IN THE BATHROOM, Jon splashed cold water on his face. He removed his glasses and set them on the sink edge, avoided his reflection. Often, he went weeks—sometimes months—without looking himself square in the eye, never really seeing himself. Just enough to shave. He’d done this for as long as he could remember. Since. Well. Now, he looked. Stared at a tired man pushing forty. In his mind he pictured himself as twenty-five, still in law school, a time when he thought he’d had his future figured out, and his past behind him. A time when the architecture of his master plan to find peace through success was first set in motion.
He glanced in the mirror now to glance at the reflection of Bethany, who was now asleep on the bed behind him through the doorway. Her son was asleep, safe under her arm. What had happened in the house had crushed her. Jon had thought she’d suffer it better. The girl may have seemed nice, but Jon knew better. She’d been screwing in his home, for starters. Jon had known girls like Jessica in high school. He had all right. At the only party he’d ever attended, a bunch of girls who’d seemed shy in the school hallways had, with a few wine coolers in them, writhed in bikinis around a bonfire like genies wriggling from bottles. A girl in a kimono had handed him a bottle of schnapps. He’d taken a drink. And another. And another. His first taste of alcohol. A joint was passed. The girl in the kimono slipped her arm around him. “I’m, Suzy,” she’d said.
“Sushi,” Jon slurred as he swayed.
Underneath Sushi’s loose kimono peeked powder-blue terry-cloth shorts and a tube top. She drank. Jon drank. She removed her kimono, took his hand and led him to the beach.
They laid on their backs on the lakeshore, drinking. Stars fell. The night hot. She’d lain on top of him. Her mouth on his. His head pounded. His hands searched. He’d wanted them down her shorts. Inside. He wanted, for once, to feel normal. To do what other teens did. To be normal. That night had been his chance.
They’d kissed. She’d moaned. Her eye shadow glittered. She’d pressed against him. Ground against him. He’d rolled over to lie on top of her. Her neck fiery hot. So soft. Such softness. His first feel of female flesh.
His heart had buzzed. He’d chewed her neck. She’d arched her back. The stars fell. She’d bitten his jugular. His head full of stars. He couldn’t breathe. He’d inched her top down. “Hey,” she’d said. He’d put his mouth on her bare breast. “Hey.” His fingers had slipped in her waistband. She’d grabbed his wrist. He’d kissed her. She turned her face away and tried to speak. A racket in his head. All the jocks in school who had girls fawning over them got their way because they were confident. Aggressive. That was the way of things. So easy for them. So damned easy for everyone fucking else.
He’d kissed her harder. A window opened in his mind. A cold breeze blew through. He’d pushed two fingers into her. God. She’d scratched at his back. Clawed. He’d read about this. The throes. Three fingers. The fourth wouldn’t go. Just wouldn’t. He’d needed time, to keep working her, because something was wrong. He was not ready. He’d curled his fingers into a fist of rage.
He looked down on her. His knees had somehow pinned her arms. Sickened, he pulled his fingers from her and wiped them on his leg as she’d scrambled from underneath him and shrieked, “You fucker. You creep.” She rubbed her wrists where he’d held her. “Don’t you know anything, you idiot?”
His neck hurt from looking up at her from where he lay in the sand, but he feared that if he tried to stand she’d run away. His skull felt fragile.
“You do this often?” she said. “Get girls drunk and—”
“I’ve never even—. You got me drunk.”
“It doesn’t matter. A boy can be drunk, a girl can’t. That’s how it works.”
“You’re creeping me out now,” he’d said, confused. Always so confused.
“Good. You should be creeped out. You’re lucky I didn’t scream rape.”
The word slammed inside him. Echoed in his head. He’d felt sick and terrified, and angry. So fucking angry and confused. Anything but normal.
He’d reached for her.
She’d slapped his face, hard, and run off.
He’d never gone to another high-school party. Never looked at another girl. He’d feared the humiliation. Ridicule. Condemnation and disgrace. He’d had no way to know if what he had done was aberrant or typical. He had no friends to afford perspective. He’d had only himself and his grandparents, who were so out of touch with any generation that had come after their own.
For years, he’d feared what he was capable of doing and how to cultivate and to maintain an image of normalcy.
He thought of Jessica in the cellar of the creamery.
Everything that had come before had led to that moment.
He was a fly caught in the web of his own lies.
JON LAY IN bed beside Bethany, not quite touching her.
He watched her sleep. Her eyeballs shifted beneath their lids, as if still trying to see.
She was lovely. So lovely.
Each time he watched her sleep, the sweet calm of her face left him overcome with a sense of sorrow, guilt for all the times he’d treated her poorly, argued, turned away.
He wanted to wake her, felt an urge to confess to her things he had never told another soul. He felt compelled to lay himself bare. Let her see him, know him, for who and what he was, whatever the cost. Even if he lost her. If he did not do it now, he never would. He felt the truth in him. It lay burrowed deep, cold and sour, a slow-working poison he needed to bleed out.
He thought about the messages he’d erased from his voice mail.
That voice.
It turned his blood to dust.
He slipped his cell phone from his pocket and brought up the e-mail with the
subject line: “You Should Have Helped Me.”
The e-mail read:
You have a week to confess on your own.
Then, I tell them how sick and evil you are.
Jon deleted the e-mail, knowing it would do no good. Nothing was ever hidden forever, he’d begun to realize.
He rested a fingertip on his wife’s wrist, his hand shaking uncontrollably.
Her wrist was so slender, so warm. His own flesh cold.
He felt a pulse at his fingertip but he did not know if it was her pulse or his own.