Regardless of all that has transpired, you are welcome here at St. Therese.
All of the necessary information, along with directions from the north, has been listed on the enclosed card for your convenience.
Also, she’s left her Bible to you, along with her beloved photo album, mostly containing pictures of you when you were a little boy. If you will not be attending the funeral, please provide me with an address so I can send you these items.
Love and light,
Mother Catherine Ebling (aka the Crab)
Mother Superior, Sisters of St. Therese
PS. Docendo discimus. (Latin. By teaching, we learn.)
PART FOUR
CHUCK BASS
CHAPTER 22
I’m no writer. I’m just a regular guy, so please forgive me if I mess this up. I’m doing my best here. Just going to tell the truth. With that being said, I guess my part begins when I leave Mr. Vernon’s party at the Manor and pull Portia off him under the trestle—I’ve never seen a woman attack a man like that before and I hope I never see it again. She’s pounding on him with both fists, calling him vulgar words. And she’s sobbing and yelling things about Mr. Vernon being the father she never had and his mother dying alone because of his selfishness and his needing to help kids—not completing sentences, hardly even making sense, losing her mind—and so I grab her, because she’s out of control, and when she struggles to get free I see that Mr. Vernon is shaking and crying himself.
“You fake!” Portia yells, in my arms now, and starts to bang the back of her head against my collarbone, trying to free herself.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Kane, that I wasn’t the man you hoped I’d be,” Mr. Vernon says in this sad awful voice. It’s depressing, and so unlike the teacher I remember. He’s a shadow. Even I can see it plainly. He’s done. Tapped out. And as much as I love teaching kids now, I honestly don’t know that I could recover from being attacked by one of my students.
I get it.
Teachers have to believe. You have to care, and that takes a lot of work and effort. Teachers need people to give back once in a while too, if only a little. If you’ve never taught, maybe you won’t understand, but I’ve done my student teaching and am subbing regularly now, so I’m starting to maybe get it for the first time.
Mr. Vernon turns his back on us and starts to make his way up the street, on the other side of the trestle now.
“Where are you going?” Portia yells. “Are you going to limp your way back to Vermont?”
“Stop belittling him!” I yell at Portia, and shake her hard enough to scare myself. I spin her around, grip her biceps, and look into her eyes.
She looks back the way Tommy sometimes does when he’s overwhelmed, after a meltdown.
“I need to do something,” I say to Portia. “Stay here.”
I let her go and start jogging after Mr. Vernon.
“Mr. Vernon!” I yell. “Mr. Vernon!”
When I stand in his way, he stops walking.
He’s still sobbing.
“Mr. Vernon, I’m sorry to do this when you’re so upset, but I’ll hate myself forever if I don’t take the time to tell you something. Chuck Bass? Class of ’eighty-eight?”
He’s shaking as he leans on his cane and tries to wipe the snot from his nose with the back of his hand.
He doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. He’s only stopped because he’s unable to physically best me; he’s cowering like a beaten dog, tail between his legs, and it kills me.
I have no idea if he remembers me or not, but it doesn’t matter.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” I say. “It’s unimaginable and wrong. And there’s nothing Portia or me or anyone else can do to erase that tragedy. But.”
I pull out my Official Member of the Human Race Card and hold it up.
He’s looking through me, weeping quietly, waiting to leave.
“I’ve carried this with me for more than twenty years because it’s the nicest present anyone has ever given me. I didn’t even thank you for it in person because I was just a teenager who didn’t know any better, but it meant a lot to me. Long story short, I became a junkie in my twenties. The addiction made me do unforgivable things I don’t want to list now, because I’m deeply ashamed of that period of my life. But when I hit rock bottom, as they say, and ended up in rehab, I had this counselor who said we were all in rowboats trapped in a fierce storm out at sea, and we needed to focus on a single light in the distance—like a lighthouse—and work our way back to it, rowing slowly but steadily through the storm, focusing only on the source of the light whenever it swept across the water and never on all of the tossing and turning and scary huge waves that threatened to suck us under at any time down below, where the real monsters were.
“Some people at rehab used their kids as lighthouses, other people used their careers, or making their parents proud. I didn’t have a career or kids or parents, but I remembered how good I felt being in your class senior year—good enough to carry around this card for so many years and read it over and over whenever I was feeling shitty about myself, like I wasn’t even a person anymore. You made me believe I was a person.
“And so I read this card every day in rehab and made you my lighthouse. I wanted to be like you. I told myself that if I could get clean and become a teacher like Mr. Vernon, make a difference—well, then the pain and the work and the excruciating detox and . . .
“I’m saying too much, I’m saying it all wrong, because I’m not as smart as you, but I wanted you to know that you made a huge difference in my life. You saved me. And I wanted to say thank you. That’s it. Thank you.”