Give Me Your Heart (29 page)

Her voice was brattish, exasperated. “Why aren’t you in bed, Mom? I told you not to wait up.”

Now that Les was gone and would not be coming back, Ethel was in mourning. Her face was pale and puffy without makeup, raw. Yet strangely young-looking, her mouth like a bruise, wounded. In the
chenille robe her body was slack, ripe, beyond ripeness. The loose, heavy breasts were disgusting to Miriam, who wanted to rush at her mother and strike at her with childish, flailing fists.
Miriam, who was staggering with exhaustion, limping barefoot, hair in her face, and her ridiculous tight red T-shirt and white cord skirt stained with her own vomit. Wanting to hide her shamed face
against Ethel’s neck which was creased, smelling of talcum.

Somewhere distant, in the mountains beyond Star Lake, a melancholy cry, a sequence of cries. Loons, coyotes. Les had taken Miriam outside one summer night to listen to plaintive cries he
identified as the cries of black bears.

Ethel smiled uncertainly. Knowing that if she moved too suddenly, Miriam would push her away, run from the room. Barefoot, wincing in pain. The door to her room would be slammed shut, it would
never open. “You look feverish, honey.” Ethel must have smelled male sweat on Miriam. She smelled beer, vomit. Unmistakable, the smell of a daughter’s vomit. But shrewdly deciding
not to go there, in that direction. So grateful that the daughter is home. Coming to press a hand against the daughter’s forehead. Miriam flinched, dreading this touch. For hours she’d
been dreading it. yet the hand was cool, consoling. Ethel said, her voice throaty, bemused, “Where’ve you been, are you going to tell me?”

For a moment Miriam couldn’t remember. Where had she been? Her mouth was dry, parched as sand. As if she’d slept with her mouth open, helpless in sleep as a small child.

“Nowhere. Now I’m back.”

Bleeed

Hadn’t known the girl. He had not. All he knew was, she was the daughter of friends of his parents. Or maybe just acquaintances, for his parents had known many people in
those years. First he remembered of her, a distinct memory, he’d been thirteen years old and in ninth grade and she’d been only five years old, a lifetime between them at those ages.
One small child interchangeable with any other small child, girl or boy, and of virtually no significance to a boy of thirteen, for whom no one matters much except a select gathering of boys his
age and older, and a very few girls. And there was his mother speaking to him in a voice frightening to him, impulsive, intimate, and her hands on him as if to restrain him from slipping away:
“That poor child! And her parents! Of course, they have to be grateful that she’s alive, and that terrible man has been—” and he saw a shudder of revulsion in his
mother’s face, and quickly he looked away, for there was something wrong in this, his mother speaking to him in a voice he rarely heard except when his parents were speaking together in the
privacy of their bedroom and the door was closed against their children; and Jess was the sort of boy lacking not curiosity exactly but the recklessness required for wishing to overhear exchanges
between your parents you understand are not meant for you to hear. And so Jess resented this behavior on his mother’s part. That look in his mother’s usually composed face of revulsion
tinged with excitement. For there was something sexual in this. Jess knew, and didn’t want to know. For what could
terrible man
mean if the girl had not been killed, except sex? Jess
was embarrassed and resentful, hotly his face pounded with blood, badly he wanted to escape. What had he to do with a child eight years younger than he was! And his mother saying, “If
you’ve heard anything, Jess, will you tell me? Tell me what you’ve heard.” (They were in the kitchen. Jess’s mother seemed to have been waiting for him there. Had him
trapped between the refrigerator and the stove.) At thirteen you no more want to speak of sexual matters with a parent than you would want to speak of God with a parent. And so, not meeting his
mother’s gaze, Jess mumbled that he hadn’t heard anything about whatever this was his mother was telling him, whatever ugly and unspeakable incident wholly unrelated to him and to any
of his classmates, Jess took care not to repeat the girl’s name—the name of a five-year-old girl means virtually nothing to a boy of thirteen—assuring his anxious mother that no
one at his school had been talking about it, so far as he knew.
So far as he knew
was possibly the truth.
So far as he knew
was, for a boy of thirteen being questioned by his mother
in a way distressing to him, the most negotiable of truths. “The worst of it has been kept out of the news, so far. Her name isn’t being released and actual details of what he did
except ‘repeated assault,’ ‘critical blood loss’—imagine! A five-year-old girl! Nothing about the family, and a picture only of the . . .
‘perpetrator.’” Jess saw that his mother’s mouth, which was usually a smiling mouth, was contorted. Harsh lines bracketed his mother’s mouth.
This is the way she
will look when she is old. When she is older,
Jess thought. Wanting badly to escape now, push past his mother and run upstairs to his room, shut the damn door behind him and burrow into his
most secret and forbidden thoughts, sick thoughts, guilty thoughts, where neither his mother nor his father could follow him. For there are places in the world like secret fissures and fault lines
into which we can burrow, and hide, where no one can follow. Stammering now, insisting that he hadn’t heard anything about the girl, nothing at school, daring now to lift his eyes to his
mother’s eyes in a desperate appeal, and it was then that Jess’s mother uttered the astonishing words Jess would never forget: “I wish I could believe you.”

