Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  Cass begins to collect their trash, pack up scarves and mittens.

  “We’ll pick this up tomorrow,” says Ryan.

  “When?” asks Pete, his face falling.

  “Don’t worry, man. We got plenty of time.”

  “But you’re leaving Monday.”

  “I’ll only be gone for a week,” he says. “And then you’re stuck with me. Forever.”

  Cass watches closely now as Ryan leads Pete further. She allows it because she feels it is necessary for Pete to learn how to razz and be razzed, to spar and be sparred with, that relaxation, recreation, and play is as essential for a child as a well-balanced diet. And mostly because she knows Ryan will make good on his promise. Given the choice between a promise-breaker and a promise-keeper, she will take the latter. A few hours of sleep is a small price to pay for her son’s second chance at a father.

  “Can we, Mom?”

  Ryan shrugs. He knows he’s won now.

  “You can’t go on this trip,” she says, “but we can start planning our holiday vacation. We’re due to go back to the Dunmore. I’ve been craving those milk shakes.”

  “Hooray!” cries Pete. He jumps up and down. Even Alice is smiling.

  Cass concedes defeat once again, but now with open delight. After years of grief, the trade of her will for her children’s joy is one she is willing to make.

  Cass walks to her husband’s side, awards him with an adoring smile, the smile of a co-conspirator, a trusted ally. She grasps his hand and imparts, in a grasp, all her love, her thanks, her adoration. He doubles the force of her grasp, as if raising her love in a bet, then tugs her gently toward their home, leading the family they have made, the family they have formed together. It is a perfect moment, its contentment sweetened by the tears that came before it.

  Travel plans gain fervor now in the empty school yard as descriptions of pink coral give way to a discussion of diving gear and the current color—blue or purple—of ink on stamps on passports. But now Ryan is ready to release the reins to his partner. Cass commands the group and begins the trip back home, anxious to resume the bedtime ritual, this time aided by hard-earned fatigue and fulfillable dreams of pirates and mermaids.

  * * *

  It is nearly eleven, and Cass and Ryan lie in bed, unwinding. In a faded blue T-shirt and cotton briefs, Ryan looks somehow too carnal for a marital bedroom. Cass wears a short silk nightgown and a gray cardigan sweater, the glasses she wore in college. She reads while he scans his device. Domestic bliss, the modern version. A breath of air rushes in the window. Cass burrows deeper under the covers.

  “More travel again so soon.” She is going for disinterest. “Which project is this?”

  “The new one I told you about. Second home. Usual bullshit. ‘Hidden Harbor,’ Jamaica.”

  She flips the page in her novel. “Sounds exotic.”

  He turns to her suddenly. “Why don’t you come? Just us? A quick vacation?”

  “You know I can’t miss class,” she says. “I teach every day but Monday.”

  “I guess I’ll just have to bring back some of that Jamaican magic. Make us some more of those cookies. We’ll do another staycation. Go back to the Lakehouse. Would you like that, babe?” He kisses her neck, slides his hand from her shoulder to her stomach. “Remember those?”

  “Do I ever.”

  “Those will take the edge off.”

  “Who says I’m edgy?” She pushes his hand away playfully and turns the light off.

  TWO

  It is just after dawn, and Cass is choking on her husband. She tries to make her mouth small. She tries to excel at gagging. He comes violently. She ingests. Wipes her face off.

  From the anonymity of this act, it would seem these two are strangers. A snake delivering venom. Not husband and wife sneaking one in before the kids wake up on a Friday morning.

  “Thanks,” he says. He walks out of the bedroom.

  Cass catches her breath. On hands and knees at the foot of the bed, she is an uncomfortable mixture of feminine and ferocious.

  * * *

  In the bathroom, Cass splashes her face with cold water, the timeless cure-all. She looks in the mirror and touches a heart-shaped locket, given to her by her husband. It is both a reminder and a talisman. To remind her to act from love. And to ward off evil spirits.

  Cass hurries down the hall, stops, closes an open window. The chill of winter is early this year. Climate change has turned hot to cold. Either that or the Connors live in their own special orbit.

