The Best Kind of People

by Zoe Whittall

  The claw-footed tub was the only thing that remained of his parents’ era in the house, and Joan rarely used it. Relaxing in a bath for too long made her feel she was waiting for a late train and couldn’t quite settle.

  The new shower stall could comfortably fit five people, had three types of shower heads, a sauna function, and all sorts of bells and whistles. She made the water even hotter, aiming it at her neck, and hung her head like a broken tree limb. Images of a panther jumping into the lake to eat her children played over and over in her head. In her dream they were twin toddlers despite their age difference in real life. She could only stand on the beach, helpless. Such an obvious metaphor, for god’s sake. A single sob, and then nothing. Empty. Her neck raw. A half-hearted shampoo. Squeezing the conditioner bottle hard but coming up empty, chucking it to the ground and watching it roll. This shower is too large, she thought. Who would need such a thing? It was a sign that her values had been distorted somewhere along the way.

  george loved to make breakfast. But when Joan got out of the shower this morning, she wouldn’t smell coffee brewing downstairs, or hear the spoon clank against the side of a pot of steel-cut oats. George often made fresh bread in the bread-making machine the night before, got up early to go for a walk, and by the time Joan roused from sleep he would be toasting almonds for their hot cereal, or chopping fresh mint into bowls of mixed fresh berries.

  What would she do without him? What if this wasn’t temporary?

  Getting out of the shower, she felt a surge of betrayal so forceful that she had no time to towel off before leaning over the toilet to throw up. She flushed, knelt, and gripped her fingers to the edges of the seat. For the first time she missed the softness of the ugly dusty-rose toilet seat cover from the pre-reno years.

  Eventually, when she couldn’t feel anything in the lower half of her legs, she stood and wrapped herself in the white plush robe hanging from the back of the door. She knotted a towel around her head and dotted serum under each eye. Her mind felt sticky, like it was stuck on one note in a melody, and she remembered the pill Andrew had given her with a glass of water before bed.

  Coming down the stairs, she smelled coffee and was momentarily hopeful it had all been a dream, but of course that only happens on tv. In the kitchen, faced with its stale air from the unwanted parade of bodies the night before, she unwrapped the towel, hung it limply on a stool, and shook out her hair while it slipped to the floor. She didn’t retrieve it before pouring herself a cup of coffee. She stared at the towel, tasted the coffee, and winced. Someone had been up earlier and left it for her, but it was stronger than she liked. A white mould was beginning to blanket the raspberries on the counter. She tore open a packet of sweetener and threw it in the garbage without using it.

  If George was guilty, and she was far from convinced, then he could be sick. She took a sip of black coffee and contemplated this. She understood sick. Everyone is generally pleased to reduce a complicated situation to the notion of evil. Or a typical sleazeball man. He’s just evil.

  Evil is a word that’s lost its meaning recently, like bully. Overused, and weakened.

  She dissolved an antacid tablet in a glass of water. If it’s a sickness, it would not be his fault. There could be an undiagnosed tumour in his orbitofrontal lobe, causing him to have no control over his impulses. She grabbed a pen from the cup beside the phone and drew a sketch of a brain on a scrap of paper. She should call Bennie and suggest an mri. She could choose to have compassion. Maybe this is a lesson from god, to see how much compassion I can have! She stood up at this revelation and drank the fizzing water down. Then she sat down again on one of the tall bar stools at the kitchen island. Every time she was sitting, it seemed impossible to imagine standing. She wrote Sick??? next to the brain doodle. She’d ask Clara what she thought of this possibility when she woke up.

  Joan was staring down the hall at the front door when she was startled by the click of the back door opening. Sadie and Jimmy emerged wet from a swim, much like other mornings, only they weren’t joking around or smiling. Joan’s eyes flooded with tears when she saw them.

  “Oh, shit, Mom. You look so awful,” Sadie said as Joan embraced her and pulled away to look at her. Joan brushed a strand of hair away from her daughter’s face and placed it behind her ear. “There are still reporters out there …”

  “I know, don’t talk to them.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I’ll make you guys breakfast,” Joan said, taking a deep breath and turning to busy herself in the fridge. The date walnut muffins George had baked the day before sat on a plate wrapped in saran. Sadie leaned against the island, playing with her phone, while Jimmy ducked upstairs to change.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I went for an early run, and just felt like … jumping in the lake. It feels weird to be here.”

  Joan hadn’t even realized that school had started and that that was where her daughter should be.

  “I cleaned up your room,” Joan said. “I stayed up late last night organizing everything again. There are a lot of things the police still have.” Joan remembered the man in an ugly green shirt pulling the portraits off the wall and throwing them in a plastic tub.

  “Thanks,” Sadie said, leaning over to fill her water bottle from the sink.

  “You should eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You need some protein after exercising,” she said, grabbing a small container of cottage cheese from the fridge door and peeling back the foil. Mothering, like nursing, can be performed methodically, a habitual ability to put one’s own needs last, and that erasure of herself was a balm to Joan in this moment. If she could get her daughter to eat, that would soothe Joan.

