Page 78 of Haunted

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what the options are. Knock on his door? Write him a letter? Pretend I never found out?” He takes a sip of coffee and grimaces. “How do you walk up to a man and say, I think you’re my father, and by the way, you paid my mother twenty thousand dollars and never came to find me?”

“You don’t have to do anything right now.”

“I know. But it’s sitting on me.” He looks at the window. “Everything is sitting on me. Alice. The memorial. My father being your boss. I feel like the ground keeps shifting and I can’t get my balance.”

I want to fix this. I want to fix all of it. I want to call Rex Harlow and put him through a wall, and I want to solve Alice’s murder, and I want to make the memorial go away so Jonny never has to stand at a podium and talk about the worst day of his life. But I can’t do any of those things. So I do the one thing I can.

“How’s it going with prepping for your engagements?”

He looks at me. “My what?”

“Your speaking engagements. The conference panel.”

“That’s not until—” He stops. “When is that?”

“Monday.”

“This Monday?”

“You left it on the counter,” I say. “I wanted to see when it was, so I could come along and listen. Did you read the whole thing?”

He rubs his face. “Most of it.”

“There’s a Q&A session with an upper-level communications class. It’s in the contract. They’ve been assigned three episodes of your show and they’re expected to produce ‘meaningful questions and critiques.’”

“Meaningful questions and critiques,” he repeats flatly. “About a travel blog.”

“About you. Your platform. Your choices. These are communications students, Jonny.” I put my mug down. “Wow, are they going to give you a grilling.”

He picks up his coffee again and this time actually drinks it. “Okay. So what do you suggest?”

“Let me throw some questions at you. The kind they’ll ask. Then we’ll see if I’m joking.”

He nods. “Fine. Go.”

I pull up a chair. “You run a travel show in India. What’s your responsibility to expose corruption and injustice in the places you visit?”

“This is not political—it’s a travel blog. My responsibilities are in the arena of giving accurate and helpful travel advice.”

“Good. So if you’re not political, what advice do you give to gay travelers in India?”

He shifts in his chair. “The same advice I’d give somebody going to rural Alabama. Know where you are. Know who’s around you. A city is not a village and a village is not a country, and none of it is the same as the last place you were.”

“So your advice is to go back in the closet.”

“With respect, that’s not what I said.” He sets the mug down. “And I’d want to know why the question assumes I’ve come from somewhere safe. Two men can’t hold hands on most streets in this country either, and I don’t recall anybody calling that going back in the closet. It’s called reading the room.”

“I’m being a student, Jonny. They like to provoke. You think you’re not going to get at least one activist who accuses you of not standing up for gay rights?”

His voice is stronger now, like he’s latched onto something he doesn’t want to let go of. “I’m not a spokesman for gay rights. I’m a travel host. I show people beautiful places and help them not get ripped off. If someone wants to make that into a political statement, that’s their agenda, not mine.”

“But you are a gay man with a platform. Don’t you have a duty to use it?”

“I have a duty to be honest. And honestly? Telling a gay traveler to pay attention to where he is isn’t cowardice. It’s survival, and I have been doing it for nine years, in Goa and in Georgia both.”

That’s good. That’s really good. But they won’t all be reasonable, so I decide to throw a curve ball.

“Try a hostile one,” I say. “A student stands up and says: you left this town to go running around India. Why is that? Did you try to monetize your fame as a survivor of these wildfires to jumpstart your career?”