“So his answer is to put her on the fucking pill?”
“Peter.”
“Did he suggest we advertise her services in the newspaper, too?”
There was silence on Margot’s end. She was at a pay phone in the mall; she’d taken both kids out for dinner, to give a sense of carrying on—as much for her own benefit as for theirs. “We had a good day,” she said quietly. “Vanessa and I.”
“I’m glad.”
“I’m not any happier about this than you are, Peter. But I’ve started to think—”
“What.”
“We should be careful not to overreact.”
“Over—. Where are you?”
“We’re at the mall. We’re having supper.”
He had his thumb and forefinger on his brow and he massaged it hard. He stretched the skin so hard it felt as if it might split. “Well, why was your day so good, Margot?”
“We talked. I asked her if she was okay. Apart from this. I asked her, like we said we would.”
“And.”
“She didn’t say a lot. But I had the impression that there’s nothing really wrong. She’s happy.”
“She told you that.”
“No. But she’s not ashamed of herself. She’s upset, I think, that we’re upset. She told me she was glad we’d never been secretive about sex. That we’d always said it was healthy. Because she wasn’t afraid.”
He could hear her crying, almost silently, her breathing shallower now. “Well, I guess that makes us good parents,” he said. “Doesn’t it? She has such a healthy attitude.”
Margot collected herself. “I have to go. When are you coming home?”
“I have more to do.”
Behind her, in the mall, he could hear the spiraling calliope of mall music, the threads of fine-clothing music, the ice-cream music. The voices of children and the sounds of coin-operated animals. He saw Margot standing in a hallway that led to lockers and a bathroom and his two children eating off of plastic trays. Were they in her sight lines? Could she see what they were doing, who they were talking to, who was, perhaps, looking at them? In his mind’s eye, he went up over all their heads, into the barnlike girders that flew into the atrium above the food court, and he pictured all the people there, moving from their seats back to their cars, or entering the building, their shopping lists hidden in their pockets. And he saw the shape of their movements as solid lines showing where they’d been, and dotted lines showing where they were going, and the place was a hive of possibility. Anything was about to happen. There would have to be lines for eye contact too, and even thoughts. Everything was connected to his children, to his wife, to him.
“Did you go to the police?”
“I’m going to finish this up and come home,” he said.
“Peter.”
“We’ll talk about it when I get home.” He closed a file on his desk. He’d just signed a letter that ended with the words, Thank you for referring this genuinely pleasant young man to me.
“I want you to think more about this. About what Richard said. She’s seventeen. Lots of kids her age are sexually active.”
He slapped the desk with his palm. “That’s not the god-damned point, Margot! That’s not the point!”
“Yes, it is!” she shouted back, and immediately lowered her voice. He imagined dotted lines converging on her in the hall where she was standing. “The point is that she’s not a child anymore, Peter. The way we’ve learned that hurts us, but it doesn’t change the fact of it.”
“I have to go,” he said, and he hung up.
IT WAS fully dark when Peter arrived back at the police station—a spring darkness, shot through with fragrances. The light from within the station was welcoming, making it seem like a place of succor or refuge. Detective Stone was on the desk and asked for someone to cover him when he saw Peter. He opened the little gate and gestured to the first room they’d sat in, earlier that day.
“Can I get you coffee?” he asked.
Peter shook his head no and the detective turned and looked at the man who was now the duty clerk and gave him a half-wave. He waited for Peter to go through the door before entering and sitting across from him sideways, his hip to the tabletop. A few police officers passed by the window, and some of them looked in. It seemed to Peter that they knew him. He was no longer a citizen come to the police to learn something, or to report something. He was a case. They knew him.
Detective Stone opened a new file folder between them, and there were three or four blown-up printouts of the two boys in the film, their faces degraded by enlargement. Peter imagined for a moment that these were pictures taken after an interrogation, the faces swollen with what it had taken to get the truth out of them. Stone spun the file around to Peter and Peter carefully drew the pictures toward himself. He looked back and forth between them. He lay his finger lightly on the picture of the bigger boy.
