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Justin and I are on the road now, finally heading out of Orchard Grove. Once we left my mom’s, things felt a little more comfortable. It’s something I’ve always liked about car trips. You don’t need to make any awkward decisions about whether to make eye contact and for how long. We simply stare at the road ahead of us. The rhythm of the windshield wipers has a hypnotic effect, and I feel ready for this next chapter in my life.
Of course I do.
There’s no reason I shouldn’t go with Justin to Seattle. Even if we have no future between us, I’ll have far more opportunities out there. And if I do have another crash, I may as well do it in a major city. Even that two-week inpatient program I finally checked myself into in Spokane wasn’t fully equipped to handle my particular concoction of depression mixed with (borderline) postpartum psychosis mixed with a history of spousal abuse and sexual assault.
Not that I came right out and told them Chris abused me, but all those shrinks, even the ones Reginald took me to see before I finally agreed to in-service treatment, seemed far more interested in my history with my husband than in the fact that I’d been raped.
Justin clears his throat and turns down the music in his car. “I think you’ll get along really well with Amy.”
“I’m sure I will.” I don’t know much about Justin’s sister, my future roommate. She works in the design business too, not the one Justin started but some kind of company connecting freelance web designers with their ideal clientele. I wonder if everyone I meet in Seattle will end up working in the tech field. And here I am, still wishing we could go back to the days of typewriters and white-out and preferring my fountain pen over any keyboard.
I want to find a way to ask him about my daughter. There’s nothing in our past conversations that should lead me to think any topic is off-limits with Justin, but it’s harder when you’re face-to-face. Or shoulder to shoulder as we were.
We’ve talked so much by phone, gotten to know each other so well, I think Justin must have sensed what I was mulling over. “Gracie’s doing really well these days. Growing healthy. Chattering up a storm.”
I try to smile. Try to remember that I gave this precious little girl the gift of life, which is more than some women would have done in my situation. I know Grandma Lucy just prayed over me a few hours earlier that I could find release from my shame, and I’m still hopeful that something really did change in my spirit, but I think I underestimated how difficult this would be. Did I think that because Justin and I hit it off so well when we were living in totally different cities that we could switch to a face-to-face relationship seamlessly?
For a few seconds, I wonder what I’m even doing here. Justin and I have talked on the phone for probably a hundred hours or more if you were to add it all up over the last few months, but does that mean I really know him? What about those news stories you hear from time to time, those online romances gone bad. Justin could be a serial killer for all I know, couldn’t he?
No, this may be the first time I’ve met him in person, but I would have known, would have picked up on it earlier if he were some sort of sociopath. Besides, he had to go through all the screening to take Gracie in. There’s no way they would have let him assume that sort of responsibility if there was anything questionable in his background.
Justin reaches out and turns off the music. “You feeling ok?”
I nod and mumble some sort of response in agreement.
“Amy’s really looking forward to meeting you,” he says. There we go again. Talking about everyone except for him and me and the baby we both want to call our own.
“Gracie’s real easygoing,” he says, and I’m glad to hear it. Once we get to Seattle, it will be after two in the morning. He’ll only have a few hours to sleep before he has to be awake for his Monday morning meeting. At least the snowstorm has let up a little. We’re halfway across the North Cascades now. I forgot how carsick I can get on these long, windy roads. The last thing I want to do is ask Justin to pull over.
We’ve been talking more openly now. He’s been chatting away about work, about this big deal he and his partner are hoping to land that comes with some sort of extended contract that will basically set them up for the next decade. I don’t think I’ve got anything akin to a head for business, but I’m inspired by his enthusiasm. There’s something in him, his zest for life, his desire to go and seize whatever adventures the universe throws his way, that reminds me of Hester.
I wonder which of her novels he likes the most.
I wonder if she based any of her characters off of him.
There’s a lull in the conversation. In the dark, sitting side by side, with the snow falling hypnotically on Justin’s windshield, I feel as comfortable as I did whenever we’d talk on the phone. But still, there are some conversations we’ve never had. Conversations I think we both knew had to wait until we were together.
“I never asked how you and Hester met,” I finally say. I’ve tried doing the math dozens of times to figure out exactly when Justin must have walked into her life. It had to be after her second novel, because that was published before Gracie was born. But after I met Justin, I read through all my Hester Lynne novels again, and the hero in The Scent of Silence seems so much like him I’m sure it can’t be coincidence.
“We were friends for quite a while. Worked together on a lot of business things. Her publisher hired me to do some design work before her first book tour — banners, bookmarks, stuff like that. I thought I was going to be dealing with just the publisher, but after Hester saw my first concept, she marched herself into my office and demanded a revamp. And that, as they say, was that.”
I’m trying to remember how many years ago The Winding Road came out. “So how long were you actually dating?”
“Dating?” He laughs. “I’m not sure Hester and I dated at all.”
“How does that work?” I’m trying to catch his amusement, but I only feel lost.
“We had this business relationship going on for a couple years. I admired her for being so straightforward about what she wanted, and she liked my designs once I was willing to take my marching orders from her and not the publisher. She did nearly all of her online marketing herself, so we were in touch quite a bit about her webpage, social media images, all that. So we had this working relationship for years, then one day she showed up in my office. She had this cute little baby in a front-pack and said she hadn’t had any adult company in weeks and wanted me to join her for dinner that evening and a walk along the pier.
“Two weeks later, we were married.”
I smiled, wishing I’d had more time to get to know Hester, wondering if Justin was grieving the same way I’d been grieving for Chris.
“What about you?” he asked. “What’s your story?”
“About what? How I met Hester?” I knew she was secretive about her co-writing relationship with her grandpa, but certainly she would have told her husband of all people.
“No,” Justin explains. “I mean how’d you find yourself ...” He clears his throat. His confident, jocular voice falters.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I get what you mean.”
What Justin’s trying to ask is how a mother like me could end up handing her baby over to be raised by someone else.