The Best Kind of People (20 page)

For once Joan appreciated how Clara spoke with authority, as though she had the right to make grand pronouncements about how everyone feels about culture, because she worked in the middle of where “it” all happened.

“Your anger at Elaine is misdirected,” Clara said, amalgamating two separate jars of white rice into one. “Write
Basmati long-grain.”

“I don’t care if it is,” Joan said, complying. “I don’t know quite how to explain it, but I’m just feeling whatever emotion occurs to me in the moment and going with it.”

“You might be on to something,” Clara said.

Joan took a card out of her handbag that a nurse from work had sent her. On the front were the words
If you’re going through hell, keep going
. She handed it to Clara.

“Keep going where? Deeper into the hell? What a load of crap,” she said.

“I think it’s Buddhist or something,” Joan said. “I found it comforting.”

“What are you going to do about Sadie staying over there? It can’t keep happening, right?”

Joan shrugged. “I certainly don’t want it to.”

L
ATER THAT NIGHT,
Joan encountered Kevin in the checkout aisle at the twenty-four-hour Safeway off the highway near Woodbridge. She was shopping fairly late, so that she could avoid most people she knew. He was standing in a shrug, cradling a six-pack with a bag of frozen french fries on top. He wore a sweatshirt with a skull on the back, and checkerboard-patterned Vans skateboard sneakers, like Andrew used to wear in high school. She didn’t realize it was him in front of her in line, a lazy stubble mapping his jaw. She was staring off unfocused, and he turned to catch her eye.

“Heyyyy,” he said, nodding his chin towards her.

He is too friendly
, she thought.
He’s going to pretend this whole mess hasn’t happened, which is almost worse than the pointed, gossipy eye bulges.

“Your daughter’s great to have around the house,” he volunteered.

She gripped the handle of her grocery cart. She looked down at the tub of low-fat margarine, the package of steel-cut oats, the loaves of whole grain bread. She could pretend to forget something, leave the checkout line, but an impatient guy holding giant handfuls of paper towels had hemmed her in. Joan resented every inch of Kevin existing in the world.

“Yes, she is,” she said. “She is a wonderful girl,” she muttered, as though she were speaking about someone else’s daughter.

“I helped her with her admissions essay yesterday,” he said, placing his six-pack on the conveyor.

“Really,” she said.

Kevin handed a crumpled twenty to the cashier, a young girl who smiled at him. “Thanks, man,” he said to her, and turned again to Joan, whose skin was hot metal. “You have a good night, Joannie,” he said, looking briefly concerned at her.

AFTER DEPOSITING HER
groceries in the trunk of the car, she sat in the driver’s seat and turned to punch the passenger seat in rapid succession. It was what a therapist had told Andrew to do when he had anger troubles in junior high school. They bought him a punching bag and put it in the basement for him to pummel whenever he felt the urge.

It did nothing to calm her and made her feel ridiculous.

When she got home, she opened the door and almost tripped on Andrew’s suitcase, which he’d placed by the pile of shoes on the mat. She regarded his shoes, well-crafted leather, as the shoes of a successful man. She remembered taking him to Harvey’s Shoes in town every August before school, where he argued each time about the importance of having the
right
sneakers. Even though she had more money after she got married than she’d ever had growing up, she still thought it was silly to buy her kids all the newest shoes as the trends shifted.

Andrew was asleep on the couch with the
TV
on, an entertainment news program blaring. A famous model was dead, aerial footage of the body being carried out of a mansion on a stretcher. The light flickered against the wall, and Payton the cat was chasing it, making clicking sounds with his mouth the way he did when stalking birds. Joan was momentarily arrested by the image, the blanket covering the model’s corpse, the medics walking her to the ambulance, the grating sound of the broadcaster’s voice, the running type under the footage that looped twice before she turned it off. She shut his laptop that was open on the coffee table next to a box of Cheerios, top still popped open, alongside a bowl with several rejected floating Os. She sat in the easy chair, the one that still had the imprint of George’s body in it. The headrest smelled of his hair product. Joan breathed it in and watched her son sleeping.

Moments later Andrew opened his eyes, stretched out his lanky body, and was startled by her still presence.

