Henry pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it across the desk. Morgan almost laughed through her tears at his gentility. He probably proposed to his wife on one knee, too, and danced a waltz at his wedding.
“The hurt doesn’t have to be physical or obvious,” Henry said, with the gentle tones of a father talking to a young child. “He did something he should not have, and it has affected you and your family greatly, in many ways, not just the obvious ones, and in some ways that might not become obvious for a long time.”
“I loved him,” she said into the handkerchief.
“I know you did,” Henry said. “And to my mind, that’s just about the very worst part.”
He looked up from her, addressing her parents. “The judge will recess for the afternoon, and Alexandra and I will start to hammer out a plea agreement. I suggest you all go home, the sooner the better, because as soon as court comes back into session and the judge recesses the trial, the reporters are going to swarm. They’ll want a comment. I’m not going to comment, and I’m sure Alex won’t, either. That’ll leave you three to pester. There’s a back door out of the courthouse. Joe, I suggest you bring your car around. I’ll escort the ladies through the building.”
Her dad stood up and went right out the door without a further word. Morgan rose to her feet, staggering slightly with the swimmy sensation in her head, not having eaten any lunch. Her mother caught her elbow. She tried to hand the handkerchief back to Henry, but he waved it away. “No, no. I have plenty. I buy them in bulk.”
Henry walked them out of the building to the back lot, through the employees’ entrance. Before he opened the door, he cautioned, “And don’t answer the phone for any number you don’t recognize. If any press ambushes you, send them to me for comment.”
With this he swung open the door. Morgan had this heady notion of feeling like a movie star for just a moment, dodging paparazzi. With a darting glance around, worried about reporters who might guess where they were, she trotted to the car, which was idling near a big garbage bin. She stopped at the door to the car, happening to look up.
There he was. Performing a similar maneuver, helping his wife into his car, the very same one where they’d been together when the cops banged on the window, when his warm hands had been fumbling with the button on her jeans . . .
Their eyes locked for a moment, then he looked down with no change in expression. Like she was no one.
She’d asked to be allowed to eat in her room and was granted this permission. Her parents were now behaving gingerly around her, and she both hated it and was grateful all at once.
She’d seen this before, with Connor in a mood, or for Jared if someone had teased him that day about his palsy.
Morgan ate her bowl of plain white rice, all she’d wanted, all she could stomach. She was cross-legged on her bed, listening to nothing but the click of her fork against the bowl. She tried to remember feeling loved by him, because she certainly had. She knew she had.
She pulled out her poetry notebook and looked over some of what she’d written.
Crackling, sparking
Dangerous they say
But heat is warm and
Life
Burning away all that is old dead dry
~
Crush me till
I’m flat, gone
Part of you
What I want
Part of you
~
Thought I was so good before
Dead more like it
But the dead are
No trouble at all
Quiet, obedient, still
~
Does the music box dancer
Twirl ’neath the lid?
Or is there
No room
In the airless dark
So she waits
For the hand to
Split the black with
Brief harsh light
~
Lift me up throw me down
Spin me round and round
Spread me out crush me small
Seize me when I sprawl
Stroke my skin brush my hair
Do whatever you think fair
Just never
Let
Go
Morgan frowned. Reading them back now—she didn’t typically read her poems again, just set them free in the pages—they sure didn’t sound like verses written by someone happy in love.
She checked her e-mail on her phone and saw a message from someone she didn’t recognize. Henry’s warning echoed in her mind, quickly overrun by trampling curiosity.
It was a random free e-mail account, from a Teresa Jane. Her breathing sputtered as she remembered that was his code name in her contacts of her old phone.
It was good to see you on my side today. I can’t tell you how good. I now hear though that you are prepared to testify if I don’t change my plea. You know I never hurt you, I never made you do anything you didn’t want to do. You’re almost eighteen, as you said to me many times, you’re not a child and don’t deserve to be treated like one.
We can’t have a future if I’m in prison. You hold my fate in your hands.
You are so special to me.
She felt a sinking sensation, but not scary or sad. It was comfortable and soft, this settling back to a familiar space. She entertained a delicious flush at a memory of him lowering her onto his brother’s big soft bed. A future, he’d written.
A gentle knock on her door. She tucked the phone under her pillow.
“Yeah?”
Her mother slid in through the door, and she carried a bowl of ice cream. “Dessert?”
Morgan shrugged. She accepted the cold bowl in her hands, trying to make sense of what she’d just read.
“Mom?”
Dinah sat on the bed next to Morgan, but not too close, she noticed. “How do you know when someone loves you?”
“When you don’t have to ask that question.”
Morgan rolled her eyes. “Just like that, huh?”
Her mother shrugged. “Why should it be harder than that?” Then she leaned forward and put her hand on Morgan’s knee. “I hope you have never once doubted that I love you. No matter how mad you ever got, no matter how mad I got.”
Morgan shook her head. “No. I didn’t.”
