The Book of Essie

by Meghan MacLean Weir

  “No problem,” Blake answers. “It’s all part of the job description.”

  The boys stare at each other and it is clear to me that something is being communicated in this. I just don’t know what it is.

  “Look,” Roarke says carefully, “if you want to say ‘I told you so,’ that’s fair. I deserve it. I know you never really bought the whole fairy-tale act. So say something if you want to, but do it now or else drop it forever. I just want things to go back to normal.”

  Blake looks like he wants to answer right away, but he stops himself. His gaze swings like a pendulum from Roarke’s face to mine and back again. “I don’t think going back to normal fixes anything. It’s not as if we were being honest with each other even then, and it always hurt that you didn’t trust me. I just don’t want there to be any more lies between us.” I see Roarke take in what Blake is really saying. He looks paralyzed and just about as nauseated as I still feel. Finally, Blake takes Roarke’s shoulder and squeezes it. “Relax, man,” he says. “I’m still the same guy I always was and I know that you are too.”

  Suddenly I begin to cry. The tears are streaming down my face, but the moment I feel them coming I know that I am not only crying, I am also laughing uncontrollably. My body is shaking so much that my sides hurt and the center of my chest begins to burn. A hundred years ago, women would have been diagnosed with hysteria and locked up, out of sight, as a penalty for such emotion. But this is not a hundred years or even a week ago and for the first time, I feel just a glimmer of what it would be like to be free. When I wipe the tears from my eyes, I see that Roarke and Blake are staring at me, shocked, uncertain what to do. Then the door of the limo opens and Reggie White scrambles inside to sit across from me and we are aware once again of the shouts of the reporters through the glass. The vehicle trembles slightly as they jostle against the door.

  “It’s getting a little dangerous out there,” he says, “and I think we all know which one of us that crowd would consider the most expendable, so I vote that we blow out of here as soon as humanly possible.”

  “I’m sorry for dragging you into this,” Roarke tells him.

  “Are you kidding? That was maybe the most amazing thing I’ve ever witnessed. I just wish you had warned me first. Then I would have had an exit strategy planned. Seriously, though, Essie, I don’t know what to say. All this time I thought you were judging me, and it turns out I was judging you right back. I should have known better.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  A slow smile spreads across Reggie’s face before he continues. “So, is the reception still on? Because I could really go for some of those tiny hot dogs right about now.”

  It occurs to me that in all my scheming, I had never actually thought this far ahead. My imagination had only gotten me to the point when Thelma and Louise go off the cliff, or Carrie stands on the gym stage at her prom. I had not dared to think of what happens after. There will be a crash, certainly, but before that…well, there’s that moment when you feel like you can fly.

  I look at Roarke and he shrugs. “Why not? We got married, didn’t we?”

  “We did,” I tell him, sounding almost surprised. I wipe my hands across my face again. I still feel a little sick, but it is passing. And I realize that at the very least we need someplace to go until we can figure out what happens next. We can’t sit in the back of a limousine forever. So I say to Reggie, “I think we can probably find you enough mini hot dogs that you’re never going to want to eat another one for your entire life.”

  “That, my friend, is how you know you’re throwing an epic party.”

  “Well, then let’s go,” Roarke says.

  He taps on the glass separating us from the driver and the limo begins to pull away through the crowd.

  * * *

  —————

  It didn’t end there, of course. For a while we were like fugitives, Roarke and I, always on the run. We graduated high school without ever setting foot in Woodside. Instead we took our exams in a hotel room while the principal paced anxiously to and fro or peeked out between the curtains to see if there were any press below. Roarke was valedictorian, but since he was unavailable, they asked the runner-up, Veronica Richter, to give a speech instead. She ended up talking about how everyone in the town had been complicit in what was done to me and promptly got escorted off the stage.

  The stage where Roarke should have given his speech is not so different from the one where I sit now. My name is printed on a folded piece of cardboard set in front of me. There are other name cards on the long narrow table; six in all. When I heard the list of people on the panel, I was confused about why the organizers had asked me. Compared with these other women, I have done nothing. Next to me sits an obstetrician who repairs fistulas for girls in Ethiopia. Two seats down is a young woman who was shot in Pakistan on her way home from school. I am surrounded on all sides by heroes. At home as well. As far as I’m concerned, Roarke is a hero too.

  When Libby and Margot decided to film a documentary about Holden Park, the first interview they did was with Roarke. He had told them about the program after Libby quit her job and was looking for something to do next. Be brave, my father had said. Roarke said this was a good motto, and since we were now a married couple, he needed to do his part. I watched him describe finding a boy who had killed himself that summer, and when he did, it was as if I was right there with him. I could practically hear the sound the body made as it was cut down and crumpled onto the floor.

  * * *

  —————

  A member of the audience stands and is handed a microphone. Her question is for me. She wants to know what has happened to my family since my parents fled the country, since Caleb was locked up and denied bail. You can tell from the way she speaks that she believes in justice, which makes sense, because justice is what this panel on breaking the cycle of violence against women is really all about. But the truth is, I do not know if Caleb will be convicted when the case eventually goes to trial. I do not know if justice will prevail.

