“Did you feel threatened?”
“Not physically. It just . . . hurt so much. Jonah had stood up for me, and finally, finally Chloe knows Anthony’s full of shit, and it could have been one of the best days I’d ever had. Instead everything fell apart.”
Doreen nods. “Let’s focus on the good part of the day for a bit. Somebody finally believed you. Somebody finally put the blame where it belongs, on Anthony. How does it feel?”
Beneath all my sorrow, all my anger, that tiny light still glows. “Unbelievable. Like—like the whole world turned upside down.”
“In a good way?”
“Yeah.” Whenever I think about returning home for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, I feel apprehensive, but it’s not the dread that has consumed me for years. Anthony will never have as much power over me again, even if Jonah’s not at my side. I saw him humbled; I saw him humiliated. That memory will feed me for a long time to come.
“What about your father?” Doreen says.
I have to laugh. “Apparently he already talked one of his golf buddies into sneaking him some jambalaya. He hasn’t changed.”
“Do you wish that he would?”
“I try not to wish for the impossible.”
And yet I can’t stop wishing I could roll back time, wind it back on a spool until I reached yesterday morning. Maybe I couldn’t change anything, but at least this time I’d understand exactly what went wrong.
Even understanding wouldn’t be enough.
? ? ?
Later that day, as I sit in my office manually inputting grades, my phone buzzes with a text. Electricity crackles along my skin, and I have no idea whether the sudden flush of energy comes from anger or hope.
But when I look at the screen, I see it’s only an invitation from Shay to come over and watch Netflix with her tonight or tomorrow. And how was your romantic weekend in the woods?
I never even told my closest friends about Dad’s heart failure. Major omission. So I send out a few texts, then spend the rest of the afternoon answering frantic questions from Carmen, Arturo, and Shay. I tell Kip, too, and within minutes a caramel macchiato has appeared on my desk as if by magic.
“Caffeine doesn’t solve everything,” I say to him, even as I accept it with a smile.
Kip sighs. “A macchiato can only solve your problems if you let it, sweetie.”
The one person I don’t hear from is Geordie. He’s incredibly busy at the moment—papers are always due at the end of the semester, and LLM papers are to undergraduate papers as World War II is to the invasion of Grenada. Still, for something like this, I would expect him to text at least. Geordie was the only guy I’ve ever been with who won my mother over; he launched a full-scale charm offensive on my parents, to such good effect that they sent him a birthday card two months after we broke up. So Geordie would be worried not only about me, but also about my dad.
Sometimes cell phone reception sucks in the library, I remind myself. Plus he might have shut off his phone to be sure he’d be productive.
Which isn’t a bad idea. I snap off the phone, and just like that, I’m not waiting for Jonah any longer. It should feel triumphant, or at least decisive. Instead it only feels sad.
That evening I go to the studio. Some artists find it difficult to work when they’re upset, but sometimes that kind of emotional energy fuels me. Don’t knock sublimation until you’ve tried it.
So I sit there, Bettye LaVette on the radio and chambray shirt rolled to my elbows, preparing to ink my latest plate. But just as I’m about to get started, I notice an indentation in the plate. Once it was just a nick in the wax, but now it’s a reservoir for ink, a blotch waiting to happen.
Some prints look good—even better—with a bit of random “noise.” Not this one. I swear under my breath and prepare to study the plate closer. Sometimes you can fix something like this; sometimes you have to start over.
Although there are several different etching techniques, and I’ve experimented with most of them, every method of etching involves the same fundamental process. You always start with a metal plate; you coat that plate with a waxy, acid-resistant material; you carve the design or picture you want to make into the wax, all the way down to the metal; and then you pour the acid. The acid bites into the metal, cutting your lines into it permanently. Then, when you ink the plate, you reveal a pattern you can print over and over—each piece of art identical and yet genuine, never faded by repetition.
But when you make a mistake, the error lives on and on. The ink catches it every time. No matter how many more prints you make, the blot will always be there, replicated a hundredfold.
Sometimes I think my life is the metal plate. Anthony carved the lines into me. But my toxic relationship with my family—and now the way Jonah turned on me—that’s the acid.