Darkness and Light in January
Unhappiness coated everything. Two days had passed without any communication between Meg and her sisters. Only Teddy, though he was in his own state of half-sweet, half-bitter melancholy, was able to speak casually with Meg. Meg avoided Joanna and Amy completely by spending most of her time, when she was in the apartment at all, in her room, with brief bathroom interludes.
Joanna had made herself go to work, her last long Starbucks shift before school began again and her afternoon shifts would return to the usual three hours. She was happy to get away from the poisonous atmosphere in the apartment, and they needed the money, but it had been tempting to stay in bed under her old red patchwork quilt, because she had woken up with a bad headache and a stabbing sore throat that made swallowing an agony.
Amy seemed to be nursing her fury, and there was nothing to do for it. She crashed around the apartment, ready for a fight with anyone about anything. She even rebuffed Teddy’s generous offer of letting her rearrange all the furniture in his room, which she had been keen to do.
“We could have been great, we were great, and now we’re nothing,” she cried, when Joanna tried to talk with her. “Why did she
have to ruin everything? Why does everything good in this family have to be destroyed?”
She had hoped that after a while she would shake off her headache and sore throat, but two hours into her shift, Joanna felt truly sick. She was sweaty at one moment and had chills the next. She kept sipping from a mug of tea, which was temporarily soothing, though each swallow hurt as if there were a burr stuck in the back of her throat. As the busy afternoon progressed, everyone in New Haven seemed to be in a simultaneous mood for complicated cappuccino orders. Twice, an impatient customer grabbed the wrong order and left, causing a domino effect of confusion and irritation. The second one had known what he was doing, Joanna was certain. She hated all of these people who seemed to have something intensely invested in indulging themselves so precisely. Why the hell couldn’t they just drink ordinary coffee and get over themselves?
Then came a sudden influx of teenaged girls who reeked of cigarette smoke and gossiped about shoplifting strategies for the Chapel Square Mall. Joanna was still working the bar, because she was faster than anyone else. She thought she would go mad as each of the six girls ordered a tall, decaf, skim latte (which the staff called a “why bother”), each one slightly different in its requirements for caramel this and extra foam that. By the time she had served them all, she was trembling and had a sheen of cold sweat on her face.
“Jeeth, you look like shit,” the assistant manager, who spoke with a slight lisp because of his various lip and tongue piercings, said. “You thtill wathted from New Year’s or thomething?”
When Joanna confessed to feeling sick, he backed away from her shaking his head, saying, “Man, you look really bad. You better go home before you thcare the cuthtomers.”
By the time she was opening the door to the apartment, Joanna felt like crying. She hated being sick under ordinary circumstances,
but being sick right now was just more than she could bear. She flung herself down on the sofa in the empty apartment, still in her coat. There was a note on the table from Teddy, saying that he had taken Amy to a movie. What a sweet boy. She put the kettle on to make some tea and felt her forehead with the back of her wrist. At home, Janet always diagnosed fevers with her lips, lightly kissing her daughters on the forehead, which in itself was always soothing. Joanna felt sorry for herself. She didn’t know what to do.
They didn’t have a doctor in New Haven, and she felt too sick to take a train to New York, if she could even get an appointment with Dr. Rosenthal. All of this would take too much time and energy just to figure out. Her mother always made appointments for them. And if Joanna used the health insurance card in her wallet, then a statement would automatically be mailed to Janet and Lou, a notification of sorts that she had been sick. How did she feel about that? She had no idea. The whole thing was exhausting and impossible. Her throat stabbed. She made herself a cup of mint tea and immediately burned her lips sipping it.
Did they even own a thermometer? She rummaged in the bathroom medicine chest but found nothing, not even aspirin. Meg always had aspirin, and Joanna recalled seeing it on her dresser, so she went to look in Meg’s room, which was unusually messy. Drawers were half open with clothes spilling out. She spied the aspirin bottle. Beside it, on a plastic lanyard, was Meg’s Yale ID card, which she ordinarily wore around her neck during the semester because she needed it so frequently when doing research in the libraries.
