“Why did you want her to call me? What’s wrong?”
“Well, according to the rehab doctor, nothing. But I know it’s not nothing. The Congressman, whenever I’ve been working with him this month, he’s forgetting things and acting weirdly. I know he was getting better a few weeks ago, but in the last weeks, he’s been really erratic. I kept telling my supervisor she has to talk with you and even get the Congressman’s surgeon involved, but she kept telling me that was not protocol, and I really needed to do my job.”
“Oh, Fiona, you’re doing the right thing. Thank you for contacting me directly.”
“I needed this job, you know. I didn’t want to go over her head, but now, you know, I really don’t have much of a choice.”
“Is there anything specific, Fiona?” I was starting to wonder how much of this conversation was disgruntled employee and how much was real.
There was a pause and then, “You know the little mouse figurine?”
“Yes, Fiona, I know it.”
Fiona kept a mouse figurine in her pocket when she worked. Apparently it was a gift from her daughter—but when Jude had admired it, Fiona let him keep it on the table in the room where he did his rehab exercises. Jude had been so touched by the gesture. He swore to enjoy it daily and made a big fuss over it. He always made a point to tell Fiona when she came in for house calls, “I’m taking good care of that mouse, Fiona.” He’d wink charmingly and Fiona would smile—a smooth, monotonous routine that I was afraid would grow old, but for Jude and Fiona, but it never did.
“Mrs. Birch, he’s forgotten the mouse.”
“What do you mean? Forgotten the mouse?”
“Last week, when I was there, he didn’t mention it like he always does, and so when I was about to leave, I asked him, ‘So Congressman, how’s our mouse?’ And he just looked at me. Blank. Mrs. Birch, it was downright eerie. I told my supervisor that and she told me he’s probably as sick to death of me as she is.”
Fiona sniffed a bit and I realized she had probably been crying this entire phone conversation and I hadn’t noticed until then. There was something telling about Jude not remembering the mouse. I couldn’t explain exactly why I knew Fiona was right, but I did. Jude was deteriorating, not improving. I’d been watching him get more and more confused in recent weeks. Maybe I was wrong that Dr. Drake’s latest diagnosis simply meant Jude was “perfectly fine, except he couldn’t lie.”
I felt a tight grip of panic in my chest with the thought. I thanked Fiona and told her I’d try to intercede on her behalf with the supervisor.
But first, I called Dr. Drake’s office and scheduled a follow-up appointment for the very next day. I called Huck and Finn and asked them to join me for the appointment so I’d have an extra set of ears (or two) to wade through Dr. Drake’s medical mumbo jumbo. I ignored two calls from Officer Bruce’s number.
The Washington Truth, dated February 14, 2019
Excerpt from the Op Ed piece, by Nate Essuzare
…Did you know there is no specific protocol or procedure set out in either the Constitution or in any laws of our nation that a member of the House of Representatives can’t continue to serve if they become incapacitated in some way? Thus, if a Congressman falls ill or suffers a brain injury and can’t logically evaluate a proposed bill or its amendments any longer, he can’t be forced to leave his position.
This is true even for a newly elected Congressman who is shot in the head just days after taking an Oath of office, and spends months recovering, and has his course of recovery actually kept under close wraps by his wife whose past is not exactly an open book.
There’s nothing to prevent this Congressman from continuing to weigh in on very significant legislation and very significant investigations.
There’s nothing to keep him—or her—from playing with other people’s lives.
Chapter 30
Huck, Finn, Jude, and I all sat together in a small room staring at new CT scan images. Dr. Drake had taken a new set of films. We’d told him we were worried about Jude’s brain changing. We wondered what that would really mean for him. In the long term. We wanted to know if there was any way to halt the changes. Dr. Drake said he didn’t know what we were asking exactly, and he didn’t follow the mouse story very well, but he agreed that follow-up films were medically warranted to check on Jude’s prognosis.
