It’s Esme, are you there? It’s Esme. Could you message back?
Is this Professor Demetriou? It’s Esme. Are you mad at me for Black Creek?
She gave me her new gmail address. Everyone had one, if not four. Hers was LongingEsme.
I answered her. I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you. I couldn’t. I feel guilty about that. I know you are scared, Esme. But I truly need to know what exactly you know or saw that night to understand what we need to fear. I know you loved Belinda. I trust you’re trying to help Stefan.
About an hour later, I got a reply.
Is Stefan okay? Did you warn him?
I wrote, I did. I have. He doesn’t know what to believe. Stuff has happened. You know it has. And he was not really okay before. He’s still pretty depressed and now he’s scared too.
Another hour passed. Then a ping. I have to tell you what happened. But I don’t know if I’m doing the wrong thing.
You have to trust me, I wrote back. I squirmed a little when I wrote that last line. I wasn’t really looking for her trust or her friendship. I wasn’t really offering mine. I just needed answers. But forget her; all this was her idea. She could take what she got.
Stefan was knocking at my door. “I’m sorry, Mom.” I didn’t answer. “Okay, anyway. I’m sorry. I’m not perfect. Not even close. I’m weak. Maybe I’m not even good enough. Maybe this whole thing is a waste of time.”
I opened the door. He looked blotchy, stubbled, like the kind of college kid who had a beer in the morning.
“Take a long hot shower, hon. You’ll feel better. You are good enough. You have talent. You have compassion. You have plenty to offer the world.”
“Maybe not.”
“Like you said, it’s too late to give up. It’s got to get easier. I know it will get easier.”
Stefan shrugged. The cant of his eyes seemed to mock me, or at least to betray the essential mistrust of a child for a parent, the doubt that rose along with the accumulated years, to replace the tender adulation. Your child had to reject you. You had to suborn it. But it was a brutal process in the best of circumstances. And these were not the best of circumstances.
The next morning Julie showed up at our house in a new Volvo, her present from Hal, and I put my overnight bag and the file box into the trunk and said goodbye to Stefan and Jep. I felt guilty leaving Stefan after our talk, or nontalk, the previous night, but I knew I would feel just as guilty if I stayed home. Then I snuggled into the new-brew scented glove-y leather and slept all the way to Sister Bay.
The cabin was alight in the afternoon shadow of the woods, and a young chef, slim as a pleat, with red-and-purple hair, already had a soup with tomatoes and garlic bubbling on the stove.
We skied. Moving is like cooking. It helps everything. We came out of the birch forest panting, to the edge of a broad-shouldered cliff and the lake frothed below, vasty as a sea. Worn out afterward, we took long baths, with absurdly expensive soaps and unguents.
“You’re so lucky,” I said.
“I am,” she said. “You’ll be lucky again, Thea.”
An ugly-faced cutworm gnawed me. My sweet best friend Julie—considerate companion, sane soul, gracious giver of gifts and good counsel—would her face glow with such unlined purity, if she were me? There were very few problems that money couldn’t solve, but, to be fair, ours was one of them. The more I chewed on that thought, the sicker I got of myself. This was patently as whiny as anything Stefan had come up with. Julie was rich, and toned, and well-married, and good. I’d stopped going to my book club when this same thing happened, because I couldn’t face my old friends’ good lives. But surely, they had their problems too. Some of them must wake up crying at times and not know why. Even Julie.
I filled her in on a recent development. We had agreed to do a lecture, Stefan and I.
“Really?” Julie said. “How did that happen?”
When I finally got another message from Curt Cowrie, I had forgotten everything but his name, and I only remembered that because it was the name of a shell.
As it turned out, he didn’t really work for the American Association of Mental Health Nurses （AMEN）。 What he did was to match speakers with events. AMEN was hosting its annual national meeting in Milwaukee in just a few weeks; the main speaker had just pulled out. The organization was going to sub in a panel discussion on the topic of criminality and the duty of care. “But I told them I could book an even better speaker than they already had.”
“I don’t know anyone,” I told him.