Joanna looked at the photograph, and saw in it many of her own features, the way she did occasionally in photographs of either of her sisters, though the resemblance was never so obvious in real life. She studied Meg’s face and recalled the remark about the brain tumor. Maybe there really was something seriously wrong with Meg. Had she eaten a peppermint from the notorious basket
of hard candies on the counter at the copy shop, the one rumored to hold the occasional hit of LSD? Or perhaps she had a tragic secret disease for which she was being secretly treated and they would all be sorry when it was revealed. It dawned on Joanna that with Meg’s ID she could get medical treatment at the Yale Health Service. She knew where it was, having walked by the building once, up on the corner of Hillhouse Avenue.
Oddly enough, she had been there with Lou, when she had spent a day with him visiting Meg because Warren had been closed owing to a Jewish holiday. Lou had asked Meg to direct them to that part of the campus for a walk, while she had a class, because he had read about the computer science professor who had, just a few years before, opened a parcel sent by the Unabomber. The professor had saved his own life by managing to get down five flights of stairs in Watson Hall and across two campus blocks, wounded and bleeding, to the Health Service. He would have died waiting for an ambulance.
Lou had wanted to retrace the steps of this brave man whose work he also admired. He and Joanna had done so, holding hands and swinging them slightly, with no need for any talking, that fall afternoon of Meg’s freshman year.
The walk across campus in the icy January air made Joanna feel better, although there was a slight tinge of unreality to everything around her. She was clammy with sweat under her clothes by the time she got to the entrance. Joanna read the directory and decided that she should go to the Primary Care department, which she located by following signs. She supposed she should have been prepared with some vague explanation for her lack of appointment, but the nurse at the desk got one look at her and sent her down to Urgent Care, where she could be seen right away.
Misrepresenting yourself seems fascinatingly easy in New Haven, whether at school or here, Joanna thought, as the Yale ID
at the end of the lanyard around her neck was scanned through a card reader without question by a distracted woman who seemed impatient to return to the Nora Roberts paperback she was reading. Joanna panicked when asked at the next desk if she had visited the Health Center in the past three months, not knowing the correct answer, but before she could respond, the woman had pulled up Meg’s records and answered her own question.
“Oh, I see you were just in before the break, got it. Okay, have a seat, Margaret, and someone will see you in a moment.”
The nurse practitioner who saw her took one look at her throat with a light and a tongue depressor and tsked “Poor baby!” before swabbing a culture for a quick strep test, which made Joanna gag. Joanna was self-conscious knowing that she probably had terrible sore-throat breath, plus all that tea didn’t help. The nurse popped an alcohol-tasting thermometer into Joanna’s mouth, looked into her ears, and took a pulse while waiting for the digital beep, which sounded just as she was writing down Joanna’s pulse on Meg’s medical chart.
“Ooh, hundred and two, you must feel pretty lousy, Margaret,” she said sympathetically, feeling Joanna’s neck and jaw, which made Joanna cry out.
“Tender and somewhat swollen lymphs, too. Let me go finish up one other patient and then the rapid strep culture should be done. If it’s positive, we won’t have to send this to the lab and we can start you on Amoxicillin right away. I’ll bet you a nickel that’s strep.”
Left alone in the room under the glaring overhead fluorescent lights, Joanna felt too sick to read any of the crumpled magazines in a rack by the examining table. She lay on the examining table with her eyes closed. When the door opened and the nurse returned a few minutes later, she had been dozing.
“Strep it is!” She picked up Meg’s chart and began to write on it. “Okay then, Margaret, here’s a scrip for your Amoxicillin, you know where to go down the hall for the pharmacy. If you take one
right away, you can take another before you go to sleep tonight. Warm salt-water gargles will help, too, and you’ll start to feel better by tonight, I promise you. But limit your activities until your fever has been gone for twenty-four hours, okay?” She finished up her notations and scanned the top of the page.
“I see you were here not so long ago, on the nineteenth, and you were treated by Dr. Tirone, who gave you Preven. How did that work out for you? Did you get that bad headache? Most women we treat with Preven say it’s almost a migraine. It’s too bad—it’s really the only common problem with this drug. But it can be treated. Did you take something for it?”
“What?” Joanna said dully.
“The headache, Margaret. Did the ECPs give you a headache or nausea? The first round don’t usually do it, but the second two pills can give you a really wicked headbanger. Lots of people vomit, too, it’s nothing to worry about, but I know it can be rough.”
“ECPs?” Joanna said.
