Daniel Palmer - Helpless

“What are you trying to do to me?” she shouted. “Ruin my life? Because that’s what you’re doing!” In that instant his daughter, who had been simmering with anger, broke into a boil.

“I moved here so you didn’t have to move away. I did this for you.”

“Well, next time don’t do me any favors, okay!” Jill tried to slam the door shut, but Tom’s foot got in the way. “Move your foot. I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

“Not until you talk to me. Who drove you home tonight?”

Jill slammed the door against her father’s foot again and again, hard as her momentum would allow. Sharp jolts of pain shot up Tom’s leg each time the door slammed into his foot, but his face didn’t show the hurt.

Jill opened her bedroom door with an exasperated sigh and slipped past Tom before he could stop her. She went straight into her mother’s bedroom, where she once again closed the door behind her. Jill slept in her mother’s bed some nights, but Tom never let on that he knew. If she wanted to open up about her feelings, he figured she’d do so in her own time.

Tom knocked. “I’m not giving up until you talk to me.”

When Jill didn’t respond, Tom pressed his ear against the door and could hear the shower running. Tom trotted downstairs. With a few turns of a knob, he shut off the hot water. It took a few minutes for the water in the pipes to go completely cold. Once it did, Tom heard Jill shriek, curse, and finally open the bedroom door. She had on her mother’s green terry-cloth bathrobe, the one Tom had bought for Kelly a year before the divorce. Jill’s hair looked a tangled, wet mess, with soapy remains throughout.

“That’s not fair.”

“Neither is ignoring me.”

“Turn the hot water back on.” Jill tried to pass him, but this time, Tom blocked her way. Jill sighed loudly. “Fine,” she said. “What is it you want to know?”

“Where were you and who drove you home?”

“At a friend’s house and a friend. There. Happy?”

“No. Which friend’s house, and who’s the guy with the Mustang? I sure as heck hope he’s young enough to still have a curfew.”

“Why? You afraid of another old guy competing with you for all the young girls?” Jill saw the hurt in his eyes and gave a slight smile of victory.

“Craig Powers thought you might have started all this,” Tom said.

Jill’s face turned a bright shade of red before her color drained. Tom hadn’t meant to say it, but Jill made it impossible not to become confrontational. Tom watched as she shook with rage.

“That’s disgusting! Why did he even say that?”

“He was thinking you did it to get me in trouble. I told them they were wrong. You’d never do anything like that. Even if you hate me.”

“I do hate you,” Jill said, but quietly, without much emotion.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” Tom replied. “But I need your help, Jill. I’m going to go on the offensive and find out who posted that garbage. But you have to believe me. I would never do such a thing, and I would never do anything to hurt you. I love you more than anything in the world. You are my world.” If Tom could have one dying wish, at that moment it would be for Jill to let him embrace her. He knew better than to ask. He lifted her chin.

“Mitchell Boyd,” Jill said, pulling her chin away.

“What?”

“You asked where I was and who drove me home. I was with Mitchell Boyd.”

“Roland Boyd’s son?” Tom wanted desperately for it to be another Mitchell Boyd from another town, though that was more than unlikely.

“Yeah. But we’re just friends, so don’t worry.”

Tom was worried. Very worried, in fact. Mitchell’s reputation made it impossible for a father not to worry. He cursed himself, because he was the one who had brought Jill to Boyd’s house. “I don’t approve.”

“I don’t care,” Jill said.

An hour later, Tom and Jill had come to a truce of sorts. After their big blowout, he’d gone to the basement and returned carrying a large whiteboard that he used to map out different plays for the team. On that whiteboard, Tom had drawn a soccer goal. In front of the goal he drew a large square, creating an obstacle in the way of two stick figures that he’d also drawn. Tom drew a bow behind the head of the smaller of the two stick figures.

Jill realized that bow was meant to signify her. “I’m not a ten-year-old girl,” she said, but not angrily.

“Humor me for a second. When we can’t figure out something going wrong on the pitch, we always draw it out. It helps us to visualize the challenge and search out solutions.”

“So you want to draw out our issues?” Jill asked.

Tom nodded. “And together we’ll look for ways to get around them.”

Jill went silent.

Tom smiled, undeterred. “I think trust is our number one challenge.” He wrote the word trust in the center of the square. “On the field you’ve got to trust your teammates. You’ve got to believe that they’ll be in position to receive your pass. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a team. What’s it going to take to get you to trust me, Jill?”

Jill thought awhile before answering. “Time,” she said.

Tom nodded and wrote the word time on the whiteboard. He drew an arrow from the word to the stick figure representing himself. “That’s on me, Jill,” he said. “Over time I’ve got to earn your trust. I accept that. But you also have to earn mine. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were hurt. Or worse. I had no idea who you were with. To make this work, we need to trust each other. So I’m just asking, what could you have done that would have helped me?”

“Call, I guess,” Jill said. “I should have told you where I was. But I was upset.”

Tom wrote call under Jill’s stick figure.

With his hand, he erased a small corner of the square with the word trust in it. “Even if you’re upset, we’re still on the same team. Shutting me out won’t change that fact. We’ve got a long way to go to get past this obstacle.” Tom dotted the square with the point of his dry-erase marker to emphasize his point. “But I think this is a start.”

“Tell me again you had nothing to do with what happened to Mom.”

“Honey, I had nothing to do with it,” Tom said. “And I need you to trust me on that.” He tapped the marker against the written word trust on the whiteboard and forced a hug out of her. It was a brief, strained embrace, but it lasted long enough to give him hope.

Rainy felt whole-body tired. Lately, she’d been working way too much OT. She’d put a bug in Clarence Stern’s ear about needing help with some imaging work. She didn’t mention the images were from a series Tomlinson told her not to bother Stern about.

“No can help,” Stern had said during one of their passing hallway conversations. “These days I’ve got to schedule time to take a piss.”

Rainy remained convinced that one or more of these images would eventually leave the closed circles of the child porn trade for wider distribution across the Internet. It was only a matter of time before there was another Melanie Smyth, she had warned Tomlinson. But Tomlinson didn’t share her sense of urgency. If the pictures had been of a bomb, no doubt her boss would have made Stern pee in a cup until he tracked down the source.

But this was terrorism of a different kind.

When Rainy’s cell phone rang, she answered it without checking the number or thinking about who might be calling.

“Rainy, it’s Clarence. I’ve got a trade to offer.”

Rainy’s heart skipped a beat.

“Talk,” she said.