VII

An Excerpt from We, Adults: “Criminal Sexual Conduct”

Nobody would’ve given a shit about a boy six months away from being old enough to die for his country and a woman in her first week of her thirties sleeping with one another if it wasn’t for Talbots. People would’ve maybe seen a two-sentence blurb in the back of the local paper—nothing about statutory rape because it would’ve been pleaded down to reckless endangerment, not to mention Mrs. Johnson wouldn’t have pressed charges without the public outcry—and that’d be it, game over, let’s move on.

But some petty, anonymous Talbots solider (later revealed to be Carolyn Sheppard, a bowling-ball faced woman who embraced the adjective frigid) leaked the store security footage to Channel 9, accompanied with an explanation of why two ladies were fighting in a mall on December 23rd, and Channel 9, being somewhat professional, contacted the attacker, Mrs. Patricia Johnson, and she confirmed the story, telling them yes, the woman she had confronted had raped her son.

At six o’clock the following night, and again at ten, Minnesotans sat on their couches wrapping last-minute Christmas presents. They watched the news. They watched a black-and-white security feed of an attractive woman with man-length strides storm into Talbots. There was no sound, but they could tell the tall woman was yelling, looking frantically around the store. The astute observer could tell the ladies in Talbots turned toward the far right of the screen, directly toward a blond woman who looked a little too young to be in the store in the first place. This woman had her hands raised in a calm-down manner. The taller woman did not calm down. No, instead she strode across the screen, her finger an accusatory exclamation point. The first woman was obviously yelling. The second woman was obviously trying to usher the woman outside of the store. The woman being accosted placed her hand on the first lady’s arm in a nonthreatening way, to which she reacted wildly, flailing her arm, then rearing back and swinging with an open fist. The second lady staggered backward. She held her cheek. The first woman came toward her, and swung once more, the blond lady raising her left arm as protection. She then simultaneously moved to her right while deflecting the second swing, while also kind of pulling on the attacking woman’s coat. The first woman lost her balance, and tumbled forward, lunging headfirst into the metal corner of an outward facing four-way rack of slacks. She crumpled to the floor. That same astute Minnesotan sitting on his couch could see a puddle of dark growing along the floor before the camera feed switched to a female anchor shaking her head.

Forty-seven stitches and a concussion later, Mrs. Johnson spoke from her hospital room about statutory rape.

By the 26th, her verbiage had changed. Americans watched Nancy Grace conduct a video interview. She used words phrases like child molestation and adult predators. She dropped statutory from her vocabulary. Between Mrs. Johnson and Nancy Grace, they used the word rape eleven times in a three-minute interview.

On the 27th, my wife was arrested on charges of criminal sexual conduct and assault. I drained our bank account and paid the fifty-thousand-dollar bail. I picked her up and there were news crews everywhere and she draped a coat over her head and I felt like security detail hopelessly shielding a doomed president. We drove away. Elliot couldn’t speak, or wouldn’t speak, or maybe there was nothing to say. The sun was out even though it was only eleven degrees. Everything felt broken. I wanted to ask what her what the fuck she’d been thinking, first about the kid, then about shoving the mom into the metal rack, then about needing revenge against me so badly she ruined her whole life, but I drove. I used my blinkers. Elliot smelled a bit like laundry that had been left for too long in the washing machine. I started toward her parents’ house, but she told me no, she couldn’t.

Then where?

Your hotel. I need to sleep.

I turned around and headed toward the Marriott. I needed her to think about lawyers. I needed her to think about the boy falsifying his age, first to her, then to her parents, and how the fuck could she have known? It wouldn’t even be a case. It’d be over with. Her little romp with youth would be a blip on the national news, then recede into oblivion, child molesters with basements full of Amber alert little boys once again taking the nation’s morbid hatred.

But I didn’t say these things.

I parked near the side entrance. I led Elliot to my room. She crumpled on the bed. I took off her shoes and pulled the scratchy comforter around her and she was crying and I told her it was okay and she told me she needed noise so I turned on the TV. She cried harder. Then she was sobbing. I sat on the bed and rubbed her shoulder and I wanted to yell, to tell her she’d fucked everything up—what the hell is Jacob going to say when he’s old enough to understand?—and I wanted to complain about our savings being wiped out and about the public disgrace of having a rapist as a wife, but she beat me to the punch: I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up.

Then I was hugging her, holding her, petting her greasy hair.

I fucked up.

Shh.

I fucked up.

It’ll be fine.

I fucked up.

Everything’s okay.

Fuck me.

Her kiss was wet with the extra saliva from the crying.

Her hands were frantic tools of erasure.

And as she pinned me down, tearing my T-shirt over my head, thrusting me into her dry vagina, I couldn’t help but feel like a scene from a B movie meant to illustrate rock bottom. The red hotel comforter. The watercolor painting of loons bobbing on a lake. The bailed wife fucking her frustration and fear out on the cheating husband. I kept telling myself to stop. I was the rational adult in the situation. I was the one who should be strong and levelheaded and I was the one who needed her to lawyer up and put this whole thing behind us. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I wasn’t sure if she was panting or crying. Maybe rock bottom was a good thing? Maybe it was a chiming elevator door, us finally deciding to quit going down and step off the elevator, and yeah, we were basement low, hurt and with legal troubles, and God only knew what damage we’d done to Jacob, but we were together. I grabbed her head, trying to steady her gaze on mine. She bucked. I felt like the worst kind of person. Harder. I was close, and so was she, her tell the biting of her tongue on the left side of her teeth, and I pulled her hair, pulled it tight so she was forced to look at me. Her eyes were oil spills. I told her I loved her. She closed her eyes and I pulled her hair tighter and then she opened up and it was the stare of a girl in my class who didn’t know enough to turn away and it was the look of a girl so swallowed by postpartum that she didn’t see the point in caring for her son’s screams, and then it was a different look, this one animalistic, cornered, this one willing to do whatever was necessary in order to stay alive.

She brought her mouth to mine and I breathed in her words: I can’t do this.

***

There was no trail.

Unknown to me, on the first of the year, Elliot drove herself to the Dakota County Police Department. She confessed to sleeping with a minor. She told them she knew he was under eighteen. She said she supplied him alcohol and marijuana in order for him to consent. These were lies. Lies I was absolutely furious about when I read them in the police report, lies I stayed up countless hours trying to understand. But maybe that’s a lie in and of itself, because part of me got it, both then and now, the perverse need for blame and guilt, the public flogging for internal turmoil. And even that’s not it. No, it’s probably closer to what she told me in the hotel room—I can’t do this—and the “this” being the life we’d created, the one that felt more confining than a jail cell.

She was convicted of fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct and third-degree assault. She was sentenced to seven months in a minimum-security jail in Shakopee, Minnesota. She didn’t say goodbye to me. She didn’t say goodbye to her parents. She’d told Jacob that she was going to work, that she couldn’t wait to see him that night, maybe they’d stay up late watching Toy Story 3.