“So, Stefan. What is your plan?” Dad sighed again.
After a moment during which anyone with eyes could see him gather up his dignity, Stefan said, “Well, Papu, getting The Healing Project up and running is actually my plan.”
Mostly everyone nodded.
“And how will you find people who would want to be part of that sort of thing?” my mother asked. “I don’t think anyone in our family knows anyone like that. Or my friends.”
“You’d be surprised,” my sister Amelia said then. “Now, is this just for people who’ve been through the justice system, like they’re in jail or they used to be in jail, or could it be for people who want to express remorse for something nobody knows about?”
Stefan said, “Something nobody knows about? That’s pretty wild, Tia Amelia. That’s a good idea, though. I think it could be.”
Then Amelia told us about a woman she knew who’d been tormented for years because when she was a teenager, she and her friends were on a family vacation in the north woods and they trashed a beautiful cabin that belonged to some neighbors down the lakeshore. They vandalized it when no one was there; they threw paint and ketchup on the newly-papered walls; they ate whatever food they found, although they didn’t break or remove anything. When the other family arrived, though, Amelia’s friend was brokenhearted. She saw the people’s despair and wanted to confess. She was fifteen. She thought juvenile detention would wreck her life and break her parents’ hearts. She had written them letter after letter and torn them all up. “It’s not just her peace of mind,” Amelia said. “Those people were freaked out. They were scared for years after that it would happen again. They felt like they’d been assaulted.”
Another woman she knew, Amelia added, had shoplifted tons of makeup over the years, all from a little mom-and-pop drugstore. “I always wanted to apologize and give it back,” Amelia said, and then blushed. “I mean, this woman I know wanted to apologize, not me! Could she be part of The Healing Project? Does the crime have to be big?”
We all sat there quietly for a moment, all the adults probably thinking what I was thinking: Amelia the admirable, the straight arrow, was talking about herself. She had lugged this guilt around all these years.
“It only has to be big in your mind,” Stefan finally said. “Not everything has to be the bombing of the World Trade Center.”
I looked around the table. Could silence get quieter, I wondered?
Stefan went on then, as if he, a felon, hadn’t just referred to the bombing of the World Trade Center, which, to be fair, in his mind was something that had happened before he was even born. He explained that any trusted person could be the intermediary and do the outreach, and also deliver the apology with its promise of service. We would receive referrals for participants from ordinary families, or people who read about The Healing Project in Merry’s nationwide Unitarian newsletter, or in the press if it got any attention, or from the families of the felons, or the felons themselves, from parole officers, and from community-based organizations that helped people start over after jail, like our local Fresh Horizon, “which sounds like cereal to me,” Stefan added.
Every person who went through The Healing Project had to promise to try to find two more participants and to mentor at least one of them. That was the deal...to pay it back and forward. The grant from Julie would be in a trust that would renew itself, and he hoped that others would also contribute funding.
Then Stefan said, “So, Tia Amelia, those old people who ran the little store?”
“Yep,” said Amelia. “I thought they were old people at the time, but they were probably in their early fifties... Do the people who participate have to use their real names?”
“That’s the idea. But I guess the person could just send the victims an anonymous check,” Stefan said.
“That wouldn’t be the whole deal though, would it? It’s hard. It’s a hard thing. It would be easier to just go on and not think about what one had done.”
“Except you do think about it,” Stefan said.
* * *
Amelia did become the first participant in the program. She took the time to write the letter and formally made amends to the store owners and the people with the cabin—Amelia, the quietest sister and the biggest sinner. So we all saw that this could work for offenders of all types. In the world, this was a very small thing. In my sister’s life, it had wings, and I was proud of her for it.
Before that happened, I tried to ignore most of this, spending days on my scholarly book, while Stefan and Julie and Merry did the spadework for the first “real” iteration of The Healing Project. It would entail a fair amount of preparation, part of the reason why it would only be possible to carry through with one renewal project at a time, at least for now.
Stefan finally settled on the next penitent after his aunt.
It seems quaint now that I never expected that one of the Healing Projects would center on a family we actually knew. Portland, Wisconsin, was a small town, and Madison, just nearby, a small city. Even Stefan would have remembered them from the photo in our living room. Perhaps memory, however distant, guided Stefan’s hand.
There were three contenders, all worthy; but one was particularly poignant, in part because the woebegone penitent hadn’t done anything wrong but had been dragging a weight for a long time.
One morning, Stefan handed me a file. “This is the next project, Mom, and I’m meeting with the woman who reached out. She’s coming here today. I thought you should know.”
I started to read the file. Seconds in, I was stunned. “Stefan, we know these people. They’re the Hodges.”
After his time as a globe-trotting photographer, my dad kept just one main client, his best childhood friend Malachy Hodge, former governor and senator of Wisconsin, brother and son and grandson of governors and senators and heir to a timber fortune. I pointed at the large black-and-white photo on our living room wall taken at one of Mal’s victory celebrations where two little girls peeked out from the cloth that covered the speakers’ table. One was Alzy Hodge. One was me.
“I know that!” Stefan said, with a hint of a scoff. “I know all about it.”
“No you don’t,” I told him. “Not everything.”
As I began to talk about those days, my sunny childhood burst upon me, weather vanes spinning on the tops of boathouses, the snap of hot dogs sizzling on a giant grill, the smell of a fresh-cut fir tree, jumping off the raft into the green water, breathless with cold.
“Papu and Mal played soccer together,” I said, “and they went to the prom with girls they later married. When your grandpa was working for the Hodges, he took photos for them all over the place, of the good things they accomplished, like these gorgeous ecologically restored lakes in Minnesota and at this old logging camp in Maine where any family who asked could stay a week for free.”
We often went along. Just like my parents, the Hodges had three daughters, about three years apart in age. They were named sentimentally for an old Longfellow poem that Governor Hodge’s mother read to him and his sisters when they were small. “Your aunts and I grew up with Alice and Allegra and Edith, more like cousins than neighborhood friends. They were all beautiful and accomplished, blond like their father and dark-eyed like their Puerto Rican mother. We went swimming at the governor’s mansion and slept over, thrilled to order hot-fudge sundaes from the kitchen at midnight.”