Belzhar (20 page)

“Yes, it’s true,” says Dr. Gant. No wonder he doesn’t care that he caught me in the boys’ dorm. This news makes everything else momentarily irrelevant.

“How did they find him?”

“The detective was interviewed. It was a new detective; he’d just started. And he saw some notes about . . . a lead? And he looked into it. Something like that, I can’t quite remember. André was being held by a man in a house not too far from DC. They made an arrest. I don’t know many details yet; no one does. It will all come out.” He shakes his head, distracted. “Poor Sierra,” he says.

THE VERY LAST SESSION OF SPECIAL TOPICS IN
English ought to be a kind of celebration, but it’s not and it can’t be. Though we’ve gotten through the semester together, in a class like no other we’ve taken, and though our lives have been transformed, we’re missing someone. And now that André has been found, Sierra’s absence is unacceptable. On the last day, it can be felt powerfully around the oval oak table. I think maybe I feel it most powerfully of all.

Mrs. Quenell knows how upset we are. She’s upset too. But still she’s brought a bakery box with her, and she places it on the table and says, “Red velvet cupcakes for everyone, to match your red leather journals.” When she opens the box, there are only four cupcakes inside. One for each of us.

“Thanks, Mrs. Q,” Casey finally says, because she doesn’t want us to come across as rude.

“I do know how you feel,” says Mrs. Quenell. “And believe me, I feel it too.”

André Stokes has been a big story in the news. Over the phone my mom and dad have filled me in on what they’ve read online and seen on TV. Obviously none of us here has had access to any of that, except for the newspaper, which is delivered to The Wooden Barn first thing every morning.

“She should be home with her brother,” I say in what comes out like a wail.

“Yes, she should,” Mrs. Quenell agrees.

They need each other, André and Sierra. Whatever he went through in his captivity was dark and frightening; I can’t even imagine how frightening. He will have “a long road ahead of him,” as the experts always say. But at least there’s a road. His family loves him, and that’s got to help him over time. Of course, I don’t know anything about this at all, but I know that he and Sierra were always so close. If they were together at home they could help each other; I’m sure of it.

Then Griffin says, “You know what, Mrs. Q? This being the last class and everything, I’m just going to come out and ask you something. No one is going to want me to do this, but sorry, guys, I have to.”

“Hey,” says Marc. “What—”

“She can think what she likes, Marc. I really don’t give a shit anymore,” Griffin says. “Sorry for the language,” he adds quickly. I sit there waiting to see where he’s going with this. Griffin speaks so much more freely these days. “Mrs. Q,” he says, sitting up straighter, “do you know what happens when we write in our journals? Do you
really
know?”

A pulse jumps in the side of Griffin’s face, and I get the feeling he’s as shocked as we are that he’s asked her this. It’s reckless. But we’re all out of ideas now, and this is it, crunch time, the zero hour, whatever cliché you want to call it. Class is about to be over for good, and Sierra’s still in Belzhar.

The silence is elongated and feels endless. No one takes their eyes off Mrs. Quenell’s face, which at first looks kind of neutral, then as if it’s trying to harden itself, then suddenly it looks softer. Then finally it collapses.

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

We can’t quite believe it. I’m still not sure we’re talking about the same thing.

“And you planned it?” says Griffin.

Mrs. Quenell plays with her watch, turning the band around and around on her narrow wrist. Griffin has unnerved her. “It’s not like that,” she says. “You make it sound devious, Griffin. It isn’t. It wasn’t. That’s not it at all.”

“So what can you tell us?” I ask. We’re begging her, really. We’re actually begging Mrs. Quenell, an elderly woman we know very little about except that she’s a great teacher and has integrity. She wouldn’t let us fall under the weight of our problems. She wouldn’t baby us. She had respect for us, even as we hated ourselves and everyone else, and thought nothing would ever feel good again.

Now here we are, on this last day. In under forty minutes she’ll leave us for good, but before then, we have to know exactly what she knows, and what it means.

So she tells us. “It’s actually kind of a personal story,” Mrs. Quenell says. “I’ve never told it to any of my students before, though they’ve often asked me what I know or don’t know.

