"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Solzhenitsyn said that. It popped up on my Facebook feed the morning I started to write this section. I saw a lot of smart young people struggle with the idea in August, but without reading Solzhenitsyn. They were trying to work it out in their own heads.
In an ass-backwards sort of way, The Incident was a piece of luck for them. Critical thinking classes can’t teach you about betrayal. They can’t expose you to that first romantic infidelity, or put an office embezzler at the next desk. They can’t teach you to accept the reality of something you don’t know how to believe. And they can’t tell you how to trust your own judgment when it’s just been brutally proven wrong.
Those young people most touched by The Incident will always have what it taught them, and I hope I was able to help with that. I told them not to stop trusting people because of the one that betrays you. I told them embezzlement and infidelity were the only times most people would see something like this. I told them that if they were ever asked about it in any setting to go out of their way to tell the truth about it. Particularly, I told them not to hedge or conceal anything because they worried it might hurt me. I’d be fine, I assured them. And don’t worry about Andrew. You can’t hurt him. That’s been taken care of.
Much of the first months of my long-ago term on Harrisonburg City Council was colored by decisions I made based on bad information from a fellow council member before we were sworn in. There was a difficult period of learning to trust people who had been on the other side of what was, if not a lie, at least an acute slant. You would think I would learn, but I haven’t because I refuse to. I know people will leave things out and shade things, especially in political circles. But I decline to believe someone will outright lie until it’s proven to me. When it happens I usually shrug. If they have lied to me because I am gullible and trusting, I can live with that. But if they have taken advantage of friendships forged in the sharing of intense experience, as the council colleague did, then the sin is deeper.
I know that every lie is a sin, but not every lie is a betrayal.
There’s a particular photo from the Coordinated office opening on July 26. I’d take several hundred pictures at party events sometimes to get one shot. It wasn’t just thrashing for a shot; it was getting people who hadn’t met me and my camera before accustomed to the idea of me walking around with a big camera. The camera always felt dated to me for two reasons. One was that I was still using an expensive SLR held up to my eye while most people were walking around with a cell phone at arm’s length. The other was that I always bought the model a year or two out of date when Costco discounted it. The generations of camera matched one of my favorite recurring shots from Democratic Party events. I called them the Generation shots, and one day I’ll do a full album of them. A young woman, maybe in her first campaign, and a woman closer to my age, working to maintain the gains made in her lifetime. The first time I met Regan, at a Kaine rally on Court Square in 2012, I got a picture of her with Deb and some others. It’s one of my favorites from that type of shot. They were discussing something, perhaps Deb’s campaign for City Council that year, and the other folks in the shot were the two women who’d be JMU Dems presidents the next couple of years. The one generation didn’t really know what things the other had been through, but they were working in part because they didn’t want to go through them.
The shot from the office opening in July 2016 was a tall young woman with bright blue eyes, short hair and long, dangling earrings. Just behind her, just falling out of focus, a woman three times her age, same hair, but whiter, and with smaller earrings. Sisters, in a way that white guys would never be brothers. Further back, Andrew was so far out of focus that you can only make out the shape of his face. The expression looks sullen. I gave him a pass on that. I attributed it to the shape of his face and bad luck. My own face relaxes into a scowl with brows that are knit for life. Back pain has a lot to do with it. In a perfect and honest world, my face would be in what my mother kindly termed that goddamned Fitzgerald smirk. Andrew’s was always smiling when he caught the camera looking. If the sullenness was real, it may have been impatience or a sense of unfairness. He wanted things, and couldn’t have them yet. Or he saw places others went that he couldn’t. There’s no telling. But the expression was often there when he showed up in my photos incidentally. One expression I caught was him and Regan, with her showing him a photo or something on her phone. She was looking at the phone and he wasn’t. He was looking at her with an expression of sad longing.
