When she was first pointed out to me at the University of Connecticut, my friend Roger whispered, “Archer, check it out. That is one seriously fucked-up chick. She’s hot-she’s got hair like a fire engine-but she’s majorly screwed up.”
Cynthia Bigge was sitting down in the second row of the lecture hall, taking notes on literature of the Holocaust, and Roger and I were up near the back, close to the door, so we could make a break for it as soon as the professor was done droning on.
“What do you mean, fucked up?” I whispered back.
“Okay, you remember that thing, a few years ago, there was this girl, her whole family disappeared, nobody ever saw them again?”
“No.” I didn’t read the papers or watch the news at that time in my life. Like many teens, I was somewhat self-absorbed-I was going to be the next Philip Roth or Robertson Davies or John Irving; I was in the process of narrowing it down-and oblivious to current events, except for when one of the more radical organizations on campus wanted students to protest something or other. I tried to do my part because it was a great place to meet girls.
“Okay, so her parents, her sister, or maybe it was a brother, I can’t remember, they all disappeared.”
I leaned in closer, whispered, “So what, they got killed?”
Roger shrugged. “Who the fuck knows? That’s what makes it so interesting.” He tipped his head in Cynthia’s direction. “Maybe she knows. Maybe she offed the bunch of them. Haven’t you ever wanted to kill off your entire family?”
I shrugged. I guessed it crossed everyone’s mind at some point.
“What I think is that she’s just stuck up,” Roger said. “She won’t give you the time of day. Sticks to herself, you see her in the library all the time, just working, doing stuff. Doesn’t hang out with anybody, doesn’t go out to things. Nice rack, though.”
She was pretty.
It was the only course I shared with her. I was in the School of Education, preparing to become a teacher, in case the whole bestselling-writer thing didn’t happen immediately. My parents, retired now and living in Boca Raton, had both been teachers, and had liked it okay. At least it was recession-proof. I asked around, learned Cynthia was enrolled in the School of Family Studies at the Storrs campus. It included courses in gender studies, marital issues, care of the elderly, family economics, all kinds of shit like that.
I was sitting out front of the university bookstore, wearing a UConn Huskies sweatshirt and glancing at some lecture notes, when I sensed someone standing in front of me.
“Why’re you asking around about me?” Cynthia said. It was the first I’d heard her speak. A soft voice, but confident.
“Huh?” I said.
“Somebody said you were asking about me,” she repeated. “You’re Terrence Archer, right?”
I nodded. “Terry,” I said.
“Okay, so, why are you asking about me?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want to know? Is there something you want to know? If there is, just come out and ask me, because I don’t like people talking about me behind my back. I can tell when it’s going on.”
“Listen, I’m sorry, I only-”
“You think I don’t know people talk about me?”
“God, what are you, paranoid? I wasn’t talking about you. I just wondered whether-”
“You wondered whether I’m the one. Whose family disappeared. Okay, I am. Now you can mind your own fucking business.”
“My mom’s hair is red,” I said, cutting her off. “Not as red as yours. Sort of a blondy red, you know? But yours is really beautiful.” Cynthia blinked. “So yeah, maybe I asked a couple of people about you, because I wondered if you were seeing anybody, and they said no, and now I guess I can see why.”
She looked at me.
“So,” I said, making a big thing of stuffing my notes into my backpack and flinging it over my shoulder, “sorry and all.” I stood up and turned to go.
“I’m not,” Cynthia said.
I stopped. “You’re not what?”
“I’m not seeing anybody.” She swallowed.
Now I was feeling my neck. “I didn’t mean to be an asshole there,” I said. “You just seemed a bit, you know, touchy.”
We agreed that she’d been touchy, and that I had been an asshole, and somehow ended up having a coffee at a campus snack bar, and Cynthia told me that she lived with her aunt when she wasn’t attending the university.
“Tess is pretty decent,” Cynthia said. “She didn’t have a husband anymore, didn’t have any kids of her own, so my moving in, after the thing with my family, that kind of turned her world upside down, you know? But she was okay with it. I mean, what the hell was she going to do? And she was sort of going through a tragedy, too, her sister and brother-in-law and nephew just disappearing like that.”
“So what happened to your house? Where you lived with your parents and brother?”
That was me. Mr. Practical. Girl’s family vanishes and I come up with a real estate question.
