by Spencer Baum
The outfit Edith liked best (a simple A-line black dress with three-quarter sleeves) had no pockets at all, so Jenna hid the paper in her bra.
After the Old Town Clothier they put Jenna back in the limo and took her to a local salon for hair and makeup. After hair and makeup, they took her to the funeral.
Three guards rode with her in the limo. Gary, a frumpy man with a neckbeard, was senior among them. He instructed the driver to take them to San Miguel Church on 96th Street.
Then he turned to Jenna and said, “You know this church?”
Jenna thought about snapping at Gary, about telling off her whole entourage. She wanted to tell them that 96th Street was so far away from where she and Kyle lived that she’d never have reason to know it. She thought about telling them it would have been nice if they’d chosen a funeral location suitable to who Kyle was, that they could have asked her for suggestions, that if they’d wanted her to, she could have organized an appropriate funeral for her brother, rather than this television circus they were putting together.
She shook her head, said, “No, I don’t know it.”
Gary shrugged. “I bet it’ll be nice,” he said.
A few minutes later, Gary’s phone buzzed with a flurry of texts.
“Look at this,” he said, holding up the phone for the other guards to see.
They all seemed displeased.
“What?” said Jenna.
“Local media’s found out,” Gary said. “Apparently the whole church is surrounded. Looks like we’re going to be on TV today, gentlemen.”
Gary retrieved a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on.
Five minutes later, they were circling the San Miguel Church, looking for a break in the crowd. News vans, camera crews, reporters with microphones, all of them swimming in a sea of onlookers who were holding up their cameras to photograph the arrival of Jenna’s limo. When the driver stopped at an intersection the limo was surrounded by a screaming crowd.
“Take us around back!” Gary snapped at the driver.
The driver pushed through the crowd, which was now banging on the windows, people shouting, “Jenna! Jenna! Are you in there?”
They took a slow lap around the church, pulling into an alleyway on the back side. The driver maneuvered the car to the front of the crowd and gunned the engine. Seconds later, they were at the back of the church, rushing out of the limo with their heads down, as if running through a war zone.
The back door of the church opened and Bart emerged. “Come on! Come on!” he shouted, beckoning with his hand. They charged through the door and Bart slammed it shut behind them, locking it seconds before the crowd arrived and began tugging on the handle.
They were in a hallway at the rear of the building.
“What happened out there?” said Gary.
“Nothing we can’t handle,” said Bart. “You all stand guard at this door. Jenna, you come with me.”
Bart rushed her down the hall, talking as they went. “The media turnout was bigger than we thought it would be. It’s slowed us down and we’re behind schedule. You won’t have time to rehearse your eulogy.”
“I don’t need to rehearse. I just need a copy to read.”
“I put a copy on the lectern for you already. Your family’s waiting in the lobby. Chad too. Cameras are rolling. Just stick with Chad and let him lead.”
“Lead what? What are we doing?”
There wasn’t time for Bart to answer. They were already stepping into the lobby, where a crowd of people looked at Jenna like she was an exotic animal.
Chad pushed through the crowd to get near her. A cameraman followed, pointing his lens at Jenna as soon as Chad spoke.
“Hello Jenna,” Chad said in a somber tone. He wore a charcoal gray suit with a bright purple tie. “Your family’s waiting to see you.” He grabbed hold of her hand. “Let’s go greet them.”
The next ten minutes were a fast-moving reel of images. People she hadn’t seen in years, people she knew only from Christmas cards and long-ago family gatherings, they came forward to hug her tight, as if they were close. As if they were family.
Aunt Ida, Uncle Frank, Aunt Lillian, Aunt Joan, cousins from Ohio and California and Washington and Canada, second cousins she hadn’t seen since they were little. Chad called them out by name as Jenna greeted them. Here’s your uncle Leonard from Cleveland, and your cousin Kip. You remember your cousin Kip, don’t you?
