Epilogue: The Fallout

Estimated reading time: 24 minutes

* * * * *

As forewarned, Ted did not read my letter of resignation aloud at the board’s Monday meeting, which fell three days after my resignation, though he did say, “As is already widely known, Jenna Brownson has resigned, citing personal and family reasons. We wish her mother well.” While I was pleased he’d specifically mentioned my mom, his failure to make any commentary about my time on the board served, in my mind, as the first overt act by one of the remaining four men on the board to stoke the flames of rumor.

Though I wouldn’t have believed it at the time, what had been tacitly forewarned—in Ted’s ignorant claim of knowing the whole story—was the uninvited speculation that weaves itself insidiously into the social fabric of any small town. In the ensuing weeks, months—even years—after my ousting, people would get snippets of the story, believe themselves to have reliable facts to explain why I stepped down, and thereafter feel entitled to draw conclusions, many of which were erroneous, nearly all of which were laden with scathing judgment, schadenfreude, or both.

I first suspected the general lack of discretion exercised by those who had been in the know (members of the board, the chief, the deputy chief, town counsel, the town administrator, and the assistant town administrator) when people in Littleton began to distance themselves from me, forcing me to a long period of self-imposed isolation. And after only a week, I began a hibernation with forays exclusively limited to my yoga studio (where the practice itself encouraged quiet self-reflection), to shuttling my oldest to school (where I’d not need to interact with anyone), and to the grocery store (where, list in hand and head down, I would go during off-hours in the hopes of seeing the fewest number of townspeople who might be inclined to gently ask, boldly comment, or simply cast their cruel glances in my direction). You might be thinking Come on, Jenna, was it really that bad?

It was.

In late April, Alex McCurdy called me with a forewarning of his own: “We’ve had several executive session meetings already, and the chief is trying to negotiate an early retirement. And I’m not having it. I’m this close to calling the press.”—Here, I pictured Alex holding a rancorous thumb and righteous index finger all of an inch apart—“If the board refuses to do anything to hold the chief accountable, don’t be surprised if you get a call from The Globe. After what happened with you, there’s no way I’m going to stand by and allow the board to turn a blind eye to his involvement in all of this.”

My ire, kneejerk in its arrival, kicked in with Alex’s presumptuous assertion that he had a clear idea of what all of this, in reality, had included, but my anger was soon eclipsed by terror in imagining a phone call with a Boston-based journalist who would have only the scantest of details but with a ready raft of probing questions in hand would be well poised to tease out what happened. While I’d elbow-crawled through a short interview with a reporter from The Littleton Independent seven weeks earlier, The Boston Globe, being a much bigger publication, would likely be looking for a much bigger story, which I had the sense Alex was more than happy to outline to get the ball of scandal rolling for a feature in the MertoWest section titled something pithy, like “Selectman Resigns, Chief Remains: Former Fire Chief Isn’t Having It.”

Of course, I presumed Alex’s motivations to harm the chief were vengeful; Alex himself had suffered harm of an indefinite but unforgettable type at the hands of the chief. But did Alex not understand how his commitment to equitable consequences might put into motion everything the chief had cunningly, even sadistically set down in his executive summary: my disbarment, Rob’s loss of his professional license to practice psychotherapy, our separate incarcerations, our children’s involuntary and traumatic displacement from our home? If all that came out, my life as I knew it would be over, and my resignation would have been for nothing.  

“Alex, I really don’t know what I would say to The Globe,” I said as Rob caught my panicked expression which I hoped didn’t reveal that I was having my first of many suicidal thoughts.

“Well, you’re going to need to say something,” Alex said matter-of-factly. A long moment or two tethered between us. Alex cleared his throat and said, “Jenna, I’m adamant about this. If they don’t do the right thing, I’m going to go to the press with the details of our last few executive sessions. If they don’t get on board quick and apply some equity, then it’s gloves off.”

Although I knew no comment was an outlet available to me, no comment had always struck me as a tacit admission to whatever had been implied by the question itself. And I knew any no comment leaving my mouth would come off, first, as evasive and then as a lie. Because the truth of the matter was that I had many comments, but the shock and disorientation of my ousting—from having gone from graciously welcomed local busybody to a resoundingly shunned hermit—had not yet coalesced into clear thoughts, a navigable timeline, or a cohesive story.

