Penance

by Rick R. Reed

  She turned to Dwight, who was standing at the threshold of the room. He covered his mouth with his hand, then took it away. “I had a slip.”

  Marianne nodded. Where were the words? She needed to find the courage to say them…now…while she still could. Tomorrow, she would forgive him and the cycle would start all over.

  How long before their names appeared in the Chicago Tribune because her husband was arrested for child molestation?

  How much therapy would it take to cure him? How many Sex Addicts meetings? How many nights more would she cry into her pillow, feeling she was drying up as a woman, empty and alone?

  How much more jealousy would she feel for these now not-so-faceless teenage kids?

  Dwight went on. “Just a slip, Marianne. They say in the group meetings it’s normal.”

  Marianne went over and picked up the length of clothesline lying on the floor. “Is this what you used to keep him here?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Is that ‘normal’?”

  She put the rope down, picked up the can of Crisco. “I wish I could say I only knew one use for this, like other wives.”

  Dwight stared at her.

  She held the Crisco can up to him. “Normal?”

  Dwight crossed to her and took the can from her fingers. “This is the last time. I promise.”

  Even though it chilled her, she picked up the knife. She thought, I don’t even want to know. She held it up to him. “Normal?”

  Marianne’s lips turned up into what she intended as an ironic smile, but knew probably came out looking more like a grimace.

  Say the words. Just find the breath and say them. “Dwight, I—”

  She could tell he knew what was coming, but she realized, too, that the words would have to be spoken. Until they were, she could never be free or at peace.

  “Dwight, I can’t live with you anymore.”

  “Marianne, don’t say that.”

  Once the words were out, she realized, it was easier. “It’s not working. It’s not fair.”

  “It’s all the kids’ fault, Marianne.”

  She looked at him, even more certain she was doing the right thing. “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s what I know.”

  Marianne was too tired to argue, to try to put some reason to his insanity. Maybe in a week or two, she could talk to him again.

  Maybe not.

  She just wanted to be away. Now that she had said the words, she wanted nothing more than to just get on with it.

  He gripped her shoulders. “Please, honey, it’s not me. It’s the kids! They tempt me. They shouldn’t be doing that.” He turned away and began whispering in an enraged, staccato voice. “Filthy little cocksuckers. If it wasn’t for them, I’d have a decent life. Filthy, rotten, dirty little perverts…sucking dick and letting their little asses get fucked until they bleed…”

  Marianne walked out of the room. She couldn’t bear to hear any more. She’d heard the words before. And she knew Dwight needed help. But it was help she just didn’t have to give.

  The bags were still by the door. She could work out the details later. Marianne started down the stairs, already practicing how she would explain things to Becky.

  Chapter 4

  Six men sat alone in a church basement, a pot of coffee in one corner, the air filled with the smell of cigarette smoke.

  The men spoke in unison, reading aloud from a purple book each had open before him, Hope & Recovery: “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not give themselves to this simple program… They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living that demands rigorous honesty… There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.

  “Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.

  “At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.

  “Remember that we deal with sexual addiction—cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power—that One is God. May you find God now!

  “Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked God’s protection and care with complete abandon.

  “Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery.”

  The men then recited the Twelve Steps, adapted from Alcoholics Anonymous. They had modified the steps to conform to their own sickness, which they called sexual addiction.

  One man, his head bowed, his voice almost quivering with conviction and want, stood out. He had grey hair, parted at the side, wore wire-rim gold glasses, a tan and green plaid shirt and khaki pants. His name was Richard Grebb, but most of the people he knew around his north-side Chicago neighborhood called him Father. He lifted a plastic foam cup to his mouth and sipped the steaming coffee. After he tasted the coffee, he added more sugar. Always more sugar, until the coffee was syrup-sweet and the caffeine and sugar combined to make him jittery tense, high with energy. Energy to cope with his addiction.

  *

  Later, after about half of the men gathered in this north-side church basement had spoken, telling their “stories” and how they had struggled with urges and desires seen only through darkness, it was Richard Grebb’s turn to speak. The other men in the group knew this about him: Richard Grebb was fifty-one years old. He was a priest at St. Cecilia’s Church on Lawrence Avenue. He had been a priest for thirty years. He continued to say Mass and minister to his parish, but was uncertain why a loving God had given him his particular cross to bear.

  Richard Grebb was a pedophile.

  He was torn between wanting to help runaway children and kids on the street and wanting to molest them.

  Richard Grebb wanted to reconcile his desires for what he considered good and evil. The group helped him. God, he thought, helped him. But not enough. Never enough.

  “Hi, my name is Richard. And I’m a sex addict.”

  As they had done a hundred times before, the group answered in unison: “Hi, Richard!”

  Richard looked down at the scarred wooden surface of the table for a moment, tracing the initials there with his finger. If I just didn‘t have to speak, he thought, his stomach churning. Maybe this time I could just listen. He took a breath and looked up, meeting the eyes of the other men there.

