The Whole Golden World (20 page)

30

W
hen Dinah would reflect on this moment later, what would strike her was how short-lived the feeling of relief had been. Intense, but gone so fast it felt unreal, that hit of
Thank God
.

She'd been in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for a salad when the doorbell rang. She muttered a curse and took the knife with her to the door, intending to get rid of the salesman or evangelists and return to making dinner. The kids were going to be home soon from their practices and studying, and Joe had promised to actually turn up at dinner and skip the hockey game, even though the Arbor Valley Tigers were unbeaten so far.

When she approached the front door and saw the police car in the driveway, she began to tremble.

She'd locked the deadbolt as was her habit, and she fumbled for agonizing seconds trying to get the door open.

Not one, but two officers were on her doorstep.

“Mrs. Monetti?” they'd asked.

She could only manage to nod.

“It's about Morgan. She's fine, but—”

In this instant, relief flooded in so quickly she almost dropped the knife on her foot.

“—we need to talk to you about something that's happened. May we come in?”

Dread collected in a hard ball in her gut as she led the way inside soundlessly. One of the officers firmly suggested she put the knife away as they talked.

Dinah rejoined them in her living room. One officer sat on her old, broken-down couch with the soft cushions and had to perch at the edge so he did not tumble backward. The other officer had pulled in a kitchen chair to sit across the coffee table from Dinah.

“Morgan was discovered with one of her teachers in his car.”

Dinah said, “So what if she was in a car? Whose car?” It had been raining. She'd probably gotten a ride. “Where is she, anyway?”

“She's at the police station, Mrs. Monetti. She was in a state of undress.”

This was the phrase that upended her life.
A state of undress
. “What do you mean?”

The other officer cleared his throat. “She was not wearing any clothing from the waist up.”

Dinah put her hands to her face. “So he . . . attacked her? Who?”

“She has indicated to us that they were having a relationship. But it's not clear at this time exactly what the circumstances are.”

“Relationship? Which teacher?” she shouted, her voice shrill and painful to her own ears.

“A Mr. Thomas Hill. Her calculus teacher, as we understand. You should come down to the police station as well. Your daughter is not being charged with anything, but I imagine you'll want to speak to her and take her home once we've gotten her statement.”

As Dinah tried to find her coat, keys, and purse, she was already failing to recapture her first feeling of,
Thank God she's not dead.

“How is she?” she asked them, unable to find her coat where it belonged so she went without, braving the chilly February air. “Is she upset? Is she hurt?”

“She's not physically hurt,” the first officer said, the one who'd sat on the couch, as he led the way to the front door. “As for upset, I'd say it's more like belligerent.”

 

Dinah rounded the corner into a small room, nested inside a labyrinth of corridors all in a bureaucratic tan color. Morgan was sitting in a plastic chair at a table, arms folded tightly, her head tipped forward and her hair obscuring her face.

“Mo?”

Morgan rose and flung herself at her mother. “Mom! It's been awful! They're treating me like a criminal!”

“What's he done to you?” Dinah asked, holding her and stroking the back of her head.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” She tried to set Morgan back. They'd given her privacy to greet her daughter, but the walls of this room seemed thin and hopeless for private conversation. She glanced around for one of those big mirrors like on TV with the cops on the other side. There was none. “They said . . . they said you weren't wearing a top.”

“But he didn't do anything to me. He didn't hurt me.”

Dinah tipped her daughter's chin to get a close look at her face. “Wait a minute. He took your shirt off, but you call that not doing anything to you?”

“He didn't take it off, I did. I took it off. I keep telling them, he didn't hurt me or abuse me or attack me.”

Morgan looked right into her face with shining eyes and declared, “I'm in love with him.”

Dinah said the first thing she thought of: “That's insane.”

“It's not insane! It's just different. I know it got him in trouble. But we're in love.”

“Is that what he said? Did he say he loved you?”