I stared again at the coils on the screen in front of us.
“Wow. Look right here. Jude’s brain is changing again.” Dr. Drake pointed. Huck and Finn nodded, and I did, too, trying to catch up.
“But how is that possible?”
“Remember how I told you, Aby, that I’d never seen a case like Jude’s? That’s still true. My powers of prediction are lost here. His brain is reshaping and shifting.”
“Shifting back?”
“No, not exactly. It’s—I don’t how to explain it any other way. The overcompensation areas. Those areas that literally made it impossible for him to lie are now devouring other areas of his brain. Areas that would normally be responsible for memory and other sensory processing.”
“He’s had memory loss.”
“It’s more than that,” Dr. Drake said. “He’s collapsing inside himself. Other vocal and speech functions are impaired as well.”
Jude sat still in the room. He appeared alert and as if he was listening, but didn’t care. He didn’t react at all to Dr. Drake’s words.
I tried to control my voice from breaking. “Can we stop this, Doctor? And if so, how?”
Dr. Drake looked carefully from Jude back to me. He pointed at the coils in the middle of the screen. “This area of the brain needs to be controlled. Surgery is much too dangerous given the areas impacted. The interesting thing—the promising thing—is this.” Dr. Drake traced his finger through the coil down the silhouette of Jude’s neck on the films.
“What is that?”
“Well the vagus nerve is involved in this overcompensated area. And in the reshaped area of Jude’s brain. There might be—and keep in mind this is a very long shot—a way to reboot Jude’s brain.”
“Reboot—like a computer?”
“Yes—it’s call vagus nerve stimulation—it’s a method I’ve used to treat clinical depression and epilepsy with some positive results.”
“That sounds terrible and risky.”
“Well—that’s the thing—it’s not. It involves a simple procedure. I could do it right here in the office.”
I looked at Huck and Finn who nodded in unison. I leaned forward to speak for all of us. “We trust you. We do. But please, Dr. Drake. What exactly are the downsides of this procedure?”
“Well, that it works. That Jude’s brain reboots itself. That Jude’s filter reestablishes itself in the cerebral cortex.”
“Dr. Drake, English, please.”
Dr. Drake nodded. “Yes, of course. The only real downside, Aby, is that Jude’s brain will go back to its pre-shooting state—that he will regain his ability to lie.”
I gave the go ahead because I thought it would save Jude. But as I signed the authorizations and kissed Jude’s head before the procedure, I couldn’t help but think about the offer still on the table (but expiring quickly) from Officer Bruce to help us get away and to protect us from Laila and Suzana. The one I previously thought was moot.
The procedure only took 73 minutes. I started the stopwatch on my phone after Dr. Drake took Jude into his procedure room. He had summoned in a resident to help assist with the procedure and told us that it would take about one to two hours. So I had decided to time him to see if he was telling the truth.
Seventy-three minutes later Dr. Drake emerged with discharge instructions. A pulse generator had been implanted under Jude’s skin in his chest. Dr. Drake had programmed it to begin very slow frequency pulses and ordered us to bring Jude in for weekly checkups until further notice.
“It might be a good idea to try to get Jude out and about—beyond his therapy sessions.”
�
�To his Congressional office?” Huck asked. I panicked. I didn’t want Jude out in the world yet.
“No. I think it would be good to try to help Jude’s brain along in its effort to reprogram itself. It would be a good idea to try to get Jude out to places he loved before the surgery. Try to stimulate his memory and help the reboot along.”
I thought about some of our favorite D.C. haunts, like Little Miss Whiskey’s and the Cherry Blossom festival, and tried to imagine revisiting some of those places. But then I thought of one place that might work very well.
“Ok, Doctor. We’ll try that. And then what?”
“Then, we wait.”
