The Best Kind of People (32 page)

Kind of a cold response, she thought. She went back out to the kitchen. The room was empty. She could hear Jimmy in the living room playing video games. The dirty plates sat on the table, the leftover food congealing. Sadie gathered them up and started rinsing them in the sink and putting them in the dishwasher.

“I should go home and feed Payton,” she said to Jimmy, calling through the divide into the living room. He pressed Pause and stood up.

“Okay, sure.” He followed her to the door. “So, like, I didn’t want to say anything, but how’s your dad recovering?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, after what happened …”

“What happened?!”

Jimmy’s eyes widened. “It was on the front page this morning …” He fished in the recycling box by his feet.
TEACHER
CHARGED
WITH
ATTEMPTED
SEX
ASSAULTS
INJURED
IN
CHRISTMAS
PRISON
ATTACK
.

“How could you not know? Didn’t your mom tell you? I mean, we were trying not to bring it up, you know, to let you do the talking, and that’s why I figured you looked so distracted.”

She scanned the article to make sure he was alive. He was. In hospital.

“Obviously, my mother would rather I find out this way,” she said. No wonder she’d left. Why would she lie? Why would Andrew and Jared both lie to her?

She looked at her phone. Seventeen missed calls from her mother. “Well, she
has
been calling and I haven’t called her back.” She thought about calling Andrew. After he’d dropped her off he probably went to see her dad in the hospital. Why didn’t they tell her? Take her along? She was sleepy and still high in the car, so maybe he didn’t think she could handle it.

“Come back inside. You should come in and relax and let me take care of you.”

“I’m so sick of feeling like I’m in need of care or comfort. I’m pissed off. I need to go home.”

She ran outside, not even sure how she’d get home. Then she remembered she’d left her old bike strewn beside their house. It was cold, but she didn’t feel it. Her hands went numb on the handlebars all the way to the outskirts of town near the highway turnoff where the hotels and conference centres had their own little universe. It started to snow, and then rain. She knew she was cold but didn’t feel anything. Cars beeped at her, not expecting to see a bike on the side of the boulevard in this kind of weather. When she finally arrived, lungs hurting, hands burning from the cold, she stashed her bike behind the Hilton Dumpster, took off her winter coat, and undid two buttons on her blouse in the reflection of a car window.

THIRTY-THREE

JOAN AND CLARA
made it to the hospital fifteen minutes before the start of visiting hours. They met Bennie in the
ICU
waiting room. Joan, forgetting this wasn’t
her
hospital, pushed through the double doors of the
ICU
. Clara and Bennie stayed in the hallway. A security guard sat in a hard-backed chair at the end of the bed looking less than thrilled. He was startled by her arrival, but quickly caught on to who Joan was. It was likely the first time he’d seen a woman age years before his very eyes, in the span of a few seconds.

George was handcuffed to the gurney. The room, like much of the hospital, was in serious need of funding, seemed filthy and obviously understaffed compared with the trauma centre. George looked as if he’d survived a bombing.

“George,” Joan said in a whisper, leaning over him, investigating the bruising on his neck, doing a quick vitals check. She did these things instinctively, without quite realizing it. He opened his eyes briefly, tried to speak but couldn’t. She put her lips to his forehead and kissed him gently. When she pulled back, he gripped her hand in what felt like terror.

“It’s going to be okay, George. It will all be okay, don’t worry. You’re going to recover and you’re going to get out of jail and all will be normal and fine again,” she said. She sat beside him, murmuring words of comfort, while tears fell down his swollen, disfigured face. Joan had witnessed hundreds of injuries in her career, but to see her husband this way made her sick and angry in a way she’d never experienced.

She watched as he fell back asleep, until she heard a stirring at the entrance. It was Andrew.

“Andrew, it’s okay. He’s going to be okay. What are you doing here? I needed you to stay with Sadie at home. But come sit by your father. He needs our support.”

