Lemon Reef

by Robin Silverman

  She continued. “What happened to your friend seems especially tragic. The current laws are trapping women, forcing them to stay with men who are violent or lose custody of their kids to those men. Imagine that for a choice. Postfeminist fathers’ rights discourse.” Sarcastically, she added, “You know all about it.” Then, “Call me cynical, but it used to be that a lot of loser fathers didn’t give a shit about their kids after divorce. After the laws changed—deadbeat dad laws beefed up, child-support payments getting calculated according to the amount of time each parent had—all of a sudden, men are going to the mat for their fifty-percent timeshare. Not sixty percent, mind you. They don’t want more work. They don’t want to actually be responsible for doctors and back-to-school night, they just don’t want to pay anything. When it means they might have to open their wallets, they’re as precious about their parenting rights as they are about their penises. They’re hiring lawyers, lobbying legislatures, getting gender-neutral language written into codes.” She laughed grimly. “If women had been as effective at getting equal pay as men have been at getting equal parenting rights—well, imagine what the world would be then. As it is now, because of these laws, women are doing all the work in half the time and with none of the financial support.”

  She stopped. “Anyway, I’m sorry to go on like this. I’m not telling you anything new. It’s just…” Margaret sighed. “Del must have been pretty desperate, Jenna, and she must have felt like she didn’t stand much of a chance in court.”

  I usually resisted and resented Margaret’s diatribes, but in that moment, all I could feel was a sense of solidarity and gratitude. “Thank you for your help, Margaret.”

  “Safe travels.” She hung up.

  I closed my phone and stood in the warm air. Voices carried from the living room. I leaned against the porch rail, my gaze drifting to the melancholy houses around me.

  *

  “This can’t be what Del meant,” Ida said about the statues. She was folded into the couch between Gail and Katie, staring at the letter we had retrieved from Sid. “It doesn’t make any sense.” Her red hair was almost orange in this light, her tone somewhat restrained. “There was no other box, Nicole?”

  “For the fourth time, no.” To me, Nicole said, “That guy you told me about. He can prove Talon lied about where Del died.”

  Katie added, “And there are police reports.”

  I sat on the floor next to Nicole, tugged at the shag carpet beneath me. “I don’t know whether Jake’s report will make any difference here.”

  “Jenna,” Nicole said in frustration, “Del was hooked to a chain thirty feet under the water. How could that be an accident?” She shifted her weight, put her face in her hands.

  “I’ll give Beasley the information from Jake. Maybe it’ll make a difference to Beasley, maybe it won’t. I don’t know. Beasley already knows about the police reports.”

  Katie lit two cigarettes and, without asking, handed one to Nicole. Nicole took it with less than a nod of acknowledgment. I breathed in the scent of sulfur from the match against freshly lit tobacco, and longed.

  Ida was still staring at the letter Del had sent to Sid. She shook her head, reading aloud, “If anything happens to me, there is a box on the top shelf of the closet in my bedroom.” She put the letter down. “It’s weird.” Ida seemed more awake all of a sudden than she had since I’d arrived. “Del wouldn’t have hidden anything in that house. Mr. Bleach-the-Sidewalk was too on top of her every move. And those fucking cameras were enough to…” Ida’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God.” She leaped to her feet. “Del’s bedroom,” she near shouted, “Del’s old bedroom.”

  Heads turned. My eyes met Gail’s—now fully engaged—as we lunged forward, falling over ourselves and each other to follow Ida down the hallway. Ida threw open the closet door and stepped on a suitcase to access the shelf. She scrambled around, moving objects, making shuffling noises, until we heard, “A box!” The suitcase she was standing on was indenting beneath her weight and beginning to tip as she balanced and reached. “There’s a box up here.” Ida pulled the box out, gracefully teetering as the suitcase began to cave and topple. She rode it to the ground, stepping off just in time to achieve a soft landing. Then she grinned hugely, as if she’d just saved the day, and presented the box to me.

