The Child (22 page)

“I think my way would work.”

“I thought you wanted to win,” Hockey said. “I thought you wanted to know what it was like to win.”

“Not that badly.”

“Then,” he said softly, “you will never win.”

 

Eva found herself walking down the street with her stuff. She hadn’t gone through a process of deciding to leave and saying good-bye. She hadn’t laid out all the possibilities and thought through their consequences. She just did it.

She did what Mary would have done.

At the corner she felt scared, regret. But by the time she got to the subway, she had another idea.

That night when she got home to her empty apartment, Eva wrote a minimum balance check of $250 to MasterCard. Then she cried. She talked out loud to Mary for a while, like she would have if Mary were in the tub. Then she said the word
“Mom?”
She had a cup of tea and dialed Mary’s number. It was the machine. She left a message.

“This isn’t fair. I love you. If we can talk, everything will be okay.”

But there was no response.

The next day Hockey rode the Amtrak to meet with District Attorney Bernard South. This was his chance to plea bargain for David. Dave had not cried on the phone; he was too doped up by the prison shrinks to respond. The guy was a suicide risk, and Hockey wished they’d just let him do it. Get it over with. But they would rather watch a man squirming on the meat hook. They couldn’t let him get off as easily as death unless they were the ones who imposed it. Hockey’s own prognosis was quite the opposite: he was being sentenced to life by lethal injection.

He wore his best work suit and set his notes on the train’s plastic folding tray. When he got back he would buy more clothes. Barney’s. That was the place to shop. He’d heard the name enough. He’d go in and buy three suits, no matter what they cost. It was a promise. Hockey took out his pill dispenser and swallowed four white tablets, two blue capsules, three orange pills, and emptied some powder into a bottle of Evian. Then he took a red pill and a red capsule and three yellow pills. Then he looked at his notes. These were the treats he had brought with him on the train.

It was clear to Hockey that the protease inhibitors had kicked in again, and he was back at the gym on a regular basis. His arrogance was also back. He was the boss again, and no one was ever going to forget it. Now he was finally angry. Angry that some force had dared to threaten to take his life away, just like it had taken away Jose’s. Hockey had always secretly suspected that an early death could never happen to him, and now he was sure. Deep down, as much
as he loved and grieved Jose with every breath, he had somewhere considered that Jose was more vulnerable than he was, and that’s why Jose died. The train stopped at Hastings.

Jose was so sweet. He had been dead for years now, but Hockey had never put away his clothing, never dismantled Jose’s altars or given away his shoes. He still had everything placed in the apartment right where Jose had placed it. He’d never bought anything new. Hockey had thought he was going to die, too, and that this was to have been the entirety of his life. Now, however, he was sure he was not going to die, so he resolved to get rid of Jose’s stuff, but he couldn’t. There were events that had taken place against these settings, engraved on his body like DNA. They represented his real life, his life with Jose, the only time he had not felt alone. The person who had the decency to stand up for him, to be for him, no matter what anyone would think. How could Hockey ever put that in a box? Then it would end. Forever. And he would be back in the world of strangers. At least Hockey’s HIV was the same genetic material as Jose’s. The merging of their molecules or paramecia or whatever. It was their child.

The train stopped at Poughkeepsie.

Hockey was alive now, and the person he owed the most to was dead. Nothing. He was not grateful for being alive. No one had handed it to him on a silver platter, life. His lover was dead. For that he was supposed to be grateful? No way.

He was a very lonely man. He wanted to have friends, but it was hard to find the ones who would listen with compassion. Most wanted to tell him how to feel and what to do. Some were so afraid of his suffering that they couldn’t bear to know the truth of it. They tried to control what he would say. If he told the truth about how
he really felt, they would cut him off. They didn’t want to hear it. Some wanted to pretend that nothing bad had happened. “That’s all behind us now.” Never being uncomfortable was more important than the truth of Hockey’s life.

