Halfway to You(100)

“I—” The memory gripped me like a waking nightmare, of which I had no control. The explosion, the way the world tilted, the impact of pavement, the blood between my legs. I tried to blink it out of my mind’s eye, but the vision wouldn’t dissipate.

I’m still not certain what came over me, Maggie. I took the interview barely four months after my miscarriage, and I was still in grief over losing a baby, Todd, and the future I had thought was finally within reach. I could’ve lied and told the reporter all my injuries were minor, but I know she wouldn’t let me evade so easily. I could’ve told her the partial truth, that I sprained my ankle and had a minor concussion. I could’ve said a lot of things. The reporter’s question was a trap, I knew, but by my logic that night, the only way out of that trap was to tell the truth.

“I had a miscarriage,” I said.

I must admit the shock on her face was worth the bitter truth. Thus far, the interview had been tense—unnecessarily ruthless, to be honest, when everyone knew I didn’t owe my private life to anyone, that just by showing up I was affording the magazine a luxury—but this reveal visibly surprised her. With one word, we were suddenly both off balance.

“You—due to the car accident?”

“Tuk-tuk.”

“What?”

“It was a tuk-tuk accident. An auto-rickshaw. Not a car.” I don’t know why I fixated on that detail—I was flailing in the sudden exposure. I wanted to be clear with her about the details—even the minutiae.

“Wow.” The reporter, for all her faults then and in the future, appeared to genuinely sympathize. I still occasionally wonder if it was her or her editor who spliced my words. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

“Did Todd know about the baby?”

I hesitated. “Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

My god, Maggie, I wanted to cry. Tears stung the corners of my eyes, but I refused to let one fall. This reporter didn’t deserve my emotion. She hadn’t earned it. But there I was, sitting in a hotel bar in New York, desperately waiting for the moment I could leave to get dinner with Keith before my flight back to Rome, wondering if my life would ever look like normalcy or contentment after a long road of getting neither. And sure, I was at fault for so much of my own suffering, but that interview—I didn’t deserve that.

“He’s in Colorado, running his bookstore,” I said.

“Are you—”

“Listen, I’m going to level with you, all right?” I didn’t want to remain off balance. Better to go bold than appear weak. “When the tabloids decided to misrepresent me and Todd at my movie premiere, we both faced harassment and ridicule. So we took a vacation. That’s understandable, isn’t it?” I paused, but not long enough for her to respond. “In Thailand, I learned I was pregnant. I lost our child in an auto-rickshaw accident—the result of a bombing. In the aftermath, I was devastated and angry. Todd and I had a fight. I told him to get out, and he left.” I leaned toward her recorder and stared into its red blinking eye to enunciate: “That’s all I’m going to say on the matter.”

I slid off my barstool. “I believe I’ve given you plenty of juicy details to work with, but make no mistake: the public might own my work, but it doesn’t own me. You think I want my pains and insecurities broadcasted?” I placed a hundred-dollar bill next to our finished drinks on the bar. “I want privacy. I want respect. Not as a writer, but as Ann. The woman. The person. I hope you and your superiors do well with this interview, because it’s the last one I’ll ever give. I’ve given enough.”

I exited the bar.

I held it together for about a block before I broke down, smearing the tears on my cheeks with my sleeve as I hurried to the restaurant. When Keith asked how it went, I told him everything that had happened. He said it wasn’t so bad. That was the point, anyway: to set the record straight. The interview might have been a disaster, but at least I’d told the truth.

If only they’d been interested in publishing the truth.

Come June, the article dropped.

Sitting in my apartment in Rome, with the magazine draped across my lap and Carmella rubbing my back, I tried to convince myself that it really wasn’t so bad. The magazine had spun a story that was at turns epic and enthralling. They’d printed all my best stories: the truth about my mother, a few fun anecdotes from my travels, even the facts of the movie premiere. For the most part, I sounded mysterious and likable (and this made the magazine sound important, for having the clout to capture my honesty).

The last section was what did me in.

The reporter—in that conversational first-person perspective of an immersive interview—wrote that she then asked me about my personal life. She waxed poetic about how I opened up, the gracefulness of my candor, blah blah blah. Then landed on the ultimate misquote:

“I lost our child [ . . . ] and he left.”

I despised those brackets. The missing multitudes. The context omitted and the implications introduced. Todd hadn’t left because I had a miscarriage—he left because I told him to. That was the difference. And that difference was everything.

(Later, under threat of lawsuit, the magazine claimed they cut the article for space. I ultimately didn’t sue—by then, the damage was done—but the reporter and editor did retire shortly thereafter.)