Russell Banks - Affliction

No, he said, Lillian did not have any alcohol or drug problems that he knew of, and neither did her husband. And they took good care of Jill. He had to admit that. And he could not imagine any sexual misconduct that Lillian or her husband would be guilty of, at least nothing that would be harmful to a child. “It looks pretty hopeless, don’t it?” he said.

“Well, no, not exactly. I need to see your divorce decree. We surely can try to have the father’s visitation rights redrawn so that you can be assured of ample and regular access to your daughter. Jill is her name?”

“Yes.”

“Fine, then.” He bent his chest toward his hand and shoved the pen into his shirt pocket, then slid the legal pad into the carrier on the side of the chair, flicked a button on the box with the fingertips of his left hand and moved his chair back a few feet. The motor made a quiet humming sound as the chair moved and a click when it stopped. “You’ll send me a copy of the divorce decree as soon as you get home?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“And I’ll need a five-hundred-dollar retainer. You might enclose that,” he said.

“Jesus,” Wade said, and he knew he had begun to sweat. “How much,” he began, “how much will the whole thing cost?”

“Hard to say, exactly. If we go for custody, we’ll have to take depositions, maybe even subpoena a few people as witnesses, hire a social worker and a child psychiatrist to examine Jill and visit your home and your ex-wife’s home, and so on. It could add up. Ten or twelve thousand dollars. It could drag on. And then, even if we win, she might appeal. But you must understand that we can’t go looking for custody without acting serious about it, even if what we expect is something much less. On the other hand, if we just want to get your visitation rights redrawn, assuming they’re unduly restrictive at present, which the divorce decree will tell me, then it probably won’t cost more than twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Oh.” Wade felt dizzy and hot; his hands were trembling again, and he knew his toothache was about to return in full force.

“You’re a workingman. A well driller, you mentioned.”

“And a police officer,” Wade interrupted him. “I’m the town police officer.”

“Ah. That’ll help,” he said. “Say, didn’t you have a shooting up your way yesterday? Some kind of hunting accident? A man from Massachusetts. Some kind of union official, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know much about it? Sounded a little… unlikely to me.”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Big-time union official out hunting with his guide, and somehow he shoots himself. You always wonder a little about these stories. Who was the guide? Local man, I suppose.”

“Yeah. Kid named Jack Hewitt. Used to be a ballplayer, got drafted by the Red Sox a few years back, then ruined his arm. You might’ve read about him in the papers. Nice kid. It was an accident, though. No doubt about it. Kid like Jack wouldn’t have any reason to kill a guy like Twombley anyhow.”

“Money,” the lawyer said, smiling. “There’s always money.”

“Yeah. Money. Yeah, there’s always that. But it’s hard to imagine,” Wade said.

“Yes, well, speaking of which,” the lawyer said, “my point in asking about your job is, can you manage the costs of a custody suit? Because you might be better off legally, as well as financially, just to go for the…”

“I know, I know,” Wade said, standing up and pulling on his coat. “I guess… I guess the custody suit business is just my way of showing how pissed off I am at my ex-wife. I’m not as dumb as I probably look. I’ll do whatever you recommend,” he said. “And it looks like you’re recommending me to forget the whole goddamned custody business.”

He made for the door, opened it and over his shoulder said to the lawyer, “I’ll send you the divorce decree on Monday. And the five hundred.”

The lawyer looked impassively at him and said nothing.

Wade walked through the outer office, then stopped in the doorway and peered back for a second and watched the lawyer’s chair scoot out the door opposite him, as if rushing him off to another meeting. The lawyer’s swift and purposeful mobility in his chair frightened Wade somehow. He tried to smile at the receptionist or secretary or whatever she was, but she was busily typing; she wore a headset and showed no sign of knowing Wade was even in the room. He closed the door carefully and moved on.

At the end of the hall, he almost bumped into two girls coming out of the women’s health center. They were giggling teenagers, kids, only a few years older than Jill, in scarlet lipstick and powder-blue eye shadow. They wore jeans, half-unbuttoned blouses and quilted down vests.

They probably just got fitted for diaphragms, Wade thought, and it was an embarrassing thought for him, although he did not know why and did not go any further with it than that. He restrained himself from judging the girls, though for a second he wanted to scold them, and he merely said, “‘Scuse me,” and stood back a second and watched them leave, switching their behinds, heads held high, hands patting their healthy hair in anticipation of the cold wind outside. As he got into his car, he thought, Those girls probably just had abortions! Jesus H. Christ. What a world.

WADE DROVE THE LENGTH of Main Street, halfway to the prison north of Concord, then turned around and drove all the way back. Specks of snow were coming down. It was two forty-five, and Wade felt himself drifting swiftly toward a familiar form of hysteria: a tangible panic. His particular desire, to conduct a successful custody suit against Lillian, now looked like a naive delusion, and his more general and long-lived desire, to be a good father, was starting to feel like a simpleminded obsession. There was a waxing and waning connection between the two desires, he knew, a hydraulic connection, so that when one was strong, the other weakened. When both weakened, however, as now, Wade dropped through the floor of depression into panic.

To fight off the panic, he decided that he wanted to see Jill. What the hell, it was a Saturday afternoon, he was coincidentally in Concord, and he needed to explain some things to the child. Why not call up and arrange to spend the rest of the afternoon with her? He also hoped that, after the fiasco at the Halloween party, she would be able to reassure him somewhat. Surely, his company was not so bad, so boring, that she could not enjoy herself with him. It was more or less a communication problem. They had missed each other’s signals the other night; that was all. He could apologize, and she could apologize, and everything would be swell.

Besides, it was his right, goddammit, especially after Lillian and her husband had driven up to Lawford Thursday night and taken her away from him. When you take a man’s child from him, you take much more than the child, so that the man tends to forget about regaining the child and instead focuses on regaining the other — self-respect, pride, sense of autonomy, that sort of thing. The child becomes emblematic. This was happening to Wade, of course; and he dimly perceived it. But he was powerless to stop it.

He called from a phone booth in the parking lot of the K mart in the shopping mall east of Main Street. The snow was coming down harder now and might amount to something, he observed, thinking warily of the drive home. The afternoon sky had darkened and lowered, and the day seemed to be easing into evening already. Shoppers, mostly women and children, occasionally a man, hurried back and forth between their cars and the store.

He let the phone ring an even dozen times before giving up. Hell, it’s barely three, he thought: too early to head back to Lawford and see Margie, but still early enough to wait around awhile and then take Jill out for supper at a Pizza Hut. She would like that. Meanwhile, he decided, he would go someplace for a beer, maybe try one of those fancy new bars in the renovated old warehouses behind the Eagle Hotel he had heard about, where there were supposed to be lots of single men and women hanging out, swingers or yuppies or whatever the hell they call them these days. He would not mind a look at that. Then he would try to call Jill again.