Denial

by Jessica Stern

  Yes, I can carry out this project, but my goodness, I need help.

  Before we leave my apartment, I suddenly realize the laundry needs washing. I scrub the kitchen. I make the beds. When this is done, I begin organizing my files. I also change my clothing several times. I know that I need to wear a long black skirt, a white blouse, and a black jacket. A kind of puritan uniform. But I have two jackets. Which one? Eventually my frenzy gets on Chet’s nerves. It is time to go.

  It takes an hour to get to Milbridge. Chet and I don’t talk much. I feel shaky. Perhaps the cleaning frenzy has enervated me.

  Global Gas is on South Main Street, just past the police station, around the corner from the house where Brian Beat grew up. When we walk into the body shop, I have a kind of tunnel vision. I see Stevie, Brian Beat’s friend, who seems to leer at me expectantly, and Uncle Henry, who looks pained.

  Henry offers a gnarled, oil-stained hand to Chet, who shakes it manfully. My hands flutter, ashamed of themselves, to my sides. I am alarmed by the oil stains, and ashamed of my alarm. I am also deterred by the pain I sense in Henry’s hands.

  “I have arthritis,” he says, relieving me, at least momentarily, of the misery I feel at my inability to touch him, or anyone else for that matter, at this moment.

  “Could we go for coffee?” I ask.

  I have an urgent need to get away from that bathroom.

  “I don’t have much time,” Henry says.

  “Someplace where we can sit,” I say.

  There is a Dunkin’ Donuts about a mile away. We follow Henry’s black pickup truck with its artificially engorged tires. I sense my features changing. My eyes seem to swell. I cannot focus.

  Do rapists really have daughters?

  A cage floats down from the heavens, encasing my body in glass. Chet does not see the cage. He thinks I am with him in the car, but in fact, I am alone in a parallel world. I look and sound relatively normal, but really, I’m only half here, only half alive.

  We turn the car into the entrance of the coffee shop. The ticking of the turn signal scrapes against my inner ear.

  Henry waits for us inside the coffee shop. We find an empty table. We sit under the nauseating glare of fluorescent lights. I hear the dizzyingly familiar buzz. Terrors are brought back to me by this sound, but I don’t know what they are or why. The coffee creamer feels far away, but the ceiling presses close. The hand that holds my coffee cup does not look like mine. I sip my coffee carefully, worried that I might drop the cup or spill the hot liquid. There is a strangely altered distance between table and mouth. Here is what makes me feel so very alone in these moments: nobody else notices that I am no longer in the room.

  I am not entirely sure that I will live through this interview, so the best thing is to jump right in, get it over with.

  “Tell me about your sister and Brian Beat,” I say to Uncle Henry.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened,” he says. “When she got pregnant, I was in Vietnam. My sister, after she got pregnant, she moved to Connecticut. She married someone else. Beat went out to California. He was dating a girl out there. The girl’s father was a cop. The father didn’t like Beat. I think she accused Beat of rape.”

  So Brian Beat may have been accused of rape in California, too.

  “I didn’t like Beat,” he confesses. “But I think he was falsely accused. I don’t believe he raped anyone. He was smart. He was brilliant. He could have done anything.

  “But he was leading my sister down the wrong road,” he says. “They would run off to Webster or to Worcester. They were taking drugs, and I was the one sent off to find them.

  “You really have to talk to my sisters,” he says, anxious to be done with me.

  “I would like to,” I say, equally anxious to be done with this interview, mainly because I’m so dizzy. I ask Henry if he would call his sister Abby to tell her that I’d like to talk to her.

  “I’ll call Fay,” he says, referring to their younger sister.

  “Abby is difficult,” he says. Henry and Abby are mostly out of touch. He does not even have her number.

  I notice that the skin on his face looks raw, as if his flesh had been lashed by the wind.

  “She’s had a very hard life,” he adds, defending his sister from some unspecified person’s critical eye.

  But then, as if to correct the record, he says, “She brought it all on herself.”

