What began with swiping his sisters’ panties evolved quickly into an obsession with their bodies. He lured one of the girls out behind the garage, and somehow—somehow—coaxed her to pull down her shorts and push a metal coat hanger up inside her vagina, as if playing some dangerous version of Doctor, or more specifically Obstetrics. Was he helping her to abort a pretend baby? What the hell kind of a game was that? She might have lacerated her own delicate contents, blighting her body with infection. In his confession with the investigator for the Oshkosh Police Department, Wes conceded, “I don’t know what I said to make her do it, but I must have said something.”
From that moment on, Wes admitted, he began to exert even greater persuasive skills on the next sister in line, tricking her into the unfinished basement and forcing her to lie naked on top of him so he could penetrate her. If they were not in the basement, they were in closets. One sister was assigned as the lookout in case a suspecting adult was headed in the general direction of the abuse. As it turned out, Ozone was not the imaginative child’s game parents believed it was. Rather, under cover of the green blanket, Wes would force his hand into the girls’ panties and clench their most special parts.
He gave up early on forcing the girls to give him blow jobs, developing a modus operandi much more devious. Once the girls fell into fitful sleep, Wes would skulk to their bedsides and kneel beside them, a sinister doctor making a house call. He ran his hands up their legs and into the warm spots between their thighs. According to Wes, his sisters often remained sleeping while he used his fingers to get his fix, but I can only imagine they merely pretended to sleep in denial or as self-defense. Wes told the investigator he “never hurt them,” except for the time he punched his sister in the panties and another time when he forced his fingers inside her. Wes’s testimony reminds me that we owe our children, at the very least, the gift of vocabulary. What good does it do to teach them only a singular definition of such a complicated word as hurt?
A friend that Annie and I shared in common wanted to know, if Wes was such a flabby guy—such a passive kid—“why didn’t those girls just punch him already?”
“I get the sense they did punch him,” I said. “But it didn’t make a difference.” Besides, shouldn’t we be asking the opposite: why couldn’t he just leave his sisters alone? In a case like this, Ryan’s job was rarely to explain or even justify his clients’ wrongdoing but rather to make sure that his clients were not overly punished. But how many years in prison were too many, when sexual abuse was such disquieting territory? We knew we’d be devastated if this happened in our own family.
We admittedly spend endless energy teaching our children the value of family loyalty. We expect them to defend each other. Therefore it’s hard to imagine that our girls—even Irie the Almighty—would want our family to implode upon the revelation of such circumstances, even though, of course, we also advocate openness and truth-telling. And what role does gender play in a family like ours, in which the girls are more physically forceful than the boys? In the same calendar year, both Irie and Fern would be reprimanded at school for grabbing friends, Fern for seizing a classmate’s wrist in a fit of jealousy, and Irie, similarly upset about a rival being awarded a music solo, for clawing at a girl’s shoulder.
Irie and her best friend, Layla, from our neighborhood school, once hatched a game called Punishments in which an authority figure (principal, teacher, parent, or police officer) penalized a disobedient subordinate (a rowdy, wayward child). Layla was always in charge. She loved to devise outlandish retributions for Irie. She would lock Irie in the bedroom closet or force her under the bunk beds. As when we played Cops and Robbers as kids, the bandit—or in this case, the “bad kid”—was permitted only bread and water for sustenance.
At first the game seemed creative, even comical. They weren’t just rotting their brains on iPods or TV. But as weeks turned to months, we noticed they began to adopt the rules of their charade at school. Layla set up Irie for legitimate repercussions, and Irie, headstrong and mischievous, relished her post beside the secretary outside the principal’s office. Their self-fulfilling prophecies unnerved us, and when the girls began to reckon with each other, without our suggesting it, we watched their friendship dissolve with sadness but relief. Even the dynamics of playful intentions could turn dangerous.
At home, Fern was forever weaseling her way into Francis’s bed at night, greedy for his comfort and warmth. We’ve tried to create gender equality in our household, but perhaps in doing so, we’ve allowed the girls too much power over the boys. Ryan jokes that I tricked him into conceiving Leo and Fern, if not Francis too, but it’s funny only because husbands are assumed to enjoy sex with their wives. During the time period Ryan was defending Aloysius Jungwirth, we rarely felt in the mood. Sexual desire was tainted with every incriminating detail Ryan was forced to read, and this worried me, just another offshoot of Ryan’s work in criminal defense, invasive and ugly.
In “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus, the short story I’ve perhaps taught most often, Luke Ripley covers up his daughter’s hit-and-run accident, not because he
