by Kim Hooper
“Tessa,” Angie says.
Tessa? I wheel around. There she is, standing in the doorway, her eyes jumping from my face to Angie’s.
“Joyce?” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“You two know each other?” Angie says.
The three of us stand very still, unsure how to proceed.
“I was just coming to apologize to Mr. Matthews,” I say.
“Oh,” Tessa says, understanding, though still seeming dumbfounded by this run-in.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. I have no idea how she knows Angie Matthews.
“I asked her to come,” Angie says.
This confuses me more.
Angie moves past me to Tessa. “Look, I don’t know why he said your name, but he said your name. Maybe you can help him wake up. I think he was in love with you or—”
“He’s my father,” Tessa says.
The room goes silent. I must not be the only one whose mind is taking a moment to process this revelation.
Cale is Tessa’s father?
“What?” Angie says. She takes a step back, as if this announcement has disturbed her balance.
“That’s why he was at the bar,” Tessa says. “He was trying to get to know me, or something.”
Angie shakes her head. “Cale doesn’t have a daughter. I mean, he has Evie. He doesn’t have another daughter, certainly not a—how old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” Tessa says.
Angie crosses her arms over her chest. I can almost see her doing the math in her head.
“He would have told me,” she says.
There are tears welling up in her eyes. It’s obvious this is what upsets her—his keeping of this apparent secret.
Tessa just shrugs, like, Well, he didn’t.
Suddenly, the thing I came to say seems so irrelevant.
Suddenly, everything seems so irrelevant.
Cale Matthews went to Ray’s Bar to see the daughter nobody knew he had.
On the way, he cut off the wrong person on the road.
That person happened to be my son.
My son shot Cale Matthews and five others.
It’s a chain of events that simultaneously makes no sense and all the sense in the world.
Suddenly, life seems so absurd.
“How do you know this?” Angie asks, arms still crossed over her chest.
“My mom told me.”
Angie looks perplexed, disbelieving. She stares at Cale, lying still in his bed, then turns back to Tessa.
“His daughter?” she says.
A single tear rolls down her cheek. I watch its slow descent, wondering how she must be feeling. If I’m not mistaken, she seems relieved in some way, like maybe this explains something, like maybe this explains many things.
Tessa nods, slowly.
“His daughter.”
ONE YEAR LATER
ANGIE
“AM I READY FOR my close-up?” Cale asks.
We are sitting on our couch, chatting with Charlie, the twenty-something filmmaker who is going to interview us for his documentary about the Ray’s shooting. His working title: Remembering Ray’s.
“You look quite handsome,” I say.
“Thanks to you,” he says.
He’s referring to the fact that I have to shave his face and style his hair every day. Cale’s come a long way, but he still lacks some fine motor skills.
“So, before the others get here, I wanted to get some footage of you two reflecting on the road you’ve traveled since the shooting,” Charlie says.
We are his first in a series of interviews. After us, he’ll visit with Kat Reynolds (the young woman who was shot in the shoulder), Jenna Maguire (Jason Maguire’s sister), Greta Lang Ferber (Bob Lang’s daughter), Sherry Reed (Rick Reed’s wife) and her two grown children, Mari and José Velasquez (Dan Velasquez’s parents), Kenzie Baron and baby Olivia (Dan Velasquez’s girlfriend and the daughter he never met), Joyce Ketcher, and Tessa.
“People need to see the lasting impact these events have,” Charlie says.
It’s just him and his cameraman, Joey, another twenty-something. They both have sleeves of tattoos. They are impassioned liberals, committed to making a film that will motivate lawmakers to ban assault rifles. I suppose I’ve become a bit of an activist myself. I have to do something with the residual anger; that’s what Sahana says.
“Are there any topics off-limits?” Charlie asks.