  “Good job,” I said.

  *

  The box contained three close-up photographs of Del, like mug shots, her cheeks swollen and bruised, her lip cut, her nose bloody. Del was staring into the camera defiantly, daring it to lie. The photos of her like this were familiar to me, yet not. With the passing of the years my memories of Del had assumed more of dreamlike quality. I trusted less and less the image of her bruised face as I remembered it. Now, as an adult, I looked again at this bruised face and felt at once the unmediated horror and odd reassurance of confirmation.

  There were copies of police reports, seven different instances in the last two years. Also in the box was a miniature tape for a microtape recorder. There was a log with dates and brief entries describing incidents of beatings and threats. There were both Del and Khila’s passports, along with some cash. Finally, there was an envelope full of Post-its.

  Each Post-it was dated and had an instruction on it. For example, one Post-it said the date and then directed Del to sort through boxes of nails in the garage and put them in separate containers by size. Another instructed Del to complete a list of household chores—bleaching the sidewalk, scouring the sink, scrubbing the toilet, sorting the sock drawers. Many of the Post-its gave the same instruction. Sorting the jar of pennies by date appeared to be a favorite. Each note was closed with “I love you” and Talon’s signature.

  We sat around the table in silence, Nicole, Katie, Ida, and me, staring at the contents of the box now spread out on the dining room table. Gail left to buy a microtape recorder so we could listen to the cassette. I stared at the photos of Del, wondering who took them. I thought of the spying man who had seemed so poised to witness earlier.

  Nicole was the first to speak. “I don’t get it. What’s with the pennies?” She was holding a Post-it in her hand that said:

  7/27/99

  Hi honey,

  Hope you slept well.

  The pennies need to be sorted today. It would be great if you could put them in order by date and stack them in groups of fifty. I’ll be home by five and expect them to be done by then.

  Love you so much,

  Tal

  By the look on Nicole’s face, I knew we were both recalling the five-gallon jar of pennies we’d seen at Del’s house.

  Ida said in a tone that sounded more like a confession, “They collected them.”

  She swallowed hard, looked around the room, and shifted in her seat uncomfortably. I could see in Nicole’s narrowing eyes that her patience with Ida was thinning. Ida must have sensed it as well, because she became more forthright with her information.

  “Tal would leave Del these notes in the morning when he went to work. He’d tell her to polish and sort all the pennies in that jar and then stack them in piles of fifty. When he came home, he’d check to make sure she’d done it. Then he’d put all the sorted pennies back in the jar and make her start all over the next day. The exact same thing all over again.”

  It was an excruciating image, Del, day after day, sitting at a table for eight hours putting pennies in piles of fifty by date. “Del told you this?” I asked.

  Ida played mindlessly with one of the notes, turned it in her fingers, looked past me when she spoke. “I went by sometimes when Tal was at work, and I’d sit with her while she sorted—or whatever she was doing, cleaning the windows, organizing the kitchen cabinets. One week he had her sorting this huge mess of nuts and bolts every day, over and over again, the same rusty bolts. She’d sort them, and then he’d come home, spill them out, and have her do it again the next day.”

  “This seemed normal to you?” Nicole blasted in Ida’s direction. She slammed her hand on the
table and kicked her chair back. “I don’t know whose side you’re on.” She looked as if she was about to pounce.

