“Are you sure I can’t help?” Hannah said.
“Everything’s done. Not to worry.”
“Is there ice cream?” Sean asked. His head was now buried in the freezer.
“There is not,” Abbie said. “You ate it al the last time you were here, remember?”
“And you didn’t get more? Shame on you.”
“Let’s go into the living room, catch up before bed.”
They went through into the living room, sat, drank wine, and talked. The conversation meandered, from the Innocence Project to the headlines of the day to Abbie’s work and back. They talked a little about Sean’s father. There’d been a car accident when Sean was ten. Sean’s father, David, had been kil ed. Abigail had suffered severe injuries to her back and right leg.
Hannah found herself staring at Abigail’s legs. You couldn’t tel that she was injured in any way when she was sitting like this, wearing long pants.
Sometime later Sean disappeared upstairs to look for a textbook he thought he might have left behind. Hannah looked around for her cel phone to check the time—she didn’t wear a watch—she’d lost track of the evening but it must be getting very late. Tiredness was pul ing at her and she was feeling the effects of the three—four?— glasses of wine she’d had. She should be in bed. But there was something about Abbie Warner. Something about her company.
Abbie was like her son. Warm, and easy to like. And Hannah was so tired. Too tired to move.
“Tel me about you, Hannah,” Abigail was saying now. “What drew you to the Innocence Project?”
“It’s a great opportunity to learn. I want to get practical, hands-on experience. It’s harder to get experience like this in Maine, you know? Working on the Project is the kind of thing that might get me noticed when I graduate.”
“Interesting.” Abbie smiled. “Most students tel you that they’re drawn to the Project because of the moral or ethical dimension. They say they want to help people.” There was no condemnation in her tone. Just curiosity.
Hannah made a face. “I think that’s just naive, real y. I mean it’s al a bit of a game, at the end of the day. Isn’t it?”
“In what way, a game?”
Hannah made an expansive gesture. “The whole thing. Life.
Society. Whatever. The Project too. Like, take Robert Parekh. Did you know he was on the cover of Vanity Fair?”
“You weren’t impressed?”
“I don’t know what the point of that is. I mean, was that article about advancing the work of the Project or was it about raising his profile personal y? And then there’s a whole other issue. Like, the whole article lacked any kind of nuance, any consideration that there might be any other take but Robert Parekh’s. Is he real y this great hero? Maybe he just likes to look that way. That magazine cover, that article, it’s just a puff piece. They’re sel ing a fantasy, right?”
Abbie shook her head. “I can’t say that I’m fol owing you on this one. Why would a journalist or the magazine want to sel that fantasy? I could see it happening with a movie star maybe. You know, some Alister with a powerful publicist. You get them for your cover and you sel copies. But for a lawyer? What’s the motivation?”
“I’m not saying complicit, exactly, or at least not consciously so.”
Hannah put a hand to her forehead, trying to think. She felt like she was losing the thread of her argument. “Like I’m not saying the journalist is lacking integrity, necessarily. I’m just saying that it’s about narrative, isn’t it? We, I mean people, al of us, we love a story.
We want a hero. We want a bad guy. We want a beginning, a middle, and an end. And life is more complicated than that but we love it when we’re served up a story and sometimes if we don’t get it, we make it for ourselves. We believe only the facts that suit the story we like and we ignore everything else.”
“So which is it? Journalists are writing puff pieces or the audience is believing what they want?”
Hannah flushed. “Both. I think that journalists, or real y, I suppose I mean opinion writers, they’re just giving us what we expect, aren’t they? The Robert Parekh story fits the accepted narrative. He’s out to save the poor, wrongly convicted prisoner. Parekh therefore must be a good man motivated by a need to do the right thing. There’s no room in the narrative for the truth, which might just be that he’s an egoist who loves the attention, right?”