Everything was still raw and tender.

“You’re shaking,” Rob said as he slipped my phone out of my hand and placed it down.

The last seven weeks had been a readjustment for us both. I’d been moving around him in a state of petrification with a looming fear that one wrong word would become hammer-like and shatter our fragile marriage. The intensity of the weeks leading up to my resignation had covered me with a sour residue of violence and violation, leaving me to wonder if it was possible—in a clinical sense—to develop PTSD from what I’d been through. Of course, I hadn’t been the victim of a digital rape nor was I married to a man who unemotionally wrote of a potential wife-less future where he might have to seek the shadows, possibly alone or in another community but somehow it seemed to me that the road to power and control in my hometown was littered with the corpses of women who wanted little more than to be respected and valued. And though it is true I knew, intellectually, that I’d hurt my husband, emotionally, all my recent energies had been spent on trying to quiet the screams of insecurity that greeted me every morning and then mocked me to sleep each night.

“Alex said that The Globe might be calling,” I told Rob. I felt faint and pulled out a chair to catch myself before I fell.

Rob knelt down, placed his hand on my knee, and said, “Seems a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“I got the impression Alex is the only one on the board who thinks the chief’s in need of some punishment of his own. And now, if the other three don’t step in line, then the remedy—as Alex sees it—is through media exposure.”

Rob puffed out a long breath. “So, what are you going to do?” he asked not at all impatient, his eyes soft and supportive.

After a moment of reflection, I said, “I’m going to write a book.”

* * * * *

So, the next day, on the twenty-fifth of April, instead of getting out of bed in the dark and drinking scalding, black coffee as I doom-scrolled social media to see if my concerns over my story spinning out of control could be confirmed, I sat before my laptop and began. Every morning for fifty-seven consecutive mornings, I reduced to writing everything I’d experienced, starting with Alex Pratt’s sales pitch about the merits of my pulling candidacy papers and ending on the day of my resignation.

In the evenings of those writing days, I’d read select passages from TRIX to Rob, who with a glass of red wine in hand, listened to my reconstruction of what Lara Jenson had lived through. Lara was not a mother of four young children and a wife of a decade and a half, but a childless young widow who spent her workdays in the bowels of Stanfield District Court advocating for her mentally ill, poor, drug-addicted, and usually guilty and properly charged clients, as I had once done at the Lowell District Court when I worked as a public defender. Like myself, Lara Jenson had few friends and always wanted more. Though Lara and I each had a Cabinet, in TRIX, Lara relied most heavily on Mitch Bradford and Ray Lawrence, her professional mentor (a fatherly veteran criminal defense attorney) and her therapist (a quiet and kind man who broke tradition when taking Lara on as a client as his bailiwick had always been angry, violent men). Rob, of course, immediately spotted himself in Ray, but Mitch’s rabid advocacy for justice and his smug, though properly placed contempt for the police also squared with the stoic values of my husband, who patiently sat and listened as I split him into these two fictional characters and recalled in writing my monthslong distraction with the chief, whom in TRIX, I’d named Sean Ryan.   

In the early evenings of those writing days, I would cook dinner as I listened to my copies of the CDs I’d given the chief during his brief musical education with me as his teacher. It didn’t take long for me to be convinced that the lyrics of Anna Begins by Counting Crows might have been penned by the chief himself during our intoxicating entanglement. The “friend” featured in the lyrics could’ve been George from the Lil’ Peach and “she/Anna” could’ve been easy substitutes for me. A recurring lyric in Anna Begins is “This isn’t love”—a claim that might lead to the reasonable conclusion that what happened never rose to the storied heights of romantic love, but I heard it otherwise and imagined the chief did as well as what had occurred between us was so otherworldly that to affix the word love to it would’ve been not only an error of definition but a complete misstatement of what was.

A few days after I typed THE END—through tears, for I was proud to have accomplished the task of writing a book and felt some finality in the act of tapping out those six letters—our family traveled to Los Angeles to meet my niece, just ten days old, and thereafter trekked north for nearly three weeks of couchsurfing with strangers and camping in national parks.

