The First Time

by Joy Fielding

“She’s a slut. Everybody knows it,” Eddy Maclean sneered, rolling his light hazel eyes, running a lazy hand through his shoulder-length brown hair.

  “What kind of incident?” Jake repeated.

  “Apparently, there was a party at somebody’s house. The parents were away on holiday. My son met this girl—”

  “Why don’t you let your son tell me what happened?” Jake interrupted.

  Thomas Maclean pulled back his large, square shoulders, scratched the side of his long nose, and sat down in the blue straight-backed chair Jake had provided, waving his hand in the air to indicate his son had the floor.

  “She came on to me, man,” Eddy Maclean said immediately. “She’s this real ugly chick, man. I never would have touched her if she hadn’t come on to me.”

  “So you touched her,” Jake said, already knowing the rest of the story.

  “Not like she says I did. I didn’t do anything she didn’t want me to.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  Eddy Maclean shrugged. “You know.”

  “Apparently,” the senior Maclean interrupted, “they had sex.”

  “How old are you, Eddy?” Jake asked.

  “Nineteen.”

  “And the girl?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “He didn’t know how old she was till later,” Thomas Maclean clarified. “Apparently, this girl looks much more mature than she is.”

  “Does this girl have a name?” Jake asked, trying not to picture his daughter naked in a bed with Eddy Maclean.

  “Sarah something.”

  “Sarah something,” Jake repeated, fighting the urge to wrestle the young man to the ground and pummel him into unconsciousness. Was that how his daughter’s erstwhile lover referred to her? As Kim something?

  “Ugly chick. We never would have touched her if she hadn’t started it.”

  “We?”

  “Apparently there were two other boys involved,” Thomas Maclean volunteered.

  Jake walked over to his desk, leaned against it. At least finding Kim with that boy had provided them with the leverage they needed to get Kim to a therapist. She was dealing with a lot of issues. She needed to talk to someone. “I think we have to start from the beginning.”

  “Apparently—” the senior Maclean began.

  “In Eddy’s own words,” Jake interrupted. “If you don’t mind.”

  Thomas Maclean nodded his permission. Eddy Maclean cleared his throat. Jake waited, aware of the small clock on his desk ticking behind him.

  “We went to this party.”

  “Who went?”

  “Me, Mike Hansen, Neil Pilcher.”

  “And what happened at the party?”

  “Nothing. It was a real drag. A bunch of teenyboppers dancing to the Spice Girls. We were all set to leave. Then this chick comes up to us and says for us not to go, the party’s just getting started.”

  “This girl was Sarah?”

  “Yeah. She says she’s seen me around and she thinks I’m real cute. You know, shit like that. What am I supposed to think?”

  “What did you think?”

  “Same thing any guy would think. You know—that she’s interested.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I say we’ll stick around if she makes it worth our while. She says, sure thing. We go upstairs, into one of the bedrooms.”

  “And then what?”

  He smiled. “We had sex.”

  “And your friends, Neil and Mike, where were they while this was going on?”

  “At first they were outside the door. You know—standing guard.”

  “Standing guard against what?”

  The boy shrugged. “We didn’t want to be interrupted.”

  Jake rubbed his forehead, trying to keep a budding headache at bay. “You said ‘at first.’ I take it Neil and Mike got tired of standing guard and came inside.”

  “They wanted a piece of the action.”

  “The action being this fifteen-year-old girl.”

  “Just a minute,” Thomas Maclean interjected.

  “I thought she was older,” his son reiterated.

  “How did she feel about the others joining in?” Jake asked, trying to keep the disgust out of his voice, the image of his daughter out of his head.

  “She didn’t object.”

  “She didn’t say no, or ask you to stop at any point?”

  “She was saying a lot of things, man. It’s not like we were listening to every word this chick was saying.”

  “So she could have said no,” Jake stated.

  “She wanted it, man. She’s just crying rape because she found out who my old man is, and she wants a piece of the pie.”