“Jesus, Mom, I didn’t hear you come in,” Andrew said, his feet poking out from under the sturdy plaid wool blanket. “I have a car coming to get me at 6:30 a.m. I’m going back for a day to get my stuff, see Jared, you know. But I’ll be right back. I don’t want you to be alone.”

“I can drive you to the airport.”

“I already called,” he said, sitting up and taking his empty cereal bowl to the kitchen. Joan followed him.

“For god’s sake, let me take care of
something.
You and your sister make me feel so goddamn useless!”

Andrew opened the dishwasher and set his bowl inside. “Mom, I think you should go talk to somebody. A psychologist. Someone in the city maybe, who doesn’t know everyone here.”

“Really? You think it’s a good idea that
I
talk
to someone? Remember how enthusiastic
you
were about that prospect?”

“I was a kid, Mom. Everyone has a therapist in New York.”

Joan pulled open the dishwasher, took out the cereal bowl, and inspected it. “You have to rinse the dishes — this is an old machine,” she said, rinsing it and scrubbing away a stubborn Cheerio. “Maybe you’re right, Andrew.”

He turned around and handed her a piece of paper. “This is the name of a support group. It’s in Woodbridge. It’s for female partners of … people in prison.”

She looked at the paper. It said Sundays, 3 p.m., and there was an address. Tomorrow. “Thanks for this, Andrew. It’s very kind of you.”

“Good night, Mom. I’ll be in touch. I mean, I’ll be back in a few days, and you can call me any time, right? You’re not alone with this.”

Joan was grateful for those words, but they seemed only to emphasize the opposite. She missed George. She heard his voice on the phone once a day, but never for long, and it didn’t sound like him. He sounded like an imposter, and she felt as though she’d tripped and fallen into some alternate reality, the protagonist from some terribly implausible show on the Space Channel.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON,
she drove thirty-six miles to the Woodbridge health clinic that hosted the support group for women with partners in prison. She arrived half an hour early, sat in the car, and watched women park their cars and go in through the side door. It was windy, and she put her hat in the glove compartment lest it blow away but then didn’t get out of the car. More women arrived, some in minivans, others in compact cars; a few walked from the bus stop. She felt the same way she had felt when she was young and travelled to different countries: surprised that the world still looked familiar. The parks in Sweden and Morocco looked like regular parks she’d seen at home. The women who parked their cars and walked into the centre looked like anyone. It’s not as though she expected them to be wearing neon signs that said
Married to a Pervert
, but she had expected to see something that would give away their status, an indication however subtle, some sort of obvious physical sign of weakness. She looked at her phone, turned it to silent, and applied some Carmex to her lips. They were dry and flaking, no matter how much water she drank. The stress showed on her face. Every step felt heavy as she made her way inside.

Joan lingered outside in the basement hallway in front of a display of health pamphlets. She pretended to be interested in the details of diabetes treatment, as though she couldn’t have written the entire pamphlet herself from memory. She waited so long to actually enter that she was a few minutes late, and walked in while a woman was speaking.

“The way I see it, he’s sick. It’s a sickness. You can’t control what you’re born with, right? My one kid’s got the Down’s syndrome. He can’t help that neither. Now he’s been found out, and he can get help, and he
wants
to get help. Who am I to leave now? I believe in second chances.”

The woman who was talking resembled a pug dog; she had one of those smooshed-up faces. Joan took one of the two empty seats around the circle and couldn’t stop herself from thinking that if the woman didn’t hang on to this guy, she’d probably have a hard time finding some other man to replace him. Then she felt awful for thinking that.

The room was cold and the walls were mostly bare save for a few
AIDS
Awareness posters and one about getting your flu shot. The only man in the room was clearly the facilitator, wearing a sticker that read
Bob
, although she knew he was really Dr. Robert Forrestor, whose biography on the health clinic’s web site said he specialized in treating sexual compulsions and disorders, and had started this group after writing his last book, about the family life of sex offenders.

She had spent a lot of time staring at the photo on the web site, concocting an entirely imaginary family life for him. She imagined his wife, perhaps an academic with greying brown hair and a soft middle, cutting up ripe plums for a fruit salad on Sunday afternoon.

He nodded at Joan warmly.

As the woman spoke, she pulled on the cuffs of her soft pink cable-knit sweater. There was a coffee urn, and stacks of Styrofoam cups beside it. Joan didn’t know anyone actually used Styrofoam anymore. She looked around at the group, most of them in their thirties. They were all wives or mothers of prisoners, some of them
sex offenders.

