When the police come, I—like a dummy, like a child—let them in. Give them my name, my age, my respect, access to my home. They are here to see my husband, Charles, so I take them to his daytime haunt, the sunken family room, where with laptop, television, and smartphone he has spent the summer wheelchair-bound, weak from dialysis.
The young officer—a girl, a woman, Detective White—stumbles on the wheelchair ramp covering the steps to the family room. She pauses to lift her lower leg, tucks her finger into the back of her cheap pump. I apologize for her discomfort. She has a blister, unbandaged, bulging on her pink heel. The older officer—a man, Sergeant Glenn—has the decency to never meet my gaze.
Charles is surprised to see police in our home, as any innocent man would be. He is innocent. I cannot be delusional on this. I have known him for nearly sixty years, though married for only two, though our contact has not been continuous. There are decades of his life I know only from his telling. Still, certain things I know, like his breath in the morning. The pattern of hair on his chest. Surprise on his face. He is surprised. We are surprised. Detective White begins:
“Sir, I need to know who has access to the Internet in this house?”
“Just me and my wife, Rosalind.”
“I’m going to need to examine all your electronic devices.”
“Why?” I ask.
“We’ve received a report of child porn accessed from this location.”
I laugh. I relax. It’s that ridiculous. Charles’s face registers no alarm. There’s been a mistake. We give them everything we have—desktop, laptop, cellphones, tablets—and I almost go back to the bedroom and get my mystery novel. But I don’t. I have a naive curiosity about police investigation, before now always witnessed on screen or page, at a remove. The reality is less forceful, more fumbling than I thought. I stay in the family room, sitting in the recliner, as Officer Glenn begins one by one to examine our electronics, pausing only to ask for passwords. Detective White sits across from me on the sofa, tapping her foot and staring out the window into the trees. From a branch of the largest oak, two ropes hang parallel and knotted at the ends, once connected by a wooden bench seat, now decaying on the brown-leafed ground. I am conscious of dust bunnies beneath the sofa, streaks on the bay window, coffee spots on the sofa cushions. This is Charles’s lair. I don’t come in here much, don’t clean it like I should. Wasn’t expecting inspection.
“Sir, is this the device you use to access Pinterest?” Officer Glenn is holding Charles’s cellphone.
“Yes,” Charles says.
Pinterest? The Web site for recipes and seasonal party decor? I did not know Charles had an account. I did not know he was interested in such things. A place for housewives looking to share small parts of their small lives. I am not one of them. I’m retired now but was a career woman, the best mortgage broker in town. I have a life beyond home, family. I don’t look for meaning on my computer.
“How often do you access pornography on Pinterest?” Officer White asks.
“An hour, maybe two a day.”
“What do you look at?”
“Girls. Well, women, actually.”
And Charles looks, for the first time in all this, something other than comfortable. Sheepish. Girls, he said. Girls. Sweet sweat. Skinned knee. Dirt under fingernails all summer long. Girls in the mud after rain—dank, wet heat rising off the earth—worms summoned out of the dark soil wriggling under the toes of girls. I was a girl. I was a girl when we met.
• •
We hired a lawyer the day after Charles’s arrest for possession of child pornography. Dwight Gibson was recommended by a friend—He’s having a baby, needs money, will cut you a deal, she said—so I made the call. I’ve been making all the calls since the charges were published in the Daily Tribune with a small but clear mugshot of Charles alongside three hundred words that in vague legalistic terms made him sound guilty, defenseless.
On our first visit to the law office we sit across from Dwight’s desk, Charles in his wheelchair, me on a floral-patterned love seat, my purse on the empty cushion beside me.
“Don’t worry about the newspaper,” Dwight says. “You have a decent case. They only found one image.”
Since the arrest, I have learned the recipes and Tablescapes of Pinterest are underlaid with a slick, rushing current of pornography. Tit and ass. College girls. Cunt lips spread wide. Girl next door. Anal. Penetration. Naughty girls. Double penetration. Girl-on-girl. Pussy shaved and tight and pink. Girl and girl and girl and girl. Through the undertow of woman and teen runs a wisping thread of girl. Images made and shared, seedlings submerged beneath blossomed bodies, eliding detection passed from faceless man to man until they surface above the layers of decoupage, buttercream frosting, floral centerpiece, autumnal place settings.
“It was an accident,” Charles insists to Dwight, as he always has to me. “I clicked on it by mistake and clicked out as soon as I realized what it was.”
“It certainly would be atypical,” Dwight says. “Most child porn cases involve dozens, hundreds of images. And then there’s the fact that you shared it on your public page. Hardly the behavior of a seasoned pedophile.”
