The Best Kind of People

by Zoe Whittall

  Clara pushed her hair behind her ears and looked out the back window at the lake. “I really don’t have any idea what the fuck to say to you, Joan. I feel like I usually have at least one answer to a problem, but I’m dumbfounded.”

  Joan sat down again at the kitchen island, rested her head in her hands, and started to cry.

  Clara squeezed both of her shoulders. “I’m surprised you aren’t angry.”

  Joan’s voice was muffled against her arms. “I am angry. I feel like someone has attacked my family!”

  “You’re very concerned for him,” Clara said carefully.

  “Of course I am. You don’t stop loving someone in an instant because somebody accuses them of something despicable. Nothing is that black and white.”

  “Of course not,” Clara mumbled. “I just think that I might feel a little more … betrayed.”

  “Well, we are not the same person, are we?”

  “No, no, we’re not.” Clara sipped her tea.

  “Plus, he’s obviously innocent,” she said.

  “You’re right, there is that possibility.” Clara didn’t look convinced.

  “It’s so easy to make assumptions,” Joan said. “I see it all the time. Doctors think they know everything before they actually get tests done, or bother to really listen to a patient. Not everything is as it seems.”

  “Of course, Joannie, of course. Where is Sadie?”

  “Upstairs, I think. And for the record: if it is true, I didn’t know,” she said to Clara, who nodded in a way that said she believed her sister. “I knew Andrew was gay by the time he was seven. I knew Sadie had a higher than average intelligence before the special tests came in and pronounced her a mini genius. I can spot a fake seizure from across a crowded emergency room. I know how much pain even the most stoic man is in by the way he walks!” Joan was circling the kitchen island now, arms in the air for emphasis. “I knew Dad was having an affair when I was only fourteen!”

  “Mom did used to say that you were unusually intuitive,” Clara agreed. “But you know the cliché — love is blind, et cetera.”

  “Clara, I would have sooner guessed that he had another whole family in another state, or an online gambling addiction, or a sudden religious conversion. There were no signs. He never uttered an inappropriate word, or watched anyone in a disturbing manner, or made any attempts to role-play anything even vaguely inappropriate in the bedroom.”

  “What is your sex life like?” Clara looked down at the table, uncomfortable.

  “Normal.”

  “Come on. No one is normal. Normal sex doesn’t exist.”

  “Of course it does. I have girlfriends. I know what’s normal.”

  “Girlfriends?” Clara cocked a brow.

  Perhaps girlfriends, plural, denoting some kind of group that went out together, confessed secrets, had a certain kind of intimacy, was a bit of an exaggeration. Joan and George tended to be one of those couples that had a community, but not friendships, really. They had each other, and Joan had Clara.

  “I have friends! I have co-workers. I read articles. Stop looking at me like I’m an Amish housewife or something.”

  “C’mon. Every guy has a kink or two. I once had a guy who wanted me to play Robin to his Batman.”

  “Fuck off, Clara. He didn’t act like a pervert. He did not ask me to wear a fucking schoolgirl kilt or put my hair in pigtails. It was good sex, okay? It was the best I ever had.”

  Joan felt that the humiliation of this conversation was possibly going to kill her.

  “I think,” Clara said, weighing her words, “that everyone has a secret they keep from their partner, no matter how healthy they appear from the outside, how communicative they are. You and George really did appear to be the pinnacle of normalcy, but nothing is ever as it appears to be.”

  “That’s cynical.”

  “I dunno. I always thought of you as the perfect example of a successful marriage. It never occurred to me to think that in itself is a bit curious, maybe a red flag. You’ve never had an affair, you never expressed boredom or uncertainty. That is odd, and a bit improbable or something.”

  Joan had stopped listening to her sister, stuck on her and George’s sex life, replaying every intimacy. What was intimacy when you really thought about it? Joan couldn’t understand it when she focused on it. She was a private person, believed privacy wasn’t valued enough these days. She was always trying to impress upon Sadie the importance of keeping some things sacred and personal. Those were the euphemisms she used. Sadie always looked at her as though she were trying to teach her the alphabet again.

