Jesus, my knee hurts. Maybe I broke something in there, pressing on it so hard.
“And I know she loves you, too.”
I clench my teeth against the immediate flush of hope hearing her say it makes me feel. I shake my head to drive home the point. What Jess feels for me—and I know she feels something—I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to get past how she first met me. I don’t know if, like the Salem of ten years ago, she’ll wake up one day in a few weeks and feel as though she’s finally broken a spell.
“In Rhode Island,” Salem says, and honestly, it’s a lot about Rhode Island. I’ve forgiven her for abandoning me for a week and a half, but at the moment I’d prefer to go home and cry in private, rather than listen to more about her nice vacation.
“InRhode Island,” she repeats, like she’s a teacher who caught me tuning out, “I also got to spend a lot of time around Pen. Hanging out, talking, doing puzzles. Helping her with her PT stuff. And you know, I don’t think I ever forgave myself for those early years of her life. I don’t think I ever forgave myself, for even thinking for one second about how maybe I wanted to escape from her for a while.
“I’ve always thought I was a bad mom to Pen, because of those years. Because of some of the things I let myself think back then, when I was in the grip of the Baltimore story. And maybe, on the scale of it, I’m not that good of a mom. Maybe I’m a mediocre mom.”
“You’re not a mediocre mom.”
She smiles at me weakly, the kind of smile you give someone when you appreciate them but don’t really believe them.
“But I am good to her, Adam. I love her, and I wouldn’t have left her. I stayed with her and I taught her things and I listened to her talk about her friends and her dance classes and the teachers she loved and hated. I didn’t ever manipulate her. I didn’t ever abandon her needs to my wants.”
“That’s a good mom.”
She shrugs. “That’s not really the point. The point is, I alwaysthoughtI was a bad mom. But I don’t really think I ever really knew what a bad mom was until I met Charlotte Caulfield ten days ago.”
She pauses, folds her napkin one more time. In the space of that fold, I see every terrible moment inside the houseboat in slow motion. I see every moment in the hotel hallway, too.
“I don’t know what it’d do to someone, to have a mom like that,” Salem says. “Someone who’d leave you like that. Who’d teach you that loving looked like that.”
She leaves it there. Doesn’t do much more than watch me for a few seconds. Like any great journalist, she doesn’t just want to tell me the story. She wants to get me thinking. She wants me to keep seeing those moments, and a hundred other ones from the two weeks I spent on the road with Jess and Tegan, through this lens.
She wants me to remember that loving Jess Greene wasn’t ever going to be easy.
She wants me to know I may have to wait.
“The interview has to be good, Hawk,” she says, slipping straight back into work mode.
Maybe she can see I’m losing the fight against this lump in my throat. I feel like taking my phone out of my pocket and texting Jess Greene that I’m willing to wait forever.
But I guess doing that wouldn’t really be waiting at all.
“I get it,” I say. “I’ll get my head on straight.”
She nods, flicks a rogue fly away from landing on the food she still hasn’t touched.
“You will,” she responds, matter-of-factly, as though there’s no doubt. “But what I mean is, the interview has to be good, because I’m not using a single second of that tape with Charlotte Caulfield if I can help it.”
I stare at her, struck dumb. She picks up a potato chip and points it at me before she speaks.
“You’re not the only one who cares about those women, Adam. You might be the only one in love with one of them, but you’re not the only one who’s going to try to protect them now.”
Chapter 31
Jess
Is it too dramatic to say that therapy is excruciating?
Probably.
But also, sometimes, it feels pretty excruciating to me.
Tegan and I make our way out of the squat, unassuming office building where we’ve come twice a week together for the last three weeks. It’s unusual, I guess, to get in to see a family therapist twice a week, especially when the first time is only four days after you’ve first called.
