17. Jessika
SEVENTEEN
JESSIKA
Memory is a dishonest narrator.
I know this. I have known it since law school, since evidence class, since the professor who taught us that eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence and that human memory actively rewrites itself every time it's accessed, changing small details, adjusting emphases, protecting the ego from things it did that it can't face straight on.
I know all of this and still the flashbacks come the way they want to come.
Tonight I'm sitting on the porch with a cup of tea I'm not drinking, watching the dark pasture where the horses have settled for the night, and the memory arrives without invitation the way it always does: Grant Vance at nineteen, standing in the parking lot of a gas station off Route 7, holding a paper bag from the pharmacy that he thinks nobody sees.
I was seventeen.
We were not—we were never. That's the thing that makes this complicated.
We occupied the same universe: I was Morgan's younger sister, a constant presence at the Mills ranch, and Grant was Morgan's friend, the hardest-edged and most difficult-to-read of the group Morgan ran with, the boy everyone knew was headed somewhere bad and wasn't entirely sure they were wrong.
We were not together.
But there was something.
The way certain people become gravitationally significant when you're young, before you have the language for what that significance is.
The way I could walk into a room and know immediately whether Grant was in it.
The way he'd look at me sometimes, quick, measuring, then deliberately away, like he caught himself doing something he decided not to do.
He was twenty-one when the summer happened.
I was nineteen.
Morgan was sick in the way Morgan had always been sick, which was to say he was struggling and brilliant and self-destructive and full of grand plans that would ignite and collapse, and none of us knew yet what the cycling was.
What the biology underneath the behavior was.
We just knew Morgan, difficult, dear, exhausting Morgan, and we did what families do, which is to say we loved him and were frustrated by him and didn't understand him nearly as well as we thought we did.
Grant understood him.
That was the thing. That summer, watching them together, Morgan in one of his brilliant phases, full of energy, sleeping four hours a night and talking at sixty miles an hour about the water table and county politics and five different things at once, I watched Grant be the anchor.
Patient, steady, never alarmed by Morgan's velocity.
Asking the right questions to slow him down.
Showing up at three in the morning when Morgan called, not because he was asked to but because he learned when the three-AM calls happened that somebody needed to be there.
He was good with Morgan.
He was better with Morgan than I was, and I had known Morgan my whole life.
I was nineteen and living at home for the summer between my first and second year at community college and I was, it’s embarrassing to say now but it's true, I was in the uncomplicated early phase of being in love with someone I decided I couldn't have.
Because Grant Vance was trouble. Because my father had told me in approximately every way a father can tell his daughter something that this particular man was not the right kind.
Because I was nineteen and smart enough to know what I wanted and twenty years away from being mature enough to know what to do with it.
Grant didn't make it easier.
There was a night in July, two weeks before everything changed, when the three of us were sitting on the tailgate of Grant's truck in the dark behind the county fairgrounds, long after the fair had closed and the lights had gone off, and Morgan had fallen asleep between us with his head on my shoulder the way he used to do when we were kids.
And I looked over and Grant was already looking at me.
Not the quick measuring look. The other kind.
The one he was usually better at controlling.
We sat like that for a long moment.
He said: "You're leaving in August."
"For school," I said.
"I know." He looked back out at the dark. "Doesn't matter."
"Grant—"
"Doesn't matter," he said again. Firmer. Not cruel. Just, decided. Like he had this conversation with himself already and come to a conclusion he was going to stick to.
Morgan stirred between us.
We didn't say anything else.
Two months later, Morgan was arrested.
The story, as I knew it then: Morgan had been caught with drugs. Significant quantity, enough for intent to supply. And the word was, from other people, from the county gossip chain, from a deputy my father knew who told him privately, that Grant Vance had provided them.
I was young when I testified.
I told the truth as I understood it. I had seen Grant give Morgan a folded bill and something I thought was drugs, I testified to that, to what I'd seen. I didn't testify to what I hadn't seen. I testified to what I knew. I was certain I knew enough.
Sitting on this porch in October, I understand that the truth as I understood it was only part of a much larger picture.
Morgan told me this and I sat with it for three years before I could fully account for what it meant.
I testified against an innocent man.
Not entirely, Grant wasn't entirely innocent, not in every direction, he'd been in fights and he made bad choices and his life before sobriety had enough complicated edges to fill a book. But on the specific charge. On the thing that sent him to prison.
I was wrong.
I put down my cold tea.
Inside the house, my father is sleeping. Nova is in her room with her headphones and her phone. The horses are breathing in the dark pasture, steady and patient, and the night is clear and cold and the stars over Briar County are the only stars I've ever known well enough to navigate by.