First Man Page 5

  The position had begun as another temporary job in a never-ending string of pursuits to keep myself from drowning after Lily’s death. I had hidden myself away in Greece for months, no doubt far overstaying my welcome with Edwin. For the first time in my life, I’d been frozen in indecision of what to do next.

  For years, I’d been content to throw a dart at a map and travel to wherever it landed. Lily had changed me, and surprising no one more than myself, I hadn’t immediately reverted to form after her death.

  “Still here then?” was what Edwin would greet me with every morning. There was no malice behind the words, only genuine surprise to find me still brooding in his guest room instead of seeing an empty room and a hastily written goodbye tacked to the door.

  I might have been content to live like a recluse, shut up in Edwin’s guest bedroom for years, mourning the life I might have had, but like an irritating older brother, Edwin refused to take no for an answer.

  “You need to go back to teaching.”

  The advice had come out of nowhere. The children had long since been put to bed and Edwin and I sat on his porch, staring out into the black expanse of the ocean. Summer was drawing to a close and the cool bite of fall was in the air.

  “Back to teaching?” I shot back, “I think you forgot that I never actually accepted that job at Corpus Christi. You’ve been ‘Professor’ all these years, not me.”

  Edwin snorted. “You bloody well know what I mean. You tutored, and you were a damn good professor’s assistant. Maybe if you have some young minds to mold, you won’t be wallowing forever.”

  Stung, I fell silent before adding quietly, “She’s only been dead three months.”

  Edwin’s voice softened. “I’m not asking you to date, Adam. I’m asking you to live.” Edwin paused, choosing his next words carefully. “I never met Lily, so I won’t claim to know who she was or what she wanted out of life, but I’d be willing to bet that she didn’t want you to build a shrine to her and spend the next fifty years locked up like a monk. I’ve known you for sixteen years, Adam Edwards, and I’ve never once seen you give a damn about something ending.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Edwin cut me off. “You know what I’m trying to say. There was always another city, another woman. Another adventure. I’ve never seen anything make you just. . . stop caring before.”

  Edwin stopped for a moment, waiting to see if I was going to put forth the effort to argue. When I didn’t, he plunged on. “I know you loved her. It snuck up on you, and you let yourself believe it would last forever. And then it was ripped away. That won’t ever stop being terrible. But I don’t need to have met her to know that girl wouldn’t want this for you.”

  Edwin stood up and walked back into the house, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I’d sat on that chair for hours, trying to envision any sort of future without Lily and failing miserably. Grudgingly, I admitted that Edwin was right. I needed a diversion, and teaching was as good as any.

  A few weeks later, I was on a flight to Boston. Returning to another warm, southern city like Atlanta so soon had been unthinkable. The bitter cold of New England seemed fitting to me.

  Logan was just another airport terminal in another city, teeming with people. The skies I could see through the tall glass windows were a uniform shade of dull grey. I gathered my luggage and rented a car, ready to make the ninety minute drive to the small town of Portsmouth, NH.

  A sleepy port town of about 20,000 people, it was a far cry from the bustling metropolises I had favored through the years. As soon as I had escaped the skyscrapers and endless highways of Boston, I was faced with an explosion of natural color. Autumn had arrived in full force here, and the trees were a riot of red and orange and gold.

  The school was a large and stately brick building, fairly typical of the Federal style that dominated public buildings in the area. I had rented an apartment nearby, a bland grey box. I was still unconvinced that this experiment would last more than a couple months, so I was reluctant to put forth much more effort than finding four walls and a roof.

  As I unpacked my suitcases, I stared out the window at the trees. A fine mist had started falling. Except for the color of the leaves, the whole town looked muted and washed out.

  Welcome home.

  I was amazed to discover in the coming weeks that I actually enjoyed teaching. If she had never walked into my classroom, I might very well have taught there for twenty or more years and retired with a gold watch and a party filled with former students claiming that I changed their lives.

  Even in the relatively privileged upper middle class town, it was rare to find a high school offering classes in my specialty, so I had found myself slotted into an unexpected opening in the English department. The previous teacher was an aging hippie who, tiring of the harsh New England winters, had moved to a commune in New Mexico. I’d laughed when I’d first heard the story in the faculty lounge. This was a very different world than Oxford.

  I found myself teaching twelfth grade English, helping anxious seventeen and eighteen year olds write college admission essays and trying to teach them the finer nuances of classic American literature.

  To a bored teenager suffering though a math lecture or a chemistry lab, the school year seems to drag on, but for a teacher the weeks slip away like hours, buried in lesson planning and tattooing papers with far too much red ink. Before I realized it, three years had passed.

  I was 33, and the loss of Lily had faded from the raw agony of those first months to a dull ache. I had so deftly fended off the advances of the few single female teachers in the beginning that I had given myself a well-deserved reputation as a lone wolf. The other teachers were friendly, but I was mainly left to my own devices.

  She entered my class the beginning of her senior year looking as bleary-eyed as the rest of her classmates. I was watching the year’s fresh crop of minds shuffle in over a cup of coffee strong enough to chew, cursing whatever sadistic bastard decided that it was necessary to start classes at ten minutes before eight. Teenagers weren’t the only ones who disliked early mornings.