The question scares me. I can tell it scares Cale too. We look at each other, shrug. What could this man—this boy, really— want to ask us? I flush at the thought of him inquiring about our sex life, which can only be described as incredibly awkward. He wouldn’t ask that though. This documentary isn’t about Cale and me. It’s not even really about Cale. It’s about this sensational thing that happened to him.
“I don’t think so,” I say, trying to sound like a woman with nothing to hide.
He points a finger at Joey, and I see the red light on his camera flash on.
“Tell us a bit about the recovery process, what you guys have gone through over the past year.”
Cale looks at me, takes my hand, squeezes. He relies on me to say so much. His memory just isn’t there.
“It hasn’t been easy,” I say, adding a little laugh because that’s what I do when I’m uncomfortable.
Charlie makes a “go on” motion with his hand.
“In the movies, they make it seem like people just wake up from comas, and that’s just not how it works. For Cale, he was in a state of what they call ‘emerging consciousness’ for weeks. Soon after waking, he was able to speak, so we knew that part of his brain was functioning. That was a huge relief for me. But he has had cognitive difficulties. He has no memory of the shooting—”
“Which is probably a blessing,” Cale interjects.
“Yeah, and he doesn’t remember many things from before the shooting. He doesn’t remember significant years in his past. Thankfully, he remembers me.”
I give another little laugh.
“How could I forget her?” Cale says.
I roll my eyes good-naturedly.
“He was in a rehab center for a few months, then came home. But he’s remained in therapies since.”
“I’ve gone through several speech therapy sessions where they focus on teaching me memory strategies. I’ve had to learn little hacks, like taking my iPad wherever I go and jotting down things as they come to me.”
He holds up his iPad, evidence.
“And he’s had occupational and physical therapy to help with his fine motor skills and some ongoing fatigue and weakness,” I say.
“What’s the prognosis, long-term?” Charlie asks.
“They think I can get back to ninety percent of where I was, eventually,” Cale says.
“His doctor actually said they’ve never seen somebody do so well after such a massive injury. Usually, people who survive the type of damage Cale had stay in a chronic vegetative state. It’s kind of a miracle, how far he’s come.”
I never thought I would be this person, a person claiming miracles. But it’s true. It’s also a minor miracle that the ad agency has let me work from home full-time, so I can be there to help Cale. He’s stubborn, tries to do everything on his own, but he’s had to learn reliance on me. He’s had to accept that he’s no longer an island.
“We’re very lucky,” Cale says.
As if on cue, Evie bolts into the room, Aria chasing after her, muttering, “Sorry, sorry.” Aria and her new boyfriend, Brian, are supposed to be confining Evie to the kitchen. They’re at the stage in their relationship when they can’t keep their hands off each other; it’s nauseating, but I’m happy for her. I’m sure Evie snuck off while Aria and Brian were gazing into each other’s eyes.
“She’s just so fast,” Aria says.
Evie laughs maniacally, and we can’t help but laugh in return. Even Charlie and Joey are laughing, the camera still rolling.
&
nbsp; “She can stay,” Charlie says. “Evie, do you want to say hi to the camera?”
She sits on the couch next to Cale. “Hi, camera!”
Somehow, quiet and reserved Cale and I have created this sociable ham of a child. When I first brought Evie to see Cale at the hospital, I was worried he wouldn’t remember her, though he said he would. When she came, there wasn’t a hint of confusion on his face; he knew her. He doesn’t have memories of much of her baby life, but I’ve started to think that’s okay. It wasn’t an easy time for him, for reasons I understand more now.
“How old are you?” Charlie asks, encouraging her.
She holds up two fingers. “But almost three!”
“What do you think of your dad?”
She looks at Cale thoughtfully, taking this question seriously.
“He’s a superhero,” she says.
She’s never said this before. And I’ve never referred to him as that before. Cale and I look at each other, perplexed by this human we’ve created.
“What’s his superpower?” Charlie asks.
She puts one finger to her chin. “Hmm,” she says. “He can take very long naps.”
