She opens her mouth to explain that she can’t reveal anything Apple has discussed in therapy, but he’s got his hands up already. “I know, I know, I would never ask you to comment on anything you two chitchatted about together.” Like they’re teenagers at a sleepover or old friends who insist on ditching their husbands for a girls’ night out once a month. “I know she blames me. I know you do too, for that matter.” He smiles at her, half sadly. “It’s hard to see, I realize, but I really am trying to help here. I have only the best interests of Bourne at heart.”
Not hard to see, I think. Impossible.
Not help but hide.
Not best but self.
She would not say any of that, but he keeps right on without giving her a chance to respond anyway.
“I meant what I said in the bar, you know.”
“About what?” As if she’s at a bit of a loss, can’t quite remember what he’s referring to, hasn’t given it another thought since.
“About the jobs. They’ll pay well. They’ll have good benefits. They’ll be good jobs. Stimulating, safe, regular hours. That’s what Bourne needs now. Hell, that’s what everyone in the whole world needs now.”
“Sounds wonderful,” she says.
“It is, it is,” he agrees.
“Why are you here, Nathan?” Gentle and not a question really. More like permission. It’s okay to tell me. It’s okay to say.
“And we’re also supporting other families’ businesses.” He’s spinning his wedding ring around and around on his finger. “We’re the go-between, Nora. Facilitators. Helpers, if you will. We enable other families to run their businesses, innovators to be able to afford to follow their dreams, companies to produce right here in America instead of having to ship the manufacturing part of their production overseas. Honestly, we’re just a small cog in the great wheel of local entrepreneurship, and I can’t think of any part I’d be prouder to play.”
He peeks up at her—involuntarily I’d imagine—to see if she’s buying this.
“Plus, if we weren’t here, it would be someone else, someone who doesn’t care about you the way we do. Bourne feels like home to us, and we want what’s best for everyone. You get someone else in here? They won’t be so invested. They won’t be so careful and caring. There’s a lot of corruption out there, Nora, a lot of people with their hands in one another’s cookie jars, a lot of CEOs who would ruin this town and everyone in it out of greed and sheer myopic disregard. We would—I would—never let that happen here.”
Again, she does not add.
Instead she repeats, quietly, “Why are you here, Nathan?”
He doesn’t say anything. He screws his eyes shut. He holds his head in his hands. Finally he looks up at her. “I have, you know, misgivings, Nora. I have misgivings.”
He looks done, like that was the confession. I am barely breathing.
“What kind of misgivings?”
“Just.” He waves around vaguely. “You know.”
She waits.
But suddenly he stands, smooths his expensive shirt and jeans. Runs a hand over his flushed face. “Thank you, Nora. That helped. It was kind of you to fit me in. I appreciate it. I know you’ve got places to be. I’ll see you both”—he’s fumbling in his back pocket but pauses to wink at me—“all around the town.” He finds his wallet and extracts a pile of machine-new fifties, pulls two of them free, pauses again, pulls out two more, folds them in half and in half, clears his throat, and holds them out toward Nora awkwardly, his face ablaze now, flustered or maybe just sorry.
She does not move. Her office is so small, all he has to do to lay his fold of money on her unkempt desk is lean forward. He gives it a little pat.
Her eyes do not leave him. “Nothing you say here leaves this room, Nathan. Not under any circumstances.”
He looks at the floor and nods, chastened as a toddler, then holds his hands out, helpless. Without the wallet to occupy them, they’re shaking. The blood has drained from his face like a downspout, and I see what I’ve missed before. Fear. This man is terrified.
He tries to pace, finds there’s nowhere to do so, and sits back down, resigned to it now, ready to get it over with. “I have a PhD in chemistry. Bet you didn’t know that.” He’s going for breezy, but his voice is shaking as much as his hands. “Over my father’s vehement protestations. He thought school was a waste of time. He said what did I need an advanced degree for since I was inheriting a job. If I insisted on going, he wanted me to get an MBA. But I didn’t want advice, a company, or anything else from him. I didn’t want anything to do with Belsum. I wanted to teach chemistry at a nice liberal arts college somewhere far away from my parents. That was the plan.” He looks up at her. “I had a plan.”
“You were a kid,” Nora says, pointedly but not unkindly. “Kids have plans. Almost no one does what they thought they would when they were twenty.”
“I would have.” He sounds like a kid, a petulant one, sulky he didn’t get his way but smart enough to be embarrassed about it.
“Except for what?”
“Well, for one thing, I started dating Apple. She didn’t want to be married to an academic. She didn’t want to be married to an academic’s salary. Her family and mine go way back. When we got together, she assumed I’d be inheriting the business. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’m sure that was the appeal.”
“Marriage often requires compromise and sacrifice,” Nora allows, “and changes of plans.”
“I agree.” But he doesn’t sound like he does.
“And for another thing?” she prompts.
“Pardon?”
“You said for one thing you met Apple. What’s another thing?”
He says nothing but nods at the floor. She’s asked the right question.
“For another thing…” he begins, and then stops. And then says, “It was me.”
“What was you?”
He looks at her. Looks back to the floor. “I invented GL606.”
He looks up at her again, expecting fury to subsume her professionalism, but she already knew this. Or maybe it’s not that she knew it but that she doesn’t care. It’s Belsum. It’s always been Belsum. It doesn’t matter to Nora who did the actual legwork. But I’m starting to see what’s coming.
“I didn’t mean to. People always say that—I didn’t mean to embezzle those funds, murder that snitch, cheat on that wife. But no one does those things accidentally. You know what people do do accidentally? Chemistry. So much of what you discover, you discover looking for something else. My research was environmental. Swear to God, I got into this to save the world. My dissertation work was on developing cheap, portable materials, like plastic, except they would biodegrade. Can you imagine? And GL606 is two of those things.” He glances up to see if she can guess which two. She can. “I named it Gala 606. After Apple. Gala? Get it? And June sixth, the first night we kissed. God, I was young.”
He stops like there’s no more to the story, like the emotional trauma of inventing a life-thieving, limb-curdling, town-destroying chemical is the embarrassment of naming it like a middle schooler. If I could, I would leap across the room and shake him.