  Ida kept talking. “It started about six months ago.” Beginning to cry, she said, “I wish I had told someone, or at least tried to get her to leave him. She was my sister—I loved her.” Her spine firmed with conviction, her chin lifted slightly in my direction. “Jenna, you know I loved Del. Del didn’t talk to me very much about Talon. For one thing, if I said anything to her about him and he found out, he wouldn’t have let her see me anymore.” She added, “And she didn’t trust me with him.” Ida snuck a glance in Nicole’s direction. Nicole shifted her face away in condemnation. “I knew they were fucked up, but I couldn’t do anything about it.” Now Ida was sobbing. “Del said the chores were important to Talon. She knew it was weird, but she said she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind him watching her on the toilet, she didn’t mind him telling her what she could and couldn’t eat. I tried.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  “Nicole,” she continued, “I told Del she was getting thin. She said she wasn’t eating because Tal thought she was fat, and she wanted to look good for him. What was I supposed to do? She loved the guy.” We sat in silence, each of us aware that Del weighed ninety-eight pounds when she died. Ida moved her finger along the surface of the table drawing circles, the way a Buddhist might rake sand. “It got really freaky really fast in the end. Tal put cameras in all the rooms. I mean, he videotaped everything anyway. Don’t know why. He was just weird like that. He cut off all her money and her credit cards. He controlled what clothes she wore, who she saw, when she got up, when she went to bed, when she took a shower or a shit. He controlled everything. But she never complained. She just did what he told her to do. I thought like a scene. You know, an S-and-M thing.”

  “How do you control when someone takes a shit?” Katie asked.

  “Maybe that’s what the laxatives were for,” Ida replied.

  I watched Ida’s face for a moment. I could see it changing as she said these things out loud to us now. She was realizing she had been duped, wondering how it was possible that she had stood idly by while something hideous had gone down. I understood—I really did—how one could go along with something like this, thinking it’s not a big deal or not understanding it is a big deal because the person it’s happening to seems so okay with it. It’s the nature of perversion to make something horrific seem perfectly normal, acceptable, natural—in Ida’s case, enviable.

  Nicole’s neck twitched, her eyes rolled, her hands clasped the air then released it. The spasms were clearly more pronounced when she was angry. “And the tapes. Why was she making sex tapes?”

  Ida was surprised, her brows raised, lips slightly parted. Then she scrunched her forehead and said, “She wasn’t making sex tapes. Are you talking about…” She hesitated. “They weren’t sex tapes. Not like bad sex tapes, I mean. Talon would get some guy from a bar or something, and videotape Del blowing him. Then they’d watch it together, and it would get them off. I mean, Del was into it, too. She told me she was glad he was so into watching her and not other women.” Ida shook her head. “Look, I loved her, but you guys have this idea of Del like she’s some innocent, misunderstood angel or something.” She breathed out a laugh. “Jenna, you’re going on some idea that you know her sexually because she experimented with you a couple of times in fucking high school. You don’t know anything about her. She was tooting when Talon met her.”

  Nicole looked at me. “That’s Ida code for ‘I fucked him and she deserved it.’”

  I ignored both of them. I was doing what I tended to do when flooded with too much painful information at once, focusing on one detail—the Post-its. I stared at one instructing Del to sort pennies, my mind filtering through everything I’d heard, trying to make sense of it.

  I said, “He was keeping her busy.” Everyone turned from Ida to me. “Talon thought Del was having an affair. So when he went to work, he gave her these assignments, so she couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. He was keeping her busy.”

  Katie sat with her legs neatly crossed, Del’s journal split open on her lap. Her fine white-blond hair caught the light and glistened. She raised her chin and pressed her lips together. Then she said, “Listen to this.” She read aloud the journal entries documenting one assault after another. They were matter-of-fact, more reports than accounts.

  The first incident had been entered in 1992 when Khila was three years old: I got home late from work last night. Talon immediately accused me of being with someone else. I asked him to lower his voice because I didn’t want Khila to hear us fighting. Talon called Khila into the room and hit me in front of her.

  The entries went on this way, one after another, year after year. The police seemed to be the intended audience. In fact, when a police report had been filed, its number was referenced. The fact that Del had been so divided in this way—living out her life and documenting it—was chilling.

  The entries also documented dates and times when Talon videotaped Del doing sex acts with other men. These incidents, too, were entered without much emotion or detail. What the descriptions did convey was a downward progression from more or less consensual on Del’s part. At first, the sex acts were something Del did because it pleased Talon. Then the taping became something she did because he insisted on it. By the end, he was bringing these guys home to punish her. He was forcing her, threatening to expose the tapes if she didn’t do what he told her to do.

