After the Moment

by Garret Freymann-Weyr

  There were no more questions from his father, as if he accepted what had happened without being able to judge it. Although when Janet said they should do any and every thing to prevent Leigh from getting expelled, Clayton said, calmly, "He beat a boy unconscious. I'm not sure he should get a pass on that."

  Clayton still felt that it was only Maia's choice whether to tell anyone about what had happened to her.

  "Unless the Gavenlocks think about pressing charges," Clayton said. "Then I'll have to tell them. They won't want his involvement entered into the legal record any more than I want an assault and battery conviction for you."

  Maia's despairing and repeated phrase I trusted you rang through Leigh's mind.

  "She doesn't want anyone to know," he said. "I'd rather go to jail."

  "You'd get anger management," Clayton said. "Expulsion is more of a worry right now."

  ~~~

  By the weekend, Leigh's face looked fairly normal, if one ignored the blue and yellow marks along his eye. His tongue had reduced in size and he could speak, although the impulse to scratch at his stitches made it hard to think. He had eaten almost no solid food for three days, and while Leigh had no appetite, his body was screaming for a meal. He wondered how in the world Maia's mind had managed to beat her desire—her body's will—to eat.

  Taking what was left of his nerve and the fragments of his bravery in hand, Leigh walked over to Maia's house. Charles Rhoem answered his knock and they studied each other for a minute. Leigh was afraid that Maia's second stepfather might try to keep him out of the house.

  "Looks like you're healing up," Charles said. "She's out back teaching that monster-size dog how to fetch."

  Leigh walked into the garden, trying not to think of all the time he'd spent there, when it had been easy to see her. D.C. happily trotted away from Maia and the Frisbee she was holding. Leigh held out his hand so the dog could lick it, remembering how he and Millie had found success and failure when training Bubbles. Maia's dog licked his hand, sniffed at his crotch, and then lay down on the ground.

  "You know how small dogs think they're German shepherds?" Leigh said. "Maybe D.C. thinks he's one of those tiny poodles that nap all the time."

  "Maybe," she said. "How's your mouth?"

  "It's okay," he said. "Weird, but, you know, fine."

  Silence, and then awkwardness grew as neither of them spoke.

  "I wish you hadn't done it," she said, finally.

  "I know," Leigh said.

  "You know," she said. "Well, that's great. I'm glad that you know."

  Leigh tried desperately to think of the exact right words to explain that he meant he also wished he hadn't done it, that he would chop off his foot—even the good one without the stress fracture—rather than hurt her. And that he would give, or do, or give up anything in order to erase the sound of her voice saying that she had trusted him.

  "And to do it to Preston, God," Maia said, all her unhappiness bursting out. "He had the least to do with it, and, I mean, who cares, but at least he felt bad about it. At least he was sorry."

  Leigh's entire body braced at the mere mention of Preston's apology, alerting him that he had not spent all of his rage in the fight.

  "If you had to pound the crap out of someone, why not Oliver Lexham?"

  Leigh spoke quickly, relieved to have words and slightly surprised she hadn't already guessed.

  "Preston's the one who knew better."

  "Of course," she said, but sounding even angrier than she had before.

  Perhaps Leigh had explained himself badly, and he added, hoping to get it right, "I'll never be like Oliver or any of those guys. But Preston, sure. Preston's not so different from me. He's a friend of mine."

  He saw her lips press together and considered the possibility that she was thinking that he'd put his "friend" in a coma.

  "Was a friend, or I thought he was, or, that's not it," Leigh said. "Preston could have stopped them. He knows that, and he should—"

  "You made this all about you," Maia said. "What I wanted was for it to be private. And all about me."

  He stood still, sure she was wrong, but afraid she was right.

  "I am not some totally innocent victim here," she said. "But I'm not totally at fault for that bad night, and, God, I wanted to figure it out."

  She tossed the Frisbee into the faded decorative grasses that Leigh remembered having moved a few times over the summer. She clicked her fingers at the dog and paused on the steps leading up to the deck.

  "I needed to figure it all out," Maia said. "By myself and in private."

  "No one will know," Leigh said.

  "I don't know what to say to you," she told him. "I know you didn't mean it. But now ... now I don't know."

  "Listen, even if Preston's parents press charges, I will never say why I hit him. I'd go to jail before I told anyone."

  Maia's head tilted slightly as she studied him. Leigh couldn't read her expression. Amused? Annoyed? If he'd once felt closer to her than anyone else, he no longer did.

  "I'd never let that happen," she said. "I don't even want you suspended."

  "No one will ever know," he said. "I promise."

  Her hand reached out and touched his face. Gently, although it was gone before he felt it.

  "But I know," she said. "And that's bad enough."

  Leigh watched her and D.C. go into the house. It was not particularly gratifying that only the dog looked back at him.

