A small, elderly woman was quickly bearing down on us, using her cane to propel her along. It was only when she got so close that I could study the way she moved that I realized, too late, she doesn’t really need that cane...but by then she had slugged me, a strong right to the jaw that knocked me to the carpet on my rear end. Stefan jumped to help me, while one security guard and then another pinned the woman’s arms behind her back. “Why don’t you kill yourself?” she screamed as they dragged her away.
Then it was a few minutes of first aid from a nurse practitioner who’d been in the audience, followed by an ambulance ride to the closest emergency room, with Jep and Stefan following behind, where I got stitches and painkillers. We decided to forgo the hotel stay that night so it was not until nearly midnight that we were finally home, and I let Jep tuck me in, and bring me hot milk with honey and cinnamon.
The next morning, I played back the voice mail on the answering machine, for some reason on speaker. There were a few random remarks about the attack on me at the speech, which had been mentioned on the news, one from a personal injury lawyer offering to sue the assailant. At the last message, Stefan and I froze, as if a tiger had just walked into the room. “Thea, this is Jill McCormack. I need to speak with you. Please give me a call as soon as you can.”
12
“Ouch,” Jep said that night when he inspected my luridly swollen lip. “Theaitsa, that little old lady packed a punch.”
“She wasn’t even old,” I said.
The details turned out to be ludicrous: My assailant, a veteran nurse certified to counsel rape victims, was only fifty, but she dressed up to look at least twenty-five years older to divert suspicion. Since the organizers picked up my medical costs, the stitches for my lip, the cost of my ruined white wool jacket, she ended up only paying a fine of $100. I declined to press further charges for assault.
I spent the next couple of days feeling sore and spent and feeling really sorry for myself. There were calls from virtually everyone I knew, even the cousins I only saw every few years at my aunt Helen’s family reunion. I slept long hours, often from dinnertime until ten the next morning, waking disoriented from blank, cavernous sleep that was the gift of the robust painkillers. If only such great medicine weren’t also so dangerous, for such sleep was not only my wish generally but specifically right now. I just wanted to sleep until Pete Sunday located Esme and questioned her.
Dithering about whether to tell Jep was a torment. There was almost nothing I didn’t confide in him, particularly if it was important. Whenever we were together, I felt as though I was cheating on him. And yet, when I pictured the pained look that would steal over his face at my latest piece of detective work, as he tried to understand how my own hunches and the text messages had combined to concoct this cataclysmic conclusion, I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Julie was right; everything would be revealed in time, if it turned out that there was anything to reveal.
I did tell Jep about Jill’s message.
“Should I call her?”
“Don’t ask me.” He put his hands up in front of him. “I’m just a simple guy. I don’t know about the protocol for this tortured emotional stuff.”
“Right, okay, draw the old Disney movie football coach card.”
“Why do you have to get so bitchy? Go or don’t go. She’s not dangerous, Thea. She’s not going to kill you.”
“I’m scared to go. Will you go with me?”
“I absolutely will not go with you,” he said. “I’ll drive you and wait for you, but I’m not going to face off with Jill McCormack.” He went to the refrigerator and began getting out ingredients for about four kinds of snacks, plus the chia seeds he was now obsessed with sprinkling on everything. My tension was so great that I wanted to smack him. A moment later, he muttered, “You should have thought of this before.”
“Before? Before what, Jep? Before The Healing Project? Or before I had our son, because it doesn’t come from your side of the family, huh?”
Why would I say such a thing, particularly at that point? Was it just pure spite? When I look back, I suppose it was superstition. Much as I rejected it, the accepted narrative, however awful, was safer than a far-fetched theory. Immediately, contrition replaced anger. Jep and I never went at each other with verbal broadswords, and it was a miserable, lonely feeling. That mood had to be popped; one of us had to do it. When I said, “Let’s stop, now. We’re better than this...”
I expected that Jep would immediately cross the kitchen and take me in his arms. But he didn’t. He nodded, and gave me a tight little smile, and then carefully made a plate of salami and cheese on rye toast. These last months had been so filled with event, by contrast with the past couple of years of leaden sameness, anyone would be at a loss. Under enough relentless stress, even steel breaks.
“He’s going to leave me,” I said to Julie on the phone. “I have to tell him about Esme, but then he’ll really leave me.”
“Thea, he is not going to leave you. You two have just been jumping from one rock to another for years, trying not to fall into the river and drown. You need to go to a family therapist. I have a...”
“A list, oh sweetie, of course you do.”
“Hal and I have gone to counseling.”
“How could you possibly ever need counseling? Your life is blessed!”
But she was right, there were always things in a marriage—not so lurid as the things that beset us, but all kinds of petal-tender doubts and lacks.
I told her, “The truth is, I can’t do anything until this is over.”
Julie asked then, “Have you heard from Esme?” I hadn’t and it was driving me mad to have to wait on her whim. “She’ll call,” Julie went on. “When she does, you’ll be ready. And maybe the detective has already found her. He could be talking to her right now. You don’t know. So just keep on with whatever you’re doing.”
It took me another entire day to find the resolve to call Jill.
She answered on the first ring. Fear sizzled along my forearms. She told me not to worry, she wasn’t bringing out the picketers again, but she had something to talk over with me. Could I meet her tomorrow at the Lava Java? I imagined the visual of Jill and me in a booth sharing a chat over our mocha lattes. Making noises about people who could be too curious at such a popular spot, I suggested somewhere more private, a place I frequented, the apple orchard at the university arboretum. The weather had been temperate; it would probably be good enough to sit outside on a stone bench for a very brief time. And I fervently hoped it would need only a very brief time.
Tomorrow, then, Jill said, about three?
The next day, there I was. As I waited, snow began to fall, of course it did, first lacy lazy flakes that gilded the darkening grove of squat, skeletal, snow-buffed trees, as the late afternoon sun pierced the cloud bank. There were eight hundred apple trees of different varieties. We used to come here often when Stefan was small. The arboretum allowed visitors to gather apples free on two specified weekends in the fall. There were signs urging everyone to share; but there were always a brigade of aggressive Mennonites armed with rakes and baskets the size of baby strollers menacing the rest of us with the force of their virtue.
Jill pulled in exactly at three.
We were the only ones there.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t told Jep that today was the day, and I hadn’t told Stefan anything at all.
Despite the snow, it was not really cold, and we got out and slowly walked toward each other like gunfighters, advancing on some imaginary middle line. I didn’t reach out to touch her, to shake her hand or hug her—although that would have happened in the movie. I didn’t say she looked well. She didn’t ask if I was teaching. She smiled then, a clear message of rapprochement; and I recalled with a pang how decent and gentle Jill had always been in the before times.
“Yikes, Thea,” she said, reaching out and nearly touching my lip before she caught herself and held back. “What does the other guy look like?”
“I’m sure you know what happened.”
“I do. That must have been awful.”
“It was scary. I was scared.”