The Whole Golden World

by Kristina Riggle

  She felt a quick dart of hope when Morgan seemed to shift under the light weight of her hand on her hip, during the pause between songs, but then she stilled again, and this time the sound that came out was loud and screechy.

  She doubted Morgan could hear her, but she said it anyway, “I’m here when you’re ready to talk,” and squeezed her hip lightly.

  There was the smallest motion as Morgan flinched under her mother’s touch.

  She stopped in next to check on the boys, who were in their room. Connor was playing some Star Wars game. Jared had a jigsaw puzzle half formed on a sticky mat on the carpet. It had been a while since she’d seen that old hobby resurface. Dinah had gotten so excited when he started showing interest in something not digital that she fairly buried him in puzzles until he groaned whenever he saw one.

  “Hey, Mom,” Connor said, grumbling as his ship or whatever blew up.

  “Hey, Mom,” Jared said, yawning and turning a puzzle piece around and around in his hand. His pant legs had bunched toward his knees, which looked hairier, more manlike, than she’d remembered.

  She never could notice a milestone of growth without part of her winging back to the NICU and their sparrowlike bodies splayed under the bright lights, and her heart would blossom with wonder and gratitude that they’d survived at all.

  Is it any wonder she was protective of them? Jared with this awkward, shuffling gait and Connor with his shifting moods and struggle in school? Neither one seemed to have an ounce of natural social grace, blurting into conversations and offending the other kid with some joke that in their heads was terribly funny.

  “Can I talk to you guys for a minute?” Dinah asked.

  Connor shrugged and put his game controller down. Jared glanced up, looking bored within an inch of his life.

  Dinah sat cross-legged between the two.

  “Are things okay for you? At school right now? Or are you getting hassled?”

  Connor perched on the futon and pulled his knees up to his chest. “Well, I’ve told everyone if they say one word about my sister around me, I’m ramming their head into the wall. And I think they pretty much believe me, so no one says anything to me.”

  “Connor . . .” Dinah began.

  Jared shrugged. “My friends are cool. They don’t talk crap about her.”

  Dinah persisted. “But what about other kids?”

  Jared shrugged. “There are no other kids. No one talks to me but like three people, so. No problem.”

  Dinah slumped, defeated. She knew they had to be aware of the whispers, pointed fingers from kids—even teachers—saying, “That’s one of the brothers.”

  “I’m really sorry, guys,” she said.

  Connor scowled. “What are you sorry for? You didn’t do it. You, like, can’t control everything, Mom. It’s like apologizing for the weather.”

  “It’s a sympathy-sorry, hon,” Dinah said, though it hadn’t been, not really. Someday they might have kids of their own and know what it was like to feel responsible for their every move.

  She sighed and got up to leave them. They closed the door behind her, and Dinah hoped they were confiding in each other, at least.

  Downstairs in the office, she found Joe, flushed with his third beer of the night, laptop in his lap, with one eye on March Madness highlights. He was in an old sweatshirt, which strained across his stomach these days, and a pair of jeans that hadn’t seen the light of day since their Internet came in through a screechy dial-up modem.

  “How are things going with you,” she asked, as he clicked something on the computer and made the screen go dark . . . too hastily, she thought. “What were you reading?”

  “Nothing. Sports stuff.”

  The outraged crowd on the television groaned over something, the timing oddly comical to Dinah, because it sounded to her like not even the basketball fans believed Joe.

  “You should really go up and talk to Morgan.”

  Joe snorted. “She won’t talk to me. And why should she? I’m not exactly Father of the Year.”

  “You’re right that she won’t talk to you, but she has to see you try. She has to see that you care.”

  “Of course I care, she’s my daughter and . . .” He cleared his throat and shifted on the couch, setting the laptop on the coffee table. “I’ll go up later. I will.”

  She sat on the other end of the couch. “How is it at the school?” she asked quietly, looking down at her own sock feet, which she drew up next to her. She and Joe had barely spoken about Morgan after that first tearful night when they tried to determine when and where she had managed to have an affair under their noses.

