Ellsbeth tried to hide the crumpled program and her quick-bitten nails. “I’ve just been working on my thesis. It’s been kicking my ass. And you know, winter.”
“Seasonal affective disorder,” Rachel said, nodding sympathetically. “What? It’s real!”
“Do you think Lennox will bring it up?” Valentine said.
“SAD?” said Rachel.
“No—her son,” said Gracie. “And not a chance. I don’t even know if she publicly talks about having a kid at all. Even if he weren’t a felon, it’s not like Lennox gives Leave It to Beaver vibes.”
“What about the dad?” asked Ellsbeth.
“Oh, he’s a nobody,” said Valentine. “Something Keene. Bradley or Ben or something. You can google him. He wrote one book twenty years ago, about owls or falcons or something nobody gives a shit about. Lennox has his balls in a jar on her desk.”
An imperceptible shift in the energy in the room alerted people to the fact that it was time for people to take their seats. Ellsbeth scooted down the row to make room for the rest of the group.
Lennox approached the podium, her shoulders pulled back and a soft practiced smile on her face.
Her hair was enviably thick, dyed an expensive chestnut brown.
Even in her mid-sixties, fine lines tracing the corners of her eyes, she conveyed a sense of professional glamour that Ellsbeth had imagined was impossible outside of movie stars and French women.
She was stunning in a perfectly tailored navy dress.
Ellsbeth could only imagine how beautiful she had been in her youth, as a wunderkind professor at Yale.
Rawlins had been at Yale as an undergraduate, hadn’t he?
A nagging memory of an email Rawlins had once sent tugged at Ellsbeth’s fingers, and she tried to pull out her phone as subtly as she could while Lennox began her introductory remarks.
(Valentine was right: There was no mention of Maxwell Keene or the parole, just polite greetings and a segue into the recent promising developments in the field of perpetual motion.)
She searched in her email account. There were months of correspondence for her to scroll through between her and Rawlins, mostly about her thesis, but also emails that had been so intimate, so explicit that even just seeing familiar subject lines made her cross her legs.
She tilted her screen to make sure no one nearby could see what she was doing, and scrolled all the way back to September. And then there it was.
When I studied under Dr. Lennox, she gave me an analogy that I have embraced: an adviser is a student’s opponent more than her ally.
Rawlins had studied under Lennox, possibly when he was an undergraduate.
Ellsbeth’s face began to tingle strangely.
Lennox continued talking, but nothing she was saying seemed to make any sense; the words simply did not connect to one another anymore.
The letters on Ellsbeth’s phone inflated and blurred.
She closed one eye, and then the other. Rawlins had studied under Lennox.
He’d had an affair with a professor when he was an undergraduate.
She had been a professor at Yale. Rawlins had gone to Yale.
And Maxwell Keene’s eyes looked very familiar.
“Sorry,” Ellsbeth whispered, standing. “I just—bathroom.”
Rawlins had come to the lecture after all.
He had arrived late and was standing at the back of the room with an untouched cup of white wine balanced in his hand.
Graying bags sagged beneath his eyes. His lips were colorless.
Even his hair looked fairer, as if some vital life had been drained from him.
She stared as she made her way out the back of the lecture hall, trying to catch his eye.
When he finally looked at her, it was a blank expression, flat and listless as a lake on a windless day.
Still, when Ellsbeth made it into the hallway, Rawlins followed her out of the Library, holding the door as it closed to soften the sound.
“You studied under Lennox,” Ellsbeth said.
Rawlins’s mouth opened and then shut again. “We should talk in my office,” he said.
They walked there in silence, steps softly echoing on the carpeted floor.
“So. You studied under Lennox,” Ellsbeth repeated when they were inside.
“I did.”
“And you had an affair with her. When you were an undergraduate.”
Rawlins blinked. He ran one hand through his hair and put the other in his pocket before he thought better and withdrew it. He looked at Ellsbeth as if he was waiting for her to say something else, but she didn’t. “Yes,” Rawlins said finally.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Why would I tell you that?” he said, and a stone settled deep inside Ellsbeth’s chest. She felt hot tears tingling her sinuses, even though she wasn’t entirely sure why she would be crying.
“Maxwell Keene was paroled, did you hear?” she said.
“I did.” Rawlins looked behind her at the door, and tried to move past her. Ellsbeth tried to close the space between them. “Excuse me,” he said. Rawlins’s eyes became vacant. He looked right through her. Ellsbeth took a step closer.
“He’s your son, isn’t he?” Ellsbeth said. “Tell me. He’s your son. I can see it. He looks like you.”
“Of course not,” he hissed. “What a ridiculous thing to say.”
Rawlins’s face flushed, and he turned to Ellsbeth with a shocking flash of rage that she glimpsed for only a moment before his face became a blank, waxen mask again. “I think we should go back to the lecture.”
“Does he know?” Ellsbeth said.
Rawlins walked past her, leaving his office door ajar and leaving Ellsbeth standing dumbfounded and alone.
She didn’t go back to the lecture. She walked down the stairs of the department building, out through the double doors, and into the chilly blast of December air.
The grass of the courtyard was stiff with frost and crunched under Ellsbeth’s shoes with a satisfying squeak.
Of course Rawlins didn’t owe her anything.
He didn’t need to tell her about his past. He didn’t need to reveal any of his secrets.
She was the one who had told him that all she wanted was sex.
But maybe she hadn’t quite believed that herself.
Because now, as she warmed her hands in the pockets of her too-thin coat, passing students with their faces hidden in oversized scarves, she realized it was entirely possible that Rawlins was a stranger.