  He had to tell himself how important it was to get through this work, that maybe through the fellowship offered here and his own spirituality, he could begin to check his desires.

  “It was an okay week, I guess.” He looked down again. “No, it really wasn’t. I almost had a slip. Jimmy, the boy I told you about last week, the one that hustles trade on Lawrence, disappeared.” Richard bowed his head again. “And I was relieved. For a while I was even grateful to the Lord for taking him out of my path.” But images of Jimmy rose up from his fantasies: the smooth white skin, naked. The sparse pubic hair, the taut little ass, the cool hairless chest with just the hint of his ribs showing through. And Richard saw himself alone in his bathroom, feverishly trying to exorcise his lust with his hand, with his mind, and succeeding only in increasing his desire.

  Why were there no substitutes?

  One of the men, pudgy with red hair, spoke up: “Thought the Old Man was doin’ you a favor, huh, Rich?”

  The man brought him back to the present and he continued. “It was selfish of me to think that way. I’ve talked to Jimmy, gotten to know him. I think I even gained his trust
.” Richard said it all in a rush. “Friday, two days ago, I was going to abuse that trust. I wasn’t even honest enough to think of picking him up off his favorite street corner and paying him for it. No, I was going to bring him back to the house for a meal…seduce him. He’s thirteen years old.”

  The men in the room nodded, or met Richard’s eyes. They knew his guilt. It was here, and only here, that Richard found acceptance and a measure of understanding.

  Looking around the room, he saw them all: an eighteen-year-old boy doing the Sex Addicts Anonymous program as part of his probation after being arrested for making obscene phone calls to the women in his neighborhood; a married man who molested his twelve-year-old daughter’s best friend; another priest, who struggled with homosexual desires in bookstores, department store men’s rooms, and bathhouses; a compulsive masturbator; the man who ran a swinger’s group once upon a time and who now grappled with the compulsion to “act out” with prostitutes; more. They all knew what it felt like to be gripped by something, compelled by forces that almost seemed out of one’s own realm of personal existence. And it was only here that they could talk freely about their compulsions and not be abhorred.

  “But when I walked down there, he was gone. Saturday, I asked some of the kids who hang around there and none of them had seen him. Jimmy’s always around.

  “I was grateful at first. Then, knowing the kind of thing that boy does for money and the people he goes with, I got worried. Here it is Sunday and I asked around again before coming over here and still, no one has seen him.”

  Another man, young (the one who made obscene phone calls), toyed with a rip in the purple cover of his book. “But you can’t blame yourself. You can’t feel guilty about something that didn’t happen.”

  Richard Grebb lifted his pale blue eyes to meet the young man’s brown ones. “Can’t I?”

  After the communal hug and the men had said the “Our Father” together, they dispersed…to lonely apartments, to wives and families, to the windswept winter streets of Chicago. Some, not wanting the comfort of the group to end, traveled to a coffee shop around the corner to talk, to find acceptance with a group who knew them as few really did.

  But not Richard Grebb. He walked through uptown alone, realizing the group had not made him feel any better, as it used to. Used to be he could feel the Lord’s presence in him. Now, he felt empty, left to do battle with his demons alone. Give it up, he told himself, give it up to God.

  But it didn’t work anymore. Maybe God just isn’t there to receive my troubles anymore.

  And just as he was thinking that, he saw a familiar figure in the distance, north on Kenmore Avenue.

  Jimmy.

  He caught his breath. At once, he felt two very different emotions: relief that Jimmy was all right, and the queasy monster of desire rising up in him.

  Jimmy leaned on a parked car and Richard Grebb could not decide whether he should walk toward or away from him. It was when he saw Jimmy slip to the cold, frozen ground that he hurried toward the boy, forgetting for now his wariness, his fear of the monster he called addiction.

  “Hey…hey. Are you okay?” Richard stooped down. The boy lay on the cold concrete shivering, his legs drawn up to his chest. He stared at nothing. Richard placed his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, but Jimmy’s eyes seemed to stare through him. “Jimmy? Jimmy, it’s Father Grebb. Remember? Remember?”

  The boy’s face was white, pocked with red from the cold. Richard had seen victims of shock before and recognized the signs in Jimmy. He removed his coat and wrapped it around the boy’s stiff form.

  Richard cradled the boy in his arms, trying to warm Jimmy with his body. He rubbed his hands up and down the boy’s back. I won’t do anything, he promised himself. But I’ve got to take him home, now. Back to the rectory.

  Richard helped the boy to his feet, supporting him. “Jimmy, we’re going to go to my house now. I have a spare room. You can stay there until you feel better.”

  Richard promised himself again that he would not touch the boy. But his stomach churned, queasy with desire at the feel of the lithe form against him.

  A cold wind, promising snow, whistled down the street, through the corridors the tall buildings made. Jimmy seemed unsteady on his legs, as if at any moment, he would collapse once more. As he had always longed to do, Richard finally picked Jimmy up and carried him in his arms. The wind lifted Richard’s thinning grey hair as he made his way south on Kenmore, toward the rectory.