  “She’s claiming you raped her?”

  “Surprise, surprise,” the young man spat out in disgust.

  “I have a friend in the state’s attorney’s office,” Thomas Maclean clarified. “He called to tell me the girl and her family were at the police station, and it looked as if they’d be issuing a warrant for my son’s arrest. We came here immediately.”

  Jake walked around his desk, sat down, stared openly at the clock. Two-forty-eight. “What else?” Jake asked.

  “What do you mean, what else?” Thomas Maclean’s voice stopped just short of indignant.

  Jake pointed with his chin toward Eddy Maclean. “He knows what I mean.” There was always something else, Jake knew, waiting.

  “She claims she was a virgin.”

  “And you dispute this?”

  “Hard to tell, man. I mean, you go in the back door, sometimes there’s blood.”

  It took a minute for Jake to figure out exactly what the young man was talking about. “Are you saying you sodomized her?”

  “I didn’t, man. That’s not my scene. But hey, Neil, he’s an ass man from way back.”

  “Is this relevant?” Thomas Maclean demanded with the skewered logic of those rich and powerful enough always to get their way. “If the girl consented, what difference does it make what she consented to?”

  “I don’t like surprises,” Jake responded calmly. “If I’m going to represent your son, which, I assume, is why you’re here, then I need to know all the facts.”

  “Of course,” Thomas Maclean said, backing off. “So what happens now?”

  “My advice would be to go down to the police station and have your son turn himself in. I’ll call one of my associates and have him accompany you — ”

  “What do you mean, one of your associates? What about you?”

  “I’m afraid I have a prior commitment—”

  “Cancel it.”

  “I can’t do that.” Jake’s voice was firm. He pressed the intercom. “Natasha, get a hold of Ronald Becker and ask him to come to my office immediately. Thank you,” he said, clicking off before his secretary had a chance to reply. “Ronald Becker is a highly competent young attorney, and this is a very basic procedure.”

  “Owen Harris assured me that you would handle everything.”

  “I am handling everything.”

  “Personally.”

  Personally, Jake repeated silently. That word again.

  Could he really do this? Could he really palm a very important client off on an associate, no matter how basic the procedure, so that he could drive his daughter to her therapist? So that he could chauffeur his wife to her mother’s?

  There was a knock on the door, and Ronald Becker, a young man with curly salt-and-pepper hair and a slight gut pushing on the buttons of his brown pinstriped jacket, walked into the room, his head bobbing up and down, rather like a pigeon, Jake thought, making the appropriate introductions.

  “I need you to accompany the Macleans to the police station,” he said. “Eddy will be turning himself in, but offering nothing further. You’ll accompany him to the courthouse, where he’ll enter a plea of not guilty to whatever charge is pending, and post whatever bond is necessary.” He turned toward the father and son, now both on their feet and staring at hi
m in open-mouthed amazement. “Mr. Becker will take care of whatever questions you have on the drive to the station. Trust me, there’s nothing complicated here. You’ll be home in time for dinner. In the meantime, I’ll have my secretary schedule another appointment with you for early next week.”

  “Next week?”

  “Let me give the matter some thought over the weekend and decide what I think would be the best way for us to proceed. Now, I really have to go,” Jake said, one foot already out the door. “Mr. Becker will take good care of you.”

  It was only when Jake was alone in the elevator that he realized the full import of what he’d just done. He threw his head back and laughed out loud. When the elevator reached the lobby, he was still laughing.

  TWENTY-TWO

  So, how did it go with Rosemary?” Mattie was asking, twisting around in her seat, staring at Kim expectantly.

  Kim shrugged, pressed her nose against the car window, feeling it cold against her skin as her warm breath caused the window to fog up around her. She drew a stick figure of a woman with frizzy hair in the glass with her index finger. “Fine,” Kim said, immediately rubbing the image away with the bottom of her coat sleeve.