We all laugh, and then she jumps off the couch and scurries off, Aria on the chase again.
After Evie is gone, Charlie waits a beat. His hesitation unnerves me.
Finally, he asks, “What about Tessa?”
I exhale. Talking about Tessa is far less frightening than talking about our sex life.
“Of course, getting to know Tessa has been one of the big blessings of this whole mess,” Cale says.
Word has spread about Cale and Tessa’s father-daughter relationship. It’s a captivating story, after all. Everyone also knows that Cale was the person who apparently triggered Jed Ketcher’s rage that night. Puzzle pieces have come together, as they say. It’s all fascinating, I guess, to the general public. It’s my life, though, and it’s complicated.
Cale has no memory of Tessa. At first, I wondered if he was just saying that, because it would be convenient to not remember. But his injuries had taken away his abilities to be that conniving. It was obvious on his face that there was just no recollection of Tessa, of his visits to her at the bar, of leaving her as a baby—none of it. If I’m honest, it relieved me, in a way. His memory loss has meant there is no point in attempting to unravel the past. It cannot be unraveled. We cannot fully understand his intentions, his thoughts, his feelings because he has no memory of them. It’s like the person who had those intentions, thoughts, and feelings died at Ray’s Bar that night. Now we have this new person. It is the epitome of a clean slate.
I imagine it’s harder for Tessa. She has just learned who her father is, and he looks at her as if she is a total stranger. We’ve explained the facts to him, of course. He understands the truth of the matter. He’s apologized to her profusely for his past actions, even though he doesn’t remember them. They—we— have a standing weekly breakfast date at Goldy’s. I go along to help in any way I can—filling in memories, answering questions for Tessa that Cale may not be able to answer. I know as much as she does, though. His existence had been unknown to her; her existence had been unknown to me. We’re both kind of fumbling around in the dark. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s what the entirety of my marriage is going to feel like from now on. But, like Cale told Charlie, the doctors are confident Cale will continue to progress. Everyone, including Cale, seems fixated on getting him back to who he was before. Secretly, I’ve let go of that expectation.
Sahana is the only person who has dared to ask about our sex life. We’ve just started trying to be intimate again. Cale has the physical ability; it’s just … strange. The first time we successfully finished—well, he finished—he said, “I guess it’s like learning to ride a bike.” I laughed when I really wanted to cry. “You’ve been mothering him for a year,” Sahana said. “It’s bound to feel weird.” She told me about this famous psychotherapist, Esther Perel, who specializes in counseling couples. In one of her TED talks, she says, “Most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person.” My life with this new Cale feels like my second marriage, a marriage from a reality TV show in which the two people saying their vows barely know each other.
There are times I daydream about leaving him. Because it’s hard. Because I’m human. I’ve done all the cliché things— screamed into pillows, downed bottles of wine, perused old boyfriends’ Facebook pages, wondering what my life would be like if I’d married them instead. These truths will stay with me. They will not be part of any documentary. People want a fairytale ending, a happily ever after. They want it all to be neat and tidy, even though life is never like that.
“How’s it been for you, Angie? You have a new daughter in your life, in a way,” Charlie says.
“Well, Tessa has a mother. And she’s an amazing woman. I wouldn’t pretend to be Tessa’s mother. Cale is her father, and I guess I’m a … friend.”
I look to Cale, to confirm this is accurate. He nods, then says, “Tessa loves Angie.”
I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes me feel good anyway. Tessa likes me. Tessa appreciates me. I am her liaison to knowing her father.
“How do you think the shooting has changed you, individually, as a couple?” Charlie asks.
Cale and I look at each other.
“I’ve become annoyingly dependent,” Cale says, giving his own little laugh.
“He used to be annoyingly independent,” I add.
“I mean, I don’t really remember much of before, of who I was. So much of that is gone. In a way, the shooting has given me a chance to start over,” Cale says.
