The next day, I was alone at home and restless.
I wanted to see Julie, but she was off on a dental mission. I opened my laptop to start a video chat with her but she was too busy. Her recent emails told me of her fury over a recent dustup: Not once, but several times, she’d been called an “evangetourist.” Global Smiles had been fixing kids’ teeth in developing nations for forty years and had no religious connection of any kind. They’d worked for decades in Haiti and talked their way into rural India where people had no access to dental care—in the country that trained the best dentists in the world. It was Julie’s first time in Africa. At a big UNICEF gathering in Addis Ababa, Julie was confronted by the co-founder of an anti-colonialist organization called BanWhiteSaviors, who told Julie that her organization was more invested in her own smiles than in those of African peoples.
“You come, you fix a few things, and you’re back to your Southern California lifestyle,” the woman said. “We’re committed. We stay.”
“She’s the wannabe, not us,” Julie wrote to me. “I was so mad I had to walk away. We’re giving people healthy teeth and teaching them how to keep them that way. It’s not a hill of beans.”
“You can’t eat your hill of beans with no teeth,” I wrote back.
“I wanted to knock HER teeth out,” Julie responded.
She then sent me what she described as “the strangest selfie in history.” After her Global Smiles project ended, she had been traveling with a small group of doctors, all but one a woman, hiking into Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, along the mountain trail. There was my pal, down on her haunches among a thicket of shrubs, while yards away, a gorilla studied her with magnificent patience. I tried to imagine myself into such a breathtaking moment.
“Do you think it gets old for the gorillas?” I wrote to her. Her being away so much must get old for Julie’s sons, I thought, not for the first time, for I knew that Ernest and Miller missed their mom when she was absent, even though Hal was a generous, deeply engaged dad. While Jep traveled with his team, I’d been righteously on the scene every night at dinner with Stefan—and look where that got me.
Oh Julie, I thought, take me away with you. Though she worked very hard, all those storied destinations raised the canopy of her mind, while my mind scuttled about like a bug trapped under a water glass. She had invited me, often, to accompany her. Why didn’t I when I could? Before our lives were changed forever? Before I’d lost sole custody of my own life. But I had plenty of time left, didn’t I? People my age were starting new careers, having their first children. That kind of boldness felt extinguished in me. But that was okay.
The next morning, I asked Stefan if he heard periodic reports from any of the people who had been involved with The Healing Project.
“I just heard from Rebecca in fact,” he said. “She’s so great. She’s like an inspirational person living the way people should live. I’m going to have lunch over there next week. Rebecca might want me to do some landscaping and I just... I’d like to see her again.”
Becky was a good ten years older than Stefan. “Do you like her, like a girlfriend?” I asked.
“I don’t think so, but what if I did? Not everybody has to be twins like you and Dad.”
On an impulse, to kill time as much as anything else, I decided to call Rebecca Broom myself. My cover would be that I was just checking in to see how things were going. The reality was, I liked her. She was also a tie to my past, in a certain way. She didn’t pick up, but I left a message, and then I felt uneasy about that.
At dinner that night I asked Stefan if he thought there was any professional reason I shouldn’t have called her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She called me about some landscaping work. Could you imagine ever calling any of the other people from The Healing Project just to have lunch?”
He rightly said it was like him wanting to get together with Roman Villera just to hang out. Even though from time to time he thought about taking Trina Villera up on her offer of a massive puppy, he was reluctant to reopen that book. I could only guess why. Edging up on a year later, Stefan’s principal reality had shifted: He was more of home now than he was of prison. He might have to admit that his and Roman’s friendship, despite its very real emotional import for both of them, was also provisional, bracketed in time and space.
I thought about it more and half convinced myself that my wanting to see Becky Broom was different. Because of my family’s relationship with the Hodges, I felt a greater obligation and thus perhaps a greater permission. The next day, I told Stefan this.
He shrugged and said, “I can see that. If you do, tell her I was asking about her and will see her soon.” He was busy packing his truck: He and Will Brent, along with Will’s new girlfriend, were hosting a blowout weekend at Julie’s cabin. Julie had emailed him directly with the suggestion, and he was clearly pleased with the idea. Luck Sergenian was coming, with her fiancé, plus her younger sister. It made Stefan feel good to be able to host for once these now good friends and mentors who had helped make him feel normal.
“What’s her sister’s name?” I asked Stefan. “Chance?”
“No,” he said with a sly smile. “It’s Snowy.”
“Is her sister a pet rabbit?”
“Mom, cut it out.” But he was laughing. “Her name is Snowy River. It’s awful, I know. It’s after this place in Australia where her parents were when she was, ah, conceived. But she’s a really nice person. Luck thinks I should ask her out. She’s my age.”
I knew better than to do anything except nod briefly. I was glad to see him planning something that was purely social, with people who accepted who he was now. It wasn’t until very late Sunday night that he got home, and I heard him whistling as he came into the house. Then he was on the phone, assuming we were sleeping the sleep of the deaf and aged. “So what time do you leave?” he said. “I really don’t mind driving you. Well, that depends. How much luggage would I have to pick up? I shouldn’t even come over, since I should be offended that you want to go to Paris for some reason instead of hanging out with me.”
A few days later, he was asleep on the couch when I came in. Some horrifying punk rock music video from about 1988 was splattered across the screen, blaring. I flipped the TV off. “I was watching that,” Stefan said ritually.
“You were snoring.”
“Fine, I’m an exile,” he said. “I meet a girl I like and she goes off to junior year abroad. Do I have good luck or what?”
“At least you know it’s possible.”
“Maybe for one in five hundred, if I have a pre-introduction and family members to vouch for me.”
School would start soon. Stefan had been accepted to UW–Madison to study in the Department of Landscape Architecture. He’d worried about the process every step of the way. If he did get in, he wouldn’t fit. But he probably wouldn’t even get in, it was so competitive. And finally, he said, “I’m really worried that somebody on the selection committee will know who I am.”
“If they didn’t admit you because you have a criminal record...” I began.
“No one would ever know that was why I didn’t get in, Mom! You know better. You’re part of the secret society of academic snobs.”