Will had forgotten he even had the sleeping pills. In fact, they’d expired, but they were nonetheless potent enough to put Claire into a brief coma. And though she didn’t take all of them and admitted later it was just a cry for help, it was a cry we all heard loud and clear.
After she left the hospital, Claire was away from school and work for the rest of the month of February. The first week she spent with her folks back in Slidell, during which she permitted Will and me to log in to her social media accounts to see what she’d been dealing with, and to gather evidence, for what, we didn’t know yet.
“Holy shit,” Will muttered, scrolling down her pages, the light from the computer illuminating both our faces.
The comments came from several young women who flung words like “ho,” “hoebag,” “whore,” “bitch,” “cunt” (even “cum rag,” which I thought was “scumbag” spelled wrong, until I really read it). Up and down her wall, the abuse poured, under her pictures, and in reply to every post.
“Look at all this hate,” I said. “Poor kid.”
Some of the posts listed ways in which the people posting were going to hurt and dismember her if she didn’t “leave Ben alone,” as though Ben had had no say in their relationship. They described how they would also run her out of the school if she didn’t “fucking off yerself.” Claire the joiner, the artist, the hard worker, the friend and niece, that girl was lost amid all these ugly, vile insults and threats. But the label that seemed most prominent, the one hurled most often, the one that seemed to stick, was the word “slut,” usually pasted beneath a certain photograph posted over and over again, of Claire holding up her shirt to bare a breast, just one. If that was the notorious photo, I thought, it wasn’t even a sexy one. It looked insouciant, more like the product of a dare between her and the photographer, presumably Ben. But posted over and over again with horrible slogans and tags attached, it took on darker tones.
Claire missed New Orleans and when she begged her folks to let her come back to her uncle Will’s, they were too afraid to say no, worried they’d set off more self-destructive behavior. When she returned to Will’s, a home with disconnected Wi-Fi, we all spelled one another off to spend time with her, Dell filling in for the both of us when necessary. Of all of us, Dell was the most perplexed, her face dropping when I told her how Claire had coped with this abuse.
“Well, once she’s all better, please don’t mind me if after I hug her, I slap her a little,” she said, fighting back tears.
The staff at Cassie’s was incredible, picking up shifts at the Café Rose so Maureen wouldn’t be overwhelmed or on her own, especially during Mardi Gras.
Will demanded the addresses of her tormentors. Over the course of that month, he made personal visits to each kid’s home, requesting meetings with parents, asking the girls to delete the posts, to write apologies and to give assurances that they understood the scope of their damage.
“I only wanted them to consider what it would feel like to be Claire,” he told me, while we shopped for new floor runners and plastic cutting boards for the restaurant. He looked as lost as I’d ever seen him, wandering the aisles of Home Depot. “Why did this happen? What did she do to deserve all this shit?”
“Nothing. She did nothing.”
Later, in the checkout line, I said, “I admire her.”
“Why?” Will asked.
“Because even after all of this, she never apologized for having sex with a boy she wanted to have sex with. I could learn a thing or two from a seventeen-year-old girl.”
That was a sincere comment; I wasn’t trying to make a point about Will’s behavior at Latrobe’s, but it was out of my mouth before I realized the implications.
Will averted his eyes when he said, “We could all learn from her.”
Eventually, Olivia, the main bully in Claire’s group, was booted out of the school, but Will wanted a more serious charge against her, something akin to criminal harassment. But the school stuck to its “girls will be girls” policy, hoping Olivia’s expulsion would be enough to start the healing. I stopped Will more than once from going over to Olivia’s house to yell through a locked door, which would only have come across as a different kind of bullying.
Meanwhile, Claire gradually got better and returned to work after March Break as if from a war, shell-shocked and tender. On her first day back, she took Dell aside.
“I swear I’m okay now. I won’t do anything stupid like that again,” she said.
“Hard going through something like that all alone,” Dell said, patting her dreads. “Next time, open your mouth. Tell somebody. Tell me.”
It was surprising to see Dell act so caring, until I remembered that she’d launched four kids, including a set of twins, and two grandkids into the world, quite successfully, and mostly alone.
The kitchen was a crazy hive of activity when Will breathlessly barreled in, tossing a small paper bag on the prep table in front of me.
“Cassie, I tried to reach you but there was no answer. No black truffles, only white. That okay?”
“You asked for black, right, Dell?” I hunted around for my phone, realizing I’d probably left it in Jesse’s truck when he dropped me off that morning.
“I did.”
“Does the color of the damn truffle even matter?” Will asked her.
“It always matters,” Dell said, pressing that point home in the form of a lesson to Claire.
Will exhaled and dropped his chin to his chest. “Fuck. I can’t do anything right.”
“Come on,” Dell said, drying her hands on a tea towel and grabbing Claire by the sleeve. “I’ll show you where to hunt and gather.”
Dell and Claire left us standing in the kitchen. I immediately rose to leave, the way I always did when it looked like I was going to be alone with Will.
“Wait,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
My stomach clenched. I turned to face him.
“I wanted to say thanks,” he said. “I already thanked Dell, and now I want to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being such a support for Claire. And such a good example.”
“A good example?”
“Of a grown woman who has her shit together.” He continued without waiting for my reply. “Every time you show up here without hurling something at my head, you’re setting a good example. Every time you pick her up and take her to a movie, and come in here early and deal with Dell because you’re better at it than I am, you set a good example. Every time you make a smart decision about the menu, or handle an irate customer with more grace than one person should possess, you set a good example for her. And I just want to say thank you. And I owe you.”
I was getting that deep, warm feeling you get when you look for longer than usual at a face you love. I let myself enjoy that moment, the two of us standing there being kind to each other in a quiet kitchen. Months of resentment slid away. And then, without my permission, my hand lifted to touch that face I once had loved so much. And he let me. He let me touch him without flinching, without stepping back and away. Somehow I had expected the feel of his skin to be familiar, but it was new to me.
“You don’t owe me anything, Will. I care about her.”
He reached up to touch the back of my hand. “Well, I owe you something, Cassie. At least an explanation.”
“For what?”
“For what I said to you, that night. At Latrobe’s. For the way I treated you.”
“No. Don’t—”
“No. You need to hear it. You’ve made all the difference in her life. In both our lives.”
Who knows how long we would have stood there marveling at each other’s faces, our hands touching. We never had a chance to find out, because Jesse walked in at that moment, shattering everything.
“Okay. Yeah. I’m sorry,” he said, immediately spinning away from us as though he’d walked in on his parents having sex. Before bolting, he carefully placed my phone on the nearest counter. “You left it in my truck.”
Will gave me a tacit go after him nod. Strange how the tables had turned; now it was Will urging me to fix things with Jesse. Guilt, that constant, awful companion, followed me out the door.
Steps behind Jesse on the sidewalk, I called his name, one, two, three times. He finally froze in his tracks, his back to me, probably giving his face a second or two to arrange itself into an I don’t really give a shit expression before turning around.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” he said. “Your phone kept ringing and ringing and I thought—”
“You didn’t intrude. We were just having some kind words over Claire. That’s all.”
“How is she?”
“Good. Better. Yeah. Don’t leave like this, okay? Come back. Come in for a beer.”
I clasped the hem of his T-shirt, giving it a gentle tug. Jesse wouldn’t move.
“I can’t right now.”
“You’re mad.”
“No, baby, I’m not mad. Just realistic.”
And with that, he got into his truck and drove away from me, at first slowly, until he turned the corner at the Praline Connection and sped up, leaving dust in his wake.