We walked out through the lobby, where several people stopped us to murmur approval for the talk and for our grace under the pressure of the protest. As we neared the door, I heard someone behind me, “Wait, dear, just a moment!”
A small, elderly woman was quickly bearing down on us, using her cane to propel her along. It was only when she got so close that I could study the way she moved that I realized, too late, she doesn’t really need that cane…but by then she had slugged me, a strong right to the jaw that knocked me to the carpet on my rear end. Stefan jumped to help me, while one security guard and then another pinned the woman’s arms behind her back. “Why don’t you kill yourself?” she screamed as they dragged her away.
Then it was a few minutes of first aid from a nurse practitioner who’d been in the audience, followed by an ambulance ride to the closest emergency room, with Jep and Stefan following behind, where I got stitches and painkillers. We decided to forgo the hotel stay that night so it was not until nearly midnight that we were finally home, and I let Jep tuck me in, and bring me hot milk with honey and cinnamon.
The next morning, I played back the voice mail on the answering machine, for some reason on speaker. There were a few random remarks about the attack on me at the speech, which had been mentioned on the news, one from a personal injury lawyer offering to sue the assailant. At the last message, Stefan and I froze, as if a tiger had just walked into the room. “Thea, this is Jill McCormack. I need to speak with you. Please give me a call as soon as you can.”
12
“Ouch,” Jep said that night when he inspected my luridly swollen lip. “Theaitsa, that little old lady packed a punch.”
“She wasn’t even old,” I said.
The details turned out to be ludicrous: My assailant, a veteran nurse certified to counsel rape victims, was only fifty, but she dressed up to look at least twenty-five years older to divert suspicion. Since the organizers picked up my medical costs, the stitches for my lip, the cost of my ruined white wool jacket, she ended up only paying a fine of $100. I declined to press further charges for assault.
I spent the next couple of days feeling sore and spent and feeling really sorry for myself. There were calls from virtually everyone I knew, even the cousins I only saw every few years at my aunt Helen’s family reunion. I slept long hours, often from dinnertime until ten the next morning, waking disoriented from blank, cavernous sleep that was the gift of the robust painkillers. If only such great medicine weren’t also so dangerous, for such sleep was not only my wish generally but specifically right now. I just wanted to sleep until Pete Sunday located Esme and questioned her.
Dithering about whether to tell Jep was a torment. There was almost nothing I didn’t confide in him, particularly if it was important. Whenever we were together, I felt as though I was cheating on him. And yet, when I pictured the pained look that would steal over his face at my latest piece of detective work, as he tried to understand how my own hunches and the text messages had combined to concoct this cataclysmic conclusion, I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Julie was right; everything would be revealed in time, if it turned out that there was anything to reveal.
I did tell Jep about Jill’s message.
“Should I call her?”
“Don’t ask me.” He put his hands up in front of him. “I’m just a simple guy. I don’t know about the protocol for this tortured emotional stuff.”
“Right, okay, draw the old Disney movie football coach card.”
“Why do you have to get so bitchy? Go or don’t go. She’s not dangerous, Thea. She’s not going to kill you.”
“I’m scared to go. Will you go with me?”
“I absolutely will not go with you,” he said. “I’ll drive you and wait for you, but I’m not going to face off with Jill McCormack.” He went to the refrigerator and began getting out ingredients for about four kinds of snacks, plus the chia seeds he was now obsessed with sprinkling on everything. My tension was so great that I wanted to smack him. A moment later, he muttered, “You should have thought of this before.”
“Before? Before what, Jep? Before The Healing Project? Or before I had our son, because it doesn’t come from your side of the family, huh?”
Why would I say such a thing, particularly at that point? Was it just pure spite? When I look back, I suppose it was superstition. Much as I rejected it, the accepted narrative, however awful, was safer than a far-fetched theory. Immediately, contrition replaced anger. Jep and I never went at each other with verbal broadswords, and it was a miserable, lonely feeling. That mood had to be popped; one of us had to do it. When I said, “Let’s stop, now. We’re better than this…”