The camera always on her, she had no opportunity to pass off her secret letter to anyone, so she didn’t try. She hugged the people Chad wanted her to hug, she listened when Chad spoke, she did what he wanted her to do.
She was greeting her cousin Peter when Chad said, “They’re so kind, aren’t they Jenna? Your crime has caused them shame, but they recognize that justice is being served, And when justice is served, forgiveness is possible. That’s how Redemption works. Wouldn’t you agree, Sir?”
“I agree,” Peter said.
Peter and Jenna hugged, even though Jenna knew Peter had sworn her off a long time ago. Kyle had told her about Peter once. About all of them. About how much they hated her, and hated Kyle for standing by her.
Jenna was worse than a black sheep in the family; she was a source of genetic embarrassment. She was a reason to change your surname. She was (according to the media and her enemies) the privileged pretty girl from the suburbs, spoiled-brat petulance run amuck, the girl who thought she could get away with anything, including the murder of a United States Senator.
Now, all the family that abandoned her was here, hugging her and extolling the virtues of Redemption for the cameras. How much had Devlin Enterprises paid them to do this?
There was no making sense of it. The familiarity of the faces mixed with the peculiarity of their surroundings. Two roving camera lights perpetually shining on Jenna’s face ensured that every person she met seemed to be coming out of the darkness.
A frightened-looking man with a thin sheaf of white hair. “Cousin Dale,” Chad said. Jenna hugged him.
A bushy beard on a man with chafing skin and bright red cheeks. “Uncle Mort,” Chad said. Jenna hugged him.
A handsome middle-aged man who wore a corduroy jacket over a black turtleneck. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” Chad said.
“My name is Gabe Chancellor,” the man said. “I’m from The Albuquerque Journal. Jenna, is this funeral something you wanted, or are they making you--”
“Alright, hang on, cut!” Chad said. “Someone help me get this guy out of here. Only approved press are allowed inside, Buddy.”
The man in the turtleneck, the reporter, held his ground. “Jenna, if there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to say to the media, now’s your chance.”
“No, Jenna, don’t you speak to him,” said Chad. He called to the edges of the room. “Hello? Help please. I need some muscle over here!”
Jenna made eye contact with the reporter, thought about the note stuffed in her bra. Surely now wasn’t the time to try and deliver…
No, of course it wasn’t. There were cameras everywhere. People everywhere.
“Jenna?” the reporter said.
A hand grabbed Jenna’s arm and yanked her away. It was Bart. “Sorry about that,” he muttered. “Didn’t realize one of them had gotten into the lobby. We’re done here, people! Someone get that reporter out of here!”
A mild scene of disorder, quickly contained, and a few minutes later the lobby was cleared. Jenna stood with five members of her family at the doors separating lobby from church. They were to be Kyle’s pallbearers. Dale, Frank, Mort, Ida, and…she couldn’t remember the other guy’s name. She’d only met him a few minutes ago.
They got a briefing from Jodi on what they would do, then they entered the church. Kyle’s casket, a shiny piece of solid oak, was on a rolling stand in the back. It was closed.
Of course it’s closed. It has to be closed. What he did to himself, how they found him, no one wants to see that, not even m
e.
“Oh Kyle,” Jenna whispered, and then the moment was too much for her. She stifled a sob. Cameras that had been hovering at the periphery of her vision moved closer, sharks swarming to the kill. She knew that everyone in the Church was looking at her, that what needed to be a private moment between her and her brother was as public as a moment could be, a moment that would be taped and broadcast to hundreds of millions during next week’s pregame.
Contain it. Kyle would want you to contain it.
Rudy would want you to contain it.
Your mother would want you to contain it.
So many people from her old life were ghosts now, her only contact with them the residue of their presence.
Maybe it was time for her to join them.
No, Jenna, no. Stand up straight. Get through this. Get back to New Rome. Get through the Semifinals. You’re winning this contest and coming out on the other side with decades of life left to go.
God dammit, Kyle. Why did you go and do this?
