The Best Kind of People (10 page)

CLARA CAME DOWNSTAIRS
just as the news broadcast the story again, on high volume. She towered over Joan, her lips a slash of red lipstick, expertly applied. She took off her glasses and cleaned them with her silky coral scarf, then went over to the radio and pressed Off
.

After every broadcast, the phone rang, with people who were hearing the news for the first time. Joan stopped picking up after George called, because she did not know what to say. Clara silenced the phone.

“I’m here, Joannie. We’re going to get you through this.” Clara was suddenly red and sweaty, pulling off the scarf and dotting her forehead with it. “Fucking hot-flash bullshit,” she said.

The answering machine picked up. It was Bennie. “Bail might be set astronomically high. I think that someone is trying to make some sort of political point with this arrest. I will come pick up the family in a Town Car tomorrow at ten. The more family members who show up … the better it looks.”

JOAN POURED CLARA
a cup of green tea and handed it to her.

“How high could they possibly set it?”

“You’ll be able to handle it. He wouldn’t leave such an important detail on a voice mail if it was something we couldn’t handle.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Joan started carefully, knowing Clara was not an easy one to convince of anything.

“Yeah?” Clara sipped her tea, then made a sour face. “This tastes like mowed grass.” She reached for the antique sugar bowl on the counter.

“No one knows better than someone with my job that everyone on earth is a variation of crazy … right? Everyone’s got a loose screw. Nobody stays the same their whole life!”

“So?”

“I’m just saying that we shift around on a see-saw moral continuum for our whole lives.
Nobody
stays the same! I’m not saying that he did it, but what if he is sick? What if he has a tumour?”

“You’re feeling ashamed, but you shouldn’t. This is not your fault.”

“I am not ashamed,” Joan spat at her. The truth was that the shame Joan felt was so expansive and so forceful that it couldn’t be something described by as few as five letters, something so commonplace. This was something else entirely. “A word doesn’t even exist for what I’m feeling,” Joan mumbled.

Clara pushed her hair behind her ears and looked out the back window at the lake. “I really don’t have any idea what the fuck to say to you, Joan. I feel like I usually have at least one answer to a problem, but I’m dumbfounded.”

Joan sat down again at the kitchen island, rested her head in her hands, and started to cry.

Clara squeezed both of her shoulders. “I’m surprised you aren’t angry.”

Joan’s voice was muffled against her arms. “I
am
angry. I feel like someone has attacked my family!”

“You’re very concerned for him,” Clara said carefully.

“Of course I am. You don’t stop loving someone in an instant because somebody accuses them of something despicable. Nothing is that black and white.”

“Of course not,” Clara mumbled. “I just think that
I
might feel a little more … betrayed.”

“Well, we are not the same person, are we?”

“No, no, we’re not.” Clara sipped her tea.

“Plus, he’s obviously innocent,” she said.

“You’re right, there is that possibility.” Clara didn’t look convinced.

“It’s so easy to make assumptions,” Joan said. “I see it all the time. Doctors think they know everything before they actually get tests done, or bother to really listen to a patient. Not everything is as it seems.”

“Of course, Joannie, of course. Where is Sadie?”

“Upstairs, I think. And for the record: if it
is
true, I didn’t know,” she said to Clara, who nodded in a way that said she believed her sister. “I knew Andrew was gay by the time he was seven. I knew Sadie had a higher than average intelligence before the special tests came in and pronounced her a mini genius. I can spot a fake seizure from across a crowded emergency room. I know how much pain even the most stoic man is in by the way he walks!” Joan was circling the kitchen island now, arms in the air for emphasis. “I knew Dad was having an affair when I was only fourteen!”

“Mom did used to say that you were unusually intuitive,” Clara agreed. “But you know the cliché — love is blind, et cetera.”

“Clara, I would have sooner guessed that he had another whole family in another state, or an online gambling addiction, or a sudden religious conversion. There were
no
signs. He never uttered an inappropriate word, or watched anyone in a disturbing manner, or made any attempts to role-play anything even vaguely inappropriate in the bedroom.”

“What is your sex life like?” Clara looked down at the table, uncomfortable.

“Normal.”

“Come on. No one is normal. Normal sex doesn’t exist.”

