Megan
In just a few months, everything changed.
After I came forward, another girl did, too—Lindsey Anderson, twenty-two, a senior at Eastern Connecticut State University who had interviewed Michael for a project on public policy. After dinner with some members of his staff, he offered her a ride to the train station, but instead of dropping her off, he’d reached his hand up her skirt. She fought him off, but at the time, she didn’t dare to come forward. “I thought it would look like I wanted it,” she said later on an interview on CNN. She wasn’t emotional like me; she was matter-of-fact and tough as anything. “I got into his car willingly. I put myself in that position,” she said. “But he needs to pay for what he did.” There were others, I knew, watching silently with their fists over their mouths, but between Anna and Lindsey and me, it was enough.
Michael Mabrey didn’t just withdraw from the race—he resigned his position immediately. There was a statement about seeking counseling and spending time with his family; not an admission, but not not an admission, either, as Bobby pointed out. Lindsey had followed through with her threat to press charges, and Michael was awaiting a trial that promised to be delayed with dozens of motions.
Online, he was routinely vilified, his smug expression the fodder for a meme. There were some who believed he was the victim, though, helpless in the face of V-neck sweaters and hems that ended above the knee. There were rules for victims, and those were impossible to shed. I followed the story for a few days before deciding I would be a happier person if never searched for his name again.
All in all, the scandal was only a blip on the national radar. There was a new president and a new congress, and half the country wasn’t speaking to the other half, and no one seemed sure what to believe anymore. For all but a few of us, Michael Mabrey was easily forgotten.
* * *
Lauren and I had emailed a few times after the press conference, and we agreed to meet for coffee in Norwood, the midpoint of northern Massachusetts and southern Rhode Island, as far as Google Maps was concerned. What with the light traffic of a Saturday and the fact that in my nervousness I’d budgeted way too much time, I was the first to arrive. I staked out a seat near a window looking out onto the street, and from there I caught sight of Lauren behind the wheel of a gray SUV, circling the block twice before pulling into an empty spot, ten minutes late. Maybe she was having second thoughts, too.
On the sidewalk she spotted me through the window and stopped, then gave a little wave of recognition. It was so strange to see her, even though we’d arranged the meeting, and there was nothing unexpected about her presence. In the years since I’d left Keale, I’d had visions of us bumping into each other at a shopping mall or a movie theater, the sort of chance meeting that would unnerve us at the moment and potentially jolt us back into each other’s lives. Now we said polite hellos, awkward as two Craigslist strangers. Lauren shrugged out of her coat, and we went to the counter, where she ordered a complicated drink that took a small army of baristas a comically long time to make. I ordered the house blend, one cream and one sugar. And then we were finally sitting across from each other, calmly sipping our coffee, and the entire thing seemed too contrived. The moment stretched to its breaking point, and we both spoke at the same time.
“I’m so glad that—”
“Thank you for—”
We laughed.
“You first,” I insisted.
“I’m so glad that you sent me that email. I know that it must have been—well, no. I’m not going to claim that I know anything about what you’ve been feeling. I’m just glad you sent me that email.” She lifted the mug and took a small sip, a thin ridge of foam lingering on her upper lip. I fought the urge to do something—toss her a napkin, the way that I would have if we were eating a meal in the Commons, or at least lick my own lip to mirror what needed to be done. But we weren’t those girls anymore, and I did nothing.
I said, “And I’m glad you came to the press conference. That was brave. If the roles were reversed, I don’t know if I could have done it.”
“Yes, you do,” Lauren said. “You were always more brave than I was.” Her eyes had gone bluer than normal, and I saw that she was fighting tears. “There’s no way that my saying sorry at this point will mean anything. But I am sorry. Every day I think about what I said to you that night, and I wish I could go back. I wish I could change so many things.”
She was right. An apology couldn’t erase what had happened, and more apologies wouldn’t make up for the deficit. But there was no point in putting tally marks in columns anymore, calculating who owed whom and how much. Lauren hadn’t been the one to attack me; that was an apology that would never come. All I could say, fighting the lump in my own throat, was a whispered thank-you.
She played with a napkin, crumbling it in her hand. “How are you doing? Since...everything.”
I smiled. “Better.” My colleagues had been fantastic; I received the occasional handwritten notes from students saying I had given them courage. In many ways, coming forward had been like opening up a part of me that had been off-limits for years—Bobby and I were closer, my mom and I now talked several times a week. I’d driven back to Scofield to visit Miriam on a long weekend, and we’d talked and cried and drunk wine and laughed. I had so many things to say, not only the sad stories, but the happy ones, too, the memories that had been accidentally boxed up together. I took her advice to see a counselor, finally, and the nightmares were less frequent—still there, but now they served as a reminder of what had been, and who I had been, and what I’d survived.