At times he found himself starting to adjust, slightly. Starting to peek into what his life might now be like. And waiting there in his future each time was the lovely face of his sweet Jose. The thought of learning how to live without him was a whole new obstacle. Dying without Jose was hard enough, but living? Hockey wasn’t prepared. It meant his worst suffering was before him. It would always be in front of him. It lined the path to his future. His future was strewn with death, fear of death, absence, fear of absence, incredible pain, incredible discomfort, Hickmans, pills, torturous treatments, unpredictable diarrhea, adjusting his fucking medication, side effects, malfunctioning organs, fatigue, emaciation, terrible skin problems, wasting in his face, fat in his gut, rashes, shingles, mollusks that had to be frozen off his cheeks, rashes on his dick, terrible itching skin, so much depression he couldn’t get into the bathtub. Today he felt good, except for the diarrhea. But all that pain formed his psyche. The past was his destiny. Why wouldn’t anyone else let him say so?

Every night when Hockey came home, he came home to some familiar remnant of Jose. It had all become so codified that those remnants now were Jose. Jose did not exist, so no new evidence that he had ever existed would ever be created. That’s why the merest shifting of a shoe destroyed the evidence. It was forensic.

Hockey couldn’t wait to take his pills. He loved leaving his office, going to the gym, having sex in the steam room, going home and taking his pills. He loved sitting in the familiar chair in his
familiar house, the house where he had spent the best days of his life. The most horrifying. The days that lay before him.

The train arrived at Van Buren, New York.

Kevin Bart was an enormous, blobby, emotional wreck. He was so suburban, beefy, and emblematic that Hockey could see the bad pop music, and the after-work Jell-O shots. His fear made him that transparent. The rest of the fellows were a bit more upsetting.

There were the two guys from the FBI who never said a word. There was David, pasty and disoriented. He was sweating at the table in his orange prison jumpsuit, hands and waist manacled. He seemed to Hockey like a cinematic child molester. He looked like a child, but he was a man. He had that effeminate pudginess that prison food produced in certain kinds of clients. It made them unsympathetic to others. Stew was also at the table.
So tiny, this kid
. Hockey was surprised at how small and thin he was. A runt.
Too small for his age.
It made David look even more like a child molester, having the two of them there in the room. Then there was Bethany. She had obviously coked up in the bathroom; the blood vessels in her nostrils were flaring. And Stew’s parents. Like anyone anywhere. Distressed, uncomprehending, absolutely unequipped to deal with anything complicated or real.

Hockey’s job was to blame everything on Bart. Nobody else could handle the responsibility, and Hockey had long ago learned that in court, as in life, you have to blame the person who can shoulder the blame. It makes it easier for others to go along with it. Blame the strong if you can’t get the guilty. The justice system is not about justice; it’s about order. If punishing the true perpetrator will create disorder, no one will go along with it. Kevin Bart’s back
was big enough for this burden. He’d get over it. He was young. He could get a second career in real estate.

“We expect you to drop all charges,” Hockey said.

“Don’t be absurd.” That was the district attorney, Bernard South.

This was a pretrial hearing attended by all parties, where each tried to reframe the paradigm, to restate the terms to their own advantage. Hockey was here to make sure David’s case never went to trial. Child molesters don’t do well with jury trials, and child molesters of child killers don’t do well in front of nervous elected judges and newspaper reporters. He was there to blame the state. Bethany was there to blame David or the state. The state was there to fry two fags, but if they could be satisfied with only one, Hockey’s job was to make sure it was the kid, not David, his client.

“Let’s face it,” Hockey said. “The biggest hole in the state’s argument is that you coerced a minor into participating in the prosecution’s case against David. A coerced confession is not admissible in the courtroom. No point in pretending that it is.”

So far, so good. That was the truth and everyone there knew it.

“Your Honor,” Bethany piped up. She had a nice voice. Melodic, an alto, it was comforting, “I expect you to remove criminal charges against my client, Stewart Mulcahey, and remand him to a state mental institution. The boy was molested by a vicious predator, which caused him untold duress. Incarceration would be inappropriate in this case. He needs hospitalization and care.”

