“And he lives in Tulsa now?”
“I’d guess he still does, though I haven’t been in touch with him in twenty years, probably. He was from there. Moved back after he finished . . .” He trails off.
Tegan’s contorting herself awkwardly to move up a row, pulling her headphones off.
“Jess,” I say again, but she ignores me.
“Finished—?” she prompts.
“Medical school. He’s a doctor.”
Tegan thunks herself into the seat behind me, leaning forward. “What’s happening?”
“Hi, Tegan,” comes the voice through the speaker again, a different tone than he uses with Jess. Friendlier, but somehow less familiar.
“Hey, Bill,” Tegan says cheerfully. “Who’s a doctor?”
Instead of answering, he clears his throat again, and I think he must be waiting for a signal. Did Jess sit across from him one day ten years ago and gave him a list of conditions, too? About when he was allowed to talk to Tegan, about what he was allowed to say to her about their mom?
Beside me, Jess has shaken off that specter, at least for the moment. She looks almost the same as she did before I brought her home to the farm. Tense and stricken.
She doesn’t like the sound of this, a doctor in Tulsa.
But when she flicks her eyes to the rearview again, catching Tegan’s gaze, there’s something else there, too.
A courage-gathering, or maybe a resignation.
“Someone he knows in Tulsa,” Jess answers for her father.
I hear her saying those words from only a few minutes ago—I didn’t let her babysit—and feel a clutch of renewed affection and admiration for her.
She’s trying so hard at this.
It takes gladiator-level strength for me not to reach a hand across the console. Instead I watch her throat bob in a heavy swallow, and I’m pretty sure I mimic it. I also don’t like the sound of this. I don’t like her dad’s renewed silence, which somehow manages to be cloaking and ominous.
“Did Mom know him?” Tegan says, but almost as soon as she’s finished speaking it’s as though the cloak has covered her, too, and in my peripheral I can see that her easy, just-waking-up expression has transformed.
She doesn’t wait for him to respond before she asks an entirely different question.
“What kind of doctor?”
“Teeg,” Jess says gently, at the same time Bill says, “I’m sure there’s lots of reasons to stop through Tulsa. College town. Lots going on there.”
For the second time this morning, I know exactly what Salem would do here. She’d know we were on the cusp of something big, that the answer toWhat kind of doctor?is going to take this whole tale to a new emotional register. She’d make a gentle suggestion. She might say,Let’s continue this conversation somewhere more comfortable, or maybe she’d address Jess’s father directly, encouraging him in that firm way she has.Bill, she might say,it’s really important we go into Tulsa with as much information as we can.
I realize, with no small amount of discomfort, thatImight as well be the Salem-specter. That the promises I’ve made to myself—that I won’t still work this story, that I’ll keep my hands off it, that I’ll be here for Jess and Tegan’s protection only—are all belied by what I’ve spent the last few years of my life studying, training for, practicing.
That no matter what way I feel toward Jess now, the way I first met her will always be tied up with this.
Something that’s toxic to her.
But I can’t think about that now. I can only think about how her knuckles have gone white on the steering wheel, her face paling to match. All the tension I worked out of her body last night is taking her over again.
She steels herself, and then she does Salem’s job for her.
Or my job for me.
“Dad,” she says, flicking on the van’s blinker, “let me pull over for a minute so we can talk.”
