And since this is not about me, since the goal is to uncover what happened to Lindy, I’ll spare you the total depression of this event. Just know that the night fell to heavy drinking for my father and his cohorts, and then to poker. In times they forgot I was there, the young men and women kissed one another openmouthed at the table. They hit up my father for beer money. Laura remained nice enough, and my father, in his own version of therapy, I suppose, drank several bourbon and Cokes out of a Styrofoam cup.
When they later turned up the music and took to dancing in the wood-paneled cabin, I slipped outside, unnoticed, and walked to the far end of the pier, where I skipped oyster shells like rocks into the still and black water. After an hour, I heard someone walking up to me. It was my father. He stood underneath a floodlight and steadied himself on a wooden beam, his shirt untucked.
“Hey, son,” he said. “Everything all right out here?”
I looked at him but said nothing. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and slapped clumsily at a bug by his ear. I could hear music still playing in the cabin, the swell of girlish laughter.
“It’s dark out here,” my father said. “There’s bugs.”
We stared at each other for a long time. And although scenes like this now strike me as heavy and important, replaying like loops in my mind, I had no deep thoughts on this occasion. I instead listened to fish moving in schools along the shallow banks and watched my father try to stifle his hiccups. After a moment, one of his friends returned from a beer run and the glow of headlights lit us up on the dock, where I imagine the two of us standing there in the spotlight looking totally unrelated, as awkward as strangers in a hospital elevator. We both blocked our eyes from the glare, and then it got dark again. I could hardly see.
I heard my father take a deep breath through his nose.
“I’ll take you home in the morning,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I eventually fell asleep on a pull-out couch and my father passed out on the front porch of the stilted cabin, sitting in a lawn chair with the Styrofoam cup in his hand. Laura slept alone in her room.
The next day I pretended to feel sick.
I barely spoke to anyone and feigned sleep the entire ride home. My father, now sober and guilt-ridden, tried to explain life to me in the car, to give me some eloquent bit about how love finds you when you’re not expecting it, how it doesn’t bother with age or situation, and how it doesn’t always play fair. He told me repeatedly to take good care of my mom because she was a special woman he would always love, and she deserved the best. He continued to talk even when he thought I was asleep and yet surprisingly little was revealed. Or perhaps I just didn’t listen.
I had my reasons.
Earlier that morning I had overheard him tell Laura that he was just going to drive to Baton Rouge and drop me off and that he’d be back to the camp that evening. I heard him tell her that she’d done great, that I was just an angry teenager, and that they would have some “real fun” upon his return. So I had heard enough, to be honest. I had nothing to say.
When we got home, my father told my mother that something was wrong with me. He said he would call her later that week to check up, but that he had an appointment to get to that afternoon and couldn’t stick around. My mother, we both could tell, had been crying.
“Kathryn,” he told her, “don’t be so dramatic. He might just have a cold or something. I tried talking to him, but he slept the whole way home in the car.”
“Glen,” my mother said, “that’s not what makes him sick.”
My mother looked over at me and, for the first time in my life, I did not recognize her expression.
“You need to see something,” she told him. “You need to see what I found in his room.”
15.
I’ve imagined this day to death, the day I became a suspect.
In the first version, a child’s version, my mother is a wreck. As soon as I left the house with my father, she cried over a teapot. She cried over her laundry. She took off her fancy clothes and put on pajamas, poring over old photos of my father and me. She thought about us entirely, and wondered why men act the way they do. She still considered me a good boy in this fantasy, the same swaddled infant who once nestled up to her breast in the delivery room, and so she planned out my meals for the upcoming week. She tearfully sliced up that roast so I could have sandwiches the next day. She double-checked to make sure we had the potato chips I liked. Then she walked into my room with a load of freshly folded clothes under her arm and, by total accident, stubbed her toe on a wooden box underneath my bed, with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
In the second version, the one that came to me when I grew up a bit, I see my mother as a complicated person, a woman lonely and in need. In this version she recovered quickly after my departure and suddenly saw her empty house as a palace where she could finally rule. She poured herself a glass of wine before lunch. She lay on the couch and unbuttoned her blouse. She fell into adult dreams and dialed up her numerous gentleman suitors to say, I’m here, now, I’m alone, I’m normal for a change. And whether they came over or not, whether she took out her frustrations in a way that so many of us would, this is beyond the reach of our business. But after night came, and she was alone again, she stumbled tipsily into my room. She dropped some half-folded laundry on the floor and, exhausted, decided to make a pillow of my black T-shirts and baggy jeans that now smelled of fabric softener. And then, before passing off to sleep, she noticed a box beneath my bed with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
In the final version, the one that still comes to me intermittently, in times when I want to feel innocent, my mother began snooping as soon as I walked out the door. She did not wait to see me wave to her from my father’s Mercedes, nor did she even bother with cooking that roast. Instead she stomped straight into my room and flung the clothes out of my drawers. She dumped my schoolbag out on the desk. She flipped through my notebooks. She called up Randy and Artsy Julie to grill them about my character. She stood on footstools and riffled through the items at the top of my closet. She looked underneath my mattress. And just when she was about to give up, when she was a second or two from realizing that my rebellion was only a quick rite of passage, nothing to be alarmed about, she sat on the floor to assess the damage she’d done. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a box underneath my bed with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
Regardless of how it all happened, what she found in the box was this: five poems; twenty-seven pornographic drawings of Lindy and myself; a green bracelet made by Lindy’s Christian pen pal in Jamaica; two hair barrettes; six pages of pornography torn from a magazine called Cherry that a guy named Ronnie Gibbs had brought to school; seven wallet-sized school photos of Lindy (two with her face cut out and pasted to the aforementioned Cherry pages); the condoms and sex pamphlet that my mother herself had given me; four mix tapes; a small bottle of Astroglide personal lubricant (half empty); six packets of vending-machine condoms with names like Mud Grips, French Tickler, and Lambskinz on them; the photo of Lindy singing to herself as she walked that I’d gotten from Jason Landry; a page ripped from the back of my yearbook that Lindy had signed for me in the seventh grade that read Hey you! Have a great summer! Hugs, Lindy (the i dotted with a heart); a pair of cheap plastic binoculars; and, finally, unfortunately, a blue Reebok running shoe.
