Chapter Five

Dane watched the gaggle of laughing, shoving, and gossiping college preparatory literature students move almost as one hormone-fueled beast out of his classroom. It was the end of third period, and Dane was glad. End of third period signaled the beginning of Dane’s free period for lesson planning, and for that he was grateful.

He didn’t need to lesson plan. He needed a breather. He needed to think.

The class was a new specialty literature course for advanced kids, and it was one Dane had petitioned for and one for which he had come up with the syllabus. “Adolescent Angst and the Antihero” sounded more like a class most of these kids would take in college, and that had been Dane’s plan—to introduce some of the more advanced students to college-level thinking about literature and how it shaped human thought.

But the first book he had chosen, one he’d had to fight to include, now stuck out to him as fateful, or synchronous to his own life, even though he didn’t think the parallels would be apparent to anyone other than himself.

The book was Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and it told the story of Susie Salmon, a teenage girl who is raped and murdered in the first few pages of the book. For the remainder of the story, Susie watches over her family, friends, and even her killer from heaven. “It’s a story about loss. It’s a story about discovery…and moving on. It’s a story, in the end, about life,” Dane had told the class, thinking he was merely trying to instill an interest in the novel’s themes over its more lurid opening sequence of events.

But his subconscious was busy working in the background. And that’s why Dane now found himself sitting at his desk with the lights off, watching the snow come down outside. It had settled into a gentle fall, the flakes big and fluffy—pretty. Most of the stuff wasn’t even sticking. Rather, it danced across the sidewalk in front of the school like lint escaped from a dryer.

Dane, of course, hadn’t lost his own life like Susie Salmon. But he had experienced loss, and even though he was still breathing, still eating, still sleeping at night, even though his nights were sometimes interrupted by nightmares and bad memories, he was alive.

Yet the life he had known, back at the beginning of the school year, was gone, snuffed out just as surely as that drunk driver had snuffed out Katy’s life on that highway.

He had worn his grief, over the rest of the past semester, like something heavy and chained around his neck, moving through life in a daze, simply going through the motions. Thank God Clarissa and Joey helped keep things on track for their sad-sack father! Those kids, he sometimes thought, were more resilient than he was. Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?

But now, with the start of a new year and a new semester, Dane was determined to be a real parent to his kids again.

And he was determined about something else too. It was The Lovely Bones that helped bring out that determination, or at least solidify it. In the book, the character comes to see her helplessness at changing anything in the lives of the people she loves. Even though she knows everything about her murder and how it tortures them, she’s powerless to lift them out of their despair, to solve the mystery for them. In the end she knows she has to let them go. Banal as it was, the bottom line was that Susie Salmon realized life was for the living and it needed to go on, despite tragedy.

And that’s what resonated with Dane. He now thought he’d been mulling over this realization, this epiphany, since he had reread the novel over Christmas break, and today, as he lectured, that theme was brought home to him as having relevance to his own life.

He glanced over at the small window in his classroom door, irrationally afraid not only that someone was peering in at him, but also that they could read his thoughts.

And what thoughts! Ever since Katy died, he’d been wondering what he should do about his secret.

Dane was gay. He always had been, from as far back as he could remember. An image flashed in his head of a very young Dane, little more than a boy really, kneeling at his bedroom window late one summer night when he couldn’t sleep. The Bernards lived on a busy street that led into downtown Summitville. Back then there were often guys hitchhiking in front of Dane’s house. And he would watch these young men—scruffy, usually, sometimes smoking, with their tight jeans and rebel swaggers—and would feel a curious excitement.

And then there was that one night when his father had crept up silently behind him. His deep voice had startled Dane as he knelt behind his son. “What you looking at?” And he peered over Dane’s shoulder. There was nothing to see out there on the night-quiet street, really, other than what Dane now figured was a teenaged boy, dressed in ripped-up jeans and a gray tank top, waiting for a car to come by so he could beg for a ride with his thumb. He had long, shaggy hair and a wispy beard. His shoulders were broad, and his ass rode high in the faded jeans. Dane could remember him even now.

But when his father laid eyes on what Dane had been watching, he moved away silently. They never spoke of it.

But Dane had crawled back into his twin bed, face hot with deep shame, feeling caught and that there was something wrong with him. His dad had passed away not long after that—lung cancer; he smoked three packs a day—and Dane, maybe not consciously, vowed he would never feel that shame again.

So even though he might have known, on some weird subconscious level, that he was gay, he didn’t accept it. His big size, his athletic prowess, his general manliness as he grew older, made it easy to “pass,” and Dane was grateful for that ability. He felt sorry for the sissy boys he witnessed as he was growing up, those who frequented the libraries, or the glee club, or the drama society. They couldn’t hide who they were. It was too constitutional for them. And although Dane never experienced the teasing and bullying those boys were subjected to, he pitied them.

But pity sometimes, in Dane’s darkest hours, turned to envy. How freeing it would be, he thought, when he had no one to answer to save for himself, to just be who he was, to not have a choice in the matter, as he had believed he did.

But he never really did. He knew, deep down, being gay, being who he was, wasn’t a choice. It hadn’t ever been, even though he married his college sweetheart—and yes, he loved her with all his heart, even if it wasn’t always with all his libido—even though he made a beautiful daughter and a handsome son who looked just like him. There was always that ache in the back of his mind, tugging at his heart. I am not living the life I am meant for. Despite all the love he got from his family, and Dane never minimized that—was never, ever ungrateful for it—he always wondered what his life would have been had he been unable to “pass.”

He’d always believed he’d never be able to take off his mask. He’d made peace with it, taking comfort in the bosom of his family’s love, which was no small thing.

But now, now that he no longer had a wife, now that times were different from what they were when Dane was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, maybe it wasn’t too late for him to be who he really was…

A knock at the door startled him. He looked over, and it was the new guy. Dane couldn’t remember his name, but he hadn’t forgotten his face, sort of a nebbish, a nerd, and, Dane gulped, frighteningly cute. That face was looking in at him right now, smiling.

Dane remembered he was supposed to meet with him for a sort of orientation, to see if the new guy had any questions. Policy. Procedure. Who to trust on the faculty. Who to avoid. Stuff like that.

Dane stood, grinning, hoping he hid well enough that he’d been lost in deep reverie, and headed over to the door to open it, to welcome what’s-his-name inside. Dane opened the door. “Come on in!” he said, perhaps a bit too heartily. He gambled, “Sean, is it?”

“Seth, Seth Wolcott,” the new teacher corrected him.

“Sorry! I’m terrible with names, especially when I don’t have a seating chart in front of me.” Dane held out a hand toward the sea of plastic one-piece desk and chair units. “Make yourself at home.” Dane briefly considered sitting in one of the student chairs himself, but his size prevented it from being even remotely comfortable anyway.

“It’s okay,” Seth said, taking a seat.

Dane collapsed into the creaking desk chair he had occupied for longer than he cared to remember and met the young man’s eyes.

And something passed between them. Recognition? Attraction? It was too brief for Dane to categorize, but there was something—the gaze held just a fraction of a second longer, Dane believed, than two straight men would hold it. He felt heat rise to his face and grinned.

Seth grinned back.

And Dane wondered if he was in trouble.