Page 66 of Counting Backwards

“What? No.” He seemed affronted by the thought. “I had no ulterior motive. You can relax your shoulders.” He laughed lightly. “I just wanted to do something helpful for you while you’re so busy. Can’t I try to take care of you, of your family?” He reached toward my face, where a stray curl had fallen from my messy bun, and he tucked it behind my ear. “Gram’smyfamily too, you know.”

As I berated myself for wrongly assuming the worst, I couldn’t stand the constant flux of my feelings toward him.

“Did you know that Gram met Carrie Buck?” Vance asked.

“Wait, she what?”

“She met the woman from that court case, Carrie Buck. The one you told me about. They met in the 1980s. Carrie was elderly, and you weren’t even born yet. Gram said your mom and dad were trying to get pregnant with you, and I guess they’d been having a hard time.”

Gram had never told me about this. Nor had she ever mentioned my mom having fertility issues. Were my own struggles with fertility genetic? It would have been nice, during those recent months of worry, to be able to connect my own struggle with my mother’s. Doing so might have somehow softened the blow of it all.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Gram told me today when we were at brunch. Your mom had a second miscarriage, and she thought it was a consequence of everything her grandfather had done, that God was punishing the family. Apparently, your mom insisted they do something to change up the bad juju or whatever. I didn’t understand the trajectory exactly, but somehow they came up with the idea of going to see Carrie Buck. I don’t know. You’d have to ask Gram about the rest of it. She said she’ll tell you. I thought you might want to go see her to find out more.”

“Go see her? Like, today?”

He nodded.

“You thought that while I was finalizing a huge complaint that’s getting filed in literal hours, I’d want to take off for the day to chat with my grandmother?” I couldn’t help myself from snapping at him. The combination of this new information and Vance’s stupid suggestion was almost too much to bear.

I hadn’t known my mom had miscarried even once, let alone two times. It was strange, learning something new about my own mother all these years after her death, and from Vance of all people. He’d never even known her.

“Actually, yeah,” Vance answered defensively. “I guess I kind of did think that.”

In spite of my annoyance, I was still stunned by this news and completely intrigued. “So they went to meet Carrie in person? How could Gram not have told me? Especially after coming clean about everything else.” I wondered what else my grandmother still hadn’t shared.

“I really don’t know, Jess, but here’s the thing: Carrie forgave them. That’s what Gram wanted me to know. I think she wanted me to understand that if Carrie Buck could forgive your family, then I can forgive you too.”

“Wow.” So much was going on inside my head, I didn’t know where to start. “I can’t believe they actually met her.” After all the time I’d spent ruminating over the woman’s history, always picturing Carrie as a young woman, it was hard to imagine her as a wrinkled elderly person, sitting in a room with my own mother and grandmother. I tried to keep my thoughts focused on that amorphous visual because I didn’t want to acknowledge Vance’s other comment—that hemightbe able to forgive me, that this was something he was still working on. Was I supposed to thank him after his epiphany? Was that supposed to be my takeaway from this conversation? I was so much more interested in the other information he’d revealed.

“You should call her later,” he said. “In the meantime, I can take a hint. I’ll leave you to it.” He rose from the bench and motioned with his head toward the conference room. “Crushing it on this case is the best way to show those guys at Dillney that they’d be fools to lose you.”

Standing back up too, I wrapped my arms around his waist and lowered my head to his shoulder, desperate to feel the closeness we once shared. We stood there for a long moment, silent, our arms snaked around each other. I soaked in the familiar lines and curves of his lean muscles, the safe smells of cedar and pine that wafted toward me from his skin. As I clung to him, I realized that he’d never understand what this was about. Whatever happened with Dillney, I knew I’d always be able to find another job. I was doing this for the women at Hydeford. I couldn’t say that to him though. Not now, while we were still so raw.

When I finally pulled back, I asked, “What do you think’s going to happen after we file tomorrow?” As if anyone could know the answer to that question.

Vance shrugged but answered anyway. “I bet it will make the news. You’ll be famous,” he added with pride in his voice, pulling me back toward him to give me an extra little squeeze.

“Oops,” he said, letting go quickly. “Don’t want to smoosh the baby.”

“About that,” I said, leaning back again so I could see his face. “I’d like to tell your parents about the pregnancy tomorrow night. After the filing is done.”

“But it’s only eleven weeks,” he said. “I thought we were supposed to wait until after the first trimester, just in case.”

“If anything goes wrong,” I said, “I want your family to be part of our grieving process. But right now, I think we should include them in our joy too.”

“So that’s the deal now?” he asked lightly. “We just tell everyone all our secrets? All this honesty is getting to be a bit much. Are you sure you can handle it?”

I smiled back without answering. I was beginning to see that I could handle so much more than either of us had yet given me credit for.

22

Jessa

May 2022

I stepped off the Amtrak train in Penn Station and waved goodbye to Lydia, Sean, and Asahi. The four of us had traveled to Trenton that morning to file the complaint for declarative and injunctive relief and damages in the US District Court of New Jersey. We also attached a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, seeking release of any plaintiffs who were still being held at Hydeford as a way to protect them from retaliation. Each time I thought about the fact that we’d just submitted a book-length complaint against the federal government, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief again.