  “How do you think? It’s horrible.” Sounded like hah-rible. “No one will look at me. No one will talk to me. I told you already about that lovely conversation with Pete Jackson, asking how I didn’t pick up on this. He was pretending to ask as a principal supervising an employee, but I knew what he really meant. How the hell didn’t I control my own daughter?”

  “That is such bullshit. It’s not Morgan who needed controlling, it’s that pervert teacher’s dick.”

  “Some control over our daughter would have been nice.”

  “Don’t you start, too.”

  “What? You think it wouldn’t have been a good idea to check in on her once in a while when she said she was gonna be someplace? In hindsight, anyways? Geez, Dinah, not even you are that blind.”

  “Not even me? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means your whole life you have made excuses for all the kids. And until just now, it looked like you were one for three, anyway, with Morgan the perfect kid. But it doesn’t look that way anymore.”

  “Oh, so this is my fault now? First, Morgan’s exploitation was her own fault, and now it’s mine? How about you? You worked with that teacher, you hired him for God’s sake. You put him in that job, in that class. You mean to say nothing he’s ever done in the past hinted at this kind of thing? No one ever complained he was overly flirty? He never showed inappropriate interest in a pretty girl before? And as for Morgan, I’m not the only parent in the house, or at least I’m not supposed to be.”

  “No, he did not have a history of fucking his students, or I think I might have thought twice about hiring him, darling. Thanks for the support. You know I could lose my job over this.”

  “Oh, stop thinking the worst,” Dinah blurted. “You always act like the worst is going to happen.”

  “The worst is happening! Right now!”

  He slammed his beer down on the end table, and the dregs fizzed as if in protest.

  Joe stomped past her toward the stairs.

  Dinah stood up and started after him. “Joe, wait . . .” she began, though she didn’t know what she planned to say. He made a shooing gesture with his hand behind him, as if waving off a wasp. Dinah slumped back onto the couch.

  The laptop was in her line of sight. With shaky hands, Dinah started it back up and checked the browser history.

  It was Morgan’s Facebook page.

  Post after post, people were calling her a slut, whore, and worse.

  Dinah swallowed down bile and then she saw Ethan’s name. He’d written: Morgan is hurting and confused right now, and you people are all pathetic assholes.

  Underneath his post was a barrage of insults, and kids accusing him of being in love with her, and informing him of what she was doing with her teacher when his back was turned. Dinah clicked on Ethan’s name and found that the abuse continued onto his page. She didn’t see Morgan’s other friends anywhere in the cyber assault, on either side . . . Not Kelly’s daughter, Britney, supposedly so loyal; not Nicole, who had covered for her. Nicole’s mother had in fact left Dinah a blistering voice mail about her daughter being interviewed by the police—interrogated, she’d claimed—so maybe Nicole had been forbidden from ever interacting with Morgan again.

  Dinah went back to Morgan’s page and noticed that many of the people posting had profiles created just within the last few da
ys. Fake profiles, no doubt. She could click to report them, but the real kids could just create new fake profiles.

  She was relieved Morgan hadn’t been online to see any of this. Her last post, Dinah noticed, was the day before the rendezvous in the car when all she’d typed was: “So confused.” Had Dinah looked? Had she even noticed her daughter’s post and thought to ask about it?

  How long had Joe been stalking his daughter’s profile and wallowing in this garbage?

  Dinah could fix this small thing, at least, if nothing else. She only had to try a few times to guess Morgan’s password, and then she logged in as her daughter and deleted the profile. Morgan would just have to start fresh, sometime in the future, when all this was a distant, nauseating memory.

  35

  Rain couldn’t stop touching the top of her waist, where it strained against her jeans. She was dimly aware of sitting in a lawyer’s office, next to her husband, to discuss defending him against charges of a sex crime against his student.

  That fact did not seem as real as the actual swelling of her belly, the first she’d ever experienced in all her years of dreaming up a baby. She was assuring herself again and again that the baby was indeed still there.

