There was justice in it, such a beating. You felt this. Though you could not acknowledge it, not even to Oz Newell and his friends.
In the gravel, partway in the weeds at the end of the lot, the bleach-haired boy lay writhing and vomiting. His clothes were torn, his chest exposed. He had not been hurt. It hadn't been a serious beating. They laughed in derision, watching him crawl toward the Jeep. Bleeding from a broken nose, but a broken nose isn't serious. His front teeth were maybe loosened. The pretty boy face had been roughed up; he'd had to be taught a lesson. Rich fucker. Rich guy's fucking son. Stay away from the Star Lake Inn, fucker. Stay away from our girls. Next time it's your head that'll be broke. Your brains you'll be puking. The guys were feeling good about this. They were grateful to Miriam, who was their friend Gideon's young sister, for needing them. For turning to them. The adrenaline high is the best high, the purest high. Laughing so tears stung their faces like acid. Except they had to get the hell out, fast. What if somebody inside the inn had called 911? Two or three of the guys had come on their motorcycles, some in pickups. Oz Newell had his beat-up Cherokee, which smelled like he'd been living in it. There was a plan to meet at another place a few miles up the road at the Benson Mines, open till 4 A.M. But Oz Newell said he'd better get Miriam the hell home.
On Salt Isle Road the wind was moving in the tops of the trees like a living thing. There was the moon sliding in the sky, about to disappear behind clouds. And the clouds so thin and ragged, like torn cloth blowing across the face of the moon. "Look!" Miriam pointed. "Makes you think there's some reason to it." Oz glanced sidelong at Miriam, sprawled in the seat beside him. He'd had to toss soiled shirts, Styrofoam wrappers, beer cans into the back to make room for her. "Like the moon makes a center in the sky. So the sky isn't just..." Miriam was losing the thread of what she was saying. It was an important thing she meant to say, might've said to her father; maybe it would have made a difference. The Cherokee was lurching along the narrow lakeside road. Whatever had gotten into Miriam's brain was making her feel like she wasn't inside her skull but floating a few feet away.
Oz Newell said, surprising her, his voice was so deliberate: "Back there, Miriam, what'd you say about your mother? I didn't maybe hear."
So Oz had heard. Heard something. Miriam thought, He will do it. For me. It could be an accident. There were so many accidents with guns. All the men owned guns. Boys owned guns. Even off-season you heard gunfire in the woods. Les Orlander had not been one of those who'd owned many guns, just two. The shotgun, the rifle. The rifle taken into custody by the county sheriff's department, then released to the family, and Stan had appropriated it, and the shotgun, to take back to Keene with him. Oz could use a rifle. Oz could fire through Ethel's bedroom window. Oz could hide outside in the bushes. Oz could fire through the windshield of the Cutlass when Ethel was driving into town. It could be a robbery. A stranger. This time of year there were many strangers in the Star Lake area. There were many strangers in the Adirondacks. There were break-ins, burglaries, vandalism. There were unexplained beatings, killings. It would happen swiftly and then it would be over and Miriam could live with Martin in Watertown, where he was out of rehab now and working as a roofer, and he'd seemed lonely, and Ethel had said, Honey, come home, live with your sister and me, and Martin had pushed her off, saying he'd sooner be in hell.
In childish bitterness Miriam said, "My mother. What she did to my father. She should be punished," and Oz said, as if perplexed, "Punished how?" and Miriam said, wiping her mouth on the shoulder of her AU SABLE BOATHOUSE T-shirt, "Some way." Miriam's brain was becoming vague again. It was like clouds being blown across the face of the moon; you couldn't see what was behind the rapidly flowing movement, if it was moving also. Oz, driving the Cherokee, braking at curves, said nothing. He was driving more deliberately now, as if he'd realized that he shouldn't be driving at all. Miriam could hear his panting breath. She said, "I'm not serious, Oz. I guess not."
Oz said, hunching his shoulders, "Shouldn't say a thing like that. About your mother. See, somebody might misunderstand."
Turning into Miriam's cinder driveway, Oz cut his headlights. Miriam saw with a pang of dread that the front rooms of the house were darkened but the outside light, at the carport, was on, and lights were burning at the rear of the house: kitchen, Ethel's bedroom. "Miriam, hey! Christ." Oz laughed; Miriam was clutching at him. She was kissing him, his stubbled jaws, the startled expression on his face. He pushed her away and she crossed a leg over his, jamming against the steering wheel. She was desperate, aroused. It felt like drowning, wanting so to be loved. Should be ashamed, but it was happening so quickly. Her mouth against the man's was hot and hurtful, her hard, hungry teeth. She had no idea what a kiss is, the opening of mouths, tongues, the softness, groping. Oz laughed, uneasy. Pushing her away more forcibly. "Miriam, c'mon."
