Mercy Street(15)

“Get in,” he called over the radio—red-faced, as though he’d spent the day on his motorcycle. He seemed in high spirits, ready to celebrate. He’d borrowed the Falcon from Street Rodz, he told Claudia. As a birthday present, he was going to teach her to drive.

There were obvious logical problems with this statement—her birthday wasn’t for another week, and anyway, she was only thirteen. Explaining this seemed too complicated, so she got into the car.

They set out driving. North of town, in the parking lot behind the Amway store, they switched places. Gary showed her how to slide the driver’s seat forward, to adjust the mirrors. They didn’t bother about seat belts; it’s possible there weren’t any.

She started the car.

It’s hard to say how long she drove. It might have been minutes or hours; even at the time she wasn’t sure. The feeling was dreamlike, trees and barns and houses slipping past. Indian summer, the clear light tinged with sadness. The leaves had begun to turn. The black vinyl seat stuck to her bare legs, superheated from the sun.

The driving lesson finished where it had begun, in the Amway parking lot. Claudia pulled around to the back of the building and engaged the brake, and Gary reached across her lap to cut the engine. The silence was a little shocking. Birdsong in the distance, the quiet tick of the motor cooling down.

“Happy birthday,” he said, and kissed her on the mouth.

He had been drinking, which was normal. She wouldn’t have said that he was drunk. Gary was a big man with a high tolerance, and the beer he liked was cheap and watery. He could demolish half a case with no apparent ill effects. In a person who rarely spoke, drunkenness was hard to discern.

She didn’t want to kiss him, and she certainly didn’t want his cold muscular tongue in her mouth, but Gary seemed not to notice.

He said, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”

MANY YEARS LATER, CLAUDIA WOULD TELL HER THERAPIST about that kiss, but at the time she kept quiet. She didn’t even tell Justine. Their conversation about the motorcycle (You touched him?) still haunted her. She feared Justine would think it was her fault, that she’d given Gary the wrong idea, and that this was possibly true.

Of course, she didn’t tell her mother. She didn’t have to. When she came home from school the next day, Gary’s motorcycles were gone.

“I kicked him out,” Deb said flatly. It was a Tuesday, her day off, and she was lying on the couch with a heating pad under her back, watching Wheel of Fortune. “I had enough.”

Enough of what? Claudia didn’t ask. Her cheeks burned as though she’d been caught in a lie.

There was a long silence.

“He came to my school,” she said finally. It was hard to get the words out. “We went for a drive.”

She didn’t have to say it. She could tell by her mother’s face that Deb already knew.

Another silence in which they both stared at the TV screen. Pat Sajak had cut to a commercial, a chorus of exuberant kids singing about vitamins. The commercial seemed endless. Even as a child, Claudia hated the sound of children singing.

Deb said, “He shouldn’t have done that.”

Claudia waited for her to say more, but there was no more. Her mother reached for the remote and clicked through the channels.

“He’s gone now,” Deb said. “He won’t bother you again.”

HERE’S ONE FINAL FACT ABOUT GARY CAIN. THIS IS SOMETHING Claudia doesn’t like to think about. As he kissed her in the Amway parking lot, he pressed her left hand to his groin.

It was a confusing moment. Her knowledge of male anatomy had come from diapering fosters, and this had in no way prepared her for what felt like a clenched fist beneath Gary’s button fly. In those two or three seconds she thought of Justine’s dog Daffy, who had a fast-growing tumor between her shoulder blades that would eventually kill her. Claudia loved Daffy and continued to pet her, even though her tumor was disgusting. When Gary pinned her hand to his lap, she felt a similar mix of revulsion, pity, and alarm.

Poor sweet dog.

To his credit, he understood immediately that he’d done something wrong.

“Fuck!” He flung her hand away as though it had burned him. “I shouldn’t have done that. You’re just a kid.”

Gary leaned back in his seat and covered his eyes with his hand. He had to go, he said. Living with Claudia had become impossible. He said other things too, but years later, those were the words she’d remember: Living with you has become impossible. He didn’t say, and she didn’t ask, what exactly she had done.

When he threw away her hand, she didn’t know what to do with it. Keep it, she wanted to tell him. I don’t want it anymore.

Gary talked and talked, more words than she’d ever heard him speak, as though he’d been saving them up for months. He would miss her, but she had to understand that it was only temporary. In three years, when she turned sixteen, he would come back for her. Claudia didn’t ask what he would do with her then. Adopt her? Marry her?

In the end they swapped seats; Gary drove back to the trailer in silence, having used up all his words. Claudia stared out the window, her left hand in her pocket. It felt different from the other one, as though she’d been sitting on it for a while and starved it of blood.

Really, it was nothing. What occurred in the front seat of the Falcon was so minor that there wasn’t even a word for it. Claudia wasn’t raped or assaulted; she was only messed with. Worse had been done to young girls all over the world, on every day of every year for as long as people had kept track of days or years.