Drowning With Others Read online

  Turning, Ian feigned recognition at a face he didn’t recognize at all, while, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Andi brighten.

  The man addressing them had aged faster than they had, his hair gray, his face wider, with bags under his eyes and a middle-aged gut.

  “Tommy Harkins!” said Andi, giving the man a hug and politely ignoring his open appraisal of her still trim, admittedly eye-catching figure.

  “Good to see you,” said Ian, shaking hands, still trying to put a youthful face to the familiar-sounding name.

  “I thought for a minute you didn’t recognize me,” Tommy said to Ian, his droopy eyes twinkling. “Totally understandable. Most people tell me I look younger now than I did then, even though I go by Tom now.”

  “Tom—of course,” said Andi.

  Then it clicked: Tom had dated Andi’s best friend, Georgina, during senior year. If memory served, it hadn’t ended well. Ian slipped an arm around Andi’s waist, and with a warm glance up at him, she reciprocated.

  “It’s been years,” said Andi. “Have we even seen you since graduation?”

  Tom shook his head. “My daughter just started this year. It’s wild to see the place again.”

  “I feel like we never left. Our daughter Cassidy is a senior, and our twins, Whitney and Owen, start next year,” said Andi. “Assuming they get in.”

  “As if Glenlake would dare decline a Copeland after all the greenbacks your family has shoveled into this place,” teased Tom.

  Andi smiled demurely. “The Copelands are big believers in education.”

  She played the we’re so rich we don’t talk about money card perfectly. Given her roots as a rich Jewish girl from Beverly Hills, it hadn’t come naturally. She’d been a quick study, though—grasping Waspy Midwestern understatement almost immediately when she’d arrived as a student at Glenlake and mastering it long before they settled in hidebound St. Louis.

  Tom took a slug of his IPA. “So you two stayed together? Or did you divorce your first spouses and have some kind of storybook reunion?”

  “There’s not much to tell,” said Andi, before launching into their oft-repeated thumbnail biography, telling how they got back together at the end of senior year and then stayed together while she went to Smith and he went to Amherst. Their New York experiment had ended with Cassidy’s birth, when they moved to St. Louis so Ian could reboot a family wine-import business and she could dabble in publishing, mostly coffee-table books. It always struck Ian as strange how life stories were summed up with dates and places but not emotions. No one who meant it ever told a stranger, It was love at first sight, and we are more in love now than when we first met.

  Gerald Matheson, who had been assistant head of Glenlake when they were in school, crossed the room like a tugboat navigating a crowded harbor. His bald head was flushed, and his drinker’s nose, only starting to bloom when they’d known him, had gone a royal purple.

  “I remember you two!” he crowed. “You were our famous couple. When you broke up senior year, even faculty talked about it.”

  Tom stuck out his hand and reintroduced himself. “Glad to see you’re still around.”

  “I’ve been retired for a few years, actually—traveling, dithering—but I’ve recently been elected to the board of trustees.”

  Matheson had been a brooding, anxious presence behind the old headmaster, Lincoln Darrow. Retirement definitely suited him—or maybe it was full-blown alcoholism. Either way, he seemed merry and at ease now.

  Across the room, Ian caught a glimpse of the new headmaster, Joshua Scanlon, and the assistant headmaster, Sharon Lysander, moving toward the front of the room to make their heartfelt fund-raising appeal to Glenlake’s most established families. Suddenly, Ian wished they hadn’t come. He wouldn’t be able to make more than a token contribution this year.

  “Any good scuttlebutt from the board?” Andi asked Matheson slyly.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know. I’m just starting my term,” said Matheson. “I can tell you we’re all very excited about this year’s writer in residence.”

  Andi leaned forward. “That program is the best thing about Glenlake! Who is it?”

  “His name’s Wayne Kelly. He’s a longtime investigative reporter and former editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Apparently, he’s using his fellowship to work on a book, but we’re very excited to have an award-winning journalist offer a break from the usual novelists, memoirists, and occasional poet.”

