The Office of Historical Corrections(56)
“I’ve known you too long for you to pretend this place is too fancy for you. You’re not a dive bar girl.”
“You haven’t really known me for years.”
“I wouldn’t have to know you for five minutes to know that. I’ll take you for a dive bar beer later if that’s what you want. I’ve been worried about you all day. I don’t like the idea of some half-cocked white supremacist tracking what you’re doing.”
“I don’t love it either, but I don’t do this work to be chased off by the first two-bit white supremacist with a paint can.”
“It’s Wisconsin. If he isn’t armed with more than a paint can he could be in five minutes. Do you know he’s the head of a rogue branch, officially? I’ve been reading about him all day. He’s been formally expelled from a quasi-libertarian organization best known for starting street fights. Not a guy you want to get into it with.”
“I’m going to recommend the sign come down anyway,” I said. “Not for the reasons he wants, but it will solve the problem. All evidence would suggest that Josiah Wynslow died an old man with a loving family in 1984, and all the good people of Cherry Mill did was use his imploded building to steal the land they were never going to let him keep.”
“Then why don’t you look happier? Case closed. Mostly no one gets a second act in America, so here’s to Joe, who got the hell out of hostile territory alive and met a nice girl and had some babies and died of old age. May we all be so lucky.”
“He had a sister. He followed her to Wisconsin. That’s what he was doing here. She never turned up, not even after he supposedly died. I think maybe that’s who sent in an obituary.”
I pulled out my phone and showed Nick the image of Minerva I’d scanned earlier. I zoomed in on her face.
“Do you think you’d know she was Black? If you hadn’t seen that many Black people?”
“It’s hard to tell in black-and-white. You think she was passing?”
“Maybe. It would explain why she cared enough to write an obituary but never got back in touch with her family to find out if he was still alive.”
“So then say she was passing. Then he lived and so did she. They both cheated the rules and beat the system.”
“The house always wins.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Don’t I?”
You know the type, I thought. You know the type.
* * *
? ? ?
Following Nick’s car back to his place, I tried to convince myself I saw things his way: two people made themselves a way out where there wasn’t one, there was nothing left for me to do but set the record as right as it could be. A way out of what, though? In the driveway of the lofted barn, I looked at the red paneling and the big windows and the bright hanging moon. I pulled Nick through his front doorway and led him up his loft stairs and into his own bedroom, trying to be a woman without baggage, a woman who did not believe the worst was always coming. I deliberately did not check my phone. Let it be as happy an ending as it can be, I told myself. I decided to change my flight and go home a day early. I wasn’t responsible for knowing the unknowable and I wasn’t responsible for what Genevieve did next and I felt deliriously not responsible for anything as I pulled Nick into his bedroom and whispered what I wanted, undressed him button to button, button to zipper, ignored the nagging voice. Later, awake in the cool sheets and in the clarity after my second orgasm, I felt suddenly, queasily sure of what was true, of the connection I’d been avoiding making for hours. I pushed the thought away long enough to sleep for an hour, but woke again as if startled out of a nightmare. I looked at Nick’s sleeping face, but instead of calming me, it reminded me how easy it was to slip into wanting something, how easy to become something else by wanting. You know the type.
I got out of bed and fished my phone out of my purse. The screen awakened to reveal a cavalcade of updates from Genevieve: everyone in Cherry Mill knew Chase had done the graffiti but no one knew where to find him or how to prove it. I had one message from Daniel, a zoomed-in photo of the photo from the file, one he must have snapped before I’d left DC, before our fight. He knew I’d see it, probably that I had seen it already and spent hours trying not to know the words for it. I opened my phone and looked again at Minerva’s face in the photo of her with her brother. I scrolled back to the magnified face of Ella Mae Schmidt. I looked between them until I was certain that looking back at me from Ella Mae Schmidt’s haughty expression was the face of Minerva Wynslow. There had been something ugly to me about Ella Mae’s presence all along, something about the set of her eyes against the florals of her dress, the baby on her hip, the feminine softness and lipsticked grin beside the triumphant aftermath of violence. I had imagined into Ella Mae’s expression a particularly vicious innocence, the innocence of white women who never saw the damage in their wake, and now I tried again to understand what I was looking at. Ella Mae could have pretended innocence, but Minerva would have known better.
I showered in the guest bathroom so I wouldn’t wake Nick and, though it was barely dawn, called Genevieve from my rental car in the driveway. I had intended not to need her, but I did now—it was a revelation I didn’t want to be alone with, one I understood I didn’t want to walk away from, although there was nothing forcing me to follow up on it. It will be good for Genevieve’s story, I told myself. Let Genevieve have it. As though I was gifting her something, and not running from it. The phone went to voice mail the first time, but she answered my second call groggy and alarmed, and agreed to meet me at a twenty-four-hour diner off the highway outside of Cherry Mill. I drove there entertaining a choose-your-own-adventure of self-loathing: at some point Minerva Wynslow had become Ella Mae Schmidt, had gone from a girl who fled the Mississippi summer for the promise of a city life, a girl who laughed with her brother’s arm around her, a girl who wanted more but cared enough to write home, to a woman who smiled outside the building where her brother had died, who boasted of having set it aflame, and then, her brother presumed dead, stayed Ella Mae long enough to have a child, who had two children of her own, one of whom had a son, and now the great-grandson Ella Mae never met was generations removed from his own Blackness, was vandalizing Josiah’s memorial, terrorizing his distant cousins, and proclaiming a violent willingness to defend the integrity of the white race.