The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  Why did he have to laugh? Any other response would have been better. “You do want to kiss,” Leah said. “I know all about what you want. I looked under your bed. I saw the stuff you have there, the stuff you get off to.”

  “Leah,” he said.

  “You’re depressed, too. I looked in your medicine cabinet. I was right about you being depressed. You’re perverted and depressed.”

  “Jesus, kid,” he said. For a moment he put his head down, and Leah saw something in him she hadn’t seen before. The loose neckline of his sweatshirt had been pulled down over his shoulder, where Leah’s fingernails had left three red trails, and half his belly, soft and full, was showing. In this disheveled state, he was vulnerable, childish. Leah thought he might start crying. But he didn’t. He was blushing. He was ashamed and humiliated. And as if just then realizing what Leah had seen, he straightened his sweatshirt and covered himself. “That’s private, Leah. That is my …” He looked at her now and, in a voice neither loud nor angry, in a voice that left Leah feeling utterly irrelevant, he said, “Get out of my house now.” When she didn’t move, he said in that same calm voice, “Now. I mean it.”

  The next day, Leah knew she couldn’t go in to work. Nor could she stay at home, lest Franklin and Noelle suspected that she’d once again done something wrong. So she left in the morning and loitered around town. She sat on the corner of State and North University where the dispossessed teenagers and homeless adults, most vaguely insane or very drunk, hung out, asking for money or playing old instruments, guitars or harmonicas, badly. A kid who wore a ripped T-shirt and something that looked like a dog collar kept asking her for a cigarette, and she kept saying she didn’t smoke, until he started to freak her out and she left. She had a coffee at the Starbucks on Liberty Street, where she couldn’t help overhearing a woman two tables away talking on her cell phone about the sex she’d been having with someone she’d just met. “It was a wonderful oral experience.” She actually said that, whispered it, with Leah sitting right in front of her. To get through the afternoon, Leah perused the used bookstores on Liberty. She found herself picking up book after book, but not really looking at them, not even reading their titles. What was she doing? Why was she even in this place?

  She had keys to eight homes in her pocket. But when she walked into the quiet, green neighborhoods and faced these houses, she couldn’t enter them. Each confronted her with its vacancy, its quietness. When she stood in front of the Bradford house, where she was surprised to see a “Sale Pending” sticker over the sign, she wanted a child, a little girl to rush out the front door, leap onto the lawn, and begin jumping rope over the grass. A little girl to dispossess it of emptiness. And a man pulling weeds in the front yard, a dog in the backyard barking, a neighbor crossing the grass to get to the front door and knock on it. So she was all the more startled to see that someone was, in fact, home. Through the glare of sunlight on the kitchen window, Leah could see the arms and torso of a woman standing at the sink. Leah glanced behind her, saw that no one was looking, and approached. The woman wore a simple white blouse, and as Leah came closer she heard her humming a childish, frivolous song. She was happy, and this thought made Leah smile, made Leah step closer until she saw that the woman was Noelle. She was looking down, wiping the counter or maybe cleaning a dish, with a nonchalance, a girlish, simple pleasure in her face that Leah hadn’t expected and that made her pause. She didn’t know this woman, the one who stood at this sink and hummed this random song. She didn’t know her at all, had never known her. Leah stepped forward, stepped directly in front of the window, not more than a few feet away. Had Noelle glanced up then, what would Leah have said? “Hi.” Or: “I saw you in the window. I was just passing by.” Or, for the umpteenth time, “I’m sorry for being a brat.” Or: “I was just thinking how beautiful and happy you look.” That last one—that’s what she would have said, what her best self would have said. But without so much as glancing up, Noelle turned and walked out of the kitchen. It was a sudden turn, unexpected, just like another slap across the face.