“Of course it does. I have girlfriends. I know what’s normal.”

“Girlfriends?” Clara cocked a brow.

Perhaps
girlfriends
, plural, denoting some kind of group that went out together, confessed secrets, had a certain kind of intimacy, was a bit of an exaggeration. Joan and George tended to be one of those couples that had a community, but not friendships, really. They had each other, and Joan had Clara.

“I have friends! I have co-workers. I read articles. Stop looking at me like I’m an Amish housewife or something.”

“C’mon. Every guy has a kink or two. I once had a guy who wanted me to play Robin to his Batman.”

“Fuck off, Clara. He didn’t act like a pervert. He did not ask me to wear a fucking schoolgirl kilt or put my hair in pigtails. It was good sex, okay? It was the best I ever had.”

Joan felt that the humiliation of this conversation was possibly going to kill her.

“I think,” Clara said, weighing her words, “that everyone has a secret they keep from their partner, no matter how healthy they appear from the outside, how communicative they are. You and George really did appear to be the pinnacle of normalcy, but nothing is ever as it appears to be.”

“That’s cynical.”

“I dunno. I always thought of you as the perfect example of a successful marriage. It never occurred to me to think that in itself is a bit curious, maybe a red flag. You’ve never had an affair, you never expressed boredom or uncertainty. That is odd, and a bit improbable or something.”

Joan had stopped listening to her sister, stuck on her and George’s sex life, replaying every intimacy. What was intimacy when you really thought about it? Joan couldn’t understand it when she focused on it. She was a private person, believed privacy wasn’t valued enough these days. She was always trying to impress upon Sadie the importance of keeping some things sacred and personal. Those were the euphemisms she used. Sadie always looked at her as though she were trying to teach her the alphabet again.

“What if the sex was just good for me, and so-so for him, Clara? God, that is so heartbreaking to contemplate.”

Clara was silent.

“What does it mean, if it was the most fulfilling relationship I’ve ever had, and it was a lie?”

“I don’t know, honey. It’s probably not about sex.”

“That’s depressing. You always think you know everything.”

“I’ve written some articles about men who are sex offenders, and they tend to fall into certain categories. You know, some are emotionally arrested at the age of their victims, from a past trauma, and they act out as though they are peers experimenting with bodies, and some are your garden-variety sadists and psychopaths, and some are, well, I don’t know, sick in some way?”

“Well, they’re not accusing him of going after young children,” Joan said, and then caught herself.

Joan and Clara stayed in the kitchen for the next hour or so, Clara making lists of things that needed to be done while Joan re-dusted the rubber plant by the window overlooking the backyard.

The silence was interrupted by the answering machine — Dorothy, the school secretary, calling to leave a message. Joan sipped her cold coffee while Clara sat with the laptop looking up legal information about George’s charges. Joan let the secretary’s awkward nasal voice fill the room.
It’s Dorothy. Sadie is not in class, Mrs. Woodbury. I just wanted you to know. We are all very concerned about her well-being.

Joan played the message twice over the speaker before pressing Delete. Mrs. Woodbury. That was new. Messages used to be:
Hey Joan! Hey doll! Hot as heck out there today, huh?
Dorothy used to sound friendly in voice mail. Now she sounded like the automatic voice you get when you call the phone company. Emotionless.

The phone rang again. Clara and Joan watched as the machine picked it up and George’s voice greeted the caller with a formal flourish.
The Woodburys are unavailable right now, kindly leave your number after the beep.

“Why do you still have an ancient machine?”

“I didn’t want to pay the phone company more money than we had to. Plus, we all have cellphones.”

“You live in an effing mansion. I can’t believe how cheap you are.”

A sound of wind or breathing came on the line. “I hope you burn in hell. You and your whole family.” The voice was elderly.

Joan took down the time and details on a pad of paper. She felt that if anyone did break down the door, she’d just lie down in the middle of the room and let them kick her. That was how little fight was left in her.

The gate buzzer rang again. She looked out and saw a
UPS
truck. Clara offered to go greet the driver, and she came back a few minutes later with a basket of fruit and a card.

“Do you think it’ll blow up?” Clara asked, handing it to her sister.