“Who’s this one?” Peter said.
“I can’t tell you his name.”
He looked up at the detective. “Why?”
“He’s a minor.”
“What about this one?”
“That one as well.”
Peter lowered his eyes back down to the report that he’d revealed by sliding the pictures out of the file. He saw his daughter’s name and his address, and then, below it, the words Juvenile A and Juvenile B. He stared hard at those denominations, and the masks of the degraded faces on the pages in front of him. Detective Stone slid the file away from Peter and turned it around. “You can charge a minor, but their names are protected.”
“She knows their names.”
“I know their names. But this one,” he pointed to the second boy, “he’s fifteen. This one’s sixteen. So I can’t tell you anything about them.”
“What if they’re tried in adult court?”
“Their identities would still be protected. And in any case, before you try them, you have to charge them.”
“I’m charging them.”
The detective swiveled his big frame around in the chair to face Peter. He closed the file and put one big hand over the top of it. “Well, that’s a problem. Since your daughter is of age, she becomes the complainant. You can’t press charges on her behalf. She can, or we can, and—before you say anything—we have to feel a crime’s actually been committed.”
Peter stared at the closed file. He didn’t want to annoy the detective. He thought if the detective said anything else that it could lead to a bad turning. So he stood up. “Well, I ought to talk to my wife and my daughter, then. I didn’t know.”
“Please sit down, Mr. Bowman. I don’t think you understand everything yet.”
“It’s up to my daughter. I understand. My wife and I will sit down with her.”
“Mr. Bowman, if your daughter presses charges, two things will happen. One is, these boys’ parents will get lawyers, and the first thing the lawyers will do is lay countercharges. They’ll say your daughter coerced them. But let’s say, for whatever reason, they don’t press their own charges. It’ll go to court, and if the media covers it, and they will, the boys won’t be named—but your daughter will be.”
“Detective Stone—”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it would work here.”
“You can’t tell me there’s been no crime committed! You know boys, I’m sure you see kids like these. . . .” He gestured hopelessly at the closed folder. “Look, Vanessa may be seventeen, but she’s a child. And anyone who would let themselves be used like this would have to be—”
“Like I said, Mr. Bowman, the facts of the case—”
“There are two of them! They fuck her up the ass! You’re telling me if they’d done this to her four months ago, when she was sixteen, that I could have laid charges?” The detective remained silent. Outside, in the hall, men swept silently past the window. No one had looked in when Peter raised his voice. He was alone with the facts of the case.
“There’s only one thing that’s a
ctionable here,” Stone said, “and unfortunately, it would be brought against your daughter. I’m not going to do that, but if someone walked in here and told me to make an example of someone, it’d have to be your daughter. And if either of these two boys’ parents wished to, they could bring a charge of statutory rape against her.” He waited a moment. Peter’s mouth had closed to a thin white line. Finally, he sat down again. “Statutory rape is a charge that pertains to sex with any minor,” the detective continued. “It’s called statutory because it’s deemed a minor cannot consent to sex, and therefore, the law calls it rape.”
Peter’s voice was thin. “I came in here to . . . how can you tell me there’s nothing I can do? That it was her fault?”
“It’s no one’s fault, Mr. Bowman. That’s what you have to understand. There was no crime committed.”
Peter stood up and shoved the table back. Stone quickly flattened his hands against it to prevent it from striking him, but otherwise he remained still. Neither man spoke for a long moment. Then Peter said, “I’m her father.”
“Yes,” said Detective Stone with a single, emphatic nod.
“Do you have kids?”
“One of each.”
“Me as well. I have a twelve-year-old son. What am I supposed to tell him?”