  * * *

  Ryan chops an apple with a large knife. An egg explodes in a pan. Scalding water descends over ground coffee. The basic tasks of domestic life are a slip away from hazard. We are in a civil space again. But this is a modern home. Mommy is on a work call, and Daddy is doing the cooking.

  “Pete! Alice! Breakfast!” says Ryan.

  Cass juggles a call for work with her true calling. She picks up a trail of toys from the floor, fastens a toothpick to a gumdrop model of the atom, stops a child to tie his shoe, and kisses her husband before ushering the whole troop to breakfast. The Connor family sits down to eat. Ryan and Cass exchange a sheepish grin. Squeaky clean after a filthy morning.

  Now, for family obligations.

  “Surreptitious,” says Ryan.

  “In secret,” says Pete.

  “Dormant.”

  “Wait! I know this one.”

  Cass takes her seat at the table. “Like a volcano.”

  “Hidden under the surface,” says Pete, beaming.

  “Hirsute,” says Ryan.

  “Hairy!” says Pete. At seven, Pete is a sucker for any discussion of creatures. In this, Pete and Ryan find a soaring common interest.

  “You sure this is the vocab for Robin Hood? Sounds more like Zombie Apocalypse.”

  “Kind of the same story,” says Alice. “If you think about it.” Alice, at ten, is a hybrid herself, somewhere in between the knowing of adults and the innocence of children.

  Cass smiles and hands Alice the model of the atom, post-triage.

  “You fixed it!”

  Cass’s next stop is Sam. At two, he is equally fascinated by his sibs and the mashed banana on his high chair. Cass sits down to feed him.

  “That’s my cue,” says Ryan.

  “Already?” says Cass.

  “It’s nearly eight.”

  She checks the clock. “It’s only ten after.”

  “I want to get in before Kevin. Make some headway on the proposal. Pete, good luck on the quiz. Alice, give ’em hell today.” He stops and plants a kiss on Sam’s head.

  Alice watches her stepdad.

  Cass clocks a note of envy. “Parents’ night tonight,” she says. “Meet you there at six thirty.”

  “You want to go solo?” Ryan asks. “I’ll stay home and watch them.”

  “Already asked one of my students.”

  He smiles. He’s been chided.

  “Is there anything you don’t do well?” he says.

  “Only the things you do better.” Cass follows her husband out into the foyer, intercepting him at the door as he puts on his jacket.

  They speak in a different tone now, with no witnesses, the private space of grown-ups.

  “Big day?” she asks.

  “Massive. What time do you teach?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Teach our children well,” he says.

  “I shall try.”

  “You sure schooled me this morning.”

  An X-rated squeeze, a laugh, and a kiss. These two have their own language. And a constantly shifting role: who wears the pants in the family.

  “I may be a little late tonight,” he says.

  She raises her brow, playful but stern. “Please don’t be.”

  And he’s gone. Cass watches the door for a moment. Then she’s back on duty.

  “All right, guys. Ten minutes.”

  * * *

  Cass ushers the kids to the car, a general and her ar
my. Alice carries the science project. Pete recites his vocab list. Cass manages the chaos, strapping the baby into his car seat. The house that stands behind them, a blue Victorian with black shutters, is as picturesque as the Connor family, an example of what can be attained with hard work, a little luck—and a low-interest mortgage.

  Cass pulls out of the driveway and peers in the rearview. The sight of her kids is like medicine, the ultimate comfort. A happy, hearty brood ranging from tween to toddler. Alice is as willowy as she is moody, her hormones stretching her legs every night as well as her emotions. Pete is as sweet as he is sensitive, his round face and big eyes, circles in the same ripple of water. And Sam, like all youngest sibs, gets the best of both nature and nurture. In addition to their similar features, the common threads woven through each sibling by their mother, all three kids have the distinct look of children who are well-loved and nourished—translucent skin, rosy cheeks, and legs with an appealing ratio of fat to muscle. They share so many features, in fact—high foreheads, saucer eyes, and easy smiles—that few can tell that one of the three has a different father.

  “Anyone know who left the upstairs window open?”

  Pete shrugs.