“Sadie’s at Jimmy’s. We left before dawn. I couldn’t handle waiting any longer,” he said. He continued to stand near the door, not looking at his father. Joan stood up, offering him the seat next to the bed, but Andrew shook his head. “I need to talk to you.”

“Andrew,
come see your father
.”

He didn’t move from the doorway, just leaned forward a bit, took a look at the machines monitoring his father’s vitals, and stepped back into the hall.

Joan gave George’s hand a squeeze and he opened his eyes. “Andrew is here. He hasn’t been sleeping lately. I’m going to go talk to him, but I’ll be right back.”

Andrew was pacing the hall, hands balled in fists.

“Andrew, he should know we’re here supporting him. For god’s sake, he was almost
murdered
. He’s your father.”

Andrew shook his head. “Mom, Bennie needs to discuss something.”

“What could possibly be more important right now?”

Andrew didn’t answer, just led her back to the family room, where Bennie was sitting in one of the scuffed pink plastic couches, leaning over his laptop.

“Joan,” he said, shutting his computer, “things aren’t looking good. We’ve come up against a significant roadblock and it could sink the case. My research team will need to speak to you at length about this. Andrew as well, but he already knows about it.”

“What does he know?”

“You should sit down,” he said, motioning to the couch across from him. She remained standing. An orderly mopped the floor, figure eights of bleach.

“Actually, Andrew already knows about it because he brought it to our attention, this morning.”

“What does he know, Bennie?”

He sighed heavily. “Do you know the name Sarah Myers?”

Joan racked her brain. Nothing. “No.”

“Think back to when you lived in the city, in that apartment building, when you started going back to nursing school.”

She resented hearing her life trajectory parroted back to her. Clara got on her phone, texting away distractedly.

“Is this conversation entirely necessary right now? George needs me,” she said.

It clicked into focus then: Sarah Myers, the skinny girl with the gap between her front teeth, who always wore an oversized Black Sabbath baseball shirt. She put up an advertisement in the laundry room that read “Responsible babysitter in Apartment 3A. Available after school until midnight” in red and purple Magic Marker scrawl. Joan had pulled off one of the fluttering tags with her number when she was preparing to return to nursing school in the evenings. After that, George picked Andrew up from daycare and Sarah would sit with him at their place while George went to do office hours at school.

“Why on earth would you be asking about our old babysitter?”

“Mrs. Woodbury …” Bennie’s pause indicated what Joan already knew, what was slowly bruising down each arm, until every fingernail felt like it had been slammed in a door, and her inhalations came fast and shallow.

Clara looked up, tuning in. “What? What’s going on?”

“Mom, I need you to stay calm,” Andrew said, leading her to the couch and gently encouraging her to sit down. “She Facebooked me a few days before Christmas. A weird note. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. She said she used to babysit me when I was little. Then she showed up at our apartment yesterday, and left her card with Jared. So I called her after you left. I was so curious. She saw something about the case on the news. She wanted to find me, talk to me, about something that happened before we left Boston.”

“Mrs. Woodbury, what happened when she stopped looking after Andrew?” Bennie asked.

“She only stopped because George’s father was sick and we decided to move. I think I brought Andrew over to say goodbye — probably, anyway. That poor girl’s mother was such an alcoholic. So what happened? Why is she calling?” Joan said.

Andrew looked at the floor. His fists clenched in his lap.

Bennie referred to some papers in front of him. “George apparently gave her mother a large sum of money in return for her agreeing to keep quiet, after … after an incident between him and the girl.”

“Sarah,” said Andrew.

“Holy shit,” said Clara.

Sweat drenched the backs of Joan’s legs, sticking to the plastic couch.

Bennie said, “George and my father arranged everything, in secret, before he retired. I was able to look into the files. George paid for Sarah to go to college. She has suffered for years from emotional difficulties, she claims, as a result of what happened, and completing college using his money — it just never felt right to her. She spent most of the money, she travelled. She developed a considerable addiction problem that she has since recovered from. Her mother died more than ten years ago, and she feels like she needs some closure on the subject. So, when she heard the news on television, she called the police. She said that before her mother died, she apologized for taking the money instead of calling the police. She said that they were poor, and her mother was an alcoholic, and she thought it was the most positive choice for her daughter. Apparently, because of their particularly low station in life, it was likely she wouldn’t have been believed anyway, and sadly, I tend to think that is accurate, especially for the times. Proving rape is never easy, even today.”