Most of these items had easy explanations.
I dabbled, for instance, in poetry. The majority of my verse was so vague, however, that if it weren’t for the accompanying visuals, my mother likely couldn’t have pegged my muse. One poem I remember was called “106 Steps” and detailed the amount of walking it took for me to get to Lindy’s house. Step number six, I bet you taste like Pixy Stix, and so on. Lindy’s name was never mentioned, of course, as I substituted words like heaven, nirvana, and paradise for the Simpson house. It was awful stuff. Another was called “Roses in My Hand” and made a series of veiled innuendos about every red part of her that I would like to touch. I wasn’t trying to be coy, though, I was just a kid to whom everything seemed unclear. I wanted to fondle her heat, her aura, her soul, none of which I’d physically know how to locate if she allowed me. The last one I remember was written in violet Crayola for effect and was titled, simply enough, “My Blood Is You.”
This was not so bad. I’ve heard more malice in pop songs.
Much of the incriminating memorabilia could also be explained by my habit of pacing the sidewalk in front of Lindy’s house. This was fairly innocent stuff as well: the barrettes, the green friendship bracelet that had unraveled and fallen off in the rain. Surely a boy can’t be blamed for that. Think of men who walk along the beaches in sunglasses and full-brimmed hats, scouring the sand with metal detectors. These are not felons. Think of our parents, even, holding on to some gold-plated brooch their mothers once wore, or stowing away a box of ribbons their father garnered in war. We are all small historians, aren’t we? We are all private treasure hunters, every one of us. So what was I supposed to do when, after the crime, I happened upon that lone Reebok sitting in a pile of trash at their curb?
Yet I was no fool. The homemade pornography was hard to defend. Stick figures or no, the lusty intention was there. My erotic thought bubbles had recently evolved into diatribes, as well, bursting out of Lindy’s head as she knelt in front of me on a piece of construction paper torn in a fit from my school binder. She spoke in long sentences in these scenes and said things like, I have always wanted this since that time you tackled me last summer. Or, This is the way I like boys to give it to me. Or, in the one I really regret, when she was on all fours, screaming, Yes! Please! Again!
I had no excuse for such things.
And even then I understood the despair that must have sunk into my mother’s bones when she saw this. I also understood the way this discovery must have recast for her the conversation we had with the police officer in our living room, when she realized, in other words, that this box may have already been sitting there silently, beneath my bed, when I performed so innocently for the Simpsons. What was she to do with this idea?
I didn’t ask.
Yet it all looked so devilish out in the light, my private collection, where it was never supposed to be. This was especially true of the way I had pasted Lindy’s face onto the torn-out pages of those magazines. Heaven help her. There she was, glued to the page, disembodied and smiling innocently for the school photographer as she unknowingly bent over some enormous penis or pinched her nipples with a trail of semen on her breasts. The poor thing. I see that now.
I didn’t know what I was doing. Please understand that. I don’t want this confession to lose you. No boy knows what he is doing when he first stumbles upon masturbation. We become amateur inventors, we gawky and lunatic teens, and Lindy was simply the stuff of my workshop, of my laboratory. And I’ve spent years wondering how different my life would be if I was like the millions of boys who hadn’t been caught, if I was like any other normal person who had the privilege of privacy, if I’d have been able to keep these fantasies locked up where they should be, in my mind, in my heart, with no empirical evidence to speak of.
But who am I kidding? I’ve never been any good at keeping things locked away.
Look at me now, for instance. Look at me telling you, of all people.
Yet the real problem, it turned out, was not the pornography, which my father laughed off when she told him. Nor was it the Astroglide lubricant that, in a fit of unbelievable bravery, I had purchased at the K&B Drugstore within biking distance of my house. Nor was it even the rambling poetry or mix tapes I had made but never given to Lindy, nor even the blue Reebok, which I was able to explain to her in the way I have to you.
No. The real problem was the pair of binoculars, and the photo I confessed to her came from the Landrys’. These items brought repercussions. Our home was never the same.