“The other boy almost certainly was Derek Rottweiler,” Audra said.
It almost certainly was. Matthew’s new best friend was a sly, feral child named Derek Rothmuller but whom everyone, including Matthew, called Derek Rottweiler. He was a sweet-looking child with a heart-shaped face and curly black hair, but his eyes were like lasers, constantly scanning for trouble. He was the worst-behaved student in the school, a constant discipline problem, and his own parents had advised Audra to put her purse in a dresser drawer when Derek came over. And yet, Graham and Audra welcomed him into their home and tried to feel fond of him. Maybe other parents had the luxury of turning away their children’s friends, of telling their children to look for more suitable peers, but Graham and Audra did not. They took what they could get.
“What did Mr. Sears say, exactly?” Audra asked.
“Just that Matthew and another boy had used the computer in the school computer lab and later the computer-science teacher checked the history and found they’d been looking at porn.”
“Matthew, though?” Audra said. “Our Matthew?”
It was easy to believe that Derek Rottweiler would look at porn on a school computer, or on any computer at all. But not Matthew, their good boy, their sweet handsome well-behaved son. Why, last year, when the teacher had implemented a system where each day every student was assigned a color based on behavior—green, blue, yellow, orange, or red (just like the original Homeland Security System)—Matthew had never moved off green, not one single time. (Derek Rottweiler, it almost went without saying, shot straight to red on the first day of school and stayed there, the sixth-grade discipline equivalent of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.) Matthew was the opposite of disruptive. Matthew had beautiful manners and the gentlest nature—everyone said so.
But when they called Matthew out to the living room for a family meeting, he looked alarmed (which was normal—he hated change of any kind and always feared that family meetings were called to announce a move or a new school), but he also looked guilty.
“What is this meeting about?” he asked.
“Well,” Graham said, and then found he didn’t know quite how to continue. “It’s about watching porn.”
“What’s porn?” Matthew asked. For a moment Graham thought Matthew was being sarcastic, but he should have known better. Matthew was never sarcastic. He actually didn’t know.
“Pictures or movies of people having sex,” Audra said.
And then it was clear that Matthew did know; he just hadn’t known the term. Remorse and shame swamped his small face.
“I don’t do that,” he said. “And I especially didn’t do it today in my room between four-thirty and five.”
Graham felt his heart twist. Matthew was so guileless, so defenseless against the world.
“Well,” he said slowly, “be that as it may, Mr. Sears called and said that you and another boy had been using the school computer to look at porn, which is against the rules.”
“There’s nothing wrong with porn,” Audra said. (Immediately Graham imagined Matthew repeating that to the school guidance counselor.) “It can actually be very, sort of, nice, and enjoyable sometimes. Relaxing, even. It’s just that we want you to wait until you’re a little older.”
“How much older?” Matthew asked.
“Twenty,” Audra said. “No—thirty.”
Graham had the feeling this conversation was so far off track that they couldn’t see the rails anymore. “At any rate,” he said deliberately, “the point is that you and Derek broke a school rule and there will undoubtedly be consequences. Mr. Sears is trying to decide now what your punishment will be.”
Graham wondered why Mr. Sears hadn’t just told them what the punishment would be. Didn’t the school have a policy in effect? Were they supposed to stress about that all through spring break? What if Matthew got expelled?
Matthew went back to his room and Audra slid down on the couch until her head was resting against the back of it. “I feel like this is some sort of cosmic payback,” she said. “Just last week, Derek Rottweiler was over for a playdate and they were in Matthew’s room and I sat in the kitchen and felt all superior. I thought they were watching Robert Lang’s TED Talk on origami! I sat there and thought, Well, other mothers may have to worry about sex and drugs and alcohol, but not me. My son is in there improving his mind. I actually thought that, Graham! Those very words!”
“Well,” Graham said, “he has watched that TED Talk—”
“I haven’t felt so—so ridiculous since that time I worked the PTA bake sale with Penny Fitzgerald and I said, ‘Uh-oh, some creepy man with an awful mustache is watching us from that car over there,’ and she said, ‘That’s my husband.’?”
Audra slid even lower on the couch. Soon she’d be sitting on the floor. “And now after all this I can’t even have a beer because it might be bad for the baby,” she said.
Baby! Twenty minutes ago she had said she wasn’t even sure she was pregnant and now it was a baby! Did she not understand what that word did to Graham—how it wrenched him?
—
Matthew left for camp the next morning. He stood in the hallway by the door with Graham’s huge old backpack on his shoulders. Was there any sight more heartbreaking than a small boy with a big backpack? Well, yes, of course, there was. Think of the photos of victims of the Nepal earthquake, of the starving children in South Sudan. But those weren’t the same. Those photos made you sad for a little while, but they didn’t make you want to run out on the balcony and drop to your knees, promising God anything if only He will protect your child from bullying and motion sickness.
Audra was standing next to Matthew, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, jingling her car keys and sipping her coffee, just like this was a normal morning. Graham hugged Matthew goodbye, and then Audra and Matthew were both out the door, gone from his protection, out in the big bad world. Graham could not shake the feeling that the next time he saw Matthew, Matthew would be in tears.
Depressed, Graham got a cup of coffee for himself and went into his study to work. An hour later, Audra leaned around the doorjamb. “Matthew went off on the bus so happily!” she said. “He was sitting by Derek Rottweiler. Now I’m going to call Dr. Medowski and see if I can have a pregnancy test this early.”
She liked to do that—announce she was going to do something, then do it, then come back and tell him about it. It was as though their lives were being televised, with a lot of buildup and recap, like the Academy Awards or election results.
“Okay,” Graham said.
He heard her walking around the living room and the small beeps as she dialed her phone. “Oh, hello,” he heard her say. “This is Audra Daltry. Can I speak to Dr. Medowski?”