Angie wheeled on him. “Oh, for Chrissake, knock it off!”
But she was grinning, and so was Stone, and indeed so was Rain herself, marveling at the simple pleasure in a smile that was genuine, not an act to lift up someone else, someone all too happy to be lifted.
50
Morgan spotted him in the park and sped up to a trot. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, and he was looking down as if trying not to appear like he was waiting for anything in particular, least of all her.
But it had been too long, and she could no longer spare the extra ten seconds to amble as if she were too cool to hurry.
She flung herself at him. He seemed to resist her affection, and who could blame him?
“Ethan, I’m so sorry.”
He seemed to relax only by one degree. Morgan snuffled into his shirt: “Teenager ruins life, friendship, career, and family. Film at eleven.”
Ethan hugged her back at last. “Hey, it wasn’t so bad. It’s not like you burned down the house.”
Morgan chuckled and set him back at arm’s length. “Probably only because I didn’t have any matches.”
He began to walk, and she joined him. They were on a bark chip path on the perimeter of the park. Joggers flew past them, and the June breeze through the leaves sounded like muted applause as they passed.
“Are you okay?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah. I’m okay, I guess. Mom says I should probably see a shrink. I don’t want to, but it will make her feel better so I probably will.”
Ethan shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt. Ask him how to come out of the closet for me. It’ll be like, buy one analysis, get another one free.”
“Haven’t talked to your parents yet?”
“I think they know, and that’s kind of the worst part. We’re all just waiting to see who cracks first.”
“Tell them in the car so they can’t run away or something. Just go, ‘Hey, let’s stop for ice cream and oh, yeah, I’m gay.’ ”
“I actually considered taping it on the back of my mortarboard. ‘Hi Mom, I’m gay.’ ”
For a few more steps they walked in silence. Ethan put his arm around her shoulders. “I can still do this, right? Because we’re friends?”
“Sure.” Morgan slipped her arm around his waist and leaned into him. Her heart didn’t pound with excitement, and for this she was glad, not only for having gotten over her crush, but for the fact she could be this close to a man, this affectionate, and have it mean nothing more than what was obvious.
“What are you going to do now?” Ethan asked.
“This is the hard part. What I have to say now.”
“Oh, great.”
“We’re moving to New Jersey.”
Ethan stopped, which forced Morgan to stop and look up at him. “What?”
“Crazy, right? But my mom is selling the business, and they made Dad retire. The boys don’t particularly like the school anyway. My dad has relatives in Jersey City. My uncle is a landlord and he’s going to let us rent one of his houses for cheap until we get on our feet. I’m going to earn some credits at CCNY and if I do well enough maybe I can transfer to Boston U. Or somewhere else, I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters so much anymore that I get away. I’ll already be away.”
“Damn.”
“It’s an adventure, right?”
“I would have thought you didn’t have the stomach for much more adventure.”
Morgan grimaced. “I know. But look, what does Arbor Valley have for us anymore? From the twins born early and almost dying, my scar, now all this that happened . . . I’m gonna miss you like crazy, but the rest of it . . . And look, you’re going away to Purdue anyway. We have Skype and we can text a million times a day and IM and everything.”
“And Facebook.”
“God, no. I’m boycotting Facebook. I don’t need to sprawl my life out there for commentary anymore.”
“I hear you.”
They walked a few more steps, heard some more running feet, and paused while a couple blew past them, bark chips scattering as they zoomed past.
“So,” Ethan said, “do you finally believe me that I didn’t rat on you? Or did you just decide to forgive me?”
A flash of heat reddened Morgan’s face. “Sorry. I feel like I should wear that on one of those signs, you know? That advertise businesses? ‘Sorry everyone, for everything.’ ”
“I didn’t mean that . . .”
“No, I know. I believe you. You’d be honest with me if you’d done it. And I wouldn’t blame you if you had, anyway.”
“Would you blame Britney?”
