A force for good, dialed up many notches, can do harm. Jill’s obsessive love for Belinda was the perfect twin to my love for Stefan. Stefan’s love for Belinda…Emily’s love for Belinda…they made up a hall of mirrors, each reflecting back the love that pushed them to obsession. But if those obsessions led to terrible acts of wrongdoing, the love itself was never wrong.
Jill was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, obstruction of justice, malicious prosecution, filing a false police report and contempt of court. She was sentenced to five to eight years. We sued her for defamation of character and her insurance was ample. Stefan received a small settlement from the state of Wisconsin, which has a lousy reputation for parsimonious compensation, but settled with Black Creek County for much more in a lawsuit for wrongful conviction.
That is the shining side of my personal planet. There is a dark side.
I don’t work at Thornton Wilder College anymore. Jep is so wholly beloved at UW–Whitewater that the powers somehow found me a tenured faculty position there; but for now, I teach only one of my literature seminars, a couple of sections of creative writing, and （my penance） remedial writing for athletes. I could have stayed at my beloved school; but it never felt right after my sabbatical. Then, after our life reversed when Stefan was vindicated, it felt even more awkward to slip back into the slot where I’d spent such a long time genuflecting to my shame. I should not have done that. I should not have been allowed by my colleagues to feel that I should do that. They should have embraced me and borne me up—instead of sighing and simply suffering my presence.
When I showed up to tell Keith the news, he had both a flowering begonia and a long-suffering expression. “Thea, of course I apologize…” he began.
“But you shouldn’t have to apologize,” I told him.
Keith’s face softened. “I’m glad you see that.”
“I mean, you should never have treated me in a way that requires an apology. And of course, even that would have been understandable, if not commendable, because of all the many times you called me when I was on sabbatical, and returned my calls.”
He hadn’t called me once. When he returned my calls, he left a brief message and pleaded about how “crazy busy” things were in the English department of a college with 845 students.
People are usually good when it suits them, and often some will make a special effort to be good when there’s a special need. But most people aren’t naturally inclined to goodness, particularly if it gets in the way of something they want. And what they want doesn’t have to be a palace or a person or a promotion. What they might want is the kind of power that comes from having front-row seats at a tragic drama or the immense emotional satisfaction of feeling luckier or more competent than someone else. That power was what my colleagues got from me, and I wanted it back.
“You judged me, Keith, like the kids say. You and Frank and Robin and almost everyone else. You judged me and you felt justified in doing it. You judged Stefan too, not that there was any way around that really.”
“What would you have done, Thea?”
“Maybe I would have done the same thing. I hope I wouldn’t have. I certainly would not now. Whether or not I would have done it, that’s not the issue. It’s that we can’t go back to before it happened, and I don’t mean Belinda’s murder, I mean what happened to me, here, where I should have been safe.”
“I really hope you don’t feel that way, Thea.”
“I love the work I do,” I said. “But not here.”
And so, I was changed. I would not have wanted to be changed; still, I cannot go back to before. We are annealed, but not restored. It was against my will that I learned what Jill had to teach me about love and loss, and about myself. Am I better for learning it? Probably, but only because I have no choice.
Now I know that, when you lose a child, it’s not the same as losing a contemporary, even a beloved husband or wife. When you lose a child, you grieve as a child grieves, which is to say, you grieve backward. You don’t get better as time passes, you get worse. Time does not take you closer to acceptance, only further from the one you love. Day by day, Belinda slipped away from Jill. Season by season, the clothes in Belinda’s closet were no longer the current style; the music on her player was not the music other kids listened to anymore. Year by year, other people’s daughters and sons, once the same age as Belinda, grew up; and they did the things that Belinda would have done: They graduated college and started medical school or graduate school. They joined the Peace Corps. They backpacked across Europe. They found their first jobs. They learned to sign contracts and leases and health-insurance forms. Some of them got engaged. The more of those milestones that passed, the more meaningless the world became. Jill did not get stronger, she only got older—older without Belinda. The very good memories—silly small things, the way Belinda cried when a dog died in a movie, the gleam of sunscreen on her small shoulder when she was a child at the beach, the color of the Christmas wrapping paper she stamped by hand, the way Belinda hummed as she made her oatmeal, the way she wrapped her long hair in an old tee shirt to dry…these began to lose their sharp edges. The sound of a laugh that was like Belinda’s, the sudden burst of a song Belinda loved when Jill turned on her car radio, the smell of freesia, a scrawl of words on an old grocery list in the bottom of a drawer, BUY STRAWBERRIES, all these had to be wrenched out of her mind and compacted like trash until they were no longer familiar or even recognizable. Those very good memories once scalded Jill like zinc in her eyes; but she realized that the scalding was better, much better, because at least it was feeling and feeling had washed off her like sidewalk chalk in the rain. The scalding grief was better because it was the dark twin of the stupefying love you felt for your child when you had your child with you, a passion so much bigger than anything you expected to feel, so much bigger than any other parent’s love, so magnificent you had to keep it secret, lest the bored gods notice and knock it out of your hands. Jill’s love for her only was a second sun. And as the sun disappeared, minute by hour by day by week by month by year, so did her reason. She would have been the last person to be aware of the awfulness of her crime. To the end, she would have considered Stefan responsible for Belinda’s death, as he does, and now, as I do, in a sense, as well.