“Don’t be absurd, both of you. I can’t drop any of these charges. It’s too high profile and you both know it. These two men are going to trial.”

The judge was scared. Hockey’s job was to make him more
scared.

“Excuse me, Judge,” Hockey smiled. He was on a roll and feeling great. “Counselor Bliss is right on one point. David was charged based on a coerced confession obtained by Lieutenant Bart that was not psychiatrically endorsed. Bart is required by law to have the approval of a therapist in such matters, and he did not. That makes the confession invalid, and I think that is obvious to all parties.”

“It was my professional judgment,” Bart slurped. He was going down fast.

“That Stew could handle the emotional stress?” Bethany was incredulous. She could get work on the soaps. “I don’t believe that’s your profession, Lieutenant. Especially since Stewart resisted your attempt to install a tracking device.”

It looked good. One point for David.

“We have an expert witness.” Bethany was giving a great performance. She combined femininity and competence. Played both ways. “He’s ready to testify that oftentimes a child, like Stewart, is just not emotionally ready to confront a predator.”

Hockey had to nip this one in the bud right away. Especially that word
child
.

“Well, we have an expert witness from the National Center for Protection of Juveniles ready to testify that some teenagers who are engaged in relationships with older men may not share the same values as detectives.”

This was his strategy. To neutralize whenever possible, play the middle ground. That was the problem with people like Eva. She was great when someone got their food stamps cut off; then you have to cat-fight. But when your client faces a long jail term, manipulation, deception, and lying were necessary. There was no National Center
for the Protection of Juveniles. There was a National Center for the Protection of Children, which had refused to offer an amicus in this case. They don’t defend pederasts. But Bernard South didn’t need to know that.

“Let me add,” Brittany continued, as though Hockey didn’t exist, “that the social service department of Van Buren Township exhibited profound incompetence and let down both Stewart and the Mulcahey family, paving the way for this terrible tragedy.”

“Completely untrue,” warbled the lawyer from the state mental health agency, Gloria Inzunatto. “Everything was determined to be normal. You’ve read the social worker’s report. There was no indication that Stew had any psychological problems. He passed the examination with flying colors.”

“Well,” Hockey rebounded. “
We
’ve got an expert witness, a psychiatrist, Dr. Miriam Goldberg. She will testify that teenagers engaged in consensual relationships with adults may not share the vindictiveness that intergenerational relationships create in parents and other adults.”
Uh-oh
, he’d faltered. He’d repeated that phrase
may not share
. It made him look like he was running out of ammo.

“Let me tell you something right now, Mr. Notkin.” South was frothing over that one. “You bring in a gay psychiatrist from New York to testify that it’s okay for boys to have sex with pedophiles, and you’re going to lose this case. Your client is going away, and I mean no parole.”

“Dr. Goldberg is married, Your Honor, and the fact that Stewart had a relationship with a forty-year-old man shows that he was struggling with his sexual identity.”

“That’s ridiculous, Counselor.” Bethany was laughing on cue.
“Stewart cannot legally consent to pedophilia.”

She had a big point there, technically.

“By imposing adult sensibilities on a fifteen-year-old,” Hockey said, unsure about this one, “the state was inadvertently adding to his difficulties.”

“Adults
are
the state,” South said. “No compromise.”

Bethany beamed. The girl was a real brat. She must have been a cheerleader in high school. “Stew’s parents begged the local social worker to remove him to juvenile detention, but the state refused.”

“It was his professional judgment.” Judge South was weakening. Why?

“That Stew could handle the distress?” Hockey was on Bethany’s team now. “I don’t think so. Stew’s relationship with Dave was the happiest thing in his life. His family didn’t want him. He’s gay. Other gay people are his family.”
Goddammit, Eva
. The Mulcaheys didn’t flinch. They were comatose.