“Oh, sorry, you know, emergency contraceptive pills, the pills we gave you. People call it the morning-after pill even though it isn’t always ‘the morning after,’ just so long as you’re within seventy-two hours, which I see here, you were, yes, more like forty-eight, good.”
“Uh, no, it wasn’t too bad,” Joanna said, trying to stay on track with this startling conversation. “I, um, took aspirin for my headache.”
“Any unusual bleeding or spotting?”
“Um—”
“Well, you’re going to return for a follow-up, let’s see, next week, with Sandy the nurse practitioner in GYN, for birth control pills, right? So you can discuss any concerns you have with her then. And did you make that call to Student Peer Health Educators? That’s important, Margaret, after what happened. You signed the agreement that you would schedule a meeting with a
Peer Counselor.” The nurse looked at Joanna, who looked down at her shoes, at a loss for the correct words.
“I do understand that with the holidays it’s been especially difficult for you, Margaret,” she said sympathetically. “So just promise me you’ll do it as soon as you feel better. We want you to take care of yourself. That’s the plan, right? We don’t want you to have to repeat the Preven, do we, Margaret?”
“Um, no,” Joanna agreed. “We don’t want that.”
Joanna had no recollection of her walk home, except for the iridescent haloes around the streetlights which kept forming before her fevered eyes. It was very cold but it was a still evening and every step she took seemed to echo strangely. The usual sour food smell in the lobby of their building made her gag. She just wanted to get into bed and close her eyes. She could hear music as she trudged up the stairs, first the inevitable Joni Mitchell jamboree on the second floor, and then, from their apartment, an unfamiliar woodwind solo of some kind which stopped and repeated, which made Joanna realize, as she put her key in the lock and went inside, that it was Amy practicing the flute, a sound she hadn’t heard in months. So that was something good.
“Hey, kiddo!”
Joanna looked up, startled by the unexpected voice, as she was hanging her coat on a hook in the hallway beside two unfamiliar coats. It was the photographer they had met that day in New York, Harriet. And there was a man beside her; there were two attractive people sitting on the sofa while Amy played the flute for them. Joanna was flabbergasted and had a passing thought that her fever had now actually put her into a hallucinatory state.
“Look who I found on Chapel Street!” Amy said, her eyes shining. She waved her flute in their direction. “Teddy and I had just seen the scariest Hitchcock movie at York Square, about this guy with a broken leg who watches all his neighbors—”
“Rear Window,” Harriet prompted, “my absolute favorite. Amy and I have been discussing how many tastes we share in music and movies.”
“And then Teddy said he needed to go to the bookstore, so I was coming home on my own, and there they were, leaving the Yale Art Gallery! We had hot chocolate at Atticus. We looked for you at Starbucks, but they said you had left early because you weren’t feeling well,” Amy continued with her giddy summary of the afternoon. “But you weren’t here when we came in. Where were you?”
“This is my husband, Benedict,” Harriet said, getting up to greet her. “Benedict, I’d like you to meet Joanna.”
“Wow,” Joanna said as they all shook hands a little awkwardly, appreciating the kindness in his face. There was something comfortable about him. Benedict hardly spoke yet he didn’t seem shy, just like someone who didn’t have to talk unless he had something to say. He looked exactly right with Harriet—somehow, they went together perfectly. “It’s great to see you, and great to meet you, it’s a terrific surprise, really, but I am so sick. I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but I have a horrible strep throat and I feel totally crappy.” She rummaged the antibiotics from her bag and held up the pill vial as evidence.
“Where’d you go to a doctor?” Amy wondered.
“Yale Student Health,” Joanna said, throwing herself down on the sofa.
“How did that work?” Amy asked skeptically. “You can’t just walk in there, can you?”
Joanna flipped up Meg’s Yale ID, which was still on the lanyard around her neck. “I’m Margaret Green, as far as they know,” she said wearily.
“Wow,” Amy said. “You’re a criminal genius.”
“Why don’t you get into bed and we’ll bring you something hot to drink,” Harriet suggested. She came over to Joanna and knelt down, and then she leaned over her until her lips were just
touching Joanna’s forehead. “You have a fever. Poor you! What can we do for you? Tea? You probably don’t have a hot water bottle.”
“No college student owns a hot water bottle,” said Benedict. “You’d worry about the kind of life any hot water bottle—owning undergraduate could possibly be leading.”
“Okay then, how about some tea with honey,” Harriet offered. “Do you guys have honey?”