  “No idea,” says Alice.

  Cass stops at a light, surveys her surroundings. Two years after moving from New York, she still occasionally feels like she’s in a foreign country.

  Cumberland, Maine, is a lush and quiet satellite of Portland, with just enough access to the city to feel connected and just enough distance to feel protected. The town spans several miles of prime Casco Bay frontage, with the glass bay in the east and, in the north, evergreen forests. The bayside is dotted with colorful Capes and Victorians and a perpetual drizzle that amplifies the glow of light from their porches. The houses are built with wide clapboards, well-kept lawns, and modest proportions. The windows light up like fireflies every night as hardworking professionals file in, returning to the comfort of their wonderful, boring project. It is the closest Cass has ever seen to a Norman Rockwell painting. A town filled with people enmeshed in living their lives, as opposed to the people she knew in New York, for whom living their lives was a business.

  Cass finds Mainers to be refreshingly honest. Like the people of America’s old Midwest—realists, literalists, and skeptics. Maine, like Missouri, the original “show-me” state, is a population of unfailingly practical people, for whom a claim is not true unless it can be proven. And so, Cass joins the locals in their loving disdain for the weather—the short summers, the early chill, the reliably brutal winter, and, in the spring and fall, the near-constant drizzle. When the weather grows cold enough to see one’s breath in the house (by mid-November), she rejoices in what locals call “the coastal effect,” whereby the towns closest to the bay are spared the most extreme fluctuations due to the clash of warmer bay air with the frigid wind from the mountains.

  Occasionally, when she misses home, she drives her car to Fort Williams Park, a jewel of the Maine coastline. She parks by the water, and then she runs away from the beach and back, as though she is on a pilgrimage and the lighthouse is her beacon. Like so many rituals, this habit has become a compulsion. Cass makes a point to drive there once a week, to run from the beach into the trails, through the gardens and the arboretum. And when the kids are restless at night, she turns on their nightlights and tells them that they too have a beacon. A beacon, she explains, is an unflinching guide that will never leave them.

  “Like the North Star for sailors,” Pete chimes in.

  “Yes,” says Cass.

  “A bright light. An unflinching guide,” says Alice. “A signal or a warning.”

  “Like a parent,” says Pete.

  “Yes.” Cass smiles. “Like a parent.” And the weight gives out in her stomach as she is struck anew by the enormity of her obligation. And the simple fact that, if she dies, her children will be left in darkness.

  Fifteen minutes later, Cass pulls into the parking lot at the Bayside School. Earnest, windswept students balance backpacks, balls, and musical instruments. The smell of fresh-cut grass sails in on a breeze from the bay. As Cass watches her kids walk in the school doors, she exhales the daily mix of relief and nostalgia. Seeing them, content and engaged, folding into friends and classmates, helps silence the occasional question of whether it was the right decision to move so far from home, so far from friends and family. Doubts quelled, she continues downtown to tend to her own students.

  * * *

  Cass stands in the front of a classroom at the local university, University of Southern Maine or USM to its students. Her students, aspiring journalists, sport garden-variety piercings, concert T-shirts, and millennial arrogance. Cass writes on the board in capital letters: REPORTING ON THE FEMALE WITNESS. She takes a step back from the board, looks at the phrase, then walks back, erases, and rewrites: DESTROYING THE FEMALE WITNESS. She ignores the nervous laughter and gasps of her female students.

  “Today we’re going to look at trends in the reporting of female testimony. Let’s look at this example. The DA has charged a man with sexual assault. The victim is the only witness. How does the defense destroy the testimony against him?”

  A student cautiously raises her hand. “Is the victim telling the truth?”

  “Does it matter?” asks Cass.

  She has their attention now. Someone coughs. One student looks visibly uncomfortable, a thin, comely girl named Jean with short dark hair, rosy cheeks, black jeans, and a black denim jacket. Jean does not look amused. Jean looks outraged.

  “Dredge something up,” says Daniel. “Find some dirt. Catch her in a lie.”

  “Okay,” says Cass. “Can you be more specific, Daniel?”

