Nicole Piasecki
Dear Alice,
1. I’ve started to write this letter at least 20 times in as many years, which is way too much time. I need to find a way to finally be done with this. The only way I’ve ever gotten close is by writing in fragments.
2. When I first walked into your high school English class in Chelsea, Michigan, school had been a struggle for me. Every class felt focused on how fast you could do something and how right you could be. Yours wasn’t.
I still remember the one afternoon senior year. We’d finished a vocabulary quiz. You said, “Open your notebooks, and close your eyes.” We looked at you strangely at first, but we trusted you enough to follow along. You dimmed the lights.
“Imagine you’re walking alone through the depths of a woodland forest,” you said. We could hear you slowly pacing and your long, sensible skirt swaying with each step. You guided us along a path in the woods, pointing to tiny mushrooms, a toad at the water’s edge.
Eventually, you told us to open our eyes and to start writing, to keep describing whatever wilderness we’d conjured in our minds. No teacher had ever asked me to write something from my own imagination, and I loved it. I started keeping a journal. Everyone, if they’re lucky, has at least one teacher who changes their life or makes them feel at home in school. That’s who you were to me- my favorite teacher.
3. I’d never given much thought to my teachers’ lives outside of school. You were a fixture in that corner classroom, a woman who seemed to exist wholly there. I never would have imagined that you were married to a man who kept a gun beneath his pillow.
4. I took Chemistry I with your husband in 1992 when I was a sophomore. He wore that plaid and wool hunting jacket and drank coffee out of that small, plastic cup that doubled as a lid to his tall vacuum thermos. His hands sometimes shook when he lifted the cup to his lips.
He kept his haggard ponytail pulled back with a thin rubber band. I remember that he played loud rock music on the stereo while we did experiments. Though I interpreted his personality as arrogant and strange, I didn’t dislike him as much as I quietly despised the subject of chemistry. You should know that I’ve always struggled with solving complicated formulas.
5. My dad never told me things that a teenager didn’t need to know, and I never thought to ask very many questions. He mostly kept his work life separate from his home life. I didn’t know what a school superintendent did all day, and I never thought to ask him.
One night, though, when I was standing in our kitchen by the sliding glass door, my dad walked up to me with his hands in the pockets of his faded weekend jeans and said, “Hey, Nic, when you went in early for chemistry help, did Mr. Leith ever act weird around you?” I looked at my dad for a few seconds and wrinkled my brow.
Then I defended your husband. “What are you talking about?” I replied. My dad dropped the subject without explanation, and I quickly forgot about it. Even when it was just the two of us, your husband and I in his chemistry lab, he had never said anything inappropriate to me. I wasn’t a pretty girl. I was self-conscious and tomboyish. Acne spotted my jawline and chin. My chest was as flat as a boy’s. And I was the boss’s daughter.
6. Earlier that year, the mother of a quiet, long-haired senior girl called our home telephone at an unusually late hour. I answered the call in the kitchen. “Dad, it’s for you,” I said, in the direction of the living room. He took the call in private.
7. One of my favorite photographs of my dad is the one where he’s sitting next to my hospital bed at St. Joe’s in Ypsilanti right after my knee surgery during my senior year. He sat in that uncomfortable chair, staying day and night as my left leg moved, bending and straightening in a constant passive motion machine. He only stepped out of the room when the nurse arrived to help me use the bedpan.
In the photograph, he’s wearing jeans and a blue sweater with a tired, loyal smile on his face. Back then, I never saw his commitment to me as remarkable because it was all I had known.
8. Surely you know all about the giddiness that your high school students felt on the Thursday before Christmas break. My energy that day felt boundless. I practically bounced from seventh period across the grass and straight to the outer window of my dad’s office.
I knocked on his window, and he tilted it open. He was eating an ice cream sundae from McDonald’s out of a small, clear plastic cup. He smiled his full face smile when he saw me, and I returned a grin. He reached out and dropped the car keys into my hand so I could drive to physical therapy. As I turned to walk toward the parking lot, my dad said, “Have fun. See you later,” and tipped the window to close it.