  “What if the sex was just good for me, and so-so for him, Clara? God, that is so heartbreaking to contemplate.”

  Clara was silent.

  “What does it mean, if it was the most fulfilling relationship I’ve ever had, and it was a lie?”

  “I don’t know, honey. It’s probably not about sex.”

  “That’s depressing. You always think you know everything.”

  “I’ve written some articles about men who are sex offenders, and they tend to fall into certain categories. You know, some are emotionally arrested at the age of their victims, from a past trauma, and they act out as though they are peers experimenting with bodies, and some are your garden-variety sadists and psychopaths, and some are, well, I don’t know, sick in some way?”

  “Well, they’re not accusing him of going after young children,” Joan said, and then caught herself.

  Joan and Clara stayed in the kitchen for the next hour or so, Clara making lists of things that needed to be done while Joan re-dusted the rubber plant by the window overlooking the backyard.

  The silence was interrupted by the answering machine — Dorothy, the school secretary, calling to leave a message. Joan sipped her cold coffee while Clara sat with the laptop looking up legal information about George’s charges. Joan let the secretary’s awkward nasal voice fill the room. It’s Dorothy. Sadie is not in class, Mrs. Woodbury. I just wanted you to know. We are all very concerned about her well-being.

  Joan played the message twice over the speaker before pressing Delete. Mrs. Woodbury. That was new. Messages used to be: Hey Joan! Hey doll! Hot as heck out there today, huh? Dorothy used to sound friendly in voice mail. Now she sounded like the automatic voice you get when you call the phone company. Emotionless.

  The phone rang again. Clara and Joan watched as the machine picked it up and George’s voice greeted the caller with a formal flourish. The Woodburys are unavailable right now, kindly leave your number after the beep.

  “Why do you still have an ancient machine?”

  “I didn’t want to pay the phone company more money than we had to. Plus, we all have cellphones.”

  “You live in an effing mansion. I can’t believe how cheap you are.”

  A sound of wind or breathing came on the line. “I hope you burn in hell. You and your whole family.” The voice was elderly.

  Joan took down the time and details on a pad of paper. She felt that if anyone did break down the door, she’d just lie down in the middle of the room and let them kick her. That was how little fight was left in her.

  The gate buzzer rang again. She looked out and saw a ups truck. Clara offered to go greet the driver, and she came back a few minutes later with a basket of fruit and a card.

  “Do you think it’ll blow up?” Clara asked, handing it to her sister.

  The card read, I hope you’re hanging in there, and it was signed by all the nurses at work. Accompanying it were a pamphlet for victim’s services, one for a support group for women survivors of violence, and another for a group for women with loved ones in prison.

  “‘Call if you need to’ … Yeah, that means please don’t, I’m just trying to be polite.”

  “Joan!”

  “I know wasp sincerity when I see
it … it’s so rare.”

  No one else, none of the neighbours who claimed to love George, had called or dropped by. The day after George stopped the school shooter, there had been a lineup of cars to come visit and offer congratulations. If Joan hadn’t had Clara, she felt as though she would have walked into the lake with her pockets full of pennies.

  Joan disappeared downstairs to check the laundry and brought up the old dusty hunting rifle that George’s father kept on a rack above the pool table in the basement. It was a .22. She didn’t know how to shoot it. She wasn’t sure it had bullets; they probably didn’t even make them anymore. But it was symbolic. It was too heavy to hold on her shoulder. She’d have to cradle it in her arms around her stomach, knocking objects behind her on the floor as she tried to walk around.

  “I’m not exactly intimidating, but its existence is comforting,” Joan said to Clara, who winced when she looked up from her seat and saw her sister with the rifle.

  “Put that thing away,” she said.

