“Class dismissed. Don’t forget, your final papers are due in my box on the twenty-eighth, no later than five o’clock.” By the time I get to “Have a nice summer,” most of them are out of the door already.
As I walk down the hall to my office, I feel a light brr against my hip. It’s a text from Tom.
Can you pick up Jane? IAH 4:05, United 1093.
I put the phone down, turn to my computer, and look up the University of Washington academic calendar. Then I check the university directory and call up a University of Washington administrator I know from grad school. A brief conversation follows.
I text Tom back. Should I get dinner too?
A few minutes later: Nope. And that’s apparently all Tom and I are going to say to each other about Jane coming home early from her freshman year of college.
It’s tricky picking Jane out of a crowd these days. You never know what color her hair is going to be. I stand close to baggage carousel 9 and wait until a tall girl with burgundy-black hair emerges from the crowd of passengers, a lock of faded-out green dangling in front of her eyes, having survived yet another dye job intact.
“Hi, Mom,” she says.
“Hi, Jane.” We hug, her heavy satchel thwacking my hip as she leans over, and then the empty baggage carousel utters a shuddering shriek and we both turn to look at it while I decide how best not to ask about her unexpected arrival.
“You changed your hair again,” I observe.
“Yep.”
Everything Jane says and does is a variation on the slammed door that first became her calling card in middle school, a couple of years after Julie was taken. In high school, Jane added loud music, hair dye, and random piercings to her repertoire, but the slammed door remained the centerpiece of the performance. Tom used to follow her dutifully up the stairs, where he weathered the sobs and yells I heard only in muffled form. I figured she needed her privacy.
“Did you have a good flight?”
“It was okay.”
It was long. I suspect Jane chose the University of Washington because of its distance from Houston. When she was a little girl she used to say she wanted to go to the university where I teach, but the pennants came down around the same time the door slamming began. She might have ended up in Alaska if she hadn’t insisted on going to a school that had quarters instead of semesters — every possible difference a crucial one. All typical teenage behavior, no doubt, but with Jane, it made a particular kind of perverse sense — as does the fact that, according to the registrar, she took incompletes in all her spring-quarter classes.
This after she’d stayed in Seattle through the entire school year. I didn’t think much about her not coming home for Thanksgiving; it’s commonly skipped by students on the quarter system, since the fall quarter starts so late. But when she explained to us over the phone in mid-December that she was just settling in, that one of her professors had invited her to a holiday dinner, that our family never really celebrated Christmas anyway, did we?, and that she felt like it would be good for her sense of independence to stay, I could practically hear Tom’s heart breaking over the extension. I covered for his silence by saying the sensible thing, the only possible thing, really: “We’ll miss you, of course, but we understand.”
Now it seems the whole holiday situation was yet another slammed door to which I’d failed to respond properly.
“So,” I say, starting again. “You still enjoying U-Dub?”
“Go Huskies,” she says with a limp fist-pump. “Yeah, Mom. Nothing’s really changed since last time we talked.” The bags start dropping onto the conveyor belt, and we both lean forward.
“Was that coat warm enough for January up there? Winter stuff is on clearance, we could go shopping.”
She picks self-consciously at the army jacket she’s worn since she was sixteen. “This is fine. I told you guys, it doesn’t get that cold.”
“Classes going okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Why?”
“Just making small talk.”
“Well, they’re going really well,” she says. “Actually, they’re going so well, my professors are letting me turn in papers in lieu of exams.”
In lieu of exams! That sounds official. I wonder how she got them to agree to give her incompletes rather than failing her. My students usually just say “Family emergency” and hope I don’t press them for details.
Carefully, I ask, “Is that something they do a lot at U-Dub?”
“Mom,” she says. “Just say ‘University of Washington.’ ”
I give her shoulder a quick squeeze. “We’re just glad you’re home.” I lower my arm and we stand there, side by side, staring at the shiny metal chute, until half the passengers on the flight have claimed their bags and wheeled them off, their absence making the juddering of the conveyor belt sound even louder. Finally, Jane’s rolling suitcase somersaults down the chute and thunks onto the belt in front of us. It was a graduation present — apple green and already dingy from its maiden voyage to Seattle and back, it almost matches her dyed-green streak. She grabs the suitcase before I can make a move but lets me take her satchel when she stops to peel off her army jacket in the blast of humid air that hits us outside the automatic sliding doors.
“I see we’re in swamp mode already.”
“No place like home,” I reply and am rewarded with a half smile of acknowledgment.
The ride home is rocky, though. I’m shooting blanks on college life despite spending most of my time in a university.
“How are the dorms?”
“Pretty good.”
“You still like your roommate?”
“She’s fine. We stay out of each other’s way.”
“Are you going to room with her next year?”
“Probably not.”
Finally I resort to a subject I’m sure will get results, although it pains me. “So, tell me about this English professor you ate Christmas dinner with.”
“Her name is Caitlyn, and actually she’s a professor of semiotics.”
Caitlyn. “I didn’t know they still taught semiotics in English departments.”
“The course is called Intersectionalities. It’s an English class, but it’s cross-listed with linguistics, gender studies, and anthro. There are supposed to be all these prerequisites, but I went to Caitlyn’s office hours on the first day and convinced her to let me in.”
I can’t help but feel a glow of pride. A true professor’s kid, Jane knows all the angles. Moreover, this is the longest string of consecutive words she’s spoken to me without Tom around for ages. “Tell me more about it, what did you read?”
“I think I’d rather wait and talk about it with Dad too,” she says.
“Of course,” I say.
“I don’t want to say it all twice.”
“Sure, sweetie.”
I turn on NPR, and the measured, comforting sound of rush-hour news commentary fills the car as we inch past a firing range and a gym where an Olympian gymnastics coach is probably even now yelling at ponytailed girls in formation. Jane stares out her window. I assume she is wondering why Tom didn’t come to pick her up instead of me. I’m wondering too.
A few minutes later