  * * *

  On her way home that afternoon, Leah passed the police department. What she did next, she hadn’t planned. It simply occurred to her when she saw three uniformed cops exit through a side door. She did not give herself time to reflect, to imagine what might happen, to foresee the consequences—a word Franklin might have used—of her actions. She simply did it. She walked in the door she’d seen the cops come out of and found her way to a thick glass window, obviously bulletproof, where an officer sat hunched over a microphone. He was reading something that was out of Leah’s view. On the glass, just above eye level, a plastic sign read, “Pay fines here.” When he finally looked up, Leah had just begun to sense the words she would use. She spoke through a microphone on her side of the glass and could hear her voice amplified on his side. “To whom,” she said, “do I talk about having been raped?” The archaic construction of that sentence came right out of her Latin III class, in which, last semester, she’d received a B-, her lowest grade ever.

  The cop didn’t seem to understand. “Excuse me?” he said.

  “I’ve been raped,” she said this time.

  “I just do traffic tickets.” For a moment he looked helpless in the face of what Leah had just said. But then he was on the phone, and shortly after he hung up, a plainclothes officer, a young woman, appeared, escorted Leah down a brightly lit hallway and into an office that reminded her of the principal’s office at her high school. An American flag stood in the corner and a few framed diplomas hung on the wall.

  “You’ve been sexually assaulted?” the woman asked. Beneath a short haircut, her face was square and solid. And though her simple gray slacks made her appear mannish, her face expressed a great deal of sympathy when Leah nodded. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Are you hurt?” Leah couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked her this question, and she liked hearing it now. “Do you need to see a doctor?”

  “I don’t think so,” Leah said.

  The door opened then, and a balding man poked his head in. “You got a minute?” he asked, and the woman gave him a severe look that made her colleague immediately retreat, closing the door behind him.

  “I’m seventeen,” Leah blurted out. This seemed necessary to say, though she hardly knew why and realized then that she was on the verge of panicking, that she was visibly trembling; her arms, her legs, her hands wouldn’t stay still.

  “It’s all right,” the woman said. “You’re all right now.” She offered Leah a cup of water, and Leah drank it down. “We should call your parents. I’m sure they’d like to know you’re safe.”

  Leah shook her head. “You can’t call my mom. She’s dead.”

  It was a relief to have said this and a relief to see the woman nod. “Okay,” the cop said, expressing less sympathy than simple acknowledgment. It was, after all, simply so. It had happened. It was one more thing to know and not question. And this remedial gesture, this “Okay,” left Leah feeling calmer. “How about your father? Could we call him?”

  Leah nodded, and soon the woman officer had reached him at work. “Your daughter is here in my office, Mr. Mitchell. She’s just told me that she’s been sexually assaulted.” How easily—as if it were straightforward information—the woman had said this sentence. And now, reassuringly and repeatedly, she was saying, “She’s safe, Mr. Mitchell. She’s right here with me. She’ll stay here until you arrive.”

  After the lady cop hung up, Leah told her story about how Max had raped her: first the picnic and softball game, the departure of all the guests but Leah, the cleaning up afterwards, the beers he had given her, the conversation on the couch about how sorry he was to see her go, followed by him reaching over and kissing her, then the struggle Leah had lost. Leah was struck by how easily she began to lie, and by how, without contempt for Max, without much feeling at all for Max, she continued to lie. The woman nodded. She said, “I see. I understand.” She gave every possible
sign of listening and taking it all in, and this encouraged Leah and kept her talking. There were more difficult questions, questions Leah hadn’t expected and didn’t want to hear. “Did he penetrate you, Leah? Did he ejaculate inside you?”

  Leah shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, maybe not. I don’t think he did.”

  “Okay,” the woman said gently. “You’ll need to see a doctor.”

  “Not now,” Leah said.

  “The sooner the better.”

  “But not immediately. Not this minute.”

  “No,” the officer said. “Not right now, but soon.”

  It was not until her father arrived that Leah wanted to take back everything she had said and realized that she could not—not with the woman officer sitting across from her. Franklin was oddly shy when he entered the room and saw her. He wore a suit and floral-pattern necktie that Noelle had recently given him. “Leah,” he said. His beardless face, thin and clean, still seemed unfamiliar to her. How strange it was to see him in the middle of a workday. There was something—not quite pain—in his face as he looked at her. As if he were trying to see the ruin and suffering she’d undergone. As if he were trying to imagine what had happened to her. He hesitated before touching her, placing a hand cautiously on her shoulder.