  “I don’t know why the cops didn’t take it,” Joan wondered out loud.

  “You have permits?”

  “Yes, I suppose. I don’t even think it has bullets.”

  “That’s why.”

  “Why do guns freak you out so much? Daddy had about a million.”

  “The city changes you,” Clara said. “I used to see guns and think of dead deer. Now I see them and think about going to the bodega for a carton of milk and getting caught in the crossfire.”

  Joan picked up the phone and called her boss, requesting to cash in her backlogged sick time and take four weeks off. When she hung up, she felt an immediate sense of relief. Saying something as simple, as elementary, as “I didn’t do anything” seemed entirely beside the point.

  Clara turned on the radio. “Castrate him!” said an elderly voice. The dj laughed uncomfortably. All the callers to the talk show uttered variations on men will be boys, boys behave badly, young girls dress too sexy these days, Mr. Woodbury’s family practically created this town and we owe him the respect of innocent until proven guilty, every man is tempted. The latter opinion was something that would’ve provoked Joan to rant a couple of days ago, condoning the lack of responsibility men assume for their behaviour. We sexualize youth, every young actress and pop singer, and we have no right to then act puritanical when a red-blooded man has a natural reaction to this display. You can’t put Britney Spears in a thong everywhere and expect men not to want her just because she’s sixteen. Men are animals, after all.

  “Britney Spears?” Clara laughed. “She’s thirty!”

  Joan turned the radio off and looked out the window and when she squinted, she could see that Andrew was lying on the dock, curled up like a toddler.

  bennie called and Joan picked up the phone. He read the victims’ statements over the speakerphone. Joan placed her head down on the table, and Clara took notes on her phone as he read. “He approached Victim A after she had consumed alcohol at the ski lodge. He told her he would walk her back to the girls’ cabin because she felt ill. He asked if she considered him a friend and she said yes, that she did. He then proceeded to tell her that he would inform her parents about the drinking, about her giving lap dances to boys in their rooms, unless she obliged …”

  Joan gripped the arms of the chair and whimpered. Even if they turned out to be lies, those stories were there, obstacles between them, things she couldn’t un-hear or un-imagine. Someone had taken Joan’s only confidant, the one person who actually knew her completely, and her best friend, and replaced him with a monster. The person she knew and trusted was gone.

  joan and clara decided to go to the Woodbridge SuperSave grocery store since they were unlikely to run into anyone they knew there. Bennie’s recitation of the victims’ statements was still ringing in their ears. Joan filled a basket with corn, avocados, and bundles of fresh herbs in clear plastic bags. She ran her hands under the sprinklers that were keeping the heirloom carrots fresh, mesmerized, until her fingers turned red and she recognized that they were cold. In this moment of disembodiment she didn’t see Clara approach, pushing a cart filled with frozen foods, whole grain waffles, Lean Cuisines, pizza, and frozen yogurt, food for a working mother of toddlers, or for stocking a bomb shelter.

  “I don’t buy that stuff anymore,” Joan said, picking up a package of frozen breakfast burritos. “Too many preservatives.”

  “You do not want to have to shop or go out, just trust me,” Clara said, grabbing several bottles of wine and thrusting them at her chest. “You’re going to need these.”

  “I’ll just break out the expensive wine in the cellar!” Joan laughed, a sudden inappropriate blurt. Phil Collins was singing on the in-store speakers. Something in the air tonight.

  “That’s the spirit,” Clara said.

  It started in the lineup. A woman in an orange and white maxi skirt ahead of them held open the local paper and said to her friend, “I feel sorry for the wife, you know.”

  It was then that Joan realized the paper had reused the photograph of her from the awards ceremony. Underneath the photo the cutline read, woodbury’S wife told police she had no idea.

  The other lady, in green plastic gardening shoes Joan could see as she stared down with her head bowed, replied, “She had to know. To know and to have not said anything, that’s worse than anything he’s done.”

  Clara grabbed her hand and whispered, “Go to the car, I’ll pay.”

