Naomi Hirahara - Santa Cruz Noir

Over coffee, I check my campus e-mail accounts. Two students who’ve been absent in my West Valley “Intro to Lit” write to tell me they were absent. An e-mail at Cabrillo alerts employees that e-mail will be down for maintenance. The dean at San Jose City College writes about an upcoming division meeting I can’t attend. The SJCC union sends another reminder about the union picnic. And I have an e-mail from Frank: Don’t tell anyone what I wrote, okay. It is confidential. I just want to be descriptive. And then, under that: 54028 Love Creek Road. My address.

For a moment, I don’t register what the e-mail means. A spring of nausea bubbles up from my stomach and percolates into the tips of my fingers. Frank knows where I live. Frank is telling me he knows where I live.

I stand up and walk to the other side of the room, as far away from the computer as possible. I want to run outside, away from 54028 Love Creek Road, and I want to check the locks on the door and windows and stay inside 54028 Love Creek Road. I don’t do either. I am having trouble breathing.

I turn on my phone to call the campus police but stop after the area code, my index finger hovering over the number. Frank knows where I live, and if he got in trouble, he could come to my house. And even if the police took his description of the stabbing seriously and arrested him, he could always send someone else.

I pace around the house. It’s too small for my belongings, and I don’t have time during the semesters to clean. Each week of the sixteen-week semester it gets messier. Now, eight weeks into the fall term, dishes sit on the floor under my futon with dried pasta noodles, the recycling bag overflows with yogurt containers and diet soda cans, a flow of dirty clothes erupts out of the open drawers of the small dresser I picked up at the Abbot’s thrift shop in Felton. I stare at a pile of clothes on the floor. I imagine a bleeding man being kicked over and over again by a heavy boot.

My ex-husband Ben is a lawyer, and our daughter Zia is in law school. I want to call them both to ask advice. But I can’t get them involved. The paper might be evidence of a crime, and they would want to report it to the police.

I’ll just pass Frank. That’s it. He doesn’t want anything else from me. I’ll tell him his descriptions are good in his paper and leave it at that. It’s none of my business what he’s done. It’s between him and his conscience. Besides, he never actually says he stabbed anyone, just “because stabbed him.” Without a subject in the sentence, anyone could have done the stabbing. I imagine the grammar lesson I could give with Frank’s sentence — I stabbed him / You stabbed him / They stabbed him / Frank stabbed him .

I reply to his e-mail: I got your note. I understand. I add, No problem, in an effort to sound casual.

Frank is absent the next class. I spend the three hours of class time working on run-on sentences, fragments, and paragraph organization, while eyeing the classroom door for any sign of him. Jorge, a dance major with thick, beautifully shaped eyebrows, asks if you can begin a sentence with “and.”

“Sometimes,” I say unhelpfully.

Jorge writes down my answer. He is a diligent student.

Yesenia, who is studying to become an occupational therapist, asks if you can begin a sentence with “because.”

“Of course.” I catch the curt impatience in my voice, but I’m too nervous to speak gently. “You begin sentences with ‘if,’ don’t you?”

Yesenia looks down at her desk. “I was just wondering. My other English teacher said you can’t.”

“I’m sorry; let me show you how to do it,” I say. And then I try to demonstrate how to begin a sentence with “because,” but my purple whiteboard pen gets fainter and fainter and disappears entirely at the end of: “Because the cat was hungr—”

“Sorry,” I repeat, “I’ll e-mail you a handout about all this.”

My students look back at me, blank and disbelieving.

At the end of class, I collect a new batch of papers and add it to the file folder bulging with last week’s papers.

On the way home, my steering wheel starts making a moaning sound, punctuated by a sharp squeal on tight turns. The steering gets less and less responsive as I make my way past the stoplight by the Ben Lomond Market and onto Love Creek Road. My headlights catch the red memorial toy box at the mudslide where those little boys died in the 1980s and were never found. As I pass the memorial, I see that someone has arranged a group of dolls in a semicircle as though they are holding a little class. I leave the paved part of Love Creek behind and rumble along the narrow stream canyon, my steering column bleating and my car bottoming out on the dirt road.

The house smells of old milk. I put half a burrito I saved from lunch in the microwave and check e-mail. In the four hours since I last looked, I’ve received forty-three new messages, mostly about campus events and items — a flash drive, a stack of papers, a jacket — left behind by faculty in classrooms. I have the usual absent-student-excuse e-mails, and then I see a subject line, Probation Check — Important.

It’s Frank’s probation officer, a woman named Lindsey Johnson, doing a “routine evaluation.” She asks me to answer a few questions:

Has Mr. Gonzalo missed any classes? If so, how many? (Please provide dates.)

How would you characterize Mr. Gonzalo’s behavior as a student in your class?

Finally, do you have any concerns about Mr. Gonzalo that you would like to share?

I am overcome, for a moment, by a sense of relief, as though I had been in a dark room but found, finally, a rectangle of light around an unlocked door. I’ll unburden myself to Lindsey Johnson, a sensible-sounding person — a professional — who will know exactly what to do about Frank’s paper, about the pressure he’s putting on me to pass him, about his intimidating e-mail.

But then I remember Frank’s gang. I can’t tell Ms. Johnson the truth.

I click out of her e-mail and scan my inbox. I have an e-mail from Frank. Dear Miss Janet, I need to talk to your office hours ASAP that is about some new issues.

The smell of my microwaved burrito turns sickeningly sweet. I throw it away and stare into the garbage. My mind scurries through a pile of thoughts — a man being stabbed, Frank e-mailing me, Frank coming to my office hours, what it would feel like to be stabbed in the stomach. I think the word “spleen” and feel like throwing up. I wonder if it would hurt, or would it just feel wrong and... final?

Too agitated to go to bed, I start cleaning the house. Things keep slipping more and more out of my control. If I could just get organized, I’d be able to think clearly. I do the dishes. I try to take out the garbage, but the bag rips when I remove it from the bin, leaving a pile of to-go containers and toilet paper rolls and coffee grounds on the kitchen floor. I can’t find another bag to collect the spilled garbage, so I shovel it into small plastic grocery bags which drip as I carry them to the bin outside. I mop up the drips with my last few paper towels and a handful of bunched-up toilet paper and give up on cleaning. I sit down to grade papers.

I wake up with my neck in knots. I’d drifted off sometime in the early morning with the lights on. Essays are scattered around my chair. A few are graded. I hear songbirds outside and a squirrel chirruping some argument. Through the window, cobwebs of fog are dissipating around the redwood branches. The sun is already up.

I check my phone. It’s 8:48, and I’ve missed my Cabrillo class. I call the division office and tell Ana Ling, the division assistant, that my car broke down on the way to campus. I hate lying to Ana, and her friendly voice over the phone makes me want to cry. For the first time this semester, I wish I were in my class teaching that day’s lesson on proper use of citations.