After the Moment (18 page)

"I heard his voice," Franklin said. "But he's too stupid to think I would know it was him."

Leigh, still wanting to beat both Oliver and Kevin senseless, was beginning to think that another kind of harm might befall them. Leigh knew he would die of shame if Millie ever spoke about him with the kind of disgust Franklin had for Kevin. If nothing else, he and Oliver would have to spend their lives knowing what they had done. And if Maia nailed them, everyone else would also know. Always. It would be in a file that followed them for far longer than their SAT scores ever would.

Maia had to get a lawyer. And a lawyer would do what Leigh could not: unleash punishment and revenge.

"The guy who filmed the thing was smart," Franklin said, interrupting Leigh's fantasy of legal retribution. "He never spoke. Not even when Oliver told him to move the camera."

"I've got to go for a run," Leigh said, standing up.

He was lightheaded and queasy, but if he didn't move around he would turn into the frozen chilled thing he'd been in Esme Green's small room.

"You going to stay for dinner?" he asked Franklin.

"Is Maia coming?"

"Probably," Leigh said, reminding himself to call and make sure she was.

"How can she eat and look at me?" Franklin asked. "How will your sister ever go out with me now?"

Leigh, doing warm-up stretches with his neck and shoulders, looked down at the small boy in big glasses.

"Ask her. You'd be surprised," Leigh said, thinking he might not let Millie ever go on a date with anyone but Franklin. "When Maia sees you, she will never see your brother."

~~~

Leigh spent all night drafting an e-mail to Pete. He was trying to ask for money without using either the word
rape
or the request
Don't tell Mom.

It was impossible. Leigh knew that while Pete would do anything for him, if he thought Leigh was in trouble (and how would a need for money be read as anything but trouble?), he would feel obliged to tell Lillian. Normally, Leigh trusted his mother. There was no reason not to. But the minute Lillian found out what had happened, she'd be all over Leigh, asking if he was okay. How he was feeling.

Questions he couldn't answer.

Clayton, on the other hand, would never want to know. He wouldn't ask, and it would never occur to him that he should. As an added benefit, Leigh's father wasn't just an emotionally autistic problem solver. He was a lawyer. He could be of real help.

It was four in the morning. Clayton woke up every day at six. He spent forty minutes on the sun porch having his coffee and reading the papers before going to the pool. Leigh could make the coffee, fetch the paper, and wait for his father to get out of bed.

Leigh took his laptop and his homework down to the sun porch. The homework was just for show. In the quiet of early morning, he let himself poke around legal Web pages, trying to figure out how often rape victims won in court when pressing charges. Maybe he wasn't typing in the right questions, or maybe the answers simply weren't there.

Google failed him.

But Clayton did not. He let Leigh stammer on about drinking, money, and things not going well until silence returned to the sun porch. Then he asked three questions: Was Maia in any immediate need of medical care, had she gone to a hospital or clinic when she woke up after that night, and what was the name of the lawyer Maia wanted to see? To which Leigh said no, no, and I don't know.

Clayton nodded, pressed his index fingers together, and laid out the terms of his loan. He would accompany Maia to the lawyer, and she had to go see her shrink again. He had heard from Charles that she had skipped some appointments. This was not the time for her to become self-destructive (although maybe he said
self-indulgent,
Leigh was never sure which). In return, Clayton would pay Maia's initial legal fees and offer advice that she could disregard. He would do all of this, as well as refrain from informing her mother.

"This is the bit I regret most," Clayton said. "But I did not find Esme a helpful advocate when looking for a way to bribe Maia into eating."

Leigh, who suspected that his father was a little afraid of Esme, accepted Clayton's terms. But into the silent space that Maia thought the body held Leigh put his belief that she should be forced to tell her mother. He wasn't sure why until years later when he saw Maia at the dinner party and remembered how stunning Esme Green had been. She was no doubt a bad mother, having been unaware that a girl could be too thin, but a woman that beautiful might have been able to tell Maia a lot about how to escape and recover from the damage men could do.

The early-morning meeting with Clayton marked the beginning of a time during which Leigh stood outside of his own life, not merely an observer but, worse, a powerless and silent one. His father took Maia to the lawyer she wanted to see in Baltimore, even though Clayton said the woman had a reputation for being political and inflammatory.

The lawyer viewed the film, took a personal history, and said it would be a fight they could win, but that it would be a fight. Clayton asked Maia, who agreed, to seek another lawyer's counsel, saying it was like going to the doctor for a second opinion.

This lawyer, Clayton told Leigh, believed that there was every chance the video would be thrown out, and it was hard to judge its impact if it was only described.

"He thinks she could win, but it's tough because she and Oliver dated," Clayton said.

"Briefly," Leigh said. "And months ago."

"It doesn't matter," Clayton said. "In these things, appearance carries more weight than facts."

Leigh listened as Clayton said little and Maia even less. He watched as within days of the lawyer visits Maia became paler and thinner, although she swore she was eating.

"Let it alone," Janet told him one night when he'd complained that she had let Maia leave her plate half full. "She has a lot to work out. A few days off of her food plan won't kill her."