“First of all, I can’t say that I exactly ‘know’ what the experience of writing in the journals is like. It’s your experience, not mine. And I didn’t want to get too involved, because it might have ended up calling attention to the class, and hurting my students. So I did an exhausting balancing act for a very long time. But I’m leaving here tomorrow for good. And before I go, against my better judgment I’ll let you know what I do know, which isn’t all that much, I’m afraid.

“I’ll start with a little history that I think is relevant.” She abruptly stops talking, and the pause goes on for so long that it seems as if she’s changed her mind. But then she says, “When I was about your age, I went through a very difficult time. I suppose you could call it a breakdown.”

Oh.
That
kind of difficult. The kind that some people at this school know something about.

“I was sent to a psychiatric hospital near Boston,” Mrs. Quenell goes on. “And while I was there, I was very withdrawn. I talked to no one. Then one day a somewhat older patient, a college girl, was admitted. I rarely heard her talk, but every day, when it was time for medication, the nurses called out to us by our first and last names, and I took note of her name, because I thought it was unusual. We never really spoke, except once, when we were sitting at dinner and I passed her a platter of food and she said, ‘Thank you, Veronica.’ She knew my name. And for a split second she looked at me the way an older, wiser person sometimes looks at a younger one. With kindness, and without condescension.”

Right, I think. That’s the way Mrs. Quenell often looks at
us.

“Do you know what became of her, Mrs. Q?” I ask.

She turns to me, seeming to force herself to focus on the here and now. “Yes. She got better. And I got better too. And I would probably never have known that, or thought of her again, for I really didn’t like to think about that painful period in my life.

“But then, years later, when I was newly married and a very young teacher here at The Wooden Barn, I came upon a poem in the
New Yorker
, and something clicked. It was
her.
I was so pleased that she’d come out of that dark time and done something with her life. Become a writer.” Mrs. Quenell pauses. “And then, several years after I first saw that poem, I read that she’d died, which made me quite sad. She was very young. Only thirty. That may not seem young to you now, but one day it will.”

Listening to Mrs. Quenell tell us this, I feel a stirring of recognition, but at first I think I’m just confused, and I tell myself to wait, to just try to take it in.

“And then,” she says, “after a while the details of her death came out—that it was a suicide—and over time the story got much more attention, and then so many people were affected by her life and her tragic death. And mostly, of course, by her work.”

“Plath,” Casey says quietly.

Mrs. Quenell nods and looks out the window again, into the snow-blurred distance and the lucid past. “Yes,” she says. She seems much older all of a sudden. “She was an extraordinary talent. As all of you are well aware.”

No one says a word. We’re shocked, thinking about how Sylvia Plath, the writer we so casually refer to around this table as “Plath,” was not only someone we’ve studied and feel like we know, but was also someone our teacher did know, at least a little, a long time ago.

“But she suffered from the disease of depression,” says Mrs. Quenell, “and they didn’t have the knowledge or the medication then that they have now. Though even now, so many people are still lost. Everything was different then, and the subject could barely be discussed in public. People thought it was a sign of weakness.

“Eventually her journals were published. And through them, it was clear that she believed in writing everything down. It was as if her motto was ‘Words matter.’ And I believe that to be true too. Anyone who becomes a Plath expert, as you all are, realizes that what she had, first and foremost, was a voice.”

Yes, that’s what Sylvia Plath had. I always hear it in my head when I read her.

But she couldn’t come back from what she went through; from where she went. And it makes me ache for her, this writer stopped in a long-ago time. This person whose voice I hear, even as I move away from what I went through myself.

“One year,” says Mrs. Quenell, “I thought to give my students their own journals to write in. I was off antiquing with my late husband, Henry, and I bought a box of them in bulk at an antique store near here that no longer exists. I hoped that writing their feelings down—in addition to all the reading and essay writing that I required—would help them.”

“And did it?” Marc asks.

“You know, it seemed to,” Mrs. Quenell says. “The students said the journals changed their lives. They burst into class and chattered on about how
powerful
the journals were. At first I thought they were just speaking metaphorically. But after a while I became convinced it was more than that. I took one of the empty journals home and wrote in it myself, to see.

“But nothing unusual happened to me, so I was confused. Perhaps I didn’t
need
the journal in the way my students did. In the way that you all did.