“We do,” Amy said, “unless Joanna ate it all. She just sits there eating honey with a spoon sometimes. It’s gross.”
“Thus speaketh the eater of a Nutella and bacon sandwich,” croaked Joanna.
“So tea with honey, then,” Harriet said. “Why don’t you go get into bed and we’ll bring it to you there?”
“That would be wonderful,” Joanna whispered.
A little while later Teddy came in, whistling his adaptation of the Green family tune. Ever since they had told him about it, and Joanna had taught it to him, he had gotten into the habit of whistling a variation of the little tune in F sharp, a Lou invention (a conceptual herald of his electronic Cliqk gadget) that they had always used in crowded places to connect with one another.
“Hello? Where is everybody?” he called out.
“In here,” Amy replied from her place on the floor in the room she and Joanna shared. “In with a sickly patient plus a wonderful surprise!”
Introductions were made all around, Joanna’s pathetic state was explained, and it was quickly organized, minus the usual fractious debate—Amy being a Pad Thai fascist—about which Thai restaurant in the neighborhood (there were at least five) was best, that Harriet and Benedict would go out for Thai food to bring back for everyone, including some lemongrass soup for Joanna.
While Amy bustled about in her newfound state of cheer, cleaning up kitchen mess and unwashed dishes and setting the table so
it would be ready for their meal, Teddy sat on the foot of Joanna’s bed for a quick little summit conference.
“So where is she?” he asked. “Have you seen her all day? What time is it, anyway?”
“It’s dark o’clock,” Joanna said. “And I have no idea where she is, but, Teddy, the most awful thing!” Quickly Joanna explained what she had inadvertently learned from the nurse practitioner about Meg and the morning-after pills.
“Should I set a place for Meg?” Amy shouted from the kitchen.
“Sure, yes,” Teddy shouted back. “Let’s just hope she comes home in time.”
“Oh, Joanna, I feel like such an asshole,” Teddy said mournfully. “I am a total shithead for telling Meg that he had called.”
Joanna closed her eyes and nodded.
“Yes, I’m an asshole, or yes, I’m a shithead?”
She shook her head.
“Neither?” Teddy asked hopefully.
She nodded, eyes still closed, and reached out one of her hands from under the covers. He took it in his and squeezed it gratefully.
“It’s horrible enough that here I was picturing someone in my mind’s eye as her postmodern English guy and he turns out to be your father, but then to think that there really was a whole bigdeal crisis going on between her and the real Mark Frank.” Teddy thought for a moment. “I can’t believe what a mean thing I’ve done to poor Meg. I shouldn’t be allowed out in public.”
“Teddy, I just don’t know what I think right now,” Joanna croaked in her sore-throat whisper, opening her eyes. “I know I should be furious at her for sneaking behind our backs and meeting with Lou. I mean, who knows what else went on, what else she did. Maybe they’ve secretly been paying for stuff all along, and I guess this means she’s probably been talking with Janet too. I guess we’ll find out, sooner or later, but I’m starting to think it doesn’t make any difference anyway. And I just feel bad for Meg, I’m not mad at her. She’s been through so much on her own. We turned to
her, without even asking. Amy and I made her take responsibility for us without ever stopping to think for a second if she wanted it, but she didn’t feel she could turn to us for her problems.”
“Shh,” Teddy said. “Don’t strain your voice. And anyway, it’s not the same. But what do you mean, it doesn’t make any difference?”
“I can’t explain it. It’s just that Amy and I had to know everything , you know what I mean? We had to be certain about all the facts. But the facts aren’t the same thing as feelings. I was thinking about Lou, and about Janet, and about the whole Phil Hart thing, when I was walking to Hillhouse, and somehow, my rage, which was always there, it wasn’t just a smaller glow, like a fire going out, but it was gone.”
“What was gone?” Teddy asked gently.
“My rage. My anger. I just told you. I mean, it’s still there, in a certain way, you know, in principle, but the feelings are gone. I just don’t have the, you know, the passion for it anymore. I am just so tired of this. It doesn’t seem so unforgivable. I just want everything to be back the way it was before. Not you, Teddy, you’re the best thing that’s come out of this, but I just felt today that we’ve been in a kind of crazy nightmare, you know? And I felt like I was waking up from it.”
“Because you know Meg has been in touch all along? Or because of something else?”