  I hear the sound of unrelenting rain. Such bleakness here in Milbridge.

  He pulls himself up taller now, reining himself in. “She made her bed. Now she’ll have to lie in it,” he concludes.

  I look around the coffee shop and then back at our table. Now I notice that it is dented and unsteady, that some of the silverware is bent from overuse. Scruffy white tufts of an asbestos-like substance are protruding from the back of Henry’s chair, which is upholstered in gray Naugahyde, the same color as the examining table in my grandfather’s office.

  There is a silence. I wonder to myself, What bed does he have in mind? The one she made with Brian Beat nearly forty years ago? Such a common expression, I think to myself, this making of the bed that now we have to lie in. But so very cruel.

  He must have sensed my confusion.

  “She used to be a nurse, but she got into a fight with someone at work. The police were brought in to investigate. They found that she had been caught with a needle in her purse when she was fourteen years old. It was still on her record,” he tells me, “from the time she was hanging out with Beat. They fired her. She’s on disability now.”

  While he talks, he dials his sister Fay’s number. She is at her desk at work. I see Henry’s face soften as he hears his younger sister’s voice. They chat briefly. Then he tells Fay that a researcher is interested in talking to Abby.

  Henry hands me the phone. I tell Fay I’m conducting research on trauma and violence, and that I’m hoping to talk to Abby about Brian Beat. Fay doesn’t seem entirely surprised, though I hear suspicion in her voice.

  “A reporter came to talk to us once before,” she scoffs. From the sound of her voice, she does not appear to have held this reporter in high esteem. “Sally, our oldest sister, was murdered,” she says, “and a reporter came to investigate. But the story never ran.”

  I catch my breath.

  “When?” I ask, wondering if Beat could have been the murderer.

  “In 1974,” she says. “We know who murdered Sally. It was her husband. We know it. But he was friends with all the cops up there. Up in Gorham. Friends with the DA. There was a big cover-up,” she spits.

  I ask more questions, half horrified, half incredulous. How could there be so much violence hatched in this tiny town? Later, I will find press coverage of Sally’s murder, which occurred in August 1974, several months after Brian Beat was imprisoned. So he wasn’t a murderer. At least, he didn’t murder Sally.

  Now that she has this story about the unreliable reporter off her chest, she is ready to give me her sister’s number. But first she wants to tell me her own view of Brian Beat.

  “Everyone was shocked when Brian was arrested,” she says. “He was just gorgeous,” she adds, breathlessly, as if Brian’s “gorgeousness” were clear proof of his innocence, as if she is confident that this one word will dispel any doubts I might harbor. There is a girlishness to her voice now, a gossipy tone. She seems to relish the memory of her big sister’s beau. “The girls were throwing themselves at him. I don’t believe he could possibly have raped anyone; he wouldn’t need to,” she says. “He dressed—well, you would be amazed. Like someone, what do you call that magazine, like someone out of GQ. But you really need to speak to Abby—she is the mother of his child.”

  Finally, she gives me Abby’s number.

  I am still sitting across from Henry under the buzz and glare of the fluorescent lights. The perspective in the room is still annoyingly off.

  I dial Abby’s number. She does not answer. In my daze, I let the phone keep ringing. A ringing in my
head. Finally, there is a woman’s voice.

  “Hello,” I hear. A kind of croak.

  I explain that I am researching cycles of trauma and violence and that I am hoping to speak with her about Brian.

  She takes in this information. She does not appear to be shocked. Perhaps she, too, talked with the reporter after Sally’s death. But she says, “I’m not well.” There is a pause. “I’m not even dressed.”

  Perhaps she senses disappointment in my silence. “I will be willing to talk to you about this if you can drive down another time,” she says.

  I am devastated. Childishly so. In this moment, I am not at all sure I will ever be able to come back to this part of the state. But I manage to recover a sense of professional equanimity. This is not the first time a potential interviewee has refused to talk to me. Once I flew all the way to Amman to talk to Hamas members there, only to be rebuffed when I arrived.

  Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she changes her mind. Perhaps she is curious.

