“Not afraid, exactly,” I said to Paul. “There’s so much good, and it’s been taken away.”
I may have been whispering because he said, “What?”
“I miss the farm,” I said.
Rafferty’s clerk spent several weeks digging up information on the boys, trying to find out if they’d been in the same class, or the same neighborhood, or day care or church school. I don’t know how he discovered that the four of them were on the same T-ball team during the month of June, and that it was highly likely that they occasionally spent time at one another’s houses. Tommy Giddings’s mother was a waitress at Dolphin Bay, the restaurant Carol Mackessy managed. Anthony’s mother was the sister of Mrs. Mackessy’s hairdresser. It seemed incredible that even Robbie could have fanned the flames and turned the boys against me. That Carol Mackessy could have done so was another matter all together.
“Can you think of a common thread with the boys?” Rafferty asked me. “Something that would have pulled them in the same direction?”
I imagined Carol feeding Norman and Robbie, Anthony and Tommy, hot dogs with Day-Glo orange cheese spread from a can in zigzags over the wiener. She might think that she was a good mother, to be able to
reproduce, exactly, down to the last zig, the picture on the can. Although she could well have had a bright kitchen with an island, sparkling copper pans, framed prints of fruit, I pictured her in a poorly lit room with dark cabinets and a red sheen, nearly a glow, coming from a fake brick wall. “What do you boys think of the school nurse, that Mrs. Goodwin?” she might have idly asked as she poured them Hawaiian punch on an afternoon only days after Lizzy’s funeral.
“She’s mean!” Norman would say. “She pulled my tooth out.”
“She pulled your tooth out? She went in and yanked out your tooth?”
“She held me hard around the stomach, I couldn’t get away, and then she reached in and dug my tooth out. It wasn’t even loose, she probably would have taken all my teeth if I didn’t scream and run away. She has a pair of pliers, a gigantic pair of pliers in her desk drawer.”
“I always kick her,” Robbie might have offered.
“Does Mrs. Goodwin do the same awful things to you that she does to Robbie?”
“She rips my pants off of me,” Robbie would have shouted, giving them a quick demonstration. “My mom says we’re going to get a pile of money from her because she did that. She killed a girl, too!”
“Put that thing back in where it belongs!” Mrs. Mackessy might have said, in anger, before she realized that the school nurse had made a little exhibitionist out of him. “Come here, Pumpkin,” she said, going to him, putting her arms around him as he stiffened.
“She did that to me once,” Anthony Jenkins cried, remembering the time his sweat pants were torn clean through and I had him take them off so I could clean the wound.
“More chips, boys? Soda? Anyone ready for a Twinkie?”
Robbie, still within the circle of his mother’s embrace, said, “We’re going to be so rich, my mom says we’ll get a sports car, the kind with a roof.”
“What did she do to you, Anthony? I can’t believe this—She’s hurt other boys too—”
Robbie burst from her arms, charging at the back door, shouting, “Them cars go ninety miles,
varoom—”
“Slow down, tiger—”
From the porch, through a small window, he called into the kitchen, “She licked my pee-pee!”
“Did she do that to you boys?” Mrs. Mackessy asked. “You don’t need to be afraid to tell. When someone touches you, and hurts you, like Mrs. Goodwin has, it is so important to tell someone. We know it’s happened. We know what she is. You only have to say one little word and we’ll know the rest. There were days”—she was getting upset now, having to blink away the tears—“when she wouldn’t let me take Robbie home. We all know what she is! Only you can help do the important job of making sure Mrs. Goodwin never sees another boy, never hurts another one of you. It’s your job to help us get her. This town will be so thankful to you four boys because you saved us from a person who is disturbed, twisted.”
“It’s starting to make sense,” I said to Rafferty, knowing that as far as proof went, Mrs. Mackessy in her kitchen was as solid as a hallucination.
“Do you think Lizzy’s death tied into the charge?” Rafferty asked. He always waited for my answer with his chin resting on his folded hands. I never thought, until afterward, that he was getting paid for his time, that my reveries were costly. Still, his questions, his watchful eye, forced my memory.
“Was it something specific that triggered the charge?” he probed.