Morgan flipped her hair back over her shoulder, chin raised. She immediately pulled her hair back forward over her face, across her scar.

“Yes. He said he loves me.”

“He couldn't possibly!”

“Because I'm a disgusting freak, is that why?”

“Because you're a kid! His student!”

“I'm almost eighteen! I'm mature for my age. Wise, remember?” She sneered. “An old soul?”

Dinah sank down into a chair and put her head in her hand. “Oh, my God.”

“What's so terrible? The age of consent in Michigan is sixteen. He'll get in trouble at work, but we'll figure something out.”

“You going to figure out his wife, too?”

Morgan lifted her chin a degree higher. “They're having problems.”

“I'll say they are.”

Morgan huffed. “I meant before, Mother. Problems that had nothing to do with me.”

Dinah shook herself out of her stunned stupor, stood back up, and took her daughter by the shoulders. She felt Morgan stiffen under her fingers, like when she was colicky as a baby and she'd tried to comfort her, only to have the infant Morgan shriek and go rigid with fury. Until this very moment, that had been the most difficult part of parenting her beautiful, honor student daughter. The first four months.

“Mo. He was taking advantage of you. He said he loved you, he told you that stuff about his wife, so he could get you to take your clothes off in his car.”

She yanked away from Dinah. “How do you know? You don't even know him.”

“Is that as far as it went? Taking off your top for him?”

The cop's word
relationship
echoed in her mind like the ringing of a gong as time slowed down before Morgan answered the question with one hand propped on her hip and her chin thrust forward.

“Of course not. We're lovers.”

 

Dinah had been afraid she might have to handcuff Morgan and stuff her in the backseat, the way she reacted at the police station to being told that despite the age of consent being sixteen, it was a crime for a teacher and his seventeen-year-old student to have a sexual relationship. TJ Hill was about to be arraigned in court.

As it was, Morgan was not speaking, curled up in a ball on the passenger side of the car, glowering at the dashboard.

At the police station, she'd started screaming she'd been tricked into talking to the police; she threw a chair over (much like Dinah had at that long-ago notorious teacher conference), and Dinah had all but tackled her to keep the police from having to intervene. From within Dinah's viselike grip, Morgan had shrieked that she was not going to cooperate ever again, that they'd have to throw her in jail first.

After assuring the police that Morgan would not harm herself—she'd seemed that hysterical—she finally led her daughter out to the car.

And the curtain of heavy silence descended.

Dinah struggled to think of how to tell Joe. He'd already texted her, wondering where she was and why dinner was half finished in the kitchen. She'd replied only
something has come up, be home ASAP
. This was not text-message-type news.

Dinah turned over the events of the last hours in her mind, while struggling to remember to drive.

“We're lovers,” Morgan had said, baldly, with something almost like pride, in fact. What bothered Dinah most was the verb tense.
We are lovers.
Not “we were” or “we made love once.”

Dinah had been told to expect a call from the prosecutor with more details, as she certainly wouldn't be getting any more information out of Morgan. The police had quickly obtained a search warrant and seized her cell phone and computer as evidence.

“Why did you do this?”

Without even looking, Dinah could feel her daughter's fury radiating like heat off a summer highway. Morgan didn't answer.

“Don't get me wrong, he's the sick bastard, here. But why did you let him do these things to you? Why didn't you come to us when he first . . . approached you?”

She stopped at a stoplight and turned just in time to see Morgan yank the door open and jump out of the car.

“Morgan! Shit.” Dinah punched the button for the hazard lights and leaped out herself, abandoning her running car, her purse, her cell phone, to chase her daughter along a grassy expanse in front of some office building. If any of the office drones chose to look up from their cubes, they'd catch quite an eyeful, Dinah thought, huffing along.

She caught up to Morgan and snagged her elbow, causing her to stumble briefly. Dinah caught her, flashing back this time to her unsteady toddler days.

Morgan flung her arms up and stepped back.

