Jonathan Dee - Palladio

The phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Roger said.

Instead she went up to her room. They didn’t follow her. She stayed there most of the weekend.

It turned out that Dennis’s parents’ house was so ideally suited for secret trysts that within months of its vacancy it had been discovered by the high-schoolers in Ulster too; they used it to get high, or when it was too cold for the playground, or for the same purpose as Dennis and Molly. Someone must have seen them arriving, or leaving, or in the act. It could have been Annika and her boyfriend for all Molly knew. She never found out.

Monday morning Kay didn’t come out of her room. Molly wanted to talk to her but she understood it would have to wait. She herself had slept a lot the last two days, at first as a refuge from depression but later out of a developing sense that the worst had happened and so there was really nothing more to worry about. Her father didn’t say a word to her either. He tried to make his silence seem like punishment but she could see that the truth was he had no idea what to say. It was the sort of offense that made all his authority seem like a fiction, lighter than air. Then, as she was on her way out the door for school, Roger said to her, “Have you told any of your friends about this?”

“About what?” she said.

His nostrils flared. “Don’t make me say it.”

But that was what she wanted; if she was to be shamed, she had decided, she didn’t want to be shamed by euphemisms. Still, she felt sorry for him then. “Of course I haven’t,” she said.

“Good. Don’t. We have to figure out a way to keep this all under wraps.”

But it was too late for that already. Joyce Vincent had considered the matter and had settled upon the course of public exposure as retribution for her husband. For one thing, she had thrown him out of the house and needed an explanation for it. Her defaming him, on the phone and then in person with all her friends and family, was mostly retributive, because she felt that he had disgraced her irremediably — that her home had been blown apart not by a sexual folly but by the proof it provided of his utter lack of regard for her, what she did and what she went through. Had he betrayed her with someone she had never met, or even someone she just didn’t know very well, she might have found a way to put it behind her; instead, though, in the evenings, after the confused, tearful children were put to bed, Joyce sat up helplessly sorting through the memories of the hundreds of times she had welcomed Molly into her home, kissed the girl, gossiped with her, played the mother to her because her own mother was known to be unreliable, done small favors for her, entrusted her children to her. She heard the voice that said she was punishing the kids by kicking their father out — that a better person than her would find a way to forgive even this, for their sake — but Joyce was who she was and there was only so much that could be asked of her. She couldn’t think which was worse: if the two of them, lying together, had smiled lewdly at their conspiracy to mock and degrade her, or if they had never even given a thought to her at all.

In school everyone cleared a path for Molly as if she were on fire. She felt the eyes on her at her locker, in the girls’ bathroom between periods, felt the silence she created wherever she walked. At lunch she arrived early and sat at her usual table; when Justine and Tia got there, they coaxed each other with impatient glances for a minute before Tia finally said, in a whisper, “So is it true?”

Molly shrugged. “Yeah, it’s true,” she said.

They weren’t really sure what to ask after that. Molly had found the limits of their apathy; in their eyes, she had gone too far — there were kids involved, after all — and for what? Dennis himself had never been considered one of the best-looking older men in town anyway. But they suppressed any desire to ask for details, sexual or otherwise. It was the hostility of the whole thing — the way Molly must have known all along, as they were finding out only now, that their own supposed intimacy with her was really just an indulgence, a lie — that surprised and, ultimately, estranged them. As for Annika, she never came to lunch that day at all.

It wasn’t bad, Molly thought stoically as she sat alone on the bus at the end of the first day, this sort of amazed ostracism. Because all it signified was that she was not one of them. She had always known it. Now everyone knew it.

But she wasn’t familiar with the other feelings that feelings of difference engendered. They were not about to esteem her for taking them all by surprise. They would not long be content to leave her alone. Whispers behind her back, which turned into accusations in her face: she didn’t really care. Ridiculous pranks: someone poured a can of motor oil through the vent in her locker. Someone painted the word WHORE on her gymlocker door. Then one morning she opened the front door of their house and the word had been painted there too.

Roger called in sick to work that day, to think and repaint his door and try to find some safe point of escape for all the fury he felt inside him. If he could have he might have tried to find and beat Dennis Vincent — Roger had never beaten anyone in his life, but he had rage on his side, and Vincent was a small man; and even the alternative, which was taking the beating himself, was bound to be more cathartic than doing nothing. But Dennis had vanished: quit his job, left town with a car full of clothes; wherever he was he kept phoning his former home, asking to speak to his children, but his wife forbade it. She did not want Kevin and Bethany, if she could help it, to grow up with any version of the catastrophe other than her own. Dennis never tried to contact Molly; perhaps he was too afraid one of her parents would answer the phone. Or perhaps he had come around to blaming her somehow for the whole thing. In any case, he was probably not very far away; but when it came to such an exotic task as locating a man who was in hiding, Roger Howe had no resources at all.

A full week went by before he suddenly appeared in the doorway of Molly’s room, finally seized by the courage to talk about it. Molly had had a lot of time to prepare and had decided that this conversation was at least going to have the merit of complete candor.

He stood with his back to the dresser, his hands behind him. Molly sat on the bed.

“I suppose the first thing I should ask you,” he said, “is whether this, whether you were forced or in any way felt you were under duress, threatened …”

“No.”

He nodded, neither pleased nor displeased, his lips pressed together. “Because I know that an adult can be a real figure of authority, and can trade on that—”

“No, it wasn’t like that. No one forced me to do anything.”

“You wanted to do it?”

“I did it of my own will.”

“Whose idea was it, whose initiative?”

“His.”

“And at some point he expressed this idea to you.”

“Yes. But in a conversation. He didn’t force himself on me or anything like that.”

“How long did it go on?”

“About six months, I guess.”

“You guess. Were you — was it your — well, never mind about that. I don’t know why it matters. How long was it supposed to go on?”

“Sorry?”

“When was it going to end? When you went to college? Or was it going to continue after that?”

“Probably not.”

“Probably not. So you just thought it could go on indefinitely. Did you really think you wouldn’t get caught?”

“Yes, actually. I really did think that. Maybe that was stupid.”

“You didn’t want to get caught, on some level? Maybe to get Joyce out of the way? Or maybe to ruin Dennis’s life, because you were really—”