He’s taken this optimist view because we’ve both learned it’s better than dwelling on what was lost. When my parents visited a few months back, meeting both Cale and Evie in person for the first time, they refused to pity me. As distant as we’ve been over recent years, they know me well enough to know I don’t want pity. Their goodbye hugs were tight, but not lingering. “Just keep moving forward,” my mom said. “And come visit us in Maui when you’re ready,” my dad added.
“Obviously, daily life has changed a lot,” I say. “Cale’s rehab has been intense—physically, emotionally. My entire focus has changed. But all the platitudes are true—about gaining perspective, gratitude, all that stuff.”
“Are you angry at Jed Ketcher?” Charlie asks.
I shake my head, immediately. This answer is simple.
“I’ve talked so much with his mother, Joyce. I can’t be angry at her son. I’m sad about it all. He was a troubled person. It’s just … anger doesn’t solve anything.”
My throat starts to feel thick, like I’m going to cry. Cale squeezes my hand.
“I’m angry I ran a red light,” Cale says, trying for comic relief and failing.
I can feel Joey focusing the camera on me, on my coming tears.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
I really don’t. I’ve cried so many tears over the past months—tears of frustration at Cale’s rehab, tears of joy at Cale’s progress, tears of sadness over the difficulties in our life now, tears of gratitude for Evie having a father, so many tears. I’d thought I was all dried up.
“It’s just that … this kind of thing, it’s life-changing. You see these shootings on the news and there’s no follow-up. You don’t know what becomes of the victims, their families, the shooter’s family. There is a whole network of people, all tied together by this terrible thing. It just makes you realize how strange and fragile and crazy life is. It’s overwhelming, I guess, how little control we all have, how unfair things can be, how fate works. That’s what it is—overwhelming.”
Cale wipes a tear from my cheek with his thumb.
Charlie gives Joey a nod. He has what he needs.
“And … cut,” he says.
TESSA
I LOOK AROUND MY apartment one more time, in
search of a surface to dust, something to keep me busy. I don’t know why I’m so nervous. I brought this whole thing on myself, after all. Joyce told me about the documentary, and I emailed Charlie and Joey, telling them I wanted to participate. I guess I just wonder if what I have to say matters. They keep referring to me as a “survivor,” and that makes me feel kind of lame. I ran into a storage closet. I’m not some kind of hero. Cale is a survivor. Kat Reynolds is a survivor. I’m someone who escaped.
My apartment is spotless, thanks to my early morning manic cleaning episode. It doesn’t take much for it to be spotless; it’s just a studio, a few hundred square feet. My bed is about two feet from my fridge. Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep (which is still a pretty regular occurrence), I reach over and grab a yogurt. Then I think about how strange it is that I’m sitting in bed, eating yogurt at 3:00 a.m. It’s almost always 3:00 a.m.
There’s a knock at the door at noon. Right on time. I take a deep breath, open the door. It’s my first time meeting Charlie and Joey, but I’ve done enough Facebook stalking to recognize them immediately.
“Tessa?” Charlie says, confirming.
I nod. “Come in, come in.”
They take in their surroundings, likely plotting where to sit. There are only so many options.
“Cozy,” Charlie says.
Everyone knows that’s just a nice word for “small.”
“Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever had three people in here at one time, actually,” I say.
There have been only a couple times when I’ve had two people in here—study sessions with my new friend, Ashley. Not surprisingly, Ryan and I ended things after I came back to Boise. It wasn’t a bitter ending. We’re on fine terms, and we text occasionally. There are no hard feelings. The shooting changed me— that’s how he explains it. We grew apart. It’s not you, it’s me. Our breakup is a collection of clichés, but our relationship wasn’t. We were good for each other, for that time we were together. He’s the one who encouraged me to go to nursing school. And I am. That’s the main reason I came back to Boise. That, and I want to get to know Cale. My father. I still don’t refer to him as that. It’s too strange.