The Town of Littleton held the special election to fill my empty seat while we were away, and the candidate I preferred did not win. I was mindful not to publicly endorse her as it seemed to me that the town-wide conventional wisdom (for those espousing an interest in town politics and likely openly discussing my worth as a person) was that I was imbued with something of a Midas touch, but more fecal than golden. Unsurprisingly, the middle-aged, white guy with an impressive combover who drove what smacked of a mid-life-crisis convertible BMW won.

The fragile sense of peace and the measure of soul-restoration that I’d achieved on the west coast evaporated as soon as I saw the Entering Littleton sign on the way home from Logan. And while I was done with my story of Lara and Sean, the people of Littleton were not.

* * * * *

Having found both distraction and comfort in words, I continued my exile and wrote another book.

FLEET FILES begins like this:

Arnold Tucker had no business being the newest chief of police for the city of Fleet. He knew it, and anyone who was paying any attention knew it, too. Having just signed a three-year contract with an annual salary for far more than he would ever be worth, Arnold figured his best course of action would be to privately meet with the two sergeants on the Fleet force and endorse the clean-slate approach: forget the past and move on.

When Arnold asked both of the sergeants into his freshly-painted corner office with the oversized executive desk, he hoped they would read his email as an order and not ignore it, thinking it merely an invitation. Arnold was acutely aware of the fact that his coworkers did not take him seriously due to his ongoing gaffes and blunders. But now with Arnold as chief, he intended to change people’s opinions. He wanted the staff to know that things were going to be better—all around. Arnold’s short-term plan was to use the meetings with the department’s sergeants to accomplish two goals: first, to encourage collective amnesia; second, as informal interviews for the lieutenant’s seat which Arnold had just vacated.

Over the expanse of his big wooden desk, Arnold looked thoughtfully at Sergeant Natalie Martin as he tried to recall what he had settled on as his opening salvo. His stomach churned a bit and sent up the residue from his greasy breakfast. Arnold needed to be careful with his words. Of the two sergeants, Natalie was the one who, upon hearing of Chief Daniel Clayton’s resignation, made her intentions known: she was going to apply to be the next chief of police in the City of Fleet. However, Natalie never had the chance to even interview; the job was never posted. Small town politics—not merit—governed this most recent myopic hire. The city council simply promoted the longest-serving, highest-ranked person on the force rather than forming a hiring committee and funding the cost of a full-fledged search. Arnold’s ascent was neither precipitous nor earned; he’d simply stuck around long enough.

He knew it, and Natalie knew it, too.

* * * * *

Fifty-seven days and 106,847 words later, I typed THE END on the last page of FLEET FILES and decided to keep writing as I’d come to believe that my preoccupation with words was the only thing keeping fistfuls of pills from being swallowed down with buckets of gin.

TRIX, FLEET FILES, MY PLUS ONE, DOUBLE DIRTY, CARLY’S WAKE, THE RULE OF THREES, and SPECTRE IN THE SUN were all written between April 25, 2014, and February 29, 2016. Mitch Bradford, that veteran lawyer from TRIX, is the main character in two of these books; Ray Lawrence, psychotherapist extraordinaire, appears in each and every one of my manuscripts. (Obviously, I love Ray.)

You might be thinking: Seven books in twenty-two months? That doesn’t sound possible. Let me assure you, it is. My daily escapes into my created world were more comfortable than living in my real one. And yet, my fingers were tired and it was getting on for me to get back to my real world. The salve of a million recorded words left me wondering Well, what’s next, Brownson?

(Bravely, foolishly—who’s to say?): Two weeks later, I stood before Diane, Littleton’s Town Clerk, and requested candidacy papers. I wanted to serve again on the Library Board of Trustees. The election was uncontested, but it was not lost on me that I’d received forty-seven fewer votes than I had when I’d been elected selectman three years beforehand. Given the hateful looks, the aggressive emails, and the unreturned messages of the previous three years, I had a pretty good idea who those forty-seven people were. And in many ways, I didn’t blame them, I only wished they’d had the decency to ask.

* * * * *

After finishing TRIX, I would often find myself ruminating over the actions and underlying motivations of the people who I’d come to know during my short time as a selectman. I’ve hypothesized scenarios of what might have happened had different choices been made. And I’ve struggled to come to terms with it all.