The card read,
I hope you’re hanging in there
, and it was
signed by all the nurses at work. Accompanying it were a pamphlet for victim’s services, one for a support group for women survivors of violence, and another for a group for women with loved ones in prison.

“‘Call if you need to’ … Yeah, that means please don’t, I’m just trying to be polite.”

“Joan!”

“I know
WASP
sincerity when I see it … it’s so rare.”

No one else, none of the neighbours who claimed to
love
George, had called or dropped by. The day after George stopped the school shooter, there had been a lineup of cars to come visit and offer congratulations. If Joan hadn’t had Clara, she felt as though she would have walked into the lake with her pockets full of pennies.

Joan disappeared downstairs to check the laundry and brought up the old dusty hunting rifle that George’s father kept on a rack above the pool table in the basement. It was a .22. She didn’t know how to shoot it. She wasn’t sure it had bullets; they probably didn’t even make them anymore. But it was symbolic. It was too heavy to hold on her shoulder. She’d have to cradle it in her arms around her stomach, knocking objects behind her on the floor as she tried to walk around.

“I’m not exactly intimidating, but its existence is comforting,” Joan said to Clara, who winced when she looked up from her seat and saw her sister with the rifle.

“Put that thing away,” she said.

“I don’t know why the cops didn’t take it,” Joan wondered out loud.

“You have permits?”

“Yes, I suppose. I don’t even think it has bullets.”

“That’s why.”

“Why do guns freak you out so much? Daddy had about a million.”

“The city changes you,” Clara said. “I used to see guns and think of dead deer. Now I see them and think about going to the bodega for a carton of milk and getting caught in the crossfire.”

Joan picked up the phone and called her boss, requesting to cash in her backlogged sick time and take four weeks off. When she hung up, she felt an immediate sense of relief. Saying something as simple, as elementary, as “
I
didn’t do anything” seemed entirely beside the point.

Clara turned on the radio. “Castrate him!” said an elderly voice. The
DJ
laughed uncomfortably. All the callers to the talk show uttered variations on
men will be boys, boys behave badly, young girls dress too sexy these days, Mr. Woodbury’s family practically created this town and we owe him the respect of innocent until proven guilty, every man is tempted.
The latter opinion was something that would’ve provoked Joan to rant a couple of days ago, condoning the lack of responsibility men assume for their behaviour
. We sexualize youth, every young actress and pop singer, and we have no right to then act puritanical when a red-blooded man has a natural reaction to this display. You can’t put Britney Spears in a thong everywhere and expect men not to want her just because she’s sixteen. Men are animals, after all.

“Britney Spears?” Clara laughed. “She’s thirty!”

Joan turned the radio off and looked out the window and when she squinted, she could see that Andrew was lying on the dock, curled up like a toddler.

BENNIE CALLED AND
Joan picked up the phone. He read the victims’ statements over the speakerphone. Joan placed her head down on the table, and Clara took notes on her phone as he read. “He approached Victim A after she had consumed alcohol at the ski lodge. He told her he would walk her back to the girls’ cabin because she felt ill. He asked if she considered him a friend and she said yes, that she did. He then proceeded to tell her that he would inform her parents about the drinking, about her giving lap dances to boys in their rooms, unless she obliged …”

Joan gripped the arms of the chair and whimpered. Even if they turned out to be lies, those stories were there, obstacles between them, things she couldn’t un-hear or un-imagine. Someone had taken Joan’s only confidant, the one person who actually knew her completely, and her best friend, and replaced him with a monster. The person she knew and trusted was gone.

JOAN AND CLARA
decided to go to the Woodbridge SuperSave grocery store since they were unlikely to run into anyone they knew there. Bennie’s recitation of the victims’ statements was still ringing in their ears. Joan filled a basket with corn, avocados, and bundles of fresh herbs in clear plastic bags. She ran her hands under the sprinklers that were keeping the heirloom carrots fresh, mesmerized, until her fingers turned red and she recognized that they were cold. In this moment of disembodiment she didn’t see Clara approach, pushing a cart filled with frozen foods, whole grain waffles, Lean Cuisines, pizza, and frozen yogurt, food for a working mother of toddlers, or for stocking a bomb shelter.