We all sat there quietly for a moment, all the adults probably thinking what I was thinking: Amelia the admirable, the straight arrow, was talking about herself. She had lugged this guilt around all these years.
“It only has to be big in your mind,” Stefan finally said. “Not everything has to be the bombing of the World Trade Center.”
I looked around the table. Could silence get quieter, I wondered?
Stefan went on then, as if he, a felon, hadn’t just referred to the bombing of the World Trade Center, which, to be fair, in his mind was something that had happened before he was even born. He explained that any trusted person could be the intermediary and do the outreach, and also deliver the apology with its promise of service. We would receive referrals for participants from ordinary families, or people who read about The Healing Project in Merry’s nationwide Unitarian newsletter, or in the press if it got any attention, or from the families of the felons, or the felons themselves, from parole officers, and from community-based organizations that helped people start over after jail, like our local Fresh Horizon, “which sounds like cereal to me,” Stefan added.
Every person who went through The Healing Project had to promise to try to find two more participants and to mentor at least one of them. That was the deal…to pay it back and forward. The grant from Julie would be in a trust that would renew itself, and he hoped that others would also contribute funding.
Then Stefan said, “So, Tia Amelia, those old people who ran the little store?”
“Yep,” said Amelia. “I thought they were old people at the time, but they were probably in their early fifties… Do the people who participate have to use their real names?”
“That’s the idea. But I guess the person could just send the victims an anonymous check,” Stefan said.
“That wouldn’t be the whole deal though, would it? It’s hard. It’s a hard thing. It would be easier to just go on and not think about what one had done.”
“Except you do think about it,” Stefan said.
* * *
Amelia did become the first participant in the program. She took the time to write the letter and formally made amends to the store owners and the people with the cabin—Amelia, the quietest sister and the biggest sinner. So we all saw that this could work for offenders of all types. In the world, this was a very small thing. In my sister’s life, it had wings, and I was proud of her for it.
Before that happened, I tried to ignore most of this, spending days on my scholarly book, while Stefan and Julie and Merry did the spadework for the first “real” iteration of The Healing Project. It would entail a fair amount of preparation, part of the reason why it would only be possible to carry through with one renewal project at a time, at least for now.
Stefan finally settled on the next penitent after his aunt.
It seems quaint now that I never expected that one of the Healing Projects would center on a family we actually knew. Portland, Wisconsin, was a small town, and Madison, just nearby, a small city. Even Stefan would have remembered them from the photo in our living room. Perhaps memory, however distant, guided Stefan’s hand.
There were three contenders, all worthy; but one was particularly poignant, in part because the woebegone penitent hadn’t done anything wrong but had been dragging a weight for a long time.
One morning, Stefan handed me a file. “This is the next project, Mom, and I’m meeting with the woman who reached out. She’s coming here today. I thought you should know.”
I started to read the file. Seconds in, I was stunned. “Stefan, we know these people. They’re the Hodges.”
After his time as a globe-trotting photographer, my dad kept just one main client, his best childhood friend Malachy Hodge, former governor and senator of Wisconsin, brother and son and grandson of governors and senators and heir to a timber fortune. I pointed at the large black-and-white photo on our living room wall taken at one of Mal’s victory celebrations where two little girls peeked out from the cloth that covered the speakers’ table. One was Alzy Hodge. One was me.
“I know that!” Stefan said, with a hint of a scoff. “I know all about it.”
“No you don’t,” I told him. “Not everything.”
As I began to talk about those days, my sunny childhood burst upon me, weather vanes spinning on the tops of boathouses, the snap of hot dogs sizzling on a giant grill, the smell of a fresh-cut fir tree, jumping off the raft into the green water, breathless with cold.