Maggie waved at us as she’d waved at her granddaughters, and continued as if Julie had been speaking Mandarin. “Just so you know I’m not going to go public and talk about how grateful we are that this man wants to make restitution to Jessamyn’s children. I’m not going to go on Dr. Phil and hug him. We’ll take his money, and I might tell the girls what he did, I haven’t decided that yet. It would only be to teach them that there’s some good even in the lowest of the low. But we don’t want anything to do with him.”
“That’s exactly what we’re offering.”
“And I will never forgive him.” She held up a finger. “I will never. They gave me all these pamphlets at the grief support group. About how forgiveness is really not for the criminal, it’s really for your own peace of mind, and how we’re all human and we’re all sinners, and there but for the grace of God. Now, I may be a sinner, but I don’t give a shining shit if I am. I wish Roman Villera died in that crash, too; actually no, I wish he was paralyzed, because he’s nothing but a useless piece of meat. It’s not fair. I hope that us accepting his so-called renewal is the best thing that ever happens to him for the rest of his life.”
She went on then to say that she wished she could forget Villera, but she was reminded of him every morning, the moment she got out of bed. Abruptly pulling up one cuff of her soft trousers, she displayed her prosthetic lower leg, the shape of an immersion blender but three times the size. Then she opened a manila folder that sat on the table the whole time, which I failed to notice. It was clearly there for her to show us.
“This is Jessamyn on her wedding day,” she said. We gazed at the demure girl with her short crop of brown curls caught back in a band of crystals and pearls. “This is Jessamyn after the wreck.” Her face was sheared in half, as if the top of her head had been opened like a can and the contents of her head, her glistening blue-gray brain and one of her eyes, spilled out over her cheeks. Her full lips made a soft pomegranate O of disbelief.
I found my feet and pivoted and plunged out through the screen door to the porch.
“Thank you, Maggie,” I heard Julie say. “The project will be in touch about the bank account.”
Once down the driveway, I had to make Julie pull the car over so I could throw up the cake and coffee.
“Oh baby, oh poor you,” Julie said. “I have some wet wipes in the trunk. Wait.” She got them out and pulled a few for me, rabbits from a hat. I sat in the weeds and scrubbed at my teeth and the collar of my shirt. “We should have known it could be like this.”
“I thought it would be more civilized,” I finally said, trying to blink the black stars away from my vision.
“I guess I did, too. But this is awful stuff, Thea. We shouldn’t expect it to be sanitized, should we? People process unspeakable loss in whatever way they can, to find the strength to live with it and go on. And this might be just the beginning. Roman is not a bad man. He’s a decent man who made a bad mistake, something you know all about. But some of the participants we might meet after this, well, like Merry says, they may be Saul, not Paul. There’s a good chance they will be bad-deed doers who want to change. But the bad stuff they did, they might have done on purpose. That’s what the project will have to face. That’s what the real making of this effort is about.”
“The worst of them, though, they wouldn’t be sorry. Right?”
“I don’t know,” Julie said, and shrugged. “I don’t know that many people who have killed other people.”
“You sound like my mother now. They’re not our sort of crowd. Most killers don’t know very many people who’ve killed other people.”
“That’s true.”
“What I meant is that I didn’t know how awful it could be...on the other side of tragedy.”
“Well, that woman would have been a perfectly nice person her whole life, with a husband, daughter and two grandkids, if none of this ever happened. Right?” I got back into the car, gratefully accepting Julie’s offer of a bottle of water and a sleeve of saltines that she found in the trunk. What else did she have back there? She intuited my look and told me, chocolate bars, baby wipes, blankets. “I knew someday I might get stuck in my car but I decided that at least I’d never die of hunger or thirst.” I smiled at her and tentatively patted her hand.
What business did we in fact have here at all? What titer of hubris so possessed us to think that we could right wrongs, repair damage, offer compensation—this much for an eye, this much for a limb, this much for a mother’s love and protection, this much for a life? Good purpose was no defense. What I was experiencing, and Julie could not, was the plain recognition of the role reversal that had begun like the distant sound of sirens and now come roaring up with lights ablaze and knocked me flat. For the first time in a long time I thought of Jill. Not the menacing Jill. But my once-upon-a-time friend Jill. Jill, grief-stricken, deprived of her lovely daughter. Her Bindy. Her only.
Then I said, “Maggie has a right to her hate. But in my mind, even though this isn’t true, in my mind...”
“Roman is Stefan.”
“That’s right.”
“So maybe Jill has to be the next recipient of The Healing Project. If she is open to it. Maybe it is time for Stefan to express his deep remorse directly to her.”
If I hadn’t already been sitting down, my legs would have gone slack with the immensity of the realization. “That’s impossible.” But even as I said it, I knew Julie might be right.
“It certainly will not be easy,” she said.
“Julie! There’s an ocean of distance between easy and confronting Jill McCormack!”
“You don’t have to be the one to confront her.”
“What else could Stefan’s plan for renewal be?”
“Remember the rules call for no direct contact between the participant and the victim’s family,” Julie said. “So I’m thinking the clearest message of remorse and amends might be for Stefan to offer to support Jill’s organization SAY. If she would have him. He would have to make the case why in his letter. After all, she formed it in honor of Belinda.”
But how would that even be possible? Why didn’t Julie suggest that he run the hundred yards in nine seconds...or cure cancer? The idea was so outrageous that it bewildered me to respond. And that was before considering whether Jill would even allow it. Besides, wouldn’t Stefan joining SAY somehow be seen as an admission on his part that he had physically abused Belinda before her death, something Stefan categorically denied. It could be seen as evidence to corroborate the belief that he was a habitual criminal who simply didn’t get caught until his crime escalated and he committed the ultimate offense. Something I knew was not true. And yes, it could be powerful, a boost more effective for the message of SAY than any public relations campaign could ever be. But it would also wipe out any hope of a good opinion of Stefan from anyone who knew about his past. It would keep his past alive to be judged all over again. By new people.
“Honey,” Julie said, “let’s go home so you can clean up and maybe have a nap. Then, if you want, we’ll go out and get a nice dinner and talk about it.”
I tried to force lightness into my voice, but the tears had a stranglehold. “Do you think he could really go through with that? Joining SAY? Would they even have him? Stefan shied away from any kind of violence. He flinched when someone hit a woman or a kid on TV. He really believes in that message, in that sense. The police told us that they tried to find evidence that he was violent with Belinda before that night, but they couldn’t find any. They were pretty eager to charge him with whatever assault they could.”