“Approached me,” Morgan repeated through panting breath, picking up the conversation as if she hadn't just leaped out of the car and run. “Like some molester with a van pretending to give me candy. I approached him, I'll have you know. Because your daughter has a mind of her own. Remember how damn smart I am? I got accepted to Boston U, by the way, not that it matters.”

Dinah reared back. “Why didn't you say you got accepted?”

“Because what does it matter if I can't go?”

“Is this revenge on us? Because of Boston?”

“Yes, Mother, I screwed my teacher because you won't let me go to the right school. My God, you're brilliant.”

Dinah clenched her fist until her nails bit the inside of her palm. Where had her Mo gone? She didn't even know this furious, haughty girl.

“You've ruined your life!” Dinah cried.

“What you mean is that I've ruined yours. You can no longer claim to be the good mother, now that all three of your kids are fucked up.”

“This isn't about me!”

“Well, that would be a first, then.”

Dinah felt hot tears on her face. “Just get back in the car,” she said, hating the pleading in her voice, but realizing whatever control over Morgan she ever thought she had was long gone now. In carrying on an affair with a married teacher, Morgan had officially declared she no longer gave a damn what any of them thought.

“Whatever,” Morgan spat, stomping past her.

Dinah followed behind, making sure Morgan was actually heading to the car, wondering what in the hell she would do if Morgan flagged down some other vehicle, a truck or something, and hopped in, disappearing forever. Nothing seemed impossible anymore.

 

Joe's face in that moment would be something Dinah would never be able to erase from her mind.

He'd gone pale, yet ruddy splotches stood out on his cheeks so starkly Dinah thought he'd broken into hives. Then his face gradually morphed from pained horror into murderous anger. Dinah was glad TJ Hill was nowhere in reach or there would be literal blood on Joe's hands.

Morgan had bolted out of the car before Dinah had even brought the car to a full stop, run upstairs, and slammed her way into her room.

Dinah had come in and ordered the boys to make a frozen pizza, then dragged Joe downstairs to his den. She made him sit in his swivel chair and then leaned on the edge of his desk and gave him the news that would devastate him beyond measure, and in that moment she felt her first burst of bitter anger at Morgan for putting them through this.

She scolded herself:
Be mad at the teacher. He's the aggressor here, no matter what Morgan believes.

“If he were here, I'd punch him until he was dead.”

“I know” was all Dinah could think to say.

“How could she do this? I mean, literally, how was it possible . . . ?” Joe put his head in his hands.

Dinah looked up at the drop ceiling, running through the last several weeks in her mind. She had no timeline of events yet. She realized with a chill that it could have been going on for months now.

“We trusted her,” Dinah answered. “We didn't check up on her comings and goings. If she said, ‘I'm going to Britney's house,' we said, ‘Okay, hon, have a good time.' Kids lie for each other all the time.”

Joe murmured, “But she posted on Facebook about being with her friends . . .”

“So,” Dinah answered drily. “So they made it up.”

“Not Morgan. I don't understand how Morgan . . .”

“Me either. She denied it, but I think she's getting back at us for Boston.”

“But . . . this? Of all the ways to rebel . . . You said he's being charged?”

“Right. Age of consent is sixteen, but there's an exception for teacher-student affairs. I guess Morgan told them all about it before she realized that part.”

Joe groaned, now tipping back in his chair. “Oh, Christ. It's gonna be on the news.”

“The cops said the news won't name her, she's the victim of a sexual crime, and they don't do that.”

Joe snorted. “So what? This is Arbor Valley, and she's the assistant principal's daughter. Like everyone won't know in about five minutes. I'm ruined, you know.”

“Joe . . .”

“I'm not gonna get the principal job. I'll be lucky if I don't get fired. A teacher-student affair under my nose, and it's my own damn daughter. This is it. The end.” He threw up his hands. “All that money for grad school tuition. I might as well have set fire to it.”