She wiped at her cheeks. Someone put a hand on her shoulder. It was the priest. She waved it away. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “I’m okay. Let’s go.”
Music. A bell. Will the congregation please stand?
Down the aisle they went, Jenna’s hand on the polished oak, an inch of wood and a buffer of air separating her from her dead brother’s body. The priest took the altar.
“We gather today to celebrate the life of…”
Kyle had his funeral. Jenna delivered her eulogy. Stand up, sit down, sing, kneel, listen, sing again, and then it was time for Jenna and the other pallbearers to load Kyle’s coffin into the hearse.
They drove in procession, a line of fifty cars or more, followed by a fleet of media and onlookers, to the cemetery. With lights, television cameras, and a huge crowd surrounding the gravesite, they put Kyle’s body in the ground. Late afternoon sun, long shadows, the smell of freshly cut grass, a cold numbness inside her. Everyone standing around the grave was allowed to wear sunglasses except Jenna. Everyone got to hold somebody’s hand, to hug someone, to be a part of a family, except Jenna.
And then she was back in the limo, driving away, her secret letter undelivered, her spirit as broken as it had ever been.
They took a roundabout path away from the cemetery, the guards using their phones to coordinate with cars behind them. They worked to put a break between Jenna’s limo and the vans that chased it. Eventually they were able to squeeze the limo through a red light and leave the media convoy stranded on the other side.
They returned to the church. Jenna gleaned from the guards’ conversation that they needed to pick up some stragglers from the production crew. The driver pulled the limo into the rear parking lot, which was now empty of people, save a solitary figure standing at the back door of the church: a man in a corduroy jacket over a black turtleneck.
It was the reporter who had confronted Jenna in the lobby of the church some two hours earlier.
The guards seemed unfazed at his presence. Don’t talk to him keep him away from the limo he’s harmless.
They waited in the parking lot. Two guys from production emerged from the church. The driver opened the back door of the limo for them.
And left it open. Everyone who was supposed to ride with Jenna, guards, driver, and crew, decided to take a smoke break in the parking lot before they hit the road.
The door to the limo hanging open, Jenna had a clear line of sight to the reporter.
They made eye contact.
He started to approach, but Jenna shook her head and he stopped. The two of them watching one another, Jenna reached into her bra and pulled out her letter.
A yellow paper folded into a square, damp with sweat from Jenna’s body. She held it up for the reporter to see.
Gently, subtly, he nodded his head.
Jenna waited.
The others stood in a circle near the front of the limo, laughing and smoking. Jenna watched them through the windshield. She slid her body to the edge of the seat, putting herself next to the open door.
When she was certain no one from the smoking group was looking, she let her hand drop down just outside the door, and she tossed her letter underneath the car.
She listened to it land on the pavement. She looked back at the reporter. He gave another nod of his head.
A minute later, the smoke break was done, everyone was back in the limo, and Jenna was riding out of the parking lot.
CHAPTER 15
Gabe Chancellor thought about the way she looked at him before she dropped the paper, the way she singled him out with her eyes. I need help and I’ve chosen you to help me was the message in her gaze. Then the driver shut her door. Then the car pulled away, the gravel crackling under its tires.
Leaving Gabe and the paper Jenna dropped for him alone in the parking lot.
Gabe was a newspaper reporter who grew up in an era when newspapers still meant something. He graduated high school with dreams of taking down big villains using his notepad and his carefully cultivated sources. He put in ten years in seven states at one failing newspaper after another, he sacrificed two marriages for the dream.
And here he was, a forty-year-old freelancer who still needed a day job to make ends meet.
He wrote feel-good pieces, mostly, not because he wanted to but because those were the only paying gigs he got. Articles about good-looking young couples figuring out what it means to be married, about high school athletes who volunteered at the food bank on weekends—he wrote pieces that appealed to the senior citizens who still subscribed to the local paper. He was lucky to clear a thousand dollars a month with his writing.