It was as if he had the power of the hypnotist, that he need only snap his fingers to make me sleep or wake. I could see into the hospital lounge right after Lizzy had been brought to the emergency room; I could see Mrs. Mackessy in her chair leafing through a magazine. I had forgotten that she’d been there. She had been with me, like a shadow, while I waited to hear. I had been dripping wet, and I had sat on the edge of the sofa, doubled over, praying. I must have looked as desperate as I felt. I remembered, too, that I had run right past Carol and Robbie at the funeral as I fled. Was it Carol who put it into his head just as I streaked past them; might she have mused aloud, “Is that woman out of her mind?” She might have realized it was I, and said to Robbie, “Mrs. Goodwin looks as if she’d killed the girl. How can they let someone like that work at an elementary school?”
“So much of all of this, I’m afraid, is a feeling,” I said to Rafferty.
Instead of looking at me with contempt or scoffing, he nodded, saying,
“It’s only taken me about ten years to understand that that’s where every case begins, not with facts or a body, a few tattered pieces of evidence, but with a couple of people and then a whole range of possibility: their pride, their love, their lust, their sense of injury, vengeance, greed, despair—you name it.”
“This is what I think might have happened,” I began then, “not too long after the funeral, in Mrs. Mackessy’s kitchen.”
When Rafferty and I met about a week and a half after my fainting spell he took one look at me, and with his normal adenoidal fire and indignation, declared that we had reached the limit. “Why didn’t they call me?” he shouted, beating the table with his fist.
I shrugged and said that I thought they’d tried to get in touch with Howard. But he knew as well as I did that they didn’t go out of their way to keep the families up to date. My bruise was not as colorful as it had been and I assumed I could just say, “I bumped my head,” and leave it at that. “You don’t get a bruise the size of a grapefruit from bumping your head,” he protested.
“It’s funny,” I said, cutting him off, “about being afraid? You asked me about that a couple of weeks ago. I thought for a while that I was going to get pounded. It wasn’t that that I feared. What’s frightening is that I can’t—love those girls.”
“For God’s sake—”
“No,” I said, “Theresa would find it within herself to love them. She would understand what they were given at the start, understand why they’re so angry. I’m more afraid of what I don’t have, that deep down, you know, way down, there isn’t really much of anything.”
“You’re reading the wrong novels,” Rafferty said. “You are not required to love your fellow inmates.” He went on to lecture me at length about how we have to protect ourselves against those, who, for whatever reasons, are barbarians. “Save your love for your daughters,” he ordered.
I said that of course Emma and Claire gave me reason to be afraid. I had wept when they were born, each in their turn, because of semiautomatic weapons on the street, stockpiles of hazardous waste, terrorist acts, hatred—all of the horrors which we bequeath to our children. My general sorrow in relation to the human condition was nothing compared to my
new and specific grief over the fact that my daughters’ lives were forever changed. I had sworn I would never do to my children as my mother had done to me, that I would never abandon them, and yet I had, for all intents and purposes, left them. Even if I was let go, even if we moved to Australia, they would always know that I had been responsible for something that permanently altered each of us. They would always feel, even if no one else knew, that they carried with them a stigma. There wasn’t really any place we could go where we wouldn’t suffer from the knowledge that evil had been done to us, and that we, in our turn, had injured those around us.
It was nearly a week after my hospitalization that Debbie came out of herself long enough to ask me a personal question. It was a relatively quiet morning, each of us at the work of holding ourselves together. Debbie shuffled into our cell after breakfast and stood, staring at me while I read. When she realized I wasn’t going to look up she said right out, “How old are your children?”
That she might ask me something was so uncharacteristic I found at first that I couldn’t answer. “What?” I finally said.
“You keep getting letters from your girls. They draw you pictures. I just wondered how old they were.”
I had not, up to that point in my stay, showed much emotion in front of Debbie, except in relation to her own troubles. I felt my mouth start to move. I wanted very much to control myself. Debbie had the sense to avert her eyes while I tried to master my poor trembling lips. For several minutes she stood looking out at the day room, pulling on her nose. To my dismay I found myself sobbing into my lap. I was apparently making enough noise to attract attention because pretty soon Sherry was poking her head around the corner. “What this fuss about? What you be doin’, Debbie girl, goin’ on and makin’ her cry?”
“I just asked her a question,” Debbie squeaked.
