Deanie laid both the photos and the logo aside, promising that the broadcast would feature them and the number to call The Healing Project. Something walked lightly across the back of my neck. I was like a dog that could feel a thunderstorm coming.
“So to be a participant in The Healing Project, the person has to state their remorse in writing. How about you, Stefan? Have you done that?”
“I have. My remorse was the inspiration for this program. My renewal was starting it.”
“Can you tell the viewers what you said?”
“I said I was responsible for the death of the girl I loved. Belinda McCormack.”
“You hit her with a golf club and killed her.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I really don’t know what happened. I really don’t. I took a lot of drugs in the evening.”
“More than usual?”
“Well there was no usual. At first, it was just that I took...well, methamphetamine to keep up...with school. With Belinda. She was so much smarter, and I was worried all the time.”
“Worried about school?”
“Yes, worried that if I messed up school, I would have to drop out and I would lose her. Because she wouldn’t respect me anymore.”
“So,” Deanie said, leaning in. “Why was this night different?”
“Well, I was upset. So I took a bunch of drugs. Different kinds. Whatever the person I was with offered me. Crack cocaine. Heroin. And I don’t have any memory of anything that night except that I ended up in the hospital.”
“You were upset,” she said, in a level tone. Then she waited. It was fascinating to watch. She knew full well that no one could endure the silence for very long.
“I was upset because I heard... I knew that, well, for sure I was going to lose her.”
“You were angry at Belinda.”
“No. Not exactly. Not... I just wanted to keep her. I wanted to plead with her.”
“You didn’t want somebody else to have her.”
Stefan pressed his fingers against his eyes. “Of course not. Nobody would want somebody else to have the girl you love, right? That doesn’t mean I was some insane psycho...” He stopped. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t make me sound worse than I already am.”
Deanie softened. “Okay, we won’t use that last moment. I promise. Let’s go on.” She tapped her knee with her silver pencil. “So you are blaming your drug use for what you did?”
“No. Or in part. I just started to use drugs for the first time that fall when I was hanging out with Belinda’s friends.” He looked up, pleadingly. “I told you why.”
I could feel doubt walk along my arms like an electrical pulse. I knew Stefan was prepared for her to move on, past the death. This was supposed to be the kinder, gentler version? What about Deanie Kessler’s promise? If this wasn’t a trap, why did it feel that way?
“Was Belinda afraid of you?”
Stefan sat back and almost laughed. I gasped. He recovered as if it were a kind of cough and glanced around him. He said, “No. Not at all.” But I knew that somehow, the camera could make a nervous grimace into a casual smirk.
“Why did she have a golf club in her apartment then?”
“Because she was a golfer. Her mom is a professional golfer. She gave Belinda a set of her clubs when she went to college.”
“And so you served a couple of years in prison and then you came home. And you live right around the block from where Belinda lived?”
“I live in the same house I’ve lived in all my life. I’m glad to be home, for sure. I want to fit in. But of course, everywhere I look, I think about Belinda and I miss her. We were best friends all our lives, even growing up.”
“Okay, let’s break for a moment.”
Stefan sighed, and pulled his shirt away from his chest as if to cool himself off.
“You’re doing great,” I told him, as the makeup artist descended with a huge powder brush. “You really are. Just keep it low-key. He’s doing great, isn’t he?” I said to Deanie.
“Yep,” she said. I felt those electrical pulses again.
The crew took a break. One of the camera operators asked Deanie Kessler if they should get a dolly ready to film a walk through the neighborhood. I quickly put a lid on that idea.
“You’re not going to walk him past those marchers,” I said. By law, the protestors weren’t allowed to gather before nine in the morning, so we tried to be on our way to wherever we needed to go well before that time. But if Stefan or any of us was late getting out, the group would chant. Listen, Stefan! Stop Abuse Young! Save a Young Life! And Stefan, say, say, say her name!
“No, I’m thinking,” Deanie said. “We might finish with both of you at the arboretum later on. But let’s just move to another setting out here. Maybe by the tree?” I brought a pitcher of iced tea. There were several takers. As they bustled about, I kept searching their eyes for clues about the way they felt; but when they took a break or moved things around, they were breezy and impassive, telling jokey stories to each other about their upcoming weekend plans. Someone asked if I preferred “Dr. Thea Demetriou” to “Professor Thea Demetriou,” and I said no, professor was fine...and using no title at all was fine too. “We just have to write it on the files. Deanie will put it up.”
It was time to start up again.
Deanie steered the questioning back to Belinda’s death. “Stefan, you said you were desperate to keep her. Why desperate? You were still together when Belinda went away to Black Creek for college.”
“I thought, the more people she met, the more just stupid I would seem. I couldn’t think of her with someone else. I would have waited forever for her. But I was losing her. And my reaction was, I was putting pressure on her to stay with me.”
“Did she say it was over?”
“No, but she needed a chance to see who she really wanted to be.” Like all good interviewers, Deanie Kessler knew that sometimes, it was just better to wait, because people will plunge in to fill the silence. “She was my best friend. We loved each other enough that we figured that we could work everything out somehow and get married anyhow and have a family. She wanted that, too. I had to let her find herself.”
“But you couldn’t.”
Stefan roughly struck tears from his cheekbones with the heels of his hands. “I could sense that she was with someone else.”
“An older boy?”
“No, not that. It was a girl. I knew that Belinda was bisexual, but I thought she was just experimenting... I was just a kid. I didn’t know.”
My eyes blurred. The poems snapped into place like a gorgeous Scrabble word, like quickly or maximize, for which all the parts had been there but not in the right order. Perhaps Longing Esme was never just Belinda’s persona, her alter ego, but a real person, her lover, her muse. So was the Esme of Belinda’s poetry actually the girl caller? The voice who said she knew everything? Was that why she was so scared and so sad? Why would she think that the possibility of Stefan talking about her and Belinda would mean that nobody would love her anymore? In this day and age? Did the girl’s parents not know, as I had to believe that Jill had not known? As I had not? Was that all there was to it? If so, why all the threats to our son’s welfare? Sadness and fear didn’t square up with repeated warnings about Stefan keeping his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him. I glanced back at the window, my living room transformed into a sound stage beyond it. So much for keeping his mouth shut.
In that moment, I almost wanted to go find Jill and put my arms around her, gentle, conservative, devout Jill. For her, this show might feel like another loss, a very public wound. All the cats were now out of the bag and rolling around on the carpet.
“What do you want people to know, Stefan?”
Pale, now clearly on the ropes, Stefan took a breath and persevered. “I want people to know that I’m not doing all this just to prove a point. I really want to make a difference in the world, however I can. And I want Belinda’s mother, Jill, to know that I’m against dating violence too, and I will help with the mission of SAY. I’ll talk about raising awareness and how girls can tell if they’re in an abusive relationship.”