  There was nothing particularly special about her that morning. It was not love at first sight. It probably wasn’t even the first time I saw her. She had been a student here for the previous three years, and it was likely that our paths had crossed at one time or another.

  I found her pretty. I won’t deny that, but she was no Lolita and I was not her bumbling Humbert. She had long blonde hair that was a bit too silvery to be natural and wide blue eyes. I caught her eye as I scanned the class, and she smiled at me. Even all these years later, I remember that smile because it was genuine. Despite her exhaustion, she wanted to be there.

  “My name,” I began, “is Adam Edwards. You are now seniors, and college is within your grasps, so I will expect a high level of work from all of you. This class is called Advanced English for a reason, so I advise anyone who does not plan on committing fully to this class to drop it now.” A pause. “Now that that small bit of unpleasantness is over, I’m handing out copies of the syllabus for the first quarter. This is by no means set in stone, but it at least makes us look official.” A few scattered laughs. “Glad to see everyone is waking up.” Picking up the freshly printed list of students and called out, “Katherine Pierson.”

  She looked up from the copy of the syllabus. “It’s Ember actually.” Obviously accustomed to questions about the unusual name, she added, “It’s my middle name. Old family name.”

  And so it began.

  BEGIN ANEW

  Ember

  You’re hearing a dusky voiced siren reading this, aren’t you? A peacock with feathers of scarlet and blonde whispering soft words in your eager ear. Don’t try to lie to me. I know how it works. The heroine of this little piece does have her siren moments of short skirts, high heels, and sparkle, but mostly she settles for pretty tempered with sassy. Cinderella with combat boots and a dirty mouth.

  All right, all right, I’ll ease up on th
e third person. I always heard that was the first sign of insanity. I never put much stock in psychology though.

  The wet leaves clung to the heels of my boots as I wove through the crowds on the first day of my senior year. It was raining again. The sky was dyed the color of tarnished silver, shiver-inducing. I always hated the cold.

  I huddled further under my pale khaki umbrella, as colorless as that day, and trudged down the rain-slicked stairs towards the front door of my high school

  The rain pelted down harder, splashing onto my shoes, and I stared at the distance, longing for the warm haven that smelled of cafeteria food and teenage desperation.

  Finally reaching my destination, I pushed open the creaking double doors, catching the eyes of an unwary freshman as I strutted into the hallway. Embracing my inner shampoo commercial, I tossed my rain damp hair and flash the tongue-tied boy a smile, bright on a grey day.

  It always came back to the vixen, didn’t it?

  Too bad, because vixen was miles away from who I actually was back then.

  My name is Ember. He always liked my name.

  When I knew him as Mr. Edwards, he’d always put a curious emphasis on the first syllable, drawing out the second like a breath. When I knew him as Adam, he whispered my name against my skin, “Ember Ember Ember” hidden in sighs and moans.

  That was not the expected reaction, I know. If I wasn’t a vixen, I was supposed to be an innocent. I was supposed to sit in court and cry and say, “Your Honor, I didn’t want to sleep with my English professor, but he said he’d fail me if I didn’t.” I was supposed to cry and ask my mother and father for forgiveness. I was supposed to be sorry.

  I was not sorry. Not then, and especially not now.

  I was sorry that we were caught and that he left town because he felt like a criminal who had ruined me. I was sorry that I spent a year of my life thinking he regretted knowing me, because I never regretted a moment with him.

  After everything blew up in our faces, my parents sent me to therapy because I needed to find some way to get over my “horrible ordeal.” My therapist wore suffocating perfume and spoke in a little-girl voice that infuriated me. She insisted that I keep a journal to “work through my misplaced anger.”

  That’s what everyone thought, that I was a stupid little girl who let myself be taken advantage of. I was a victim, lashing out at the people that had saved me from the big, bad English teacher. None of them would believe that I’d been the one pursuing him from the beginning. Good girls didn’t do things like that.

  No one told me that I had to be a good girl forever.

  I was far from the first person in that school to make eyes at Adam Edwards. A lot of it was the accent. His clipped British accent might not have been anything special back in the stone halls of Oxford, but in Portsmouth, New Hampshire he was the most interesting thing to happen in years.

  Wavy dark hair that always looked a bit shaggy, as though haircuts were the last thing he wasted his intellect thinking about. Warm brown eyes that always seemed to be focused inward, as though the real world was just some dull dream he had to slog through. Lost in a world of my own, I found him mesmerizing.

  I’d had to content myself with admiring him from afar those first years. Beyond arguing with my friends whether the sexiness of his accent made up for the fact that he was “like 30 or something” in the cafeteria, I’d never crossed paths with him. Over the bland public school lunches of soggy pizza and overcooked chicken nuggets, I had come down firmly on the side that his accent trumped those extra years.

  I didn’t think of myself as particularly literary back then, but it’s hard to miss that level of foreshadowing.

  I’d begun my high school years the same year Adam arrived in New Hampshire, though he was still Mr. Edwards back then. The early days of any girl’s high school existence was inevitably fraught with angst and drama, manufactured or legitimate, and I won’t pretend that I didn’t spend more time than was probably healthy dreaming about that handsome, dark-eyed teacher.