  “She seems like a very nice woman.”

  “I guess.” Kim closed her eyes, waited until she heard her mother turn around before opening them again. She fell back against the plush leather interior of her father’s car, stared out the side windows at the mounds of stubborn snow. Was winter never going to be over? Here it was the beginning of March, and there was still almost a foot of snow on the ground. Of course, the faster time passed, the less time there was. At least as far as her mother was concerned. Kim sat forward in her seat, reached out her hand to touch her mother’s shoulder. But her mother and father were whispering conspiratorially, and Kim quickly withdrew her hand.

  “Yes, sweetie?” her mother asked, as if she had eyes in the back of her head. “Did you want to say something?”

  Kim grunted, watching a red sports car pass them on the inside lane. Her father had somehow managed to convince the car dealership to take back the red Corvette her mother had purchased at the time she first learned of her illness. Why should that surprise her? Kim wondered, absently counting the number of red cars on the road, the way she used to do when she was a child. If her father could convince seemingly sensible people to let murderers walk free, then surely it took no effort on his part to convince car dealers to take back their red Corvettes. He was Jake Hart, after all, the Great Defender, lionized, and all but canonized, in the most recent issue of Chicago magazine. He could convince anyone of anything.

  “Did anyone at school say anything about the article on your father?” Mattie was asking, as if she were privy to every thought in her daughter’s head.

  “No,” Kim said, although several of her teachers had in fact remarked on it.

  “What did you think of it, Kimmy?” her father asked.

  “Didn’t read it,” Kim lied. The truth was she’d read it so many times, she could have recited it by heart.

  “I thought it was very complimentary,” Mattie said, and Kim heard her father laugh. “What’s so funny?” her mother asked.

  “Same words I used this afternoon,” Jake said, as Kim squirmed in her seat.

  Suddenly they were so damned compatible, she thought. They never fought anymore. They never yelled. Never even raised their voices. Ever since her father had moved back into her mother’s bedroom, they’d turned into Mr. and Mrs. Congeniality. Sometimes she’d wake up in the middle of the night and lie there in bed waiting for the once-comforting sound of their strained whispers, like the ones she grew up with, her signal to jump out of bed and rush to her mother’s defense. But the only whispers Kim heard lately were usually followed by a muffled barrage of giggles, and one time, when she’d tiptoed over to her parent’s bedroom to make sure everything was all right, she’d seen her father’s body twisting inside the blankets as he positioned himself over her mother, and she realized, with no small degree of revulsion, that her parents were making love.

  That was the way it went these days in the Hart household: her parents always agreeing with one another, laughing at each other’s feeble jokes, conferring with each other over the best way to handle difficult situations. Like their insistence she see a therapist after discovering her with Teddy, she thought, stifling a groan in her throat. Not that experimenting with sex was synonymous with mental illness, they were quick to explain. It was natural for teenagers to experiment with sex, they stressed, not wanting to appear too hypocritical. Just that coupled with her recent behavior and their own recent separation and reconciliation, not to mention Mattie’s condition, well, Kim obviously had a lot on her plate. She needed someone to talk to, to help her sort out some of her feelings during this very difficult time.

  What was there to talk about? Kim wondered, remaining stubbornly silent throughout most of her initial session with the therapist. Teddy hadn’t even called since his rather hasty exit from her bedroom that night. He ran the other way whenever he encountered her in the school corridors. And of course the whole student body had heard what happened, how the condom had come off, how she’d screamed for him to get it out, how her mother had burst in on them while they slept, how he’d had to grab his clothes and run for his life. Deflowered and deserted, Kim thought, permitting herself a slight chuckle. A first time to remember.

  “How did you feel when you saw your mother standing there?” Rosemary Colicos asked at Kim’s first session with the almost aggressively unattractive social worker.

  “Embarrassed,” Kim answered reluctantly. “Angry.”

  “Relieved?” Rosemary asked.