  Joan wanted to kick the women. Her foot actually involuntarily fell forward. But she did as Clara instructed, pushing by them and breaking into a run after she got through the sliding doors.

  They were mostly silent on the drive home, until Joan drew a heart in the passenger-side window and said, “Imagine the person you love and trust becoming a different person overnight. What would you do?”

  “I’d want a bottle of Percocet, and a gun to go shoot him with.”

  “I thought you didn’t like guns.”

  “That’s why — I’m afraid if I had one, I’d use it.”

  “You’ve never been married,” Joan said.

  Clara frowned. “I’ve been in love,” she said. “I understand devotion.”

  “Marriage is different.”

  “That’s archaic.”

  “Someone could be setting him up,” she said.

  Clara pursed her lips, checking her blind spot before changing lanes. “Yes,” she said.

  “George is essentially a very good person,” Joan said. “But that is one of those meaningless sentences. What is a good person? Under the worst of circumstances, who can say what we would do? For all we know, we might be the worst people on earth.”

  “You’re not, Joan. You know that.”

  Joan remembered what the woman in the grocery store said.

  Joan was no longer a mother and a nurse and a person with her own history. She symbolized evil, and for that, people were not kind. That the front windows of her house were streaked with egg yolk said it just as plainly.

  Monday Afternoon

  six

  sadie went to school at the end of the day, unsure what to do with herself otherwise. Her mother and Clara went to visit her father at the police station and she didn’t want to go. The house felt empty and imposing, and she was afraid of the journalists buzzing around outside. Going on as usual might actually be comforting, even though she had to show her student id to a police officer to get in through the front gate of her school, and the security guard was extra-thorough going through her knapsack.

  She walked with sneakers squeaking out her presence on the polished hardwood towards the principal’s office, where the rules of high school dictated she acquire a note to explain her absence. Her right toe poked through her green cotton school socks. Everything felt askew. She’d never been to school this dishevelled, but like a lot of things that had mattered before, s
he had ceased to care about her appearance. The sixth-period bell rang as she neared the principal’s office. The hallway succumbed to bodies in plaid and green and white, suffocating with chatter and screams. The sea of uniforms shocked her as she minnowed her way towards the office, forcing her shoulder blades to kiss in an approximation of confidence. Eat or be eaten.

  She said hello to Susan Taylor, who was standing at her locker applying hot-pink gloss in a tiny square of mirror. Susan, who normally greeted Sadie with a warm hug and a slug of gossip, half waved and scurried away as Sadie passed by. Mr. Solomon also ignored her, offering a mumbled hello but clearly reticent to look her in the eye. This was an enormous shift. She had known most of the teachers since she was a child. She also had the highest grade point average in school, with Jimmy behind her by a fraction of a percentage point. She had always been greeted with enthusiasm and respect. Simply put, Sadie was not treated the way other adolescents were treated. I’m one of them now? she wondered. The regular young. Or maybe worse.

  sadie was in the accelerated academic program, a group of well-regarded students who, barring a stint in the eating disorder wing or a trip to rehab for Adderall addiction, were all heading to prestigious universities. They operated as a separate microcosm within the school’s structure, mostly taking classes in their own wing on the west side of the building. They ate lunch in the student government lounge, because naturally they were the student government. There was an adjoining library, funded by her grandparents and now several corporate donors, with gold-rimmed antiquarian books and a long oak table. There was a small room with a rich red velvet couch and imposing desk, a room of unknown purpose when the school was built in the 1800s as a private college. This was their quiet contemplation room that they could book with Dorothy in order to have complete privacy while writing essays. Most of the time, though, they used it as the make-out room. No one knew this because it was assumed that the nerdish spent their time preoccupied only with cerebral issues. It was possible, while on the third floor of the west wing, to be in complete ignorance of the activities occurring throughout the rest of the school, and out of the watchful disciplinary eyes of authority.