“I mean you. And if he wants to, Stefan. I’ll get you both top dollar, forty minutes tops, then a question and answer session, in and out. No social duties, no reception. It’ll start at six and you can stay over that night at the nicest hotel in town, and I don’t know what that means in Milwaukee, have a great dinner after the talk, and in the morning you are on the road back home.”
I said, “There’s not a chance that I would do this. I’m not a speaker.”
“You were pretty great on that show.”
“That was…a fluke, a one-off…”
“Thea, you’ve been giving lectures for years. You’re a professor.”
He described the audience. Professionals, doctors, psychiatric nurses, social workers, some representatives of advocacy organizations. I said that there was really no way I could talk about my own life in a lecture. He mentioned a figure that was less than half my annual salary, but not much less. I took a deep breath and refused.
“Why don’t you ask Stefan first?”
When I did, to my horror, Stefan was definitely interested. He was interested in the money, because who wouldn’t be? But more importantly, he saw it as an extension of his quest to bring more attention to The Healing Project. We talked over what this speech might look like—that is, Jep and I talked it over while Stefan ate a whole family-sized bag of taco chips and texted his friends. Curt Cowrie had advised me to make my talk a narrative, a story. Tell what happened, and how we felt then and how we felt now. What was learned? What do you wish you’d known? These audiences would want news they could use in their professional lives. They would also just be curious. They would have questions.
Stefan said he wanted to do it, for sure.
So we’d agreed.
“Well, how bad could a bunch of psychiatric nurses be?” Julie said, and then both of us burst out laughing.
“There will be all kinds of people there, Jules. You know and I know. Some will just be people who want to feel better about themselves. They want to know they’re better parents than we are. But the trap door opens for everyone. Nobody gets through life without it happening, not like for me, but some way.”
“Would you want it to open for everyone?” Julie said.
“No,” I said. Yes, I thought. I told her, “What if it draws somebody out in the open?
“If Stefan talks about that night, maybe it’s like a challenge. Don’t hang back like a little coward. I have a right to know who’s after me. Stefan has a right.”
“What if it draws somebody out into the open but this time that person doesn’t just stop with burning up a car? It’s a risk,” Julie said. “You can’t control a big lecture like a little story at the local public TV station.”
“Jep said that. But Stefan said he couldn’t hide forever.”
“That’s true.”
“I don’t know if I’m brave, but Stefan is. He’s dedicating part of his life to letting people know he repents. He’s helping other people repent. He’s not even letting this threat stop him. Even though he’s scared to death sometimes.”
I remembered Curt’s words. “To be honest, I didn’t know if I really could feel much sympathy for Stefan. My wife was the one who brought the show to my attention, because she’s a psychiatric nurse. She told me, unless this kid is really sincere, what’s in it for him? Now that I’ve seen it, I agree with her. I don’t think I could have faced up to it so publicly, the way he did.”
“It’s a lot of needless exposure, honey,” Jep said. Community leadership covered a whole bunch of ground and a whole spectrum of politics. And there was no avoiding that the gallery of ghouls, the kind of people who slowed down to gape at car accidents, would probably be there too. “Let things die down a little.”
“Dad,” Stefan said. “I can’t wait my whole life for this to die down.”
Between two old friends, lay not only bottomless love and irritation, but the allegiance of soldiers. I knew that, when Julie was first married, she inexplicably fell in love with her younger sister’s college boyfriend and was tempted to run away with him except that, before she could, he ran away from both of them. She knew that I had changed the order of the stack of vitae in Keith’s office so that it looked as if the committee had put my name on top instead of Steve Ngobe’s. We were smug in the possession of each other’s murderous secrets.
It got late.