That hadn’t even crossed my mind. I considered it briefly.
“No,” I said. “I’m sure she’s not making it up.”
“I’m glad I called the police.”
“You were the one who called the police?”
Jep smiled and kissed my forehead. “I had a hunch.”
“Okay,” said the doctor, holding up the X-ray. “You got lucky here, as far as being shot-wise goes. Didn’t hit a bone, and muscle tissue pretty much takes care of its own healing. You’re going to feel this for a while though. Maybe quite a while. It’ll feel like a bad bruise. Right now, you’re just going to feel some pressure while I get this thing out. We’ll keep you overnight and give you some antibiotics IV.”
Jep went on, “How could she carry this on so long and wait so many years?”
When he said that, suddenly, I got it. I got the whole thing.
18
Stefan did buy a house. It’s that ramshackle copy of a tiny English cottage where he lives with Molly and Figaro, the absurdly huge Neapolitan mastiff puppy given him by Trina Villera, who is Molly’s obedient servant. Julie loves the place. It’s a refurbishing project with a capital P. Her boys love it because they can throw stones out the upstairs windows and try to hit the ducks in the creek nearby. All I can see are hot-and-cold running mice. Still, Jep and I relish our born-again solitude, this one such a different tenor than when Stefan was in prison, and I have a second…well, a second second career too. In part I’m sure because of all the spicy elements—murder, betrayal, dating violence, the spectacular fraud of Jill’s activism—and probably because Belinda was beautiful, white and middle-class—the news engine roared to life… I was nonplussed by such events as hearing the familiar gentle voice of Anderson Cooper on my answering machine. Of course, the developments sparked Curt Cowrie to approach me again with a whole new idea for a series of talks, and this time, for sure, a book. （“This is a dilly,” he said in the message he left.） Were we interested in such things, now that we could slip back to our quiet private lives? You bet your ass we were interested…show me the money. We wanted everyone who saw us broken on the rocks to hear how hope—which a Japanese philosopher once called “that which prolongs the torments of man”—pays off once in a while.
Or so we first thought. As it transpired, never did those talks. There was no joy left in a circus of self-righteousness. The pure jubilation I thought I would taste was spiked with such bitter sadness. Stefan felt the same way. It was time to draw a curtain in front of our lives.
Stefan still has his business. He’s in college and should finish in a year. The Healing Project has seven volunteers and sometimes, Julie and I still help out. The stories just get sadder; but the healing always helps. For a while it seemed like Stefan and Luck Sergenian’s younger sister, Snowy, who got a stomach virus and ended up coming home early from Paris, would be a thing. But then, one day, he told me that was over. Hesitatingly, I asked why? He said, “I liked her a lot, but she liked me more.”
“Isn’t that good?”
“I guess it could be unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless you like someone else that way.” He stopped for a moment. “And I do. I like Becky.” All those days of working and then hanging around for dinner at the safe home, playing with the baby, his respect for Rebecca grew, for her competence, her quiet beauty, her matter-of-fact vision of the world.
“She’s so much older. She has a child. Does she like you that way?”
“I didn’t ask yet. Not in so many words. But I think she does. She said one time that her mom was five or six years older than her dad. I’m going to win her.” The hundred objections I could have mounted melted in the sun of that courtly phrase. This was none of my business, at least not yet.
In the meantime, Stefan is wildly overcommitted, with school and with work and night classes in fire science at the community college. He longs to become a volunteer firefighter, and perhaps eventually do that as a career if he likes it. It’s as if he’s wheeling in space, looking at all the doors opening to him, the former felon. It’s as if he’s making up for lost time.
I have my own business to attend to. Paradoxically, I am writing another book; in fact, it’s finished now, but not yet published. It’s not about the case, exactly, but about something I never thought I’d tilt with. Forgiveness, it transpires, is not just a slogan on a coffee mug. It’s the hardest work a human being can do, or at least that this human being can do. It controverts both your instinct and your intellect. I initially thought I would write about the experience of lives kidnapped by one woman’s malevolence. But Aeschylus was right—and how could I have doubted such a wise and voluble Greek? Wisdom, if a human being ever can be said to achieve wisdom, comes through pain, drop by drop, in our own despair, against our will. The deeper I dug, the more I unavoidably understood. The universe has its own forces.