In no particular order, here’s some of what I’ve come up with:

Early on in my coffees with the chief in his office, I’d told him anecdotes about my past run-ins with the police: first, at age thirteen, my truth-or-dare flashing of a passing car that turned out to be an LPD cruiser; and then later, in college, my Super-gluing a football player in his dorm room my freshman year and then another prank my junior year that led to a dramatic, middle-of-the-night police interrogation and my subsequent easy confession wherein I refused to name my accomplices.

I think the moment the chief saw the anonymous letter—with its cut-out, glued-on letters not unlike a ransom note, circa 1980—he knew I was its author. (While the remote possibility exists that the chief thought Rob might have penned it—a rumor to that effect floated around LPD for a while—my husband’s value system would place anonymous letter-writing in the category of undignified, and thereby beneath him.) I believe when the chief first held the letter in his hand, the first thought that crossed his mind was Holy shit, Brownson wrote this, followed quickly by: I’m going to hold onto this; it may prove useful someday.

Now you might be inclined to ask with some measure of incredulity, “Oh, come on, Jenna, do you really believe when he got the letter in December that he purposely held onto it to use against you some time down the road?”

Ah, yep.

Because that’s exactly what happened.

The board’s inquiry into the allegation of digital rape was in its embryonic stages when the chief confronted me about bringing the information to light. And while I assured him that I had absolutely no agenda on how the matter unfolded, I lived through this scene:

The pink in his cheeks transitioned to hot garnet, his eyelids had narrowed into horizontal slices of rage and judgment. All this physical foreshadowing was a fitting prelude. He snarled at me, “You’re never getting the letter back.”

I shook my head. So, it comes down to that, I thought. I had no urge to try to persuade him to follow through with his promise, no energy to try to convince him to listen to reason, and instead, enjoyed the surprise unfold across his now carmine expression when I said, “I don’t need it.”

“Oh, you don’t?” he asked, noticeably taken aback by my boldness.

“No. No, I do not. The letter hurts you as much as it hurts me. In fact, I would think it hurts you more than it could ever hurt me. Rob knows already; I doubt you can say the same thing about your wife. And even if you’re not thoughtful enough to consider her in this calculation, you are smart enough not to hurt yourself. What the letter brings is nothing but exposure and scandal. You don’t want that, and I certainly don’t want that either. So, it seems to me the letter is nothing now.”

“You think so?” he goaded. “I wouldn’t be so sure, Jenna. . . . ”

While I was confident I’d foreclosed the possibility of the letter ever becoming significant with the solid reasoning I’d set forth for the chief, less than forty-eight hours later, I was both impressed and unsurprised to be on the receiving end of a call from Tom requesting me to meet with him and Bonnie to learn how they intended to launch a bogus and distracting inquiry into sexual harassment. The chief and deputy were also warned of the inquiry, so the two of them had a full week to consider how the sexual harassment inquiry might go: The chief wouldn’t have been able to deny his active participation in our relationship, so the sexual harassment claim had no teeth. But if the letter came into play, then maybe that could be employed to force me out. And a week later, when Tom and Bonnie came to my office to discuss the spurious allegation of sexual harassment in the workplace—mind you, they were under no obligation to even explore the matter as there was no complaint to justify their shameless voyeurism—the letter came up during their interview of me, which happened after the ones with the chief and the deputy chief.

Not infrequently I’ve wondered what might have happened if I were to have said Oh, you want to bring that up now? You missed your chance back in early January when I made a full confession. Remember how you opted to do nothing then? But okay, go ahead and bring it up. We’ll see how that plays out.

Of course, that didn’t happen.

And with the chief’s executive summary in hand—with its predictions of my cataclysmic ruin and the collateral damage it would cause Rob and our children—I believed the chief would stop at nothing to secure my downfall. Looking back, I wish I’d been brave and principled, but I was neither. I was terrified.

So yes, I believe when the chief saw the letter and deemed me its author, he tucked it away for his future use. The chief had seen his predecessor use a gag order to shut down any and all speculation over why Matt King had been put on administrative leave in the wake of the digital rape allegation. The chief himself had used a gag order to keep Sergeant Lisa Bonney from discussing her ousting from LPD. The culture at LPD by the time of my resignation—and I suspect still today—had a well-established practice of strong-arming decent people into compromising their very ethics out of fear of retaliation, the threat of a lawsuit, or something unimaginably worse.