  “My house is a mess, so we’ll have to go out,” she warns me. “Give me an hour to get dressed,” she adds. I look at my watch. It is 12:45 PM.

  When we take our leave of Henry, I have trouble locating the car in the small lot behind the coffee shop. The car looks different—longer, or maybe shorter. I feel that I am different, too. My features feel even more swollen. The phrase features swollen like those of a mongoloid child come to my mind. That was the cruel term used for hydrocephalus when I was a child.

  “Do I look different?” I ask Chet.

  He tells me that something may have happened to my pupils.

  We drive the fifteen miles to Worcester, then stop for lunch to allow Abby time to dress. Chet, as usual, is in a mood to explore. He is delighted to be driving to a part of Worcester he’s never seen, delighted to try a new restaurant, delighted to meet someone new. I am not at all delighted by any of this. I have an overwhelming desire to shut myself in like a bivalve. But another feeling competes with my desire to hide—I am curious. What will I learn from Abby? And I also want to know, what will happen to my body and mind when I hear whatever it is she has to say?

  After lunch, we make our way to Abby’s house. She has provided directions, but she hasn’t taken one-way streets into account. After several false turns, and several stops to consult passersby, we finally find Abby’s street, and then her home. She lives in an apartment in a triple-decker house. The house has gray siding. The siding is slipping.

  I call from the street to tell Abby we’re outside. She comes downstairs. She locates our car. It is still raining, with a heavy gray sky, but she blinks, as if adjusting to the light of day. I notice long straight hair, long legs, blue jeans, a 1960s look. Her face is traced with delicate lines. She has no scent. Remnants of her good looks remain, intensifying an overwhelming sense of loss I feel in her presence. The vulnerability in her glittery blue eyes makes me feel I ought to look away. It is as if, in observing the lines that faintly crease her delicate skin, I am trespassing on some private grief.

  “Dunkin’ Donuts is just a couple miles down the road,” she says.

  I offer her the backseat, then scramble to gather my son’s leavings—half-eaten muffins, mittens, an extra pair of boots. She sits down and buckles herself in, but then suddenly comes to her senses.

  “Can I see some ID or something?” she demands. “How do I know who you are?”

  I assume that she is concerned about getting into a stranger’s car for all the normal reasons. We might be rapists, or even terrorists. Okay, those might not be totally normal worries, but you never know. But she is not worried about her own safety, it turns out.

  “How do I know you’re not working for the feds?” she asks. “Brian is dead, but I still don’t want to hurt him in any way.”

  I paw through the papers stuffed carelessly in my purse. Why am I not more organized? Old receipts. Library notices. The results of medical tests. Other people’s business cards, but alas, none of my own. Panicked, I offer up a driver’s license and a Harvard ID. For whatever reason, these two items help to persuade her that I’m not a fed. She agrees to proceed.

  She directs us to a shopping mall a few minutes down the road. Dunkin’ Donuts is on the corner, just outside the mall. When we arrive, the coffee shop is crowded with retirees enjoying a mid-afternoon snack. I am worried that the happy din will be too much for Abby, but she seems unfazed. Chet asks Abby what she would like to eat. She requests coffee and a chocolate cruller. I wonder if this is her first meal of the day.

  I ask her how she first met Brian.

  “I was fourteen or fifteen,” she says. “He was a couple of years older. He had been going to a vocational school, an agricultural school. When I met him, he had just switched over to Milbridge High. There were three of us who started hanging out together: Brian, me, and Simon Brown. Later, John Henry was part of our group. We were oddballs. People called us hippies.

  “He was very intelligent. He knew everything about everything, things that a lot of us weren’t interested in or didn’t know anything about—politics, history. He was spoiled by his parents. His mother—she adopted him, she wasn’t able to have children—she just adored him. He was her only child.”

  Now I recall the document that Lt. Macone gave me, which indicated that Brian was adopted.

  I ask about his birth mother, the sister of his adoptive mother. “He never got over the fact that his birth mother gave him up. She wasn’t interested in him. She went on to have more children, but that side of his family only took an interest in Brian after his adoptive mother died, when it came to settling the estate.

