Now Is Not the Time to Panic(49)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I lived in the world. I was famous in the way you can be as a writer of a book kids loved for a brief period of their lives, and I navigated all kinds of situations where things I’d made were discussed and considered, and sometimes people asked me to join those discussions. I didn’t mind.

And I had a really great husband and a kid who was lovely and beautiful, and I volunteered twice a week at the elementary school library to read to kids who did not give a shit and just wanted to fight over the pillows they got to lie on, and I visited schools in the neighboring counties to talk to teenagers about writing, and it was an entire life that I’d made. But I guess the other thing is that I had built that life over another life, this secret life, this secret thing, and I had told myself that this would all work as long as I kept my life on top of that secret, if I weighed it down so it stayed deep inside of me. And when something comes back, when it reappears, when it emerges from that place inside of you, it takes up real space in the world that you’ve made. And I wasn’t sure how much space it needed, if it would push me so far outside of that life that I’d have to start over, become someone else.

That night, I had Junie’s babysitter take her out to see a movie, and after Aaron came home from work, I told him that I needed to tell him something. My whole body was kind of vibrating; my skin felt tingly.

“You look a little sick,” Aaron said, frowning. “Are you okay?”

“I just listen—” I said, and he instantly stiffened.

“Did someone die?” he blurted out. “Did your mom die? Wait, did my mom die? Is that why you sent Junie out with Bea?”

“No, god, Aaron, I’m sorry. No, nobody died. No one is dead. No one is dying, either. It’s nothing like that. Jeez, you ran to that so fast.”

“You just had that look,” he said, still suspicious of me. “Like someone had died. You looked like my mom when she told me that our dog got hit by a car.”

“Well, thank god, it’s nothing like that. This is just my face, you know? My normal face.”

“You’re really pale,” he said, inspecting my face. “You’re sweating.”

“Shit, you’re making this worse,” I told him. “Do you want a beer or something? Do you think that would relax you?”

“I think you’d better tell me what it is,” he said, “’cause you’re freaking me out a little bit.”

“Okay, well, I met with this woman today, and she wants to write about me for the New Yorker, and so—”

“Oh, shit, Jesus, Frankie, it’s good news? Why were you acting like that? This is great! Is it about the Evie books? Or your novel?”

“No,” I said, “it’s not about the books.”

“Oh,” he replied. He was smiling, but I could see that his mind was working, trying to figure out why anyone would want to talk to me if it wasn’t about Evie Fastabend and her evil mind. “Well, then what?”

“She wants to talk to me about the Coalfield Panic,” I finally said.

“Is it, like, an oral history, then? Frankie, jeez, I’m confused, and I wish you’d just say what—”

“I did it,” I said, screaming a little. “I made it happen. Back then. I made the poster. I wrote those words.”

“Shut up,” he said, frowning. “Frankie, you would get in a ton of trouble if you lied about that. She’s a reporter, so, like, she would—”

“I really did. I really did. Back then, that summer. I wrote that phrase, and I made the poster and I hung it up all over town, and then things got really weird, and it was too late to do anything about it. And so I just didn’t tell anyone, ever.”

“You didn’t tell me,” he said. “You didn’t tell me about this? What the hell?”

I reached for him and he let me, which was a kindness, to let me touch him. I hugged him. “I didn’t tell anyone, Aaron. Do you understand? I couldn’t.”

“Well, you must have told someone, because this lady knows, right?”

“It’s complicated,” I told him. “She kind of knew, and then she asked me, and I said yes. And now she is going to write about it. And everybody is going to know.”

“Well, now, shit, wait. You know, Marcus is a lawyer, so we should ask him about it first.”

“Your brother does immigration law, Aaron. He wouldn’t know the first thing about something like this.”

“Well, he knows the language, right? He could do, like, a cease-and-desist. Or sue for defamation of character.”

“But, Aaron, do you understand? You heard me, right? I did it. I did do it. I made it. The edge? You know about the edge, right? I wrote that. I made it.”

“Well, it feels really defamatory to bring that shit up now,” he said, trying so hard to protect me, which made me feel much worse. “It feels libelous or whatever to bring up something you did as a juvenile. Shouldn’t that be sealed, you know? The record of it should be sealed, because you weren’t eighteen.”

Junie would be home in less than an hour. We were not going to spend that time on the internet typing mass hysteria legal responsibility juvenile statute of limitations and reading twenty pages of results. It was too late for that. The story had already happened. I’d already written it.