You can be more fucking careful with your texts.
I’ve tried to forgive him, and to hate him, too, but the Tom I met on campus at a stupid mixer my dorm was throwing who pushed his glasses up his nose and then up on top of his head, that Tom who never let me treat him like I was his mother and who was perfectly capable of doing his own laundry, who stayed up all night with the kids when they had croup, who held first Cassie then Henry in his arms as if they were the best present I could ever give him . . . I still love that guy. Most of the time, I still think I made the right choice. Many days I’d probably make that choice again. But in this new life, post-texts and death and anger and grief, if ever faced with the possibility again?
This time I might go for the moon.
This time I might bask in the sun.
The committee waits for me to compose myself. Jenny hands me a Kleenex and someone else offers me water, but I’m fine, I say, fine.
“Go ahead, Franny.”
“So we know this is her mug,” Franny says, fighting back her own tears. “We know my mother worked there and that she logged into the building that morning.”
While the building’s paper entry records were lost, there was a computerized system for those who worked in the building—they had to swipe their pass in order to get through security or exit the building. Unfortunately, the program that tracked departures had a glitch in it that was discovered only after the explosion. So we knew who’d gone into the building—Tom had entered at 8:22 that day, a bit early for him—but not who’d left before ten o’clock.
“And she sent an e-mail from her work computer at nine fifty,” Franny continued. “To Cecily, actually.”
I still had that e-mail. It said simply: Good luck. Call me after. I’d seen it only days later, when I finally had the energy to look through the hundreds of e-mails that had gathered in my in-box. I’d felt so tired, so crushed, after I read it—one of her last thoughts had been about me. Not that she knew what was coming, but my wish for my friend was that she was at peace in those final minutes, not worried, and certainly not worried about my stupid problems.
She was Tom’s head programmer, but we’d known her for years before she joined the business. The Rings lived in Evanston like us, and she and I were in a book club together for a while. But it was after the birth of her second daughter, Julia, four years ago (her third, I guess, a fact that still took me by surprise even though I was sitting down the table from the evidence, the person, Franny), when she was hit with a bout of postpartum depression, that we became close friends.
Depression’s a funny thing. We don’t know what to do about it—as a society—unless we’ve been there ourselves. The person before us is not someone we know, and their unhappiness is often not something we can understand. So we downplay it, and we make the afflicted somehow to blame. No one would ever tell someone with cancer that if they tried a bit harder, if they got out of bed and took a shower, everything would be better, but people told her all those things. That and more, worse.
Her husband, Joshua, hadn’t known how to handle it, but I’d been there in college—clinically depressed for much of my sophomore year—so I knew what it felt like. I knew what had worked for me, what had pulled me through and brought me out the other side. I made myself as available to her as I could, and we became close.
When she was on her feet and feeling ready to go back to work, I suggested she apply for a job at Tom’s company. Tom agreed—they’d always gotten along—and several months after she started working for him, he told me how happy he was that he’d taken her on.
“Yes,” I say to the committee in the here and now, “she wrote to me that day.”
I can feel their curious stares. They’ve read the e-mail. What was she wishing me luck for? Why did she want me to call her after? After what? I’ve been asked more than once. It isn’t anybody’s business, and I’d made up some answer, some inside joke between us about how we wished each other luck on ordinary days. Just for fun. Ha.
“You’ve all seen the e-mail,” I add. “Nothing relevant there.”
Jenny looks as if she wants to ask more but turns to Franny instead. The others follow suit. The fact that anyone read her e-mails feels like the worst invasion of privacy. Which it is, but privacy gives way to compensation.
“Did someone check the IP address?” one of the men asks. “She could’ve sent it from her phone.”
“We checked,” Franny says. “All this information is in your packets.”
There’s a slim white folder sitting on the table in front of each of us. It has the shadowy label of the Initiative on it. I open it up. It’s full of the usual application materials. Financial information, the details of the deceased’s job, how many family members are seeking compensation. A photo.
I touch its matte surface. It’s been a long time since I held a real picture rather than simply scrolling through memories on my phone. It’s a happy photo taken at a backyard barbecue. There’s a date stamped on the back. Two years ago, almost to the day.
“The judge had all this information,” Jenny says.
“Correct,” Franny answers. “But he didn’t have the mug, and her DNA is clearly on it. It was matched to the DNA we have on file for her.”
“But it’s the mug she used every day, right?”
“Your point being?”
“It isn’t any better evidence she was there than anything else we have. Not based on the criteria you insisted we put in place.”
Everyone waits for Franny to respond. She takes a moment, possibly counting to ten in her head before proceeding as we’d discussed when we’d prepped for the meeting on the phone last night.
“I agree with you. It alone doesn’t prove anything.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Hush, Jenny,” I say. “Let her make her case.”
Jenny slouches down and thrusts out her bottom lip. I can count the ridges in her spine through her cream linen shirt.
Franny gives me a grateful smile. “I think if you turn to the last page of the packet, you might feel differently.” We do as she asks. There’s a grainy photograph of a woman standing at the elevators. It is time-stamped 9:56 a.m. “They found this in a cache of backups on the cloud,” Franny says.
She explains. The company that owned the building used a cloud service to back up its security camera footage. But since all the passwords and people with authorization were blown apart in the blast—their offices were located on the first floor, next to the day care—access had proven difficult. We’d get packets of information at a time without, it seemed, any rhyme or reason.
“Look at the time stamp,” Franny says. “It’s her. She’s in the building right before it happened. The lipstick on the cup matches her DNA, the cup she washed meticulously every day, according to anyone who knew her. I think there’s sufficient evidence to bring this to a vote. Do I have a second?”
“I second,” Jenny says, perhaps to make up for her former criticism.
“The vote has been seconded. I call the vote.”
The voices ring around the room, and I don’t have to count to know.
The ayes have it.
“Thanks for the support in there,” Franny says at the coffee shop where we go after our meetings to grab a coffee and decompress. “What’s gotten into Jenny?”
I poke my finger at the foam in my latte. The server’s made a smiley-face pattern in it, perhaps sensing we have something to celebrate but don’t quite know how to do it.
“It’s hard, all of this. It gets to all of us sometimes.”
“I know.” Franny picks up and then discards the cookie she bought. Though she’s thinner than she was, she still struggles with her weight, something I’ve tried to get her not to care about. “Why don’t I feel happier?”
“About what happened today?”
“Yeah. I mean, I got what I wanted . . . for the family.”
“For your family.”
“It’s hard for me to think of them like that sometimes.”