The Animators(72)

“You’re just saying that.”

He clears his throat. “Hey, Sharon? My dad raped little girls and took pictures of them tied up asleep. You, of all people, should know—my tolerance for being freaked out’s pretty high.”

We both burst out laughing. I look down at my hands. “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

“What are you sorry for? Stop saying that, would you?” He takes hold of my shoulder. “Hey. Really. You’ve done nothing wrong here.”

Oh, but I have. I’m getting the feeling that I’ve done something very, very wrong just by coming here. Just by making Teddy a party to whatever’s going to happen next. I clench my hands and open them. Look him in the face. “That must have been hell for you,” I say. “And I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.”

“Let me tell you something my aunt Nadine told me during the court case. Okay? You ready? I want you to take these words to heart. Take them to the grave.” He leans in, puts his hands on my shoulders. Whispers, “Sugarpie, it ain’t your fault Daddy’s a kid diddler.”

I clap my hand over my mouth. Teddy grins. Mel and Tatum and Ryan stare at us. “What are you looking at,” Teddy says to them.

He gives my arm a quick squeeze, sudden and intimate. My breath catches in my throat. “In my experience, it usually makes it weirder to try to avoid the subject,” he says.

He leans in, picks up his beer. There are glints of silver right above his ears, a little gray in his stubble. Every year that has passed between then and now is in the way he sits. Mel showed me the article the night before online—Honus Caudill spent a grand total of eight months in prison before, like her mom, he was stabbed by another inmate. Child molesters, she explained, tend not to last long in Gen Pop.

“And you say there’s no rough chuckles in you,” I say.

Teddy shrugs. “Well, I think I get what you mean, about your project. You make your head a hospitable enough place to be, why would you ever want to leave?”

I see something cross his face, dark and fleeting. It occurs to me that he might actually understand. That maybe he does something that feels like the List and puts effort into looking like he doesn’t.

“I’m really glad you’re here,” he says. He reaches out, brushing my arm, and grabs an unopened straw. Taps the wrapper down to the tabletop, leaving a perfect crimped paper roll. The straw is inserted into his beer, beer suctioned up, dripped onto the paper. It unfurls, quick and alive.

“Look, it’s a snake,” he whispers to me.

Mel and the boys have left behind three empty pitchers and two plates of hot-wing bones, and have moved on to a vintage Mortal Kombat console. Tatum and Ryan watch the screen as Mel’s shoulders flex under the denim jacket she has stolen from Tatum; she is winning. “Yeah, motherfucker,” she hollers, then turns, lets rip her best Axl Rose, pointing with both hands. “Sha na na na na na yeah!”

“They’re in love with her,” Teddy says.

“She’s been eating pussy since 1999.”

“Oh well. Want to go for a walk?”

“Sure.”

Outside it’s breezy and chill. There’s the smell of car exhaust and toasting leaves. We approach crosswalks and stop, waiting through two signals, talking, distracted. “So about this list,” Teddy says, leaning over and jostling me with his elbow. “Am I on it?”

“You’re number one,” I tell him.

His face lights up. “Really?”

“Of course.”

We’ve arrived at a little circular park. A sign posted at its entrance reads OLD EPISCOPALIAN BURIAL GROUNDS. Teddy leads me to a stone bench under some chestnuts. We sit.

“How did it happen?” I ask him.

He lifts his eyebrows. He knows, immediately, what I’m talking about. He takes a deep breath. “All of it? Oh Jesus. There’s probably a pretty exhaustive Wikipedia entry somewhere.” He rubs his palm over his chin and sighs, smile fading. I’m not sure whether he’s joking. “Did you follow it at all in the papers? The trial?”

“I tried not to.”

“What a luxury,” he says. “I wish I could have slept through that part of my life. There’s nothing more damaging to your sense of well-being than hearing about your parents’ sex life in court. The whole unbearable, nasty story. All three-ways and body hair and 1970s key parties. Though that sounds pretty cosmopolitan for them.”

“The seventies were gross,” I whisper.

“The seventies were disgusting,” he agrees. Then he goes quiet, picking at his jacket. “You know how being in our heads is sort of a refuge for us? Well, sex was sort of a refuge for my parents. And for Dad, it was an illness, something that made him dangerous. I think the weirdest part of the trial, for me, was hearing about these details from my mom. When she was giving testimony. Like, her acknowledging that she had always known something was wrong. That for my dad, it was more than, you know, swinging, having multiple partners. All in legalese.”

“So you were there for the entire trial.”

“Oh yes. I was twenty. I was there for it. The whole goddamned ordeal,” he says. “Apparently Mom didn’t think him having a thing for young girls meant he was dangerous, or a pedophile. That was her defense. Her argument? All men do. Can you imagine? But you remember that van?”