The Animators(73)

I inhale sharply.

He lifts his chin, looks ahead, not at me. “You do,” he says. “He really committed to the cliché. Big gray van, tinted windows, rolling down the street. Don’t mind me. No child molesters here. Beep-beep.”

We both laugh, a touch uncomfortably.

“I was three or four when he bought it. It’s like, come on, Mom. The van wasn’t a tip-off? The extended work trips? Or the fact that he always kept it locked? That wasn’t an indicator? Well, one day she pried her way in. And under the passenger seat, she found a pair of panties that were very, very small.”

I feel something cold and unpleasant shoot up my spine.

“So. In a move she can’t quite describe to this day, even in her version of the story, my mom picked up and left. She claims she could barely take care of herself back then. Had undiagnosed hep C, drank a lot. But I think she was in panic mode. She realized that what was going on really was her worst suspicion. That she was married to a predator, a really sick guy. And her instinct said run. She says she planned to come back for me. Thought I’d be okay in the meantime. And I guess I was. Physically, anyway.”

“The pictures,” I say.

He turns to me, looks hard.

“You remember showing those to me?”

He shakes his head.

“I remembered those when I saw the news report back in college,” I say. “It just hit me. Like I had forgotten. Actually, I think I had.”

I can see his face drain in the dark. “I showed those to you?”

“You don’t remember that?”

He shakes his head. Exhales. “No. Oh Christ. Sharon, I am so sorry.”

“Well, what else were you going to do? You were a kid.”

I see him swallow and close his eyes. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“Bound to happen. We were together all the time back then.”

“We were.” He speaks slowly, blinks rapidly. Takes a deep breath. “Your house was a refuge.”

I toy with the zipper on my jacket. “Things had to be pretty bad for our house to be a refuge.”

“Well, I knew I’d always get fed there,” he says. “I wouldn’t paw through things and find just unspeakable shit. Things like those pictures. Which, apparently, I showed you.”

He covers his mouth with his hand. His eyes empty out. A necessary pause. The two of us, here, doing this—it feels like a miracle, a northern lights of human interaction. Two brain-dwellers of the worst variety, luring each other out.

He says suddenly, “Sharon, did he ever—”

“No,” I say quickly.

He exhales, long and slow. His shoulders sag under his coat. He shuts his eyes, relieved.

“And you,” I say, “you—”

“No.”

The air has gotten colder, developed a light bite. At some point, the streetlights have flickered on.

“So your mom came for you,” I say.

“She did. We moved here. And when I was a teenager, I tried to forget a lot of what I saw and heard in my dad’s house. Did a lot of drugs. Read a lot of books. Watched a lot of movies. Just crammed my head with stuff to try to force it out. But it never worked. And, at some point, I realized what it was I saw, in those pictures. How wrong it was. Just what a trespass on someone else’s humanity. I had a friend in high school who had something like that happen to her when she was a kid. It really fucked her up. Profoundly. She put the whole thing into perspective for me. I had to do something. So one day, junior year of high school, I got up out of my English class at duPont Manual, right there up the street, found a pay phone on Central Avenue, called the Faulkner Police Department, and left an anonymous tip. But they didn’t have a search warrant or anything else they needed. So nothing happened.”

“The arrest wasn’t until a few years after, right?”

Teddy nodded. “He was in West Virginia. Tried to get a girl into his van. She bit his hand and ran off screaming. They traced his plates. When the police came to the house, there were bite marks that matched the girl’s dental records. That girl was scrappy as hell. She testified. Showed the jury her teeth. There’s a picture of it. It’s pretty famous. She’s probably in college by now.”

“So that gave them what they needed.”

“They raided the house, found something like what we found. You have to remember, this was pre-Internet, pre–deep web, really, so this was a very by-hand operation. There was a lot of just tangible stuff to go through, apparently. So much so that he was absolutely fucked by the sheer weight of the evidence. They connected him to a larger ring of porn distributors in the Southeast, something the FBI had been tracking for a while. And it ended up on the news.”

We’re close together on the bench. It occurs to me that I’ve been holding my breath. It’s the kind of conversation that makes you feel an unspeakable closeness to another human being. For me, a person who has always considered herself alone, those conversations feel like a gift, someone trusting me with something private and valuable. My body reacts before my mind does: My stomach warms, I become weirdly golden between the legs, my breathing slows. I can count these conversations on both hands. Most I’ve had with Mel: the first night we met, and late, late at night, deep into work and bottles of vodka, when she’d talk about the way her aunt Shelly’s house smelled, or her mom letting her drive the car when she was eleven, or when she lost her virginity, at sixteen, to the divorcée next door. I had one with my dad, on one of those nights before I left for college, when he was drunk and talking about his mother: how she’d actually, physically dig coal out of a crevice at their farm’s rear acre for their furnace when his dad was passed out. Another one, a very long time ago, with Shauna—also drunk, on wine coolers—who told me, “Sissy, you suck. I love you.”