“Mom—”
She rounded on the girl, her eyes red and furious. “You could be pregnant, for Christ’s sake!”
“They didn’t come in me.”
“My god—”
“You could have AIDS,” said Peter. “Have you thought about that?”
“They aren’t gay.”
“I’m not even going to respond to that.”
“So you do know them,” said Margot.
“Does it look like we’re strangers?”
Margot held her tongue and just stood there, trying to breathe. “Who’s seen this tape?” she asked.
“We all have a copy.”
“You think if you each have a copy that’ll keep everyone honest?”
“I don’t know,” said Vanessa. “They both wanted one.”
“Naturally.”
WHEN THEY were going out, as students at the University of Toronto, Peter and Margot had developed a ten-year plan. There was traveling to be done and degrees to be finished. They were both twenty-one, and Peter was going to specialize. Margot could wait until she was thirty to have kids—it was getting to be safer to have children later—and that way, they could enjoy what their own parents called their “youths,” and do the things some friends of theirs regretted not having done before starting a family. They even wrote it all down, with dates along the top and rows playing down the side, with headings like Destinations, To Buy (a car in Year Two, a house in Year Five), and Money Saved. Then Margot got pregnant three years in. By that point, they’d bought a car and driven to Orlando in it. The rest of the plan went fallow. By the time Vanessa was born, what they’d thought they were going to do didn’t seem to matter: reality had usurped fantasy. They adjusted to the possible, and they liked it. Year Eight would be Eric, this time planned.
Vanessa slept in their bed for the first year, a bump of warmth between them. To make love, one of them would change places with the baby, and sandwich her snugly between pillows. It was quiet lovemaking, sensible lovemaking. They got over feeling guilty. Margot found an article that said the smell of the pheromones and the rocking of the bed produced an especially sound sleep for the baby. Plus, she said, how could an infant resent the very thing that had brought it into the world?
When they tried to move Vanessa into her own bed, she resisted. For months, they struggled with her bitter night cries, and if the two of them sat together watching television, Vanessa would not settle down until she was between them.
The solution in the end was a smaller crib, one that would allow the baby to feel enveloped. Many years later, Paul read about a woman who had developed a special machine that you lay down in, and it hugged you, and he thought about their solution to Vanessa’s loneliness.
THE NIGHT of the videotape, Margot and Peter lay together in the king-size bed, trying to follow the nightly ritual. Vanessa was in her room, forbidden to go anywhere but the bathroom. They could hear her through the wall that separated her room from theirs. That such plans had been hatched only inches from their sleeping heads. How was it that she had not shot up in bed, as if from a dream, Margot thought, the moment her daughter had decided on this course?
The news played in front of them, the volume down to its lowest setting. It was Peter’s habit to turn the news up if there was anything he thought he wanted to know about. The rest of the time he grazed business and news magazines and looked up only once in a while. He could sense a fire burning silently on the screen, or an update from a faraway war. Margot took her news with breakfast, and usually only from the newspaper, preferring not to be distressed by what was happening halfway across the world right before she went to sleep. She was a novel reader, and each publishing season she bought the crop of new hardbacks, which she kept stacked on a low shelf beside the bed. She’d read half of something, then start something new, returning to the first book only when she was ready, when she had processed whatever it was that had made her stop reading it. As a librarian, she could have access to any book before the public, but she was a believer in paying for her pleasures, and they could afford it.
The night before, she’d been in the middle of three books. One was about some men on a misbegotten fishing trip, another was a family saga rooted in the New England of the Pilgrims, and the last was an arty romance about a painter. A struggle anchored each one; like every good book she’d ever read, something dreadful was the occasion of every story, something to overcome. That was the nature of all books, although the stories of people’s lives, as they were lived, weren’t really like this. People tended to move forward motivated not, in the main, by crisis, but by ambition and hope and need. Most people she knew who suffered through terrible crises did not turn out to be more interesting, as they did in novels, but rather withdrew from those around them and only turned up again somewhere down the road, changed in a fugitive way that it was best not to talk about. Death was immune to this pattern, unless it was a shameful death, like a murder or a suicide, or someone who’d died from an avoidable health problem. Usually, death was made congenial by neighbors and friends. Later, grief could be difficult, but there was never any shame in it.
Margot made a pretense of reading the fishing novel. It took place in Spain. It really had more in common with the romance novel than anything, except that the part of the woman was played by the fish.
“What,” said Peter.
She’d laughed bitterly to herself. But she shook her head. He turned the television off.
“I think we should keep her out of school for the time being,” he said.
“I think so as well.”
“You take her in to Richard tomorrow. I called him at home and asked him to run a pelvic series. He knows what to do.”
She sat up. “Does he know why?”
“No. I just asked him to give her an appointment. He won’t have any questions.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s the way I asked. He’ll just do it and then you can bring her home.”
He turned and switched off his lamp, muttering Jesus Christ under his breath. Her lamp threw a pool of light onto her hands and the sheets. She flashed on the image of a surgical procedure.
