The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  Except: he could not wake me.

  Did not dare call 911 (Mr. Sandman would confess) for then he’d be discovered, arrested. His secret life exposed.

  Yet, he did not want the girl to die.

  Well, yes—(Mr. Sandman would confess)—the desperate thought came to him, he might let the girl die, he would never succeed in waking the girl and so there was no alternative, he would let her die, and in that way he would be spared exposure and arrest, the outrage and loathing of the community of decent persons, he would be spared prison, how many years in prison, of which he could not bear even a few days. Yet, he did not want Violet Rue to die for (he would insist) he loved her . . .

  Or this he would claim, afterward.

  His solution was to dress me hurriedly, haphazardly, in the clothes he’d removed from me, and had partly laundered, and partly dried, and to wrap me in a blanket snatched from a cedar closet, and carry me out to his car, stumbling and sobbing; in the car, he drove me to the Port Oriskany hospital, to the ER which was at the side entrance of the building; half-carried, half-dragged me inside the plate-glass doors that parted automatically, and left me there, slumped on a chair; hurried back outside even as a hospital security guard was calling after him—“Mister! Hey mister!” He’d left the car running. Key in the ignition. He would make a quick getaway, was the reasoning. But so agitated, within seconds Mr. Sandman collided with a van turning into the hospital drive as he tried to escape.

  In the telling it would become a story to provoke outrage, and yet mirth.

  For, outside the tyranny of the math teacher’s classroom and house, the math teacher was revealed as bumbling, foolish. Bringing an unconscious fourteen-year-old to the brightly lit emergency room of a hospital, a hastily clothed and (seemingly) dying girl, believing that he might abandon the girl there, might simply run back out to his car idling just outside the entrance and drive away undetected, and then, so agitated, such a fool, colliding head-on with the first vehicle that approached him as if in his desperation he’d failed to see . . .

  But mostly, the story provoked outrage. Of course!

  A mathematics teacher entrusted with middle-school students, revealed to have been sexually abusing one of his ninth-grade pupils over a period of seven months, routinely drugging the girl to make her sexually compliant, at last overdosing the girl with barbiturates, bringing her blood pressure lethally low . . .

  In the ER the girl whose heart was barely beating was revived. In the hospital driveway the ninth-grade algebra teacher was arrested by Port Oriskany police officers.

  Taken into police custody in handcuffs, brought downtown to police headquarters. Overnight in the county jail and in the morning denied bail by a repelled judge. Suicide watch, for the distraught man had raved and sobbed and uttered many wild things, pleas and threats.

  It would be revealed that Arnold Sandman, fifty-one, longtime resident of Port Oriskany, faculty member since 1975 of Port Oriskany Middle School, had been accused of “unacceptable” behavior at previous schools, including a Catholic school in Watertown; but he’d been allowed to resign from the positions, and school administrators at two schools had agreed to provide him with “strong” recommendations, to get him out of their districts without a scandal. For there was the uncertainty of several girls’ accounts—there was the uncertainty that the girls’ parents would even allow them to make statements to the police, which would be revealed to the public. And Mr. Sandman denied all—everything. And Mr. Sandman did speak persuasively. And Mr. Sandman was, all conceded, a capable, if eccentric teacher whose students tended to do well on state examinations; in fact, better on the average than students taught by other math teachers. Jocosely it was said that Mr. Sandman “terrorized” students into learning math, where other, more gentle methods failed.

  This time, however, Arnold Sandman would plead “no contest” to charges of protracted child endangerment, sexual molestation of a minor child, drug statute violations, abduction and false imprisonment.

  The cobblestone house on Craigmont Avenue would be searched top to bottom. The incriminating archive would be discovered. Of thirty-one girls photographed by Mr. Sandman over a period of eighteen years all but six were identified; of these all but two were living in upstate New York and vicinity; the two no longer living had died “suspiciously” (suicide?) but in no ways connected with Arnold Sandman.

  None of the photographed girls could remember being photographed by their ninth-grade math teacher. None could remember having been sexually abused, coerced, threatened by him but most could remember “after-school tutorials” and their math teacher being “very kind” and “patient” with them.

  9.

  “Violet. Please try to remember. Tell us . . .”

