For Better and Worse

by Margot Hunt

  “I’ll buy you another cookie if you take over all of my mom duties for the rest of the day. Especially the part where I have to talk to my son about the fact that his principal might be a pedophile.” I shook my head. “This is seriously screwed up.”

  “I know, and it’s awful and scary, but at the same time...”

  “At the same time, what?”

  “It’s like that old saying about when you hear hoofbeats, it’s more likely to be a horse than a zebra.”

  “Who’s the zebra supposed to be?”

  “Look, I know this may make me sound like an asshole, but it’s what everyone is thinking—it’s more likely that a troubled kid would make a false report, than that a good man with no criminal history would suddenly turn into a pedophile in his late forties.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why do you look so freaked out?”

  I shook my head and shrugged. “Honestly, I just have a bad feeling about this. A really bad feeling.”

  “It will be fine,” Mandy said, putting her hand over mine. “As mothers, we worry all the time, and everything almost always works out.”

  “I know,” I said, nodding. But I was silently thinking, Except for those times when it doesn’t.

  Chapter 7

  As I reached the front of the car line, Charlie was talking to a cluster of friends. When he saw me, he waved and ran to grab his blue camouflage pattern backpack, which had been discarded by the brick school wall.

  “Hi, Mom!” He climbed into the car. “Can Jack come over this weekend? ’Cause I just invited him to.”

  “Maybe. Let me check with Dad and see if we have any plans. Do you have a lot of homework?”

  Charlie held his thumb and finger a half inch apart.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “A teeny-weeny amount. I’ll finish it in, like, ten minutes.”

  “Just don’t put it off too late.”

  “I know, I know.”

  I turned left out of the school parking lot and headed back toward downtown.

  “Where are we going?” Charlie asked. Our house was in the opposite direction.

  “I thought we could go get some ice cream. How does that sound?”

  “Really?” Charlie grinned. “Awesome.”

  I found a parking spot near Jinxy Cones. We headed inside to place our usual orders—a strawberry sundae with extra whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles for Charlie and a small scoop of mint chocolate chip for me. Ice cream in hand, we strolled down to the boardwalk, where we found an empty bench overlooking the water.

  “Did anything interesting happen in school today?” I asked in between bites.

  “We’re having an egg drop contest in science,” Charlie said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s an experiment where we drop eggs off the second story of the school.”

  “That sounds messy.”

  “Not if we do it right. We’re supposed to wrap them in something that will keep them from breaking. Like bubble wrap, or those foam thingies that sometimes come in packages.”

  “Styrofoam peanuts,” I said. “Is that what you’re going to use?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I was going to look up ideas on the internet. It has to be environmentally friendly, though.”

  “I wonder if Jell-O would work,” I mused. “What if you made a huge vat of Jell-O, and suspended the egg in the middle of it? Then it would just bounce off the pavement.”

  Charlie shrugged, clearly unimpressed by this genius idea.

  “Come on, it’s a great idea,” I insisted. “And how much fun would it be to create a giant Jell-O blob?”

  “Is Jell-O environmentally friendly?”

  “I have no idea. How flexible is your teacher on that point?”

  “She said if our project isn’t environmentally friendly, we’ll be disqualified.”

  “So not flexible at all, then.” I licked my minty ice cream from my spoon and tried to decide how best to broach the topic I’d brought Charlie here to discuss. “I have something I need to talk to you about.”

  Charlie turned to look at me, his expression apprehensive. “Are you and Dad getting a divorce?”

  “What?” I asked, startled.

  “That’s what parents always say when they’re about to unload the divorce talk. First they buy you ice cream, then they say they have to talk to you about something.”

  “No, it’s not. How do you know that, anyway?”

  “I saw it on a YouTube video.”

  “Oh, well, then it must be true.

  “So, you are getting a divorce?” Charlie’s voice rose with anxiety.

  Good work, Nat, I thought. Great start to what already promises to be a hideously difficult conversation. Real Mother of the Year award potential.

  “No, honey, of course not,” I said, reaching over to pat his arm. “I was being sarcastic. You know, because of how silly most of the YouTube videos you watch are. But, no, your dad and I are not getting a divorce.”

  Thoughts of Will and his obsession with his phone over the past few months, coupled with his recent pass code protection of it, immediately popped into my head, but I pushed them away. I had to focus on the issue at hand.

  “Have you heard anything about why Principal Gibbons wasn’t at school today?” I began.

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s on a leave of absence, and I wasn’t sure if your classmates had talked to you about it.”

  “What is that?”

  “A leave of absence?” Charlie nodded. “It’s when a person takes some time off work, but without quitting their job. And with the understanding that they may return at some point. It’s like a time-out for grown-ups.”

  “Oh. Hey, is that a dolphin?”

  “Huh?” I was momentarily confused by this non sequitur. “Where?”

  “There.” Charlie pointed toward the river. “Oh, never mind. It’s just a stick or something. Or is that a grocery bag?”

  “Anyway,” I said, realizing his attention was flagging, and that I should probably get to the point, “the thing is, sweetheart, one of the kids at your school said that Mr. Gibbons touched him in a way that he shouldn’t have. So I need to talk to you about that.”

