The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

Speak. Say something.

  “Who is this? . . . Anna, is that you?”

  “Help me.” It comes out in a whisper. Did she hear me?

  “Anna? What did you just say? Sweetheart, is something wrong?”

  “Help me.”

  And she does. Soothes me with her calming voice. Names it: panic attack. She has me say the address. Says she’s going to get up now, get in her car. Put the address into her GPS and come to me. She’ll bring the Xanax, she says. She’ll be right here. She’s coming.

  I’m downstairs, waiting at the front window, when I see her headlights. I unlock the door. Open it, let her in, and fall against her, sobbing. “I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was dying.”

  “It’s all right, Anna. I’m here now. Come on. Let’s get you up to bed. You’re all right now. I’m going to stay with you.”

  “No, you can’t. I promised him.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She takes my hand in hers. “Come with me.”

  At the base of the stairs, I stop. Look over my shoulder and into the living room. The recliner’s empty, the blanket’s on the floor. Marissa’s woken up and gone to bed.

  “Come on now, Anna. Come upstairs. . . . That’s it. Now get under the covers. You feel cold. There you go. Good girl. Now just hold on a second. I’ll be right back.”

  She returns from the bathroom with a cup of water. I take the pill she gives me. Swallow it. She gets into bed. Places her body against mine and holds me. Massages my temple with her thumb. “It’s all right now, baby. I’m here. You’re here with me.”

  “I was up here, trying to get to sleep, but I started thinking about my kids. Worrying about them, and then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack.”

  “I know, sweetheart. But just try to relax now. Okay?”

  “Andrew and I were downstairs. This movie was on, and Marissa—”

  “Shssh. Close your eyes and rest.”

  “He started asking me about when I was a kid. About things I never talk about. And then when I came back up to bed . . . Viveca, there are things that happened when I was little. Bad things.”

  “Shssh. You can tell me about them, Anna, but right now you just need to relax and go to sleep.”

  “Okay. Okay, Viveca.”

  Lying there in the dark, I can’t see the photographs on the bureau, but it’s as if I can feel him looking at me. I’m sorry, Orion. I couldn’t keep my promise. I need her here. I’m worried about the kids, Orion. Did you notice anything about them when they visited you? Why did Andrew and his girl break their engagement? It wasn’t because of me, was it? Why did Ariane decide to get pregnant that way? She’s still young. . . . But okay, Viveca’s right. I need to let it all go and get to sleep. And Marissa’s gotten herself up to bed. She looked so uncomfortable asleep in that chair. All three of them are down the hall, asleep. And no matter why Ariane got pregnant, her child is growing inside her, its tiny heart beating away. . . . In the quiet, I listen to Viveca’s rhythmic breathing. Feel the steady beat of her heart. Her warmth relaxes me, and her arm resting against my back makes me feel safe. I called her, and she came. Took care of me. . . .

  I’m starting to doze now. Don’t fight it, Annie. Just let it go. . . .

  When I wake up, I lie still, confused for a few seconds about where I am. Okay, now I remember. Our bed. The yellow walls, the curtains I hung after he installed the rods. Then it comes back to me: the strange, paralyzing fear that came over me last night. Panic attack, she said. Then she came, brought me up here, got me to sleep. . . .

  It’s our wedding day! I reach out to touch her, but my hand comes down on the empty mattress. A car starts outside. I get up, go over to the window. Watch her back down the driveway and out into the street. She puts on her headlights. Puts the car into gear and drives away. The sunrise is pretty, a mother-of-pearl pink beyond the trees. . . .

  I see it on the bureau: the note in her beautiful, flowing penmanship.

