Work of Art

by Maysonet, Melody;

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “He sold it to people?”

  “Yes.”

  A horrible thought came to me. “How much money did he make from it?”

  “He sold a series of these . . . books. Not all of them featured children. Some of them were adult pornography. I guess you could say he specialized in portraying fetishes. People pay a lot to see their sexual fantasies in print.”

  “How much?” I repeated. “How much did he make?”

  “The investigation is still ongoing, but we estimate he made anywhere from twenty to thirty thousand dollars over the years. He had quite a little enterprise going.”

  Twenty thousand dollars. About the same amount he had given me for art school. Under the table, my mom’s hand squeezed harder.

  “Miss Waters, I know this is difficult for you. The way the law is . . . This is simulated pornography, and it came out before 2003.”

  My mom’s voice was shaky. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “That’s when a federal law was passed, making it illegal to simulate child pornography.”

  “So you’re saying this isn’t illegal because he did it before 2003?”

  “It’s a gray area. But with Miss Waters’s face as one of the victims . . . It becomes less gray.”

  Mom grabbed the file folder and slammed it closed. “How can this not be illegal? How?”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t illegal. I said it was debatable. But his timing was perfect, as if he knew exactly what the law would allow and deliberately worked around it. It was after 2003 that he stopped drawing children and began producing books depicting other types of fetishes.”

  I listened to all of this like I was detached from my own body. The words hung there, waiting to be heard, while my thoughts reeled, trying to process what I’d seen. My dad had drawn me naked. That much was on the cover. And inside those pages . . . What was I doing? Posing so men could get off? Having sex with them? Did he show me liking it, or was I crying and pleading with them to stop?

  All my life I’d clung to him, practically begged him to love me. But now I knew I’d never been a daughter to him. I was something else. Whatever he wanted me to be, that’s what I was for him. A lump of clay to be shaped. Something to be sold to strangers so they could—

  “Tera?” Mom cut into my thoughts. “Tera, look at me.”

  I blinked, my eyes like sandpaper.

  “Can I get you a glass of water?” asked Mr. Liebowitz.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Do you understand what your mother and I were discussing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to know that we can make a federal case, especially since the simulations show a real person. This kind of thing has been an ongoing issue for years, and the laws have been challenged several times.”

  “You want to show this?” I said. “Make a case out of it?”

  “I know how hard this must be for you.”

  Mom cleared her throat. “He’ll still go to prison without anyone seeing it, right? He’ll go to prison for the photos that were found on his computer?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Then no one has to see this. We’ll make it disappear.”

  “Mrs. Waters.” He was talking to my mom now. “It’s debatable whether these books were illegal at the time, but we can still make a stronger case against him. A jury won’t like knowing he compromised his daughter this way. I’m gathering other testimony, too.” He looked at me. “Your testimony would help immensely.”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t have any testimony to give, but I’d already let it slip about the picture. He’d want to know the details. If I talked to him, he’d know I’d posed for it willingly. The whole world would know.

  He slid his business card across the table to me. “I’m here to see that justice is done.”

  I stared at the card but didn’t take it. “I need to go home.”

  • • •

  Mom drove. I didn’t think I could.

  “You want me to drop you off at school?” she asked.

  “I’m not going.”

  I expected her to argue, but she nodded instead. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  We didn’t talk again until we were almost home. The silence between us felt oddly comforting. I didn’t think I could handle empty words.

  When she turned onto our street, the mail truck was just arriving at our house.

  “I’ll grab it,” I said, glad for the distraction.

  Mom stopped at the top of our driveway and let me out. I couldn’t help looking across the street to Haley’s house as I pulled the pile of mail from our box. Haley’s car was gone. She was at school, of course. I wished I hadn’t talked to her yesterday. I wished I hadn’t made her cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Mom asked when I got back in the car.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about Haley.

  “Did something come in the mail?”

  I looked down at the pile of letters in my lap. She saw it before I did. A letter from the prison. From Dad.

  “Don’t read it,” Mom said, but I was already tearing open the envelope. She put the car in park but kept the engine running. “Please don’t read it.”

  I pulled out the single piece of paper.

  Dear Tera,

  I tried to call you, but you hung up on me, so that’s why I’m writing. I called to tell you that you can still go to Paris. Come visit me and I’ll explain.

  Love,

  Dad

  “What’s he say?” Mom asked.

  “He says I can still go to art school, that he can help me.”

  “He’s lying.” She studied my face. “You know that, right?”

  But I didn’t think he was. He probably had more money stashed away from sales of his porn comics.

  “He wants me to come visit him,” I said.

  Her eyes got huge. She looked scared. “You think he wants to help you? He wants something from you. He wants to get you in there so he can lie to you.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But I need to go.” I needed to tell him I knew about A Bowl Full of Cherries.

  She lowered her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Please, don’t,” she said.

  “I have to, Mom. I’m going.”

