26. Jett #2
"I came in through the back door because my parents were in the front room watching television and I didn't want them to see the suit.
I went up to my room. Took the suit off.
Hung it up. Sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.
I think I was there until two or three. Then I got up and made myself a peanut butter sandwich in the kitchen and went back up and ate the sandwich and went to bed. "
"You did not cry."
"No."
"Why."
"Because I didn't yet know I was allowed to cry about it. The version of me that was allowed to cry about it was a version I hadn't yet figured out how to be. The kid in the suit cried about other things. He did not cry about that."
"What did the kid in the suit cry about."
"Hartley."
"You don't have to answer."
"I'm going to answer. I'm thinking about it.
" I picked the coffee back up. I drank some of it.
"He cried about my mother. He cried about my father.
He cried about being yelled at for trivial things on Sunday mornings.
He cried about being told he was going to hell at a tent revival when he was eleven.
He cried about a dog we had to put down when he was fourteen because nobody had been brushing her teeth and her infection had gone septic.
He cried about being lonely. He did not cry about you.
He hadn't yet figured out, at seventeen, that what you did to him was a thing happening to him, instead of a thing that was true about him.
So he didn't cry about it the way you cry about things that happen to you.
He absorbed it the way you absorb things that are true. "
She closed her eyes. She did not move otherwise.
"When did you figure out it was a thing that had happened to you and not a thing that was true about you," she said.
"About three years ago."
"That's recent."
"Yeah."
"What happened three years ago."
"Therapy."
"Therapy."
"Not the first round. The second. I went again at twenty-three.
A different woman in San Diego. Three weeks of sessions in the off-season.
She asked me about my hometown. I told her about the dance.
She told me, in week two, that the thing I'd been carrying for nine years was a thing that did not belong to me, and that the kid in the suit had been a kid who was the victim of a specific cruelty in a year of his life when he had no other resources to fight it with, and that the cruelty had been a thing that was about you and the situation you were in, not a thing that was about him.
I didn't believe her for the entire third week.
I was on the plane back to Vegas before I believed her.
By the time I got back to my house up here I'd figured out she was probably right, and that the kid in the suit hadn't deserved any of it, and that the woman who did it to him had probably not deserved to do it either, although I didn't yet know what I was going to do with the second part of that and decided to ignore it. "
"You decided to ignore the second part."
"I did."
"For three years."
"And then I walked into your conference room."
"And then you walked into my conference room. Yes."
She opened her eyes. She looked at me.
"You were a kinder person than I deserved on day one, Jett."
"Hartley."
"You were. We are not going to argue about it.
You were. You sat at that table with me on a Monday morning three weeks ago with a recorder between us and a witness in the room and you did not burn me down, and you didn't burn me down because the woman in San Diego had told you something true about the kid in the suit three years before that, and the truth had stuck.
I want to say thank you. I'm also aware that thank you is not a thing I get to say, because not burning a person down is not a thing a person gets thanks for, but I'm saying thank you anyway, because the kid in the suit was a kid you protected by not burning me down, and the kid is the person I'm thanking. Not you. Him."
I sat with that. I drank my coffee.
I had not expected to be thanked, this morning, on the bed, for the choice I'd made at the conference room table.
I had not expected to be told the choice had been on behalf of the kid in the suit.
I had not, until she said it, understood that this was a true sentence.
That the not-burning-her-down had been a kindness extended by the man I'd become on behalf of the boy I'd been.
The only kindness I'd been able to extend to the boy in the last nine years, because the boy had not been in a room with the woman who'd done it to him at any point in those years until I had been.
"Okay," I said.
She didn't press. She let me sit with it.
After a moment I said, "I owe you something too."
"You don't, Jett."
"I do. I'm going to say it. I want it on the record."
"Okay."