Things You Save in a Fire(102)

I hope those kids hear me. I hope they come away resolved to be better people. To be more careful with one another. To try like hell to use their pain to help others rather than harm them.

Maybe they get it, and maybe they don’t. All I can do is try.

But when I get home, Owen is always there, waiting for me. He makes sure he has dinner ready—something warm and soothing and buttery. On those nights, I play with our kids and kiss their chubby little bellies until bedtime, and then he takes them up to their little attic bedroom with pom-pom curtains and tucks them in. When he comes back down, he brings me a blanket and a mug of tea, and we sit on the sofa and talk about the day. He tries his best to make me laugh. Sometimes he gives me a foot rub with lemon-scented lotion. Sometimes we watch bad TV.

He can’t fix it, but he tries to make it better.

And then, when it’s our bedtime at last, he falls asleep in my arms, and I fall asleep in his.

Unless I can’t get to sleep right away.

Then, just like I’ve done for so long, I close my eyes and imagine making chocolate chip cookies. I measure out the chips. I crack the eggs. I watch it all churn in the mixer. It’s the same as it always was. Except now it’s different.

Now, it’s not just me baking cookies alone. Now, I always imagine my sixteen-year-old self there, too—right beside me.

When the cookies are ready, we pull them out, sit side by side on the sofa, and eat them—still warm and gooey—and drink glasses of ice cold milk. Sometimes I put my arm around her. Sometimes I say compassionate, understanding, encouraging things. Sometimes I lean in and promise her with all the conviction I possess that what happened to her won’t destroy her life. That in the end, she will heal, and find a new way to be okay.

She never believes me, but I say it anyway.

I know these moments don’t really happen. I know I can’t truly step back in time and mother my long-lost self. I know the teenage me and the current me can’t actually hang out like that, eating cookies and rolling our eyes at the world like besties.

It’s pure fiction. Of course. I’m just telling myself stories.

But that’s the life-changing thing about stories.

We believe them anyway.



* * *



BUT, HOLD ON—did I ever forgive Heath Thompson?

Not exactly.

I forgave myself, at last. Even though I’d done nothing to require forgiveness.

I didn’t really forgive Heath Thompson.

With him, in the end, I guess you could say I chose revenge.

I don’t know if you read about it in the papers, but he wound up going to jail for a long time.

And not for what you’d expect, either.

Tax fraud.

Though, in that same month, in a front-page story, he was outed as a patron for an expensive prostitution ring. And then, in the wake of that, he was sued by thirteen different women for assault. And then his wife left him—but not before posting some deeply, eternally humiliating photos of him in some very embarrassing outfits on the internet.

We’ll leave it at that. Use your imagination. Then make whatever you’re picturing a hundred times more humiliating and try again.

But what did he go to jail for? Tax fraud.

On top of it all, he turned out to be embezzling city money to pay settlements to the women who were suing him.

Which the good people of Austin, Texas, did not take too kindly to.

Yeah, he went down in flames.

One of the women he’d assaulted ran for his city council seat—and won.

All this was in the papers and on cable news for months. But somehow I missed it.

I must have been too busy being happy.

Honestly, I didn’t even hear about it until years later—when Heath Thompson tried for parole and was soundly rejected, and the whole series of scandals churned back through the news cycle.

I spent some time after that wondering if I should have spoken up—and wondering why I hadn’t. Partly, I just didn’t know about the lawsuits, way back home in Texas. I’d like to think I would have joined them if I’d known.

But I can’t know for sure.

For so long, it was everything I could do to keep my head above water.

Sometimes I wonder, if I’d been able to tell someone sooner about what he did, if I might have been able to protect the women he harmed after me. Maybe. Maybe one brave voice could have stopped him. Or maybe, just as likely, I’d have been blamed and humiliated and ignored—and he’d have gotten a pass.

I know why women don’t speak out. It’s hard enough just to survive.

And, by the way, the blame for what Heath Thompson did to all of us sits nowhere but on his shoulders.

The morning I discovered all the news about his scandals, I took a few minutes to enjoy his spectacular downfall, and then I got right back to making us all heart-shaped pancakes for breakfast.

I had more important people to think about.

I guess it really proves the old saying: “The best revenge is marrying a kindhearted guy with a washboard stomach who brings you coffee in bed every morning.”

Wait—is that the saying?

Maybe it’s “The best revenge is spending your life in a cottage by the ocean with a world-champion kisser who takes the phrase ‘with my body, I thee worship’ literally.”

That might not be it either.