  “I saw Amanda this morning. Apparently her sister is one of the girls …” Sadie paused to eat a spoonful of cottage cheese.

  Joan froze in front of the toaster, holding two floppy pieces of multigrain bread. She bowed her head. Then she put the bread into the toaster as though she hadn’t heard correctly.

  “That can’t be possible. She is, what, twelve years old? For god’s sake, Sadie. This just can’t be true.”

  “She just turned fourteen. But if this is true, if it’s true what those girls are saying … what the hell can we do?”

  “Honey, we don’t know anything for sure yet. And who are you going to trust? Strangers, or your own father? We have to wait and see what Bennie says. Someone is lying and out to get him.”

  “That sounds crazy.”

  “This situation is crazy!”

  “I know, I know it is,” agreed Sadie. “I want to go see him and talk to him myself. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Joan wasn’t sure what made her say this, but she felt a sudden surge of protectiveness for her husband. “We need to stick by your father,” she said. “We don’t know the real story.”

  “But if it is true …”

  “Sadie, don’t say that.”

  “Come on, we can’t not think about that possibility.”

  “Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and who knows your father better than us? He is a friendly guy. Perhaps some girls, who are told by everyone not to go near men because they’re all evil monsters, maybe they misinterpreted his kindness and interest in their lives.”

  When someone is your husband or father, that’s simply who they are. You don’t stop to question much about them, unless you’re given reason to, and they’d never been given reason to.

  “Well, keep an open mind until we know more. Until we can see him. You are coming with me to the hearing tomorrow, right? We’ll figure out bail and he’ll be home again and we can put this behind us and let the lawyers do the work.”

  “Mom. What if we’re just in denial? What if it’s true, what they’re saying?”

  Something cracked against the front window. Joan ran into the living room, expecting to see the
smear of a bird carcass across the grass, but when she moved the blinds aside, she saw remnants of eggshell and the smear of yolk, and saw the blur of teenagers running and jumping over the Hendersons’ side hedges.

  “Maybe you should stay inside today, honey.”

  “Okay, Mom,” Sadie said as she headed upstairs. She paused at the landing and turned around. “We have to face the facts of what is happening.”

  “We need not to jump to conclusions. This is a shock, but we’re not going to help anything by being hysterical and convincing ourselves that your father is some sort of axe murderer.”

  “Two-thirds of all sexual assaults are committed by someone who knows the victim. Someone who the victim trusts.”

  “So? Most murderers murder people they know, but that doesn’t mean if you know someone, you’ll murder someone.”

  “No one is charging anyone with murder. You’re obscuring the point. We have to look at what’s really happened here.”

  “We need to stay calm and focused on helping Dad beat these ridiculous, baseless charges. He’ll be home soon, and we’ll figure this out.”

  “I think we just, like, need to make sure we know that they are baseless.”

  Joan stopped buttering the toast and stared at her daughter.

  “I mean, it might be a misunderstanding or something,” Sadie mumbled.

  They were silent for a moment before Sadie went upstairs.

  Joan stirred her coffee slowly, the carton of skim milk sweating on the table in front of her, anchoring the morning newspaper. Joan ignored her toast. Above the fold was a headline about George, screaming out in thick, bold lettering. She watched as the liquid in her cup cooled, the text blurring behind it. Outside, the leaves appeared to have reddened overnight, going mad alongside her.

  Whatever the police had tried to find wasn’t discoverable, but they dug and sifted anyway, with no regard for personal history, for the meaning humans attach to objects, for the symbols of a family’s life. They took the family albums, the diaries, the telephone bill printouts.

  The phone rang. Joan answered, and heard her husband’s voice on the other end of the line, sounding far away. “I am being set up,” he said. “I only have a few seconds, but I wanted you to know that. Watch your back. Who knows what these people are capable of.”

  He didn’t sound like himself. Joan took the approach she took with emotionally disturbed patients at work: clear questions, empathy, calm.

  “Have you been having headaches? Blurred vision?” she asked. “George?” She said his name a few more times, couldn’t quite believe that he’d already hung up.

  Joan turned on the small tv that lived on the wall above the microwave. Normally it was only on when the housekeeper was over, or when something big was happening on the news during dinner prep. She clicked from channel to channel, past layers of footage of her husband being walked in handcuffs from the police car into the station.

  She heard the beeping of the intercom from the front gate, something so rare that it confused her for a moment. She muted the tv and pressed Talk, trying to adjust the video screen so she could see who was at the gate. She saw a close-up of a middle-­aged man, just one eye at first, then he pulled his face back. Probably a journalist.

  “I’m not talking to journalists,” she said, pressing Talk again. “You’re trespassing.”

  He held up his hands, spreading his fingers. He spoke too loudly into the intercom, as though he was yelling across the front yard. “I’m not the enemy, don’t worry. I’m here in support,” he said, as though she should applaud him. “See? Look at my T-shirt,” he said, stepping back for the camera.

  She peered a little closer. His T-shirt read, Justice for Men and Boys.

  “I’m not going to open the gate,” she said loudly.

