friend.
“That’s why …” Danielle gasped, looking up at June. “That’s the night …”
June didn’t have to be told. Even if she had wanted to, there was no way she could clear that night from her mind. June had been working in her sewing room. Danielle and Grace were upstairs eating popcorn, lamenting their lost chance at the regional championship. Richard was in his office. Martha Parson called, looking for her daughter. Richard offered to drive her home but the girl chose to walk. Why hadn’t June thought it strange that a fifteen- year-old girl would rather walk six blocks in the cold than get a lift from her best friend’s father?
“It’s my fault,” Danielle managed between sobs. “Grace saw us, and …” Her eyes were nearly swollen shut from crying. Her shoulders folded in so tight that she looked as if she were being sucked backward down a tube.
There was a long row of windows behind Danielle and her parents. June could see Richard’s reflection in the glass. His face was impassive. There was a glint of white from his glasses. She glanced down and saw that his hands were in his lap.
She glanced down and saw that he was enjoying the story.
By the time the deposition was over, June’s jaw was so tight that she could not open her mouth to speak. Her spine was hard as steel. Her hands were clenched into fists.
She did not say a word. Not when the girl described a birthmark on Richard’s back, a scar just below his knee, a mole at the base of his penis. Not when she talked about the obsessive way he’d stroked her hair. The way he had held her from behind and used his hand on her. The way he had seduced this fifteen-year-old child in the same way he had seduced June.
And June had thought of her words, long ago, to Grace: “Which is more possible,” she had asked, “that every single person in the world is conspiring to make you seem a fool, or that you are only fooling yourself?”
June had left the prosecutor’s conference room without a word to anyone. She drove straight to the school’s administration offices, where they gladly granted her request for a temporary leave of absence. She went to the dollar store and bought a packet of underwear, a toothbrush, and a comb. She checked in to a hotel and did not go home until the newspaper headlines told her that Richard would not be there.
He had left the heat on eighty, he who had fastidiously turned off hall lights and cranked down the thermostat on even the coldest days. The seat was up on every toilet. All the bowls were full of excrement. Dirty dishes spilled over in the sink. Trash was piled in the corner of the kitchen. The stripped mattress held the faint odor of urine.
“Fuck you too,” June had mumbled as she burned his clothes in the backyard barbecue.
The school board couldn’t fire her for being married to an imprisoned sex offender. Instead, she was moved to the worst part of town, a job for which she was routinely called to testify in court cases of students who’d been accused of armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, and any number of horrors. Her social life was nonexistent. There were no friends left for the woman who had defended a pedophile. There were no shoulders to cry on for the principal who had called the students raped by her husband a pack of lying whores.
Over the years, June had considered giving an interview, writing a book, telling the world what it was like to be in that room listening to Danielle Parson and knowing that her husband had as good as killed them both. Each time June sat down to write the story, the words backed up like bile in her throat. What could she say in defense of herself? She had never publicly admitted her husband’s guilt. June Connor, a woman who relished the English language, could find no words to explain herself.
She had shared a bed with Richard for eighteen years. She had borne him a child. They had lost their child. They had loved together. They had grieved together. And all the while, he was a monster.
What kind of woman didn’t see that? What kind of principal did not notice that her own husband was brutally sodomizing her daughter’s fifteen-year-old best friend?
Pride. Sheer determination. She would not explain herself. She did not owe anyone a damn explanation. So she kept it all bottled up inside of her, the truth an angry, metastasizing tumor.
“Another story about the weather,” Richard said, rustling pages as he folded the paper. “Umbrellas are suggested.”
Her heart fluttered again, doing an odd triple beat. The tightness in her chest turned like a vise.
“What is it?” Richard reached for the mask hanging on the oxygen tank.
June waved him away, her vision blurring on her hand so that it seemed like a streak of light followed the movement. She moved her hand again, fascinated by the effect.
“June?”
Her fingers were numbing, the bones of her hand slowly degloved. She felt her breath catch, and panic filled her — not because the time was here, but because she still had not asked him the question.
“What is it?” He sat on the edge of the bed, his leg touching hers. “June?” His voice was raised. “Should I call an ambulance?”
She looked at his hands. His square fingers. His thick wrists. There were age spots now. She could see the blue veins under his skin.
The first time June held Richard’s hand, her stomach had tickled, her heart had jumped, and she’d finally understood Austen and Bronte and every silly sonnet she’d ever studied.
This was the feeling she wanted to take with her — not the horror of the last twenty years. Not the sight of her daughter lying dead. Not the questions about how much Grace knew, how much she had suffered. Not the thought of Danielle Parson, the pretty young girl who could make it through the day only with the help of heroin.
June wanted the feeling from the first time she had held her child. She wanted the bliss from her wedding day, the first time Richard had made love to her. There were happy times in this home. There were birthdays and surprise parties and Thanksgivings and wonderful Christmases. There was warmth and love. There was Grace.
“Grace,” Richard said, as if he could read her mind. Or perhaps June had said the word, so sweet on her lips. The smell of her shampoo. The way her tiny clothes felt in June’s hand. Her socks were impossibly small. June had pressed them to her mouth one day, kissing them, thinking of kissing her daughter’s feet.
Richard cleared his throat. His tone was low. “You want the truth.”
June tried to shake her head, but her muscles were gone, her brain disconnecting from the stem, nerve impulses wandering down vacant paths. It was here. It was so close. She was not going to find religion this late in the game, but she wanted lightness to be the last thing in her heart, not the darkness his words promised to bring.
“It’s true,” he told her, as if she didn’t know this already. “It’s true what Danielle said.”
June forced out a groan of air. Valentine’s Day cards. Birthday balloons. Mother’s Day breakfasts. Crayon drawings hanging on the refrigerator. Skinned knees that needed to be kissed. Monsters that were chased away by a hug and a gentle stroke of hair.
“Grace saw us.”
June tried to shake her head. She didn’t need to hear it from his mouth. She didn’t need to take his confession to her grave. Let her have this one thing. Let her have at least a moment of peace.
He leaned in closer. She could feel the heat from his mouth. “Can you hear me, wife?”
She had no more air. Her lungs froze. Her heart lurched to a stop.
“Can you hear me?” he repeated.
June’s eyes would not close. This was the last minute, second, millisecond. She was not breathing. Her heart was still. Her brain whirred and whirred, seconds from burning itself out.
Richard’s voice came to her down the long tunnel. “Grace didn’t kill herself because she caught me fucking Danielle.” His tongue caught between his teeth. There was a smile on his lips. “She did it because she was jealous.”
IT AIN’T RIGHT
BY MICHELLE GAGNON