Not accusing so much as yearning, wistful. And her mouth strained, ugly. And it was the final moment of Jess’s childhood, as it was, for Jess’s mother, the final moment of a phase of
her motherhood. Though neither could have said. Though neither would have possessed the words to speak of their loss. At that moment in the gleaming and overlarge kitchen of the Hagadorns’
“classic contemporary” house on Fairway Drive overlooking the sculpted hillocks and sly sand traps of the North Hills Country Club golf course, it was clear that the mother could not
trust the son even as the son, steeling himself against a sudden unwished-for gripping of his mother’s hand on his shoulder or a caress of proprietary fingers at the nape of his warm neck,
could not trust the mother.

“Go away, then.
Go.”

That night overhearing her speaking to his father and her voice quavering in disgust, reproach—“that terrible man,” “terrible thing,” “so close to
home,” “should be put away for life”—and this time Jess stood very still in the upstairs hall outside the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, scarcely daring to
breathe, needing to hear all that might be revealed. And more.

Why? It was the sex. It was the sex secret. That thrilled quaver in his mother’s voice. That look on his mother’s face. For now he would see his mother at a
distance and recognize her as a woman, a woman among other women: female. In Health Science you were taught that sex was “normal,” sex was “healthy,” sex was
“good,” sex was “nothing to be ashamed of,” sex should be “consensual,” sex should be “safe,” yet the fact was, everyone knew that sex was secret,
and sex was guilty, and sex was sniggered at by the guys, and sex was a wild roller-coaster ride you were scared to climb into yet had no choice about climbing into, soon. (How soon? Thirteen, in
ninth grade, Jess was one of the younger and shyer and less experienced boys but he was determined this wouldn’t last.) Sex was “porn,” and sex was “sex pervert,” and
sex was “rape-murder,” and sex was that “terrible man” who’d done that “terrible thing” to a little girl whose name Jess would try not to remember.

Another time. A few years later. Not the same girl. And not Jess’s mother but Jess’s father interrogating him, not in the kitchen but in Jess’s room, from
which there could be no escape.

“—know anything about this . . . abduction, do you?”

Quickly Jess shook his head:
no.

“—boys in your class? Not friends of yours, are they?”

Quickly Jess shook his head:
no.

It was so: Jess wasn’t friends with the boys involved in the “abduction,” and Jess didn’t know the “underage” girl. All he knew was what he’d heard: the
girl wasn’t a student at North Hills High, her parents weren’t residents of North Hills but of Union City. The rumor was, there was only a mother, an “illegal immigrant.”
The rumor was, the “underage” girl was in eighth grade. (But “mature for her age.”) (Girls were maturing at an alarming rate in middle school; you heard astonishing things.)
It was possible almost to think that this girl was the girl to whom the “terrible things” had been done by the “terrible man” when Jess was in ninth grade, but Jess knew
that this was unlikely. (The other girl, such a little girl at the time, would still be in grade school. And anyway, her family had moved away from North Hills and no one ever spoke of them now.)
Still, Jess had to suppose that the two girls were like each other in crucial ways. Circumstances were similar. For this time too there had been “terrible things” perpetrated upon a
young girl, and this time too there was talk of blood.

Bleeding on the mattress. Bleeding all over. And too drunk to give a damn how grossed out we were.