“I couldn’t live there alone,” Cynthia said. “And like, there was no one to pay the mortgage or anything anyway, so when they couldn’t find my family the bank sort of took it back and these lawyers got involved, and whatever money my parents had put into the house went into this trust thing, but they’d hardly made a dent in the mortgage, you know? And now, it’s been so long, they figure everyone is dead, right? Legally, even if they aren’t.” She rolled her eyes and grimaced.
What could I say?
“So Aunt Tess, she’s putting me through school. Like, I’ve had summer jobs and stuff, but that doesn’t cover much. I don’t know how she’s managed it, really, raising me, paying for my education. She must be in debt up to her eyeballs, but she never complains about it.”
“Boy,” I said. I took a sip of coffee.
And Cynthia, for the first time, smiled. “‘Boy,’” she said. “That’s all you have to say, Terry? ‘Boy’?” As quickly as it had appeared, the smile vanished. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I expect people to say. I don’t know what the fuck I’d say if I was sitting across from me.”
“I don’t know how you handle it,” I said.
Cynthia took a sip of her tea. “Some days, I just want to kill myself, you know? And then I think, what if they showed up the day after?” She smiled again. “Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?”
Again, the smile drifted away as though carried off by a gentle breeze.
A lock of her red hair fell forward across her eyes, and she tucked it back behind her ear. “The thing is,” she said, “they could be dead, and they never had a chance to say goodbye to me. Or they could still be alive, and couldn’t be bothered.” She looked out the window. “I can’t decide which is worse.”
We didn’t say anything for another minute or so. Finally, Cynthia said, “You’re nice. If I did go out with someone, I might go out with someone like you.”
“If you get desperate,” I said, “you know where to find me.”
She looked out the window, at other students strolling past, and for a moment, it was like she had slipped away.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think I see one of them.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like a ghost or something?”
“No no,” she said, still looking outside. “Like, I’ll see someone I think is my father, or my mother. From behind, say. There’s just something about them, the way they hold their head, the way they walk, it seems familiar somehow, and I’ll think it’s them. Or, you know, I’ll see a boy, maybe a year older than me, who looks like he could be my brother, seven years later. My parents, they’d still look pretty much the same, right? But my brother, he could look totally different, but there’d still be something about him that would be the same, wouldn’t there?”
“I guess,” I said.
“And I’ll see someone like that, and I’ll run after them, cut in front of them, maybe grab their arm or something and they turn around and I get a good look.” She turned away from the window, gazed down into her tea, as though searching for an answer there. “But it’s never them.”
“I guess, someday, you’ll stop doing that,” I said.
“If it’s them,” Cynthia said.
We started hanging out. We went to movies, we worked together in the library. She tried to interest me in playing tennis. It had never been my game, but I gave it my best shot. Cynthia was the first to admit she wasn’t a great player, just a fair player with a magnificent backhand. But it was enough of an advantage to make mincemeat out of me. When I served and saw that right arm of hers swing back over her left shoulder, I knew I had little hope of sending that ball back across the net to her. If I even saw it.
One day, I was hunched over my Royal typewriter, even then approaching antique status, a hulking machine forged out of steel and painted black, heavy as a Volkswagen, the “e” key looking more like a “c” even with a fresh ribbon. I was trying to finish an essay on Thoreau I honestly didn’t give a flying fuck about. It didn’t help any that Cynthia was under the blanket, fully clothed, on the single bed in my dorm room, having fallen asleep reading a tattered paperback copy of Misery by Stephen King. Cynthia wasn’t an English major and could read whatever the hell she wanted, and found comfort sometimes in reading about people who had gone through worse things than her.
I had invited her to come over and watch me type an essay. “It’s quite interesting,” I said. “I use all ten fingers.”
“At the same time?” she asked.
I nodded.
“That does sound amazing,” she said.
So she brought some work of her own to do, and sat quietly on the bed, her back up against the wall, and there were times when I felt her watching me. Then she lay down to read, and fell asleep. We’d been hanging out but we’d barely touched each other. I’d let my hand brush across her shoulder as I’d moved past her chair in the coffee shop. I’d taken her hand to help her off the bus. Our shoulders had bumped looking up into a night sky.
Nothing more.
I thought I heard the blanket get tossed aside, but I was consumed with setting up a footnote. Then she was standing behind me, her presence somehow electric. She slipped her hands around my chest and leaned down and kissed my cheek. I turned so that she could place her lips on mine. Later, under the blanket, before it happened, Cynthia said, “You can’t hurt me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “I’ll take it slow.”
“Not that,” she whispered. “If you dump me, if you decide you don’t want to be with me, don’t worry. I can’t be hurt any more than what’s already happened.”
She would turn out to be wrong about that.