People that age are sometimes expressive. They may be the generation who invented “hangry.” Regan came to my office a couple of times to express how horribly her job was going and how impossible it was. After the first time she solved it by going away and getting something to eat, I discounted it. I didn’t doubt what she said about the job. I always suspected that campaigns intentionally set unrealistic goals in the early going. The pressure would help get the rookies up to speed, and would weed out the ones who weren’t ready to do two years’ worth of work in six months. And there were daily conference calls where everyone was required to recite their numbers for the day. I’m sure it wasn’t intended as public humiliation for those who lost the competition. I’m just as sure that organizers saw it that way.
Andrew had no quotas or, as they called them in the campaign, “goals.” I was pretty explicit about that. I told him that if he came up with zero in any given week he’d still be paid. Quotas are dangerous things, even if you call them goals. I’m sure within a couple of campaigns, they’ll quit calling them goals and begin calling them metrics. When the Coordinated adapted - stole - many of the processes we’d used in the Winter Drive, class visits became class raps. Or maybe class wraps. I never remembered to ask. Vetting the forms became auditing the forms. During the six weeks that Andrew pursued registration forms without benefit of class wraps, he got between 150 and 200. At least one week was in single digits.
Colleen shows up in the story somewhere in here. She doesn’t deserve to, because she did nothing to place herself in the middle of a tawdry story about a dumbass kid fabricating voter registration forms. But on the one hand, deserve’s got nothing to do with it, and on the other, she’s one of the heroes. It’s relevant in a minor way that Colleen and Regan are both pretty. Colleen in a way that only small, athletic women can be, and Regan in a way that only women who look like Ann-Margret can be. Andrew was a good-looking young man, I suppose. I have to ask Deb about things like that. She and Simmons were having a discussion in an East Village restaurant about whether everyone is pure straight or pure gay or if there’s a spectrum. Simmons had just put himself at somewhere around 70-30 when he glanced over at me as I watched a woman walk into the restaurant.
“Joe, 99-1,” he said. I remembered it in part because he referred to me by my first name, a rarity for both of us, and in part because Deb reminds me of it at least once a week.
Andrew would occasionally mention his looks in a humble brag. He told me about girls coming on to him when their boyfriends were present, or about the girlfriend who’d come to the house with him and her plan to win him. He also told me soon after Colleen arrived that she was coming on to him. I didn’t specifically ask her about that, but once when we were chatting in October, I asked her if he was attractive. She thought about it, and couldn’t really decide. He was so young, she said. She was 23 at the time and he’d been 20 in summer, so it made sense that she’d see him that way. She’d lived twice as many years since 17 as he had. I always try to measure relative experience that way. I’m three times someone’s age, but it’s twelve times as long since I started driving or passed some other milestone. It’s not how long they’ve been alive, but how long they’ve been stockpiling experience and not just learning to feed and clothe themselves.
But in July Andrew told me she was coming on to him. I didn’t believe or disbelieve him. It was just a thing he said. But there’s a quote about that. “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” William Congreve said it, and it’s often misquoted. I can see why, but I’ve always found the first half more meaningful and compelling. “Heaven Hath No Rage” was almost the title of this, but you don’t want your betrayals to be too authentic. I doubt very much that Colleen came on to Andrew. Maybe he couldn’t take that. When Regan said later that he had never expressed any romantic interest in her, I remembered that he always spoke of women coming on to him, never of any effort on his part.
It had been fairly clear for a while that Andrew was putting in a lot of time at the Coordinated office. He and some other JMU students were helping Regan, and I had no problem with that. A voter registered was registered, and I didn’t care if he was helping at the office or at a table at a festival when he got the form. I told him to go ahead and turn them in through the office as well. The two advantages were that any forms would count toward Regan’s goals and that the forms would be vetted or audited by someone other than me. I don’t mind work, but I don’t mind letting someone else do the annoying work if they’re willing. The expression I used was, “Let Regan have the numbers.”