Morgan stopped so fast she almost tripped. “Oh my God, it was her?”
“I almost didn’t tell you because you’re friends, and I usually don’t get in the middle of friends. But she’s told a few people that it was her who found out and told the cops. She sounds almost proud.” Ethan wrinkled up his face. “It’s kinda sickening, actually.”
“That bitch. I should have guessed.”
“You were all set to forgive me for it.”
“Because you would have done it out of love. She did it to be the center of attention. Or at least, that’s what she’s milking it for now. I mean, why else tell anybody at this point? When it’s supposed to be over and I want to move on?”
“Guess she waited until after the trial because she didn’t want to be called to the stand.”
“For all we know she’s making it up. It was anonymous, right? It could have been just a random stranger who saw me get in the car with a man and thought it looked suspicious.”
Ethan wrapped his arm around her again and squeezed. They ambled on. He said, “I’m sure you’re sick of it, and I’ll never ask another thing again after this, I swear. But I can’t stop thinking about this one thing.”
“Fine. Go ahead.”
“Why? Why him? You’re a pretty girl and could have dated anybody.”
“And you’re such an expert, right?” Morgan had tried to say it playfully, but it came out with a sharpness that made Ethan pull his arm away.
He jammed his hands in his pockets. “You know what I mean.”
Morgan folded her arms across her body as if she were chilled, though it was one of those honeyed early summer days that you try to remember in the dead cold of winter. Her mother had asked, so had Henry the prosecutor, so had kids at school who were bold or ignorant enough. She asked herself, many times since that day in court, what it was that made her briefly lose her mind.
“I don’t really know. I think I liked who I was in his eyes.”
“Who was that, then?”
“Myself as the adult I wanted to be. Grown up, wise, beautiful.”
“I think you’re all those things. So do lots of people.”
“I didn’t say it made sense.” She stopped on the path, and he stopped ahead of her. The sun was behind him, and she stood in his shadow, shielded from its brightness. “You know? My mom keeps saying, Henry the prosecutor, everyone around me keeps saying I was a victim, manipulated, whatever.”
Ethan put an arm around her shoulders, but Morgan shrugged it off. She continued, “But I feel really bad. I don’t want to say it out loud, because I don’t want to hear my mom go on about how wrong he was and all that, and he was responsible, whatever. But . . . Ethan, I feel awful. He was married. There’s gonna be this baby, now, whose dad will be in jail . . . I didn’t mean for that . . .”
“I know you didn’t. Everybody knows you didn’t mean that to happen.”
“What the hell is wrong with me? And don’t say nothing, because, yeah, obviously that’s not true.”
“Could I say anything that would fix it? Short of turning back time? I would if I could. You know that. So would your mom and dad.”
“So would he, no doubt.”
“No doubt. What’s wrong with him? Now that right there is a good question.”
Morgan shuddered. “I bet he was using me to have time-travel sex with a younger version of h
is wife. Did you see how much she looks like me? All that long dark hair.” She grimaced.
Ethan reached behind her and gathered up her hair. “Ever thought of changing it?” He cocked his head this way and that. “You look so pretty this way. When people can actually see your face.”
Morgan’s first instinct: shake her hair away from him, pull it back across her face. She made herself freeze. She made herself look him in the eye. “Hey,” she said. “You free for an hour or so?”
Ethan let go of her hair. “Considering you’re moving, like, a thousand miles away? I’m free anytime you want.”
51
This time, Dinah held her daughter’s hand, and this time, Morgan let her.
Joe’s warm hand was on Dinah’s knee.
Behind her, of all places on the prosecution’s side of the courtroom, were Gregory Hill and his pretty wife, their new baby dozing in her arms. Behind them sat Rain, next to an older woman Dinah didn’t know. Maybe her mother.
The defense side of the courtroom was full mainly of gawkers and press.