She noticed that her mother’s gaze had caught on something. Morgan followed it down. The poetry.
Dinah cocked her head. “May I?”
Morgan shrugged. Just that morning she’d been prepared to sit in a public courtroom and talk about sex with her teacher. Letting her mother read her poetry could be no worse.
Dinah pulled it toward her. Morgan spooned the cold blandness of her vanilla ice cream and waited for the freak-out.
Dinah leafed through it with a serious crease in her forehead, but silently. Occasionally she blinked rapidly and drew back the tiniest bit.
Once, she read a few lines aloud, in a reverent tone tinged with bafflement.
“. . . bursts the seam of the sky, . . . setting alight the whole golden world.”
When she set the notebook down, she looked up at Morgan and said, “I never knew . . . These are good, Mo.”
Her ice cream had melted into soup. Morgan set the bowl on her desk. “I thought you’d be like, weirded out. Some of that is kind of weird.”
Dinah shook her head. “It wasn’t so easy to read the ones about . . . all of this, lately. Him. But that’s different. . . . I wish you’d shared them before.”
“It would have felt weird. Plus . . . you always make such a big thing of everything. I didn’t want a big deal out of it.”
“Like what big deal?”
“Oh, you know, like buying me writing magazines and clipping out poetry contest entries, and researching which colleges have writing programs . . .”
Her mother frowned, and Morgan could see her effort in reining back in what she wanted to blurt out.
Her mom bit her lip, and said, “I try to
be supportive . . .”
“I know, and it’s better than, like, condemning it. But it’s too much. It’s suffocating.”
“Sorry.”
“No, don’t be all sad and that. I’m not mad. I’m just trying to explain.”
“I know you are. Wish you’d said so before . . .”
“Would you have listened? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re a little stubborn.”
Dinah smirked down at her own lap. “Like a whale is a little big.”
Her mother was quiet then for a minute, and Morgan sighed into that quiet. She realized how seldom it was they were ever just together in a simple way. Like when they weren’t having a fight, or talking about the boys, or her mom was trying to have a big old “mother-daughter moment.”
Finally her mom spoke, and Morgan tried not to roll her eyes; of course she couldn’t just be quiet for five minutes. “Hon, can I ask you? No pressure, I’m just thinking. What do you want to do? When all this is done?”
“ ‘This’? The trial?”
“Yes.”
Morgan rested against the wall behind her and considered.
What popped up now in her memory was that look, in the courtroom parking lot. No, it wasn’t a look, even. Their eyes had met, but he might as well have been looking at the garbage bin for all the emotion that was there. She could have chalked that up to the presence of his wife, not wanting to get caught looking, but she was inside the car. His wife could not have seen his face.
All these weeks she’d suffered alone, cut off from everyone, cut off from him, and he’d never tried to reach her. Even as she was called filthy names on the Internet, as someone carved a death threat into her locker, as her mother’s business was trashed, as his lawyer stood up and described her like an unhinged, desperate slut . . . He was silent and let it all happen, all to save his own ass. But only now, as he realized she held the key, in his last desperate attempt to stay out of jail, he reached out and what did he do? Did he even ask how she was holding up?
“Mom, I have something to tell you. He e-mailed me just now. Him. Mr. Hill.”
Dinah jumped off the bed, and Morgan could read the signs of fury in her clenched fists, forward leaning posture . . . Then she shook herself like waking from a dream and sat back down. Her mom put the bowls on the floor and hugged her. “We’ll call Henry in a minute. I’m so sorry this happened to you. So very sorry I let you down.”
Morgan pushed her back, firmly, but she hoped not roughly. “Mom. You have got to stop doing that. I’m a person and I make decisions. Stupid ones, I guess, but I make them. Me. And so do Jared and Connor. We’re people, not puppets.”
“How did you get so wise?”
“Yeah. Really fricking wise.”
Dinah leaned in for another hug. Morgan could smell her mother’s shampoo, and she breathed deeply, realizing that someday she’d miss this smell. At college, if she ever managed to go, or on her own somewhere, or . . . someday when her mom would be gone. She made a mental note to buy the same kind, wherever she went, whatever she was going to do, when “this” was at last all over.
48
And just like that, it was over, and Dinah exhaled, as if she’d been holding her breath for months now. She tipped her head up as if she were in a grand cathedral to thank God for this, though her gaze rested on flecked ceiling tiles instead of stained glass.
And then she promised herself to start going to Mass again.
TJ Hill had stood up in court with his lawyer, changing his plea to guilty as charged.
Excited whispers had swelled through the courtroom, and the judge tapped his gavel twice. The judge had asked him if he was sure. Then the judge had asked—his long, severe face the very picture of indignant irritation—why the sudden change of heart.
TJ Hill had mumbled so quietly that the judge demanded that he speak up.
“I was in panic mode before.” He shifted from foot to foot. “That’s all I can say.”
