The Best Kind of People (16 page)

Andrew went in to retrieve Clara, who was energetically dancing to the B-52s’ “Love Shack” on the dance floor, while the leather daddy stabbed a wooden cane in the air for the
bang bang bang
parts. Andrew waved at the table of Stuart’s teammates as they left. Stuart, standing by the bar, pretended not to see him go. Andrew noticed a young man beside him, probably a teenager, who looked totally enraptured.

“He’s still got that charm,” Andrew said to Clara, nodding towards the young kid.

Clara rolled her eyes. “He should be more careful.”

TUESDAY

ELEVEN

BENNIE PICKED UP
the family in a Town Car for the hearing. Clara, Joan, and Andrew were all standing in front of the gate at the end of the driveway when he pulled up. Joan had spent twenty minutes looking for Sadie before she noticed a scrawled note on a napkin by the coffee machine reading “I couldn’t sleep, went for a run and to Jimmy’s.”

Joan had found her at 2 a.m. listening to three threats and several hang-ups on the answering machine in the living room. She had been crying and Joan had walked her back to bed, barely concealing her own shaking limbs.

The car smelled of stale booze and cigars, and the driver wore a surfeit of peppery cologne that competed with the cherry-scented air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror.

Once everyone was seated, Bennie turned around from the passenger seat to address them. “This is the arraignment hearing, and it is likely they’ll set bail at some exorbitant amount because they know how wealthy he is,” he explained, though they already knew.

“So, they’ll use it as an excuse to re-pave the parking lot or to put another Starbucks in the courthouse complex,” said Clara.

“Yup,” Andrew said, sipping from a travel mug of coffee.

Before long they were curving through the subdivisions on the hill that hadn’t existed when Andrew was young. They pulled up in front of Jimmy’s house.

Elaine showed Joan to the breakfast nook where Sadie, still in her running clothes, was eating a bowl of cereal.

“It’s time to go, honey.”

Sadie looked down at the bowl, circling the spoon around the remaining Cheerios. “I’m not going.”

Sadie looked up to briefly meet her mother’s eyes and then returned her gaze to the cereal bowl. Elaine went into the kitchen and rinsed out the coffee maker.

Joan gripped the back of Elaine’s kitchen chair, poking her fingers through the lattice wicker. She tried her most patient voice. “I understand this is hard, but we have to stick together right now. We need
each other. I know you are hurting, and believe me, we all are.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t go.” Sadie dismissed Joan with a wave of her hand, scraping her cereal bowl with her spoon.

“This is a very complicated situation, Sadie. Love just doesn’t dissolve when something terrible happens.”

“See? It’s even in the language you choose. Something terrible didn’t just
happen.
There was no tornado or act of God. Dad may have
committed a crime
using his own free will.”

“
May
have,” Joan said, and then corrected herself. “
Didn’t.
And maybe if you weren’t seventeen you’d be a little more forgiving of the fact that not everything is black and white.”

“I understand the dangers of binary thinking, I just don’t think that in this situation there are many shades of grey,” Sadie said, standing up and walking towards the kitchen sink with her cereal bowl.

“You don’t know everything, honey. No one can. That’s not how the legal process works.”

“You know what I
do
know, Mom? I know that the weekend Dad chaperoned that ski trip, you went to work and helped a dozen people live through the night. Those are acts that are commendable, Mom. Why do
you
have to be the one to suffer?”

Joan pulled her jacket tightly around her waist. “Sadie, I’m trying to be patient and supportive. And neither you nor I know exactly what happened. There is innocent until proven—”

“Do you think that maybe you need to be feeling less empathy and more rage, Mom? Do you think the situation might call for that at this point?” She turned on the faucet, scrubbing at her bowl and then rinsing it again. Elaine left the kitchen, walking up the carpeted stairs.

When you’re a teenager, it seems that the time for rage is always. Joan tried to think of things to say that might change Sadie’s mind. “You have the right to feel however you feel. Your feelings are valid.”

“I
know
,” she said, as if Joan were the stupidest woman in the world, saying the most obvious things. “Mom, sometimes you forget I am no longer twelve.”