TJ Hill looked like hell, and Dinah felt a reflexive maternal jolt at seeing him, unshaven, haggard, and pale. She turned to glance behind her. Rain’s face was cool and still as a frozen pond. She was knitting.
Dinah wondered if she should call Rain after this was all done. She had yet to thank her for whatever it was she said or did that convinced her husband to at last give up his lies. And she suspected with a maternal hunch—that is, believed for certain, no proof required—that seeing Rain on that day at the wetlands, with her pregnant belly and obvious heartache, helped weaken the fortress of indignant outrage that Morgan had thrown up around herself. That had been a desperate gamble for Dinah, not only legally, but in the sense that Rain, if she’d been a conniving sort, could have done or said anything at all, just to hurt the girl who’d invaded her marriage.
One thing Dinah had learned about parenting the twins is that her hunches were unerring. She only had to remember to pay enough attention to notice them.
The judge gaveled court into session. Then it was time, and Morgan rose, smoothing her plain black skirt, and touching the ends of her newly shorn hair, which now just brushed her chin and set off her elegant cheekbones. Ethan had gone with her to the salon and convinced her she didn’t need to hide behind her hair.
Morgan approached the podium between the two attorneys’ tables, her smooth gait not betraying the fact she’d thrown up that morning or spent nearly thirty minutes trying on clothes, searching for the right outfit to tell the court, judge, and public what her teacher had done to her.
Dinah and Joe could have made victim impact statements as well, but they decided to afford Morgan the respect of speaking for herself.
Her daughter cleared her throat. “This is where I get up and say how Mr. Hill ruined my life. I’m supposed to talk to you about how, because of him, my mom’s business got trashed with spray-painted slurs about me. How I missed days and days of school because I couldn’t bear to walk the halls, how there was a death threat on my locker, how prom and graduation were an ordeal and should have been joyful. And all that’s true, but that’s not really the problem. See, people think I hated myself before, and that’s why I let a teacher seduce me. That I have really low self-esteem because of this scar right here. But I had friends, I had a boyfriend before, a normal one. I did well in school and knew my parents loved me. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but do people who get in trouble ever make any sense? Anyway, it’s now, that’s the hard part. When I remember my senior year, I’ll remember being dumped off in a dark parking lot alone because his wife was coming home too early. I’ll remember him unbuttoning my shirt in his car and then telling the police and the court and everybody that I’d taken my own clothes off because I was lust crazed and bonkers. I’ll remember being crushed against a cold tile floor and how it hurt my back but he didn’t seem to care.”
Dinah gasped and bit her fist to silence herself. Joe was squeezing her hand so hard she had to whisper to him to ease up before he crushed it.
Morgan continued, “I know that’s shocking. But if I got up here and acted like everything was fine, it would just be more lying, and that’s what got us all into this mess. But this last thing is important to say, too. He did not ruin my life. Because I have a lot of life ahead, and I will not be defined by these few months. I’m taking my life back, and I’m taking my name back, so that this is the last time you’ll write about me in the paper until I do something amazing that makes my family proud. This is the last time anyone will ever call me a victim.”
With that, she whirled around to go back to her seat, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright.
Scattered applause burst out from distant corners of the room, gathering strength like the rain does ahead of a storm.
Morgan tried to muster a smile, but instead she sat down heavily on the hard bench next to Dinah and let herself be embraced.
Rain was clapping.
She hadn’t expected to. She was going to sit in the back with her knitting, and Beverly’s quiet serenity beside her. She’d planned to tell everyone “No comment” and then go back to her mom’s house where Stone and her dad were assembling the crib.
Though she did not hold Morgan any specific ill will—at least, not much—neither did she expect to applaud the girl who had slept with her husband.
But the detail about being crushed against the floor had made Rain drop her knitting in her lap.