I put in time at the office too, except not working. As I mentioned above, people who didn’t want to work at calling and canvassing would sometimes find other things to do. I worked really hard at finding ways not to work but still help out. One year I arranged for Muawia to come and fix a sink. He was agreeable, because he works on houses and it only took him five minutes. He was in and out so quickly all anybody knew was I’d got some guy to fix the sink. Same thing in 2013 when they needed carpet scraps to deaden the sound during phone banking. I got them from Muawia but I delivered them. All in all, I got a lot of credit for the work I avoided that year.
I helped, but in 2016 I went out of my way not to try to or appear to direct or control anything that went on in the office or to make suggestions about their operations. The Coordinated Campaign is a hierarchal, almost military operation, and I didn’t want my perceived authority as a CD chair to clash with any instructions that came from Brooklyn via Richmond or Roslyn. At the same time, I tried to be an unofficial adviser to them without causing any problems.
The unofficial advisor capacity came into play in July. Andrew’s crush/dislike of Colleen was obvious, and he attributed it to her interfering with his operations, treating him as her employee, and taking advantage of the arrangements he’d made. I didn’t see these things happen, but believed what Andrew told me. I suggested ways to him to work through them and suggested he welcome Colleen as a newcomer and make both their jobs easier by helping her to do hers. I don’t remember specific details of what I told him. I would describe it as generic advice about getting along in a workplace, obvious to a 60-year-old but not to a 20-year-old. I do remember telling him to remember that she was far from home and possibly in her first job with this level of authority.
One particular issue had to do with cooperation between the Coordinated and Andrew at the Farmer’s Market. He told me on July 30 that he’d promised folks there his registration efforts were nonpartisan so he didn’t want the association with the Clinton campaign. Colleen and her colleague, Emily, thought he could lose HarrisonburgVOTES’s nonprofit status if he worked too closely with the Coordinated. Emily and Colleen thought that, but weren’t 100 percent sure if Andrew had told them that. But that they weren’t sure came when I asked them about it later. At the time I explained to them that the organization was pretty much just a name we’d stuck on the process so it would be more than two guys and a cup of coffee.
July 30 again. I remember the dates by remembering what day of the week the 7th fell on, and thus 14, 21, and 28, and also by the dates on pictures I took. There are a lot of Colleen because she’s photographically interesting. There are a lot of Andrew because I felt like I never quite captured him. July 30 was a Saturday. Deb and I delivered some furniture to the Coordinated office. We found the door locked and potential volunteers waiting outside. We called around to find someone to open it. Andrew and Colleen arrived about the same time. While we were moving the furniture inside, assisted by the volunteers, I was aware of a clash between Colleen and Andrew over printing voter registration forms. She had apparently thought that her computer would work with the printer and it wouldn’t; but I wasn’t sure what the apparent sparks were about. Deb drove a very angry Andrew to get forms copied instead of printed, while I stayed to talk to Colleen. We didn’t plan it that way, but it developed that way.
I asked Colleen if there had been some conflict over the printer, and she focused on the technical details and not the conflict. I instinctively liked her, and respected her intellect, but didn’t really know her yet. She explained the printer issue with clarity and understanding of the technical issues. She seemed unwilling to focus on the conflict. I explained to her then that she might be seen as a replacement for Regan and that she might experience some resentment over that. She thanked me for that information, but otherwise exhibited a wariness that I attribute to her dealing with an older, taller, Democratic Party official whom she barely knew. I was wary with her because I didn’t know the source of the conflict, and, between her and Andrew, she was the one I didn’t know.
The first time I met her I’d bought some supplies for the office, including a trash can and a mop bucket. The office had been chosen by an idiot. There was a huge chunk of concrete sticking up in the middle of the bathroom floor for no apparent reason, and the sink worked more or less. But in an organization as large as the Coordinated, there will be some people making stupid decisions. Colleen was scrappy enough to work around it. She found that by holding the trash can lid just right she could use it to route water into the mop bucket.