“Is that all?” she said.
“What else is there?”
“I don’t think we should do anything that could take this out of our hands. I don’t want you to talk to the police.”
He said nothing, just dug himself deeper into the mattress. She put her hand on his shoulder and tried to pull him around to her so she could see his face. His stillness upset her. He’d always said he was good in emergencies, and it was true. He had a centered calm that was good for frightening moments. It was what made him a good doctor. But she didn’t need that right now. She believed their daughter had made a mistake, but Margot wanted it to remain under their roof, where their own laws reigned. “You’re going to make things more difficult, Peter. What are they going to tell you at this point anyway?”
“They’re going to tell me what my rights are.”
“Your rights?”
Now he turned around. His face was red, as if he’d been hanging upside down. “Get her to Richard Davies and then bring her home,” he said.
PETER STAYED in the bedroom the next morning until he heard Vanessa and Margot leave. Eric was downstairs, putting dishes away. Peter got dressed slowly; it felt as if he was being watched while he did it. His arms and legs didn’t move the way he was used to, and he caught his breath once or twice. He went downstairs and said nothing to Eric while he folded a piece of white bread around a slice of cheese. Then the two of them silently gathered their things—he his briefcase, and Eric his books and baseball things—and got into the car.
Peter usually drove his son to school in the mornings, picking up another boy on the way, the other parent bringing Eric home. They drove over to the boy’s house, and Eric stared into his baseball glove most of the way, looking up now and again to stare out the window with purpose, as if indicating there were
things on his mind, too. Peter pulled into the boy’s driveway and put the car in park.
“There’s a problem in our house,” Peter said.
“I know.”
“It’s a serious problem, but we’re going to take care of it. You don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not worried,” said Eric. Peter ran his hands down the side of the wheel, as if admiring it. “What’s the problem?”
“I’m not going to talk about it. And if you hear anything at school, you’re not going to respond. People are vicious. You stay out of it.”
“Okay.”
Peter looked at Eric steadily. It was not a look Eric had seen before. His father’s face was still, but his eyes were as sharp as starlight. “This is our problem, do you understand? When families get into trouble, they have to work it out. It happens to everyone.”
“I know,” said Eric.
“You’re a good boy, though. All right?”
Eric opened the door. “Does Vanessa have to leave school?”
“Go and get your friend,” Peter said. “Everything is going to be fine.” He watched his son go up the walk to the boy’s house and trade a couple of words with the boy’s mother, words he couldn’t hear, that floated up into the air above them all and vanished. The friendly time of day, how distant that kind of thing seemed to him now. The boy emerged, another twelve-year-old, with a baseball bat that had a glove balanced on its tip. He watched the two of them come toward the car. He’d been a good father to this child, he thought, and images went through his mind of all the things he’d taught him. But they were the same things he’d tried to teach Vanessa. How to play fair. To have respect for the natural world. To develop a sense of wonder and joy (to use the terminology of the parenting books he and Margot had read). Maybe Vanessa had taken a different message from him? Did he somehow send her down a path different from the one he’d always thought she was on? He worked the seam of these thoughts for the fault, for whatever would show him where he’d even just slightly broken faith with the girl.
WHEN HE got to work that afternoon, X-rays from the morning’s patients were waiting for him on his desk. He took the first group and slipped them into the wall viewer. A man’s torso, the ribs arcing back into shadow, the organs behind dully arrayed. The body, reduced to the barest of structure, had no power to scandalize, he thought. You could show skeletons fucking, and it would never bother anyone. He leaned into the glowing pictures on his wall, his hand braced against the side of the light box, seeing the striations of cirrhoses on the man’s liver. The story the body told. Anonymously, it was phenomenological, a statistic, a likelihood. With flesh on it, it was a man’s death. In the rest of the envelopes on his desk, he would find a woman’s death, a parent’s relief, a child’s ruination.
That morning he’d spent some time in the company of the police.
He’d gone to the station on Dundas and waited on a cold molded-plastic chair in the waiting area. It was merely the strip of floor in front of the main desk, behind which men in uniform scuttered back and forth with papers in their hands. There were posters for missing children, some of them aged by computer. Another poster advised which types of freshwater fish you were allowed to catch in August, a month that was a whole season in the future.
His name was called and the little wooden gate held open for him and he was admitted to the back. He met Detective Stone, a large man in his fifties with gray stubble that curved down off his face and onto his plush neck. The detective ushered Peter into an interviewing room and slapped a fresh pad of legal paper onto the table between them. There was a wall-length window that looked out on the hallway, and officers walked past it, singly, or with someone who might have his hands behind his back, an officer leading him by the elbow. Peter sat cautiously, taking care not to let the videotape make a sound against the chair. He was carrying it in an inside coat pocket.
“Where’s your daughter, Mr. Bowman,” said the detective.
“She’s at the doctor with my wife.”
“Rape kit.”
Peter nodded once.
