I get up and use the bathroom. When I come back, Jill and her uncle are still talking, so I sit back down. From somewhere behind me, I hear the door open and footsteps approaching.
“Nate, you in?” a male voice calls.
I recognize that voice. It takes me a second, but then it clicks, and when he appears in the doorway, I’m not surprised to see he’s got a pockmarked face and picket fence teeth.
“Bruce,” Nate says, jumping up as Snaggletooth steps into the room. “This is my niece, Jill. And her boyfriend. Griffin.”
The three of us stand there and I can feel the pieces falling into place, practically hear the click click as they align like gears on a watch.
Nate coughs again and Bruce extends his hand. “Nice to meet you both,” he says.
“Have we met before?” I ask.
He too stutters and then clears his throat and shoots a surreptitious glance at Nate.
“No, I guess you’ve just got one of those faces,” I say, giving him a wink.
They start talking about the Yankees-Red Sox game coming up, and that’s as deep as the conversation gets. So I let it lie.
When I finally look at my phone, I have thirty-seven missed calls, mostly from Cam, a few from my mother.
“What the f**k is going on?” he shouts when I finally call him back. I hold the phone away from my ear. “Dad was arrested?! You had something to do with it?”
“You mean Carl? Yes, Carl was arrested. Would you like to know why? Oh, because he almost killed my girlfriend. Is Carl going to be adjusting to a new life of three hots and a cot? I’d say so, and for a long ass time.”
“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’VE DONE?”
“The right thing, for once in my life. Look, Cam, I think Dad was involved in a whole bunch of shit we had no idea about. Like, bad stuff—”
“Oh my god.”
It sounds like he’s hyperventilating. Or crying. Maybe both.
“I’ve got to go. I’ve got to f**king go. Jesus Christ. You have NO IDEA how badly you’ve just messed things up, you moronic piece of shit! FUCK YOU, Griffin. FUCK!” He screams this last part, his voice cracking, and then the line goes dead. I stare at the phone for a minute. I take three deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, then slip the phone back into my pocket.
Chapter 28: Jill
Testifying against the man who tried to kill me is not as cathartic as you might imagine. The courtroom is packed, and the entire time I’m being questioned I feel as though I’m stuck in a terrible dream where I’m on stage for a school play and I’ve forgotten all my lines. But I am able to look out into the sea of faces and find Griffin, and all he has to do is give me a little smile and I know that yes, I can get through this. Afterward, we fly back to California. There is no need to follow the rest of the trial or the ensuing media circus. The second session of camp starts up, and both Griffin and I dive back into the routine, glad for the distraction.
It’s the night of the Beach BBQ, which has pretty much wound down to a few campers giggling in their tents. Griffin and I set up separate tents next to each other, but we both wind up outside, lying in the sand, looking up at an impossibly clear sky that looks like crushed velvet.
“Maybe you should be down there patrolling the shore for any more kidnapped men who happen to wash up,” Griffin says. He’s holding my hand, running his thumb in slow circles over my wrist bone. “You know, one that might be more handsome and better in the sack than I am.”
I laugh. “You’re actually the only person I want to be with. Even if your father did try to kill me.”
“Oh yeah, that. Well, there’s also the whole getting kidnapped by your uncle, so maybe it’s a fair trade-off. Clearly, our families are both completely f**king insane.”
“So then we probably are, too? I mean, it seems like such a bad way to start a relationship. That’s what the basis of our relationship is: My uncle had you kidnapped; your father tried to kill me.”
“Lift your head up a little,” he whispers.
His breath is warm against my ear. I do, and he slides his arm under my neck and pulls me toward him. I turn so I’m lying more on my side and drape my arm across his face, nestle my own face in the crevice where his shoulder meets his neck. “It doesn’t matter what our families tried to do. Or actually, it does, because that’s what got us together to begin with. So am I glad it all happened? Yes and no. Nobody wants shitty things to happen to other people, but sometimes they do, and sometimes good things come of it. Not to get all New Age-y on you or anything. But really, the way I see it for myself, anyway, getting kidnapped gave me this second chance to actually live a life that wasn’t a total f**king waste. I don’t know if it would’ve happened otherwise, or it might’ve taken a lot longer. And then I met you, and actually get to be with you, well, that just tells me for once I made the right choices.”
It’s an interesting way to look at things. And who knows? Maybe he’s right. Maybe every bad thing that happens is just an opportunity for a second chance, for a better way of doing things. It has certainly brought the two of us closer, and we both, in a way, have a second chance at things, and I think that just maybe that means things will work out.
Epilogue - Griffin
The day of Jill’s graduation is warm and sunny. We drive over from our apartment in Hayes Valley to her mom’s house to help her get ready for the ceremony. When Annabel is ready, I wheel her outside and help her get into the car.
“I just wish her father could be here to see this,” she says. “But I’m really so proud of her.”
The ceremony is long, and during a particularly verbose speech, I find myself daydreaming, thinking about the past year. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I occasionally miss the old days, but it’s a fleeting type of longing, and not something I’d ever go back to if I could. My days now have a steadiness to them that I think of as a kind of rhythm, a balance that I never had before. I like nothing more than waking up in the bedroom of our third-floor apartment, the sun gently filtering in through the curtains Jill and I picked out. I get up, make coffee, we have breakfast together. We get ready; she goes to the Sutter St. Women’s Center, where she’s doing an internship when she doesn’t have class, and I head up to Marin, where I’m working as an intake counselor at the Morning Glory Rehabilitation Center. I get a paycheck every two weeks, directly deposited into my bank account. We pay our bills, we go out sometimes, still have great sex. Life is good.