  ~~~

  On her first day back at school after the holiday, Millie came home saying that Oliver Lexham and Kevin Staines were playing dumb about what had happened. They'd been called in, along with Jonathan Kimber, to the headmaster's office and sworn up and down that they had no idea why Preston Gavenlock and Leigh Hunter had tried to kill each other in the cafeteria.

  Millie told Leigh that this was horribly unfair and wrong.

  "If they expel you, you won't live here anymore," Millie said, sitting on his bed, her shoulders slumped.

  Leigh remembered, with more shame than he felt about putting Preston in the hospital, that he had moved to Calvert Park to be near his sister, whose father had died only eight months ago. How had he let things fall apart this fast?

  "I'll go to public school," he said. "Don't worry."

  "Clayton's already told Mom that the minute Lillian finds out about any of this, she'll yank you to Maine really fast."

  "She won't find out," Leigh said.

  "Unless you get expelled. Then he'll have to tell her."

  "I won't get expelled. I promise."

  For obvious reasons, Millie didn't put a lot of stock in her brother's promises, and took her woes to Franklin. Who simply couldn't believe the mounting damage his brother had caused without paying for any of it.

  Leigh never knew whose idea it was—Franklin's or Millie's—but he found out soon enough what was done. Franklin played the video for Diana Jane Gilbor, who did just what he hoped she would. She left the Staineses' house (Leigh would always wonder how Franklin had convinced her to go there), called Oliver's father, and had a private conference with her firster, Ms. Kestell.

  By the third day in December, Leigh was looking at a ninety-six-hour suspension, which Calvert Park Prep was happy to consider as already served. But Leigh would have preferred being expelled, even if it meant Lillian finding out everything. Because as a result of Franklin's showing the video to Diana Jane, Maia went from trying to put what she called that bad night behind her to living with everyone having an opinion about it.

  chapter twenty-four

  provisional agreements

  Calvert Park Prep was located in a small suburb, but it was part of a wide, close-knit circle of private schools located throughout several of Maryland's counties. As the story of Maia's rape spread, different versions appeared and certain details were told as gospel truth. In one version, GHB was slipped into Maia's wine; in another, five boys had sex with her; and in yet another, she'd asked them to make the tape, wan
ting to become a sex star via the Internet.

  Some thought her story showed what could happen when boys got out of control. Others pointed to it as part of an obvious lie told by a girl with morning-after regrets.

  Leigh, watching and listening to this happen, finally understood why she had elected to skip a trial. The swirl of rumor, speculation, and judgment was like reliving that bad night every day. Throw lawyers into the mix, and it would have been that much more toxic.

  What he also understood, as Maia sat apart from him at lunch, refused to meet his eye in the hallway, and stopped coming to the house for dinner, was that she would never forgive him. Leigh was forced to assume Maia had found another way to visit Josh, since Leigh's e-mails asking if she needed a ride went unanswered.

  He wanted to tell her she was wasting her time being mad at him. Leigh was already mad enough at himself for the both of them. He heard from Janet that a radio talk show in Baltimore had discussed the alleged date rape during a segment on how technology was changing not just dating but all the ways in which dating could go wrong.