The detective stood up and swept the file to his side. “Don’t tell him anything. It’s none of his business.” He waited a moment to see if Peter had anything else to say, and in his silence began to leave the room. “I’ll tell you one more thing, in case it’s something you’re thinking of, Mr. Bowman. If you force your daughter to press charges, I won’t be able to prevent anything that happens as a result. And there’s a good chance that this will be the last time for a long time that anyone feels like talking to you.” He went out the door. From the hallway, he said, “See the clerk. He’ll have your tape.”
WHEN HE finally came home, it was past midnight, and Peter went into the house silently and sat downstairs in the dark. He held the tape in his hands, this tape that now felt as if it could broadcast itself throughout the city.
Margot was in bed and so was Vanessa. Peter had gone downstairs, thinking he wanted to watch Eric sleeping. He went down into the basement, remembering the times when Vanessa was a baby and he’d get home after bedtime and go into her room to watch her sleep. The fragile lids under which her eyes would be flicking back and forth, the parted lips.
But what if once or twice he’d taken the precaution of stripping a bit of that simple safety away? By frightening her awake, or pinching her hard enough to bring her out of the warmth of sleep? Then maybe she would have had the sense not to film herself having sex with two boys. What on earth could help him trace the contents of that tape back to the quietly soughing child under her covers?
When he got to Eric’s room, he heard the sound of the boy’s television from behind the door. The telltale sounds of cartoon lasers, the muffled cries of imaginary victims. He turned away and went silently up the stairs again.
In the living room, he put the videotape into the machine and turned the television on. He quickly muted the sound and waited for the old VCR to thread the images on the tape through to the TV. It was now at a spot near the middle of the tape. Someone had watched it that far. In the scene now playing, his daughter was performing fellatio on the two boys, alternating between them. From this scene they would remove their T-shirts, and she her underwear. Then would come the myriad sex acts. In silence, it was a sinister dumbshow.
He brought himself to look at his daughter, really look at her. He looked at the body that he sometimes, and with some shame, imagined under her clothes. Did she look like her mother, he sometimes wondered, and here he saw that she did, a little. But who she really looked like was him. She had his long, greyhound torso, his gangly limbs. The top of her pelvis poked out as his did, both of their flesh insufficient to contain their wild, oversized bones. In whatever way such an alchemy could be worked, it was his body on the television, except that it was his body as a young girl’s. He felt the pained affection he’d felt for her when she was a child, aware of how delicate all of her was, and how tenderly he loved that frailty. What genius there was in nature, that it could tell him that even at this moment, when he was frightened and disgusted, this was still his child, the same one he had so instinctively wanted to protect. This was him, cut loose from the moorings of his being, and flung heedlessly into hers. But that did not make her separate from him.
He turned off the TV and went out to his car. In the station’s interview room, he’d taken care to note the address of the boy called Juvenile B. The typed report had been exposed long enough for him to memorize it.
The fifteen-year-old’s house was not far from Vanessa’s school, although it was in the opposite direction from their house. It was now almost three in the morning, and when Peter got to the house it was dark. He parked the car across the street and killed the lights and engine. For five minutes he sat there in complete stillness, his hands palms-down over his knees. No cars went up or down the street, and nothing changed inside the houses that he could see. There was no one even watching television, no telltale dancing blue light. There was a jittery tension in his body; he gritted his teeth and could not relax his face.
The neighborhood he’d come to was a mirror image of his own: he felt the people who lived in these houses would have been people he’d be comfortable with, if he met them at a school function, a barbecue, or a school play. He knew what kinds of cars would be in those garages, which magazines came to the houses, which newspapers. The fifteen-year-old’s garage door was not open. (You did not fear your neighbors in such quarters, only that, if you did something such as leave a garage door open, you would stand out. Not just to thieves, but to those around you. You did not want to advertise that you were blasé about your possessions, or careless. These solidarities were the shibboleths of such neighborhoods.)
