24. Jonny
Chapter twenty-four
Jonny
Aunt Shelley’s office is on the second floor of the Whitfield Building, which is connected to the administration wing by a covered walkway that cuts through the main lobby.
I’ve been through this lobby once before—the day I came to see Lance about the conference ticket—but I was so focused on not being recognized that I walked through it with my head down and my hood up.
Today I’m early for lunch. The lobby is quiet, and I don’t have my hood up.
The marble floors and high ceilings give it the hushed atmosphere of a courthouse.
There’s a security desk and a row of flags and, on the far wall, a long line of framed portraits in matching gilt frames.
Former presidents of the university, I assume.
I wander past them without much interest until I reach the end, where a smaller cluster of photographs is grouped under a brass plate that reads OFFICERS OF THE UNIVERSITY.
Provost. Vice Provost. Dean of Students. Comptroller General.
That's Lance's boss, and I'm overcome with curiosity about the person he works for.
He is a silver-haired man in a dark suit and a burgundy tie, smiling down out of the frame with the ease of somebody who has had his photograph taken a great many times.
The nameplate reads REX HARLOW. I look at him for about as long as anybody looks at a portrait in a lobby, which is not long at all.
And then, with no warning and no reason at all, I am thinking about Elliott.
It has been weeks since I really thought about him.
Not in passing—not the reflex of “Elliott would have liked that” or “Elliott was afraid of dogs”—but properly.
Sat with him. Let myself remember the weight of him on my lap, the way he’d press his face into my neck when he was tired, the particular pitch of his voice when he said my name.
He was fourteen years old and he didn’t deserve what happened to him, and I’ve let weeks go by without giving him a single honest thought.
I sit down on the marble bench across from the portraits. The guilt is sudden and total.
My phone buzzes.
Aunt Shelley
Running 5 min late. Wait for me in the lobby?
When she comes through the doors five minutes later, breathless and apologetic, I must still look rattled, because she stops mid-sentence about the parking committee and studies me.
“You look pale. What happened?”
“I was thinking of Elliott,” I say. “It’s been weeks since I thought about him. Properly thought about him. What kind of brother does that make me?”
She loops her arm through mine and steers me toward the exit. “The kind who’s been busy living, which is exactly what Elliott would have wanted you to do.”
Over lunch, she lets me talk about him. The things I remember.
The things I don’t. The wall in my memory that locks out everything before the fire and only lets through fragments—his laugh, his obsession with Super Mario, the way he’d line up his action figures by height and scream if anyone moved them.
“Can I ask you something?” I say. “Have you ever heard of a company called Albatross Press?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Alice said it belonged to the man she thought was my father. And there’s a bank statement in a box at Lance’s that says twenty thousand dollars went from Albatross Press into Mom’s account.”
Aunt Shelley sits back. “That’s a lot of money.”
“No kidding.”
She shakes her head slowly. “I have never heard that name in my life. Not from her, not from anybody. And I’d have remembered it, because it’s a damn stupid name for a business.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I were more use to you.” She picks her fork back up and puts it down again. “She kept a lot to herself, Jonny. I’m learning that the same as you are.”
“I want to hate her,” I say. “Mom. For what she did to me. For making me into his keeper. For making me responsible for two people who were falling apart.”
Aunt Shelley puts down her fork. “Making you into their warden wasn’t the answer,” she says quietly. “I told her that. More than once.”
“No, it wasn’t. I just—” I stop. I’ve been carrying this anger for so long that the next words feel dangerous, like pulling a pin out of a live grenade.
“She didn’t set out to become what she wound up as.
She was just overwhelmed. When Grandma was really there, and she didn’t get confused, she could keep Elliott in line.
But when she started failing—how else was Mom supposed to manage two people who needed full-time care?
She couldn’t afford help. She couldn’t ask the neighbors. She was drowning.”
“I don’t think anybody deserves blame. It was an impossible situation.
Everything was one cascading disaster after another.
None of that makes it okay,” I say. “What she did to me was wrong. But I think I’m starting to understand that she wasn’t cruel.
She was just—out of options. And too proud to say so. ”
“That’s the most generous thing you’ve ever said about your mother,” Aunt Shelley says. Her eyes are bright. “And for what it’s worth, I think you’re right. She loved you. She just didn’t know how to love you without leaning on you.”
Then Aunt Shelley leans forward with the look she gets when she’s about to pitch something.
“So, I’ve got some news. And I know it’s changing the subject, but I’ve been angling to get out of this bullshit job for years and I finally got the opportunity to get out of the alumni office.
The university is giving me the Fairhaven radio station to manage next term.
WFHV. It’s been limping along for years with student volunteers and no budget, and they’ve finally decided to put some real resources behind it. ”
“That’s great, Aunt Shelley. Congratulations.”
“The thing is, I need talent. And before you say no—”
“No.”