  There, he could take care of the boy. Nurse him back to health.

  Chapter 5

  She drew in on the little wooden pipe, letting the marijuana smoke settle inside her lungs, letting it work its magic once more. Julie Soldano wanted an escape and in this pot, she found it. Earlier, three college guys had given her the marijuana, in exchange for blow jobs. Julie hadn’t minded; she knew the pot would make her forget their low laughter as they walked away from her. Make her forget how she was five hundred miles from home and knew no one here in Chicago.

  She found the streets cold. Somewhere, in this flat landscape of buildings and a huge lake, Julie Soldano had expected to find refuge. It had been two weeks since her grandmother, her “Nana,” had discovered the little bag of pot in her bedroom dresser drawer. Two weeks since the screaming argument the two of them had had, the argument where Julie let Nana know the truth about her: that she traded her young body for pot older guys would give her. Julie remembered the quiet when she blurted out the truth, how Nana had stared at her, as if the young girl she had raised from infancy was suddenly a stranger to her. When she slipped away from the trailer in Chester, West Virginia, leaving behind her Sicilian grandmother, the only family she had ever known, Julie had thought that her dark Italian looks (long, straight black hair, eyes so dark Nana used to say people could “fall into them”) would sway people into thinking she was older. Nana had always told her she looked too wise to be a teenager and the men who picked her up a block or two from her trailer always seemed to believe her when she told them she was eighteen, or even nineteen.

  But here, no one believed. Not the people at the employment agencies she went to, not the woman at the McDonald’s she applied at, not even the guy she tried to get to give her a few dollars for a meal night before last. Most of them saw Julie for what she was: a fourteen-year-old runaway from a small town with no idea how to make it in a big city.

  *

  Now, huddled in a parking garage on some street whose name she didn’t know, Julie found herself wishing for the comfort of Chester, West Virginia, where she was known as “wild” and “incorrigible.” Found herself missing the warmth of the trailer and its smells: anise at Christmastime, when Nana made pizzelles and the ever-present smell of garlic, basil, and oregano, growing in pots in their windows, competing for sunshine. The concrete floor beneath her made her numb with cold, even though she had pulled her down jacket tightly around her, even though she had been lucky enough to find a gas range box to pull into the garage and crawl into.

  She sucked the last smoke out of the pipe, then opened its cover and tamped the ashes out on the floor. She felt light and a little dizzy, not able to remember what she was thinking about even minutes ago. The thoughts flowed.

  But she was still cold.

  The wind whistled and howled through the concrete structure. And now: the hiss of rain on the streets outside. Julie used to find such sounds comforting, but now she couldn’t stop the shaking. Couldn’t end the loneliness she felt.

  She wondered what it would be like to make her way down to one of the beaches she had seen and just begin walking into Lake Michigan, farther and farther, until the cold silver of the water enveloped her, sucking her down.

  Who would miss her?

  She turned in the box, drawing her legs up closer, putting her back to the wind that seeped in at the front of the box. Trying to ignore the hunger pangs the marijuana had intensified, Julie closed her eyes, willing sleep to come, willi
ng its woolen oblivion to come over her for one more night, just one more. Tomorrow, with the sun shining, she would find work, or one of those handsome, dark-suited men she had seen downtown would spot her and want her for his own. She remembered Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, thinking there might be a Richard Gere on some uptown street corner, just waiting for her.

  The parking garage had filled with water. Lake Michigan’s waters had encroached; covering the beaches, washing onward, west to Kenmore, all the way to Broadway. Julie had gone to the top of the eight-story structure and heard the water outside, making its way up the cold staircase. Above, the rain fell in sheets. Julie thought of just jumping from the structure, but when she turned to look, white-capped dark water rose up ready to overtake the top of the parking garage. She leaned into it at last, thinking, Take me.

  *

  Julie started awake. The cardboard box in which she lay stunk. Outside humidity had made it damp and there was a small scurrying noise in a corner, letting Julie know she shared the box with a new occupant.

  Julie climbed out of the box. Every muscle ached and she felt as if she couldn’t move. The rain from the night before (Julie flashed on her dream and looked around, reassuring herself that the parking garage had not flooded) had stopped, but left in its wake a piercing, wet cold. She looked up at the morning sky: pewter-grey, streaked with darker grey.

  And she realized that this day wouldn’t be any different from the last six.

  Julie had had enough. Julie wanted to go home.

  Out on Sheridan Road, Julie didn’t bother trying to mingle with the Loyola University students hurrying to classes. She was no longer afraid of looking too young; she was afraid of looking like the woman standing under the el tracks, wearing a man’s ski parka, mud-encrusted hiking boots, a lavender and white housedress, sunglasses and a sky-blue ski cap. She was rummaging through a wire-mesh trash barrel.