  Even though I was technically below the age of consent when the baby was conceived, other rapists have been let off with even more damning evidence against them. Men convicted of forcing themselves on women in college dorm rooms or parked cars or behind dumpsters, men whose crimes were witnessed by other men still walked away with a light tap on the wrist, a shake of the head, a Boys will be boys, a warning to be more careful where they put their penises, to be smart enough to know which girls won’t talk. The justice system has bent over backward to avoid denying these men their bright futures, has spent too much time considering their suffering, their heartache, instead of seeing them as the predators they are.

  Caleb, on the other hand, won’t necessarily be able to depend on the old boys’ club for sympathy. After all, incest is harder to dismiss. Lissa has said she will come forward if she needs to, but for now she is staying where she’s been happiest, out of the spotlight. She told me that Mother struck her hard across the face when they were still barricaded in the church, blamed her for everything that happened, accused her of putting me up to it. My sister hit Mother back. Lissa was surprised at how shocked Mother was by the blow, but later she realized that this must have been the moment Mother knew for certain that she had lost control of it all.

  I tell the girl as much of this as I am able, trying to explain how it was the groundswell of public outrage that led to Caleb’s arrest despite my parents’ best efforts to make it all go away, to shift the narrative, blame the victim, imply that I had somehow orchestrated it all. I tell the audience that these smears very well may have been successful had it not been for people just like them, who refused to look away, to pretend they did not see. And I thank them. I thank them for being here today and I thank them for being there for one another even after we have all gone our separate ways.

  * * *

  ———�
�—

  When the session lets out, I shake hands and pose for pictures. I am also given a surprising number of hugs. On my way home, I stop to pick up the dress I will be wearing to Libby and Mike’s wedding and then climb back into my cab. When the taxi stops again, I overtip the driver and step out onto the pavement outside our building, trying not to let the thin plastic bag around my dress drag on the ground. The sidewalks are still slushy and I am not wearing the right shoes, but I can just detect the first breath of spring in the air. I pick my way carefully between the gray puddles and, as I do, I take in the tall buildings, the general bustle of the city, the constant motion that has begun to feel like home.

  I am anonymous here in a way I would not have been able to hope for in any other place, except maybe overseas. We tried that for a little while, the summer after the wedding. We climbed the Eiffel Tower, explored the Louvre, then took the Chunnel and visited Windsor Castle and ate scones in a crooked teahouse just next door. A few people recognized us, but on the whole it was refreshing to be in a part of the world where stories like mine, like ours, seem like a tiny blip compared with the drama their royal families have wrought over the centuries. Now this city is home, is mine in a way I never expected to feel a place might belong to me and I to it. This city is where my daughter was born. We named her Louisa after my grandmother. She is ours, Roarke’s and mine, no matter what a paternity test might say. She is beautiful and she is loved.

  I stand outside our building and pause to let the sounds of the neighborhood wash over me. Then I go inside. We have a loft not far from campus. I walk there with Louisa sometimes to meet up with Roarke in between his classes. Other times I walk there on my own. I think about applying to college the way I always assumed that I was supposed to. I think about the other things I might do instead. The freedom of having a choice and of that choice being entirely mine seems like a miracle. I still don’t know what I will do.

  I open the door to our apartment quietly. I like to watch my new family in those few moments before they know that I am there. It’s one of the things that gives me the most comfort, knowing that Louisa is all right even when I am away. From the doorway I can see the life that we have made together: the mismatched furniture, the scattered plastic toys, the large framed black-and-white photo of a papier-mâché Liberty Bell that hangs above the couch.

  Roarke turns and I see that he is holding Louisa. She is wearing a smocked dress that his mother sewed by hand. Louisa’s hair falls in soft curls around her face as Roarke buries his face in her belly and she throws her head back and erupts in a fit of shrieking, her face wet with spit, and the room is filled with the sound of laughter. Adam emerges from Roarke’s bedroom and checks a pot on the stove. He leans over and inhales the steam and reaches into the cupboard for some seasoning. Roarke puts Louisa down onto a play mat and begins to pull plates off a shelf to set the table. Adam joins him with the silverware and kisses him lightly on the cheek.

  Despite my best efforts to shield him, Roarke is a media darling. His parents are beloved as well. After all, unlike my parents, they raised a hero, not a rapist. Roarke has his own flock of paparazzi, and it turns out that he and Adam are more popular as a couple than he and I could have ever hoped to be. That sort of attention has opened him up to a torrent of online abuse, but he ignores it. In any case, his fans are fiercely protective and more than happy to fight his battles for him. They are fiercely protective of us all. It may be silly, but it gives me hope, this army of strangers that have sworn to stand up against slut-shaming and homophobia and bigotry. That have promised to parse right from wrong.

