5

I had one order of business to attend to before making the journey. His name: Bobby Owens. I’d no trouble spotting the young man when he came out of school the next afternoon. Coach Wells, his basketball coach and a friend of mine, had told me to look for a tall kid with younger girls draped over him. His entourage gave me the suspicious eye when I separated him from their company, but I paid them no mind as I suggested to young Mr. Groves that we take a ride. It wasn’t clear whether or not he knew who I was at this point, but he was certainly alarmed by my interest, as evidenced by the meager ‘Why?’ he managed to get out after a difficult swallow. To bring it all together for him, I threw out Dr. Whittler’s name. To this he responded more actively, glancing around to see who was looking before ducking inside the cab of my beat-up 4Runner, squeezing his backpack to his chest like a security blanket.

I’d no sympathy for him. Yes, I’d been there. I knew the pressures of adolescence, having been through the rigors of imposed religion in the home, the lofty expectations, the demands of teachers, coaches, peers, the whole bit. But I also knew he was a senior and my daughter was a freshman, that he had as big a mouth, even if it only omitted, as he had an appetite for the cradle, a penchant for feeding his self-esteem on the readiest means possible. Quite frankly, he could have been the poster boy for family values and I wouldn’t have cared. Kristin was all that mattered. The truth, whatever his level of involvement, was coming out of him one way or another.

I drove us down Montana Creek Road, the nearest outlet into the wilderness. To illustrate how appropriate that word, ‘wilderness’, when Felicia, Kristin, and I first moved to Juneau, a repairman I was quizzing about the local hiking opportunities gave me this advice about Montana Creek: “I wouldn’t go back there without bear mace.” I doubted bears would concern my jock passenger too much, but the seclusion was a different matter. To his credit, he did muster up the courage about halfway along the three-mile stretch of weather-battered road to ask where I was taking him. It might as well have been a rhetorical question, as we both knew full well the road ended in a circle by the trailhead, a perfect place to have a little chat. When I failed to provide even a ‘shut up’ for his effort, his better judgment prevailed. I strongly suspected it would continue to do so without too much finger-breaking on my part. He knew who I was now, no question. This drive was designed to let that knowledge sink in real deep.

When I’d parked and shut off the engine—the both of us very much tuned to the fact that we were surrounded by dense, dark forest, as far away from anything resembling a comfort zone as could be obtained without hiking in—I faced him.

“Let’s get to it, Mr. Groves. I want you to tell me exactly what happened that night.”

He clutched his backpack, looking everywhere but at me. “I didn’t, you know . . . like I told the doctor. . . . nothing happened.”

My next words were calculated. The spearhead of an extremely direct tactic that potentially left me exposed for having no support from Kristin herself. They followed the path that had been cleared by Dr. Whittler, who had apparently approached the young man without explanations for his questions, shrewdly letting the mystery surrounding his interrogation also encompass the consequences of blabbering about it.

“Did you rape her, Mr. Groves?”

He met my eye for the first time as he replied, “No! God, no, Mr. Ocason. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“What was it like? You used a condom, so that paints it prettier than rape?”

He took a deep breath, getting command of himself, as though preparing either to tell all or to tell me to fuck off. Fortunately for him, he proceeded in the former direction.

“The condom was mine. I admit that. But I didn’t use it. I couldn’t bring myself to. I mean, she was really fucked up, man.” Again, he paused, gathering more fuel for the punch. “All right, look, we’d scored some acid earlier and she was trippin’ hard. So hard she—”

“From whom?” I said, locked on the word.

He was startled by the question. “I don’t know. Some dude down by the Douglas Bridge. You know, those guys that live in the tents.”

“Had you seen him before?”

“No, but what’s that got to do—”

“Describe him.”

He opened his hands. “He was bundled up, man. Hood around his face. And it was getting dark. Then when we went down to do the transaction, he’d put on this weird elephant head thing. He was a freak, what can I say.”

My blood, already rushing through me, now thumped in my temples. But I kept on point. “Did you ever see this man again? That night? Since?”

“Nah, man. He’d poofed when we went back down there later to tell him only one of us had gotten off, that he’d given us bad shit. It was blotter acid, right? Well, one of the tabs, it was different than the others. It had a heart on it. The other ones had smiley faces. Dude said the heart was less intense, that if we had anyone new to tripping, they’d probably do better to drop it instead of one of the smileys. So we gave Kristin that hit. We didn’t think . . . I mean, we thought it was cool, and just dropped it into the last bit of rum in the bottle. But it was, like, the opposite of what the dude said. We never got off on our hits. But Kristin, man . . . man, she was really out there.”

He paused long enough for me to wonder, then dismiss as irrelevant, whether Kristin had known about this little genie in a bottle. Long enough, also, for me to notice a change in his expression, a devolution to something conflicted, disturbed. I was about to prompt him to go on when he did so on his own, eyes glazed in memory.