She was too young, Gideon's kid sister. She was a sister to him, or she was nothing. He was sure she'd never had sex with anyone, and damned if he'd be the first.
"I love you. I want to be with you."
"Sure, baby. Some other time."
Miriam jumped from the Cherokee, made her way wincing, barefoot, into the house. So ashamed! Her face pounded with heat.
The kitchen was two rooms, one a former washroom. Les had knocked out the wall between. There was a long counter with a scarred white enamel sink. The beautiful cabinets of dark, polished wood Les had built. On the linoleum floor were scattered rugs. Miriam saw that Ethel wasn't in the kitchen even as, in her bathrobe, a cigarette in hand, Ethel entered the kitchen from the direction of her bedroom. Ethel's eyes were brimming with emotion, fixed on Miriam in the way of one staring at a blazing light, blinding.
Miriam's heart gave a skid. She loved this woman so much, the two of them helpless together, like swimmers drowning in each other's arms.
Her voice was brattish, exasperated. "Why aren't you in bed, Mom? I told you not to wait up."
Now that Les was gone and would not be coming back, Ethel was in mourning. Her face was pale and puffy without makeup, raw. Yet strangely young-looking, her mouth like a bruise, wounded. In the chenille robe her body was slack, ripe, beyond ripeness. The loose, heavy breasts were disgusting to Miriam, who wanted to rush at her mother and strike at her with childish, flailing fists. Miriam, who was staggering with exhaustion, limping barefoot, hair in her face, and her ridiculous tight red T-shirt and white cord skirt stained with her own vomit. Wanting to hide her shamed face against Ethel's neck which was creased, smelling of talcum.
Somewhere distant, in the mountains beyond Star Lake, a melancholy cry, a sequence of cries. Loons, coyotes. Les had taken Miriam outside one summer night to listen to plaintive cries he identified as the cries of black bears.
Ethel smiled uncertainly. Knowing that if she moved too suddenly, Miriam would push her away, run from the room. Barefoot, wincing in pain. The door to her room would be slammed shut, it would never open. "You look feverish, honey." Ethel must have smelled male sweat on Miriam. She smelled beer, vomit. Unmistakable, the smell of a daughter's vomit. But shrewdly deciding not to go there, in that direction. So grateful that the daughter is home. Coming to press a hand against the daughter's forehead. Miriam flinched, dreading this touch. For hours she'd been dreading it. yet the hand was cool, consoling. Ethel said, her voice throaty, bemused, "Where've you been, are you going to tell me?"
For a moment Miriam couldn't remember. Where had she been? Her mouth was dry, parched as sand. As if she'd slept with her mouth open, helpless in sleep as a small child.
"Nowhere. Now I'm back."
Bleeed
Hadn't known the girl. He had not. All he knew was, she was the daughter of friends of his parents. Or maybe just acquaintances, for his parents had known many people in those years. First he remembered of her, a distinct memory, he'd been thirteen years old and in ninth grade and she'd been only five years old, a lifetime between them at those ages. One small child interchangeable with any other small c
hild, girl or boy, and of virtually no significance to a boy of thirteen, for whom no one matters much except a select gathering of boys his age and older, and a very few girls. And there was his mother speaking to him in a voice frightening to him, impulsive, intimate, and her hands on him as if to restrain him from slipping away: "That poor child! And her parents! Of course, they have to be grateful that she's alive, and that terrible man has been—" and he saw a shudder of revulsion in his mother's face, and quickly he looked away, for there was something wrong in this, his mother speaking to him in a voice he rarely heard except when his parents were speaking together in the privacy of their bedroom and the door was closed against their children; and Jess was the sort of boy lacking not curiosity exactly but the recklessness required for wishing to overhear exchanges between your parents you understand are not meant for you to hear. And so Jess resented this behavior on his mother's part. That look in his mother's usually composed face of revulsion tinged with excitement. For there was something sexual in this. Jess knew, and didn't want to know. For what could terrible man mean if the girl had not been killed, except sex? Jess was embarrassed and resentful, hotly his face pounded with blood, badly he wanted to escape. What had he to do with a child eight years younger than he was! And his mother saying, "If you've heard anything, Jess, will you tell me? Tell me what you've heard." (They were in the kitchen. Jess's mother seemed to have been waiting for him there. Had him trapped between the refrigerator and the stove.) At thirteen you no more want to speak of sexual matters with a parent than you would want to speak of God with a parent. And so, not meeting his mother's gaze, Jess mumbled that he hadn't heard anything about whatever this was his mother was telling him, whatever ugly and unspeakable incident wholly unrelated to him and to any of