  Charlie continued to silently spoon ice cream into his mouth while staring out at the water. I couldn’t tell if he was listening to me or not. I set my half-empty paper cup down on the bench, then turned toward my son, and reached out to hold his hand. It felt solid and warm in mine.

  “Do you know what I mean by that?” I continued. “There are places on our bodies that are private and that shouldn’t be touched, unless it’s by a doctor or, when you’re grown up, by someone that you care about.”

  Will had gone over the basics of sex with Charlie when he was in the third grade and came home from school completely wigged out after one of his friends had told him that daddies inject babies into mommies. This had caused Charlie to conjure up a horrifying image of Will giving me a shot with a huge hypodermic needle, like the one his pediatrician used to give him vaccines, only big enough to hold a fully formed baby. It took Will the better part of an hour to convince him that sex had nothing to do with needles.

  “I know that,” Charlie now said, his voice dripping with condescension. He pulled his hand away from me.

  “Good,” I said. “That’s good. But I still have to ask you. Have you ever been alone with Principal Gibbons? Just the two of you, with no one else in the room?”

  Charlie didn’t respond. Instead, he took another bite of his ice cream. I noticed that his narrow shoulders had begun hunching up toward his ears. I felt the first faint stirrings of alarm.

  “Charlie?” I tried again. This time Charlie shrugged. I took a deep breath. Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, I repeated to mysel
f. “I really need to know, honey.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Charlie said. He had stopped eating his ice cream, but he was still staring into the paper cup, where the vanilla ice cream was starting to melt, swirling with the bright red strawberry.

  “I understand, but it’s important that you tell me.” I kept my voice as steady and reassuring as possible. “Were you ever alone with Mr. Gibbons?”

  This time, Charlie nodded. A wave of emotion—terror, panic, anger—washed over me, leaving me breathless and almost dizzy. I wanted to ball my hands into fists and scream. No. No! Not my son. Not my sweet, funny, innocent son. Not Charlie, please God, not Charlie. And suddenly I found myself negotiating with a God I wasn’t even sure I believed in:

  Dear God, do anything to me, anything at all, and I will take it. But pleasepleasepleaseohGodplease, don’t let it be possible that Charlie was hurt. Please, that’s all I will ever ask of you, please just to keep him safe. If you do that, I’ll even start believing in you. Do we have a deal? Do we?

  I realized I was holding my breath and had to remind myself to inhale, exhale, inhale again.

  “Charlie,” I said, and I was stunned to hear how calm I sounded. “Did Mr. Gibbons ever touch you in an inappropriate way? In a place that he shouldn’t have been touching you?”

  Charlie bent his head forward so that I couldn’t see his face. I knelt down in front of him on the boardwalk. I plucked the ice cream cup out of Charlie’s hands, and set it on the weathered bench beside him. Charlie clasped his hands together, but I pried them gently apart and held them. He still wouldn’t look at me.

  “Honey, it’s okay. You can tell me anything. I won’t be angry at you, or upset...but I have to know.” I wondered if Charlie could hear my heart beating, because of how hard it was thumping against my chest. So hard, it was physically painful.

  Charlie still didn’t speak, so I gave his hands a soft shake.

  “Charlie?” I said again, and this time I couldn’t keep the quaver out of my voice.

  Charlie lifted his head and looked straight at me. There were tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Chapter 8

  Will didn’t get home until nearly ten o’clock that night. I knew he was going to be late. The managing attorney at his law firm was wooing a potential candidate, and had asked Will to join them for dinner. At least, that’s what Will had told me he was doing. I had no reason to think he was lying, but I actually didn’t even care. If Will was having an affair, today’s news had knocked that to the bottom of my list of concerns.

  “Hello,” Will called out, entering through the side door from the garage.

  “I’m in the living room.”

  He came in, still wearing his tie, although he had his jacket off and slung over one arm. He looked at me curiously. “What are you doing?”

  I was curled up on the couch, holding an enormous glass of red wine, wanting only to numb myself after the onslaught of emotions of the day. I’d brought Charlie straight home after our talk by the river. He’d showered and gotten into his pajamas early. I made him pasta for dinner just the way he liked it—with butter and lots of grated parmesan cheese, no tomato sauce. We’d watched Toy Story, which was still his favorite movie, although he was probably getting a little too old for it. I wanted him to have a quiet night, filled with all the things that made him feel safe.

  And the entire time, all I could think about how sure I’d been that I would know if something bad had happened to Charlie. How could I have been so foolish, so completely self-deluded? It kept washing over me, the pain so intense, it took all of my self-control not to curl up into a ball and weep. But I had to keep it together for Charlie’s sake. I hadn’t yet told Will about what had happened. It just wasn’t the sort of news you conveyed over the phone, not if you could help it. It also gave me extra time to absorb the horror of what had happened before I had to talk it through with another adult.

  “How was your dinner?” I asked, ignoring Will’s question.

  “Fine.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t blown away by the candidate, but most of the other partners like him. We’ll probably extend an offer.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. He was fine. A bit of a suck-up, although I guess that’s standard for job interviews.” Will sat down heavily at the other end of the couch and loosened his tie. “What’s new here at Casa Clarke?”

