It was true that my life, which had lost all shape in those two weeks back at Granby, had reconfigured around these two projects. And of course there were my kids; they’d never gone anywhere. Jerome and I had officially divorced. Not because of what happened online, but because we’d been heading in that direction all along. He still lived next door.
So my life had purpose, but here’s one thing that churned my gut at night: Thalia’s family, aside from Vanessa, didn’t want any of this. Her half brother was speaking on behalf of her parents, her cousins, all of them, against what we’d done to the family, to their grieving process. They needed to believe the case was settled in 1997. They already had their closure, and even entertaining the idea that the wrong man was behind bars would shatter that. The fact that we were right, the fact that on the balance scale of misery their strife was utterly outweighed by Omar’s past twenty-five years, rendered this concern irrelevant—but they didn’t see it that way. “It’s like we’re losing her again,” Thalia’s brother had told the Union Leader, in an interview that seemed aimed right at me. I was the one reinflicting this pain. Plus Vanessa was estranged now from the rest of the family. I couldn’t help but feel the weight of it all.
By the time their podcast wrapped up a year later—Britt then a sophomore at Smith, Alder a freshman at Columbia, both finishing their school years online in lockdown—the New England Innocence Project was involved, and cash was pouring into Omar’s legal defense fund. The Spider-Man actress was suddenly interested again, contributing less money than you’d think but talking about it a great deal.
The podcast ended with the announcement that Omar had been granted a post-conviction relief hearing—one we didn’t yet know would be hugely delayed thanks to the pandemic and the backlog of cases.
They promised to release bonus episodes as things unfolded. By that point, there were at least five other legitimate podcasts dedicated to the case. One with lawyers close-reading the evidence, one looking at forensics, one hosted by a retired cop and a victims’ rights activist, and a couple that just synthesized everyone else’s work and gossiped about it. Figures from Granby and people involved in the case appeared on various shows. Vanessa went on many of them, against her family’s wishes. And Yahav appeared regularly on Britt and Alder’s show, speaking to the legal side of things. He was still married to his wife. He was still beautiful.
Omar himself only talked to Britt and Alder—and only once, having been subsequently advised by his lawyers not to speak publicly lest it affect his case. Did you listen? After all this, I’d still never spoken with him myself.
Here’s something for you to chew on, Mr. Bloch, something I’ve dwelt on a lot over the past few years. The hell of imprisonment isn’t the terrible food, it’s the lack of choice of food. It isn’t the cold, wet floor, it’s that you can’t choose another place to stand. It isn’t the confinement so much as the fact of never running, never getting in your car and speeding off, as Omar loved to do. The New Hampshire State Prison for Men is almost two hundred years old, a stone building that, according to Vanessa, is always either freezing or sweltering. For more than half his life, Omar has not been able to choose when to wake up, when to eat, when to sleep. He has had to ask for every square of toilet paper. That incident in 2018 was not the only time he was attacked; it was simply the worst, so far. He has seen the murder or suicide of countless men. He was not with his mother when she died of COVID. I can’t imagine that’s the worst of it. I’d love to know how much time you’ve spent considering this.
The official run of the show went out on the voice of Dr. Meyer, who, on the verge of retirement, had taught both Thalia and me in senior English. “We’ll never feel we have justice,” he said, “unless someone confesses.” His voice was impossibly old. “You get one man out of jail, you put another man in. Is that justice? We’ll never know. It’ll never feel right. If you believe in God, maybe that changes your view. But unless we could go back in time and know for sure—I mean. We’re never getting that. We’re never getting that.”
You have to understand that with the music underneath, this was quite powerful.
5
Leo and Silvie FaceTimed me from the back of the car on their way to Silvie’s gymnastics class. Leo was bitter about being dragged along. Silvie wanted me to tell Leo that her eyes were darker than his.
“Without shoving the phone in your father’s face while he’s driving,” I said, “could you let me talk to him?”
The picture was suddenly of the car ceiling; I figured the kids had launched the phone into the passenger seat.
Jerome’s voice: “We’re stuck on the 10. Why do all their activities start at five p.m.?”
I said, “We could always go back to Zoom gymnastics.”
A howl of protest from the back seat.
“How goes the trial?”
“It’s a hearing. And I wouldn’t know yet. You remember what I said, though; there’s a chance of winning, but it’s slim. These things like to stay solved.”
“There’s been lots of coverage.”
“I know, and please don’t tell me about it. I’m sequestered now.” It didn’t seem they were going to be terribly strict, but I didn’t want to risk it.
“How do I get myself sequestered?” he said. “That sounds delightful.”
I mentioned that Jerome’s mess had died down, and it did, but only temporarily. That previous fall had brought a second wave of disaster—for him, if not for me. After the initial hurricane, after he quit his job and his gallery dropped him, there was a long stretch of quiet. People forgot, and his art itself never lost value. The commissions came back, and he found new representation. There wasn’t even much online chatter. But then in October of ’21, Jasmine put on a month-long performance piece in Washington Square Park, during which she ate only the food people brought her and wore only the clothes people brought her. How this wasn’t just vagrancy and an insult to the homeless, I was unsure. It garnered enough attention that in January she was the subject of a lengthy feature in New York magazine. The article revisited her piece about Jerome, included new quotes from her about him, and featured a black-and-white photo of the two of them at a costume party in 2003 as Artemis and Zeus. There was no new revelation, just a bigger platform.
Twitter was once again where the fallout happened. People tagged Jerome’s new gallery, telling them to drop him. They asked Jerome for a long-overdue public apology. （This, he’d been advised, was a trap: There was no apology they’d accept. And defending himself would be worse.） They tried to drag me into it again, asking how I could stand by him. Fortunately, they caught on soon enough to the divorce going through, and assumed Jasmine was the reason. I didn’t correct them.
You might guess that I had come around on Jasmine Wilde. That I’d realized how wronged she was, how much a victim. Or maybe you’re hoping that I realized: If Jasmine had voluntarily dated Jerome, maybe the love between you and Thalia was just as simple. Absolutely not.
I’d thought about it, how Thalia, at seventeen, had only been four years younger than Jasmine was when she dated Jerome. It seemed so little, but then four years is the difference between eleven and fifteen—ages no one could argue are the same. Four years was the length of my entire time at Granby: an entire education. It had been four years now since I’d returned there to teach and my life had changed.