The judge tipped back in his large judge chair, tented his fingers under his chin, and observed, “Quite a long panic, I’d say. Bond remains in effect, and you will report for sentencing on June 26.” The sentencing was part of the plea deal, however, and thus a formality. Dinah had already been briefed: three years in prison, though with time off for good behavior he could be up for parole in a little over two years.
Another crack of the gavel and that was it.
Dinah squeezed the hands of Joe on one side, and Morgan on the other, and they stood up almost at the same instant. Henry turned around with a jubilant smile, reaching over the barrier to shake Joe’s hand. Dinah leaned over for a hug, too. Morgan hung back shyly, her curtain of hair falling around her, and Dinah sensed the burst of a flashbulb and she knew what would be on the front page the next day.
They hung back while TJ filed out of the courtroom, trailed by his lawyer and a phalanx of press. After that crowd had surged past, Dinah locked eyes with Rain, across the aisle. She’d sat on his side of the room, but she had not followed him out. They traded a look, but that was all.
For all anyone knew, they were strangers, with every reason to hate and distrust each other.
Henry was speaking now to Morgan, so Dinah looked back to their tight circle. He said, “I’m proud of you that you turned over that e-mail to me and didn’t give in to his manipulation. That was very brave.”
Morgan wouldn’t answer at first, then she said something very quietly, in Henry’s direction. He whispered back in her ear and gave a sad smile to Dinah.
“Let me walk out with you,” Henry said. “They’ll want a comment from someone.”
“May I?” Dinah said. “It’s all over now, and we can’t hurt the case or anything, right?”
Henry frowned. “As you wish. But whatever you say could be in 48-point type tomorrow and repeated on the news in a constant loop. You do get a victim impact statement at sentencing.”
“I’ll be fine.”
And so they walked out of the utilitarian courthouse onto the plaza, where benches no one ever used flanked a flagpole and a memorial to Arbor Valley’s veterans.
The reporters moved like one organism from TJ and his lawyer over to the four of them and began shouting questions. Henry answered first in the practiced, dignified cadence of one who had given many, many interviews.
Joe made like a statue. He’d put on his stern assistant principal face and shielded Morgan under his arm. Morgan looked down at the ground, letting her hair form a barrier between herself and the rest of the world.
Dinah cleared her throat, not listening to any particular question, and their attention turned to her. They crowded around—about five of them plus a couple of cameramen, Arbor Valley wasn’t that big—but there were enough that for the moment, they screened out everything else in her view.
“We’re pleased at the outcome, but not how long it took for TJ Hill to tell the truth. I also want us as a community to stop and think about what it means to be a child. Teenagers today act very jaded and sophisticated, don’t they? Without ever saying it out loud, we all know they have sex, and they drink, and smoke, and use credit cards and interact online, hold jobs, watch TV shows where the actors are having sex with everyone all the time, and all the other things we as adults do every day.” Dinah sensed their fidgeting, noted one snappily dressed anchor lady checking her watch. She rushed her speech a bit. “We have let them grow up so fast that I can see why it’s tempting to say a seventeen-year-old is the same as an adult. It’s only a few months, right? What difference does it make? But I dare you.” She pointed at them, addressing the press specifically, who would carry this story to the town, who would portray their family. “Think back on the things you did, when you were seventeen and thought you were immortal. Consider just one reckless thing, and now imagine that you didn’t get lucky and come out unscathed. Imagine instead that the absolute worst happened, and not only that, everyone knew about it, and wrote about it, and commented on it in a public forum, an
d that the public forum where everyone commented will be preserved forever and ever in some kind of digital archive. The law knows, the court knew, where to assign blame for this exploitation of a child who has not yet matured into the person she’s trying to be. I only wish the rest of you had been as wise.”
There was a beat of silence as scribbling went on, and jockeying of cameras, as the reporters with shining, ravenous eyes were plotting their follow-up questions.
Dinah took that opportunity to forge through the lot of them as if they were no more than long grasses in a field. They parted in front of her, and with her family in tow, Dinah marched unimpeded to their car.
“He’s right there,” muttered Morgan from under Joe’s arm. Joe stopped, and they all stopped.
Joe turned to face him. TJ was across the plaza with that slick lady lawyer. Joe bellowed in his best assistant principal voice, but with his accent in full glory, “Don’t ever go near my daughter again, you fucking low-life pervert!”
Henry squeezed Joe’s arm with a small, warning shake of the head. Joe stopped before any specific threats were spoken out loud.
TJ was already scuttling away, head bowed as if under fire. Dinah noted with a cocked eyebrow that Rain was walking to a different car.
Good for you, Dinah thought. You go, girl.
It was night, and the eleven o’clock news was coming on. The kids were all in their rooms, supposedly asleep, but probably not. Anyway, the next day everyone was going to the beach. Joe and Dinah had decided on the way home. They all deserved some stupid family fun with Popsicles and beach volleyball and Lake Huron, miles away where no one knew them.
The Whole Golden World Page 34