  But I could not. My throat was shut up tight, there were no words to loosen it.

  For some time I was very sick. Too weak to sit up in bed. Fluids dripped into my veins, too weak to eat or drink.

  No. Can’t remember. Don’t make me.

  Amnesia was a balm. Wept with gratitude for all that I did not remember and not for what I did remember.

  The shock of it is, what was intimate becomes public. What occurred without words becomes a matter of others’ words.

  Sexual abuse of a minor. Abduction. False imprisonment.

  In that deep sleep, in which my heart had barely continued to beat, at the very bottom of the marble coffin, I had been protected, safe. Almost I would think that Mr. Sandman’s arms had embraced me.

  Vio-let Rue! Vio-let Rue!

  You know, I love you.

  He had never uttered these words to me, I was sure. Yet often I heard them, confused with voices at a distance. Muffled laughter.

  “. . . what that terrible man did to you. Try to . . .”

  But I did not remember. And Mr. Sandman was my friend. No one else was my friend.

  Aunt Irma staring at me, disbelieving. Uncle Oscar, with repugnance.

  For I would not testify against the abuser. My eyes were heavy-lidded, my voice was slow, slurred, insolent.

  No. You can’t make me. I’ve said—I don’t remember.

  There was a female police officer, questioning me. But I knew better than to make that mistake again.

  A (female) gynecologist who would report no vaginal or anal penetration, no (physical) evidence of sexual abuse. A (female) therapist who would report probable extreme trauma, dissociation. Ms. Herne from the Children’s Protective Agency.

  It would be held against me that I was uncooperative with authorities trying to establish a case of repeated and sustained sexual abuse against Mr. Sandman unless it might be argued that I was a victim, mentally ill, unable to testify against the teacher who’d drugged and abused me for a period of approximately seven months.

  Mr. Sandman had been careful, fastidious. My clothes had been laundered—no DNA. (Except an incriminating trace would be discovered on my sneakers.)

  If you don’t help to convict him he will hurt other girls, they told me. I thought—Other girls will be hurt whether Mr. Sandman is in prison or not. That is our punishment.

  “Violet. No one is putting pressure on you . . .”

  You are all putting pressure on me.

  “. . . but you must tell us, you must take your time and tell us, all that you can remember. When did that man first . . .”

  Ms. Herne was visibly upset. For (she believed) there’d been a special understanding between us, I’d known that I could trust her. And yet, I must not have trusted Ms. Herne for the abuse had been going on for months during which she’d met with me several times and there’d been no hint.

  Of course, there’d been a hint. Plenty of hint. Ms. Herne had failed to detect, that was all.

  And now with the (ugly, relentless) publicity in the local media it hardly looked as if Dolores Herne of the Port Oriskany Children’s Protective Agency had been very good at her job, one of her at-risk juvenile clients having been sexually abused, terrorized by a teacher, over
a period of seven months and she had not noticed.

  I’d thought—Not abuse but punishment. And not the worst punishment either.

  10.

  And what had happened to Arnold Sandman? He’d been in custody in the county jail. Wisely, he would not risk a trial. (The prosecutor was calling for a sentence of ninety-nine years.) Instead, Mr. Sandman would follow his attorney’s advice and plead no contest, and express contrition, and repentance, and shame for his crimes; and the presiding judge would sentence him to twenty-five to thirty years in the maximum-security prison at Attica.

  A death sentence. Arnold Sandman would never survive Attica.

  None of this was known to me, at the time. Though if I shut my eyes and began to drift in the rapid current that was always there, inside my eyelids, far below the Lock Street bridge, amid the churning writhing snakes of the hue of eggplant, there came Mr. Sandman to stoop over me, his face no longer jocular and mocking but contorted with grief.

  Violet! You know, of all the girls I loved only you.

  There came a timid knocking at a door. Aunt Irma asking please, could she speak with me?

  Pulled the covers over my head. So that I could see Mr. Sandman more clearly. So that I could hear him more clearly.

  At last the timid knocking ceased. Whoever was outside the door had gone away and left me alone with Mr. Sandman.