  No names had been mentioned, of course, but Millie reported that a link to the radio show's audio was flying around the school population via IM and e-mail. Leigh wasn't sure how things could get much worse. He studied for his exams, got the stitches in his tongue taken out, and sent his applications to six colleges he picked by randomly opening a guide book.

  The school in Ohio was impossible now. Any college seemed impossible. And pointless.

  Leigh tried watching the DVD of the 2002 World Cup that Pete had given him over Labor Day. Leigh had thought France would win that year, but it was Brazil, for the fifth time in a row. Watching the highlights was boring, because the goals were never, for him, at least, the highlight of a good game. But there were no clubs Leigh cared about on the three channels that brought soccer into Clayton's house.

  For the first time, zoning out with soccer failed him, forcing Leigh to turn his attention back to the war. It too had become worse in almost every way, and especially difficult to follow. In a way, this was good, as it made it impossible to dwell on how Preston had been the only person with whom Leigh could talk about what was happening in Iraq. He had to focus on what he was reading, not on any conversation he wasn't having.

  If he missed Preston, he missed the guy who had been his friend. Not the guy who'd shot the video.

  As Leigh navigated through the newspaper stories of power transfers, bombings, and attacks, he picked one news source—the paper Clayton read each morning—and began noticing bylines. Leigh realized, in a way he hadn't before, that reporters were living in Baghdad or Basra or, more likely, the Green Zone. They weren't simply writing about the war from a newsroom somewhere in an American city. The same names would show up again and again, and after Googling them, Leigh understood that just like everyone else, reporters had jobs and bosses. And, as in school, there were assignments, and Leigh supposed that reporters got a kind of grade based on how well they captured what was true.

  Not that anything true seemed to be coming out of Iraq. He tried to imagine himself in Iraq, not as one of the teenagers on the Kuwaiti border whom he'd thought of in March, but as a reporter assigned to figure out what had happened when. Leigh didn't have the slightest idea about how events were investigated but suddenly wanted to learn. He was disgusted that something as important as a war should be happening without the consequences of it being broadcast everywhere.

  Was getting away with it now allowed on a global level?

  For a few hours on the Sunday when the news channels were full of Saddam Hussein's capture, Leigh thought that maybe, finally, something had happened. An end or a new beginning, he couldn't tell, but at least it was a clearly stated goal that had been accomplished.

  Maybe it would all be over, the army would come home, and the reporters sent somewhere else.

  Leigh watched TV in the kitchen that day, perched on the counter while Janet and Millie moved around him, making a batch of Christmas cookies. He had gotten up early to go running and discovered that, for the second morning straight, his father had already left, presumably for the office.

  "What's Dad got going at work that he's there all weekend?" he asked Janet, and she shrugged, as if it happened all the time.

  Instead of running or even helping with the cookies, Leigh watched the news and ate the misshapen ones that his sister slipped him. When the same clips of the hiding place began playing over and over, Leigh told Millie he'd take her to a movie when she was done baking, and then went upstairs to finish his homework. Exams would not be given until after the Christmas break, but there was still a lot to keep up with.

  Leigh spent the afternoon trying to write about Winesburg, Ohio. What he really wanted to do was build an entire essay on the sentence "Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to the city." Leigh thought he should discuss how ordinary lives, which Winesburg, Ohio was sort of about, are like romance novels. Every life had the same basic story, made different—or special or unique—only by details.

  After six false starts, Leigh decided he didn't have the brains to make his point well enough to get an A. He felt keenly how disappointing he must be to his father right now. Since he couldn't take back having put Preston in the hospital, Leigh wanted grades that wouldn't cause Clayton any further worry. So he wrote about the manifestation of despair and loneliness in the life of a small town, as imagined by Sherwood Anderson. Obvious, but a safe bet for an A.