  “I’m okay, Daddy,” she said. It was unbearable, looking out at the nightmare she was creating. She closed her eyes then and heard Franklin make a sound, a brief sigh, a sign that he, too, couldn’t bear this scene. His hand left her shoulder. Leah opened her eyes.

  “My God,” he said. And though he was usually calm, mild, slow to react and feel things, he became suddenly fidgety, nervous. He thrust his hands in his pockets and paced. He looked frightened now. He looked impulsive and uncertain. “What do we do?” he asked the officer. “What next?”

  She said something that Leah couldn’t listen to about a doctor, about filing criminal charges. “I need to leave now,” Leah said. “I need to go home. Please. Now.”

  Soon Leah was following her father down the hallway and out the station, knowing she’d have to return later that afternoon, though she wasn’t thinking about that. She just wanted to move, get out and away, forestall and put everything behind her. Acceleration and velocity. That’s what she needed now.

  But the world outside the police station was slow. It seethed with humidity and a dull, fleshy layer of midafternoon sun. Franklin’s forehead broke out with sweat as soon as they hit the air. The green on the trees seemed unctuous, seemed to weigh them down and sadden them. There was no breeze, no motion. As they crossed the street, Leah felt the sticky asphalt burn through her soles and bake her ankles. And everywhere she looked, Leah saw terror thinly veiled. A small, shirtless boy on the other side of the street, his chin smeared with something like ice cream, held onto a bike and quietly sobbed. Where were his parents, his brothers and sisters, his friends? A large truck backing out of a driveway, its bed filled with layers of ripped-up sod, made that insistent bleating sound that was supposed to warn pedestrians away. Franklin was walking too fast across the street, and though no cars were in sight, Leah felt the threat of being hit, crushed in a moment too sudden to anticipate. Before getting in her father’s car, she looked for the truck. It was gone. Suddenly nowhere. As was the child. Gone. Snatched up. Stolen. “I’m sorry,” Franklin was saying. Inside the car, the heat became viscous, as if the air would gather and begin to boil. The leather seats stuck to Leah’s legs, sucking on the backs of her thighs. Her skin—her face, her arms, her chest—stung with sweat. “Daddy,” she said.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said. And then: “I’m sorry. So sorry. I can’t believe Max would do this. I can’t believe anyone would. He’s a little funny, a little lonely. But that’s all I thought he was.”

  Leah’s window came down. Air rushed in. One tree, then another and another, passed by. They were driving. “But you’re okay, aren’t you? You’re fine. You’re safe. I can see that. Thank God. Anything could have happened. We just need to go home now.” But home was just down the street from the station, and they had already passed it. He looked at either side of the street. “We drove right by our house, didn’t we? We’ll have to turn around. We’ll go home and rest. And then we’ll see what has to be done.” He let out a sigh. “Bad things. First your mother and now this. We were okay before. We survived. We’ll be okay again.”

  “Daddy,” Leah said.

  He didn’t look at her. He just kept driving.

  “I lied,” she said.

  He was trying to find a place to turn around, his eyes searching the road, attempting to focus, to concentrate.

  “I made it up.” She wanted him to stop the car now and listen, but he didn’t. “Max didn’t rape me. Nobody did. Max didn’t even touch me. He didn’t do anything. I made it up. I did it because I hate people. I hate everyone.”

  He slowed down now. He stopped, pulled the keys out of the ignition, let his head drop to the steering wheel, and began to sob, at first quietly and then more loudly. This was him. The man she recognized as her father: small, hurt, weak, overcome by grief. Not happy, not vigorous, not in love. He lifted a fist, the keys clenched in his fingers. “Daddy,” Leah said.

