Aftermath

The note was never made public. The guard on watch that night wasn’t watching, he’d fallen asleep. He found Blynken hanging there by his own prison issue pajamas, and saw the note. Apparently, he grabbed it because he must’ve figured how explosive it would be. There’d be a lot more media attention. Instead, it was just another example of federal incompetence, not exactly breaking news.

In retrospect the conspiracy was obvious. When the note, and the story, made its way to Kendra through a reporter she’d known since college, it devastated her. She hadn’t known Blynken except as the guy who tried to kill her but she was more grief-stricken than me. It caught me completely by surprise, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. My own feelings about what happened to Blynken were complicated. Everyone has a right to decide when they don’t want to deal with all of this anymore. But it’s hard to see it happen to someone you care about. And I had just left him there.

Kendra withdrew. She stopped attending city council meetings. She stayed in her home. Then she left town for a few weeks, without me, and it was the hardest two weeks of my life. It wasn’t even a full two weeks but it felt like a year. She said it was a conference in Argentina she’d been invited to some time ago, and she wanted to stay to get her mind straight.

I didn’t know what it meant until later. She came back, and spent a few days trying to be normal, and then said she had to leave town again, and this time she wanted me to come with her. We went out to a resort in the mountains a few hours outside of the city. It’s amazing how much there is out there in the outdoors outside the city and its sprawl and the farms and their sprawl.

I had been completely inadequate for her, and it was the first time I’d felt that way in my life about anything. Of course I’d failed at things before, but there was always a reason. Inadequate preparation, rigged systems, unfair rules, preposterous standards. I just didn’t know what to say.

She finally opened up to me at the resort. When her mother died when she was seven, it was by suicide. She recounted every excruciating detail, and what she remembered of her reaction to it as a six-year-old--children have a remarkable capacity for repression--and the way people around her moved, but I won’t, out of respect for her privacy. Suicide is serious. If you need help, dial 988 in the US or Canada, 13 11 14 in Australia or 03 5774 0992 for English in Japan. Or you can search it on any search engines. They’ll give you the local number, sometimes even if you search for out of town numbers.

Now her reaction made sense, and my failure felt even bigger. I told her so.

-Is it true?, she asked. Were you obsessed with me?

-No. I defended you and, and Wynken and Blynken and Nod and Josiah, they didn’t like that. They didn’t expect it. I paused. I had feelings for you, I confessed, maybe from the first time you knocked on my door. But there was something wrong with Blynken. There was something wrong with all of them.

-There’s something wrong with politics, she said with disgust. It’s all so much poison.

We sat there in silence. Things got better over the next few days, and, while it made me feel guilty to feel that way, I was excited that she seemed to be coming around to the idea of leaving politics behind.

Sharing her story with me lifted a rock off of her chest. She said she’d never told anyone all the details before. I remember when she said that, thinking that a lot of politicians would have made their entire careers around it. There was a story about one vice presidential candidate years ago who apparently would tell people in private the story of jumping on his child’s grave, and always saying he’d never told it before. He told it to his running mate, who’d already heard it second hand. They lost.

On our way back from the mountains, Kendra said something that made me feel she’d decided to call it quits on politics.

-I’m going to focus on what matters, she said, squeezing my hand as she drove.

It took all my strength not to say, Us.

-Life is precious, she continued. Every moment counts. God, listen to me. I sound so sappy.

We laughed.

She threw herself back into her work quickly, but a media storm had been brewing for weeks. Her extended stay in Argentina led to a lot of speculation, mostly about whether she had been invited to stay by the far right president there. One media loudmouth made the reference to hiking the Appalachian trail, like that one governor who had the affair with the television anchor in Argentina but his cover story was that he’d been hiking the Appalachian trail and that’s why no one could reach him, not because he was in another country.

It made me realize how the media worked that I briefly got jealous. Mostly I felt longing and loss when she was gone and the time just dragged on, but watching some of that coverage one day, I pictured him in her slimy embrace, even though I knew better. They’d brainwashed me, just for a moment.

The trip to the resort didn’t go well with the media. Spa Siren, one tabloid called her. Last Resort. Bad Badger Mountain. Down and Out. Kendra Kan’t.

What we weren’t expecting: Red Badger. One tabloid had found out I was with her at the resort and ran with it.