“Believe me, I know how old you are. I would appreciate your support, is all that I’m saying.” She said this so quietly, and it pained her to admit it. She wanted her there; she wanted them all there in a group, together.

“Mom, it’s not just that I’m mad. It’s that I’m mad and I’m worried that if I see him, my heart will just break. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information, with all these rumours. I can’t organize it all in my head. It’s like Dad has just disappeared. It’s too devastating. I just have to stay away.” She said this while she looked out the window at the Town Car idling on the street.

“Okay, honey.” Joan started towards Sadie to embrace her, but Sadie stuck her hand out in protest. She turned and noticed Jimmy’s stepfather, Kevin, standing in the doorway, holding a bowl of cereal.

Outside, Clara called Joan’s name.

“Mom, just go,” Sadie said.

Joan felt as though she didn’t have any choice, so she left, hands curled in fists at her sides.

THE SCENE OUTSIDE
the courtroom was actually fairly benign, as if they’d all shown up to pay parking tickets, except for the ever-present media team. The building was on the edge of town, next to the golf course. It looked like a community centre. Joan had never really absorbed the fact that it was the courthouse. A group of teachers were there to support George. They had buttons and signs reading things like
We Support Mr. Woodbury! Still Teacher of the Year Every Year!
A group of angry parents were also present, a small crowd of their supporters shouting outside. In the adjacent municipal park there was a picnic, some sort of community gathering for children, unrelated to the court date.

Joan wasn’t prepared to see the girls. In her head, she’d imagined them the way teenagers look on television when they’re played by twenty-five-year-old actresses and dressed in skimpy designer jeans. Instead, they looked the way Clara had looked in junior high, with braces and legs that hadn’t grown at the same rate as their arms. They looked the age Joan had been when she’d daydreamed at night about her first kiss. Joan’s face burned when she looked their way, tears formed when she saw the pained looks on the faces of their parents standing behind the prosecutor. She immediately thought of someone hurting Sadie, which produced a sudden thrum of nausea, and pain in pricks all over her body.

She was even less prepared emotionally to see George.

After they were seated, two guards led him into the room. They’d given him prison attire, which was very jarring, and he looked so pale and frightened, different from yesterday. He was so dishevelled, holding up his pants because they’d taken his belt. She’d never seen such a previously confident and commanding man so vulnerable. She was immediately thankful that Sadie wasn’t here to witness him like this. Even Andrew, who was used to trials, who had displayed the stoicism of his grandfather through the journey up to this point, began to shake, and had to turn his head away.

Joan saw that George was scanning the crowd, looking for her. When they locked eyes, she broke down. After that, he kept his head bowed.

The judge greeted the crowd and read a summary of the charges, including a new charge Joan wasn’t aware of, and announced that his trial was set for eight months from now. He would be incarcerated until then, with no chance of bail, due to his being a considerable flight risk.

Joan felt as though she couldn’t hear; or rather, sound receded into the distance and was replaced by a persistant ringing, a swell of voices. She could make out Bennie’s voice, in the distance, as he announced his intention to appeal the no-bail decision. The gavel struck the bench.

The judge basically said, in legalese, go ahead, but fat chance.

When they led him away, a slip of himself in handcuffs, Joan watched herself as she fell to the floor, hands on the cold tiles breaking her fall. Mom, she heard. Mom. She was on her knees, palms down, fetal. Take a deep breath. Joan, Joan, her sister’s voice. Andrew grabbed Joan’s hand and helped her up and encourged her to sit down, then held onto her firmly. The judge banged his gavel again. The room quieted and Joan regained her senses.

A man in a plaid sports jacket yelled, “Send him away for life!” George’s shoulders shook with sobbing as he walked away.

“Innocent until proven guilty!” shouted Dorothy in a hysterical tone.

“This is a conspiracy!” a voice rose from the crowd.

Andrew grabbed Joan’s hand and helped her up. The judge banged his gavel.

