It was a relief to talk to another adult about this. Fran didn’t want to, and Carlotta didn’t want to, but Mike seemed less interested in chatting about his participation in the podcast than in the details of the case. It made me feel less crazy; he’d clearly spent time thinking about this, too.
I found myself halfway down one of the two chapel aisles. A living room was set up on the stage—flowery sofa, a lamp with no cord, a coffee table with a lace throw—and I remembered the posters around campus for the one-act festival happening here. The sun was setting through the stained glass on the west wall. Everything smelled like warm, ancient wood.
I said, “Would he really trade a drug charge for a murder charge?”
There was a long pause, and a couple of times I heard him take a breath to start, but nothing came out. Finally he said, “A lot of my research touches on amnesty and human rights. And I’m seeing this case, and I feel like such a hypocrite. I contributed to this.”
“Plenty of people contributed.”
“Probably he did, but what do I know? It’s not up to me to decide, and teenage me shouldn’t have had a say either. Maybe we shouldn’t have let, you know, a bunch of kids hand someone to the police. What I mean is, the stuff they had on him—it came from us. Except the DNA, I guess. But none of us thought, hey, I’m personally framing this guy. And—very much off the record—maybe we did. We might have set up a guilty guy, but we set him up.”
By that point I felt physically unsettled in a way that had nothing to do with speaking to someone I’d once found attractive. He didn’t mean to include me in his “we,” but he had.
I walked back to the vestibule and headed into the bathroom, although I didn’t need it—bathrooms simply being the place you go when you feel sick, when you need to be alone. The door was old and swung in on two familiar decrepit stalls, a familiar sink, the warped mirror above it, the crank paper towel dispenser. I couldn’t have told you a thing about this bathroom five seconds earlier, and now I recognized every inch.
There was a radiator under the tiny frosted window, and I leaned back against it, grilling my butt through my jeans.
I said, “This is random, but do you remember if students were drinking backstage that night, at Camelot? Would Thalia have been drinking?”
He puffed out air. “I mean, in general, sure. That night? Who knows. Why?”
I explained, as best I could, my concerns about the timeline. He gave a noncommittal “Huh.” He said, “I just—God, this could be such a mess. I don’t trust my memory of what I ate last night. What do you think happens to memory over twenty years? Anyway, your students ask me to chat and this is what goes through my mind. I just feel like—it’s such a can of worms.”
I couldn’t figure out if he was arguing against looking into the case. Surely not. But he sounded pained.
“It’s only a student project,” I said, feebly.
“So was Facebook.”
He agreed, in the end, to talk to Britt and Alder about his memories of Thalia, at least; he’d see how he felt about whatever else came up. I’d taken off my coat, enjoying the stuffy heat of the small bathroom, scooting around on the radiator to warm different parts of my legs. I said, “Lola says you found me scary in high school.”
“Oh. I mean—you were a little prickly, maybe. Or maybe you just didn’t want to deal with me. I was passing as a dude-bro. I’m sure I was terrible.”
“You were nice to me.”
“Well, sure. That’s what you do when you’re afraid of someone.” He was laughing, though, and there was something flattering about the idea that he’d looked at me with anything other than pity or scorn. “I could never figure you out. This goth kid who rowed crew and did musicals.” That was two more things than I’d have guessed he remembered about me, even if I hadn’t quite done musicals. I couldn’t parse the nostalgia, or maybe even tenderness, in his voice.
He had to go; he’d be in touch after he talked to the students.
“You have my number,” I said, and wondered if my tone was more like someone in a business meeting or in a romantic comedy. Ridiculously, I wondered if Yahav would have been jealous if he’d heard me.
I was hanging up when my phone buzzed with a text from Carlotta, and for a moment it was 1995, me debriefing with her after I talked to a cute boy. You okay? the message read. Plz lmk if there’s ANYTHING I can do, seriously.
I put on my coat, toasted dry from the radiator. I’d love it if this were about my students’ podcast, but I knew that even though Carlotta wasn’t on Twitter, it was about Jerome and about my own downfall, information making its way through the private messages of people who knew me.
I got hotter and hotter as I stood there, and when I stepped out into the ridiculous cold, it came as a relief.
53
Things constantly on my mind:
The next time I’d hear from Lance. Whether I should check Twitter. Whether I should check my inbox. Whether it was time to switch careers or change my name.
Whether Jerome was sleeping and eating enough that he could safely drive the kids around.
Whether quitting the podcast would mean I was financially dependent on Jerome again. Whether Jerome still had an income for me to depend on.
Omar’s mother, in front of her piano.
Thalia’s parents, at their kitchen table.
How quickly I could get to Boston and grab Yahav and convince him to spend just one afternoon in a motel so I could drink in enough of him to last me a few months.
What you might have done after you left the theater that night, just moments after you said goodbye to me.
What I’d once seen as a pile of evidence against Omar quickly turning to sand.
(But then: His ex’s words, her fear.)
The news story, which I couldn’t avoid even when I wasn’t online. Another woman had come forward. The president called her a dog.
Loose ends on the Rita Hayworth episodes I might never finish. The way her flamenco dancer father took her on the road at age four, abusing her physically and sexually, setting her up for a lifetime of terrible relationships. She considered herself a dancer throughout her career—more than an actress, certainly more than a sex symbol. When she was upset, Orson Welles, her second of five husbands, would put on a record of Spanish music and leave her alone to dance out her stress. What happens when your only escape is the same thing you’re trying to escape? Here’s the soundtrack of your tragedy: Dance to it.
54
My classy move: Rather than getting Yahav on the phone myself, I invited him to conference call with Britt and Alder after class on Wednesday. The whole group ended up staying, though, gathered around my faceup phone. Yahav’s voice was ice in a whiskey glass, and I could feel it through the table, through the floor, up my legs.
He said, “I’m not so interested in guilty or innocent, strange as that might sound. I’m interested in due process. My perspective is maybe this guy did it, but the case was shit.”
Britt typed frantically at her laptop, despite the fact that we were recording; Alder did a happy dance with his arms.
“I don’t know New Hampshire law precisely,” he said, “but I can speak to the issues in general. The only evidence that isn’t horribly circumstantial is the DNA and the confession. And this was trace DNA. DNA is tricky. A few years ago, they find DNA on a dead girl’s jeans, they spend all this money, and they end up tracking it back to a worker at the Taiwanese factory where the jeans were made. Not helpful. Plus, in 1995 the DNA science was horseshit. You have a much smaller pool of samples back then, so they end up saying, like, This is a one in eight million match, when now they’d say it’s one in two thousand. It was a brand-new field.”