thrilled for us.” She lifts her drink in a toast, then pauses for a long pull. “I sold your services, too.”
“I already have a job, remember?”
If she rolls her eyes, she’s considerate enough to do it behind her mirrored sunglasses. After Chelsea died, Mandy made no secret of her disgust with my decision to shove my press pass to the back of a drawer, and she’s spent the past three years encouraging me, rather loudly and relentlessly, to get back in there. To write something good, something meaningful, do something more exciting than my current drudgery.
But what Mandy can’t seem to understand is, there’s no shelf life on guilt. Someone died because of me, because of words I wrote. Just because I wasn’t the one to pull the proverbial trigger doesn’t mean I wasn’t to blame. Words, even when they’re carefully crafted, can be just as deadly as a bullet.
“Come on, Abigail.” Mandy shoves her glasses to the top of her head and leans into the table. “I’ve seen your day planner. You row until mid-morning, you take weekly martini lunches—”
“I take them with you.”
She waves off my rebuttal with a manicured hand. “Not the point. My point is, you can do your job in your sleep. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve done your job in your sleep, and more than once. You have plenty of time for the one I’m offering.”
I shake my head, confused. Mandy is a technological genius who peppers her sentences with terms like HTML and search engine optimization and JavaScript. Half the time, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Why would she hire me for anything?
“I know nothing about apps,” I tell her, “except how to order pizza off them.”
“No, but you know about writing.” When I don’t respond, she cranks up her pitch a notch or two. “Have I mentioned it’s for the Honeymoon Channel? We’re talking beaches and cruises and European getaways. How is that going to harm anyone, except maybe with jet lag or a sunburn?”
“That’s not the point, and you know it.”
She sighs. “I know, I know. Your muse has vanished, your well’s run dry. But surely you have enough talent still lurking in there somewhere to spit up a few thousand words of catchy advertising copy.”
I turn and stare down the street, not eager to rehash this stale argument—yet again—with my well-meaning best friend. No matter how many times I’ve told her, she refuses to believe my not writing is so much more than just me missing my muse. It’s that I can’t. What happened with Chelsea didn’t just mess me up mentally but also physically. I know this because for the past three years, every time I sit down at a blank computer screen or pick up a pen and paper, my fingers freeze up. My brain shorts out. The words are piled up somewhere deep inside of me, but they refuse to come out to play.
If anything, I’d always thought it would have been Maria. After all those pictures hit the internet, I’d obsessed about her welfare. Did she find another job? Had she made friends, come out of the closet, settled into a normal life? Was she living on the streets? But Maria had gone dark. Her phone was disconnected, her apartment empty, her email address unrecognized.
And then Chelsea surprised everyone by tying a noose around her neck and dangling herself from the showerhead—not an easy task, considering she had to rig the rope just right to support her weight and keep her knees bent as the oxygen stopped flowing to her brain. But she succeeded, and while the rest of the world shook their heads in compassion or tsked their tongues in holier-than-thou judgment, a chain of two words repeated in an endless loop through my brain. My fault—my fault—my fault.
And because Mandy knows me better than just about anyone, she heard them, too.
“Abigail, repeat after me,” Mandy said when I called to tell her the news, now coming up on three years ago. “I am not responsible for Chelsea Vogel’s death.”
“My phone and email are blowing up with people, my freaking colleagues, asking me how her death makes me feel.”
“Tell them it makes you feel unbelievably sad. For Chelsea, for her family, for everyone who ever knew her. Tell them her death is a tragedy, but do not, do not accept responsibility for that woman’s suicide.”
My fault—my fault—my fault.
A loud, exasperated sigh came down the line. “How many times have I listened to you preach about public enlightenment, how it is the foundation of democracy? That, as a journalist, it is not only your job but your duty to seek truth and report it to the world?”
“Yes, but I was also supposed to be sensitive and cautious and judicious in order to minimize harm, which clearly I didn’t, because I’m pretty sure suicide is the mack-fucking-daddy of harm.”
“If Chelsea Vogel didn’t want her dirty laundry aired, then she shouldn’t have had any in the first place. You reported the facts, Abby. Fairly and honestly and comprehensively. Just like you were trained to do.”
“Yes, but—”
And just then, a terrible, awful, horrible thought entered my mind unbidden. It was like an invasive weed that couldn’t be killed, climbing and coiling through my consciousness like kudzu, suffocating every other thought in its path.
And the thought was this: yes, I had been sensitive and cautious and judicious with Maria, perhaps even overly so, but I could have done better by Chelsea. I could have shown more compassion for how she was about to be involuntarily outed not just as a predator but as a lesbian. I could have thought a little longer about her husband’s and son’s response to the news, what would happen when they opened up their morning paper or switched on their morning talk shows. I could have been more sensitive to her right to respond to the allegations, could have been more diligent in seeking her out. I should have done all those things, but I didn’t.
“Yes, but what?” Mandy said.
“I have to go.”
“Not until you answer me, Abigail. Yes, but what?”
I hung up on her then, and she never badgered me about it again—a decided lack of interest that’s very un-Mandy-like. I suspect she heard those words, too. The loud and insistent ones I didn’t know how to smother, the ones telling me that while I might have done everything right with Maria, with Chelsea I did everything wrong.
“Earth to Abby,” she says now, waving a hand in front of my face.
I shake off the memory with a full-body shudder. “Sorry. What?”
“I said just think about it, okay? This job’s a great way to ease back into writing, and I really could use the help. The last copywriter I hired was a total dud. He missed every single deadline.”
“Great. So now I’m your last resort?”
She gives me a teasing half smile over her Starbucks cup. “You know what I mean.”
I nod because I do know what she means, even though my answer is still no. “No offense, but if I ever write again, it will not be for an app. It will be because I can’t keep the words inside. Because the story demands to be told. As awesome as tropical beaches are, I don’t think they qualify.”