While Jude waited on the dock, patiently doing as he was told, like he was a child, or an elderly man who’d lost his fight, I got on Front Runner and shook out the cushions and checked the gas tank and made sure everything was in order. We hadn’t been on the boat in months. The Harbormaster had been paid to put the boat back in the water in the spring, and to inspect it and run it occasionally—with enough frequency to ensure that everything was still in working order.
From my cursory inspection, the Harbormaster appeared to have been doing his job. I led Jude onto the boat, and watched as he massaged his chest. I winced thinking about how much Jude had been through in one day.
“Does the new device hurt, Jude?”
Jude kept on massaging but shrugged.
“Jude, you like Dr. Drake, don’t you?”
Another shrug. Jude was starting to resemble a petulant teenager.
“Jude, Dr. Drake saved your life. Do you understand why Huck and Finn and I asked him to put that device there? It’s not staying forever. But it’s going to help your brain. It’s going to help your brain heal itself. So you can go back to being the way you were before the shooting. Do you want that, Jude? Do you want things to go back to the way they were before the shooting?”
Another shrug.
I waved Jude to the bed. “Lie down, Jude. Let’s get some rest. I’ll sleep over here so you can stretch out.” I started to pile up blankets on a chaise lounge stored next to the bed in the cramped bedroom.
“No, Aby. Come to bed.” Jude pointed to the spot next to him, and even moved over to make room for me. Jude rolled over and closed his eyes, and I took my place by his side, curled up under one of the blankets.
I checked my phone. One more missed call from Officer Bruce. A text from Huck and Finn telling me to call them if I needed anything. A text from the security detail out on the dock letting us know they’d be stationed there all night.
And one more surprising text. From Laila.
I heard about Jude’s “condition.” If you’re finally ready to hear the truth, you should hear it from me.
“Aby.”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry,” Jude whispered into the quiet of the night. The water lapped up against the boat hypnotically.
For what, I wondered?
I was afraid to ask. And I wondered if it was the truth speaking or if Jude’s brain was rebooting already, allowing him to lie. The rocking boat lulled him to sleep quickly, and I got up and walked up on the deck of the boat staring at the moonlight dancing on the water and the boats nearby. It looked like everything was coated in glitter.
As a child, I had a beloved collection of glittery snow globes scattered around my bedroom, but when my mother built a shelf solely to house the collection, I realized how ugly my treasures really were.
Lined up on the shelf, the globes’ ugly unreal scenes mocked me every time I entered my room, until I went down the line, shaking and scattering the confetti pieces to create a row of glittery-coated false landscapes. The pretending only lasted a few moments before the confetti settled to the bottom again, and I’d have to turn my back to them.
I grew to hate those snow globes.
Similarly, I had been trying to shake off the memory of the night of the shooting. All that shaking and pretending was exhausting. Eventually, the confetti settled for good, and I let it. Looking out at the water Front Runner was rocking in, I remembered.
I had told Monica of The Washington Truth where I’d be that night. I had told her where Jude would be that night.
I sat down on the deck of the boat, letting my body feel the weight of what I had done.
Monica had called a few times after the swearing in, still trying to get me to introduce her to Jude. But I didn’t want to talk about Jude anymore. I wanted to talk about me. I wanted her to tell someone about me. About the good work I was doing at Appletreese. When she asked me what I was doing later that night, she seemed interested to hear that I was headed after work to return a lost and valuable football to an 11-year-old boy from the projects. Isaiah Morris. I’d wanted to include his story in marketing materials for the Foundation, and a spot in The Washington Truth seemed like a good place to start.
I once read an article that every good deed releases a chemical from the brain. I blame the chemicals for what came next.
What a nice gesture, Aby. Will you be going right from work?
No we will be going around eight. We have a Capitol Hill cocktail event.
We?
Jude and I.
Even though I said his name on purpose, even though I knew she’d be more interested in a photo opp of Jude than me, I didn’t take enough time to dwell on the decision. At that point in my life, I was still only afraid of Laila Rogers and Suzana Treese.
Not the media.