  Though no one else would have noticed, Ian saw Andi stiffen at the word poet, her eyes going slightly vacant above her perfect party smile. His own smile suddenly felt similarly painted on. As a fork tapped against a glass, quieting the room so the headmaster could speak, Ian put his mouth close to her ear.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked as innocently as he was able. “You seem preoccupied.”

  “Nothing at all,” she lied, kissing his cheek.

  Following an exchange of no fewer than eleven texts, tonight’s brief sighting of Cassidy had been scheduled for six forty-five, shortly before they were to walk through a truncated version of her class schedule, visiting each classroom in turn. After leaving the fund-raiser, Ian and Andi waited for her at sprawling Copeland Hall, where Cassidy had a college-application coaching meeting and where they would be meeting this year’s teachers.

  She arrived in a rush, pushing through the doors, striding across the lobby to where they were waiting, and giving them firm but perfunctory hugs before collapsing onto the bench next to them.

  Ian thought she had aged a year in the month since they’d dropped her off, and she looked more like a young woman than ever. His mind raced ahead to future milestones: moving her into the freshman dorms, college graduation, walking her down the aisle, and, hopefully someday, grandchildren.

  “Dad’s favorite place on campus,” Cassidy snorted, bringing him back to the here and now. She raised her eyebrows toward Augustus on his plinth.

  Their daughter had always been conflicted about the status conferred by her family name. Ian remembered with heartbreaking clarity her dismay upon learning, at six years old, that most families did not have buildings named after them.

  But that’s not fair, she’d said, pouting.

  “I brought brass polish and clean rags,” Ian shot back. “You can get to work as soon as we leave.”

  She pushed a lock of wavy brown hair—more like his than Andi’s—behind her ear. “Most of the kids here pretend they have no idea that’s my last name on the building, but you’d be surprised how many others are all about collecting friends from the ‘important families.’”

  “Just carry on with your usual low-key regal bearing,” said Ian wryly. “Are you sure you don’t want to join us for dinner later?”

  As Andi gave him a don’t overparent look, Cassidy drove home the point by adding, “Can’t. First I have to learn how to get accepted to the college of my dreams, and then I’m either doing homework or sneaking off to town with the rest of the girls to meet and marry local boys.”

  “Far be it from us to stand in the way of progress,” Andi responded with a smile. “See you tomorrow at brunch.”

  “Ten thirty sharp,” she said.

  Cassidy was already rising, everything about her—hair, backpack, school uniform—perfectly tailored to suggest careless disregard. He wondered if her effect on boys was as devastating as Andi’s had been on him.

  A quick hug and she was gone, accelerating up the stairs to catch up with a friend going the same way. For a moment, they watched the parents pour through the doors, scrutinizing campus maps and class schedules as if they were written in Greek.

  “So,” Andi said, with a lilt that boded well for later back at the inn, “want to play high school sweethearts?”

  Ian shifted uncomfortably in the classroom desk chair, wondering how teen hormones could have raged so hard in such a sterile setting. This year’s writer in residence stood facing the roomful of expectant parents.

  “I know the
first question on your minds,” he said. “How does a Filipino kid end up named Wayne Kelly?”

  There was a nervous silence, as if the assembled adults were afraid they might accidentally answer—and, worse, answer with cultural insensitivity. Wayne Kelly was a handsome guy, fortyish, with jet-black hair and a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard. He pushed his Warby Parker glasses back, then put them all out of their misery.

  “If you were my students, I would ask you to form a working hypothesis and then tell you to check it out. But since I only have you for seven minutes, I’ll give you a one-word answer. Adoption.”

  There were a few chuckles, and the room relaxed ever so slightly. Ian himself had never taken the famous Glenlake writing seminar, but Andi had spent a lot of time in this room.

  Kelly tugged at his new-looking tweed blazer and sat on his desk. “If you’ve already checked me out, you’ll know I’ve been a working journalist and editor for seventeen years. I’m here to draft my first book and to teach investigative journalism. My students will learn how to report a story, how to write it, and how to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous editing.”