The rest of his income came from his day job. For twenty hours a week he was a document clerk at a law firm. He was a forty-fucking-year-old document clerk who took orders from thirty-something lawyers and twenty-something paralegals. It sounded bad, and it was, but it was a living. And Gabe had friends at the office. His best friend, a young lawyer named Myka Johnson, was the one who tipped him off about a funeral at San Miguel.
Something big and secret, she told him. The way they’re mobilizing it sounds like the president’s in town.
Myka was an ambulance chaser who liked to listen to the police radio band in her office.
Gabe finished his filing by 10:30 and took the rest of the day off to go to San Miguel on 96th Street. He went less because he expected to find a story and more because he was curious. When he found Jenna Duvall in the lobby, he ad-libbed the first question that came to mind. Everything about his interaction with Jenna was done on a lark. A middle-aged wannabe reporter on a snipe hunt stumbles into the most notorious criminal in America, twice, and the second time, the criminal looks him in the eye and drops a secret slip of paper on the ground.
The paper sat in place, in front of him, getting sunbaked in the parking lot. Gabe stepped closer, thinking it was funny how things worked out.
A soft breeze, west to east, and the paper danced, first rolling on its side, then skidding a few inches on the pavement. As Gabe bent over and reached for it, he was keenly aware that he might be on the cusp of a dramatic alteration to the path of his life.
He picked it up.
CHAPTER 16
Seth Daron, the President of the Blue Brigade Who Was NEVER MY BOYFRIEND
Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall.
At Sunny’s request, I joined the Hillerman chapter of the Blue Brigade.
Our meetings were on Thursday nights at Victor Haley’s house. The less said about Dr. Haley, the better (other than to say I think Dr. Haley liked hosting undergrad girls at his house a little too much).
The Hillerman Blue Brigade wasn’t about Dr. Haley. It was about Seth.
Yes, that Seth.
Seth Daron, my supposed co-conspirator who was shot dead on the Hillerman campus.
Seth Daron, the tall and skinny antidomer radical with wavy blonde hair and a sharp nose who left behind an apartment littere
d with Starbucks cups and Upton Sinclair novels.
Seth Daron, the young man that the media wrongly (so wrongly) dubbed as my boyfriend.
Seth was president of our chapter, leader of our meetings, opinion and tone policer of our group, a bookish, but also childish, asshole.
Not that I knew any of this on the night I met him. On that night, Seth seemed like a well-spoken if slightly pretentious guy who took seriously his role as president of the Hillerman chapter of the Blue Brigade.
“The apologists like to talk about how it’s all voluntary. They say prisoners know exactly what they’re getting into. You know what I say? I say that’s all a crock of shit.”
That’s my attempt at quoting Seth on the night of the first meeting I attended. Did I get the quote exactly right? Probably not. But I guarantee you I’m close. Seth had a way of speaking, especially when we talked politics, that was exceptionally predictable.
“Our first job as activists is to convince the good people left in America, the people who have a moral compass but may not fully understand all the evil behind the Redemption Act, that prisoners do not have a choice, that the whole notion of choice is a lie.”
Re-read that previous quote, put a forced and unnatural emphasis on all the adjectives (convince the good people, the people who have a moral compass) and you’ll be hearing Seth exactly as he spoke at every meeting.
Even as I speak ill of Seth, I should note that, at the height of my involvement in the Blue Brigade, I was really into this stuff. I was into the activism, the philosophy, and the ethics. I’m still into the ethics. If you take some time to remove yourself from the hubbub of modern-day America, and really think about the ethics of The Tetradome Run, I’m convinced you’ll turn it off and become an antidomer, just like me.
But I also understand the stance of those who think the Blue Brigade does more harm than good. The argument that the Blue Brigade is a bunch of entitled college kids who are virtue signaling to one another without contributing anything of value to the discussion…yeah, I get that. And the argument that, through the forcefulness (and sometimes lawlessness) of their activism, the Blue Brigade is hardening opinions on the pro-domer side? Yeah, I get that too.