  BRIAN PANOWICH

  A Box of Hope

  from One Story

  Will sat on the front porch of the house, his feet tucked in close to his body. He’d been sitting in that spot, staring out into the yard, for at least a hundred years or so. He sat and watched both the ghost of his father and a younger version of himself playing tag football in the thick overgrown crabgrass. His old man purposely leaving himself wide open and slowing his movements to let his boy win. Will watched the figments of his imagination climb on the monkey bars that his father had spent a full two weeks yelling at while building piece by piece so many summers ago. The jungle gym started out as a huge flat cardboard box that a truck from K-Mart had dropped off in the driveway, but Will’s father slowly erected it into a steel fortress for them to climb and conquer together. Now it just looked like frail and rusted dinosaur bones—the carcass of some ancient dead thing that had chosen his front yard for its final resting place.

  His father had died in his shop just behind the house—an aneurism in his brain. Will was fifteen and felt like he should have had a clear idea of what an aneurism was, but he didn’t, not really. He sat on those steps looking out at his memories and trying to ignore the fat man sitting next to him. The man’s mouth had been moving through every bit of the past hundred years Will had been out there, but his voice had shrunk to a hum that gave the ghosts a soundtrack of static. Will was almost thankful for it.

  Almost.

  He missed his father’s voice. He was beginning to believe he’d already forgotten the sound of it, and he considered that maybe this fat man’s words bouncing off the surface of his memories might just be saving him from breaking completely in half. He took his eyes off the ghosts and looked down at his brightly polished patent leather loafers. He traced the reflection the trees made in them with his finger. He thought about how he had never worn—or owned—a pair of shoes like this before. Why in the world would his mom spend what little money they had on these shoes, knowing full well he would never wear them again? She had been so adamant about it.

  “You need to look respectful,” she’d told him in the middle of J. C. Penney while she’d pulled box after box of shoes off the rack, littering the aisle with tissue paper.

  “How does a pair of shoes make you look respectful?” he’d said. How does a person “look respectful” in the first place? Will felt himself slipping into his own anger. He’d lost his dad two days before and was filled with just as much grief as his mother. At least he’d thought so at the time. These shoes felt so unimportant, but as he’d tried on a third pair—the pair he was wearing now—he noticed his mother fighting back her tears. She’d been hiding her own pain behind the shopping. That’s when Will loosened up and allowed her the small comfort those shoes seemed to bring her. “These are good, Mom.”

  “Are you sure?” she said and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Walk around some and make sure they fit.”

  Will did and then sat back down on the little bench. He reached over to take her hand as she cleaned up the wads of tissue paper. “Mom, it’s going to be okay.”

  She looked at him and answered him honestly for the first time without the facade of a protective mother. “No it isn’t, William. No it isn’t.” Then she broke down crying.

  This was part of Will’s job now—holding his mother while she sobbed in a department store—whether he wanted it or not. But he hadn’t seen her cry again since. He knew that was due to her new medicine—the little yellow pills that rattled around in her purse and sat on her nightstand. Those pills did their job too. They kept her from crying but they also seemed to keep her from feeling much of anything else. That was okay, though. Will felt enough for both of them. He wanted to cry along with her, but he knew the rules. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He was the man of the house now, and men tough it out. Men keep it together. Above all, men don’t cry.

  Men get angry. But who was he angry at?

  God, maybe.

  The helplessness made him want to scream. He wanted to scream until his vocal cords strained and burst. He wanted to scream so loud it would crack the world in half, so that everything that had happened over the past few days would fall through the middle—get swallowed up by the void and be over. Even now, sitting on the porch steps, lost in his memories, he could feel that scream building up behind his tongue and teeth, swelling in his throat like a living thing. Maybe if he let it out he could stop being so angry. Maybe screaming would make him not want to take a swing at everyone in the house.

  Before he’d stepped out to get some air, he’d watched as people floated around in their Sunday best, chatting about their jobs or football or the economy—whatever the hell that was. Some of them were even talking about what they had planned for later in the evening. That made Will’s skin burn. Later this evening didn’t exist for him or his mom, not in any kind of way they could have wanted. They were stuck here in this reality for a long time coming, while all these friends of the family shook hands and ate casseroles off little paper plates.

