A Work of Art (24 page)

Mr. Barnes came rushing toward us, his face tight with anger. “What are you guys
doing
back here? We have customers!”

Joey waved his arm at the prep station, his face a picture of innocence. “I'm right where I'm supposed to be. She's the one throwing things.”

With Mr. Barnes standing there, I saw my chance. I knew I couldn't keep up with Joey's verbal attacks. And I knew I couldn't claw that smug smile off his face.

“Joey's right,” I said to Mr. Barnes. “I'm the one who should be in the dining room.”

Joey smirked. Cam seemed engrossed in the stainless-steel surface of the prep table.

“But I think Joey would rather be out there bussing tables,” I said. “There's more money in it. Isn't that right, Joey?”

Joey's sneer froze on his face. That was all the encouragement I needed to keep going.

“Did you ever notice how eager he is to help out in the dining room?” I asked Mr. Barnes. “He moves pretty fast when it comes to snatching things off tables.”

And now his cocky grin started melting away.

Mr. Barnes's eyes flitted from me to Joey and back to me. “What are you talking about, Tera? Did you see something?”

“I saw him take something from a table,” I said.

Joey rubbed the back of his neck. “She's full of shit.”

I shrugged, like he might have a point. “And did you know he drinks beer all night from the tap?”

Mr. Barnes looked furious. “We'll talk about this later. Right now we're in the middle of dinner rush, and I need all of you to get back to work.”

Before I headed to the dining room, I tried to catch Cam's eye. I needed to know if I'd just ruined whatever friendship we had.

Cam didn't see me. He was kneeling on the floor picking up my pen. He stood and held it out. “You dropped this.”

My hand shook as I took it from him. “Thanks.”

“Do you need anything?” he asked, always with that shy politeness.

Tears of relief welled up behind my eyes. Relief because he was still being nice to me after all he'd heard. “I'm good,” I said.

And then I went back to work.

• • •

After the dinner rush, Mr. Barnes called Joey back to his office. Cam, Sadie, and I huddled near the prep table, hoping to listen in, but Mr. Barnes had made sure to shut his door.

Sadie peered at my face. “I know you hate him. And you have every right to. But tell me for real. You saw him stealing tips from the tables?”

“I saw him take something from
your
table,” I said. It didn't seem to matter that I wasn't sure what he'd taken. They assumed it was money. I let them assume.

“Do you think he'll get fired?” Cam asked.

“If Mr. Barnes doesn't fire him,” Sadie said, “then I quit. I'm not working with someone who steals from me.”

After a few minutes, Joey came out of Mr. Barnes's office. He had a vague smile on his face.

Shit,
I thought.
He didn't get fired.

And then he took off his work apron, wadded it into a ball, and threw it into the garbage. I wanted to cheer.

“Hoo-ray,” Cam whispered.

Sadie, Cam, and I lined up against the prep table to watch him leave. Joey didn't look at any of us as he walked past.

I thought of it as his walk of shame.

The sun had barely risen over the tallest downtown buildings when Herman Liebowitz greeted my mom and me in his office the next morning. If he was surprised to see my mom with me, he was polite enough not to say anything.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

He looked exactly how I'd pictured him. An old guy, tall and lean, with thinning white hair and wrinkled skin. I wiped my sweaty palm on my jeans before shaking his hand.

“Won't you sit down?”

Mom and I took seats across from him at a big conference table where a file folder marked
Confidential
lay next to an open laptop. I assumed it was some new evidence against my dad, and suddenly I was glad Mom was there beside me. Whatever was in that folder, I didn't want to deal with it alone.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he asked. “My girl's not in yet, but I think I can manage to get you some coffee.”

“No, thanks,” Mom said.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't take my eyes off the file folder.

“Then let's get down to business.” He folded his hands and placed them in front of him on the table. “I called you in here because I thought you should know about a key piece of evidence we found. It's rather sensitive, and I didn't think it was right to let you hear about it from an outside source.”

Suddenly I felt sure I knew what was in that folder. “The picture,” I murmured.

He leaned closer. “I'm sorry, what was that?”

Mom whipped her head toward me. “What are you talking about? What picture?”

I closed my eyes, trying to banish the image of me naked, posing like a dog. I'd tried so hard to forget it, but I knew it too well. Every line, every shadow.

“Miss Waters?”

I opened my eyes to see Herman Liebowitz looking at me. I saw compassion, but I saw confusion, too. He didn't know what I was talking about. So it wasn't the photo of me naked. It was something else. Thank God it was something else.

“I'm okay.”

“I know this is difficult for you, but if there's anything you want to tell me . . .”

“Please,” I said. “Just show me what's in there.”

“All right.” He put his hand on the folder but didn't open it.

“This is hard for me to say, and there's no delicate way to put it.” He took a deep breath and opened the file folder.

Inside was a graphic novel. On its cover, a drawing of a naked child, a girl of about nine. I recognized my dad's work right away, but it took me a moment longer to realize I was staring at my own face.

The naked girl with my face stood posing in front of a classroom. One thin arm rested on her bare hip. Her other hand held stringy hair off her shoulders. She thrust her chest out, flat as it was, and propped one of her legs on a desk. The pose was designed to give a full view of her nudity, but someone, probably Herman Liebowitz, had stuck a Post-it note over her privates. On the chalkboard behind her, I recognized my dad's careful lettering:
A Bowl Full of Cherries.

Something inside me withered and turned to dust. My throat swelled up. Tears stung my eyes but didn't fall. Under the table, Mom grabbed my hand and held on.

A moment of silence, and then Herman Liebowitz started talking. “Your father wrote and illustrated a series of pornographic books portraying children. There are many different faces in these so-called graphic novels, but the main one is obviously based on Miss Waters, on how she looked as a child of about eight or nine.”

He cleared his throat. “There's more inside the book that you don't want to see. Sexual acts.” He laid his hand over the cover and looked at each of us in turn. “I'm sorry. I thought you should know.”

I stared at the girl's face peeking out from beneath the lawyer's liver-spotted hand. She had a sulking, pouty look, like she'd gotten in trouble. It was a face I knew well. I'd painted it enough times.

“Miss Waters? If there's—”

“Other people saw this?” I asked.

“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.

“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.”