At physical therapy, my friend, Carey, and I both rode Stairmasters, and we listened to the Lemonheads album It’s a Shame About Ray on the stereo. We moved our arms like we were dancing. The snow fell quietly outside. The cold windows had white paper snowflakes Scotch taped to them.
Mid-workout, we overheard someone say there had been a shooting at Chelsea High School. We stepped off the Stairmasters and huddled around an AM/FM radio to try to learn more. At first, we were worried about our friends who might have been at a game in the school gym. We imagine that the shooter must have been a kid from another school. It never crossed our minds that the shooter could have been your husband or the victim could have been my dad.
9. When the details of that afternoon that your husband killed my dad slowly leaked out from police reports and school employees, I learned that your husband had been reprimanded for sexually harassing female students in the hallways. I learned that he was on the verge of losing his job. I learned that your husband had stormed out of a grievance meeting with administrators not long after the school day had ended.
I learned that you and your husband carpooled home from school together that day. I learned that you were with him and his anger for the 20 minutes it took you to drive home. I learned that when you arrived home, your husband disappeared upstairs. He returned with a 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol in his hand. He asserted, “He is going to die.”
I learned that your husband got back into the car alone and sped toward the school administration building, where my dad and two others continued the meeting. 20 minutes- that’s how long it took your husband to drive back to the high school.
I learned that you didn’t call the police, whose small-town headquarters were less than a five-minute drive away from the school. You didn’t call the administration building to warn the three men whose lives were at stake- sitting ducks. Instead, you called the teachers’ union office in Ann Arbor, 20 minutes in the opposite direction.
Your husband wore a long coat with pockets of ammunition. He squealed his tires in the school parking lot. He told someone who approached him that he had, quote, “unfinished business to attend to.” He walked into the administration building, turned the corner into the doorway of the small office.
He lifted the gun and pointed it first at my dad- Daddy, Dada, Pops. My 47-year-old dad’s last words were, “Steve, you don’t have to do this.” Your husband fired round after round. He killed my dad. He injured two others. You didn’t call the police.
10. Why, Alice? Why the [BLEEP] didn’t you call the police? Why? Why? Why?
11. After your husband shot my dad, a pocket of time existed where my dad was gone, and it was still just a Thursday in December. I was still just a teenager, happily riding the Stairmaster at MedSport, looking through icy windows with paper snowflakes taped to them.
My brother, Brian, was still just a fresh-faced Private First Class wrenching bolts on the engines of fleet vehicles at a Marine base in North Carolina. My mom was still a wife of 25 years and a middle school special education teacher at a neighboring school district. And you were still just my favorite teacher, the one who let us write about an imaginary forest.
12. I can’t remember if it was you or I who initiated the meeting a few days after your husband murdered my dad at our school. I hadn’t slept since I found out. I had been desperately pulling his photographs from sticky plastic pages of family photo albums and taping them to the bathroom mirrors.
Still, I was worried about how you might be feeling. I was eager to believe in you, to affirm that we were both unknowing victims of your husband’s violent actions, to tell you that I didn’t blame you. I sensed some hesitation from my mom, but she took me to meet you anyway. The story was still developing. I couldn’t imagine any scenario wherein you were not the hero. She could.
We learned that since the shooting, you had been staying with your friend and colleague, Pam. When we arrived at her house, Pam took our damp jackets, and I saw you sitting alone in a wingback chair at the far corner of the large room. You didn’t rise to greet us when we entered the Christmas-ready living room. Your face displayed a low, distant gaze. Your fingertips fidgeted with a pinch of fabric on the bottom of your sweater. I don’t know what kind of a welcome I had expected, but it wasn’t this.
Finally, you approached me. You said something like, “This is for you,” and your tone was solemn. You reached out and handed me a hardcover book and a handwritten letter. Do you remember the title? Did the book have a tree on the cover? I never read the book. I meant to. My head was too clouded with grief in those days to concentrate for long. I stuffed the book into a drawer in my bedroom and never looked at it again.
I did read your short letter. Your words were scrawled diagonally across a yellow legal paper that you had folded like a business letter. The one thing I’d always remembered about that letter was the part I understood the least. “Maybe we can make a circle someday,” it said. I’ve been wanting to ask you for years. What does that mean?