Rape
. The word landed hard between them. No one had used that word before without the
attempted
preceding it.

“So this entire time, for our entire
lives
,
he has been supporting this young woman? Out of guilt?”

“Out of fear of getting caught, more likely,” Clara snorted.

Andrew rubbed his nose with his hand and squinted as though lost in thought. His face paled, anger grew along his jaw as it tensed. “It means he’s definitely fucking guilty, Mom.”

“How could I not have
known
?” Joan’s voice reverberated around the room.

Bennie spoke more quietly. “The majority of sex offenders are very adept at living completely double lives. Most partners would never know, would never even suspect. Though I must emphasize that this is just an accusation — it hasn’t been proven.”

“Of course, of all the people in the world, he was just too smart, too, too charming. Who didn’t love George, right?” At this point she was standing up, pacing around them. Andrew shook his head back and forth.

“All this time I’ve been sticking by him, I’ve been
believing
him. What a fool! What a fucking fool! She was a child.”

Andrew spoke up. “Mom, it’s okay. Sit down. Let’s just finish this and process our emotions later.”

“Don’t talk down to your mother, honey,” said Clara. “She’s allowed to express her feelings.”

“Why didn’t Sarah press charges?” Andrew asked in a quieter voice. “Is it possible that the attraction was mutual? She was a teenager, right?”

Bennie actually chuckled at this. “The law is the law, Andrew. You can’t reconfigure this with your sexual liberation theory of law, or whatever. She was thirteen years old.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Andrew said. “I didn’t really mean that. I’m just … grasping at straws.”

“It is also possible that more victims will come forward, and you need to be prepared for this potentiality.”

Joan stood up quickly and marched back into George’s hospital room. He was asleep. The window blinds clicked against the glass, moved by the breeze from a heating vent. If Joan could’ve got away with it at that moment, she would have pressed one of the pillows to his face and held it still, in one swift silencing rage.

Instead, she fluffled up the pillows around his head, and underneath the wet, hardening thrum of rage she felt an immeasurable depth of sorrow at being abandoned. The only sign that love still resided within her and between them, fighting like a gasping bird to stay alive for one more second, lay in the fact that even now, she couldn’t do him physical harm, even though it was the closest she’d ever come to understanding the act of violence. This felt like the end of love.

She watched him breathe, knew his body would recover. But her George was dead.

IN THE FAMILY
room, she waited with Bennie, trying to fill out legal forms and talking to the prison warden, who had a way of addressing her as though she were in cahoots with her husband, or an imbecile. The suffering, stupid wife. She wanted to rip at his mottled face with her hands.

She called Sadie again, but it went straight to voice mail.

She tried to call Elaine, but she didn’t answer. Andrew tried as well, eventually giving up and driving back to Avalon Hills.

INSTEAD OF BEING
gentle with Joan, Clara was insistent that she be decisive. “What do you want me to do?” Joan asked her on the highway, cups of coffee between them. “You seem so clear. What should I do now? With this knowledge?”

“I want you to let go. I want you to just let him go for a while. It will be months until the trial. Show him the kind of consideration that he has shown you, which is exactly none.”

“You act as though I can just stop being married.”

“Uh, you can. You’re not Amish. But that’s not what I mean. I want you to accept the fact that none of this is in your control, and you cannot change what happened, and you have to start taking some steps towards ending your marriage.”

“I have accepted it. I have started to move on, by going back to work and going to a therapist, but the rest will be a slower process, and you are the one that is going to have to accept that.”

Clara lifted her coffee to her lips and the car hit a pothole, causing it to spill all over her sweater. She swore a string of curse words and then whipped the coffee cup out the window.