“George saved my life!” shouted the former Avalon Hills secretary, the woman whose boyfriend had tried to kill her a decade earlier. Joan hadn’t seen her in years; rumour had it she’d been on long-term disability for
PTSD
after the incident. “He’s got a good heart! He’s being framed!”

“Order,” the judge shouted. “Please clear the room,” he said, annoyed at the spectacle.

“Why didn’t you see this coming?” Joan asked Bennie in the car. He offered a run of apologies before admitting that he was basically stunned. Had he angered that particular judge? It made no sense to him.

There was an awkward silence as everyone absorbed the reality that George wasn’t simply coming home as they’d all expected.

After a few moments, Clara read aloud from an editorial published in that morning’s paper, written by a group calling itself Citizens in Defence of George Woodbury. “‘While we can’t know for certain, we can speculate, based on witnessed past behaviour on the part of Avalon girls while on school trips, that there is often contraband alcohol consumption and subsequent bad behaviour. According to one teacher chaperoning the senior trip in question, single-sex dorms were deemed coed once the chaperones had gone to bed. Many girls confessed to waking up ashamed of their behaviour, and one can easily speculate that some sought out a way to abdicate responsibility for their actions, many of which they have little to no memory of, except for what is caught on camera phones. Let us all remember that six students were suspended and three expelled when video footage of the trip was anonymously posted online, and none of the footage contained anything involving Mr. Woodbury. It is clear to us that Mr. Woodbury, who has never before been anything but a well-respected role model, going back to the day he literally saved the school from an armed gunman, is being framed by a group of girls unwilling to look at the role their own decisions had in a weekend trip gone awry. We have led our girls astray in our pornofied culture, and we should go back to the days of propriety and self-respect, something our young women so sorely need.’” Clara’s voice was thick with sarcasm. “I can’t believe the paper actually printed this disgusting, archaic, victim-blaming letter!”

Joan would normally have vehemently agreed with her sister on this, but she could only place her hand against her tender heart and weep for the confusion she felt.

TWELVE

A
NDREW DROPPED BY
to see his sister after the hearing. She was sitting on Jimmy’s back deck with her school books and laptop.

“They held him without bail,” Andrew said, trying to sound as gentle as he could, despite the rage he felt at his father’s incarceration.

“Oh my god,” she said quietly, “Holy shit. I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” said Andrew. They sat awkwardly for a few minutes, sipping iced tea and watching Kevin weed the garden.

“No school today? Are the kids being terrible?”

“Someone threw a can of Coke at my head from a Town Car when I left the track this morning.”

“Good to know chauffeured kids are still the worst.”

Sadie nodded. “So,
why
isn’t Dad out of jail? He was going to be home today. I thought that was just, you know, a fact. How things work.” Sadie gulped her tea, chewing on a shard of ice. The afternoon clouds broke apart for a brief bit of sun.

Andrew shook his head. “No, it’s a bit complicated. They’ve held him without bail on a technicality that Bennie is appealing. Something is going on with the family trust money, though. Mom was surprised she didn’t really know how much money they had, and it was less than she’d assumed.”

“I can’t believe that Mom didn’t know how much money Dad had. That’s weird. She’s such a control freak.”

“I also found that odd,” Andrew admitted. “But the wealth that Grandpa had, you know, it doesn’t last forever unless it’s properly invested, right, and Dad was never good at that stuff. Perhaps that’s what happened, you know. They have a nest egg, but it’s not limitless, the way we’ve always assumed.”

“Do you think she’s abandoned him?”

Andrew shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that straightforward. I think she really does think that this will all magically blow over.”

“Do you think so?”

“Not after seeing those girls today in court. I’m not sure at all.”

He opened up his iPad and showed Sadie an article. The headline read
TOWN
DIVIDED
OVER
POPULAR
TEACHER
. A photo of Dorothy holding up a sign of support accompanied the story.

“Teachers are going batshit. Most of them think it’s a witch hunt,” Sadie said. “Oddly, mostly it’s the female teachers. They can’t say it outright, but they don’t believe the girls.”

“This town is fucked up, Sadie. I’ve always told you that. Not that I can know exactly what occurred,” he said carefully.