  Time had a way of creating paragons out of us all. I know I’d been so entranced with Adam in the early days of our relationship that I’d found even his most irritating flaws charming. The harsh cynicism that he told me had once permeated his every action had faded into a quiet apathy. He had seen the world and it had ceased to amaze him. He was a lonely man looking for a companion in the unlikeliest of places.

  What did either of us expect though? I was a teenager, and he was a man so buried in loss and solitude that he’d allowed himself to fall in love with me. We both could have walked away, but we made our choices and we lived with them.

  I didn’t walk into his life with the intent to seduce him, but that didn’t mean I was innocent. Like most of my peers, I had a forgettable string of teenage romances. Those dalliances had seemed so important to me at the time, but years later, I’d struggle to remember their names and I’d need to flip through a yearbook to recall their faces.

  Adam once told me that he thought of me as “infamous” among my peers. I’d loved that description for the images it conjured up. An infamous woman was in charge of her own destiny and unafraid of the whispers behind her back and to her face.

  Adam thought I was infamous because I talked back to anyone who gave me shit. I’d landed myself in a fair share of detentions over the years because of my mouth, but you work with the weapons you have. The truth was, Adam was just about the only person who didn’t hide the world “slut” behind a cough when I passed by.

  The truth was, I never thought of myself that way, despite the usual teenage self-esteem issues. I’d lost my virginity as a 16 year old sophomore to a worldly junior. A bonfire had crackled that night as we celebrated the football team’s triumph over whatever other school we hated that week. Like most young girls, I fell into the trap of wanting to grow up too fast. I gulped down hard cider and laughed with the boys, letting the fire heat me from the outside while the alcohol warmed me from within.

  I wasn’t a victim. He didn’t coerce me into letting my guard down and ply me with glass after glass of alcohol. When the couples started breaking away from the crowd and disappearing into the darkness, searching for secluded spots to be alone, he’d kissed me before leading me away from the fire.

  His mouth tasted like the bitterness of cheap beer he’d been drinking mixed with the heady flavor of teenage rebellion. When his hands grew bolder, I didn’t slap them away and run back to the bonfire.

  When I emerged from the darkness twenty-some minutes later with wrinkled clothes and leaves in my hair, I didn’t harbor any illusions that I had undergone some great transition into womanhood. I liked the boy, but I didn’t think we’d be together forever. Virginity had just seemed like a bothersome invention of men that I was eager to be rid of.

  The next day I walked into whispers and jeers, and I knew the boy had told everyone. No one laughed at him. No one judged him. Overnight I became something to be reviled. I could have tried to take the high road and ignore them, but I was never very good at turning the other cheek.

  One too many people whispered insults under their breath as they passed me and I snapped. I didn’t even know the name of the guy I punched, just that he outweighed me by about fifty pounds. Those fifty pounds just made him fall faster when I hit him with a sucker punch to the jaw.

  I didn’t get in trouble. The guy I dropped turned out to be the junior varsity running back, and getting knocked senseless by a girl wasn’t something he was eager to advertise. My hand ached for a week and I wore the purple bruises on my knuckles like a badge of honor.

  I wasn’t suddenly welcomed into popularity. The cruel politics of high school were rarely as simple as the teen movies made them out to be. Instead I acquired a new label – crazy.

  Crazy was fine by me. People gave crazy a wide berth. The prison metaphors for high school really did fit. Sometimes you have to take down the biggest, baddest person right upfront to gain respect. I wasn’t looking to run the sch
ool. I didn’t hold secret dreams of being the prom queen or class president.

  The innocent version of Ember had wanted to enjoy all high school had to offer. This new tough girl I had become just wanted to do her time until graduation day brought freedom.

  Where were my parents in all this? Blissfully unaware as most parents were when it came to the battles of adolescent life. My parents were the rare couple among my friends’ families that didn’t have a string of divorces behind them. My mother’s name was Veronica, and she’d been the shy girl working for the yearbook who fell for the quarterback. Jack Pierson could have had any of the gregarious cheerleaders that followed him like puppies with pom-poms, but he picked the girl hiding behind the camera instead. Twenty plus years of marriage, and they still danced to Elvis Costello in the kitchen, lost in each other.

  From the time I’d been toddling around the living room, I’d seen love in my house, and I’d longed for that same kind of love for myself. I’d tried the high school idea of love and found it lacking, so I’d shoved that part of myself in a box and tossed away the key.

  I certainly didn’t expect my English teacher to come by with bolt cutters and rip that lock off.

  I’d finally reached my senior year. I’d been wearing blinders for almost two years. Tunnel vision had made everything so much easier. I wasn’t as much of a social pariah anymore. I had a few trusted friends, but that couldn’t take away the echo of those words that still sometimes followed me down the halls. I didn’t forgive and I never ever forgot.

  I liked Mr. Edwards from that first day of class. He’d always seemed like a bit of a loner. While most of the teachers seemed to cluster in packs, their cliques just as apparent as the students’, he spent most of his free time in his office, his nose buried in a book or a stack of papers.