  He stepped out of the car then and, without shutting his door, began to walk. They were on the edge of West Park, a place her parents had often taken her as a little girl. Leah’s mother had been alive then, and everything had been fine. When Leah walked after him now, he left the sidewalk and started moving faster over the grass. “Daddy,” she said again. He began to jog, and so did Leah. And then, his suit tail flapping behind him, he was running. Leah ran after him, but he was fast and thin, in better shape than ever. He lengthened his stride, leaned forward, and broke into a sprint, losing a black leather shoe in the grass. Leah ran until her lungs burnt. Then she stopped and watched her father run over a hill and disappear on the other side.

  When Leah arrived home with her father’s shoe, a police car was parked at the curb. Inside, Franklin stood in the entryway. “Here’s your shoe.” Leah held it up. That shoe, the largeness of it, the empty, clunky presence of it in her hand as she had walked through the park, then around and around the same block, wanting never to go home, never to face her father again, haunted her, reminded her of the times as a little girl that she’d put on his buckskin house slippers and been consumed up to her ankles by animal hide as she tromped through the house, imagining and visualizing his gargantuan strangeness, the simple mystery of his size in comparison to hers, all the while overjoyed by the fact that this alien giant was hers, all hers. And now he wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t even look at it. Leah put the shoe down. His necktie was undone, and his face showed an exhaustion Leah had not seen since her mother’s death. Two cops sat at the kitchen table, obviously waiting for her. “They’re going to arrest you,” Franklin said. “I called them.”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll need to use handcuffs,” one of the cops said.

  Franklin was looking at Leah when he said, “I’d like to request that you do use them.”

  She turned and put her hands out behind her. “I don’t mind,” she said. The younger cop, a boy with a crew cut who seemed only a few years older than Leah, stood up and began taking the cuffs from their container at his waist. With her head down, she could see where the bulky black pistol sat in its holster on the boy’s hip. “You have a gun,” she said. Then she began to cry.

  Still holding the handcuffs, the boy looked over at Franklin. “All right,” Franklin said. “I guess she doesn’t need those.” The boy put them away.

  Leah truly did not know how to be arrested. It was awkward and humiliating. The young cop, no doubt new to his work and seeming anxious, gripped her arm too tightly while the other read her rights. Her father said and did nothing. From the curb outside, Leah looked back for him, but the front door was already shut. “Thank you,” she sobbed when the boy lowered her cautiously into the backseat, making sure her head did not hit
the car. It wasn’t right. She wasn’t right. Criminals didn’t say thank you. At the station, the cops gently—too gently—searched her with a metal detector, took her mug shot, then left her in her own private cell that nonetheless had real bars and a door that slid heavily into place. Later she would hear from both her father and Jason Clark how four uniformed cops had gone into the lab and compelled Max to accompany them to the station for questioning. They’d visited him at his workplace without warning because such visits intimidated criminals and because, Franklin explained, intimidation often led to confessions. In front of Jason, Diana, and others, the cops told Max he was suspected of criminal activity. They offered no more explanation, and Max had been too terrified to ask for more. “You should have seen his face,” Jason Clark would later tell her. “He couldn’t speak. He just followed them. He got into a car, and they drove him off.”

  But in her cell Leah wasn’t thinking of Max. She was too terrified to think of Max. It wasn’t the handcuffs, the Miranda rights, the body search, or even the mug shot that scared her. It was the numbing aloneness of incarceration, the lack of detail, the simple repetition of bars, the orphaned bareness of the single toilet in the corner of her cell, the bland white of the concrete wall at her back, the drain—not unlike the drain in her animal basement—in the concrete floor, the weird echo of someone whistling somewhere down the corridor of cages. She’d expected the place to be teeming with prisoners, with bad men and women. But across from her and next to her, the cells lay vacant. There were no sounds of talk, of laughter. No screams, no sighs, no grunting. She half expected to hear her dogs and sheep, and she thought of them now, thought of them in the basement of the lab, in their cages as she was now in hers. She wanted some sign of them: a bark, the bleat of a stupid sheep. But she heard only the weird whistling and her own unsettling breathing, heavy and too fast and snotty because she couldn’t stop crying. She felt the thud of her heart. She wanted someone—her father, Noelle, even a criminal, a real criminal—to be in the cage across from her.