  Ian glanced at Andi and saw she was studying the teacher carefully. For the first time all day, she seemed unaware of Ian’s presence. He wondered if she was wishing things had turned out differently, that she’d never traded poetry for coffee-table books.

  “Journalism is not an abstract concept. For us to commit an act of journalism, we need a story. I had a lesson plan for the year, but a few weeks ago, I put it aside. Because, fortunately, we have a doozy of a story right here on campus.”

  A few of the parents glanced at each other, suddenly uneasy with the idea of their children’s expensive education being any part of a “story.” Others, like Andi, waited expectantly, eager to hear what was next. When she was fully focused, as she was now, she gently chewed on the left side of her lower lip.

  Kelly walked into the rows of desks, headed for the back wall. “Some of you may already know this, but earlier this week, some students made a discovery in Lake Loomis. They were swimming at night, so they were in violation of Glenlake’s rules of conduct, a matter which has been addressed with some severity by the administration. I believe several of them may have been forced to take my English composition class as punishment.”

  Over a few chuckles he asked, “Would somebody please dim the lights?”

  An obliging parent fumbled with the row of switches by the door, eventually finding the right balance. Kelly worked some other controls, and a white rectangle of light projected from above onto the whiteboard at the front of the room.

  The room was completely rapt now. Like everyone, Ian was wondering how this would produce a story worth the scrutiny of a nationally known investigative reporter.

  “The kids found a car at the bottom of the lake. One of them, who I recruited for this class, turned out to have excellent reporter’s instincts. At night, in twenty feet of water, he managed to take a picture of that car.”

  On the whiteboard appeared a blurry, murky picture of a car covered in so much mud it looked like cake icing.

  Ian heard Andi’s sharp intake of breath. He felt his stomach tighten.

  “This car wasn’t some junker dumped in the lake to avoid a wrecking fee,” continued Kelly. “This was a very specific car belonging to someone who went missing twenty-two years ago.”

  He advanced the slide, showing the car dangling from a crane on a construction barge that had been anchored next to the distinctive cliffs on the north side of Lake Loomis.

  Its passage out of the water had caused some of the mud to wash off, and here and there the car’s original metallic-blue paint job showed through.

  He wished one of Andi’s hands would find his and squeeze it tightly, but they remained palm down on her desk.

  “Inside the car, the police found human remains. After so many years underwater, they were completely skeletonized. But license plate records revealed who owned the car, and the deceased has been identified tentatively, pending confirmation from dental records.”

  Uneasy murmurs rippled through the room as a name, long unheard, echoed in Ian’s mind.

  “So you’re saying our kids will be investigating a . . . murder?” asked one shocked father.

  “Who said this was a murder?” said Kelly. “Our job will be to gather every shred of information we can find, to shadow the police investigation, and, eventually, to tell the story of how this happened.”

  “This has been . . . approved? By the headmaster?”

  Kelly ignored that comment, moving on to the next slide, a decades-old head shot. Suddenly, Ian was a senior again, limping along a wooded path, rage blurring his vision.

  Hating his secret.

  Beside him, Andi was rigid, as though the only way she could master her emotions was to not move a muscle.

  “Forensic analysis has yet to confirm this,” continued Kelly, “but the owner of the car was in fact a predecessor of mine—a former writer in residence here at Glenlake who went missing shortly before his year came to an end.

  “His name was David Walker,” he said. “But he went by the name Dallas—Dallas Walker.”

  Chapter Two

  ANDI BLOOM’S GLENLAKE ACADEMY JOURNAL

  Monday, September 2, 1996

  After three years of journaling practically every day of the school year, you’d think I’d have something clever or inspirational to write the night before the first day of senior year. Honestly, though, the only thing that comes to mind is this:

  I hate poetry.

  I dread reading it.

  I hate analyzing it.

  I despise trying to write it.

  I get that this makes me full-on shallow, illiterate, even a fraud. Whatever. It’s not like I’ll ever say I hate poetry out loud.