“Now you’re making me talk and my throat hurts,” Joanna protested in a whisper. “With Meg, I feel bad for her more than anything else. And I just think that we’ve been really hard on Janet and Lou, and somehow we ran away with our selfrighteousness.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Amy came into the room, wiping the spaghetti pot with a dish towel. “I heard some of what you said and I don’t know why you’re letting Meg off the hook so easily. How can we forget that she betrayed us?”
“So, Ames, you’re ready to shift your anger from your parents
to your sister now,” Teddy inquired. “Is that how this works, just so long as somebody is the villain? Someone is to blame for wronging you?”
“You’re twisting everything around, Teddy,” Amy said crossly, giving him a shove so he would make room for her at the foot of the bed. She plopped down beside him. “I have a right to be upset that Meg lied to us, in effect, by pretending that were living independently while she was secretly in touch with them.”
“But you were living independently,” Teddy pointed out. “You are. You didn’t know she was in touch with him. Maybe it was just something she needed. Did you ever think of that? You needed her to share your anger, but maybe that wasn’t fair to Meg. You had no contact, just as you planned. You have absolutely succeeded at making a go of this. Look at you. Look at all of this! It’s been totally real. You’ve succeeded! The question now is where do you go from here. You and Joanna need to work that out, don’t you think?”
“Well, what about her thing with the married professor? What about that? What if it’s really an affair?” Amy asked him angrily, jumping to her feet and stamping across the room. “And anyway, you’re jealous that we have parents and you don’t, I know that’s mean but it’s true. It doesn’t make you so wise.” Amy stood there glaring at Teddy, her chest heaving. She was still holding the dish towel and the pot, which she had polished in her fervor. “You’re so full of observations but you can’t just live on books, and you’ve got to stop acting like we’re characters in novels to be deconstructed whenever you feel like it. What’s wrong is wrong!”
“Nothing is so black-and-white, Ames,” Joanna protested hoarsely.
“It just blows dead bears that everyone in this family turns out to be such a traitor,” Amy said. “And that I cry so easily,” she added, snuffling and wiping her face with the dish towel.
“Charming,” Joanna whispered.
There were footsteps in the hallway and then multiple voices as Harriet and Benedict returned, along with Meg.
“We just keep finding Green sisters like Easter eggs on the streets here,” Benedict said.
“Dinner’s on the table in two minutes,” Harriet said. “Are you able to come join us, Joanna?”
While they ate, and while Joanna managed a bowl of the promised soothing brothy substance, about which she was tactfully silent concerning the presence of loathsome bits of coriander leaf—she believed the flavor to be identical to that of old aluminum doors and mildewed canvas awnings—they took turns of conversation with Harriet or Benedict, so the absence of connection between each of the Green sisters was somewhat camouflaged until the end of the meal, when there was a lull in the chatter and everyone looked around at everyone else.
“Twenty past?” Benedict predicted. “Yup,” he confirmed, checking his watch.
“What?” Amy demanded. “How did you know the time? Had you just looked?”
“When there’s a lull in conversation with a group of people, it’s always twenty past or twenty of,” Benedict said. “It’s a known fact.”
“Among the insane,” Harriet added.
There was another awkward silence.
“So how about them Mets,” Amy threw out, and got a laugh.
“Totally cromulent,” added Teddy after another silence.
“There’s that word again!” exclaimed Benedict.
“Okay, I have a confession,” Harriet finally said after another self-conscious lull. “It’s not the total coincidence it seemed to be that you ran into us on the street, Amy.”
“What?” Amy demanded.
“Actually, we came up to New Haven specifically to see you. When we got to your apartment, nobody was home. Then we went to Starbucks looking for you, Joanna, but you weren’t there.”
“What?” Joanna whispered.
“What?” Amy demanded.
“I don’t like where this is going,” Meg said quietly.
“So we went to the Art Gallery,” Harriet continued, “and after, we were going to try the apartment again. But that’s when we ran into you, Amy. We were going to tell you that we were looking for you, but you didn’t give us a chance and after a while it was kind of too late.”
“So that’s why the Starbucks manager looked at me like I was nuts when I insisted on going in there and asking for Jo-Jo, because I was with you, and he had already told you she was out sick?”
Harriet and Benedict nodded.