And I was no exception.

Strangely enough in the intervening years, I’ve come to appreciate the letter for its power to end what had existed between the chief and me. You see, I don’t think the chief or I had the strength to exit our entanglement on our own. There needed to be something outside of our control to force a wedge between us. We were hurtling toward a time when each of us was getting closer to making irreparable choices, all of which would’ve had profound and negative reverberating effects for the people we loved. The letter, symbolically and literally, saved us from destroying the lives we’d created long before our paths crossed. (One of the ways I’ve been able to spend so much time thinking about these events is by sketching a silver-lining around select clouds of shit. Letter = one large shit-cloud.)

And still, I’ve wondered about what might have happened were there never to have been a letter, were there never to have been an allegation of digital rape. Hypothetically, had the chief and I run away together, we likely would have discovered very quickly how very incompatible we were. In fact, I could almost picture myself expressing my misgivings over our selfish choice—maybe at a gas station where the chief was gassing up Piglet—only to be met with a roundhouse punch to the face. I’m not saying that the chief at his core is a violent man, but the craziness between us was such that I couldn’t have completely ruled out uncharacteristic behavior—in him or me. In fact, I would’ve been open to just about anything to keep the intoxication at the same head-spinning level we obviously both got off on, which might have included a little A&B. In some ways, the chief’s we can’t do this mantra probably saved me a black eye and a broken cheekbone, but I bear invisible scars all the same.

Those disfigurements have been soothed over the years thanks to Rob, who in the telling of this story has emerged the hero who, in his own words, would tell you I won: I got the girl. But still, you might be thinking Rob’s too good for you, Jenna. Your dalliance and your behavior ought to have resulted in him divorcing you. Maybe, but here’s how I like to see it: On my riverside walk in November with the chief, I’d told him this:

“You’re it for me.” I said this with such an abiding sureness that it only seemed to reinforce how rare my connection to him was for me. “John, you’re the only one. I’m never going to feel this way again about anyone. Seven billion people on the planet and I had to find you.”

And while I’d said these words privately, soon thereafter Rob learned of both my feelings for and pronouncement of them to the chief. But Rob, knowing me as he does, also knew I’d chosen those riverside words carefully: I would never feel this way about anyone else ever again. And as such, Rob could (and should) wholeheartedly believe his remaining years with me will be free of any future distracting entanglements. It’s an ironic sort of insurance policy, but a guarantee nevertheless that my eye will never again wander, that what I’d experienced with the chief was, by true definition, unique—never to be repeated again.

For those of you who have never been overtaken by limerence in the midst of an otherwise healthy and happy marriage, I both envy and pity you. To feel that way is nearly indescribable, but highjacked is about as close as any word comes. GINNED UP, in many ways, could be considered, on the surface, a cautionary tale about the fallibility of the naïve human heart; but at its plumbed depth, GINNED UP, I hope, is a commentary on the permanency of love itself.    

* * * * *

A short while after my resignation, Deputy Chief Matt King was interviewed for the position of Littleton’s Chief of Police by Alex, Jim, Joe, and Ted. Whether the four remaining board members, perhaps under the guidance (or the dissuasion) of Keith Bergman and Tom Harrington, actually conducted a thorough investigation of the allegation of digital rape, I do not know. What I do know is that all four selectmen voted to install Matt King to the position of Chief of Police and over the course of his four years and some months as chief, he received $580,362.41 in taxpayer-funded compensation.

·         Ted Doucette completed his three-year term two months after my resignation. He has not run for public office since.

·         Jim Karr ran for reelection in the spring of 2014 and (despite my enthusiastic endorsement) won another three-term. When he ran again, three year later, he lost.

·         Joe Knox remains on the board, where he has continuously served since 2010. He is seeking his fourth reelection this spring.

·         Alex McCurdy served until the end of his term in 2015. He did not seek reelection. His house was vandalized with red spray paint months after my resignation. Oh, and he never called The Globe.

·         Tom Harrington continues to work as town counsel to the Town of Littleton.

·         Keith Bergman retired as town administrator in the fall of 2018.

·         Bonnie Holston committed suicide in July 2019. (That mismanaged municipal tragedy, which left two children motherless, is a story for another day.)

