There is so much to say about Harrison Wynn, it gets stuck on the way out. For one, the day I learned she was dead, my eyesight changed. I want to call it “vision,” but it was eyesight. Straight lines began to warp—lines of type on a Xeroxed sheet on my desk, instructions for turning our grades in. I already knew how to turn my grades in. From the hall came students’ too-loud exuberance. I closed the door and adjusted the arms of my chair, ergonomically designed for a different body type.

It was May, the end of the school year, when I’m usually blithe unto silly. Three months without classes, one more summer out of childhood. But Harrison was dead. Passed away was what Freya said on the phone. That was all she could say at the time—Freya, the good daughter, consigned to the good-daughter job of transmitting what no one wanted to hear. She would call back, she said, over the tears in her voice.

For minutes I kept the phone to my ear while the fact (fact?) looked for a place to reside. Later I’d have details, which would make things worse. Meanwhile, what did it even mean, as my students would say. Harrison, my more-than-friend, my love, my mirror. This summer we were going to Tikal to see the pyramids, to cel- ebrate the fact that we’d made it through the school year in different cities for the first time since graduate school. I got to my feet as if I had somewhere to go, then sat back down in my office chair and tried to remember who I was. A professor of what is still called Rhetoric? The wife of an ailing husband?

Then I’m driving home to Leonard, my husband, and the yellow line meant to keep us in our lanes balloons out for a moment. One moment, easy to overlook on this road in Austin, where we had recently moved. A road that continued to annoy me with its unrelenting straightness.

Dangerous, a road that doesn’t curve. You fall asleep at the wheel.

Back in Chicago, in graduate school, driving home from Harrison’s in Friday rush hour, creeping along Ridge, creeping then braking, I fell asleep one time. We were PhD students at UIC, both of us, in Rhet-Comp because the field was said to be growing—jobs aplenty for us (as opposed to our fellows in Literature or, god forbid, Theory). But Harrison burned to write a novel, and I, with (at last) an emotionally stable boyfriend, would have renounced my forthcoming degree if it meant I was pregnant. Harrison, incidentally, was pregnant. By our Visiting Poet, a brainy Communist from Argentina. I had quit birth control, although Leonard (who had no qualms about marriage) would mime a panic attack at the word “baby.” He also accused me of plagiarism. “Life” plagiarism: I was mimicking Harrison. Did I want to be Harrison?

Fuck you, Leonard, I said then and many times thereafter. He irritated but didn’t bore me. Which was maybe why I married him, unaware that some of his overreactive T-cells were marshalling against the perfectly sound tissues in his brain and spinal cord. But that was a problem for later. At the time I respected his uncertainty about fatherhood. He was wrestling with it. Searching his soul and his (mildly) troubled childhood. He talked; I loved his talk. He could disagree without getting angry. He laughed at my jokes. He was even Jewish, which pleased my father. The day I fell asleep at the wheel, my period was a hopeful four days late.

Those were good days for me and Harrison. Fifteen years before, in Skokie, we’d been close in the way of other intellectually advanced, emotionally delayed girls. Then she moved. I was lost. I got over it. But when we met again at UIC it seemed that fate had a purpose for us. What other wonders were in store?

Year two we remained glad for each other but less so for our graduate program, which we enjoyed mocking. The object of which that Friday was the presentation we were planning to deliver at our first national conference: “Teaching Punctuation to College Freshmen: The Uses and Usefulness of Pauses.” We each taught two sections of composition, one the usual way, in a classroom, and the other in a computer lab where students read their drafts aloud while their mates followed on their monitors, amending the punctuation where the reading stumbled. They listened for pauses, verbal stumbles that signaled confusion. Would these fresh- men come to see punctuation as essential to expression and not as rules made to trip them up? That was our Thesis Question. We gathered statistics. It was cutting edge pedagogy, said our professors. Literature pitied us, Creative Writing yucked it up. But after we graduate—we’d remind anyone listening—guess who’ll be flying to MLA and who’ll be asking oh-so-courteously, Would you like fries with that?

We were hilarious. Life was hilarious, its whims, its random gifts. On my loopy way home, along with Harrison’s strong coffee, project-based puns kept my foot mindful on the gas and brake. This gives me pause! A pregnant pause! Down the road was the traffic light, forever distant. I could forget the conflict with Leonard, a disheartening meeting with my gynecologist. Then the coffee wore off and I was resorting against my better judgment to three-second naps at stop signs, when I was jerked awake behind my seatbelt. I had hit the car in front of me, which had hit the car in front of it. Two drivers were opening their doors, one male, one female, both deeply unhappy with me. Between my legs on the cloth of the driver’s seat was a dark spot.

“Well, that’s one good thing, isn’t it?” said Leonard when I called to ask him to bring me clean clothes. He was joking, of course. I hung up and called Harrison, who met me at the police station with Tampax, jeans, and a pair of her lace underpants.

As we stood at the counter waiting for the return of my documents, I reprised Leonard’s irritating remark. “Cut him loose,” she said, as she’d said of most of the men in our lives. Her baby’s father had a wife in Buenos Aires. “I’d miss his dick,” she had said, meaning that’s all she’d miss. She wasn’t posturing. Months later, she’d be typing her thesis while nursing the babe in the crook of her arm. My Harrison.

I didn’t cry when Freya told me the news. As if I doubted her words in my ear, I called Harrison’s cell and heard, the message unchanged, the low, rough voice of a diehard smoker.

But she was dead, Freya had said. And, as I would learn when she called back, it was by her own hand. . . .

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