  Good morning, darling. I wanted to get up and out of here before any of the kids woke up—respect the family boundaries. You were sleeping so peacefully, I didn’t have the heart to wake you up. I’m so sorry you had a bad night, but don’t dwell on that. Think about today and all of our tomorrows. I love you, Anna.~ V

  And I love her, too. I need her. I want to marry her, go with her to Greece and see the things she wants to show me: those sun-bleached houses built into the hill, the blue Aegean, the red hibiscus against the snow-white fence. My doubts are gone, and I’m filled with hope. The sunrise is beautiful, the sky is clear. It’s going to be a beautiful day.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Kent Kelly

  At the hardware store, I got promoted to the sales floor. All those fix-it lessons Uncle Chick had given me came in handy, and I was good at selling. I was a natural, they said. Some customer would come in for a can of paint or a package of picture hooks and leave with a quartz heater for their garage or a socket wrench set that was on sale. Impulse buys: that was my specialty once I realized how gullible people could be. I sold this one lady patio furniture in November, and I’m not even talking clearance prices. After a while, I got another promotion: assistant sales manager. They still let me be the key guy, though. There was something about cutting keys that felt satisfying. Years later, when I mentioned that to some court-ordered shrink who was treating me, he said, “Well, Kent, there’s something phallic about a key, isn’t there? You stick it into a lock and voilà.” He was so far off base, I couldn’t help laughing at him. For me, it was more about hearing my name over the loudspeaker. “Kent Kelly to the key machine, please. Kent to keys.” I was a somebody at that store—the assistant manager and the key guy.

  At the flophouse where I lived, this guy Mitch moved into Daisy’s old room. He was a tattoo artist. Worked at a storefront place two streets over called Marked Men. (This was before every chick in the universe started getting tattooed.) There was a porn shop next door to Marked Men, and Mitch worked there a couple of nights, too. He was closer to my father’s age than mine, but we got to be friends. We’d smoke weed together, play cards, go out for breakfast or to the movies on Sundays, which, like I said, was always the hardest day of the week for me. One Sunday afternoon, he opened up the shop and gave me a tat free of charge—a cobra, its body coiled around my bicep, its hooded head raised and ready to strike. Mitch said a paying customer would have had to fork over seventy-five bucks for it. It hurt like a motherfucker for a day or so, itched for a couple more, but it was worth it. When I wore short sleeves at work, people would ask me to pull up my sleeve so they could see the whole thing. Tell me it was cool. I didn’t know Mitch had an ulterior motive until the night we were hanging out in his room doing vodka shots and he reached over and put his hand on my crotch. At first, I was so stunned that I just sat there letting him. But when he went for my zipper, I grabbed his wrist and gave him his hand back. “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Nothing. What are you, a fag or something? Because I’m not.”

  “Don’t knock it till you try it,” he said. “A guy knows a lot more about what makes another guy feel good than a woman does.”

  I shook my head. “I’m just not into that kind of action.”

  A few minutes and a couple of vodkas later, he asked me what kind of action I was into. I never would have told him if I wasn’t shit-faced.

  The next night there was a knock on my door, and when I answered it, there was Mitch. He handed me a magazine called Young Love. The porn shop where he pinch-hit kept stuff like that in the back, he said. “Have fun.” I stood there, watching him walk down the hall to his room.

  The pictures in that magazine excited me, but they shocked me, too. I was pretty streetwise by then but still naïve about some stuff. I guess I’d more or less assumed I was the only guy in the world who liked them that age, but Young Love let me know I wasn’t. Over the next several days, I looked at it so many times that the binding fell apart
.

  From there, one thing led to another. Mitch and I had an agreement. He kept me supplied with kiddie porn, and I let him do stuff. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it was a means to an end. This was years before all that shit became available on the Internet. After I started selling life insurance and could afford a computer, it was like someone had handed me the key to the candy store. At least that was what it was like until those two plainclothes detectives showed up at the door of my condo, read me my rights, and walked out with my hard drive. But that happened a lot later, when I was in my forties and making decent money. The lawyer I hired couldn’t get the charges dropped, but he got me off with just a fine. With what he charged me plus what I had to fork over to the government, someone might as well have shoved a gun against my ribs and said, “Stick ’em up.” But at least in terms of jail time, I dodged a bullet. Dodged another one in terms of my job. The Duffy Insurance Agency was none the wiser. By then, I had four framed “Sales Manager of the Month” certificates hanging on the wall in my cubicle and four three-hundred-dollar sports jackets hanging in my closet. It didn’t much matter if it was out-of-season patio furniture or life insurance policies: I was goddamned good at whatever it was I had to sell.