“She seemed okay when we left her in Elvin’s sister’s bed and went out cruising for a while, but when we got back and I went in to check on her, she was naked, Mr. Ocason, naked from the waist down. She had this goo, like Vaseline or KY jelly or something, all over the insides of her thighs. I thought . . . I mean, it looked like . . . like maybe she had been masturbating or something. Sorry, but that’s all I could think, man. Then she started mumbling, and I laid down with her, just to kind of pet her, you know, tell her she was going to be okay. But she was clinging to me, right . . . then we started kissing . . . or that’s what it seemed like . . . but I swear, man, nothing happened. Yeah, I pulled out the condom, but I couldn’t do it. ‘Cause . . . ‘cause it hit me at some point that the way she was clinging to me, it wasn’t like making out. It was more like . . . like she was scared or something.”

Scared or something. That’s what he said to me. Scared or something.

“Mr. Ocason?” he said as I sat there trying to process it all.

“Yes, son?”

“Is Kristin okay? I mean, I never wanted . . . ”

I was silent.

He straightened in his seat, unclenched his security blanket, resting his hands on top of the bag, and met my eye squarely. “I want you to know I never intended any harm. Elvin came in, saw her lying there, saw the condom, and assumed things that weren’t true. I let him. And I’m sorry.”

I looked at him for a long time before replying. When I did, it was without calculation, though for the first time I addressed him by his first name. “I need you to clean up the mess, Bobby. I need you to go out of your way to restore her reputation. When that is accomplished, we can talk about forgiveness.”

***

When I returned home from delivering my hostage to basketball practice, I found Felicia lying on the couch in a pair of shorts, her knees up, the back of her hand on her brow, and her eyes closed but not in sleep. I wondered, as I looked at her a moment before sitting down by her bare feet, how long the Forest Service was going to let her leave of absence continue. At least another week, I hoped, with Portavora ahead.

“Where’s Kristin?” I asked.

“Sleeping. Quietly. In her bed. Earlier she walked down to the pond and fed the ducks.”

“Ah,” I sighed. “How I’ve longed to hear such words.”

“I know,” she said, still resting her eyes. “Hey, Barry?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for always being there for Kristin. I don’t blame you, you know. For taking her to Brazil.”

“I know, Felicia.” The forgiveness seemed to be going around today, a touch of something good amid the madness. I placed her foot in my lap, rubbing the tension out of it. Out of her. When I finished with one foot, I massaged the other, both of us silent, letting our thoughts drift, or disappear altogether. When I finished with the second, I got up and knelt beside her, stroking her cheek with the backs of my fingers, admiring how beautiful she was, how fragile. She had suffered too much, this woman I had once been married to. She had changed, become both less and more in the face of it all. We all had.

It was she, eyes still closed, who leaned up to kiss me, but I accepted it warmly, from the mother of my children; eagerly, from this woman who had won my heart in another lifetime. They were small, really, these gestures, as I grazed her nipple with my thumb, stroked the inside of her leg. Uncostly sacrifices to each other, considering. But with each touch, each caress, each exploration, grew something more, something needier, more desperate. The flow of emotion being less an outpouring than an intake, a physical incarnation of the dependence our situation so demanded. When we moved to the bedroom, we never let go of each other, nearly stumbling in a tangle of legs in our haste to communicate what we could out of each other before the opportunity was lost, bleeding back into the reality of life, where possibilities remained only possibilities, fleeting daydreams.

I threw her on the bed, ripping her clothes from their various half-shed states, the tee shirt that had caught up around her bra, which I’d pushed up over the mounds they supported, the shorts hanging open in wings, exposing the silky fabric of her low-cut panties. She moaned as though already on the cusp of release as she tried to help me free her body of its trappings, while at the same time struggling frantically with my own. We never reached liberation from our material binds as she accepted me with the hungry ease we’d known early in the marriage, before physical desire had bowed to the daily demands of rearing twins. I clutched the flesh behind her thigh so tightly as I pushed her leg back against her body that the marks would remain for days, hints of things forbidden, dreamed, visible just under the hem of her shorts. Likewise, she spared my back, my buttocks no mercy as she took what she could of me before it was too late.

The gasping, sweat-soaked, animal nature of it was in direct contrast to the lovemaking we had perfected to our tastes in those first years, the long stretches of foreplay rooted in giving, in pleasuring the other first and deriving ours from theirs. And yet selfish would be the wrong word to describe the current encounter as the tide toward supreme dependence swelled and swelled on our grunts and cries. In accord with the opposite style of lovemaking, the taking was the giving, and vice versa, so that maybe it was an outpouring after all, an outpouring of thanks for providing the outlet for all the fear and pain and horror and dejection and isolation and abandonment, if only for those few precious moments that preceded the subsidence of the surf. I hardly recognized the gulf left behind as the afterglow, stranger than remembered but no less real, dimmed into sleep, where one could pretend for a while that the emptiness had never existed.