I turned the question to Lauren, worrying my own napkin to shreds. “How are you doing? I can’t imagine, with your family...”
“Yeah, well...” Lauren’s smile was flat, the corners turned down. “I only know what you know. Rebekah took the boys to live with her parents in New York. From what I understand, my brother is staying at Holmes House now. I—” She stopped, considered her words, and finished, “I’ve had to let them go.”
I touched her hand, just for a second, a fleeting gesture. Once she’d leaned across the table and kissed me on the mouth just to make a point. But now her hand, with its chewed cuticles and thin silver wedding band, wasn’t familiar to me in any way. I wouldn’t have recognized it in a lineup of hands, wouldn’t have known hers from my next door neighbor’s.
“I need to apologize for something, too,” I admitted. “When we met—I don’t know why anymore, but I think it had something to do with insecurity and a whole lot of other bullshit—I told you some lies.”
Lauren’s face was a mask. The bit of white foam had dried on her upper lip, like a toothpaste stain.
“I exaggerated certain things—like how poor my family was, and how many boyfriends I’d had. It all seems like excuses now, I know. But I wanted to be someone else, someone different from the boring girl I really was. I thought somehow it would make me...” I thought about saying cool, but the word seemed so lame, inadequate to everything I’d felt about myself then.
“Cool?” Lauren suggested.
I laughed. “Yeah. But it was stupid. It was wrong.”
“I have a confession, too,” she said. “Brady had a conference in Kansas City a few years ago, and I flew out there with him. One day when he had meetings, I rented a car and drove to Woodstock.”
I gaped at her. “Seriously?”
“I wanted to see where you were from. And—I don’t know—I thought maybe you’d gone back there, after that summer. Anyway, I did some digging online, and I went to your old address. It wasn’t in a trailer park like you said. It was just this little yellow house.”
I closed my eyes. “And it wasn’t on a dirt road. And it didn’t have a giant satellite dish in the front yard.”
“Or a chain-link fence,” Lauren added. “You know what, actually? It was kind of a cute town. I went to the diner where you used to work and ordered a piece of pie.”
“I hope it was the apple.”
She smiled. “What else?”
I thought about all the implications of my lies, the outward ripple effects of tossing a stone into a pond. In so many ways, I’d hurt myself—I’d made myself a person who couldn’t be believed. “You must have hated me. You must have thought you never knew me at all.”
“Maybe a little bit. But then, I made my mistakes, too,” she pointed out.
I sat back. “What ever happened to Joe Natolo?”
She shook her head. “He moved to Michigan, I think. He wasn’t a bad guy, but practically speaking...”
I finished her thought. “It wouldn’t have worked.”
“I wonder if he still lives over someone’s garage,” she mused.
“I wonder if he still picks up girls at bus stops. Or art galleries.”
For the first time, Lauren’s smile looked like the old Lauren’s smile. “Touché.”
I took a fresh napkin from the dispenser and leaned across the table to wipe the last trace of foam from her lip.
It felt good to laugh. After a while, we refilled our coffees and split a scone the size of my hand. I asked about her husband and kids, and she asked about Bobby. I told her that we’d recently adopted a cat from an animal shelter, a tiny, scruffy, fierce thing that had already shredded one of our lampshades. A cat wasn’t a ring, but it was its own kind of promise. I asked about her photography, and she shrugged.
“I loved it, but...I don’t know. Some things you just move on from.”
“Are you kidding? I figured you’d have your own studio by now, or some kind of fancy business where you charged thousands of dollars for portrait sittings.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t that good.”
“Yeah, you were. You were really talented. Still are, I bet.”
“Well...maybe someday, when the girls are older...”
“Definitely,” I said. “You should.”
She drained the last of her coffee. “I have about a million pictures of you in some boxes in my attic. Maybe I’ll send them to you. Or I could bring them for next time.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. Next time. “That would be nice.”
When it was time to say goodbye, we reached for each other awkwardly, our shoulders bumping, our arms unsure.
I told Lauren that I needed to use the bathroom before I got back on the road, but for a long moment, I stood at the window, watching her get into her car, adjust the sun visor, reverse onto the street and head out, back to her other life, the one that didn’t intersect in any way with mine.
A lump rose suddenly in my throat, and I swallowed it down.
I didn’t know if Lauren and I would ever see each other again, although I’d learned that just about anything was possible in life. Things were always changing and always moving on, and who we were at one moment wasn’t necessarily the person we would be forever.
But at least we were being our true selves—no matter how messy and imperfect and complex.
And that had to be a good thing.
* * * * *