But I’d told them where he’d be that night.
The police concluded that Jude was the victim of a shooting on the wrong side of town. An unsolved crime. A crossfire victim in the hard innards of the “inner city.”
But maybe he was none of those things.
And if that was true, I’d put him in the trail of that bullet just as sure as if I’d pulled the trigger myself.
The glitter confetti finally settled once and for all to the bottom of the globe, revealing the ugliness underneath.
I headed back to bed next to Jude, letting the boat rock me to sleep, wondering if I’d been afraid of the wrong people all along.
I thought about Laila’s unanswered text. I thought about all that I’d been running away from. I thought about how I’d been afraid to tell Jude about my past. About the lies I’d told and the reasons why. I thought about how I’d been afraid to ask the difficult questions of Jude, because I’d been afraid of learning the answers.
It was time to stop running from the truth.
I decided to go confront Laila on my own.
The Washington Truth, dated March 1, 2019
Excerpt from the Op Ed piece, by Nate Essuzare
Have you ever heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?
Yes? No?
No worries. You’ll be hearing about it again soon. And again.
Baader-Meinhof is the name for that weird thing your brain does when it stumbles upon a piece of random information and then notices it everywhere.
You know, when your BFF is all “have you tried the apple cider diet?” and you’re all, “that’s disgusting.” Only, then the next day pretty much everyone you know is drinking apple cider. Actually, maybe that’s a bad example, because apple cider is trendy, so of course it’s everywhere. Like sleeve cutouts and military hats.
Baader-Meinhof works better when you’re talking about obscure things. Not trendy things. And it might even feel a little like coincidence, only there’s no such thing as coincidence, of course.
I read an article in one of my high school science classes (I won’t tell you exactly how long ago that was) that says that our brains love patterns. They seek them out in fact, sometimes ignoring all the other uninteresting data that comes between a few points of similarity. Our brains, it turns out, are really sort of amazing when you think about it.
Lately there are so many coincidences popping up in my life, but I guess it’s just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon causing my brain to focus on a few key things recently like Jude Birch’s winn
ing campaign. And Innovative Media’s LessThan, and Out The Bullies new rise to the top in defiance of all that Innovative Media is doing. And Jude Birch’s beautiful bride at the center of it all—Aby Boyle.
Chapter 31
The next afternoon, after I took Jude home from the boat, I texted Laila for the first time since the shooting. Where can we meet?
Three dots and then, meet me at the campaign office.
I was shocked that we still had access to it. I thought our short-term lease was up. But of course, Laila was in charge of closing out the office. Jude had trusted her with too many things. I wanted to meet somewhere more public.
No. How about Pete’s?
I’m not in a condition to drive anywhere. Sorry. It’s here or nowhere.
I could tell I was dealing with drunk, slurring Laila. Even via text.
It wasn’t reasonable to assume that because she was drunk, she was harmless, but I didn’t really know what else to do. I wanted to know the truth finally.
I went to the campaign office, and I didn’t say “hello” or “what did you do?” or “do you know who shot Jude?”
I simply asked, “What did he do to you?”
Laila was sitting alone in the semi-dark office, the dim light reflecting off a Manhattan glass with ice clinking alone at the bottom.
Maybe she’s only had one drink so far, and I can still get the truth out of her.
This thought quickly evaporated in the wake of Laila reaching for a near empty bottle of whiskey next to her and rushing the brown liquid over the ice crystals left in the bottom of her glass. The clinking stopped.
I watched Laila sip the liquid strength.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like being the only woman working for a family-owned construction company? The jokes, the innuendoes? I’ve heard them all. The catcalls, the whistles. Honestly, I stopped hearing them after a while. Like background static or white noise. The Treese Company had kept its name out of the financial scandal of the 2000s and had the potential to become the fastest growing construction company in the region. I saw that right away. So I was willing to put up with quite a lot.”
Why We Lie Page 23