  Some nights I still lie awake and wonder if I made the right decision. I go back over everything and try to work out what I could have done differently, how I might have saved Louisa from being marked by the publicity of how she came to be. But anything less and Caleb probably would have walked away unscathed, and I couldn’t risk that—not only for Louisa’s sake but also for the sake of whatever girl Caleb set his sights on next. So these days when people ask me why I did it, I tell them that it was no more complicated than this: I wanted a safe place to raise my daughter, both in this apartment and later when she has to face the world. That’s all any of us ever want, but we won’t get there unless we refuse to stay silent. Somehow I knew that it would feel that simple even before she was born. The money, finally standing up to my family, those were just a bonus. Louisa’s safety was all that ever mattered all along. I step across the threshold and Roarke and Adam turn and smile as I pick up my daughter. I press my lips against her head and I know that I am home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am beyond indebted to my editor, Jenny Jackson, and her colleagues at Knopf. Their insight and endless enthusiasm have made this book better than I ever hoped it could be. Innumerable thanks to my agent, Kirby Kim, for remembering me after a decade of silence, and to Brenna English-Loeb and the rest of the team at Janklow & Nesbit.

  My thanks to Laura Certain, physician scientist and grammarian, for her early and careful reading of this text. To Lindsey Fitzharris for forging the path and giving encouragement. Thank you to Sardiaa Leney, in advance and in writing, for all future safari adventures. My gratitude to Terri Becker, Karen Gruskin, Rich Bachur, and my colleagues at Boston Children’s and Beverly Hospitals for their support. To Ellen, for making it in Mozambique and beyond. To Lucie, fellow PK and the closest thing to a big sister I will ever get. Next, I would not be the person I am without Mark Rourke and Holly Dolan and the rest of my Bement family. Thank you for knowing me before I knew myself.

  Thanks to my mother, Jan, for not being anything like Celia Hicks and my father, Dan, for being the sort of priest allowed to have children. To Matty, Marnie, and Timothy as well. To Uncle David. Thanks, finally and most importantly, to Daryl Achilles, a prince among men, and to our two children, Emmaline and Gideon, who deserve a safer, kinder world than this one.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Meghan MacLean Weir was raised in the rectory of her father’s church in Southbridge, Massachusetts, and later moved with her family to Buffalo, New York. Her memoir, Between Expectations: Lessons from a Pediatric Residency, chronicles her years in training at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital. She continues to live and work as a physician in the Boston area. This is her first novel.

  An A. A. Knopf Reading Group Guide

  The Book of Essie

  by Meghan MacLean Weir

  The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation of The Book of Essie, an intimate portrayal of a young woman nearly destroyed by her family’s place in the public eye.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  How do the multiple points of view of the narration (alternating chapters among Esther, Roarke, and Liberty) contribute to the “truth-telling” premise of the novel, and even mimic the televised, staged, and split-screen way in which the viewing public knew the Hicks family?

  The novel is set in the present day, an age when nearly everyone’s life (celebrity or not) is part of the public domain via social media and the internet to a degree. How does this new reality clash with the old-world values the Hickses seem to represent? What effect does that have on the way their religiosity and volunteer work is viewed by their watchers, or by you, the reader? Consider how Essie explains, “Even if Daddy does what he does for all the wrong reasons, that doesn’t detract from the results” (this page).

  Is the Hicks family’s infatuation with fame and attention in fact a product of our digital age, or is it something rooted deeper in human nature? Could the novel have been set in any other time period with the same effects?

  Why does Roarke accept the offer to marry Essie despite the sacrifice it demands of him, in terms of his personal life as well as his sexual preferences? How do his compromises in the marriage compare to Essie’s? Who ga
ins more, and how do their motives differ?

  How does Essie’s idea of love change over the course of her life? Does what she feels toward her baby make up for the way she’d been taken advantage of, sexually and emotionally, and her alternative relationship with Roarke? Did you believe that Roarke and Essie were truly in love—especially in the moment they say “I do”?

  How do you think you would have reacted if you were in Essie’s or Roarke’s situation?

  Discuss the importance of the female characters’ names in the book, especially Esther, Liberty (and Justice), and Elizabeth. How do they circumvent or live up to the expectations of the historical figures or principles they’re named after?

  Discuss the different methods and values of parenting illustrated in the book. Where do the three main families overlap in terms of a desire to do what’s best for their children, and where do their decisions derail those intentions? Which family do you think is worst in this respect?

  Would you characterize anyone in the novel as a victim and why? Who among them has the most agency?

  Why do you think Essie had to expose her story indirectly, by guiding Margot and Liberty to her diaries for eventual publication? How does this need for a mouthpiece reflect more largely in the way we read the book’s many “I” voices? Is any one of them more accurate than the others?

  How does the goal of revenge manifest in the book? Can you put different characters’ desire for revenge on different moral planes, or are they all the same? Consider Liberty Bell’s realization of Mike’s judgment “about everything I’d ever said, every person in every group I’d ever targeted and tried to hurt in the name of that same God who said ‘Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing’ ” (this page).