Kindergarten Baby: A Novel (34 page)

Just as she’d guessed, she found a variety of drinks bobbing in the cold water, so she picked one and popped the top.

“Ah, this is living,” she said, enjoying the cool bubbles as they washed down her throat.

When she reached in to replace the lid of the cooler, she noticed a topless cardboard box on the floor, filled with files. She frowned. That was an odd thing to bring camping. Just before she shut the car door, her eyes drifted back to the box and paused on the file on top of the pile. It was labeled: SHAWNA. Shawna? Jake was involved with
Shawna
? How? Why?

She stood paralyzed for a moment as her body filled with the now familiar sense of panic, then she turned and started to run. Vaguely, she heard Malcolm squawking as loudly as he could, but she didn’t stop. She ran until her body gave out under a ponderosa pine. Then she leaned over, hands on her knees. Sweat dripped from her face as she tried to catch her breath.

“What am I doing?” she shouted. “What is
he
doing? What is he doing with
Shawna
?”

Just when she thought the shattered pieces of her puzzling life were beginning to come together, they’d fallen apart again. She’d taken a positive step forward, and then had been shoved back.

“I can’t win,” she sobbed. “I want Shawna out of my life once and for all!”

She didn’t hear them approaching, so when the wet tongue licked her hands and face, her body jerked away. She glanced up and met Wendell’s happy face. Just past him stood Jake, holding a bouquet of wild flowers.

“Look what we found. Aren’t they beautiful?” he asked, but when she didn’t answer he stepped closer. “You scared us, Lindsey. When we got back to camp and you weren’t there, we worried. Fortunately, Wendell sniffed around and picked up your trail right away. Is there something wrong? Do you feel all right?”

“No, I feel all wrong. I want to go home. I want to go home and be by myself.”

He set one hand on his hip, looking confused. “What? Lindsey, you aren’t making sense. Talk to me.”

“I drank one of your sodas from the cooler on the back seat of your car.”

“Yeah, so? Lindsey? Come on. We are getting nowhere playing Twenty Questions,” he said, clearly frustrated.

Lindsey glared at him. “You…‌You lied to me.”

He held up his hands, looking helpless. “Geez, Lindsey. I’m just trying to help you. What did I screw up now?”

“What’s going on between you and Shawna?” she demanded. “First I lose my husband to that woman, and now I sense I’m losing someone‌—‌you‌—‌that…‌that…“

She burst into tears, and he stared at her, his expression shocked. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he said.

She didn’t pull away when he wrapped his hand around hers and led her back to the campsite. Then he gestured for her to sit by the fire ring, and he sank down across from her again.

“I didn’t lie to you, Lindsey. Shawna was one of my first three official and legal study subjects. She loved the idea at first…” He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “This is a really long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“Go on. I’m listening,” Lindsey replied coolly.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“Right. Well, I got a call. It was Shawna, begging me to come over because there was an emergency. When I got there, she slugged me in the face. She calmed down a little when she realized I was hurt and bleeding, then she helped me up, and we ended up talking till dawn.” He chuckled softly. “You know, I knew she was an odd one from the first interview we had almost a year ago, and the more time that passed, the stranger it all got.

“She started off as the woman who stole Anthony away from you, then turned into someone who was a real threat to your safety as well as your happiness. That’s when my desire for information about her took a completely different path. I needed to know what was going on with Anthony and Shawna, because their actions did not make sense. But none of my detective work made sense either. Not until that night. I sat there with a swollen and bloody face, and Shawna cried all her mascara off, and she talked. She let it all out, and the puzzle began to take an even more bizarre shape.”

Jake pulled out one of Shawna’s files and handed Lindsey an old photo. Lindsey stared at it, not knowing what she was looking at.

“What do you see?” asked Jake.

“A tall man and a small boy.”

“Right. Does the tall man look at all familiar?”

She stared harder. “You know, he looks a little like Anthony.” Her eyes widened. “Is it Anthony’s father?”

“No, but you’re on the right track. It’s Shawna’s father, and he really does look a little like Anthony. I’m pretty sure that resemblance was one of the reasons Shawna was so obsessively determined to have him. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

That didn’t seem to make much more sense than anything else so far. “So the little boy is her brother?”

