She gave me her new gmail address. Everyone had one, if not four. Hers was LongingEsme.
I answered her. I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you. I couldn’t. I feel guilty about that. I know you are scared, Esme. But I truly need to know what exactly you know or saw that night to understand what we need to fear. I know you loved Belinda. I trust you’re trying to help Stefan.
About an hour later, I got a reply.
Is Stefan okay? Did you warn him?
I wrote, I did. I have. He doesn’t know what to believe. Stuff has happened. You know it has. And he was not really okay before. He’s still pretty depressed and now he’s scared too.
Another hour passed. Then a ping. I have to tell you what happened. But I don’t know if I’m doing the wrong thing.
You have to trust me, I wrote back. I squirmed a little when I wrote that last line. I wasn’t really looking for her trust or her friendship. I wasn’t really offering mine. I just needed answers. But forget her; all this was her idea. She could take what she got.
Stefan was knocking at my door. “I’m sorry, Mom.” I didn’t answer. “Okay, anyway. I’m sorry. I’m not perfect. Not even close. I’m weak. Maybe I’m not even good enough. Maybe this whole thing is a waste of time.”
I opened the door. He looked blotchy, stubbled, like the kind of college kid who had a beer in the morning.
“Take a long hot shower, hon. You’ll feel better. You are good enough. You have talent. You have compassion. You have plenty to offer the world.”
“Maybe not.”
“Like you said, it’s too late to give up. It’s got to get easier. I know it will get easier.”
Stefan shrugged. The cant of his eyes seemed to mock me, or at least to betray the essential mistrust of a child for a parent, the doubt that rose along with the accumulated years, to replace the tender adulation. Your child had to reject you. You had to suborn it. But it was a brutal process in the best of circumstances. And these were not the best of circumstances.
The next morning Julie showed up at our house in a new Volvo, her present from Hal, and I put my overnight bag and the file box into the trunk and said goodbye to Stefan and Jep. I felt guilty leaving Stefan after our talk, or nontalk, the previous night, but I knew I would feel just as guilty if I stayed home. Then I snuggled into the new-brew scented glove-y leather and slept all the way to Sister Bay.
The cabin was alight in the afternoon shadow of the woods, and a young chef, slim as a pleat, with red-and-purple hair, already had a soup with tomatoes and garlic bubbling on the stove.
We skied. Moving is like cooking. It helps everything. We came out of the birch forest panting, to the edge of a broad-shouldered cliff and the lake frothed below, vasty as a sea. Worn out afterward, we took long baths, with absurdly expensive soaps and unguents.
“You’re so lucky,” I said.
“I am,” she said. “You’ll be lucky again, Thea.”
An ugly-faced cutworm gnawed me. My sweet best friend Julie—considerate companion, sane soul, gracious giver of gifts and good counsel—would her face glow with such unlined purity, if she were me? There were very few problems that money couldn’t solve, but, to be fair, ours was one of them. The more I chewed on that thought, the sicker I got of myself. This was patently as whiny as anything Stefan had come up with. Julie was rich, and toned, and well-married, and good. I’d stopped going to my book club when this same thing happened, because I couldn’t face my old friends’ good lives. But surely, they had their problems too. Some of them must wake up crying at times and not know why. Even Julie.
I filled her in on a recent development. We had agreed to do a lecture, Stefan and I.
“Really?” Julie said. “How did that happen?”
When I finally got another message from Curt Cowrie, I had forgotten everything but his name, and I only remembered that because it was the name of a shell.
As it turned out, he didn’t really work for the American Association of Mental Health Nurses (AMEN). What he did was to match speakers with events. AMEN was hosting its annual national meeting in Milwaukee in just a few weeks; the main speaker had just pulled out. The organization was going to sub in a panel discussion on the topic of criminality and the duty of care. “But I told them I could book an even better speaker than they already had.”
“I don’t know anyone,” I told him.
“I mean you. And if he wants to, Stefan. I’ll get you both top dollar, forty minutes tops, then a question and answer session, in and out. No social duties, no reception. It’ll start at six and you can stay over that night at the nicest hotel in town, and I don’t know what that means in Milwaukee, have a great dinner after the talk, and in the morning you are on the road back home.”
I said, “There’s not a chance that I would do this. I’m not a speaker.”
“You were pretty great on that show.”
“That was...a fluke, a one-off...”
“Thea, you’ve been giving lectures for years. You’re a professor.”
He described the audience. Professionals, doctors, psychiatric nurses, social workers, some representatives of advocacy organizations. I said that there was really no way I could talk about my own life in a lecture. He mentioned a figure that was less than half my annual salary, but not much less. I took a deep breath and refused.
“Why don’t you ask Stefan first?”
When I did, to my horror, Stefan was definitely interested. He was interested in the money, because who wouldn’t be? But more importantly, he saw it as an extension of his quest to bring more attention to The Healing Project. We talked over what this speech might look like—that is, Jep and I talked it over while Stefan ate a whole family-sized bag of taco chips and texted his friends. Curt Cowrie had advised me to make my talk a narrative, a story. Tell what happened, and how we felt then and how we felt now. What was learned? What do you wish you’d known? These audiences would want news they could use in their professional lives. They would also just be curious. They would have questions.
Stefan said he wanted to do it, for sure.
So we’d agreed.
“Well, how bad could a bunch of psychiatric nurses be?” Julie said, and then both of us burst out laughing.
“There will be all kinds of people there, Jules. You know and I know. Some will just be people who want to feel better about themselves. They want to know they’re better parents than we are. But the trap door opens for everyone. Nobody gets through life without it happening, not like for me, but some way.”
“Would you want it to open for everyone?” Julie said.
“No,” I said. Yes, I thought. I told her, “What if it draws somebody out in the open?
“If Stefan talks about that night, maybe it’s like a challenge. Don’t hang back like a little coward. I have a right to know who’s after me. Stefan has a right.”
“What if it draws somebody out into the open but this time that person doesn’t just stop with burning up a car? It’s a risk,” Julie said. “You can’t control a big lecture like a little story at the local public TV station.”
“Jep said that. But Stefan said he couldn’t hide forever.”
“That’s true.”
“I don’t know if I’m brave, but Stefan is. He’s dedicating part of his life to letting people know he repents. He’s helping other people repent. He’s not even letting this threat stop him. Even though he’s scared to death sometimes.”
I remembered Curt’s words. “To be honest, I didn’t know if I really could feel much sympathy for Stefan. My wife was the one who brought the show to my attention, because she’s a psychiatric nurse. She told me, unless this kid is really sincere, what’s in it for him? Now that I’ve seen it, I agree with her. I don’t think I could have faced up to it so publicly, the way he did.”