A Work of Art (25 page)

“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.

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 paintbrush 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.”

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?”

“I said, shut up!”

A guard took the phone out of my hand. Another guard on the other side took my dad's arm, started to lead him away. He was still talking to me, even though I couldn't hear him. But I saw his lips moving.
Tera! Don't do this! I never wanted to hurt you!

And then he was gone from my sight.

“This way,” the guard said.

I followed the guard through the twisty corridors. A steel door slammed shut behind me. The clang echoed against the stone walls. Sealing my dad away.

As soon as I got home from the prison, I poured myself a huge glass of water from the jug in the fridge. I couldn't remember ever feeling so thirsty, and I stood there with the refrigerator door hanging open and gulped it down.

I was pouring myself a second glass when Mom came into the kitchen. She'd curled her hair. It made her look younger. “How'd it go?” she asked.

I shut the refrigerator. “I did it. I stood up to him.” I opened the drawer and pulled out the scrap of paper where I'd written Herman Liebowitz's number. I held it up for Mom to see. “I'm going to call him. I'm going to testify.”

Her face sagged. “You don't have to do that. There's no reason anyone has to know about that filth.”

“He's going to show them in court. He'll subpoena me if I don't talk to him.”

“I don't understand what he wants from you.” She rubbed her hand over her eyes, like she was trying to erase her memory. “What can you tell him that he doesn't already know?”

There was something I could tell him, but I wasn't ready to say it out loud. I sat down at the kitchen table to think. Mom sat beside me. I felt her eyes on me.

I could tell him about the photo, how I'd undressed for my dad and gotten on my hands and knees. I'd been probing that memory for years. I'd touch it, and then I'd flinch away.

If I told him about the photo, there'd be no more pretending it hadn't affected me. No more pretending Dad had done it because he didn't know any better.

And what would happen if I didn't tell? What if my dad's new lawyer picked up where Charlotte Gross had left off? What if my dad got set free because his lawyer argued that he “accidentally” downloaded child pornography? Would the porn comics be enough to convict him? Maybe not. Herman Liebowitz had said it was debatable whether they were even illegal.

I imagined my dad coming home after his trial. For him, it would all be over, like waking from a bad dream. And how would he explain himself to me? Would he find some other way to manipulate me? What if he started preying on little kids? Maybe he'd been doing that all along.