How many times had TJ taken Rain herself so roughly? Slamming her against walls, tugging her down to the floor, heedless of rug burn or bruising. Rain would bite her lip and let him, though she never enjoyed it that way. And she was a wife, a grown woman! He’d done the same to this girl, and why would Rain have ever imagined differently? Why did she somehow imagine that their lovemaking—when it sprang to her mind, try as she might not to think about it—was loving and romantic? It made Rain want to vomit, too, the idea of this young girl not only manipulated by him but tossed around carelessly for his satisfaction.
She glanced around at the voracious interest written in the wide-eyed faces of the crowd. Rain put her hands across her belly and considered how long she’d shielded her baby from a nosy, rubbernecking public, a luxury Morgan’s mother never had.
So when Morgan declared herself a victim no more, Rain started clapping before she knew what she was doing. Even as she realized reporters would notice and comment, she kept clapping, and with each slap of her palms, scraps of anger swept away on the current of sound.
Morgan leaned into her mother. Applause? For what? She wished it would stop. She shouldn’t have gotten up to speak. She should have let her mother handle it.
When she’d written the speech, she hadn’t anticipated how it would feel to have said it all out loud. Now she felt as naked as she had in the rehearsal room, the doctor’s house, his car.
She was also feeling more ashamed by the day. Each time she saw a baby, or a pregnant woman, she would remember that because of something she did—after all, when they first did it it was in the rehearsal room, her own idea!—some baby was going to be born into the world with a daddy in jail, and a criminal record as a sex offender. Some kid would have to grow up with that hanging over him, like, forever. And she’d heard that the wife had filed for divorce, too. The pretty bride who looked so happy in that wedding picture.
The applause was dying away, which meant soon she’d have to rise and walk out through all these people. She wished she could just blink and be back home, under the covers with her notebook.
There was something else. Something she hadn’t said, she hadn’t dared say, not even to her mother, or Ethan, or even to write down secretly on her blue-lined paper. Once in a while, even now, even after all this . . . she missed him.
Her mom squeezed her hand. “We’ll show them, won’t we? We’ll show them what we’re made of.”
The judge was gaveling down the last snatches of clapping, but even he seemed proud, or at l
east pleased.
Then he put his serious face back on and sentenced Mr. Hill to three years in prison.
The bailiffs came forward. This was it. What he had been bracing himself for since the first moment he leaned toward Morgan in his car that windy December night.
He slumped, almost relieved it was finally happening. His lawyer was whispering to him something about good behavior and parole, but TJ wasn’t listening.
He looked over his shoulder as the bailiffs cuffed him. He caught his wife’s eye, and she looked away. As well she should. His brother openly sneered, his eyes flashing fury as if Greg was the victim. Alessia flinched like she’d accidentally laid eyes on a monster, and perhaps she had, at that.
Alex was speaking to him urgently, but TJ heard her like one of those honking noises from Charlie Brown cartoons. Man, he used to love Charlie Brown. And Snoopy. Greg used to draw Snoopy to make him smile when they were kids, back when his brother loved him. Back when everybody did.
He’d have liked to have seen his mom and dad out there, but maybe that was for the best.
“I’m okay,” he finally told Alex. “I’m resigned to this.”
He said it because he figured they would want him to say that, because he didn’t want to end up watched for twenty-four hours in a glass box. Anyway, it was true enough. He was resigned to it. All of it.
He took one more look toward Morgan as the bailiffs led him toward the door. She’d cut her hair.
She looked so beautiful.
P. S.
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About the author
Meet Kristina Riggle
KRISTINA RIGGLE is a former newspaper reporter now pursuing her first love, writing fiction. Her character-driven novels have been honored by independent booksellers in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, and her debut, Real Life & Liars, was a Target Breakout pick. She finds people of all walks of life fascinating, as in the old A&E Biography slogan, “Every life has a story.” She’s the fiction coeditor for the e-zine Literary Mama and has published short stories at Literary Mama, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. When not writing, she can be found taking care of her two kids and dog, and squeezing in time to read whenever she can.
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