  Stupid question, Kim thought at the time. Why would she be relieved at her mother discovering her in bed with Teddy Cranston? And yet, the more sessions Kim had with the middle-aged woman whose streaked blond hair looked as if it had been plugged directly into an electrical socket, the less stupid the question seemed.

  It was the same with most of the questions Rosemary asked: “What do you think motivated you to have sex with Teddy under your parents’ roof?” “Are you angry at your mother for being sick?” “What would you be giving up if you forgave your father?”

  “Lust.” “Of course not.” “Nothing,” came Kim’s immediate replies. But over the course of the last six weeks, Rosemary had subtly forced Kim to rethink her answers. Maybe she was relieved at having been discovered. Maybe being discovered was exactly what she’d had in mind when she invited Teddy over. And if she wasn’t angry at her mother, then why did everything her mother said and did these days annoy her so much? As to what she would be giving up if she could somehow manage to forgive her father, well, Kim could sum that up in one word—power.

  “So, how come we’re going to Grandma Viv’s?” Kim asked, a deliberate challenge in her voice. “I thought you didn’t like to go there.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Mattie admitted.

  “So why now? What’s the special occasion?” Kim saw her mother’s shoulders stiffen, noted the pinched look that filled her father’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They were going to tell her grandmother about Mattie’s condition, she realized in that instant. They were going to tell her grandmother that her daughter was dying. “I don’t feel well,” Kim cried suddenly. “Stop the car. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Immediately, her father pulled the car to the side of the road. Kim pushed the door open, jumped out of the car, crouched in the middle of the sidewalk, a series of dry heaves racking her thin frame. She felt her mother squat beside her, her arms draping protectively across her shoulders. “Take deep breaths, sweetie,” her mother was coaxing, smoothing Kim’s hair away from her face. “Take deep breaths.” Was this how her mother was going to feel? Kim wondered, fighting for air. Was this what it felt like to choke to death?

  It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. It happened the other day at school as she was walking toward the cafe
teria. This awful shortness of breath, the air literally freezing in her mouth, as if a large chunk of ice had wedged itself at the back of her throat. She’d run into the nearest washroom and locked herself inside one of the empty cubicles, circling the tiny space in front of the toilet like a caged tiger at the zoo, flapping her hands in front of her face, fighting to get air into her lungs. She was dying, she understood in that moment. She’d inherited her mother’s awful disease.

  Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

  Standard run-of-the-mill anxiety.

  At least according to Rosemary Colicos. “Which doesn’t mean these attacks aren’t scary and awful,” the therapist told her. “Just not fatal.”

  “What about the fact my foot keeps falling asleep?” Kim demanded during today’s session.

  “It might be a good idea to get out of those heavy boots from time to time,” Rosemary suggested, motioning toward Kim’s tight knee-high black leather boots. “You sit all day in boots like those, your feet are bound to fall asleep occasionally. You’re not dying, Kim,” she assured her. “You’re going to be all right.”

  Was she? If so, what was she doing on her hands and knees heaving bile into the middle of an icy sidewalk in the middle of Chicago in the middle of a wintry Friday afternoon?

  After what seemed like an eternity, the gagging reflex stopped, and Kim felt her chest expand with air. She wiped the tears away from her eyes, lay her head on her mother’s shoulder, felt the cold sun surprisingly warm against her cheek.

  And then her father’s shadow was looming over them, blocking out the sun. “Are you okay?” he was asking.

  Kim nodded, slowly climbing to her feet, then turning to help her mother. But Jake was already beside Mattie, one hand under her arm, the other around her waist, and Mattie was leaning her full weight against him. She didn’t need Kim’s help.

  “Are you all right, sweetie?” Mattie asked as they climbed back into the car.

  “Fine,” Kim said. “It must have been that hot dog I wolfed down at lunch.”

  “I thought you didn’t eat red meat,” her father said.

  And then no one said another thing until the car pulled to a stop in front of her grandmother’s house.