~~~

School, which Leigh feared would be a nightmare, was a relief. He knew what was expected of him there. The bells rang, he moved from class to class, took notes, and handed in his work. Every time he saw Kevin or Oliver, Leigh thought his heart would either stop beating or explode from beating too fast. But he was able to make eye contact with each of them, and even smile, because he was certain that Maia would not thank him if he gave any indication that he either knew or cared.

The one person at school who made him feel normal was Preston Gavenlock. At the start of school, they had fallen into the habit of running together about twice a week, in an attempt to improve their speed. During cooldowns, they talked about colleges, their teachers, and the war. They did not talk about Maia or, for that matter, any of their classmates. Like Leigh, Preston was worried about getting into a good college; they both mostly liked their teachers, even the annoying ones, and were largely baffled by how the war had become part of daily life but not nearly as visible as most parts.

"We spend more time brushing our teeth than we do being part of the war," Preston said. "It's not really a group effort in this country."

Preston had sent money to an organization in London that was trying to track the number of civilian deaths. It had been his father's idea. Mr. Gavenlock had said, in March when the bombing began, that as a taxpayer he was responsible for anyone killed who was not part of an army.

"My mother only ever said the war was a disaster," Leigh said. "She still says that."

In a way, Iraq had become like homework. On one level, it was abstract and pointless, like physics. And yet, unlike with homework, there were consequences to the war. Serious ones. Countless people were dying. Only yesterday the news was full of sixteen American soldiers being killed when their helicopter was shot down.

"It's not a war anymore—that part's over," Preston said. "Now it's an occupation."

Leigh had read somewhere that bombing was easy. It was rebuilding that required thought and care. Was that true? Preston had picked up the pace and Leigh was falling behind.

As they raced from a street lamp to the farthest stop sign, Leigh found himself thinking of Astra and Maia. Once he finally did it, ending things with Astra was easy. Being with Maia, with whom he wanted to stay forever, felt like it was slipping beyond his grasp.

On a Saturday in the middle of November, Maia came by the house, asking if he'd like to take a walk. Leigh, who was not sleeping very much, had gone swimming with Clayton that morning and, with his twitchy energy having returned in full force, had been all set to go for a run. Alone. Without Preston or any thoughts of colleges and casualties.

A walk with Maia would have to do instead.

"Let's take the dog," she said, and they headed off to the park.

It was one of those days when the weather was torn between fall and early winter. Maia made a few comments about how the seasons would eventually vanish into global warming. She said there was a poet in Hawaii who wrote about that all the time. Leigh, afraid to reach for her hand, said nothing.

"Basically, everyone says that I'll always regret not going to court," Maia told him, finally broaching the topic on both of their minds, "but that there's also every chance I'll regret going."