“When can she come in, then.”
“I’ll find out.”
Someone knocked at the door and stuck his head in. Stone looked up and nodded, then looked back at Peter. “Does she know her attackers.”
“They weren’t really attackers,” said Peter. “They’re boys from her school.” The detective wrote it all down. “They filmed it.”
“The boys who attacked her.”
“Yes.”
“How do you know this?”
“I have the tape,” Peter said, and instinctively he held it closer to his body. Detective Stone noticed this and tilted his head to one side, looking at Peter’s coat. “I’m uncomfortable about this.”
“Yes,” said Stone. “We’ll move to a better room.”
He led Peter into the basement of the station. As soon as they’d come down the stairs and the sounds of the workday faded, it immediately seemed that this was a more serious business. For the first time, Peter became aware that there were fewer options for him now, fewer ways to think about all this. He was in a police station, therefore anything with the taint of crime on it would be brought forth as a crime.
The room in the basement was more remote, but there was a window in the wall. There were ten or so chairs in the room, and a television on top of a metal trolley. Peter sat in one of the chairs, but then stood again when the detective didn’t take a seat himself. Stone put the tape in and pressed play. Peter turned toward the window. His hands started to ache, as if he were holding something very cold. He heard the sounds of the tape.
A couple of officers passed by the window and made eye contact with him and then quickly glanced at what was on the screen. How easy it was to put it all together. After a moment longer, Stone switched the machine off. Peter breathed out deeply.
“Your daughter’s seventeen,” the detective said.
“Yes.”
“And who are these boys?”
“I don’t know.”
Peter stood uncomfortably, the window in his peripheral vision now filling more regularly with officers going past. It was change-of-shift, or lunchtime. Stone ejected the tape.
“I’m going to have a technician produce some photos from this. Just of faces. You can pick up the tape later this afternoon. Then we’ll see.” Peter watched the detective slide the tape into an interdepartmental envelope he picked up off a pile on a desk behind the television stand. The envelope was covered with signatures. You could see the tape through holes punched in the envelope. “Don’t worry,” said Stone. “Our guy has to look at this kind of thing all the time. He knows it’s sensitive.”
“Thank you,” Peter said. He went out of the room and then up and out of the station. No one accompanied him.
AS THE afternoon passed, and the steady flow of patients came in and out of his office, Peter found his mind tuned in to what he imagined Detective Stone was discovering. Perhaps a computer program was comparing the images from the film with pictures taken by the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Transit Commission, which had probably issued the boys student cards. Maybe it was going to be that easy, just connecting the dots. He could be walking into Vanessa’s school with Stone in a matter of hours, the detective already armed with names and the principal cooperating. They’d collect the criminals and bring them back down to the station and they’d be photographed and fingerprinted. It wouldn’t take long before they realized what kind of long-term trouble they were actually in. And he, Peter, would watch it all in silence, his face a warning to the rapists that the longer their incarceration, the safer they’d be.
It took most of the afternoon, through a broken tibia, a fatty liver, a spot on a lung (biopsy ordered), and a greenstick fracture for Peter to weave the entire story. After his last patient, he sat alone at his desk and savored the possibility of punishment. The cars in the doctors’ lot below had dwindled to fewer than ten. His nurse came in. “Do you ne
ed anything?” she asked.
“No,” said Peter. “I’m just going to finish this.” He put a hand down on his paperwork.
She stood in the doorway, looking at him. She was in her stockinged feet now. “You okay, Peter?”
“I’m great,” he said, and he smiled at her brightly.
“I’ll forward your calls to this line.”
AT RICHARD Davies’s office, Margot had been asked to wait for Vanessa outside the examining room. The doctor took about half an hour with the girl and then sent her out smiling. Margot went into Davies’s office and sat down in front of his desk as he washed his hands at his own sink. The washing of hands always struck Margot as a gesture of propriety. Her own father had washed his many times a day, before meals, after meals, when coming in from outside. It always seemed a quality of probity: a man who washed his hands could be trusted because he was thinking of other people when he did.
Richard Davies asked her about herself and Peter, and about the back extension of the house, which had been done some years ago, the last time he’d spoken to either of them. (Margot searched her memory for the difficulties—if any—they’d encountered on building the porch. All she could bring to mind were the picayune disagreements she’d had with her husband about paint colors and a skylight; she hoped a time would come soon when such things would seem important again.) Davies opened Vanessa’s file and looked down at it. Vanessa was a wonderful young girl, he said, but he thought she should be on the pill.
Margot nodded, feeling quite mute. She felt that, perhaps, he was letting them both off easy.
Davies led her out of his office with a comforting hand under her elbow, and kissed her on the cheek. He gave her a prescription.
“But what about the goddamned exam?” Peter asked when Margot told him all this.
“She’s fine, he says.”
“What does that mean?”
“He said physically she looked fine. There were no abrasions, no cuts. There was no evidence at all that anyone had forced her to do anything.”
Fidelity Page 9