  He hadn’t expected to feel this way today. Angry with no one to lash out at, lonely with no one to hold on to, scared and hollow with nowhere to hide. Out of the blue, he felt the urge to punch the man sitting next to him square in his fat face. He wouldn’t do it, but sitting still like this was excruciating. It was just as bad as having to listen to people he barely knew tell him over and over how “time heals all wounds.” He wanted to cheat his emotions like his mother was doing with the pills. Maybe he’d sneak one from her purse later. She’d never notice. No. Will shook his head again. He wouldn’t do that either. Dad wouldn’t want him to. He just needed to suck it up and take it. He needed to follow the rules and stop being so selfish. These people in his house were only trying to help, and the truth was they probably were helping his mom just by being here. He scratched at the back of his neck and loosened the tie his mother had also bought him that day at the department store—another act of endurance he’d had to bear for her sake.

  Inside the house, Will’s mother had spent nearly twenty minutes spreading the creases out of a red and white checkered tablecloth before she set out all the covered dishes. A few people—Will included—had tried to help her, but she became indignant about it. She was still able-bodied, she reminded everyone. “I lost my husband,” she said, “not my goddamn hands.” She never cussed or took the Lord’s name in vain like that, but she was angry too.

  His Uncle Jack’s being there didn’t make it any easier.

  Will didn’t know much about him. He’d never even seen him before today—outside of a few family photo albums—but
it was obvious that his presence at the funeral and now here at the house was upsetting his mom even more than she already was. She’d barely spoken to him at the funeral home. She’d introduced the two of them, but then she’d immediately pulled Will away to talk to one of the neighbors. Will had been so taken aback by his uncle’s resemblance to his dad that he’d been dumbstruck, anyway.

  The fat man sitting next to him truly had no idea that Will hadn’t heard a word he’d said. It was baffling. He continued yapping until Will felt a hand touch his shoulder and a new droning sound started. Then the fat man brushed the nothing from his pants as he stood up, made a hasty sign of the cross in the air, and mumbled a few words that might as well have been a recipe for rhubarb pie. He cast a weary glance at his replacement. “Good luck,” he said.

  Will felt the urge to smack him again but sat still as the fat man headed inside to get in on some free potluck. The new man sat down on the steps.

  Uncle Jack.

  “Hey there, Will,” he said. And then, after a few moments: “I hate that you had to sit out here and listen to that guy for so long. I would have come out to save you a while ago, but your mama said she wanted you to have some time with a holy man.”

  “A holy man?”

  “That’s what she said, kiddo. A preacher from one town over. I wasn’t about to argue.”

  “Yeah, she’s been a little touchy lately.”

  “Don’t be too hard on her. She’s going through a pretty rough time. If she wants to act a little touchy, then I reckon she’s entitled to.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Will was amazed at how quiet it got without the “holy man’s” hot buzz in his ear. He turned and took in the sight of his uncle, his dad’s younger brother. This close up, the resemblance was startling. Uncle Jack was so much like Will’s father it made him hard to look at, so Will didn’t look for very long. There were differences, of course, but those seemed—at a glance, anyway—to be matters of style. Will’s father had been uptight about his appearance and manner. He always sat up straight in his chair, always kept his hair short and trim, and his shirt stayed tucked in. Will supposed his dad’s twenty-five-year tenure in the Fire Service had made him that way. He always carried himself as if he were in service of someone else and ready for a business meeting. That sort of thing had been important to him, but clearly none of that mattered to Will’s Uncle Jack. He was thinner, looser. His graying brown hair fell long and messy. Not long enough for a ponytail or anything, but long enough for him to have to reach up and tuck it back behind his ear every two or three minutes throughout the entire funeral, Will had noticed. He wore black Levi’s and a pair of beat-up black cowboy boots that seemed to be challenging Will’s own sissy shoes to a duel on the steps below them. His black button-up shirt looked expensive, but not new. Will got the feeling Jack dressed like that all the time. He hadn’t just made a stop at J. C. Penney to pick up some dress-up clothes to make himself “look respectable” on the way here. He didn’t wear a tie, either, but he wore a lot of silver rings and they made both of his hands sparkle in the sun. Will could see bright-colored tattoos creeping out from under his sleeves whenever he moved his wrists just the right way. Although Will thought that was cool, he knew every pair of eyes in the house behind him had washed this man down with buckets of judgment—good Christian judgment.