“Junk. Junk. Junk.” I pitch pieces of unsolicited mail into the trash can, pausing to take a second look at the last envelope in the pile.
The sloping cursive letters spelling out my maiden name strikes me as vaguely familiar, but I can’t remember where I have seen them. I shrug and slide a finger under the flap, opening the envelope with exaggerated care. A single page slides out onto the floor.
As I kneel to pick it up, a string of numbers, letters, and symbols rises up from the page like specters of high school returned to haunt my adulthood. I shudder and shake the paper, willing the letters to swarm into intelligible words. Instead of making sense, they remind me suddenly of math insecurities that my math teacher Ms. Twist maximized my junior year of high school.
Ms. Twist adored puzzles. She loved watching us fail to solve then even more. I bombed spectacularly every times, so she delighted in letting me show my work on the board as often as possible. I dreaded it.
Needless to say, I didn’t need to fight back tears when she disappeared halfway through the school year. I listened to all the rumors, but all that mattered to me was that the last minute sub let us skate through the course with the minimum amount of mathematical understanding. Some people thought she ran away with a mystery man. Others asserted that she finally drove herself mad with cryptograms and now lives on the outskirts of town, living off of whatever she could scavenge in the dead of night. Others thought she had come to some foul end, but didn’t dare posit the cause of her demise. Her sister declared her legally dead after no one saw or heard any trace of her for over a decade.
I shake my head. “Surely, this can’t be from a dead woman. I just have high school on my mind.” I glance at the cork board I keep by the door. An invitation to my twentieth high school reunion reminds me that I have a week to get ready to relive even more memories of pre-adulthood.
~
A week later, I put the finishing touches on an outfit that I hope doesn’t make it look like I am turning forty in a couple of years. Carefully coiffed hair shows that I am just as stylish as I ever was in high school. My husband grins at me as I fuss over my hair.
“You look gorgeous. Let’s go.”
I grab the folded mystery note from the table on an impulse as he opens the door and his eyes catch my movement. “What’s that?”
“Just something I wanted to show to the girls.” I smile at him and tuck it into my purse.
“You girls and your secrets.” He laughs and closes the door behind us.
As soon as we step into the gymnasiums with our neatly printed name labels reminding us who we once were, my two best friends descend on us.
“They served the same punch we had in high school…” Lacey informs us.
“But Ms. Crow mastered keeping it from being spiked.” Patty pours.
My husband squeezes my arm as his own friends drag him toward a basketball hoop where his old teammates are already warming up the hoop. My own friends drag me toward the punch. As we nibble cookies and promise not to let each other overindulge, reminiscences flowed. It doesn’t take long for the conversation to turn toward the mystery in my purse.
“I got the weirdest thing in the mail a week ago,” Lacey pulls an envelope similar to mine from her own bag.
“Me, too.” I show them my puzzle.
“I got one, too.” Patty’s face lit up with the thrill of a mystery. “Are yours math puzzles, too?”
“Maybe?” Lacey and I exchange shrugs.
“You know what, I think Ms. Twist isn’t dead…”
“You don’t say,” I mutter as my eyes scan the crowd for a face aged by twenty years of math puzzles. “But where has she been and why is she sending us puzzles now?”
“Let me see yours.” Patty holds out her hands.
Neither Lacey nor I question her command. Only Patty ever seemed to understand Ms. Twist, who never called on her. We slip the papers out of their envelopes and hand them to her. She nods as she contemplates each one.
“I think I can get the answers. Then I will have to figure out what they mean. May I?” She motions toward her own purse and reached for our envelopes.
~~
True to her word and faster than anticipated, Patty finds answers. She insists we meet in person at a diner one town over the following Saturday. Despite setting up our meeting, she arrives fifteen minutes late. Lacey and I exhaust theories about what she found and split most of the breakfast special. Neither of us had room for the pancakes.
“Yum. For me?” Patty greets us, slipping into the booth next to me and pouring a generous drizzle of maple syrup on them.
As she set the bottle down, I put my hand over hers. “No yum until you tell us what you found.”
She sighs. “Still so impatient…”
“Waiting twenty years is rather patient,” Lacey offers.
Patty grins at us, pulling a notepad from her messenger bag. “It was an amazingly simple cypher after I had all the pieces. You see…”
“You don’t need to show your work,” Lacey interrupts. Unlike most people, she gets grumpier when she is full than when she’s hungry.
Patty sighs again. “Okay. Once I worked through the whole puzzle, I ended up with ten numbers—obviously a phone number.” She paused and lowered her head. “I should have waited until we were together, but I went ahead and called…”
When we remain quiet, she looks up.
“And?” Lacey and I prompt.
“Ms. Twist’s husband answered and said he was expecting our call and could we come over this morning.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“He said she is too weak to talk on the phone and was looking forward to seeing us.”
Lacey and I trade looks. “When?”
“Right after I finish these.” Patty tucks into the pancakes, refusing to say more until they disappear.
~~
Patty turns off the engine of her tiny car and we all pause to stare at the two-story, white house. As we step out of the car, a woman in soft pink scrubs opens the front door to peer out at us. When we don’t approach the house, she gestures for us to hurry.
“Come on in, ladies. She has been talking about you all morning, but it is making her tired.”
We pick up our pace, reaching for each other’s hands with Patty at our center as we rush to the door. We follow the nurse quietly
“The three amigas,” Ms. Twist smiles weakly as she rasps out a greeting. ‘Welcome to my home.”
“Thank you,” we mumble as one, exchanging concerned looks.
"Time for my story to be told,” she smiles again. “You were my favorites. You always tried to find the answers, so I want you to share the answers to all the questions about my disappearance.”
We nod our heads, afraid to speak and cut off her weak words.
“No one did anything to hurt me. I just wasn’t made to teach. Well, I wasn’t made to watch students fail. One day, I just walked away and never looked back.” She pauses, wheezing as the nurse steps forward to place a hand on her chest. “Back off, Bevy. Let me finish.”
The nurse frowns slightly before directing an imploring look at us. I nod my head and lean in as her soft words resume.
“I should have resigned, but I wasn’t thinking straight. It took me two years to find myself. Reginald helped.” She turned her head toward a picture on her bedside table. The Ms. Twist we remembered smiled back at her, bedecked in white lace and leaning into a tall, dark-haired man. “By then, it was too late to go back and explain things or so I thought.”
She wheezes again, taking the nurse’s hand as she reaches for her again. She nods toward a pile of books beside the picture. “My journals can help you fill in the gaps. I need to rest.”
Her voice trails off as her head falls back against her pillow. The nurse gently pulls the blankets up to Ms. Twist’s chin and smoothing them. She gazes down at her patient before picking up the books and ushering us into the hall.
She hands the books to Patty as she whispers, “We don’t know how long she has. It could be days or months. If it is months, I know she would love you to visit again.” Her large brown eyes hold pleading and tears as she looks at us.
“We will call to see if she wants a visit next week,” Patty offers softly.
“That would be nice.” The nurse shakes our hands and leads us to the door.