“I started to think that the journals only release their so-called power under the right circumstances. Of course, believing in any of this goes against everything I’ve ever been taught. The practical ways of the world.

“And yet, and yet,” she says. “One after another, my students tried to explain that something was happening to them. At first I was skeptical, and then I became afraid. But then I saw that they were getting better. Writing in the journals really did seem to be a form of release. And so what was the harm? I couldn’t quite understand what they were going through, but they all assured me the experience was life-changing, and in a good way. So I let it be.”

“Unfuckingbelievable,” says Griffin. He’s really pushing it here, but it hardly matters now. “How do you choose who gets into the class?” he asks.

“Every year,” she says, “I look over the students’ histories, trying to put together a group who all seem to have . . . similar kinds of stumbling blocks. And then I match them with a writer who might help them. One year we had a very anxious, alienated group, and we studied J. D. Salinger. That was a good class, though they all talked
way
too much, and no one really listened to anyone else.

“Another year, the students needed to be more self-reliant, so we read Ralph Waldo Emerson. And all of you were in the middle of a million things, and yet were isolated. Plath seemed a very good choice. But it’s never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don’t think. It’s also the way the students
are
with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire—whether it’s a book that’s already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in. You all know what I’m talking about, I think,” she says.

“Yes,” I say. And then I remember Sierra. “But sometimes,” I add tentatively, “the class—or at least the journal—isn’t safe for everyone.”

“You’re referring to Sierra,” Mrs. Quenell says, her voice suddenly weary. I nod. “That was definitely the journal?” And I nod again. “I was afraid that was the case,” she says.

“She’s
stuck
there, Mrs. Q,” I say. “See, she found a way to
stay
, and at first it was a choice we respected—”

“But
now,
” Casey says, “we can’t get her back to tell her that André’s safe.”

“No one has ever stayed before,” says Mrs. Quenell in the barest whisper.

It’s the first time I see that she truly does understand. She knows what it might mean to “stay.” She fully believes now that there’s another place, accessed only through the journals. She
gets
it.

“In the entire history of Special Topics in English,” Mrs. Quenell says, “everyone has handed back their journals on the last day, and has gone on to thrive.” She looks extremely pale as she speaks. “But this time, I’m afraid I’ve caused something terrible to happen. I should tell Dr. Gant right now.” She stands unsteadily. “Inform him of what I’ve been doing all these years while I was entrusted with young minds. I should turn myself in. There can be . . . a tribunal. Or whatever they want to call it.”

“No,” we all say. “
Stop.
”

Everyone is alarmed. Mrs. Quenell was all set to retire, to travel, and now her plans are potentially ruined. I can’t bear for her to feel guilty about what happened to Sierra. “It’s not your fault,” I say quickly. “You’ve been trying to do good. And you did do good, Mrs. Q. What happened to Sierra is a freak occurrence, I guess. You’re an amazing teacher. Don’t tell Dr. Gant. It won’t make a difference. It won’t help Sierra. He’s not part of this. This is . . . ours,” I say.

And it is. It’s our story and no one else’s.

Mrs. Quenell calms down and agrees that she won’t say anything to anyone. “You know,” she says finally, “I’ve always had an idea in the back of my head that I would teach Sylvia’s work to my very last class of students. I would teach it, and then I would be done. There were some years when I
almost
considered teaching it, but it wasn’t exactly right, and besides, I truly wanted to wait. And then this year, all of you came along, and I knew this was the right class, and the right moment.”

Special Topics in English is about to be over for good. I feel choked up, because I know that we will never all sit here together like this again, and that Mrs. Quenell will soon be gone. And I feel this way because of what’s happened to me, because I’ve let go of so much. Because I’ve changed.

And I also feel this way because of Sierra. Leaving her in Belzhar isn’t acceptable, but we don’t have a choice.

At the end of class, after we’ve eaten the red velvet cupcakes, and handed back our own journals, including Sierra’s, and after we’ve even played a round of Sylvia Plath
Jeopardy!
—a slightly ghoulish thing to do, but fun—Mrs. Quenell checks her watch and says, “I’m afraid it’s just about time for me to release you.” She looks at each of us in turn. There’s that
attention
again, as though no one else exists other than the person she’s looking at.