  “History of drug use. A mental disorder. Better yet, a sex tape.” Daniel does little to disguise the smile that this concept conjures. Retro glasses and overly groomed sideburns make him look a little more sinister than hipster.

  “That’s vile,” says Jean.

  “Well, hold on, Jean. Every person is entitled to a vigorous defense. Come on, guys. There’s a playbook for this. How do you discredit a female witness?” Cass turns back to the chalkboard. “One: mental illness. You poke holes in the reliability of her observations and statements.”

  “The oldest defense in the book,” says Daniel. “‘She crazy!’”

  The students laugh. Except for Jean and another girl named Anna. Anna, even with cherubic blond curls, has the intensity of a prosecutor. She usually sits in the front row and takes copious notes. Sometimes she records the entire class on a recorder.

  Cass occasionally marvels at the awesome potential of her female students. Would that they understood the power they hold, the power conferred by youth, intelligence, and beauty. This generation, she often notes, shares a confidence hers didn’t. She only hopes she can direct them to an accurate awareness.

  “Without a wound or a bruise,” says Cass, “most assault cases come down to hearsay. He said. She said. Mental illness is a charge that’s easy to make and hard to shed. What else?” She writes numbers on the chalkboard. “Two: fabrication. Describe the testimony as a lie. For a lie, you need a motive. The witness made it up due to jealousy, revenge, or, better yet, for money. Where have we seen this work?”

  “The Cosby case,” says Anna. “Thirty women. Thirty years.”

  “Yes,” says Cass. “Good.”

  “It’s like a bad light bulb joke,” says Jean. “How many women have to report a crime before one person believes them?”

  “It’s true that this claim can make an assault charge dead on arrival. Why? A lot of people think women make up crimes for attention.”

  A collective cringe from all the students.

  Cass writes the number three on the board, followed by the word Inculpation.

  “What else?”

  “Blame the victim,” says Anna.

  “Yes,” says Cass. “Inculpation. Incriminate the victim. Her skirt was too short. She got too drunk. She wandered into the wr
ong locker room. Basically, she asked for it. Where have we seen this?”

  “Pretty much every single rape case,” says Jean.

  “It’s true,” says Cass. “Shared inculpation works like a charm, not only discrediting the victim but often reducing the perpetrator’s sentence. Okay, what else?”

  The students are growing more uncomfortable.

  “Charge her with something,” says Daniel. “Criminalize the victim. Resisting arrest. Faking a police report. A theft that she committed.”

  “Yes,” says Cass. “Shift the blame. Turn the tables. Change the focus. Who has employed this strategy?”

  “The president of the United States?”

  Laughter all around.

  “Shocking but true. He confessed to numerous assaults on an audio recording. Then he denied it and passed it off as a joke. When his victims corroborated the account, he said his victims were lying. Fabrication. Then he said they were too ugly to merit his interest. Inculpation.”

  Anna and Jean are shaking their heads in unanimous revulsion. Cass sees their indignation. And raises the ante.

  “Congratulations, you guys. You now know the playbook. How to destroy female testimony in four moves or less. What makes this possible?”

  “Systemic baked-in misogyny in our legal system from the communities to the courts, from the policy to the precincts?” says Anna.

  “Bingo!” says Cass.

  The students shift uncomfortably in their seats, unsettled by the statements. Cass has made her point. Jean and Anna are proud to have assisted.

  * * *

  Cass sits in the USM office later. Her office is adorned by framed clippings. Atlantic Monthly. Mother Jones. A degree from the Columbia Journalism School. A call comes in on her phone. Caller ID: DAD. She declines the call. Enough drama for one morning without talking to her father. Jean pokes her head in.

  “Okay if I bring ingredients for s’mores when I babysit tonight?”

  Cass softens, tamping back the reflexive anger that comes from seeing her father’s number. “They would love it.”

  “See you at five thirty.”

  * * *

  Cass waits in the car outside the Bayside School doors. A breeze scatters October leaves and the hair of outpouring students. Pete and Alice straggle out, looking a bit like runners after a track meet. Alice’s ponytail is loose to her chin, and Pete’s backpack needs a quick zip to deter a cascade of pencils.