The Summer That Melted Everything(51)

“One of the girl’s friends, a young boy, gave testimony that he had on more than one occasion walked in on the father naked and sleeping in the daughter’s bed. The father was known to drink too much and had in the past been charged with rape. The woman who accused him was an ex-girlfriend who later dropped the charges and said she filed only because she was mad at him. Still, I was certain of his guilt in regards to his daughter’s rape.

“I looked at his narrow eyes and said to myself, those are the eyes of a devil. I looked at his hands, his rough hands with their filthy nails, and said those are the hands of a monster. Ignoring they were merely the hands of someone who works construction.

“He sat still through the whole trial, never once batting an eye when his daughter on the witness stand described the gruesome details of being violated by him. Yes, I said, he is no father. He is the devil.

“Everyone cheered when he was convicted on all four counts of rape. Hell, I cheered. I had put the devil through the filter and the world was cleaner for it.”

Dad stepped over to the window, where he laid his sweating forehead against the glass.

“Just this last January, the girl—now thirty-three—came forward. Said she falsely accused her father for the same reason the ex-girlfriend had. All that man seemed guilty of was making the women in his life angry.

“The daughter said before she knew it, the case just got out of hand and she was too frightened to say it wasn’t true after all. But ever since getting off the heroin and becoming a born-again Christian, she felt it was her duty to set things right.

“As for the boy who testified, he happened to be the one who had caused the trauma that led to the police believing she’d been raped. Apparently, the two liked things a little rough. And the neighbors who said they saw the father with low hands, lingering kisses and hugs, were actually mad at him for a fence he was putting in, which they said was too far over on their property line.”

Dad pulled his head back from the window, leaving a smear on the glass from his sweat.

“I wanted to apologize to the man, but that damn daughter, she had come forward too late. Prison can be a tough place for a man accused of raping his own. Three years into his sentence, a sentence that up to that point had been filled with numerous trips to the prison’s infirmary, the man had been fatally attacked in the laundry room.”

Dad rubbed the scar on his forehead as he mumbled something to himself before squinting to the bright light outside.

“I had been so certain of his guilt. If I could be so certain and yet so wrong, how many times had I been wrong before? I started to wonder. I looked back on my cases and saw cracks, not victories. I was no hero. I had failed in handling the filter entrusted to me.”

Dad was standing, but he looked like he was kneeling. His trousers dirtying at the knee before my eyes. His hands coming together, at his sides, but coming together in front. My father was praying.

“It got me thinking about all the things we are so certain about. Like the devil. I put that invitation in the newspaper, and I thought the devil will show and he will have a pitchfork and horns and be red all over. He’ll be mean and cruel and evil. I was so certain of that, and then you came, Sal. Not with a pitchfork but with a heart. I—”

Dad was cut off by the ringing doorbell. He wiped his eyes as Mom answered the door and a moment later showed Fedelia in, wearing a heavy black coat—velvet, of all things—that swept the floor and which she held tightly closed by the collar.

I stared at the sweat glistening above her bare lip. It was the first time I’d seen her face naked. The makeup washed off. Little red marks on her cheeks from scrubbing. White film at her hair line left by the soap.

She rather forcefully pushed me out of the way to get to Sal standing behind me. “Well, you little devil, you’ve put me in quite a state since last I saw you.”

“I have?”

“Every time I look in a mirror now, I see the infinity I have built.” She gestured up to her hair. “It is time to be rid of it.”

“Oh, Auntie,” Mom gasped.

Fedelia nodded as she reached into the pocket of her coat to pull out a pair of hair shears, offering them toward Sal. “Won’t you do the honors?”

To avoid a mess of cut hair in the house, we went to the back porch, where Mom brought out a stool. The dark of the evening had laid its way, so she made sure to set the stool beneath the porch bulbs, the lights already preaching to dozens of moths, beetles, and little night flies.

As Fedelia sat down on the stool and checked its wobble, she kept that coat closed tight, her squeeze straining the veins in the backs of her hands. She was quickly tapping her toes. In the tapping, the bottom of the coat slightly fell down across her leg and I caught a glimpse of sequins. She grabbed the coat back and frowned at me as if it’d been my fault.

Sal stood behind her, watching the insects fly the light above, giving him a halo of gnats and moths as he asked Fedelia if she was ready.

“I am ready. Set me free.”

As the shears made their initial approach, Fedelia closed her eyes. She winced as the blades cut and the first ribbon fell in that slow-motion elegance of falling things.

I thought she was going to stop him, say she’d changed her mind, but as the tear slid down her cheek, she opened her eyes, and as if all the light were shining there in her irises, the amber shade became diluted by glow to a yellow that took hold of us all.