Chapter 10
My deepest wish had been to return to Summit, but the next morning, I was glad for the first time that I didn’t have to.
My mind felt shattered. I’d find myself standing in the middle of the living room, forgetting why I’d headed there in the first place.
I put two eggs into a pot of water and set the pot to boil, and only remembered an hour later, when I smelled something burning. The water had evaporated.
Benjamin would be home from school by noon.
I should have been wondering how his exam went, and whether this would be the first semester in his life when he got all As and Bs instead of mostly Cs.
Instead, I was only wondering about his relationship with Izzy, if it was a relationship at all, and not some insignificant exchanges of flirting and teasing.
Around ten o’clock, needing to clear my head before I tackled my most important mental chore of the day, I tried going for a jog around our new neighborhood, but the heat and humidity were stifling.
I felt like every person peeking out a window or pulling out of their driveway was looking at me as if to say, Do you belong here?
Even a working woman in overalls, sliding open the side door of her panel van—GREEN THUMB PLANT THERAPY—turned to stare.
Other neighborhood women ran or speed-walked in the same kind of tank top and shorts I was wearing, but something about me must have given it away—I didn’t have perfect caramel highlights adding pizzazz to my dull brown hair, or my eyebrows lacked definition, or a crease was forming in my brow even though I was only thirty-seven years old.
Unless I was just being paranoid, the way my own mother was when she claimed some of the local roads were confusing on purpose, to keep newcomers out.
Mom wouldn’t have guessed I’d end up on this part of the North Shore, within a few blocks of Sheridan Road, the lakeside drive on which she frequently got turned around, attempting to drive the prettier route from Waukegan to Chicago.
In places, Sheridan Road just disappears.
You have to look for signs, and where there are none, you have to trust that if you keep going in a generally north-south direction, with Lake Michigan nearby, you’ll stumble onto Sheridan again.
I needed to feel the same modest confidence that we’d all understand soon what had happened to Sidney and Izzy.
There were no dead ends except the ones of my own making.
None of my fellow teachers had texted with questions about my suspension or intel about any investigations, though I kept checking my phone.
When it came to Izzy, Dean Duplass had provided a rough location, and she’d mentioned a note, and some sort of drug.
I tried to think what something “more complicated” than suicide would be, and the only thing that came to mind were those cases of kids being pressured into injuring themselves by sadistic online groups.
Maybe it wasn’t a group, only a person. But what kind of person would have so much influence on a girl as confident as Izzy?
And how was it connected with whatever happened to Sidney, who’d simply overdosed?
No, not simply, I reminded myself. None of this was simple.
When I got home, I traded out my sweat-soaked tank top for a looser T-shirt and dug through the box I’d brought home from Summit.
At the bottom I found a legal pad where I’d recorded what I’d remembered from the only conversation I ever had with Izzy, on the bench outside school.
These weren’t privileged client notes, per se; she wasn’t yet a client.
In my mind’s eye, I’d jotted only a few words.
Once I had the legal pad on my knees, I saw there were more than a few words.
I’d filled up a whole page. It was proof that she’d gotten under my skin.
Proof that I thought she might be in trouble.
Proof that I hoped she’d come to my office for a formal session, even if I feared that she wouldn’t.
The first word I saw, now, at the top of Izzy’s page was Manny.
That was Izzy’s jock boyfriend. I’d forgotten his name. Izzy said he was jealous. She admitted she did things at times to make him jealous, and when I’d asked her why, she didn’t avoid the question.
“Because I’m pretty sure we’re breaking up soon? Because I’ve . . . I don’t know . . . I’ve outgrown him? And when we fight then we make up, and that part is the only time I really feel close to him?”
The cops definitely needed to know about Manny.
But there, in the middle of my page of notes, was the more interesting confession. Izzy had also mentioned an “older man.”
I remembered asking, “Is your boyfriend jealous of this other relationship?”
“He doesn’t know.”
But she’d just said she made Manny jealous on purpose. But not jealous about this person?
On the legal pad, I’d written: Concurrent relationship. Age? Not student?
“Older man” could mean anything. It could mean eighteen. It could mean thirty.
An older man.
I’d written no full sentences, only single words or phrases to nudge my memory. Below the questions about the older man’s identity, I’d skipped several lines and written Shrimp. A third person. She hadn’t told me his age, only that he went to Summit.
“So,” I recalled saying to Izzy, “you like to make your boyfriend jealous, it’s a game you both play. But he doesn’t know about this older man. You say that he ‘can’t know.’ Then . . . ?”
“He knows about the Shrimp. That’s what Manny calls him.”
“But you like ‘the Shrimp’?”
“Not that way. He’s disgusting! That’s the whole point or it wouldn’t work.”
“By ‘work,’ you mean make Manny jealous. Because this other boy is beneath you?”
“It can’t be someone Manny is threatened by. That would be serious. This isn’t like that.”
Izzy didn’t want her boyfriend to know she was fooling around with the older man, or planning to. But Manny could know she was fooling around with the Shrimp. In fact, it was because of the Shrimp that Manny didn’t think to suspect the real threat to her affection.
When I worded the situation back to her, she objected.
“I wouldn’t call it affection,” she corrected me. “Didn’t you ‘play the field’ when you were my age?”
I could tell by the way she said it that no one called it “playing the field” anymore.
“My mom likes to pretend that people her age were so careful about sex, but you guys didn’t even talk about consent.
I did a paper on it. How there was a college in the nineties that drafted a consent policy and they were ridiculed for it, even on Saturday Night Live.
Was it weird back then, everyone thinking a guy could fuck a girl even if she didn’t say yes? ”
I was trying to decide the best way to answer when she added, “Oh my god. Wait a minute. Were you dating in the nineties?”
“No,” I said, smiling. “I was in grade school. But for you, I’m sure my dating years would still seem a long time ago. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were still together. Beyoncé was still part of Destiny’s Child . . .”
None of that computed. Then she tilted her head, interest returning as she examined me.
“You were pretty, I bet. It doesn’t last long, does it? That’s what I hear.” She made a sweeping gesture down the length of her body, like a television game show hostess drawing attention to a prize. “Evidently, I’m in my prime. I’m supposed to enjoy it while I can.”
She’d said it wearily. Maybe ironically. But I think she believed some part of it, too. Izzy was involved in a three-ring circus of suitors. Or something more complicated. A secret infidelity, an unhealthy game. The Shrimp was a decoy.
I could remember, even now, the way Izzy had leaned back and looked up at the oak trees over our heads, their gnarled branches forming a thick yellowing canopy, and how she had blown a long, slow blue-gray stream of smoke that we both watched rise and dissipate, while I tried to find the words to say, You think you’ve got this all under control, but trust me, you don’t.
“My life is fucking boring,” she said. “And Manny is the worst of all.”
“So maybe you should break up with him.”
“My new friend isn’t boring.”
“The Shrimp?”
She laughed, which I took to mean no, the other one. The older man.
“Well, this was a mistake,” she said.
“Can we talk again?” I asked. “Make an appointment. Please? I want to hear how you’re doing.”
But most of that wasn’t written on the legal pad.
It was all in my head, a mix of half-remembered dialogue and conflicted feelings, because much as I worried for Izzy, I also disliked her, which made me question myself yet again.
It wasn’t in my job description to like or dislike. My job was to care.
I thought back to what Benjamin had said. Girls use guys. Maybe they did, sometimes, but maybe that was their way of asserting power in a world of angry, frustrated, “dangerous” men.
I heard the sound of familiar steps, coming up the walk. The front door swung open. I flipped over the legal pad and jumped up like I’d just remembered I needed to defrost something for dinner.