  She did it so often that TJ interrupted Alexandra to ask sharply, “Are you okay?”

  Rain clasped her hands and tried to bring herself back into the room.

  Alex smiled tightly at Rain, by way of, “Let’s move along, shall we?” and resumed her speech. “It seems the most difficult piece for us to address will be the text messages. You’re going to have to explain these to me, TJ.”

  Alex looked down at the papers in her hands, elongating her elegant profile. Behind her, out the windows of the closest thing Arbor Valley had to a high-rise, Rain glimpsed ducks paddling in one of those fake office-park ponds meant to serve as both drainage and “water feature.”

  TJ cleared his throat. “I was trying not to set her off. Trying to let her down easy.”

  Alex tipped back in her office chair and tapped a pencil against her chin. “Doesn’t sound like letting ‘down’ here. I mean, listen: ‘Miss you.’ Seriously, TJ? And ‘Will have house to self Friday night.’ Come on.”

  “Hey, I thought you were on my side.”

  “Of course. Which means I have to look at this like a prosecutor might, so I can punch holes in it. And I guarantee you, Henry did a victory lap around his office when these turned up.”

  Rain interrupted, “He feels bad enough.”

  “Feeling bad or good is not the issue here. It’s not going to feel good to be on trial. I can’t soft-pedal this if we want to win. Now. Back to the issue. TJ, if you’re telling me that these text messages were meant to deflect her, and keep her from freaking out, that’s what we’ll work with. What I’m envisioning here is basically telling the jury you were stupid and naive but not a sex criminal. Again, not fun to hear, but unless you want to spend your baby’s day of birth in prison and your life on the sex offenders list, you’ll just have to live with it. Next issue,” Alex continued, looking down at her legal pad. “Our cross-examination, if she takes the stand.”

  “If?” TJ asked, seeming to brighten. “She might not?”

  “I understand that she’s not the most cooperative witness, based on courthouse gossip and reading between the lines of the police report; she had quite a story to tell at first, then she clammed up at some point. She’s on the witness list, naturally, but her unsworn statement to the police is inadmissible hearsay. I’m actually feeling pretty good about this. If Henry doesn’t call her, then his evidence is thin. If he does, I’ll be able to rattle her during cross, and my bet is that her story will fall apart. I’ve seen this before, when witnesses, especially young witnesses, are confronted with the judge on the bench, the jury staring at them, the audience, the lights, the swearing on the Bible . . . She could very well go to pieces in front of us. I mean, she made up an affair; that’s not exactly the behavior of a stable girl.”

  Rain felt like she was watching a lawyer on a television show. She glanced at TJ, and he looked stricken. Rain frowned into her lap. Wasn’t this good news? That their evidence was flimsy?

  Alex continued, “Honestly, I’m not sure why Henry is pushing to go to trial on this, unless it’s some personal vendetta to hang you out to dry, or he’s trying to score points to get elected next year. That plea deal he offered was a joke, given his so-called evidence. It will be painful going to trial, but this has got reasonable doubt written all over it.”

  TJ groaned as if in pain. Rain reached for him, but his chair was just a little too far away.

  Alex dropped her severe tone and tilted her head. The effort to look sincere came off as preprogrammed. “Look, don’t worry. The situation could change as we learn more. Hell, the girl could recant any day. Public opinion hasn’t been kind to her, either.”

  TJ shifted in his seat and raked his hands through his hair. Rain stared hard at him, trying to understand why TJ had barely looked at her during the whole meeting.

  On the way home, Rain felt so tired in the passenger seat she thought TJ would have to pour her out of the car. And she was supposed to go to work now, and preach “ohm” and chakras to the neighborhood mommies in their cute yoga pants. Gran used to praise Rain for her strength, but Rain always knew better. Real strength is innate. What she had was a finely honed, oft-practiced ability to fake it.

  Dizziness swam up around her and Rain cracked the window, as TJ drove white knuckled down the highway.

  “Stop,” she muttered, clutching her stomach. “Got to . . .”

