Chapter 35 #2
Toward the end of summer, I do the thing I’ve been putting off since the memories resurfaced. I google Mr. Hubert.
I haven’t been ready before, but I’m ready now, on a nondescript August day. Out in the back garden sitting on Hal’s egg chair
that she left behind, I take three huge volcano breaths and type his name into the search bar, then press Enter.
It doesn’t take me long at all to filter through and find the correct person, a Robert Hubert of Plainwell, Michigan. The
results make my stomach plummet.
He’s dead. He died. Mr. Hubert is a goner.
Four years ago he lost his battle to cancer, as the obituary says. The obituary is long and glowing, so much more adoring
than the one for Chris’s brother, Luke, which just makes me ruminate on the injustice of it all.
In all the internet search results for Mr. Hubert, there are no mentions of anyone reporting him as a child abuser or sexual offender.
No mentions of lawsuits, no evidence at all that he was anything more than “a larger-than-life, salt-of-the-earth man who was beloved by his whole community,” as the flowery language of the obituary says.
My stomach feels bloated and empty all at once. I sit there swinging back and forth on the egg chair, my legs kicking out.
The lack of closure closes in on me.
I’d thought maybe this could give me a sense of purpose, bringing his atrocities into the light, helping protect others against
his evils.
But now there is no lawsuit for me to pursue, no poetic justice to serve.
“You coward,” I snarl aloud to Mr. Hubert. “Going and dying before I could press charges and make everyone see you for who
you really are.”
I suppose I could still go public with my story, but it hits differently when you’re accusing a dead man. Not just the optics
of it—I don’t care about that—but there’d be no sense that my trauma was really helping anyone. I could donate to a nonprofit
or even start one myself, but the news that Mr. Hubert is six feet under has taken the wind out of my sails.
Maybe it was my ego wanting the attention of a sensational lawsuit, but the motive has some good in it too. Everything is
tangled. Isn’t that just how life is?
To counteract the rage or maybe just add more, I look up Chris’s wedding site to see if he and Olivia are married yet. It
turns out they’re not, which makes me more relieved than it should, as if I still think there’s time to sabotage the whole
thing. My ruinous tendencies are still there, but I’m not going to indulge them like I used to.
The wedding will be October 3 at the Plaza Hotel. It’s as typical of a venue as I would’ve expected, all chandeliers and New York opulence. I don’t scheme to crash it, just put a card in the mail congratulating them and apologizing to Olivia.
It’s not any grand confession or anything. I just tell her that I feel bad that we got off on the wrong foot and I hope we
can all do something together soon. I’m not expecting them to take me up on this but I feel better inside, like I’ve scrubbed
away some of the muck that I thought made me cool but actually just made me cruel.
I put in a little gift for Arnie too, a “best man” chew toy. It’s pretty adorable. I know Chris will like it and I hope Olivia
will too. It’s pretty obvious now how Olivia was never to blame at all. She didn’t force Chris to be with her. He chose that
with his own free will and I was just too jealous to accept it.
Chris ends up calling me to thank me. I let it go to voicemail and I listen to the voicemail a lot of times in a row, but
then I delete it. That part isn’t out of spite; it’s out of respect. He’s about to marry another woman and I don’t want to
tempt him or tempt myself. I unfollow him on social media too.
Tara seems surprised by these developments, says she’s proud of how far I’ve come. “Now you can start opening yourself up
to new people who are actually emotionally available,” she tells me one morning while we’re sizzling up some blueberry pancakes
for breakfast. I’ve started getting up earlier now so I don’t miss so much of the day.
“No thanks,” I say. The thought of meeting someone new doesn’t excite me; it just makes me feel like I let something precious
drop through my fingers onto the concrete and shatter. “And what about you? Why haven’t you professed your love to Niles yet?”
Her face contorts. “I don’t want to mess things up.”
“The only way you can mess it up is if you let fear hold you back,” I reply, since I’ve pretty much become a fortune cookie
these days. “Now I’m giving you three days or I’ll do it for you. And you know I’m not joking.”
Tara is cramped with nerves. She rocks her knees back and forth on the couch. I sit down next to her and give her a side hug. “Look,” I say. “Maybe I’m not the best role model on the whole relationship thing, but just go for it. You don’t want to have regrets. Trust me.”
“What about your view that monogamy is monotonous?” Tara wants to know.
“Well, it depends how deeply you dive into another person’s spirit and grow with them,” I say. “We all have a choice about
how boring or interesting our relationships are. Confinement doesn’t always come in the form of commitment. Sometimes it’s
the opposite. And on that note,” I go on, “I think it’s time to formally announce that I’ve dissolved the Anti-Marriage Pact.”
Tara’s brown eyes bulge. Maybe she’s been trying to ignore the signs that we were headed that way, headed to the end, which
is actually the beginning. I wish Tara could’ve been up there on the mountain with me and the fawn and the stars. Then she’d
understand.
“Here’s the thing,” I explain, trying to help her see the starlight. “Rules against convention can be just as confining as
conventional rules. That’s something the divine woman helped crystalize for me. Being free doesn’t have anything to do with
whether we get married or not. It has to do with how liberated we are in our choices to marry or not marry, and then how we
heal and grow and love with someone else and most of all with ourselves.”
Tara runs her hands through her Afro, untamed these days. It’s like she’s trying to convince herself that I’ll get bored of
my enlightened self and go back to how I was before. I have to admit I’m kind of scared of that happening too, but at the
same time I know that it’s a permanent shift—that once a blind woman can see, she doesn’t wear eyepatches just for the hell
of it, except maybe on Halloween.
“So by that logic, you might get married?” she asks me, like she’s trying to catch me in my own trap so I’ll backtrack on the whole thing.
“Perhaps.” There’s a thrill at how many doors have been flung wide open. Not just with relationships but with everything else
that I’d previously prohibited. “It’s still unlikely,” I admit. “But I’m open to evolving and you should be open too. If you
want to be with Niles, then just go for it. I’ll buy you three pints of pea milk ice cream if it doesn’t work out. How’s that?”
“Pea milk ice cream is disgusting,” Tara says. “I’ll need the coconut milk kind. And make it five pints, not three.”
“You’re worth the splurge,” I assure her. “Now woman up and tell him how you feel.”