  I can’t. I mean, I’m Andi Bloom, the girl who left Beverly Hills to come to Glenlake Academy in the middle of Nowheresville, Illinois, because of the school’s renowned writing program. Not to mention my supposed gift for the sport of writing.

  At least that’s what everyone around here thinks.

  Never mind the real reason I was shipped off had more to do with the burden raising a teenager placed upon my dad, the great and important Simon Bloom. That, and his world-class talent for convincing people he’s fulfilling their deepest, darkest desires by giving them exactly whatever it is he wants.

  He started by convincing me that none of the day schools in LA had quite enough to offer me, his oh-so-talented daughter. Then he flashed a couple of my middle school writing awards, name-dropped the movies he’d produced, added a few bucks to the deal, and voilà (!), Glenlake bent their firm rules and admitted me three weeks into fall semester.

  Christening me the literary It Girl from California.

  Luckily, I love it here. It’s more like home than home has been for years. I was even glad to get back to the stifling Midwestern heat and humidity this fall. So much so that I could easily wax poetic about spying my first yellow-tipped leaf and the seductive crunch of impending autumn beneath my feet.

  I’d best save all that imagery because I’m going to need every bit of poetry I can conjure up. After all, legit literary It Girls love poetry. It simply rolls out of their brains and onto the page.

  Fuck.

  For the past three years, I’ve petitioned and gotten into a seminar offered only to seniors. The writers in residence have been a short story writer, a novelist, and a memoirist. Now that I’m finally a senior, and can’t possibly bail out of my rightful spot in the one class everyone at Glenlake expects me to take, how is it they decide to bring in a poet?

  Ah, the fucking irony.

  And not just any poet, but Dallas Walker, known for his macho, bad-boy elegies to love and loss, and who, according to an article in Interview magazine, gave his class at an unnamed Ivy League a collective C because “I needed to kill some darlings.”

  I bought a copy of his book, American Son, and it’
s all beer and old cars and mill workers’ houses and sex between people who wear Kmart underwear. (He uses the word pussy twice.) Some of the imagery is kind of amazing, I have to admit, but I don’t get what he’s trying to do. At all.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Tuesday, September 3, 1996

  Not even Ian’s take (“Dallas Walker sounds like a fake name. Besides, poets are wimps and douchebags, so who cares?”) made me feel any less anxious about entering Copeland Hall today.

  I expected to step into my own twisted Dead Poets Society hell—the rows of desks, the 1920s bookshelves, the blackboard, the hissing radiator in the corner, and Dallas Walker, his back to us as we, his unsuspecting students, entered the room. He’d be writing out some super-famous line from a poem no one really ever got, including him, but that we were expected to parse and somehow write a three-to-five-page essay on, due tomorrow.

  That, or we’d file in, take our seats, and wait for the bell to ring. Once we started to give each other the what-the-hell face, but before anyone actually wondered aloud if the poet knew he had a class right now, ominous footsteps would reverberate down the hall. Dallas Walker, a short, bald, older man with combed-over wisps of gray hair and a stained cardigan that barely contained his bulging belly, would saunter into the room. Naturally, he would be quoting the aforementioned inscrutable poem in his deep bass voice.

  (Note to older self: if this year’s journal entries sound more like a scene or exercises in dialogue than my earlier diary entries, it’s because I’ve decided that if I am going be a writer someday, I have to practice. Anyway, back to the story.)

  Either way, we’d be given the same heartless assignment, on which I would inevitably get my heart broken with the first F I’ve ever received.

  Ever.

  I felt like puking. So much so, I waited until the class started to fill before I took a deep breath and willed my legs to move.

  I forced myself into the room just as the bell rang.

  Dallas Walker was not only present but leaning casually against the front of his desk—looking nothing, of course, like I imagined. He was younger, but not young, taller, but not tall, graying, but not gray, and anything but paunchy. Instead, he was wiry and muscular, like a boxer or a distance runner. If he weren’t wearing a pair of those hideous suede slip-on Merrells, I might even have described him as handsome—in a rugged, cigarette-smoking, seen-a-few-things, older-guy kind of way.