  She twisted in her seat to face me. “Let me go with you then. I can help you.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want her there when I confronted him.

  “I helped you today, didn’t I?” She stared out the front window at the sloping driveway. “You needed me there.”

  “Yeah, Mom.” I wanted to touch her hand. Instead, I stuffed Dad’s letter back into the envelope. “I’m glad you went with me today.”

  “So you’ll let me go with you to see him?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I need to do this by myself.”

  Her lips tightened. Her hand squeezed the gearshift. “When will you go?”

  “Tonight.” Dad’s cellblock allowed visitors on Tuesday evenings.

  “I wish you’d let me go with you.”

  When I didn’t say anything, she shifted into drive, and we rolled the rest of the way down the driveway. She turned off the car and grabbed my hand, squeezing it hard before letting me go.

  CHAPTER 32

  The Best Gift Ever

  Her dad handed her a box wrapped in Christmas paper, only it wasn’t Christmas. It was her seventeenth birthday. The box was small and rectangle-shaped. A necklace, maybe? But her dad wasn’t the type to buy her jewelry. Another paintbrush, then. A really good one.

  “Can I open it now?” She glanced at her mom. Her mom was the one who would flip out if she opened the gift when she wasn’t supposed to.

  Her mom nodded, even smiled a little. “Hurry up before the pizza gets cold.”

  “Any guesses?” asked her dad.

  She gave the box a little shake. Heavy and solid, not like a paintbrus
h at all. “New acrylics?”

  “Wrong! Guess again.”

  Her mom sighed.

  “I don’t know . . . A chocolate bar?”

  “That’s your guess? Really?”

  “Just let her open it, Tim.”

  “Fine.” He waved his hand at her. “Go ahead.”

  She made a tear in the shiny wrapping, peeled it away, and let it fall to the floor. Her mom snatched it up and wadded it into a ball.

  Tera held a small box with the name of a bank on it. “You robbed a bank?” she joked.

  “Open it.”

  She did. At first she thought it was money inside, a nice fat stack. But then she saw it was the wrong color, the wrong everything. “What is it?” she asked.

  Her dad lifted the stack of bills from the box and riffled them. “This is your future,” he said. “Savings bonds. They’ll mature next year.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “For art school?”

  “The one in France, if you can get in. It took me a long time to save that much.”

  “Oh my God, thank you!” She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him as hard as she could. He patted her on the back, whispered in her ear. “I love you.”

  His arms felt strong and good, and she closed her eyes, wanting to melt into the feeling. When she opened them, she saw how her mom was staring at her and biting her lip. She moved to give her mom a hug, too, but her mom shook her head, crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  CHAPTER 33

  The concrete walls of the visiting room seemed to close in on me as I sat down in one of the hard chairs that lined the wall of bullet-proof glass. I couldn’t stop shaking. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

  A door opened on the other side. I blew on my cold hands and squinted through the hazy glass at the man in the orange jumpsuit trudging toward me. He moved slowly, his body stiff as he sat across from me and picked up his phone.

  I stared. This was my dad, but his face was so battered that I barely recognized him. He had a gash above one eye, with angry black stitches cutting through red, swollen skin. The flesh around his cheekbones looked mushy, like chewed-up meat, and one side of his mouth was bloated like an inner tube.

  I lifted the receiver and brought it to my ear. “Dad, what happened to you?” As much as I despised him, he was still my dad.

  “They beat the shit out of me, that’s what happened.” His words came out slurred and mangled.

  “Who did?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer. “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  So, this had happened after he wrote me the letter.

  “A bunch of prisoners jumped me in the exercise yard.” He touched his swollen lips like it hurt for him to talk. “Guys on their third strike, with no chance of getting out. They said they’d kill me.”

  “No one’s going to kill you.” I tried to sound reassuring, but I knew all about the prison hierarchy, how child molesters were the lowest of the low. “Tell the guards what happened,” I said. “They’ll protect you.”

  He barked a laugh. “The guards are the ones who put them up to it. They told me I was headed to prison for sure. Said they wanted to give me a preview of what it would be like.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Open your fucking eyes, Tera.”

  Good advice. If only I’d opened them sooner.

  “So what do you want from me?” I asked. “Your letter said you could help me go to art school. But I know that’s not why you called me here.”

  “That’s exactly why I called you here. But then this happened.” He pointed to his mangled face. “I’m not going to lie to you. I’m scared. I was ready, before, to take my chances with the public defender. But now . . . I need that lawyer.”

  “You told me you didn’t think she could help you.”

  “At the time, I didn’t think she could. When Chase Hardy told me what they found on my computer, he said there was no way I could fight it. But then this new lawyer comes along and says I can. I never told you I was guilty, Tera. You assumed that. And I’m telling you now . . . Those downloads were an accident.”

  I studied him through the glass. Did he honestly think I believed him?