  “I understand, you think every man is a predator. But it’s the feminists who are going to ruin your husband’s life, you know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “No one in the media ever wants to discuss the very real fact that women lie to get attention, to excuse behaviour they regret. It’s way more common than anyone wants to admit.”

  She didn’t know what to say, so she just stared at him on the screen. Then she pulled back the living room curtains and pressed one finger to the glass, as though pointing at him.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a stack of papers. She saw him waving them in the air. He looked like one of those unkempt socialist newspaper sellers.

  “I’ll put these under the gate,” he shouted. “We just want to help your husband.”

  Joan watched him walk away. She waited twenty minutes before she walked up the laneway and grabbed the flyers he’d slipped under the gate. Some were starting to blow away in the wind, others had stayed beneath the rock he’d placed on top. On the front of the flyer was a photo of George. Above, the headline read:

  rampant misandry takes A hero down in woodbury lake.

  Oh, brother.

  joan’s affable husband, who would have called the man at the gate a crazy misogynist, was being defended by him. Had she woken up in an opposite world?

  Back in the kitchen, starting over again with another two pieces of toast, she scanned the headlines on Sadie’s iPad and noted that George’s likeability turned out to work against him in the press. She kept the news station on, and read each article. Most of them said the exact same thing, but some editorialized. The local newspaper, as well as all the big-city affiliates, were really keen on exploiting George’s status as a man of distinction in a town they said was “corrupt with old money” and “entrenched in the antiquated ways of archetypal New England wasps.” The reality — that Joan worked as a nurse, that George collected a teacher’s salary, that the house was paid off when George was still in diapers — the complexity of that reality didn’t fit into column inches. Joan knew, from her one and a half years in journalism school, that once there was a simple narrative to attach to a story, that was the one they ran with. Nuance is too complicated for the daily news. One station replayed the archival footage from when George stopped the gunman. “It was instinct,” he said to the camera, beaming. Played out of context, it was monstrous and humiliating.

  a month before the arrest, Joan had been the recipient of a gold-plated brooch in the shape of an angel, an annual municipal award presented to someone in the community who demonstrated compassion or heroics. The accompanying plaque was engraved with Joan Woodbury — true compassionate care. On an outdoor platform behind City Hall the mayor recounted a story about a child Joan had saved before presenting her with the plaque and pin. He’d used the word heroine. At first she’d considered the whole ceremony a lot of fuss over nothing; she was doing her job and shouldn’t be rewarded for it. She’d remarked to co-workers that it was likely a hogwash public relations exercise meant to make city hall appear as though it cared about workers. In fact, she knew the mayor personally — something she didn’t really brag about at work — and knew the gesture was likely genuine. This feeling was bolstered as she stood there, wearing a new bright green cotton dress, and she choked up. The emotion was so unexpected that her face grew flushed and she produced an abrupt sob. George and Sadie were in the front row taking photographs. Joan smiled as wide as she had at the piano recitals of her children and felt something she hadn’t felt in a long while, which she only later identified as valued. She did feel valued at home, but at work she’d long felt exhausted and cynical. The award was motivating. Photos appeared in the Life & Arts section of the Saturday paper, which she’d clipped and pinned to the bulletin board at work. A second copy went on the fridge, beside Andrew’s graduation photos from law school and the article about Sadie’s county track and field win.

  clara came downstairs just as the news broadcast the story again, on high volume. She towered over Joan, her lips a slash of red lipstick, expertly applied. She took off her glas
ses and cleaned them with her silky coral scarf, then went over to the radio and pressed Off.

  After every broadcast, the phone rang, with people who were hearing the news for the first time. Joan stopped picking up after George called, because she did not know what to say. Clara silenced the phone.

  “I’m here, Joannie. We’re going to get you through this.” Clara was suddenly red and sweaty, pulling off the scarf and dotting her forehead with it. “Fucking hot-flash bullshit,” she said.

  The answering machine picked up. It was Bennie. “Bail might be set astronomically high. I think that someone is trying to make some sort of political point with this arrest. I will come pick up the family in a Town Car tomorrow at ten. The more family members who show up … the better it looks.”

  joan poured clara a cup of green tea and handed it to her.

  “How high could they possibly set it?”

  “You’ll be able to handle it. He wouldn’t leave such an important detail on a voice mail if it was something we couldn’t handle.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Joan started carefully, knowing Clara was not an easy one to convince of anything.

  “Yeah?” Clara sipped her tea, then made a sour face. “This tastes like mowed grass.” She reached for the antique sugar bowl on the counter.

  “No one knows better than someone with my job that everyone on earth is a variation of crazy … right? Everyone’s got a loose screw. Nobody stays the same their whole life!”

  “So?”

  “I’m just saying that we shift around on a see-saw moral continuum for our whole lives. Nobody stays the same! I’m not saying that he did it, but what if he is sick? What if he has a tumour?”

  “You’re feeling ashamed, but you shouldn’t. This is not your fault.”

  “I am not ashamed,” Joan spat at her. The truth was that the shame Joan felt was so expansive and so forceful that it couldn’t be something described by as few as five letters, something so commonplace. This was something else entirely. “A word doesn’t even exist for what I’m feeling,” Joan mumbled.