Part II
We Are Fugitives, and the Law Is Skinny with Hunger for Us
FALL 2017
Thirteen
JUST TWO WEEKS AFTER MAZZY BROWER HAD FIRST COLD-CALLED my house and ruined my life, I was sitting in a booth at the Krystal in a town thirty minutes from where I lived, in Bowling Green. I’d dropped Junie off at school, gone home, and paced the house for three straight hours, the cat meowing and pacing right alongside me, occasionally getting caught between my feet, making me yell out curses. And then I’d texted my husband, who was at this point in the day deep inside the mouths of people we knew very well, cleaning and fixing their teeth, and I told him that I was going to meet someone who wanted to interview me about my writing. It was not an odd thing to assert, because I had written some books that were very popular, and because people sometimes talked to me, and so it was an easy lie.
Because, the thing is, I had never told my husband that I was responsible for the Coalfield Panic of 1996. I did not tell him that the T-shirt I sometimes wore, which I’d ordered from a very expensive clothing store in Toronto, had the exact phrase that I had written when I was sixteen.
Aaron knew I was from Coalfield, that I had been there during the panic, and we’d talked about it. But I had never told him the truth. Because when I met him, he was kind of a doofus and not that interesting to me as a romantic partner. He had been into teeth even when he was in college, and that seemed like something I didn’t want to get involved in. He was interested in my teeth, actually, because my two front teeth had been badly repaired by a very inexpensive dentist who was not particularly good. And he acknowledged how bad the repair job was and said that someday, when he was a dentist, he would fix my messed-up teeth, free of charge, and so, you can see how unromantic that was, and you can understand why I wasn’t going to tell him that I was responsible for a work of art that people thought was the product of Satan.
And then, one night, you make out with that guy because, even if he is interested mostly in your teeth, it’s still more than most of the other guys in college have noticed about you. And then, after you make out, there’s a small window where you can tell someone about your culture-altering poster, and I missed that window because I still wasn’t thinking I will marry this doofus who wants to fix my teeth and was, like, kind of licking my teeth while we made out. And then we dated off and on, and each time it was off, I was thinking, I am so glad I didn’t tell him. I am so glad I did not show him the poster, and then when it was on, I was thinking, Just in case he forgets your birthday and instead goes to a comic book convention for a second time, don’t show him that poster, and then I was dancing with him at our wedding, and my mom was watching us and crying, and I knew that I couldn’t spin away from him and then spin back and tell him that there was a boy, Zeke, and there was nothing romantic about it, that it wasn’t like that, but I would never stop thinking about him and he was partially responsible for the trajectory of my entire life, and also, I was a fugitive and the law was skinny with hunger for me, all while Patsy Cline was singing “You Belong to Me” and someone was videotaping us. And then I fell in love with Aaron for real, who was weirder and more interesting than I’d first thought, and he was above all incredibly kind and gentle and he loved our daughter, and I thought, What if I ruin this? What if the thing inside of me ruins everything and I lose it all? So I didn’t say a word. It stayed a secret. A secret that Mazzy Brower had somehow discovered.
When she showed up, I was shocked to realize that she was older than me. I had expected, with a name like Mazzy, that she was going to be some hipster girl from Brooklyn who was twenty, had graduated from Yale early, was somehow on staff at the New Yorker, and then I would find out that her grandfather was, I don’t know, Dave Thomas, the Wendy’s guy. But she was older than me; she was tall and slightly skeletal, with graying hair, and she had on this really amazing floral button-up shirt from the seventies. And this whole time, I was thinking, I did not expect this, and then she was standing over me, looking down at me in the booth of this fast-food place that sold tiny steamed burgers, and I said, “Hi,” so quietly, I had no idea if she’d heard.
“Frankie?” she asked, but she knew it was me, of course. She’d found me.
“That’s me,” I said. “That is my name, yes.”
“I’m Mazzy,” she said. “Thanks so much for agreeing to meet with me. Do you think I could sit down? Could we talk?”