  Del also mentioned another tape she believed existed: the tape of Thomas’s murder, the one piece of evidence that could exonerate Sid. Talon, she wrote, videotaped all his crimes, and there was no way he would have passed up on that one. The cameras made it hard for her to search the house, which was another reason she thought Talon had installed them. But she’d still managed to get into most of the places she thought the tapes might be hidden. If they weren’t in the house, there was only one other place he would leave them.

  Del described in the last pages of the journal her fear that Talon was going to kill her, and she wanted to find the tape that proved Sid was innocent and destroy the sex tapes so Khila would never see them. The tapes, she believed, were on Kramer’s boat.

  “That’s why she went with him.” It hadn’t made sense to me until then. I kept wondering why, if she was leaving Talon or she was afraid of him, she had gone with him on this last trip. Now I understood. “She was looking for the videotapes.” As I said it, Gail returned with a microtape recorder.

  *

  The tape Del had left in the box, dated July 27, 1999, began with her asking Talon in a strained but calm voice if they could talk. When he agreed, she said, “I don’t think this is working.”

  Her voice was deeper than I remembered, but so familiar, and hearing it instantly made my heart billow—and then shrink, as I remembered where I was and what had happened.

  Del’s tone was even. “I feel like we’ve tried for a long time. I don’t think it’s working,” she repeated. A lengthy pause followed. Nervousness creeping in, her tone edging from reasoning into pleading, Del said, “Tal, you can keep everything. Keep the house, the car, the bank account, whatever you want, you can have it. I don’t want child support. I don’t want anything. Just let me take Khila and leave. We’ll go to my mom’s. You’ll see her whenever you want.” More silence. Del’s voice trembled now, but she kept on. “You know you haven’t been happy with me, either. I know you’re sleeping with other women.”

  Her tone, although sad, had a tender, open quality that I remembered and loved about her.

  Talon was calm and matter-of-fact as he said, “I’ve told you before, I’ll tell you again, you’re not leaving with Khila.” One could imagine him smiling coldly as he said, “You’re very sick, Del. You have serious mental problems and everyone knows it.” As if speaking to a child, “Do you get what I’m saying? You will never get Khila.”

  Del said, “How do you know what the court would do? She’s with me all t
he time. You’ve never taken care of her. You hardly know her.”

  Talon let go a deep, gargling laugh. “With your history of drugs and tooting, you think you’re gonna get custody of my kid?”

  “That was a long time ago,” Del said.

  More laughter, louder, harder. “What’ve you been smokin’?” Then Talon said, “Those cocks you’ve been sucking. Remember those? Who says you didn’t get paid for that? What would the judge say about those videos? Nice motherly behavior, don’t you think? Real ladylike.”

  “Those tapes,” Del said, her voice cracking a little, “say as much about you as they do about me. I did those things in the privacy of our marriage. You made those tapes.”

  “Prove it,” he said sharply. “I’m not in them.” He laughed once. “Who’s gonna believe a word you say? You’re lying white trash.”

  “Maybe I am. But there—” Del started then stopped. Her voice became more forceful with the second attempt. “There is someone who would believe me.” She paused. “And she would help me keep my daughter.”

  Silence. I was looking around at the others now, trying to get a sense of whether they had any idea who Del was talking about. They didn’t. I thought it must be the underground folks.

  “Who?” Talon shouted. “Who would believe you? The other guy you’re fucking?” Either he had disregarded or hadn’t heard when she’d referred to the person as a she. “Tell me who you’ve been talking to.” His voice was louder and clearer, perhaps because he was moving closer to the tape recorder. “Do you have an attorney? Did you get an attorney? Who would believe you? Who have you talked to about me, Del?” There was a slam and some shuffling.

  “Get your finger out of my face,” Del said.