“That’s what I thought at first.” He let out a breath. “Here’s the shocker. The little boy is Shawna.”

“They dressed her like a boy?”

“Yes. Her mother dressed her like a boy…‌because she
was
a boy.”

She blinked. “Huh?”

Jake nodded slowly. “Shawna grew up in Benson, Arizona, living there from birth to high school graduation. Her father was an angry, twisted son of a bitch who verbally abused her mother for producing a son instead of the daughter he’d wanted.” He watched her eyes. “A son named Sean.”

Lindsey gasped. “Sean? He…‌could he be the man who’s been calling me? Leaving odd messages? But if he…‌if he was Shawna, why would he go back to being Sean when he called me? Is she…‌is he…‌schizophrenic or something? Oh my God. This is unbelievable.”

“I know,” said Jake. “And trust me, it’s about to get even stranger. When Sean was about four years old, his father lost his job with the railroad and became the stay-at-home dad, before that was a cool thing to be. Sean’s mom went to work at the local movie theater four days a week from mid-afternoon to about eleven o’clock. It wasn’t much, but they got by. That was supposed to be a temporary situation until he found another job, but unfortunately for little Sean, his dad’s period of unemployment went on for years.”

Jake sighed, then looked down at his feet for a moment before meeting her gaze again. “There’s more, but it’s really hard core stuff. I don’t know if you need to know all the details.”

“I’ve been around a lot of troubled kids, Jake. I can handle it.”

“That’s exactly why I’m hesitant to tell you everything.”

“It’s okay. Just continue.”

He stood, apparently needing movement, because he started to pace a little, his eyes on his feet again. “Sean’s mom felt bad about having to leave her little boy, and she made up for her absence by obsessively reading her favorite stories to Sean when she wasn’t at work. And get this, Lindsey‌—‌her favorite stories were fairy tales.”

That part of the story brought a wistful smile to Lindsey’s face. She stood as well, and without a word, the two of them walked quietly away from the campsite. “Like I said when I got those flowers from her, Shawna knows her fairy tales.”

He nodded. “And those stories became Sean’s mental safe haven, his escape from reality, as his father’s abuse took another turn. Before long, while Mom was at work, Dad began to dress little Sean in girl’s clothing, transforming him into the daughter he wanted so badly, and treating him like a little princess. When Sean was dressed like a girl, his dad treated him well. When they were not playing this sick dress-up game, his dad treated him badly, shouting at him and locking him in his room just for doing ordinary things that children do.

“Sometimes any kind of attention is welcome, I guess, because Sean began to look forward to the hours Mom was away and Dad took out the hidden clothing: frilly dresses, pink socks with ruffled edges, purple panties, and white patent leather shoes that clicked when he walked on the tile floor. Dad played music on the radio and they danced, then dad made popcorn and pretty, little Sean sat on his lap, watching TV and munching. Pleasing Dad made Sean’s life more tolerable, almost pleasant.”

“I know where this is heading,” Lindsey said, breaking her silence. “He began to sexually abuse her‌—‌him, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. Shawna wasn’t sure exactly when it started, but it was sometime during her first year of school.”

“Kindergarten?”

“Probably.”

Lindsey stopped walking and sat on a fallen tree trunk. Jake sat beside her.

“That poor baby,” she said. “He was just a kindergarten baby.”

Jake put his arm around her shoulders, and she welcomed his comfort. Her mind swam with so many thoughts and emotions, landing finally on anger. She drew away and faced Jake.

“How long did this go on? Didn’t the mother know? Of course she did. Mothers always know. Did she call the police? Was he arrested? Is he labeled as a sex offender at least?”

He shrugged. “I don’t have all the answers. Even Shawna doesn’t. She thinks the playing dress up and the sexual abuse went on all the way through elementary school and into middle school. By then he was terribly confused about his own sexuality and who he really was. He’d spent the majority of his life trying to please his dad, and that meant being a girl.

“By middle school, the other kids were certain that Sean was gay. He became an outcast, and his peers constantly ridiculed him. That’s incredibly difficult to live with anywhere, but it’s worse in a small, rural town. He dressed as a boy at school, but the kids saw through that. And every day when he arrived home, his boyish appearance enraged his dad.”