“You missin’ your babies? That it?” Sherry asked, sitting down next to me. She pointed at Debbie. “Go get some tissues.” Sherry was nineteen years old. She had been driving the get-away car when her boyfriend held up a Handy Pantry. He’d wounded two people and nearly gotten away with six hundred dollars. I couldn’t stop crying. I felt as if a ball bearing
had come loose inside my head, that it banged from side to side, every time I blinked. If I was sent to prison and my children got a stepmother in due course, I would still be a blight to them. If there was a plea bargain and I pleaded guilty for a lesser sentence, Child Welfare might barge in and take the girls away from Howard. If I lost the trial, I would be in prison for years. My absence was a wound—I might just as well have cut off a limb or put out an eye.
“I miss my babies too,” Sherry said, slipping her arm around me. I was rigid in her arms as she moved back and forth, trying to rock me. “I got my three little dickens at my mama’s house.”
I remember wanting very much to protest, to insist that someone nineteen years old couldn’t possibly know my pain, that our ages, our experience, our upbringing were so dramatically different we were virtually not of the same species. I remember trying to say that. My head was throbbing and I couldn’t make the words to tell her that she knew nothing.
“You have three babies?” Debbie asked.
Sherry stared at her. “You in awe today or somethin’?”
“Well, I—”
“Ain’t she though?” Sherry said, trying to draw me out. “It’s like she noticing we made of bones instead of cee-ment. Congratulations, girl. Three babies, that’s right, Dante, Jamella, Michael J. One, two, three. They always say jail ain’t no vacation, but for me it is, that’s for sure!” She laughed her big belchy laugh. “Don’t let Dyshett fool you,” she said. “She had a baby boy when she was fourteen, a baby girl a year later, but they both got took away to foster care. She say she don’t mind, but that ain’t no shit but talk. She go out and bust herself buying fancy presents for their birthdays. She got her girl a gold necklace with a diamond the size of my butt.”
I stood up then, dried my eyes on my sleeve, and thanked Sherry. My head hurt so much I couldn’t see. I needed my children not to know me, not to remember that it had been I who made their world smash, as much as I needed to breathe near them, to encircle them, to keep them safe. I leaned over the toilet trying to choke down the grief, as if what was inside was likely to come ripping up my throat, as if it was something that could be purged and flushed away.
After Debbie and Sherry went into the day room I lay on my stomach and looked at the stack of drawings the girls had made. Claire made scribbles and Emma drew stick self-portraits in triangle dresses with funny little club feet pointing in the same direction. I smelled the drawings and I held them to my cheek because the paper always seemed as if it should be directly related to them. If I only could look more closely, or read in a way that was just beyond my ability, the girls would be there, underneath the paper. I didn’t ever seem to remember the keen disappointment I always felt, and each time there was mail delivery I opened their letters with great expectation. As I lay in bed I tried to study the pictures objectively, to see if I could tell if the girls were scarred in any way. Emma’s portraits included feet and fingers, and I tried to remember if that wasn’t a sign, that a child was well adjusted, had a sense of self-worth. Claire’s lines had been made with a free hand, and she used a good deal of color. I thought that a child who was suffering would surely use somber tones, and draw spirals that circled into a tight knot. I tried to will the girls to be fine and well and unscathed and unharmed. I closed my eyes and assumed the tense prayerful attitude I’d used to no avail in the hospital.
The following morning we were eating our scoop of oatmeal with milk and sugar prepoured, a dirty slice of cantaloupe, orange juice, and cold coffee. For some reason Dyshett had already been out of the pod. No one looked up or paid any attention when she was buzzed into the day room. She sat down at her usual place at the other table. She seemed to take care to keep her distance, to avoid eye contact. After the meal she went into Sherry’s cell to play cards. I had a headache and spent most of the morning lying on my bed trying to sleep. Debbie sat on the floor crosslegged, rocking forward and back as she listened to music on her headset.
At lunch, Dyshett sauntered over to the table where I was eating and straddled the stool, her side to me, her profile obscured by her mass of braids. A woman named Carla, who was in for fraud, was explaining how her boyfriend’s credit-card scam worked for years before he got caught. I assumed that Dyshett was interested in how to go about the business. I was nibbling at my hamburger, reading my college alumni magazine, which Howard had sent me in a brown envelope along with the
L. L. Bean
catalog. A man named Robert J. Harrison, class of ‘67, had figured
out how to grow plastic by genetically engineering a potato. The potato itself produces plastic, in the ground. One of the problematic aspects of making the technological wonder a reality is the fact that the plastic could get mixed up in the food chain. I dabbed a French fry into a puddle of ketchup, imaging our Golden Guernseys putting their heads down in their pasture to graze the perfect lush green grass, only to find that it was fake.