The chief’s wife confronted me three times: once in person in the parking lot behind my office and in two phone calls: one before the in-person confrontation, one after. All three times, I listened to what she felt she needed to say and offered apologies for my role in the matter. I’ve thought about her over the years more than I ever would have predicted, especially so during the serialized publication of this memoir. A few people asked me, “What do you think she thinks of all of this?” My response was “I told the chief that I wouldn’t be the one to tell her, and I wasn’t. If anything I’ve written about is new information to her, that’s on him. He had eight years to tell her what really happened.” Of course, maybe the chief kept bits and pieces of our story from her. If he did, I’d like to think that he chose to do so to have a few scraps of memory in his private attic, just for him, and not because he was reluctant to be fully disclosing.

* * * * *

In July 2014, when the newspaper reported on the May early retirement of Chief John Kelly, I read the article with interest and couldn’t help but wonder about this quote of his which objectively related to an experience he had when responding to an ugly car accident where two teenaged boys were badly hurt:

Because you know what you’re supposed to do and you do it,

and you know this person is living a life far diminished from what he wanted.

It was the use of the word diminished that gave me pause as this was a word that had existed in our shared lexicon. The chief’s choice to use the word led me toward my own conjecture: The first half of his quote sounded like a reframing of something he had once written to me: We can’t do this. There is no happy ending here that exists in reality. It only exists in the attic. The chief’s words at the time were a reminder to us both of our obligations to behave in a manner commensurate with the choices we made before our lives intersected. And the second part of his quote came off to me as a veiled existential statement about his own life wherein “this person” to whom he referred was, actually, himself.

But these suspicions of mine would never be confirmed or denied. In fact, nothing I would hypothesize in the years after my resignation would ever receive the benefit of Chief John Kelly’s review or input. (The exception being the three letters I received from the chief’s lawyer relative to this memoir, making clear the chief’s position on the worthwhileness of my setting down this story for all of you to read.)

And while the chief and I, along with our respective families, have each remained in Littleton, he and I have only once in the last eight years been in one another’s presence. It was only a sliver of a moment when we walked in opposite directions: him out of the middle school, where I suspect he’d just voted for the least qualified person in the history of our nation to lead it; and me, into the polling place to vote for the woman.

When I was a just few feet from him, I said, “Hello, Chief,” with a brightness that reflected the historic vote I was about to make and not really in response to having run into him.

While there had been at least a half dozen times the chief and I had driven past each other since my ousting—when every time this occurred the chief made a big show of turning his head away from me irrespective of the speeds at which either of us had been driving—this was the first face-to-face in two and a half years. But this time, on this national—and now personally—historic day, he saw me—in the flesh. So, instead of pretending he didn’t, he simply ignored me and continued walking in the opposite direction.

Over my shoulder, as he scuttled quickly away, I said, “Well, that’s pretty pathetic,” fully aware that my word choice fit the scene as pathetic comes from the Greek root pathetos, which means destined to suffer, which I think we both have.

And I’ve tried to do so gracefully.

In my efforts to make sense of it all, I have discovered the healing power of words—not only for the personal benefit of creating a cohesive and humbling narrative but also for the potential connection between me and a reader who perhaps is a little like me and can feel fragments of their flawed humanity in reading the account about mine.

Without reservation, I will tell you that in the voluntary revealing of the tenderest of underbellies, the sort teeming with complications and imperfections, one is granted freedom. Because it’s in the sharing of our stories where we find true liberation and, ultimately, if done honestly and thoroughly, how we find our way back to ourselves.

 * * * * *

Author’s note: GINNED UP is a memoir, a genre of writing which relies on my memories alone. This memoir is of the events that took place during the course of approximately one year in my life, starting in March 2013.

Over fifty-seven consecutive days in April, May, and June 2014, I reduced to writing a fictionalized version of this period of time. Although I refer to and draw from my original manuscript in the telling of GINNED UP, the original manuscript is merely a memory aid. While I have ample documentation of the many written communications I had at the time this memoir is set, I did not walk around with either an audio or video recorder. Please note that the conversations in this memoir come from my recollections. The words spoken between people are not offered—nor should they be read—as a word-for-word transcript of words said to me or by me. Rather, I provide them in a way that evokes the feeling and meaning of what was said, and therefore, in all instances, the essence of the dialogue is accurate.

* * * * *