  “He hid a lot of things, the pain he felt at not being wanted by his birth mother. He told me things he wouldn’t tell anyone else.

  “He was so gorgeous,” she says, in agreement with her younger sister, at least on the matter of the gorgeousness of Brian Beat, a quality not at all consistent with my vague recollection of a skinny man with a gun, and not at all in evidence in the photographs I now have of him from his prison file, the photographs I barely caught a glimpse of, but an impression remains nonetheless.

  “He went for other girls, too. I know a lot of girls were after him. He needed to have conquests. But I always felt that he did that because he wanted to prove he was a man.

  “I was thin,” she adds. “One hundred and fifteen pounds, but he thought I was heavy. He thought I was supposed to look like Twiggy. I’m five foot five, that is my normal weight. But he made me feel like I was fat.”

  “How old were you when you got pregnant?” I ask.

  “Seventeen,” she says. “In my senior year of high school. We didn’t have birth control back then. Brian wanted me to have an abortion, but I refused.”

  Abby’s father was Brian Beat’s father’s best friend. The two fathers knew about Abby’s pregnancy. But Mr. Beat supposedly never informed his wife that their son had impregnated Abby.

  “My parents wanted to put me in one of those homes for unwed mothers. Girls who go there agree to give up the baby. I didn’t want to do that. So my mother called my sister Sally, and I moved in with her.”

  She lived with her sister Sally for a while, and ended up marrying the brother of Sally’s husband. The brother of the man whom Abby and her sister Fay believe murdered their sister Sally. How could one small town sustain this much violence?

  “I married Tom when I was eight months pregnant. He didn’t care that I was pregnant with another man’s child. He said it is one thing to impregnate a woman, another thing to father a child. He never threw anything into my face. He was very good to me. He loved my daughter. I didn’t have any contact with Brian when I was married to Tom, living in Connecticut.

  “But I was in love with Brian,” she says. “I really wanted to be with him.” She is smiling now, for the first time, drifting into a wistful space. The horror of it shocks me awake.

  But her wistful mood quickly fades. “None of my relationships since then have worked out, beca
use I was really in love with Brian,” she says.

  Is it possible to be in love with a child rapist?

  “He had a really hard time in prison. The other inmates mistreated him. They set fire to his bunk. They thought he was a diddler.”

  I ask what that means. “A child molester,” she says. “They don’t like diddlers in prison,” she explains.

  “When he came out on furlough, he kept saying to me, ‘I didn’t do it.’

  “After he got out of prison, we were thinking about getting back together,” she continues. “But he was unstable. He wrote me a letter about how proud he was of me that I kept my daughter. But he kept asking, Are you sure it’s mine? That really hurt me. There was a cold side to him. I realize now, looking back, that he was very cold when he made love to me. There was a lack of compassion during the sex act.”

  “Do you think he could have been abused?” I ask.

  “Not by his parents,” she says. “Maybe by someone else. There was a lot of sexual abuse and incest in Milbridge,” she adds. “No one was ever arrested, but the police knew about it. It was written up in an almanac, an annual report on the town. I was shocked when I saw it. There were over a hundred reports of incest, women getting abused, domestic violence. The police never did anything. Back then, they assumed that if a woman was getting beaten, she must have done something wrong.

  “I really liked his mother. She told me that she always thought the two of us would get together. But she told me, You’re too good for him. She knew there was something not right with Brian’s mind—but people didn’t talk about these things in those days. He was moody. Sometimes he was extremely charismatic. He kept himself really well. He always had to have his tan. He wore a corduroy suit…. People were intimidated by him. He was so bright. But sometimes he could be very cold. He had different personalities. He could be very charismatic and loving, but he could also be very cold. Not a lot of compassion.

  “Karen was around thirteen when I told her that Brian was her father. She’s been mad at me ever since,” she says.

  I don’t want to interrupt her story to ask who Karen is; I assume that she must be Abby’s daughter.