The Whole Golden World (23 page)

34

MARCH 12, 2012

D
inah sucked in a breath as she stepped out of her car at City Hall. She did this every time she was out in public these days, this intake of breath like she was about to dive deep underwater. Whispers and stares trailed in her wake, everywhere she went.

Whenever she felt guilty about keeping Morgan at home, and not at school, she'd go out and feel the vibration of lurid interest all around her and remember that she was doing the right thing, protecting Morgan from all this.

The poor girl was so isolated and disconsolate, Dinah had caved in and bought her a cheap phone that could text since the police still had her existing phone, though she announced that she would be checking her daughter's text messages routinely.

Morgan had only sniffed and turned her back, curling up on the comforter. Dinah had tried to embrace her, and her daughter's body had gone rigid.

Dinah stepped over melting, graying snow on her way into City Hall. It was eerily warm for this early in a Michigan March. She'd spotted a crocus in the garden when she bent to get the newspaper off the porch the other day. She'd brought the paper to the table and performed her now-daily ritual of scanning it for anything about the case. Since the initial arrest and first few articles questioning “How could the school not have known?” the official press coverage had ebbed as both sides prepared for trial.

The absence of formal news only seemed to increase the buzz of gossip like the rising pitch of swarming wasps. Dinah had heard from Kelly there was a Facebook page dedicated to “supporting” TJ Hill, but she hadn't had the stomach to look, not after the queasy horror of reading the anonymous online comments posted after each news story. The “slut” remarks were eventually deleted by some faceless (and slow) moderator, but what difference did it make? Can't unring that bell, ever. Morgan had not been reading them, so far as she knew, what with not having her computer anymore and not wanting to use the general family computer in the den.

Dinah stepped into the City Hall chambers and blanched at the full room. It had to be the Den. It was the only issue of any substance at all.

She did a quick visual sweep, trying to gauge the crowd. Supporters? Enemies? Neither? She couldn't tell. Too many faces.

She chose a seat front-row center, where there were plenty of seats. The rubberneckers seemed to prefer the back.

The buzzing fluorescents hurt her eyes. This was no grand Romanesque structure, but an economic, utilitarian City Hall. Other than the city's seal on the wall behind the commissioners' seats, and a couple of flagpoles, you couldn't distinguish this room from any other colorless meeting space.

She fidgeted through the routine parts of the agenda, wishing to hell she'd had Joe here for support, as she'd planned. But it was his turn to play warden at home.

They both feared that if they took their eyes off Morgan for even a minute, she'd drive off and disappear forever. They took nothing for granted these days.

Connor had been in two fights attempting to defend Morgan's reputation and was suspended for a week. Dinah had pleaded uselessly with Pete Jackson, citing extenuating circumstances—after all, there had been a death threat carved into his sister's locker!—but he'd been unmoved. Meanwhile, Jared had become more sullen and withdrawn than normal, and Joe had heard through the grapevine he was back hanging out with the pothead kids.

Finally, it was her turn to speak.

Her knees were trembling as she rose, and she had to clear her throat twice. The words of her printed speech—written with such pride and anticipation just a few weeks ago—swam in her vision.

As she began, her voice cracked, and she took a steadying breath. The microphone picked up her shuddering inhalation and broadcasted it across the chambers. The Planning Commission chair leaned toward his neighboring commissioner and whispered, eyes still on Dinah.

Her rising anger at their naked gossiping felt familiar and galvanizing, and she sailed through the rest of the pitch for an entertainment license for the Den, feeling proud and imagining applause, though of course there wasn't any.

Dinah's satisfied smile melted away as she saw the first person rise to speak in the public comment portion. It was Helen Demming, in a suit that looked like Chanel but couldn't be. No one spent that kind of money around here. Not even Helen.

Helen pursed her lips and began to speak in a steady, clear alto, just like she'd done at chamber of commerce meetings many, many times.

