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She takes one step closer and quickly glances behind her down the corridor before closing the door.
“He…Alex…he’s dead. I’m so sorry.”
I flinch. “Alex?MyAlex?” I ask this with a hand on my chest and my eyes opened wide. Carla did that last night as part of her scene and I made a mental note of it, then rehearsed it myself in front of the bathroom mirror this morning.
June nods. “Yes.”
I cock my head at her. “No, he’s not. I spoke to him just yesterday.” This was true, of course. There would be a record of that and I have just put it on the record that I am probably the last person to speak to him and I’m not hiding anything.
“He’s dead, Anna. They found him a few hours ago.”
Her words conjure the image I’ve been trying to banish from my mind. I feel my chest compress the air out of my lungs, and there’s a moment where I’m not sure I can get it back in. I sit there, looking at her, suddenly unable to speak. The room is airless in spite of the broken crank. Then I realize I’m not asking any questions. I find my voice again.
“Who told you? Who found him?”
“The police called. Val in student services told me just now.”
I cover my face with my hands. “Oh my god.”
June comes around my desk and touches my shoulder gently. “It’s not your fault, Anna.” I look up so quickly it hurts my head.
“He was not well. Everyone knows that. There was nothing you could have done.”
I breathe out again, slowly. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Maybe I pushed him too hard.” I stare at her in shock: did I really just say that? I put my hands over my face and pretend to cry but suddenly I’m laughing and I can’t stop. Luckily, tears are streaming down my face anyway.
June scans the room for a chair, then pulls the one from the other side of the desk around to my side. She sits so close to me our knees almost touch. I’ve never been this close to June before. I barely notice her, to be honest. I realize now how pretty she is, with her bouncy black curls and her curvy shape. She looks younger than me, but I think that’s because she’s in better shape than I am; we’re both nudging forty.
“That has nothing to do with it,” she says, and for a moment I forgot what we were talking about. “You know what Alex was like, how difficult it was for him. He was depressed…”
I stare at her for a moment. “How would you know that?”
“He told me. He was worried about how obsessive he had become. He didn’t sleep for days at a time. I don’t know how he managed, frankly.” I stare at her in disbelief. Alex wasmystudent,myprotégé, and yet June who, as the faculty executive assistant, isn’t even part of the teaching staff, knew so much about his inner demons.
What else did she know?
“He told you all this? When?”
“I don’t know exactly. Over the last few weeks. You saw what it was like. Did you see how much weight he’d lost? Did you see how he changed? He would get over-excited, too much so, like he was on drugs. He’d say to me, ‘June, one day you’ll be able to say you knew me when!’ Then the next day he wanted to quit and go sailing for a year. To be honest, I never thought he was cut out for academic research, not at this level anyway. He was too…unstable.”
“How did he die?”
June’s face looks full of pain when she says it: “I’m so sorry, Anna. He jumped. Out the window of his apartment.”
Bile rises and for a moment I think I’m going to be sick, right there on the dark blue carpet. “I thought you were going to say he took an overdose or something.”
“I know.”
“But jumping out of a window?” I feel as pale as June looks. “He’s really gone?” I ask, god knows why. Maybe because hearing it from someone else makes it real. Even more real than yesterday, when I looked down at his bleeding and broken body wedged behind a dumpster three floors below.
June says something else but I don’t hear the words, only the sound of blood pulsing inside my ears. Her mouth is still moving when I step out of the room and almost run down the stairs and around the corner to the parking lot. I drop my keys before I can open the driver’s door of my car, where I spend the next twenty minutes with my forehead resting on the steering wheel, hyperventilating, vaguely recognizing the symptoms of a panic attack. I can’t even tell if it’s because Alex is dead or because of the magnitude of what I’ve done.
Eight
I have a longing to be with Luis, to rest my head on his shoulder and hear his soothing voice. I reach for my bag on the passenger seat and fish around for my cellphone, but the call goes straight to voicemail, which I half-expected. He always turns off his phone when he’s working.