That would have been on July 24, if it matters. Andrew called me later on July 30 to ask me a question about addresses on registration forms for JMU students. I told him the answer and he told me that Colleen had told him and Regan something different, and said that I told her. I knew I had never discussed anything with Colleen about voter registration forms so the revelation unnerved me. I told Andrew at the time to view it as a workplace snafu and not a lie and to let me know if there were any more conversations like that. I set it aside as something to be considered when I knew more of the context. When I asked Regan about it on August 16, the day we found out Andrew had fabricated the forms, she had no idea what I was talking about.
Later that same week in July, Andrew told me that he had questions about some of Colleen’s voter registration forms. I asked him what he meant and he said he wasn’t sure but that it didn’t seem like she could have gotten as many as she did. I asked him if he had seen some particular thing or spotted an irregularity on a form. He hadn’t, and I had trouble believing he was anything but badly mistaken, but I never thought he was flat out lying. Aside from the illegality and the near certainty of being caught, fabrication of a voter registration form is the most pointless action one can take in the voting process. The action does not gain a vote. It does not benefit anyone. The only possible reason to do it is to boost numbers to impress a boss or fill a quota. I had the impression Colleen was doing a good job, and I couldn’t think of a reason she would need to fake numbers to impress anyone. I concluded that while his observation had to be colored by his dislike of Colleen, he had made it in good faith. He was mistaken, I believed, but I didn’t know why.
Andrew had other complaints about Colleen, particularly the way she dressed. She wore what she called a t-shirt dress a couple of times. Andrew thought it was too short. I pointed out to him that Regan had a dress almost exactly like it. I told him the same when he complained about a pair of shorts Colleen had worn. So many of these things were tiny little pieces of other conversations. Later in the fall I read an analysis of the slanders about Hillary Clinton’s lack of trustworthiness. The story said that it was the constant drumbeat that made the slanders believable. Each scandal really wasn’t one, and each accusation was mostly untrue, but after a while all anybody remembered was that there were stories about her trustworthiness. That happened to an extent with Colleen. I dismissed it when he complained about her dress. I assumed he was spending too much time looking at her legs. But at the same time, someone I trusted was frequently saying something negative about someone I was still getting to know. I knew she couldn’t be faking registration forms. There was no reason to. But at the same time, the suspicion had been planted by someone I trusted.
Andrew never had really got around to canvassing, but he found a use for the paperwork anyway. Sometime that weekend, he fabricated 19 voter registration forms. He apparently copied 19 forms with information straight off the New Virginia Majority walk sheets. Name, address, date of birth fabricated based on the age. He made up the Social Security numbers.
On Monday, Aug. 1, he input the data in the VAN. The forms went to the registrar’s office that Thursday, Aug, 4. They went into the folder of vetted forms and forms went down every Thursday. Regan took the folder down. She later told me that was one of many times Andrew could have stopped her, one of many times he could have come clean before the sin became a crime. When Andrew told me he had suspicions about forms Colleen had turned in, it’s almost certain he was trying to make her take the rap for what he’d done. I don’t know if what he told me of his suspicions of her came before or after the forms were turned in. If after, then it was a squalid attempt to get out of a stupid blunder. If before, then the whole thing was not just to help Regan but to hurt Colleen. It speaks to the level of malice. The level of dumbass was just as high either way.
The original story had it that somebody in the registrar’s office recognized the name of someone deceased. But apparently the letters went out confirming registration. The son of a deceased man got one and contacted the registrar’s office. One of the forms was a dead man who had once been chair of the city’s Republican committee. His son was a retired judge and prosecutor. That was the one The Washington Post wrote about. It was also the one that drew the most black humor.
“He’d vote Republican, even dead,” said one person.
Another wondered why Andrew didn’t have sense enough to register dead Democrats.
