“Fuck, Juliet. That’s terrible.”
Sean hung up his coat and filled the cat’s bowl with food.
“At Crawford?” he asked.
“Yup.”
“We played a show there once.”
“Really? What was it like?”
“Fine. Weird kids, honestly.”
“Yeah. That’s the sense I got.” I pressed my face against his shoulder. “I wonder if she was there. At the show.”
“Who?”
“Sara. The girl who died.”
“Oh. Uh, I don’t know.”
“No, I know. There’s no way you would know. Of course. I was just wondering.”
He frowned. That type of thinking irritated him. I wished that I had kept the question to myself. I could say that kind of stuff to Celeste, but not to him.
“This is good for you, though, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, for your career. ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ Isn’t that what they say?”
“I guess. But it isn’t that kind of story.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not that kind of newspaper. We’re a local paper, we do stories that are, I don’t know, tamer.” I heard a hitch of exasperation in my voice, and took a deep breath. “Besides, I want to be respectful.”
“Of course. But still, it’s not exactly the kind of story you can make family-friendly.”
“No. I guess not.” We sat down on the couch, and I leaned into him, relieved to feel his body make way for mine.
“I like that about you,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“You know, that you take it seriously. That you still care about being respectful. Not everyone would.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
He shrugged and looked away. These scraps of kindness he handed me—I could gnaw on them for days.
Our cat, a tiny, capricious animal named Cat, dove onto his lap. A tabby who must have been the runt of the litter, she used to belong to Nell, Sean’s girlfriend of several years before we met. Cat adored Sean and tolerated me. Cautiously, I leaned over to scratch behind her ears.
Sean turned on the television. “Pretty baby,” he said to the cat.
We fucked right there on the couch, not even taking off all our clothes. Cat watched balefully from the coffee table. I liked having the television in the background. I found it relaxing. When it was over, I felt empty, and warm, and calm. Sean asked what I wanted for dinner.
“Anything,” I said. Cat continued to stare at me.
We ate spaghetti with meat sauce. Sean cooked simply, but well, and I didn’t realize until the food was in my mouth how hungry I’d been. The television was playing a movie with Gene Tierney.
“Didn’t she go crazy?” I asked Sean, though I already knew she did.
“No idea.”
“She was so pretty.”
“Yes, she was.”
“Not as pretty as Cat.”
“No. No one is as pretty as Cat, though.” He gave her a kiss between the eyes. She yowled and scurried off to a corner. I took our empty plates into the kitchen and returned to the couch. Sean pulled me onto his lap, and I rested my head on his shoulder.
When I was in high school, my father taught me how to shoot a gun. He took me to a range two hours from our house, and I stood in front of him, feeling small and brave. He taught me how to line up the barrel, how to stand, where to hold the stock so that it didn’t hurt me when I fired. I found that hollow spot on Sean—just below his shoulder, skin easily revealing the veins beneath—and placed my head there.
We kissed for a while. He moved on top of me. I felt the pressure of his fingers on my throat. Was he pressing hard, or was I imagining it, my anxiety making me too tender?
I shifted out from under him and stood up.
“Hey. Hey, are you OK?” Sean looked stricken.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Did I do something?”
“No, of course not. I just need to go to the bathroom.”
I trudged upstairs. The tiles were the same shade of gray you often see in office buildings and state hospitals. I hate this house, I realized. It was so fucking ugly.
John Logan’s trial lasted one more month. He pled guilty to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison. There was cheering in the courtroom when the sentence was read. It made me sick, even though I understood why seeing someone bad punished sometimes felt good.
Celeste and I watched the families of the victims embrace one another and shake hands with the prosecutors. I felt like I was watching a movie I wanted to switch off.
“Our last romantic date,” Celeste said, when we met at the diner. “How tragic.”
“Heartbreaking,” I agreed.
I told Celeste about the conversation with my mother.
“She thinks Logan’s victims got what they deserved,” I paraphrased.
Celeste shook her head. “Lots of people I work with think like that. They think empathy is a limited resource, that they have to hoard it, only give it to those who need it the most—it’s not. It’s a muscle. You have to exercise it.”
We sat in silence. I could not make myself eat.
“You look exhausted. Take some time off,” she advised me. “Take a break from all this. Go to a spa.”
“I can’t afford a spa.”
“OK, well. Take a lot of hot baths. You’ll be fine.”
It was painful to admit it, but there are some things that just can’t be fixed, not by any quantity of pills or vacations or hot baths or yoga or meaningful talks with understanding friends.
“Are you disappointed in me?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “If you were really giving up, I would be. But you’re not.”
“And if I do?”
I stared at her.
“Why do you think you’re so obsessed with her?” Celeste asked.
“Well, aren’t reporters supposed to be obsessive?” I answered, petulantly.
“To a point. Look, if her family got in touch with you, saying, we want justice for our little girl, we want that bastard to rot in prison, whatever, that would be something else. But they didn’t, did they?”
“No.”
“That means they want to grieve in private. So let them.”
Sara was survived by her mother, Christabel, her father, Richard, her stepmother, Colleen, and her half sister, Luna. None of them wanted to talk to me.
Celeste spoke with so much certainty, even about things I knew neither of us could ever really understand.
“You feel connected to her,” Celeste said. Her voice softened. “You’ll feel that way about other people you write about, too. Trust me.”
“I told you, I’m going back to covering the Sheep and Wool Festival.”
“So maybe you’ll feel connected to a certain lamb. Who knows.”
I put my head down on the table. Celeste stroked my hair.
“You need a break,” she said again. “It’s OK. I was the same way. I took it all so personally.”
Outside the diner, we hugged and promised to keep in touch. I drove home, completely hollowed out.
Three weeks later, Odile called me to say that there would be a vigil to honor Sara Morgan, as well as John Logan’s victims. Sean came with me. There were maybe fifty students there, gathered outside the library, holding candles. A handwritten poster read: HONORING VICTIMS OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE. It was decorated with flowers. A girl who introduced herself as the leader of some kind of activist group made an earnest, if uninspired speech, followed by a minute of silence. They sang “Over the Rainbow” and “Hallelujah,” and then it was over.