The Journey Prize Stories 21 (24 page)

In the beginning, I tried to do the right thing. I'd usher our ragged family back to the house from the latest ordeal with the god-like Dr. Arnold. We'd throw in the
Land Before Time
video for Becky, and Lora would go into the bathroom to scrub away the hospital stink, and I'd move from room to room, fixing the sticky window and cracked tiles, rechecking the furnace filter, re-sorting the paint cans under the stairs. I'd grind the coffee beans when the church people arrived, bow my head and wait silently when they offered their prayers, hold back Becky's hair when she vomited into the pail. Throughout
it all, I'd keep saying to Lora, over and over, “Becky's gonna be okay; we're gonna be okay.”

That was in the beginning. Lora finally told me to shut up and spare her my empty, godless assurances. I felt relieved to not have to speak the words. After that, we spent our days dancing around the elephant, waiting for night, barely clinging to respectability until Becky had been tucked away. Then we came together like animals, my wife and me, clenching and pounding and clawing through the darkness. I did nothing to stop it. I let the anger wash over me like a scalding shower, not much caring if I tore her in two. In the mornings, Lora dressed in the closet behind the closed door so I wouldn't see her purpled skin.

When Officer Jarvis and I got back to the parking lot the other cop stood post by the police cruiser, arms crossed, yawning. The pervert slumped in the back seat. I walked up to the car and glared through the glass at his sweaty face. A blood-soaked gauze square had been taped to the gash above his right ear. He stared past my hip at the camera swinging below Jarvis's fist. Then he put his unshackled hands to his face and rocked back and forth. I almost felt pity. Not for the man, but for what a man can be reduced to.

Jarvis handed me a pen and a clipboard and told me to use the cruiser's hood for a desk. She said I should write down everything from when I first saw the suspect to when she and her partner showed up. “Stick to the facts,” she warned. “Leave your emotions out of this.”

I stared at the form for a long time, emotionless, trying to remember the facts. We wanted to give Becky everything. That was a fact. But when that wasn't enough, we brought her to the ocean instead. Lora and I set up camp on the beach, closer to the water than the rest. “Look, Becky, look at the huge waves.” We watched as our daughter listlessly filled her pail with the heavy, wet sand. “Where are the shells, Michael?” Lora kept asking. “There's just these tiny broken bits that could be anything. Washed up cardboard pieces or oyster turds.”

“I'll get rid of the lunch garbage.” I walked away from them, turning back once. I remember trying to muster a little enthusiasm for Lora's sake, making some stupid remark about blowing up the beach ball, a soccer game, girls against boys. Lora nodded absently, not taking her eyes off Becky.

The cameraman stood beyond the garbage cans. Click. Click. Click. I thought maybe it was dolphins, or a pelican skimming the water's surface, so I turned around too. That's when I saw what he saw. I was overcome by such a profound and utter misery my knees buckled out from under me. The top of Becky's head was as smooth as a snow globe, her stick of a leg needle-bruised from knee to thigh. Click. Click. Click. She could have been a war refugee, a skeleton child with an unspeakable past. Lora kept thrashing Becky's bathing suit with her open palm, as though it were filled with stinging bees and if she just kept pummelling, she could kill them all. Click. Slap. Click. Slap.

I scribbled out the story about my chasing the bastard. First we ran here, and then we ran there. I left out the part about my needing to run away from that scene on the beach.

Officer Jarvis read over my account while her partner leaned
into the car door and examined the group of bikinied girls that had gathered a few cars down. Jarvis must have been satisfied, because she initialled the statement and told me to go back to my family. Before she let me go, she folded at the waist and looked down at my congealing toes. “Get that checked out,” she ordered. “You should probably get a tetanus shot. No telling what you stepped on.”

Then she flicked a dismissive wrist at her partner and they both got in the car and drove away with the pervert in the back.

By the time I limped back to the beach, Lora was frantic. Becky had fallen asleep in her arms under the shade of the rented beach umbrella. Where had I disappeared to? How could I just leave them like that? What happened to my foot for God sakes?

I stuck to the facts, while Lora's eyes darted back and forth looking for terrible things against the concrete wall that held back the road. Then we packed up the umbrella and the towels and pails and the ball-still-in-its-bag and trudged through the tunnel and back to our motel.

Lora wanted me to go to emergency for my foot, but I couldn't face another hospital, so we stayed in our shabby room the rest of the day. She filled the bathtub and I soaked my foot until the yellow water turned pink, and then she wrapped my toes in overpriced gauze strips from the motel's gift shop. We ordered takeout Chinese that came in those house-shaped cardboard boxes you see on
TV
. Becky ate part of a dumpling. We threw the rest away.

“I want to go home, Michael,” Lora whispered. “There's no hope here.” Our daughter lay between us on the motel bed, oblivious to the ocean we'd brought her to on the other side of the closed curtains.

Becky slept the entire flight home and all through that night too. The next morning she wolfed down a man-sized heap of Shreddies. Dr. Arnold told us this might happen and that it would be a good sign. When Becky held out her bowl for more, Lora kissed her forehead and said, natural-like, “Sure sweetie. Of course. As much as you want,” as if her asking was a regular thing. But when Lora tried to pour the milk, her fingers shook so badly I had to cover her hand with mine and steer the carton to the bowl.

I couldn't bear that scene – my daughter asking for more, like a normal kid, my wife wanting so badly to pour life back into her she was trembling like a bird. I left them in the kitchen and climbed into my truck and drove past every house in the neighbourhood. I couldn't think of where else to go, so I headed to the job-site. I was supposed to be at the beach, taking care of my family. Nobody expected me back for days. But then that's the thing, isn't it? Life's surprises. Nobody expected to find monsters under the bed either, waiting to prey on their little girls.

“We're not out of the woods yet,” Dr. Arnold told us. This was at our last consultation. “But I'm optimistic,” he added at the end. Sneering, I thought. Lora said it's just the way his
mouth moves when he tries to smile. I suppose I should feel grateful to the man. But he makes it sound like we've been on a camping trip together, sharing the same tent. Who is he to think he can dole out hope like ice cream scoops? When I picture all the times his rough, clammy hands have been on my daughter, poking and prodding, oblivious to her tears, I want nothing more than to punch him in the mouth.

But hope is slippery. Becky's grown an inch these past few months, the top of her new reddish curls reaching the sixth ladybug on her growth chart. I'm afraid to blink in case I miss something.

Lora hasn't confessed to her church about the wasted there-and-back airfare. I haven't confessed to Lora either. She has no idea about the kind of thoughts that were chasing me on that beach and ever since. My wife believes I'm a man she can count on. I've overheard her tell her friends as much when she's talking on the phone.

A few weeks after we got back from our trip, she sent a card to Preacher Danny, which we both signed. He posted the note on the vestibule's bulletin board. She wrote:
We can't thank you enough for your prayers. Your generous gift gave our family God's ocean
. She says God will forgive her for omitting the details.

Officer Jarvis says it's all in the details. The pervert was a city worker, a member of the Coconut Creek Scratch Bowling League. His digital images were just a low-grade ranking of kiddy bum shots and side views. There were twenty-two such pictures on his memory stick – no coercion or enticement or
children posed in sexual acts. There was no proof of distribution, either, nothing to warrant more than a slap on the wrist from the pornography police.

I should have thought to kill him when I had the chance. I have this weird little recurring daydream where he hangs himself in his wife's laundry room. It comforts me, his dangling head swinging back and forth inside mine.