  “Quite a lot, actually.” I drew in a shaky breath, and ran a hand through my hair. “I have news. It’s not good.”

  Will’s expression turned serious. “What’s going on?”

  I hesitated, dreading that this moment had arrived. Right now, Will was smiling, looking slightly buzzed from the cocktails he and his partners had undoubtedly ordered with dinner, happy—or happy enough—with his lot in life. He might resent me, dislike his job on occasion, fret about our finances...but once I told him what I knew, he’d long for the days when those were the worst of his problems.

  “Nat, you’re scaring me. What happened?”

  I told him everything Charlie had told me. How Robert Gibbons had approached Charlie on the fifth grade camping trip at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in early December. How he’d asked Charlie to help him set up his tent, and then, once the task was completed, suggested Charlie come in to admire his deluxe tent. How once they’d been alone, he’d told Charlie his story about ancient Greek men having relationships with young boys, as a rite of passage.

  “He didn’t know what that meant,” I said, my mouth dry, my throat scratchy. “He thought it had something to do with the Lord of the Rings movie, when Gandalf tells the fire demon he can’t pass.”

  Robert had explained, it was something slightly different...and could he show Charlie what he meant? Charlie had agreed. That was the point that he kept coming back to, through his tears and his stuffy nose and the sobs that caught in his narrow chest. He had agreed.

  I stopped then, unable to go on. I touched a hand to my cheek and found it was slick with tears. I hadn’t even realized I’d been crying. I looked up at Will to see that his cheeks were wet, too. I reached a hand out to my husband, but he ignored it. Instead, he suddenly stood, turned and took a few stumbling steps toward the kitchen.

  “Where are you going?” My voice was a croak.

  Will didn’t respond. Instead, he made a fist and punched the wall.

  “Jesus!” I stood. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Will stared down at the wall, which had a large, noticeable dent in it, then looked down at his hand.

  “You’re bleeding,” I said. I stood and went to the kitchen. I dampened a paper towel and tried to hand it to Will. He ignored it and went straight for the cabinet where we kept the liquor, pulling out a bottle of Scotch and banging the door shut Will retrieved a glass from the cupboard near the sink and filled it close to the brim with the Scotch. I tried again to offer him the paper towel, but he waved me away.

  “Charlie.” Will closed his eyes and I knew that he was reliving our son’s life. The helpless red-faced newborn. The jolly baby who loved to giggle. The toddler who got into everything and anything, so that we had to secure the whole house with safety locks and bumpers just to keep him safe.

  But we hadn’t kept him safe, after all. And I would never forgive Will or myself for that.

  “How is he? I mean, I know he must be traumatized and upset, but...is he okay?”

  “I think so. For now. I’m going to make an appointment for him with a child psychologist tomorrow.”

  Will nodded. “That’s a good idea. It will give him someone to talk to. Other than us, I mean.”

  “I just need to make sure I find someone who’s had experience in...this. Someone who will be in a position to help Charlie get through it. To heal.”

  “Should we take him to a medical doctor? Have him examined?”

 
“Charlie told me that the abuse was all touching, that there wasn’t any...” I stopped, swallowed. “Penetration.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I was concerned that having a doctor examine him—” I began.

  “It might feel like another violation,” Will concluded. He shook his head. “We’ve known Robert for years. He’s been in our house, eaten at our table! How could he do this to Charlie? To us?”

  I longed to go to my husband, to put my arms around him, to press my face against his chest. But something stopped me. I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d touched, much less held one another. The space between us had grown too wide. When had that happened?

  “What are we going to do?” Will asked.

  “Well,” I began slowly. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  I hadn’t been able to think about anything else since Charlie had told me.

  “Have you called the police?”

  “No.”

  “I guess we’ll have to do that first thing in the morning.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No. We are absolutely not calling the police.”

  Will squinted at me, as though we were in a dark, smoky room, instead of our well-lit kitchen. “What? Why not? Is there someone else we should contact first? Like, a guardian ad litem or something?”

  “No, of course not.” Will had limited experience with criminal law, I knew, but the course had been a requirement when we were in law school. I wondered just how drunk he was. “Those are for kids who need someone to represent them to the court. Kids with abusive parents or no parents or who have chaotic lives that require extra help.”

  “So who do we report it to? We have to tell someone!”

  “Do you know what will happen if we report this?”

  Will stared at me silently. I had never seen my hale, preppy husband look so bloodless, so sickly white.

  “First of all, the police will question Charlie,” I continued. “They’ll do their best to be kind and gentle, but they’ll ask him about it again and again and again, to make sure that his story holds up through the retellings. Then, they’ll have him examined by a doctor, who will also hopefully be kind and gentle, but who will be required to check him over thoroughly and intimately. Next, they’ll have him meet with a social worker, who will, again, probably be a very nice person, we would hope, but her job will be to get Charlie to go into as much detail as possible about the abuse. How he was touched, what he himself touched, what he saw, what he was told...and, just like the police, she will take him through it again and again and again. And that’s just the beginning of the nightmare.