13. I returned to school only three weeks after my dad died, often arriving late and unprepared, driving up to the school in the used Chevy Corsica that was still registered in his name. My other teachers offered me unspoken allowances for my unimpressive academic performance during the second half of my senior year. My government teacher passed my late biased research paper that took a stance against the death penalty. I called capital punishment, quote, “an option that doesn’t warrant enough suffering.”
I was scheduled to return to your English class, but the counselor intervened. Instead, I met with your student teacher in the library every day. I don’t remember her name, only that her severe psoriasis frightened and distracted me. I was afraid it was contagious, and I couldn’t bear any other complications in my life.
We read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as an independent study. I remember how tired Santiago was while trying to reel that large marlin into the boat. I wouldn’t have had it in me to keep going like he did. The final semester of high school, I don’t remember speaking to you. Surely, I must have seen you in the hallways. Did you see me?
14. It was confusing to see you in the courtroom on the opposing side, sitting next to your mother-in-law, then taking the stand, making a case for your husband’s insanity defense, trying to keep him out of prison. The defense attorney led you through a detailed account of your husband’s bizarre actions.
I remember the story of your husband killing your pet bird, how he broke its neck with his bare hands. You recounted a holiday when he curled himself beneath a piano and sobbed like a baby. You explained his obsession with guns, how he usually kept one within reach.
An aisle in the courtroom divided my family from his, yours. You never once looked across, at least not while I was looking. And you didn’t look when the verdict was delivered- guilty, life in prison without parole.
15. I know exactly where I was when I learned you lost your battle with cancer. I stood courtside in the main gymnasium at Adrian College. I wore my jersey, baggy white shorts, and a bulky knee brace. I had just finished playing a Division III basketball game. My mom came to watch my game because it was the second anniversary of the day your husband killed my dad. It seemed that we should be together.
“I have some news,” Mom said. She had done the right thing by waiting until after the game was over to tell me. “Alice died.” “When?” I asked. “Her funeral was today.”
16. Did you ever attend the National Council of Teachers of English convention? I’ve barely missed a year since I began my own career as an English teacher. You’re gone, so I don’t have to worry about running into you there in the elevator going up or the cafe at lunch.
But I must admit that sometimes I think I see you places. I see a modestly dressed woman with shoulder-length brown hair and downward pointing chestnut eyes, and my breath catches in my throat. Then I remember. If only it was just in those moments that I thought of you. But I have a classroom like you had a classroom. And the books I sometimes turn to in my thoughts, I first read in your class.
17. The last time I saw you in the flesh, I was a freshman at Adrian College. And you were still an English teacher at Chelsea High School. In a moment of capriciousness, I drove the hour north on Michigan 52 and parked in a visitor’s space in front of the high school. All the students sat in class, which left me alone to walk the cement pathways.
It still seems strange that life just continued on in that place. A different teacher stood in front of your husband’s old classroom. A new superintendent sat at a desk in my dad’s old office. New kids replaced those of us who had graduated.
I entered the English building and walked down the locker-encased hallway to your classroom. I peeked into your classroom window, a thin, rectangular pane of glass. I saw you leaning on a desk just a few feet from the door, helping a small group of students. I stared through the window until you saw me. When you looked up, your body froze for a moment. I wonder what you were thinking then.
I hadn’t told anyone that I was coming and still find it hard to explain my motivation to see you that day. You looked weak, frail, sick, a dimmer version of your former self. I remember that you stepped into the hallway and faced me. You looked me straight in the eyes. You wore an expression that I decoded as a combination of compassion and fear.
Even with your full attention, I couldn’t speak a single word. All I could do is stand in the hallway and look at you, standing three feet away. I searched your face and eyes, and you searched mine, as if all the questions were written there. You never asked me why I had come. You seemed to understand, maybe more than I did. How long did we stand there saying nothing at all?
18. I never figured out what you meant when you wrote, “Maybe we can make a circle someday,” in the letter you handed me. Over time, I got angry at you for saying something so cryptic to a 17-year-old.
Did you plan to tell me something later, after the trial? Something that would have closed the space between us? I can’t, even after all these drafts, imagine what that could be. What words could possibly have accomplished that? Maybe you never figured it out either.
Sincerely, Nicole.