“Do you mean that if someone decides to rape someone, he’s sick, he’s not a criminal?” asked a woman with a purple streak in her hair.

A woman with a name tag reading
Mallory
scoffed. “Where would that rationalizing stop?”

“He’s a criminal. Of course he did the crime. He’s guilty. No one is saying it’s right or excusing any behaviour. What we’re saying — I mean” — and she looked at the doctor — “what
I
believe is that restorative justice is better than just sending everyone to jail so they can come out and reoffend, with more anger in their hearts, more hatred. If some men are able to face their demons and change, they should be allowed to, as long as they follow the rules.”

It was a lot for Joan to take in all at once. She felt simultaneously grateful that these women existed and totally judgemental of them. For the next hour she listened carefully to their stories. A woman named Cindy who spoke in uncertain upspeak, every sentence going up at the end like a question, complained endlessly about how unfair her husband’s
PO
officer was. “He won’t let us live a normal life? And my husband is harassed so much, he’s got no freedom?”

“What’s a
PO
officer?” Joan whispered to the woman next to her, who was knitting a brown and red afghan in her lap.

“Parole officer,” she hissed, annoyed.

Joan imagined what Clara would’ve said to Cindy. If you fuck with
children
,
stop expecting anything but hatred from everyone.
Suck it up.
She just looked so pathetic, whining about how her husband kept taking shit out on her whenever he got frustrated.

“He should be thankful you didn’t drive a stake through his heart for molesting your daughter!” Mallory practically shouted, unable to control herself.

Apparently this wasn’t the right kind of thing to say. Joan took note.

“Our role is not to judge,” said Dr. Forrestor calmly. “Our role is to listen.”

But Joan swore that she saw Cindy smile to herself. Like
yeah, you’re right.

She hated the women in the group when they talked slowly, or mispronounced words, or cried, or expressed shame for staying with their husbands. She hated them because she could relate to them, and that meant she didn’t really know who she was becoming, who she had been, who she was supposed to be.

WHEN JOAN WENT
home, she ransacked George’s office, looking for clues about where his money had gone, or evidence of something, anything concrete. She felt almost envious of the women in the group who knew things for sure. Facts. George’s office was a room she’d never been much interested in, piled high with books and papers. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for amongst the endless papers of theories and notes. The police had already been through it all, taking his hard drive and later returning everything banged up but apparently containing nothing of interest. “Not even one bit of porn,” said Bennie at the time. “How many men can say that? Heck, how many women?” He looked pleased with himself, but to Joan it seemed to say that most normal men look at porn, and this was therefore just another way her husband was a freak of nature.

When she found nothing unusual at all, just the regular bits of detritus of his life, she curled up on the floor and wrapped herself in the old brown sweater he’d kept draped over his cozy oak office chair since the day they moved in, it seemed. It smelled like his aftershave still, and she inhaled deeply.

PART TWO

THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS

EIGHTEEN

JOAN EMBARKED ON
the three-hour journey to the prison and back every Friday during the first month following George’s arrest. She packed her brown leather cross-body satchel with magazines, granola bars, a hairbrush and compact, an extra sweater. She developed rituals. There was a truck stop where the same middle-aged woman with silver curls served her a medium with milk and half a sweetener every week. She often pulled the Volvo up on the side of the road to visit a particular farmer’s cart, buying squash and root vegetables, beets, or kale with dirt still clinging to each leaf. She would rub a hearty apple on her shirt before taking a bite, standing on the gravel shoulder beside her car and looking out over the farmer’s fields towards the mountains. In these moments she could pretend to herself she was visiting a great-aunt at a neighbouring farm, or travelling to the outlet malls for bargains. She brought along easy-to-read entertainment magazines to glance at in line and discard at security. She even began to nod politely at people she recognized in the visitors’ line. Some of the guards learned her first name. There was an unexpected humanity and sense of routine to visiting the prison now. Still, every time she pulled out of the parking lot and began the journey home, she cried. She’d pull over and buy a coffee only to sip it once and then hurl it with all the strength she had into the air behind the other parked cars in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. The anger was the most startling, and the most difficult to diffuse.