  It was Millie who knocked on the door with the news that Leigh's father was home and wanted to speak to him.

  "Oh, Christ," Leigh said. "Am I in trouble?"

  "I don't think so," Millie said. "Mom says he's spent all weekend getting you out of trouble."

  Leigh looked for his father in the sun porch, but it was Janet who was there, using the computer, and she said, "He's waiting for you in the dining room."

  "Thanks."

  "Leigh, remember that he only wants what's best for you."

  He went, with mounting dread, into the dining room.

  ~~~

  When Clayton began to speak in the same clear, easy manner he had used for their talk about car insurance, Leigh knew his father had found a way to view him as a problem.

  His son had become a crisis, and now Clayton could manage him.

  "The Gavenlocks are still making a lot of noise about charging you," Clayton said. "But the video has scared them and they've agreed to a deal."

  "What kind of deal?" Leigh asked.

  "They wanted Maia to sign a document in which she relinquishes her rights to ever press charges."

  "You're kidding."

  "No," Clayton said. "A lawyer has drawn it up."

  "But she decided not to go to court," Leigh said. "So why would she have to sign that?"

  "The Gavenlocks were clearly afraid that she might change her mind," Clayton said. "And, I believe, although I can't prove it, that the Lexham boy's father was involved in their decision."

  "Well, let them charge me," Leigh said. "I don't care if I wind up in jail. There's no way she's signing that."

  "It's done," his father said, quietly. "She's signed it."

  Leigh was quiet as this new reality settled over him.

  "How could you ask her to do that?" he said, finally.

  "Charles and I explained it to her," Clayton said.

  "Why?" he asked. "Why would you do that? It's ... wrong."

  Leigh caught himself chewing on the inside of his mouth and quickly stopped, almost gagging at the recent memory of his stitches.

  "Jesus, you said I'd get anger management," he said. "I'd do that happily a thousand times over."

  "That was when the Gavenlocks were talking about assault and battery," Clayton said. "But because of the extent of Preston's injuries, his parents were ready to add grievous bodily harm and, if they could manage it, criminal negligence."

  "Well, what does that mean?" Leigh asked. "A year? Two?"

 
How long was a tour of duty in Iraq? Could he manage two years behind the walls at Cumberland? That endless supply of his good fortune that Leigh barely understood should run out. It seemed only fair.

  "There's no way I'd let you risk going to prison," Clayton said.

  And back it came, that mixture of luck and luxury, as invisible as air and blood, only this time it belonged to Leigh at Maia's expense.

  "Let me?" he asked. "You don't get to let me."

  This wasn't a car trip, after all. Insanely horrible things had taken place, and even more insane ones were waiting their turn. Criminal negligence? Relinquishing her rights to press charges?

  "I'm your father, which means I get to protect you," Clayton said. "And it's not as if she were chomping at the bit for her day in court."

  "But asking her to sign that makes me more important," Leigh said.

  "To me, you are more important," Clayton said.

  "I don't understand," Leigh said. "Why make her sign something when she had no intention of charging them?"

  "I am under the impression Lexham senior was concerned that his boy might wind up in court," Clayton said. "I think this was all a precautionary measure, but the chances of charges sticking to you were too great to risk."

  "Oliver," Leigh said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "It's the name of Lexham's boy. The one who did it. Mostly did it."

  "Yes, Oliver Lexham," Clayton said. "His father is ... How does your mother put it?"

  "You've told Mom? I thought you didn't want Mom to know unless she had to."

  Leigh wondered how it was that Lillian knew anything about this mess and hadn't phoned him or, more likely, shown up at the door to find out for herself exactly what had happened.

  "No, no, I haven't told your mother," Clayton said. "I'm waiting for my nerve to arrive."

  They both laughed uneasily.

  "If she gets mad, it will only be at me," Leigh said, for once in his life not caring about his mother's opinion.

  Maia had signed a legal document so that he would be safe. This was wrong on every possible level.