Peter tried the front door of the house, gently. Just having the cold brass of the knob in his hand made him feel as if he had already done something wrong. The knob turned fractionally before meeting a resistance. He went around the side of the house, past the garage, to a door he assumed led to a mudroom. The outer portion of this door swung open freely. In fact, there was no mechanism there to keep it closed. An inner door was more firmly shut, but there was no deadbolt. He took a magnetic card from his wallet, the one that admitted him to the hospital garage, and slid it into the door, just as he had seen it done in the movies. He entered the house.
Peter paused a moment in the hallway that led to the open part of the main floor to let his eyes adjust to the faint streetlight that suffused this part of the house. It was a vague light. It made all the objects around him seem composed of each other. There was no color here. He could hear his heart in his neck, but otherwise, all was silent. After a few moments, the staircase to the second floor emerged out of the grayness, and he began to go up. The wooden banister under his hand was cool.
As he came toward the upper hallway, he began to hear the sounds of a sleeping household. To his right, and through a slightly open door, a man snored quietly. In the pauses between inhales, he could hear another’s breathing, a sibilant but hollow sound that was almost exactly like Margot’s breathing when she was asleep. Softer breathing came from the left. He continued down the hall. There were five more doors. One was open: a bathroom. Another was a narrow door, a closet of some kind. The other three were bedrooms.
He pushed the first door open. It slid against carpet. A crib, above which a mobile hung, stood out in silhouette against the back wall. A nightlight, plugged into the wall beneath the crib, projected the bars of the crib across the ceiling. The baby was sleeping on its stomach and had its head tucked, like a swan, into the warmth of its own body. He stepped away and closed the door. When his own children had been that small, such stillness and peacefulness seemed a signal to him that he and Margot were doing everything right. No child sleeps so soundly if it knows hunger or f
ear. This faceless infant was well loved, he thought. It did not yet know what kinds of people it lived with and that they could attract darkness.
The second door was the older boy’s room. A pennant bearing the name of the baseball team Eric played on was on the door. Pythons, it said. Maybe the boy even played with Eric, although he was likely to be on another squad, a boy Eric perhaps looked up to. Peter put the flat of his palm on the door and pushed it open, and the faint light from the hall seeped in, illuminating the bed and the body in it. He stepped into the doorway, cutting the light out, and waited for his eyes to adjust. It smelled like Eric’s room, a boyish smell cut with an edge of sourness. Peter could put his face in Eric’s hair and smell the milky warmth of his scalp. Eric’s lanky body was covered in a blond down, and he was shy of it. He was harmless. All he cared about was his video games and making his mother laugh. Peter thought, if he could, he would freeze him at this age, while he was still a delight.
But the smell in the room was also his smell. He recognized that he had brought his own funk along. He wondered why humans’ instincts were so in abeyance that they could not smell a threat in their own burrow. He had not awakened to the threat in his household, in the body of his daughter. He’d been oblivious to it; it had moved through the rooms of his life like something familiar.
Peter stepped into the room. There was a bat on the floor—he touched it with the tip of a shoe and rolled it toward himself, and then pushed it silently under the bed. His eyes had adjusted and he could see the boy’s face now, in profile against his pillow. He recognized the spiky blond hair over the forehead. He saw it in his mind’s eye, bent down against the small of his daughter’s back, her face buried in the boy’s groin, the boy’s eyes closed, as now, only more conscious, the lids clenching and unclenching. He knew, when he’d looked at the image, what the boy was feeling; there was no end to the alikenesses he’d sensed when he looked at that video. He’d even remembered, for the first time in many years, his earliest kiss. It was on a dare, in a closet, and the closet was as dark as the boy’s room. The girl’s name was Casey. She was small and limber; he recalled that she was a gymnast. Her mouth had tasted metallic. Someone shouted “Time!” outside the door, and they’d pulled away, and Peter had become immediately aware of the fact that his erection hurt. He was thirteen then. If they hadn’t called time, if he’d been alone with her in there, would the urgency of the sensations in his body have compelled him to carry the encounter further? What if Casey had resisted him? What if she’d pushed him on?
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