Jake chewed his bottom lip briefly, looking as if he wished he could skip over the next part, but he changed his mind. “One night, Sean’s dad sat him across the kitchen table from him, saying they needed to talk. Sean sat, but all his dad said was,
“Goodbye, my princess”
before he lifted the firearm from his lap. He pointed the barrel of the gun right at Sean’s head and cocked the hammer. Sean closed his eyes, knowing he was going to die, but he didn’t care. Life was too painful to live anyway. The sound of the single gunshot was deafening, but he felt no pain. Death must have come instantly. But he didn’t die; he opened his eyes again. That’s when he saw his dad slumped over the table, a portion of his head gone. His dad’s blood had splattered Sean’s face, his shirt, his hands, and throughout the kitchen. Sean cried in his room for over a month then vowed he would never, ever shed a tear again.”

Jake, Lindsey, and Wendell walked silently back to camp. It was dinnertime, but only the dog was hungry. Jake and Lindsey brewed and drank some white tea using Jake’s tiny one-burner backpacking stove.

“Sean had a difficult time all through high school,” Jake continued. “He never thought he was gay, but he did think he wanted to be a girl. His only happy childhood memories occurred either when his mom read fairy tales or when his dad dressed him like a girl and treated him like a princess. He blocked out most of the horrific trauma and began to fantasize about becoming a female and living happily ever after. After high school he moved to Phoenix and found jobs at posh beauty salons and spas, learning about the ‘ways of women’ while sweeping up and go-fering for hair stylists and make-up artists. That’s when he began his six-year physical transformation, letting the world think he was simply a gay man. He took female hormones and had numerous cosmetic surgeries, including lots of face work, some leg reshaping, and nips and tucks to establish a smaller waistline. Apparently, some of these surgeries were botched and there was a problem with unusual scarring, so he was awarded about $250,000 in an out of court settlement. With this money, Sean decided to go the next step by getting breast implants‌—‌big ones! He moved from Phoenix to Tucson soon after to begin his new life as the gorgeous Shawna that we all know. Shawna came into your life and destroyed your marriage about three years after moving to Tucson.”

Lindsey frowned. “Your timeline doesn’t make sense. If all that’s right, then how could she have been only twenty when Anthony moved in with her?”

“Twenty? She’ll turn thirty in a couple of weeks. What made you think she was only twenty?”

Lindsey couldn’t hide a smug smile. “That’s what Anthony told me back when this whole thing started. Do you think he was lying, or he just didn’t know?”

“Well, I think it’s safe to assume that he didn’t know about a lot of things.”

“So…‌when she met Anthony, she wanted him, and she had to have him‌—‌in part‌—‌because he reminded her of her father?”

“I think so. She was relentless in her pursuit of him, from what she said. He didn’t stand a chance. She still had money, she looked fabulous, and she was hot and kinky‌—‌and all those ingredients were the perfect recipe for Anthony’s addictions.”

Anthony.
She’d been so shocked about all this she’d forgotten about him. “And Anthony didn’t know she was a guy?”

Jake shook his head.

“But…‌but I don’t get how that all worked out…‌you know, sexually, I mean.”

“I didn’t ask, so I don’t have details, though I can imagine…‌no, I don’t even want to go there. She did say they never did anything with the lights on. I know that she needed to be certain that Anthony would love her, marry her, and stay with her forever, supporting her through the last and most difficult part of her transformation: the sexual reassignment surgery, because there was no going back after that.”

Lindsey shook her head, speechless. How on earth could all this have been going on around her?

“But Anthony knows now,” Jake said.

Her mind flashed on his note to her:
I have been an idiot and a fool.

She couldn’t help smiling.
You can say that again,
she thought. “How did he find out?”

“She was packing for their trip to Trinidad, Colorado for that final step when Anthony stumbled upon some photos, probably taken by the surgeon, that included a completely naked‌—‌with the lights on‌—‌frontal view of Shawna. The sight of the sexy woman standing naked in the photos with her rather robust male sex organ pointing right at him was, I imagine, fairly shocking.”