  “You have to help me, Tera. You have to keep paying Charlotte Gross so I can get out of here. If I don’t have a good lawyer, I’m going to prison for sure. And I won’t last in there. You know I won’t last.”

  Something didn’t make sense. “You said in your letter you could send me to art school,” I said. “How were you planning to do that?”

  He stared at me like he didn’t understand the question.

  “I’m thinking you must have some money stashed away,” I said. “And if that’s the case, you can pay for your own lawyer.”

  He leaned forward in his chair so his face was inches from the glass. “Before I get into that, I want to tell you something.”

  I gripped the phone a little tighter. This sounded like a confession. “Tell me,” I said.

  “They record everything we say. I need you to understand what that means.”

  It meant he didn’t want to say anything that might incriminate him. “Then what am I doing here?” I asked. “I came here to see what you had to say. And to tell you I know about the—”

  He cut me off. “You’re right. I have money.”

  “So what’s the problem? If you have money, you don’t need my help.”

  “I had money. They froze my account while they investigate where the money came from.”

  “Because you earned it illegally.”

  “No! I’ll admit, I made money penning some pretty racy comics.”

  “Racy comics?” Why wouldn’t he just say it?

  “Okay, pornographic comics. But nothing illegal, I swear.”

  And in that, he might be telling the truth. Herman Liebowitz had said the comics with children in them weren’t considered illegal because of how the law was back then.

  “So when this is all over,” he said, “they’ll unfreeze my account. And you can have the money. You can still go to Paris.”

  I leaned forward, staring at him through the glass. “I don’t want your money.”

  “Why not? It’s—”

  “Because I know how you earned it.”

  He made a dismissive gesture with his hand.

  “I know you drew me, Dad. I know you sold me.”

  His body got very still.

  “Yeah, Dad. I know about A Bowl Full of Cherries.”

  His eyes dropped to his hands. He rubbed his fingers together. Slowly, he shook his head. “I don’t know what you think I did, but you can’t talk about that here. Wait until we’re sitting down with Charlotte Gross and then we can talk about it. The truth, okay? But we’ll only get the truth if I have a good lawyer. Charlotte Gross is good. You were smart to hire her.”

  “So you’re saying everything I think about you is a mistake?”

  “There’s two sides to everything, Tera. If I get sent to State, I’m a dead man. You know that.”

  “So you want me to keep paying the lawyer.”

  “And I want you to sit down with her, with both of us. So I can explain what really happened.”

  “Tell me now what happened.”

  “I can’t. They’re listening.”

  I glared at him through the glass. This was pointless. He was never going to admit to anything.

  “Dammit, Tera. You’re smarter than this. Think! Think about what you know about me. All your life I did what I thought was best for you. Since you could hold a crayon in your hand, I saw what you could be. I worked my whole life to make you into a great artist. And I protected you.”

  I kept shaking my head.

  “I did, Tera. You don’t realize how crazy your mom is. You don’t know how she tried to rub her craziness off on you. Even now, she can get to you.”

/>   “No one’s getting to me.”

  “It’s true. She’s like a disease that creeps under your skin.”

  The fingers of his free hand crawled up his arm, as if to show me how insidious Mom could be. My throat closed up as I watched him. His fingers were stained with ink. They’d always been that way, ever since I could remember. I used to love watching those hands move over blank paper, creating something from nothing.

  And that’s how he had created me. On clean paper, he made an image of me that he could stare at whenever he wanted. He could have drawn me playing. He could have drawn me laughing. Instead, he drew me naked.

  That picture of me on the cover of his porn comic, stripped to nothing, with my leg propped on a desk. Like he was inviting all his friends to have me. A Bowl Full of Cherries, ripe for the eating. I’d been trying not to think about what was inside those pages. Naked little girls. Naked men. Men with little girls.

  He’d stopped talking.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. I stood.

  “You can’t!” On the other side of the glass, he reached for me.

  I knew he couldn’t touch me, but I cringed from his hand.

  “Please,” he said.

  Feedback on the phone echoed my voice. “Is that what I said in your graphic novels?”

  He furrowed his brow, gave a warning shake of his head.

  “Did I say, ‘Please’?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When the men had me backed into a corner in your fantasy world, did I say, ‘Please don’t’? Or maybe you had me saying something else. ‘Please fuck me’?”

  “You’re wrong. Stop talking.”

  “Did you draw yourself as a character, too?”

  “Tera, shut up!”

  “Did you put your hand over my mouth to stop me from talking? Did you actually draw yourself pounding into me?”

  “Guard!” he called. “We’re done!”

  The guard was on his way, but Dad kept the phone pressed to his ear.

  “Do you tell yourself you sold me to help me out? Is that how you justify it? Or maybe you think you never hurt me. All you did was draw me—and then maybe take the drawing into the bathroom with you so you could jerk off? What could be the harm in that?”