Aug. 15 there was a special meeting of the Electoral Board. They immediately went into closed session. I sat outside with Red Zack and speculated about what was being discussed. We didn’t come up with any great theories. But Regan called about an hour after the meeting to tell me she’d just had a call from the Harrisonburg Police Department asking questions about dead people being registered to vote. I told Regan to contact her dad, who’s an attorney, and to tell her bosses immediately. I told her to have Andrew call Tom right away. The officer who called may have mentioned HarrisonburgVOTES, but I can’t remember if Regan or Andrew told me that.
I knew that HarrisonburgVOTES hadn’t turned in any forms for at least a month, and didn’t know for certain if Andrew had turned in any forms at all before he began crediting them to the campaign. So the mention of the organization was suspicious. Since the information came from the registrar, it was doubly suspicious. She often got things wrong, but it was hard to tell when it was intentional. In retrospect, she may have believed it was true. Maybe she thought every college student, recent grad, or person under 25 who brought forms to her office was with HarrisonburgVOTES. Maybe she wanted it to be from my organization. We don’t like each other, but that’s speculation, not paranoia. My best guess is still that she was just plain wrong. But it was handy, bordering on invaluable, later when HarrisonburgVOTES diverted attention from the fact that the Coordinated Campaign had turned them in. I almost felt sorry for all the alt-right people speculating that it was a Clinton conspiracy, but missing the essential fact that the HRC campaign had apparently turned in the forms. The impression continued in the Statement of Facts when Andrew pleaded guilty. It wasn’t inaccurate in that document, just incomplete.
By the time I arrived at the office or soon after I heard a reference to Blue Ridge Drive, possibly from Tom, whom I believe had spoken to Harrisonburg Police Department on Andrew’s behalf by that time. At some point I recalled that Blue Ridge was in the New Virginia Majority turf I’d given Andrew. I asked Andrew about the packet sometime that afternoon. He said that it had been in the office and that some pages were missing. I failed at the time to consider how he knew that. Instead I walked through the implications. That oversight didn’t come from not believing Andrew could have done it. It came from believing no one in the office could have done it.
But someone had. I could believe a lot of negative things about the registrar’s office, but no one there was smart enough to trump up something like this. The only thing anyone suggested that afternoon that made any sense to me was Colleen’s suggestion that one of her volunteers may have brought the forms into the Coordinated office. As I walked through that, beginning to believe the information had come from the NVM walk sheets, I decided again that only someone in the office could have been responsible. Walk sheets normally only contain names of registered voters who have to be called or canvassed. But the NVM walk sheets contained the names of people that were purported to be unregistered. Someone would have to know that in order to use the sheets to fabricate voter registration forms. Colleen, in mentioning her volunteer, was the only person so far who had tried to place suspicion on anyone else. And someone I trusted had suspected she was doing something wrong for a while.
Later that evening I told Deb that I thought Colleen was the only possible vector. I still wasn’t quite ready to believe she’d done something so stupid and tried to build an argument in my mind that her volunteer could have somehow been responsible.
Some weeks later I was gossiping with two DPVA lawyers, one a woman in her late twenties, the other a man closer to my age. The official word was don’t talk about the incident. Reality was people wanted gossip.
“Why did he do it?” the older attorney asked.
“Why does any stupid 20-year-old male do anything?” I replied.
Almost simultaneously, he said, “I don’t know. Why?” and she said, “Oh, for god’s sake, you’re kidding me!”
He still had an uncertain look on his face. She looked over at him, and with the tone you’d use to say, “Do the reading,” she said, “To impress a girl.”
Regan curled her nose at the story. “Nineteen federal felonies is not the way to impress me,” she said, more than a little dismissively. And Andrew wasn’t just trying to impress a girl. He disliked another one.
I have to believe two things about Andrew to keep the image of a dumbass 20-year-old form turning into the picture of a dangerously disturbed person. I have to believe that his attempts to blame Colleen came after he realized the forms had been turned in, and I have to believe that he told the truth when he said he didn’t mean to turn them in. I still try to believe those things when I think about The Incident. I don’t know if that’s for my benefit or Andrew’s. I don’t know if that’s because I don’t want to believe the worst about him or because I don’t want to believe how badly I was fooled. The line cuts through every heart, Solzhenitsyn said.