“I know the chamber recommended this project, but I must tell you it was not a unanimous vote, and the concerns I had then still exist and in fact have only grown. Mrs. Monetti has described for you a project intended for the safe enjoyment of our young people, and I laud her intentions. But good intentions do not always produce the desired result. As evidence, I give you the skate park, which now is chained and padlocked because of the vandalism suffered there. That was also a project approved with the laudable goal of ‘something for the young people to do.' They did something, all right. They trashed it and spray-painted it and bullied away the kids who wanted to just have fun. How do we know the same kind of thing won't happen here? And I realize that Mrs. Monetti has a deservedly wonderful reputation for doing nice things for the teens of this town, but the license is attached to the business, not the person. Should she sell the business—and we have no way of knowing if she ever would in the future—the license goes with it. With a change of ownership, the Den becomes a raucous bar just down the road from the high school and close to a residential area.”

Dinah scribbled rebuttals in her notebook. But after Helen sat down, person after person rose to raise this or that niggling question about parking or noise levels. One even wondered if the kids would be smoking outside and tossing their cigarette butts into adjacent yards.

Dinah scrawled in her notes:
A 25-foot “toss”? And these kids don't smoke!

It was her turn again, and Dinah stomped up to the podium, slapped her notebook down, and raised her hard gaze to the planners.

She opened her mouth to begin, but then she read their faces.

Every one of them was staring at her with disapproval and mistrust. Except for that young Amy person on the end, who always seemed to be on the verge of fainting from the first sign of conflict and had filled the seat of a commissioner who retired midterm. Amy wouldn't even look up from her table.

“Never mind,” Dinah said, abandoning her brilliant rebuttals. “I can read the writing on this wall. You know, I have done nothing but support this community and its young people. Could I have made more money catering to a crowd that had more money to burn? Sure. Could I have opened up a soulless, impersonal franchise? Naturally. But I did not, and it's because I care. However, you all here are holding something against me, against my family, that has nothing to do with my business and don't think I can't tell. You can talk to me all you want about traffic concerns, but I'm being punished for what my family is going through, something that is horrible but not my fault, and not my daughter's fault.”

She heard a rumble at this behind her and turned around. “Don't you dare! Don't you dare act like she's not a victim.”

The word
victim
rang through the air like a whip crack.

Dinah began to shake. She had felt this way before, most notably when she'd tossed a chair in that conference with that loathsome teacher who had condemned her twins to being rotten kids forever before they'd even lost all their baby teeth.

“Forget it.” She seized her notebook, bent to pick up her purse and paperwork, and headed for the back door. She was halfway across the lobby when she heard running feet behind her. A kid with ill-fitting khakis and a horrible paisley tie was puffing after her. “Could you give me a comment for the
Daily
about what you just said in there? You're referring to your daughter, Morgan, and TJ Hill?”

“Go to hell,” Dinah said. The moron actually shouted after her, “Can I quote you on that?”

She heard more running feet and fantasized about punching the little twerp, but she turned to see Kelly, Britney's mom and maybe her only friend left in the whole damn town.

“Oh. Hi.” She kept walking toward her car.

“I came in just at the end; what was going on in there?”

“If you're going to talk to me, you're going to ride in my car because I'm not staying here another second.”

“Just drop me back off to get mine when we're done,” she said, and hopped in. Together they burst into the damp night.

They didn't speak again until they were blocks away from City Hall.

Dinah said, “They railroaded me, Kell. Helen saw an opening to sink this permit and she ran with it. And they all followed along like little lemmings. Or rats. Are lemmings a type of rat?”

“That sucks out loud.”

“I don't get why they're turning on us. On us! And he has a Facebook page supporting him?” Dinah pulled over in front of Sereni-Tea because she didn't trust herself to drive, her white-hot anger taking over by the minute. “Why is he the victim?”

“I know. It's so totally awful. I guess most people think she threw herself at him.”

