My antenna shot up. No news, I thought.
Stefan went on, “Like all I can do to protect myself—and also to redeem myself really—is to prove myself, my worth. What else can I do? Buy a gun illegally? Lock myself in the closet? I know probably a lot of people still have it in for me who aren’t going to text me to send a warning. Maybe they’ll come for me, like the guys at the lumberyard. Like the marchers outside our house.”
Stefan’s words made it clear that even though the protests in front of our house were fewer after the lumberyard incident, and the hoodie guy had vanished for now, Stefan still felt a sense of personal threat. And so did I, on his behalf.
That certainly wasn’t just because of the protests or because of what the little-voiced caller had said during our few conversations. I didn’t know any better way to express it but this: I was beginning to have a deep sense that something was missing. Something was missing from the bigger picture of what had happened to Belinda. Some information. What was it? What about that particular night had combusted an ordinary lovers’ quarrel into a petroleum fire raging out of control? What? Was there another person involved besides Stefan? Was it this girl? Was there an earlier argument? Had someone used Stefan’s wildly over-the-top possessiveness to get at Belinda? Why would anyone ever want to hurt Belinda? No one was ever so seemingly stainless. It was beyond the bounds of imagination.
But nobody’s life was one-dimensional. Nobody’s life was the life she showed the sunny world. What was it this caller wanted to say? Was she part of this? Was she guilty also and afraid to come forward?
The wondering itched at me. At times in the past few months, I did try to reach out to the girl phone caller, but she was a kaleidoscope of phone numbers. The longer the silence stretched between her calls, the more fixated I became on finding her and extracting what she thought she knew, as if she alone held the key to that night. My brain ran up and down the possibilities like a dog at a chain-link fence: Did she really know Stefan? Did she really know the hoodie guy? Was he trying to intimidate Stefan into silence, or was he waiting for his moment to strike? Surely, he wasn’t brazen enough just to kill Stefan—or was he? Maybe he’d done it before. Why did the caller keep saying she knew who was there that night—and that I didn’t? I knew everything about that night. From what Stefan could remember. From the police report. Then it occurred to me that I had never set eyes on the actual police report, but our lawyer received information from the police about the crime scene. And at that time, I left it all in the lawyer’s hands. I didn’t have any desire to know one single detail more about the night that crashed into our lives like a burning car. But given the possibility that the caller might actually know something else, what was my excuse now? Maybe I wouldn’t be so frightened and blindsided by some creepy little death hag if I could make my own assessment of what happened at Belinda’s that night. And who might be after Stefan. Did ordinary citizens get to look at police reports? I assumed so. Why not, weren’t they public records? Reporters looked at them all the time, didn’t they?
Suddenly my protective instincts were fully engaged. I said to Stefan, “Look, you should avoid the media. Reporters are not your friends.”
Stefan shot me a confused, angry look. “So the only thing I am ever going to be known for in my life is something horrible?”
“I didn’t say that,” I told him.
But when Stefan walked away, Jep said, “That’s exactly what you said, Thea.”
I spilled it all to Jep then, about the caller’s messages and the in-person threats, and what Stefan had glimpsed on my phone. I couldn’t believe I’d held it back from him for so many months, despite the threat I often felt. That I had done so was a measure of how fully ensnared I had become in this web of menace. It was only responsible, I suggested, to warn our son now that he could be in real danger...but Jep cut me off.
“No, Thea,” he said. “I’m not going to let you put that fear in him. As it is, our son is like a piece of glass, he’s so tense. This project is the first thing I’ve seen him talk about that seems to make him feel like he can take control of his past. I’m not going to let you interfere with that by putting one more layer of angst on that.”
“But he needs to know the calls still come.”
“He does not need to know. Not at all. That...person is probably just one more crazy from your stable of crazies...”
“Just how are they my stable of crazies?”
“Because you answer them! You give them agency. You should just ignore them. Then they’d get tired of the game and go away.”
“This one is different, I know it is...”
“Thea, I love you and I’ve always loved you. But this is what you do. Stefan is trying to build a new life. Don’t put him in a bubble.”
I knew there was something to what Jep said.
And so, I decided I might as well go along, blow the horn, too, about Stefan’s new endeavor. Why? Sigmund Freud’s receptionist would have been able to explain it: If Stefan had something to prove...so did I.
Stefan had made plans that were meant to redress wrongs beyond his own needs, and this meant that Stefan wasn’t all bad, which meant, therefore, that I wasn’t all bad.
The following Sunday, when we gathered with my family to celebrate all the seasonal birthdays, including my father’s seventieth birthday, I knew it was time to share what Stefan had been up to. After my father, with Phoebe’s youngest on his lap, blew out the candles and everyone accepted “just a sliver” of Amelia’s magnificent coconut cake, I jumped in and described Stefan’s idea for The Healing Project. I knew that he wouldn’t do it himself; my family was too cherished an audience to risk their disapproval. I would need to open the curtains and then let him take the stage.
“So if there’s anyone you know who might know someone who’d like to be involved, that person could volunteer, especially as an intermediary. He already has a representative from the clergy giving the project support.”
“Where will the money for all this come from?” my father said.
“Stefan got a very generous start-up grant,” I told him. “From an anonymous donor.”
“Miss Moneybags,” my father said, guessing rightly that Julie was indeed the bank behind the plan. But he smiled. The first year Julie had offered to divert a small portion of the foundation she had set up with her husband, Hal, and one of her brothers. It was now being fully used to fund Global Smiles, a dental version of Doctors Without Borders, which sent teams of dentists and hygienists to impoverished sites to do emergency services and train locals to run small clinics for routine care.
“So what do people get out of this? A certificate or something?” my dad went on. “What if a person has a plan and it doesn’t work? Doesn’t it make doing this like those participation trophies? What’s the meaning of it?”
“You have to believe in it for it to have meaning,” I told him. I pointed out that marriage, for example, was symbolic, just a few words and a piece of paper, but that it changed people’s status. And it didn’t always work out.
“Everybody who participates has to create a plan that could work out,” Stefan said. “The variable will be how much the person is committed to making it work out. And sure, it could still fail.”
“And someone like a minister or a social worker will be the go-between? Those are busy people,” my dad said. He sighed and I could feel that sigh run right down my spine. I wanted to break a window.
Meaning to joke, I pointed out, “Merry is a Unitarian minister. So she has plenty of time. And she’s also a prison chaplain part-time. And they don’t have to be clergy or a social worker.”