But the concern on that Monday afternoon was keeping everybody out of jail. Tom thought the cops might show up any minute. I thought that if that were the case, they wouldn’t have called ahead, but I don’t remember if I said it out loud. The idea that the cops were not exactly in hot pursuit would be buttressed two days later, when I tentatively blocked off an afternoon for a police interview, and they scheduled it for a week later when the FBI agent could be there. Tom’s branch of law wasn’t criminal defense, so he called one of the two best Democratic attorneys in Harrisonburg, Gene Hart, and arranged an appointment the next day for Andrew. Both Tom and I were thinking that Colleen and Regan had bosses who’d have to take care of them. Colleen later told me she took it as evidence Tom and I were somehow involved.
We spent perhaps two hours in that office, calling people who needed to be called, theorizing about what could have happened, trying to find that entity that Alexander Haig in the midst of the 18-and-a-half minute scandal had called “a sinister force.” That force had to be one of the people in that office, and the knowledge made it claustrophobic.
Years ago, during my first months as city editor at the Daily News-Record, a reporter went to a murder trial involving three brothers. The one with the thick glasses had remained in the car during the armed robbery, and much of the story revolved around whether he could see well enough to have known what was going on. The story showed up in the paper with a lead that said the vision-impaired brother was the getaway driver. It was very late in the day before we found out the managing editor had made the change in order to spice up the story. During that time the assistant city editor and I had to deal with the fact that each of us knew the other had done it and wouldn’t admit it. The managing editor later went on to become the oldest player ever to suit up for college basketball. The assistant and I never completely got over the opinions we formed of one another that day.
That’s what it felt like that day in the Coordinated office. All of us knew that it was one of the others. At some point we called it a day. Later that evening, Regan, Andrew, and Colleen got together to try and figure out what had happened. I was still trying to figure out who I could talk to. I needed to ask someone smarter than me for some advice about what to do with my suspicions. Andrew told the others that night that he thought he knew where the forms had come from. Tom had told him to go to a lawn party and pick them up from somebody. Andrew remembered the guy as a middle-aged white guy. Anybody who’s ever heard of a crime being blamed on “unidentified black males” would have to laugh or at least shake his head. But none of the three folks discussing it were old enough to get the joke.
Neither Regan nor Andrew were answering their phones in the morning. I first heard from one of them when Andrew called around 10:15 to ask if I was in my office and if he could come by and talk to me. I knew that he had an appointment with Gene that Tom had arranged at 11 a.m. I wondered what he might want to ask me about before visiting the attorney. He came into the office at about 10:35 and closed the door. I asked him if he didn’t need to be somewhere at 11 a.m.
He said, “I might be somewhere else,” then sat down. I wrote the following reconstruction within two days of the confession, so it’s probably fairly close.
“I did it. I filled in the forms from the walk sheets. I made up Social Security numbers. I don’t know why I did it.”
“Andrew, I’m obviously disappointed, but you’re still my friend. You need to go and talk to your attorney,” I answered. I think I knew what he was going to say when he sat down, but I’ll never know for sure. I do know that I wanted him out of that office right away. Despite the immense pity I felt for him right then, I knew he was the one we were going to eat to get us through the pass in the Sierras.
“I’m so sorry. I wasn’t going to turn them in . . .”
“You need to stop. If you say anything else you could put me in legal peril.”
“I’m so sorry, I ….”
There were a few more words to the sentence, but I cut him off.
“Go talk to the attorney. I’ll wait until noon before I start calling people.”
We both stood up at this point, and after a second’s consideration, I held out my hand. He shook it, and I don’t know which of us initiated the hug. “I’m glad you decided to come clean,” I said.