Jess hadn’t heard these words of disgust firsthand. Jess wasn’t a close friend of any of the guys who’d driven out to Bay Head. Though the guys were seniors, and Jess Hagadorn
was a senior, and it was graduation week, and there were parties. Many parties, of which some overlapped on the same nights. And some of these were parties to which Jess Hagadorn had been invited,
and some of these were not. For there were social circles— cliques—that excluded Jess Hagadorn, though the Hagadorns lived on Fairway Drive overlooking the North Hills golf course and
Mr. Hagadorn owned Hagadorn Electronics, Inc. And Mrs. Hagadorn was friendly with many of the mothers of Jess’s classmates. Jess was seventeen years, ten months old and still one of the
younger, shyer, and less experienced members of his class, but Jess did have friends, Jess did get invited to a number of parties. He’d taken a girl to the senior prom. He’d been
coeditor of the North Hills yearbook. It was an incontestable fact, Jess Hagadorn hadn’t been one of the half-dozen senior boys who’d left a late-night party to drive twenty-eight miles
to the beach house at Bay Head, at the Jersey shore, with the drunken underage girl. The beach house belonged to the family of one of the boys, who’d taken the key without his parents’
knowledge. Jess wasn’t even certain who’d gone on that drive: popular guys, jocks and rich kids. A Fairway Drive neighbor, three houses down. Maybe a few girls, in another vehicle. How
many vehicles drove to Bay Head wasn’t clear. The girls would claim to have left the Bay Head party after only about a half-hour. The girls would claim to have left when they saw “how
things were headed.” Meaning the drinking and drug-taking, and the deafening heavy-metal music. Meaning the underage girl. All that Jess knew, and was trying in a faltering voice to explain
to his father, who stared at him with a grave gray gaze as if viewing him through a rifle scope, was that following the party at Andy Colfax’s house (to which Jess Hagadorn had not been
invited, though, if he’d gone, like numerous others who hadn’t been specifically invited but simply showed up, Jess would have been welcome, or anyway not made to feel unwelcome) the
“abduction” had occurred. It was an “alleged abduction,” for the boys’ claim was that the girl had gone with them willingly. She’d “insisted upon”
accompanying them, she’d “practically begged.” And so the drive to Bay Head had been “consensual.” Whatever happened at Bay Head had been “consensual.” At
least at the beginning, at the North Hills party, “consensual.” If Jess Hagadorn had been invited to join the half-dozen guys and the underage girl on the drive in Ed Mercer’s
father’s Chevy Trailblazer to the Jersey shore, possibly Jess would have been flattered, grateful to be included by such popular jocks and rich kids after years of being excluded. So maybe,
yes. If he’d been invited, maybe he’d have gone with them; this was a possibility. This wasn’t exactly what Jess’s father was asking, but it was what Jess’s father
seemed to be implying. No matter that Jess would have been the only boy at the Bay Head house to be graduating summa cum laude. No matter that Jess would have been the only boy to be attending an
Ivy League university in the fall. And maybe now Jess Hagadorn would be one of seven North Hills, New Jersey, senior boys arrested by Bay Head, New Jersey, police on charges of statutory rape,
sexual assault upon a minor, providing a minor with alcohol, forcible abduction of a minor, resisting arrest. Except Jess hadn’t been one of these boys. He hadn’t so much as glimpsed
the girl. He didn’t know her name. (If he’d known, he had forgotten.) He’d heard that she’d lied about her age. He’d heard that she was fourteen. He’d heard that
she was sixteen. He’d heard that she was thirteen. He’d heard that her birth date was unknown for her single parent, her mother, was an illegal immigrant and had no papers. He’d
heard that the girl herself was an illegal immigrant and had no papers. He’d heard that she was “physically developed,” “mature for her age,” whatever her age was, as
a white girl would not have been. Nor would any white girl, at least any white girl from North Hills, have climbed into a vehicle with a gang of drunken high school seniors on an impulsive drive
sometime after 2
A.M.
to the Jersey shore twenty-eight miles away at Bay Head. (And especially no white girl who was having her period—this is what Jess heard, at second or third
hand—would’ve gone with the guys unless possibly, considering how drunk/drugged the girl was, she hadn’t realized she was having her period and would in this way disgust the guys,
or if she’d known, she’d forgotten. Another possibility, the girl began having her period at the time of the “abduction,” “assaults.”) Jess knew nothing about
any of it. Jess had not glimpsed the girl. Jess had not heard the girl’s screams, and if he’d heard, Jess might have thought the girl was laughing. When girls drink, girls scream with
laughter. Like birds being slaughtered, girls scream with laughter. Girls high on drugs scream with laughter. And when girls have sex, girls scream with pleasure, or so Jess had reason to
believe.