  I’ve done eight little girls over the years. I have Polaroids of some of them, and memories of every single one. What I’d do was rent apartments in smaller towns but cruise city kids. Get what I wanted and then get back on I-95 and disappear six or seven exits down the highway. I’d zero in on lonely kids for the most part—girls who, in their own way, were as starved for attention as those old folks at Eldredge Eldercare, as neglected as I was when I was a kid. This one girl, Lawanda? In Bridgeport? She was the only black kid I ever did. Her mom was a hooker who, when she worked the streets, would give her daughter a few bucks and drop her off at McDonald’s. You know how easy it is to pick up a kid when McDonald’s is her babysitter?

  When you’re a grown man who’s circling a little girl, you’ve got to be patient. If you make your move before the kid and her mom both trust you—begin to need you—then it can all go south. But if you bide your time, within a month or so, you’re staying the night, going to Wal-Mart with them, giving the kid rides to gymnastics or some other little girl’s birthday party. For one thing, the moms whose daughters I’m interested in are struggling to make ends meet—working a job with long hours or, even better, two jobs. And for another thing, they’re lonely, too. Starved for attention and romance. So you start pinch-hitting for them if their regular sitter’s sick, maybe do a load of laundry if you notice that the hamper’s full. When they get home from work, you rub their aching feet or massage the tension out of their shoulders, listen to their gripes about their crap-head boss or their difficult coworker. You tell them they’re pretty, and if they try to dismiss the compliment, you look them straight in the eye and say, “No, seriously, you are.” And they look back at you, hopeful as hell, blinking back all of their past disappointments. See, I’m lucky because my diagnosis is Pedophilia, Nonexclusive Type, “nonexclusive” meaning that, although it’s little girls who turn me on, I can do the mothers, too, even if I have to think about their daughters to help me cross the finish line. And when Mom’s getting hers on a regular basis, it’s easier for her to stay blind about what might be going on when she’s not there.

  Do I feel guilty sometimes? Sure. Like I said, I’m not a monster. Case in point: the day I found out my mother had died and been buried two weeks earlier, I started banging my head against the wall, hard as I could. Then I stumbled down the street to the walk-in clinic. Had to get stitches in my forehead. Hey, I’ve known monsters—in prison, in a therapy group for sexual predators they made me go to—and believe me, I’m a different breed than those guys. The way I look at it, I’m just a guy who needs sex like any other guy, except that I’m wired a little differently than most, which, when you think about it, is kind of like having a disability. Think about it. Most men can go to a bar or go online, pick up some pussy, and be done with it. Whereas I’ve got to always be looking over my shoulder, risking arrest because society’s so fucking squeamish and hypocritical about it. You walk through the girls’ department of any department store in the country, and they’ve got the mannequins dressed up like little sluts. They sell makeup for little kids, for chrissake. But as far as the law’s concerned, it’s strictly look but don’t touch. And don’t kid yourself. Some of these little girls can be pretty seductive. They’ll climb up in your lap and want to cuddle, touch their fingers to your face so that they can feel how scratchy your whiskers are. And take it from me: some of these kids, once you’ve initiated them, want it, too. Because, hey, sex feels good no matter what age you are. I gave a ten-year-old an orgasm once and don’t tell me I didn’t, like that one facilitator said in one of those groups they made me go to. I mean, who was there? Me or that battle-ax? . . .

  But yeah, I do feel guilty sometimes. Hate myself, even, once the rush is over, especially when they cry. This one guy I knew in prison? Eamon? He killed a kid who wouldn’t stop crying. His girlfriend’s little boy; he flung him headfirst into a wall. Now there’s a monster for you. And I’m lumped in the same category as that sociopath? Uh-uh. No way. The day I picked up the paper and read that Lawanda had been murdered by her mother’s meth head boyfriend, I felt so bad about it that I cried like a baby.

  This woman Michelle I met when I lived in Stamford was a bit of a cow, but she was also a widow, so there was no ex-husband to contend with. (The exes can be tricky if they’re still invested in their kids’ lives, or if it wasn’t them who wanted the divorce.) Her daughter Lily was a beautiful kid—ten years old, sweet and innocent, with frizzy red hair and tiny pink nipples. Out of all the little girls I’ve done, Lily came the closest to Annie.