As he left my office I remember thinking that he was filled with the relief of having unburdened himself but that he was heading into hell. Confession is good for the soul but doesn’t help the body. It took about a minute to decide I couldn’t keep the impulsive promise to wait until noon. By the next day I knew I’d lied to him about something else as well. I wasn’t his friend any more. But I believed what he’d told me there in the office. When people hit that level of confession, they tend to tell the truth. They let go of the lies without thinking about the cost. I believe he wasn’t going to turn in the forms. Not that it mattered that much. He was the other guy now. As late as Monday evening, before his confession, Deb and I had discussed helping him with any legal fees that might arise. That idea didn’t last.
I shared the news of Andrew’s confession with several people over the next hour. Everyone I spoke with reacted with disbelief and shock. The most common word I heard was “betrayal.” Bill said it was “insanely stupid.” Over the course of the day I became painfully aware that I was the only one who had heard a heartfelt confession from someone who had betrayed me, my wife, most of my friends, and the spirit of the highly successful and inspirational Winter Drive. I told Deb I needed to contact the Harrisonburg Police Department, and she suggested consulting an attorney. First thing Wednesday morning, I called Bill Helsley. He has to treat our discussions as confidential, so for the most part I’m going to return the favor. But he did tell me at one point that I was overthinking the whole thing. Which was true. I was trying to solve the crime in my head. But all I needed to do was tell the HPD and FBI what I knew. They got paid to solve it. He only got one thing wrong in that lecture.
He said something along the lines of, “You’re worried about this, you’re not sleeping.”
I hadn’t slept well since I was about 13. At one point I was on Ambien for five years. But in the late summer of 2016 I had made it more than a year without any sleep meds at all. That ended the day of Andrew’s confession. The mental swirl that began then took several weeks to contain, and during that time I began eating Tylenol PM like M&Ms.
I’m still pissed off at Andrew about that.
I spent most of the rest of the day in the Coordinated office with Regan. She’d already passed the word of Andrew’s confession up the line. Over the course of the day Tom composed an email firing Andrew and I forwarded it. Colleen, who’d been informed of my suspicions but didn’t really know the reasons for them, came by the office to give me hell before leaving for another assignment for the day. I tried to apologize and she quite rightly walked away. She stopped on the other end of the office and said what she had come to say.
Later, when Deb and I had rented a 5,000-square foot former gym with 20-foot ceilings to use for a Get Out The Vote staging location, I took some time to get Colleen to carry on a conversation with me in the cavernous space. I backed away from her and had her face the wall and faced away myself to figure out exactly how and why her voice sometimes just disappeared. My working theory is that in the multiple tones that make up any voice, Colleen’s has more highs, the ones that sixty-year-old ears start to lose. It’s a guess, and I’ll ask an expert one day.
But on Aug. 16 in the Coordinated office, all I knew what that a small woman across an office from me was giving me hell. The occasional word would make it across the space between us, and Regan was listening quietly. But as to the content itself, all I could know was that this was one of the most heartfelt moments in the life of a young person I had deeply wronged. I hoped I had the right expression on my face. In retrospect, it’s a little bit funny. But the reaction then, if I’d allowed myself one, would have bordered on hysteria.
Colleen would later refer casually to “that day I stopped on the way to Winchester to yell at you.” Oh, that.
It wasn’t funny. But it was. Because in the wreckage of trust something had to be. Regan drove to the office the next day and there was a black suitcase sitting by the door. She called me, highly agitated. She didn’t think it was a bomb, but she didn’t know what it was. In the wreckage of trust, even a suitcase could be dangerous. I knew it was the voter registration kit I’d given Andrew. I drove to the office and put it in the back of my SUV. It wasn’t funny, but it was. Everything was dangerous for a day. A mutual friend called me to ask about what was going on. He was a friend of Andrew, and I told him it wasn’t my story to tell yet. Regan was sitting across from me when I talked to him. He called her next. In the wreckage of trust, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to tell him. At one point, trying to find one more way to say she couldn’t say anything, she said it wasn’t her story to tell. It wasn’t funny, but it was.
Nothing was a goddamned bit funny.