“So what?” Dinah nearly shrieked, causing Kelly to flinch. “If she's got some kind of issue, we will deal with it, but he's the adult, and he took advantage. She's a child.”

“Well, she's seventeen.”

Dinah cranked around to face her as well as she could in her cramped sedan. “Don't you start. Don't you dare.”

“Sorry, I didn't mean anything by it. I was just saying. Anyway, they don't all think it's her fault. Plenty of people are disgusted by him, too.”

“But those same people aren't exactly heartbroken with sympathy for Morgan, are they?”

Kelly didn't answer, only looking down at her folded hands.

“Is Britney in touch with her? I got her a cell phone again since the police took her old one. I hated to think of her so isolated.”

“I don't think she is.”

“Not her, too?”

“She's just weirded out by it. She doesn't know what to think, now. She told me it's like she doesn't even know Morgan anymore. And everyone's grilling Brit for details all the time, at school. She hates all that attention.”

“I bet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. My default mode right now is ‘maximum bitch' so feel free to ignore me. Okay, I'm calm enough to drive without wrapping the car around a tree. I'll take you back to the lot. You'll forgive me if I don't get out of the car, though.”

“Of course,” Kelly said, turning to look out the window.

At City Hall, Kelly stepped out hurriedly, with a quiet “bye.” As the door slammed, Dinah fantasized about loading up the kids and Joe and a change of clothes in her car and taking off for somewhere. Anywhere.

 

Dinah walked into her house, unnerved by the silence.

To think she used to be irritated by the fighting and chaos! Now, the twins seemed afraid to make a sound and stayed holed up in their room, giving Morgan a wide berth should their paths happen to cross. Joe was sullen and dark, creeping like fog around the house.

Morgan wasn't speaking to anyone unless she absolutely had to.

She'd wanted to sob with relief when Ethan turned up on the porch that night, and then to have Morgan scream at him and throw her iPod . . . Dinah had a welt for days.

Morgan had raged that he had ratted her out, and though Dinah tried to tell Morgan she had no way of knowing that, privately she agreed he'd probably done it. Someday she would find a way to thank him. Horrible as the experience was to have it all public, who knows how far it might have gone?

Dinah put down her purse and went to Morgan's room.

Her daughter was curled up on the bed, where she always was these days, her earbuds in her ears, papers scattered around her like a moat.

Dinah sat down on the edge of Morgan's bed without invitation and rested her hand on Morgan's slim hip. The bone was sharp under her hand.

“I know you don't want to talk to us,” Dinah began, reciting a variation on the speech she'd been giving since that first day the police showed up and Joe took down her door. “But I love you more than my life, and nothing that's happened has changed that. I'm sorry for whatever way I failed you, and if there's any way I can fix it now, I would do it, in a second.”

Dinah paused and sat in the stillness, trying to decode the song leaking out from Morgan's iPod. It had become her game of sorts, as she waited daily for Morgan to respond to her. It sounded improbably like Dean Martin. She waited all the way until the song—whatever it was—stopped, and there was a pause before the next began.

She felt a quick dart of hope when Morgan seemed to shift under the light weight of her hand on her hip, during the pause between songs, but then she stilled again, and this time the sound that came out was loud and screechy.

She doubted Morgan could hear her, but she said it anyway, “I'm here when you're ready to talk,” and squeezed her hip lightly.

There was the smallest motion as Morgan flinched under her mother's touch.

She stopped in next to check on the boys, who were in their room. Connor was playing some
Star Wars
game. Jared had a jigsaw puzzle half formed on a sticky mat on the carpet. It had been a while since she'd seen that old hobby resurface. Dinah had gotten so excited when he started showing interest in something not digital that she fairly buried him in puzzles until he groaned whenever he saw one.

“Hey, Mom,” Connor said, grumbling as his ship or whatever blew up.

“Hey, Mom,” Jared said, yawning and turning a puzzle piece around and around in his hand. His pant legs had bunched toward his knees, which looked hairier, more manlike, than she'd remembered.