“So I don’t get it,” Amy said. Then she saw Meg’s face. “But Meg gets it, I see,” Amy said with bitterness. “We’re the little babies being handled again, is that the way this works? Make them feel grownup and independent while manipulating them behind their backs?”
“Not exactly,” Meg started. “See—”
“I’d rather hear it from Harriet if you don’t mind,” Amy interrupted.
“Okay,” Harriet said. “Here’s the thing. After I met you that day, I looked you up in the phone book, and a few days later I called the number for Green children at the address which wasn’t too far from the gallery, which I thought it was a good guess. I wanted to ask you if I could photograph you, the three of you together, I mean.”
“Oh no, you spoke with them?” Amy was aghast. Joanna felt so dizzy that she couldn’t tell if it was the strep reaching her ears or the unreality of what was being said.
“Well, I did—wait, don’t interrupt me, Amy, hear me out—I
asked for any of you and ended up in a long conversation with Janet.”
“Uh-huh,” Amy said. “How charming.”
“And then we met for lunch,” Harriet confessed.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Amy exclaimed, throwing down her chopsticks and starting to get up from the table. “This is just insane.”
“Ames, don’t, please stay and listen,” Teddy coaxed. “There is nobody at this table who really has the complete story of whatever is going on.”
“I understand why this is so upsetting, believe me,” Harriet said. “But you have to understand that I had no idea of your situation when I tried to call you on Seventy-fifth Street. Anyway, that was a while ago. I had been thinking of calling you here in New Haven one of these days anyway, maybe coming up to see you, really, but then yesterday Janet and Lou called me.”
“Why did they call you?” Joanna whispered. “Amy’s right. This is nuts.”
“Because Meg must have called them,” Amy shouted. “Why am I the only person who sees where this is going? Meg knows what this is about!”
“I did call them,” Meg said quietly. “May I speak, please, or am I only to be spoken about from now on?”
“Go on,” Amy said begrudgingly.
“I called them because I just really needed to talk with them. Maybe you don’t need them to be your parents anymore, either one of you,” Meg said, looking first at Joanna and then at Amy. “But I still need them.”
“But aren’t you angry at Janet for what she did to us?” Amy said desperately, snuffling back tears.
“Yes, I am,” Meg said simply. “I’m really angry. But I understand it, a little bit, and she didn’t really do it to us. She did it to herself, and to Lou. This is about them, not us. Maybe it isn’t our business as much as we thought it was. I don’t know what good
can be achieved by punishing her this way, and punishing Lou, too. I feel as though we’ve all taken rat poison and we’ve been waiting for the rats to die, and it doesn’t work. Don’t you think they’ve been punished enough?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said belligerently. “What’s enough? She did an immoral thing. He didn’t stand up to her. Why should there be no consequences for what she did? We’re the ones who didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,” Teddy said absently.
“What the hell is that?” Amy turned on him with irritation. “Another one of Avery’s cute sayings?”
“No, dummy, it’s one of Shakespeare’s cute sayings,” Meg scolded, and Benedict laughed briefly.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, “but you’re all very amusing even when you’re having an intense angry conversation and you’re not trying to be amusing.”
“I’m glad we amuse you,” Amy muttered.
“Really, I do apologize. I shall endeavor to cease being amused,” Benedict said with mock solemnity, a merry look in his eye.
“So are you and Benedict on a mission?” Joanna whispered to Harriet.
“Sort of,” she admitted. “But I guess we’ve blown our cover, you know? We were just going to see how you were doing and then let them know. They were very worried about Meg, mostly, but they wanted a reality check for all of you.”
“Why were they worried about Meg?” Amy asked. “They should have been worried about their estranged children! They were in touch with Meg.”
“Exactly,” Harriet said, looking at her steadily. “Don’t look away from me, Amy. Look at me, please. Okay. Are you listening?”
Amy nodded. Joanna’s hand crept across the table and took hers. Meg took Amy’s other hand. Teddy let out a deep sigh as if he had been holding his breath for a very long time. Benedict
stopped pretending that he was trying to look solemn and really did have a serious look on his face now.
“They knew she was very unhappy and dealing with some big life things and they were worried about her,” Harriet said gently. “They love her. They love all three of you. Both of them love all three of you very much and that has never had anything at all to do with any mistakes either of them has made. They’re your parents. You’re their children. They love you. Can you accept that? Can you just accept that?”