“—you have an excellent voice for radio. I’m serious, Jonny. That low, intimate quality you’ve got—it’s perfect. People lean in to hear you. That’s exactly what you want on the air.”
I stare at her. Nobody has ever described my voice that way.
In my head, it’s still the damaged rasp the smoke left me with—the voice that can’t carry across a room, that can’t shout for help when someone is dying on a boathouse deck.
But Aunt Shelley isn’t hearing damage. She’s hearing something else entirely.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, which surprises us both.
“That’s not a no!” She points her fork at me. “I’m holding you to that.”
I look around the restaurant. It’s a campus place—wood tables, chalkboard specials, faculty and staff picking at salads.
Through the window, I can see the memorial banners along the quad, and even from here, I can make out the Excelsior photograph reproduced at poster size.
My face, Lance’s face, soot-streaked and terrified, hanging from every lamppost like a wanted poster.
“You know what the worst part of being back is?” I say. “The pictures. They’re everywhere. And even with henna in my hair and thirty pounds of muscle and enough ink on my skin to rewrite the Rig Veda, I still feel like I’ve got a sign on my face.”
Aunt Shelley tilts her head. “How much of that is the anniversary, and how much of it is waking up next to Lance?”
I stare at her. “What does Lance have to do with it?”
“Everything. You spent nine years building a life where nobody knew Parker Bishop. Now you’re back in the one place where everybody does, and you’re sleeping with the boy from the photograph. You can’t outrun who you are, Jonny. Especially not here.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. But it still feels like standing on a knife’s edge.
“I have to leave,” I say. “You know that. The university paid for my ticket. The minute that visa clears, I need to get back to work. It’s not like I can just stay here and—what?
I’ve got no work history, no qualifications, no skills that translate to anything in this country. ”
“Radio,” Aunt Shelley says.
“You’re not letting this go, are you?”
“No. And I’m serious. It’s talk radio. You’d be interviewing people, telling stories. You’re already doing it for Jonny on the Spot—the only difference is a microphone instead of a camera. You’re good with strangers. You’re curious. You listen. And that voice of yours—”
“How much of this is about keeping me in town?”
She doesn’t flinch. “Can’t blame me for trying. There are several people in this town who love you. You have to decide whether you can integrate that into the life you’re going to build moving forward.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I take a sip of water and glance around the restaurant, and that’s when I notice the man.
He’s sitting alone at a table near the door.
Brown hair, unremarkable build, about my age, give or take a year—pale eyes, blue or gray, hard to tell in this light.
He’s looking at me. Not the casual glance of someone people-watching over coffee—he’s looking at me like he’s waiting to see if I’ll place him.
He holds my gaze a beat too long, and gives me a lazy smile, like he’s saying there you are.
I’ve been getting this look all week. The anniversary has my face on every surface in town, and half of Fairhaven seems to know me from a life I can’t get back into.
My life before the fire is locked behind glass—dreamlike, there but not reachable—and the months right after are worse, a smear of strangers and casseroles and people who held my hand at funerals I don’t remember attending.
So when a man looks at me like he knows me, it opens that old, gaping curiosity.
Maybe he went to Farley with me, or Central.
Maybe he taught a class I sat in and can’t remember sitting in.
Maybe he has stories about a version of me I’ll never get back on my own—maybe he even has pictures. There’s only one way to find out.
I stand up before I can think about it. Aunt Shelley watches me cross the restaurant.
“I’m sorry,” I say to the man, sitting uninvited at his table. “Have we met? I’ve been out of town for a long time and there are so many people coming up to me trying to place my face. I’m Jonny Bishop.”
He recoils in surprise and then smiles. His chin comes up, and there’s a smirk somewhere behind it. It is a look I have had before in three or four countries. It says you’ll remember my name soon enough, and underneath that it says something about my mouth.
“Hi, Jonny.” He shakes my hand. “Yes, we have met. In a manner of speaking. It was a long time ago, and very indirectly.”
“Your name?”
“Roger.”
“Please forgive me for not recognizing you. There are a lot of things I don’t remember clearly, especially when it comes to the time around the wildfires. I assume that’s the period we’re talking about here, right?”
He hesitates. “More or less.” He stands up and glances past me at Aunt Shelley. “I’d better be on my way. I’ll leave you to your aunt. It’s nice to finally meet you, Jonny.”
“And you too, Roger.”
He leaves. I walk back to the table. Aunt Shelley is watching me with a look I can’t quite read.
“See?” she says. “Proof of concept. You’re not afraid of anything. You just walked up to a total stranger and had a conversation. That’s exactly what a talk show host does.”
I let her talk. But as I half-listen, I think about the man at the table.
Roger. I wish that I could remember. There’s so much missing, and the pieces of memory just aren’t fitting back into place.
And that’s the part that scares me the most about staying in Fairhaven.
What if I’m never able to reassemble those shards of memory and they wind up cutting me?
What if the gaps I can never fill are bigger than the life I can build without them?