Leigh, who desperately wanted her to press charges, wondered what she could regret about it. Even if she lost, everyone would know what she had accused Kevin and Oliver of, and therefore everyone would know what they had done.

"My shrink says that I won't believe it was their fault until a judge says it was."

They were crossing Calvert Park's empty tennis courts.

"Wouldn't that be a good reason to do it then?" Leigh asked. "So that a judge can say it was their fault?"

Talking to Maia had become the way thinking about her had once been: difficult, confusing, and just a little frightening.

"Well, this girl at the crisis center thinks that it gives too much power to the court," Maia said. "And that I'm setting myself up if I lose."

You won't lose,
Leigh almost told her, but she wasn't done.

"The lawyer in Baltimore said that it's empowering to go to court no matter what happens," Maia said. "Like losing is so empowering."

Maia bent down to take the stick that Bubbles had just brought to her like a present.

"What does
empowering
mean, anyway? Josh was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street, and look what happened to him."

Leigh didn't think she would appreciate his reminding her that Josh had broken the law, which was different from what had happened to her. Oliver and Kevin had broken the law, and they should pay for that, just as Josh was.

Maia threw the stick again, and they watched Bubbles take off after it.

"I am so sick of people telling me what they think," she said. "Or explaining to me what I should think."

Leigh, aware that he wanted to trade places with the dog and just take off running, made a list of the reasons he loved Maia. She was totally brilliant (she had read John Donne and thought learning Italian in order to understand Dante made sense), totally insane (he didn't need to elaborate on this one), and totally beautiful.

The totally beautiful probably came first, but he didn't feel obliged to tell himself that.

"And the lawyers, God," Maia said. "You know, they each had the same name for my going out that night: a voluntary social engagement."

Leigh already knew those three words, having come across the legal definition of date rape during his useless computer search. The definition had been full of words that when put together sounded like an almost meaningless encounter.

"It's like everything I tell them has to fit into their language," Maia said. "It can't possibly have happened until they can say it properly."

Of course it has to fit into their language,
Leigh wanted to yell at her. Once it gets to court, it's a legal matter. It must be presented in legal terms.

"I want it to be over," she said. "Like, this happened to me, they got in trouble, boom, the end."

"Right," Leigh said. "That's why you want a trial."

"No, it's ... I thought going to court would end it," she said, "but even
thinking
about going to court has made it feel endless."

"It'll end when the trial does," Leigh said, never having believed his own words less.

"It should end because
I've
decided it's over," Maia said.

She pulled her jacket shut.

"I mean, it's not like I've never had sex before."

"It's about—" Leigh started to say, but she interrupted.

"I know, I know, 'rape isn't about sex, it's about violence,'" she said, quoting many, many sources. "And power, too, I think. It's all about power."

Leigh had stopped walking, soggy stick in hand, Bubbles looking at him expectantly.

"I can't help but think that if I just get on with my life, I'll have more power," Maia said. "If I let this drag out with lawyers and appointments, and then maybe don't even win, well, they'll have power over me for longer than they already did on that night."

Leigh couldn't believe it. She wasn't going to press charges. She was just going to let Oliver and Kevin get away with it.

"Remember when the war started?" Maia asked. "And they thought there would be a huge battle for Baghdad?"

He nodded. Yes, he remembered. She really wanted to talk about the war?

"There was all this talk on the news about female soldiers becoming POWs and how they were so hugely vulnerable, remember?"

He shook his head no. The only talk or news about POWs that Leigh remembered had been about the enemy combatants being held in Guantánamo. And he couldn't recall any details, except that while the Geneva Convention let POWs have a razor blade, the United States, mindful of what could be done with box cutters, was reluctant to hand out razor blades to Al Qaeda members.

Maia's voice brought Leigh out of his foggy memory. She was saying that she had read an interview back then with a female pilot whose jet was shot down during the first war with Iraq.