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Levi

Gilder’s is on Sixth next to a hole-in-the-wall diner that serves corn dogs at nine o’clock in the morning, so of course I’ve walked past it maybe forty times without a reason to go in. I have never in my life owned anything worth framing. Now I own a letter from a publishing house in New York with my husband’s name on it and the words we are pleased and honored. I also have fifty minutes left before my two o’clock, and a plan. I want this on a wall where it’s the first thing I see when I walk in. My husband the brilliant academic.

The woman behind the counter is patient with me. She lays out corner samples and talks about archival matting and conservation glass. I’m not sure what any of them are, but they sound impressive.

“So, for something this size, we’re looking at about $180. It normally takes about two weeks to get the framing done,” she says.

“Uhhh,” I say.

She smiles at me and looks over her shoulder for her boss. “Tell you what. There’s a rack by the door. You pick one off that and I’ll do the rest properly anyway.”

“Thank you! Wow!” I turn and look at the rack, but it doesn’t sit right with me. “Why?”

“Talk Back with Saint-Jacques?” She points to his last name on the letter. “You’re the husband, right?”

“How do you know about this?”

“It’s all anybody’s talking about on campus. Are you kidding me?”

I don’t know what to say to that. I buy the discount frame and she fits the letter into it for a fee her boss would fire her over. I take my wallet out, but it’s stuck in my breast pocket with the stuff I grabbed on the way out the door, when I was trying to grab the publisher’s letter. I put the pile on the counter and apologize for it as I hand over my card. I open my backpack to shove in the envelope from Fairhaven Electric and a two-for-one deal at the Smoothie Shack for Strawberry-Kiwi or Blueberry-Banana. I pick that one up and I’m just about to call Bastien to ask him which one he wants when I see the envelope that it had been sitting on top of.

It’s a cream envelope with the university seal on the flap, addressed to Dr. S. Saint-Jacques.

It’s been opened. Roughly and urgently, which is the way my husband opens every letter, like he’s never heard of a letter opener.

There’s one sheet inside. I pull it open and skim.

Notice of Formal Hearing. The Committee on Professional Ethics will convene. Wednesday the fourth, ten in the morning, Grier 412. And up at the top, small, in a box: SECOND NOTICE.

Second notice.

So there was a first one. There was a day, weeks back, when this landed and he read it and he sat down in our trailer and decided not to tell me. And then there was every day after that. Every dinner. Every night I put my hand flat on his chest. Every morning I made coffee for a man carrying his own execution folded up in the mail.

My ears have gone hot. There’s a band tightening across the front of my chest as I stare at the words.

“Sir?” the woman says. “Would you like me to frame that one too?” she asks, gesturing to the letter.

I slide it out of view. “No. It’s not important. Just something from Fairhaven Electric. I picked it up by accident.” I put the cream envelope facedown in my backpack. “Sorry. Can I get that in a bag?”

“Of course!” She binds it in brown paper and enthusiastically tells me how she cried over last night’s episode. “Poor Justin,” she says. “You’re a lucky man.”

“Thank you.”

I carry the frame out to the truck and set it on the passenger seat. I put the letter in the glove compartment. When two o’clock rolls around, I don’t go to my class. Instead, I go to the campus library and look up all the books they have on PTSD. There are dozens. Decades of research. And nothing even close to Psychedelic Warriors. I hit the library computer lab and look up articles covering it. The research is genuinely thin.

I have been telling myself he will land somewhere. That is the story I have been running since the suspension. He’s brilliant and somebody will want him and this will be a bad year in a long life. But nobody else is doing this work. He was the only one, and I walked into his classroom, and now there is a hole on this shelf where the next ten years of research were supposed to go.

My phone goes off in my pocket as I’m walking out of the library.

“Hi, baby boy,” I say.

“How was class?”

I glance at my phone. I should have been walking out of Political Science right now. “It was fine,” I lie.

There it is. Smooth as anything, first try, no effort at all. He taught me that. I didn’t even have to think about it.

“Good.” He sounds almost cheerful. “Listen. The station wants to send more equipment out so I can do next week from here properly. They say the numbers are up. Cara Finch called about doing something with us, a longer piece, and I told her I had to talk to you first, because it’s your story too.”