  TJ finally heard her, and pulled over, but it was nearly too late when Rain opened the door without getting out and vomited onto the side of the road. She fumbled for her bottle of water and TJ handed it to her. She was breathing into her abdomen, spitting out water, and working to steady herself before she fainted right out of the car. She felt the car rock and heard the road noise change as TJ got out of his side, and Rain was briefly afraid he’d walk off and leave her. Hitchhike away somewhere and vanish.

  Alexandra had been prepared to argue that the baby was a reason TJ wasn’t a flight risk, but Rain had asked her not to mention it in open court unless she had no other choice. She did not want her pregnancy, her innocent fetus, dragged into the gossip mill; she had already been strategizing courtroom outfits that might conceal her pregnancy without looking so much like maternity clothes. Billowy maxi dresses were in fashion; that was a help.

  The whole blissful experience, so long hoped and prayed for—irrevocably tainted.

  When her mother called to talk about a baby shower, Rain had laughed. Who would come?

  TJ crouched down in her peripheral vision. “You okay, babe?”

  And the dizziness receded. His presence alone seemed to ground her. She met his eyes, which seemed dark and shrunken in their hollows. He might have lost weight. All those insomniac hours on the elliptical, not to mention his diet had consisted mainly of beer since his brief jail experience, which he refused to discuss.

  She cleared her throat and gave him a weak smile. It was time to rally for TJ. He needed her as much as anyone ever had.

  Rain had almost shaken off her morning’s experience—both the attorney and the highway sickness—when she crossed the threshold of NYC to find Beverly shooting her a look of kind commiseration that also bore a slight head tilt of pity.

  Rain looked away and tried to pass Beverly to ready herself for her class.

  Beverly blocked her path. “I’m worried about you. Let’s talk. Please.”

  Rain, resigned, followed Beverly into a small room in the back of NYC that Beverly used for private lessons and small, three-person yoga classes for the teachers themselves. There was still a ballet barre and mirror from the building’s former incarnation as a dance studio. Unlike the main studio, which looked out over a shimmering inland lake, this room had mirrors, and Rain was confronted with her reflection. Beverly was always saying she was going to drape the mi
rrors with cloth: Preoccupation with the physical form was a distraction from mindful practice, she liked to say.

  Rain would have been thrilled with covered mirrors so she could look at something else besides the floor, Beverly’s face, or her own reflection.

  “I’m going to warm up,” Rain announced, “while we talk. I have class soon.”

  “Sure,” Beverly said, as if Rain had asked permission. “Maybe I will, too. Why not.”

  Rain took in a deep breath and exhaled through the back of her throat, ujjayi pranayama, and folded into a forward bend. Her hamstrings were tight. She rode the tide of her breath back upward, sweeping her arms out in wide arcs, meeting in a prayer position at her chest. She was facing the mirror, to avoid facing Beverly head-on. Her friend’s forehead was wrinkled, and she was making pitying puppy-dog eyes. Rain tried to soften her own facial expression and felt her whole self relax. How long had she been walking around all knotted up like this?

  Beverly was in tree pose with one foot against her other thigh, knee stuck out sideways.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “Forgive me for asking, but . . . What does TJ have to say about all this?”

  Rain considered her answer. “That he was stupid for trying to handle it himself.” Swooping down, Rain spoke into her own shins. “But he was trying to avoid this very thing.”

  “Handle what for himself?”

  Deep breath in, rising up. “Her sick infatuation. He was afraid of this, and it happened. He said the other day he wished he’d gotten fat and homely like his college roommate . . .”

  “Yes, the poor handsome devil.”

  The smirk in Beverly’s voice grated over Rain’s newly relaxed mind, and she tensed again. She abandoned the forward fold and stepped back into downward-facing dog, elongating her back, rear in the air. She spoke to the back door of the room, looking between her knees. “He’s saying he’s the victim of this girl’s issues. Maybe she would have latched on to another teacher if he hadn’t been promoted to calc. To think we saw that promotion as a blessing . . .”