his classmates, Jess took care not to repeat the girl's name—the name of a five-year-old girl means virtually nothing to a boy of thirteen—assuring his anxious mother that no one at his school had been talking about it, so far as he knew. So far as he knew was possibly the truth. So far as he knew was, for a boy of thirteen being questioned by his mother in a way distressing to him, the most negotiable of truths. "The worst of it has been kept out of the news, so far. Her name isn't being released and actual details of what he did except 'repeated assault,' 'critical blood loss'—imagine! A five-year-old girl! Nothing about the family, and a picture only of the...'perpetrator.'" Jess saw that his mother's mouth, which was usually a smiling mouth, was contorted. Harsh lines bracketed his mother's mouth. This is the way she will look when she is old. When she is older, Jess thought. Wanting badly to escape now, push past his mother and run upstairs to his room, shut the damn door behind him and burrow into his most secret and forbidden thoughts, sick thoughts, guilty thoughts, where nei ther his mother nor his father could follow him. For there are places in the world like secret fissures and fault lines into which we can burrow, and hide, where no one can follow. Stammering now, insisting that he hadn't heard anything about the girl, nothing at school, daring now to lift his eyes to his mother's eyes in a desperate appeal, and it was then that Jess's mother uttered the astonishing words Jess would never forget: "I wish I could believe you."
Not accusing so much as yearning, wistful. And her mouth strained, ugly. And it was the final moment of Jess's childhood, as it was, for Jess's mother, the final moment of a phase of her motherhood. Though neither could have said. Though neither would have possessed the words to speak of their loss. At that moment in the gleaming and overlarge kitchen of the Hagadorns' "classic contemporary" house on Fairway Drive overlooking the sculpted hillocks and sly sand traps of the North Hills Country Club golf course, it was clear that the mother could not trust the son even as the son, steeling himself against a sudden unwished-for gripping of his mother's hand on his shoulder or a caress of proprietary fingers at the nape of his warm neck, could not trust the mother.
"Go away, then. Go."
That night overhearing her speaking to his father and her voice quavering in disgust, reproach—"that terrible man," "terrible thing," "so close to home," "should be put away for life"—and this time Jess stood very still in the upstairs hall outside the closed door of his parents' bedroom, scarcely daring to breathe, needing to hear all that might be revealed. And more.
Why? It was the sex. It was the sex secret. That thrilled quaver in his mother's voice. That look on his mother's face. For now he would see his mother at a distance and recognize her as a woman, a woman among other women: female. In Health Science you were taught that sex was "normal," sex was "healthy," sex was "good," sex was "nothing to be ashamed of," sex should be "consensual," sex should be "safe," yet the fact was, everyone knew that sex was secret, and sex was guilty, and sex was sniggered at by the guys, and sex was a wild roller-coaster ride you were scared to climb into yet had no choice about climbing into, soon. (How soon? Thirteen, in ninth grade, Jess was one of the younger and shyer and less experienced boys but he was determined this wouldn't last.) Sex was "porn," and sex was "sex pervert," and sex was "rape-murder," and sex was that "terrible man" who'd done that "terrible thing" to a little girl whose name Jess would try not to remember.
Another time. A few years later. Not the same girl. And not Jess's mother but Jess's father interrogating him, not in the kitchen but in Jess's room, from which there could be no escape.
"—know anything about this ... abduction, do you?"
Quickly Jess shook his head: no.
"—boys in your class? Not friends of yours, are they?"
Quickly Jess shook his head: no.
It was so: Jess wasn't friends with the boys involved in the "abduction," and Jess didn't know the "underage" girl. All he knew was what he'd heard: the girl wasn't a student at North Hills High, her parents weren't residents of North Hills but of Union City. The rumor was, there was only a mother, an "illegal immigrant." The rumor was, the "underage" girl was in eighth grade. (But "mature for her age.") (Girls were maturing at an alarming rate in middle school; you heard astonishing things.) It was possible almost to think that this girl was the girl to whom the "terrible things" had been done by the "terrible man" when Jess was in ninth grade, but Jess knew that this was unlikely. (The other girl, such a little girl at the time, would still be in grade school. And anyway, her family had moved away from North Hills and no one ever spoke of them now.) Still, Jess had to suppose that the two girls were like each other in crucial ways. Circumstances were similar. For this time too there had been "terrible things" perpetrated upon a young girl, and this time too there was talk of blood.
Bleeding on the mattress. Bleeding all over. And too drunk to give a damn how grossed out we were.