  I moved in with them during summertime. The setup was perfect because Michelle played on a softball team. She was their pitcher, and from what I could see, the main reason why her team was leading the league. We’d go to her games in two separate cars. Lily and I would sit in the bleachers and watch for maybe three or four innings. Then I’d take her home and get her ready for bed. Michelle usually went out to a bar with her teammates after their game, so she wouldn’t get home until after ten most of the time, and by then I’d have gotten what I wanted and Lily would be asleep.

  But I got careless one night. Got a little too rough with Lily, and I was so focused on getting the kid to stop crying about the bleeding that I didn’t even realize it had started raining heavily. That the game had been called. I didn’t hear Michelle’s car pull into the driveway. Didn’t hear her enter the house or walk down the hall toward Lily’s room. When I looked up, there she was in the doorway, sopping wet, still in her uniform. It got ugly. Lily was screaming, Michelle was screaming and throwing whatever she could grab at me as I hurried toward the door, dressing myself and trying to find my friggin’ car keys. She nailed me with these heavy brass bookends. One of them clipped me on the shoulder, the other landed hard against the small of my back. I mean, shit, she was their star pitcher. Trust me, that bitch had an arm on her, and her aim was accurate.

  Gunning it back to my place, I made an emergency escape plan. I’d go back to my apartment, throw a few things in a bag, and drive to Providence where Mitch lived. Disappear there for a while. My crucial mistake was stopping at the ATM for cash on the way to my place. I was backing my car out of the driveway when a cruiser pulled in front of it, blocking my way. That was it, and I knew it. The jig was finally up.

  I wrote Michelle an impassioned letter, promising that I’d get help and begging her to forgive me, a.k.a. to drop the charges. It came back a week later, unopened. My lawyer told me we should plea-bargain. “The mom’s out for blood and they’ve got the girl’s testimony on video. And if I know Judge Dwyer, he’ll rule that that kiddie porn prior of yours is admissible. The deck’s stacked against you, Kent. Take the deal.”

  The deal was a ten-year sentence, suspended after seven. I left the courtroom cou
rtesy of DOC and was processed into the society of scumbags at Enfield Correctional. My new peers were rapists, skinheads, arsonists, contract murderers. And trust me, when you enter the hell that’s an American prison with a pedophile conviction—when word gets around that a new “short-eyes” has arrived on the compound—you’re in for special treatment. At Enfield, I got shanked in the med line, had my food spat on by the servers as I went through the chow line, got beaten up and raped by the tattooed muscleheads who spend their days lifting weights and their shower time meting out a justice system of their own, often with a thumbs-up from the COs, who have it in for us short-eyes, too. “So what the hell do you want me to do about it?” one CO asked me when I showed him the turds that some goon had shat onto my mattress. I told him I needed to be moved to a different unit. Two weeks’ worth of torment later, a different CO opened my cell door. “Let’s go, Kelly,” he said. “You’re moving.”

  Finally, I thought. “Where to?”

  “Solitary. The deputy warden’s issued you a ticket.”

  “For what?”

  “For licking your lips and making goo goo eyes at someone’s little girl in the visiting room.”

  “That’s bull,” I said. “It didn’t happen.” It didn’t!

  “Were you in the visiting room Friday afternoon?” I told him I was—that I’d had a legal visit. “Well, then. Come on. Move it.” I was innocent, but it was futile to object.

  I was in seg for the next ten days. Nothing to do, nothing to read. I was going stir-crazy, thinking about everything from the day I’d flushed those baby gerbils down the crapper to the night of the flood. When they put me back in gen pop, the beat-down I took was so vicious that I lost my left eye. After I got out of the infirmary, I wrote the warden a letter, telling him I was thinking of suing the state and him personally. That was when they transferred me to Gardner, a medium-security facility that houses more drug dealers and white-collar crooks than killers. But there were goons in Gardner, too. “Cyclops,” they nicknamed me. Nice, huh? I went along with my counselor’s suggestion for survival: pass the word around that I was doing a bid for check-kiting. Whatever prison you’re in, you have an easier ride if your fellow felons think you’re something other than a child molester. At Gardner, I applied for the nurse’s aide program. Waited until I was ten months away from the end of my sentence before I got in.