Jess hadn't heard these words of disgust firsthand. Jess wasn't a close friend of any of the guys who'd driven out to Bay Head. Though the guys were seniors, and Jess Hagadorn was a senior, and it was graduation week, and there were parties. Many parties, of which some overlapped on the same nights. And some of these were parties to which Jess Hagadorn had been invited, and some of these were not. For there were social circles—cliques—that excluded Jess Hagadorn, though the Hagadorns lived on Fairway Drive overlooking the North Hills golf course and Mr. Hagadorn owned Hagadorn Electronics, Inc. And Mrs. Hagadorn was friendly with many of the mothers of Jess's classmates. Jess was seventeen years, ten months old and still one of the younger, shyer, and less experienced members of his class, but Jess did have friends, Jess did get invited to a number of parties. He'd taken a girl to the senior prom. He'd been coeditor of the North Hills yearbook. It was an incontestable fact, Jess Hagadorn hadn't been one of the half-dozen senior boys who'd left a late-night party to drive twenty-eight miles to the beach house at Bay Head, at the Jersey shore, with the drunken underage girl. The beach house belonged to the family of one of the boys, who'd taken the key without his parents' knowledge. Jess wasn't even certain who'd gone on that drive: popular guys, jocks and rich kids. A Fairway Drive neighbor, three houses down. Maybe a few girls, in another vehicle. How many vehicles drove to Bay Hea
d wasn't clear. The girls would claim to have left the Bay Head party after only about a half-hour. The girls would claim to have left when they saw "how things were headed." Meaning the drinking and drug-taking, and the deafening heavy-metal music. Meaning the underage girl. All that Jess knew, and was trying in a faltering voice to explain to his father, who stared at him with a grave gray gaze as if viewing him through a rifle scope, was that following the party at Andy Colfax's house (to which Jess Hagadorn had not been invited, though, if he'd gone, like numerous others who hadn't been specifically invited but simply showed up, Jess would have been welcome, or anyway not made to feel unwelcome) the "abduction" had occurred. It was an "alleged abduction," for the boys' claim was that the girl had gone with them willingly. She'd "insisted upon" accompanying them, she'd "practically begged." And so the drive to Bay Head had been "consensual." Whatever happened at Bay Head had been "consensual." At least at the beginning, at the North Hills party, "consensual." If Jess Hagadorn had been invited to join the half-dozen guys and the underage girl on the drive in Ed Mercer's father's Chevy Trailblazer to the Jersey shore, possibly Jess would have been flattered, grateful to be included by such popular jocks and rich kids after years of being excluded. So maybe, yes. If he'd been invited, maybe he'd have gone with them; this was a possibility. This wasn't exactly what Jess's father was asking, but it was what Jess's father seemed to be implying. No matter that Jess would have been the only boy at the Bay Head house to be graduating summa cum laude. No matter that Jess would have been the only boy to be attending an Ivy League university in the fall. And maybe now Jess Hagadorn would be one of seven North Hills, New Jersey, senior boys arrested by Bay Head, New Jersey, police on charges of statutory rape, sexual assault upon a minor, providing a minor with alcohol, forcible abduction of a minor, resisting arrest. Except Jess hadn't been one of these boys. He hadn't so much as glimpsed the girl. He didn't know her name. (If he'd known, he had forgotten.) He'd heard that she'd lied about her age. He'd heard that she was fourteen. He'd heard that she was sixteen. He'd heard that she was thirteen. He'd heard that her birth date was unknown for her single parent, her mother, was an illegal immigrant and had no papers. He'd heard that the girl herself was an illegal immigrant and had no papers. He'd heard that she was "physically developed," "mature for her age," whatever her age was, as a white girl would not have been. Nor would any white girl, at least any white girl from North Hills, have climbed into a vehicle with a gang of drunken high school seniors on an impulsive drive sometime after 2 A.M. to the Jersey shore twenty-eight miles away at Bay Head. (And especially no white girl who was having her period—this is what Jess heard, at second or third hand—would've gone with the guys unless possibly, considering how drunk/drugged the girl was, she hadn't realized she was having her period and would in this way disgust the guys, or if she'd known, she'd forgotten. Another possibility, the girl began having her period at the time of the "abduction," "assaults.") Jess knew nothing about any of it. Jess had not glimpsed the girl. Jess had not heard the girl's screams, and if he'd heard, Jess might have thought the girl was laughing. When girls drink, girls scream with laughter. Like birds being slaughtered, girls scream with laughter. Girls high on drugs scream with laughter. And when girls have sex, girls scream with pleasure, or so Jess had reason to believe.
Give Me Your Heart Page 22