What idiot does that? It is this, the way Charles was caught, that I cling to when I find myself in search of innocence. He reposted the image of the girl to his public page, triggering an alert to Pinterest, the shutdown of his account, and a report to local police. An accident. Fault of old-man eyes and old-man hands that certainly struggle with buttons on his shirt front, that shake as they open an envelope. But hands well enough to sign up for a social media site without my help, to comb through the stuff of craft and celebration unearthing naked bodies for hours a day. Eyes sharp enough to discern the ones he likes from the ones he doesn’t, to share favored images with men he doesn’t know, will never meet. This their only connection—Girls. Girls all day, day after day in the sunken family room. I’ll never know how I’d feel if I’d known he spends his days collecting porn, this stream of girls ever inseparable from the girl. And now so much in the hands of this attorney. He seems too young, boyish, not even forty I’d say.
I scan the lawyer’s office for signs of his life. The room gives little. A diploma on a white wall. No family photos. A large desk calendar flat against the glossy desktop. I manage to decipher upside-down scribblings—BABY DUE in big letters on September 1. Small life pushing its way into the world.
“A boy or a girl?” I ask.
“Sorry, what?” Dwight replies.
Stupid me. I have interrupted a discussion on whether Charles should take the stand. I have intruded on Dwight’s private life. I regroup, pose a question with a known answer, pretend I don’t recall the truth.
“In the Pinterest photo I mean, is it a boy or a girl?”
“A girl,” Dwight says.
“How do you know? Just from what the police say? Will we see the picture?”
“At trial. I have a written description of it for now.”
“May I see it?”
Dwight looks at me strangely. But pushes a typed report across the desk. I flip through the typed pages until I read:
Reported image contains unidentified prepubescent female in bikini top, unclothed from waist down, holding erect adult penis. Unknown male adult subject unclothed and photographed from waist down.
Contained in my hands, two dimensional, eight by eleven, black on white, reduced to a moment, a language, a pose. This is not a girl.
• •
Two months after the arrest, and the season shifts. The weather does not; September sinks its toes into swampy summer heat, doesn’t retract. Dwight has filed for an expedited trial. We need to get this over with—I told him when I paid the retainer. Charles’s health is bad. We don’t need this dangling overhead. A fleeting feeling. My desire to rush the verdict has abated.
In the months after Charles’s arrest we have become a world of two—reduced to one man and one woman, Eden-like. The state confiscated all our electronic devices. The conditions of Charles’s bond prohibit any Internet access. He has been ordered to avoid places where children congregate. So we go nowhere. No one speaks to us, we speak to no one. We hardly speak to each other.
At first, there were calls and check-ins from friends and family, mostly to me, never direct inquiry. Do you need anything? Are you OK? No, really, are you OK? Can I help in any way? If you ever want to talk, about anything at all. Many thoughts, prayers, referrals for divorce attorneys, church invitations in the beginning. Charles had a few friends visit him, scuttle past me to the family room to mumble and rumble and clap him on the back a few times before nodding in my general direction and sliding out the door.
But over time attention has fallen away, curiosity and goodwill evaporated. Now it’s just us alone, comfortable and quiet in the house. I have never felt closer to another person. I’ve never felt further from another person. We don’t talk about it—the girl—but she’s here, hovering, having once streamed uninvited like a beam of light through the wireless signal into our home, she floats light and aromatic under nose.
I haven’t seen Charles in hours. He must be in the family room. I am not sure what he does in there now without his online world. I guess I’ve never really known how he fills his time. I sit in the center of our bed and scour my elementary school yearbooks for photos of us. I was eight when I met Charles. He transferred in second grade, transferred out fourth grade. Would have been a nonmemory except for the time the other kids locked us in the equipment shed, left us there for hours. We huddled in the center of the shed, narrow stripes of daylight cracking through the slatted wall. We should have cried out, sought salvation from the world outside. But we clung to each other and whispered—It’ll be OK, this can’t last forever, it’s not all that dark, not all that bad. It began to rain, water steeping the earth beneath our feet, soaking through our canvas shoes and cotton socks. We bared our feet, stood face-to-face, toe-touching-toe, until the door opened and gray daylight flooded in.
• •
Charles is an old man but a new husband, my second husband. My first husband, Walt, left me for another girl. We married at eighteen, full of want for each other, not much joining us but sex. We were a rushing stream of arousal all day in the sunken family room. Tit and ass. College girl. Cunt lips spread wide. Girl next door. Anal. Penetration. Naughty girl. Double penetration. Girl-on-girl. Pussy shaved and tight and pink. Girl and girl and girl and girl. I was girls then when we fucked.
When I turned thirty, Walt hung a swing in the oaks outside the family room.
“For me?” I sat, my hips neatly contained between the ropes.
“For my girl,” Walt said. “Or maybe another little girl one day.”
I pushed off from the ground with my feet, left earth, flew toward the sky alone, near weightless. I wasn’t going to give this up, ever. I took my pills, made promises of later, later, pleas of not ready yet.
I was nearly fifty when Walt called me to the family room to confess—a girl young enough to be his daughter, his daughter planted inside.
“An accident,” he swore. “Just one time and this.”
• •
The trial is a month away. Our budget has been busted on attorneys’ fees; I’ve become liberal with credit and calories. The television stays on in the family room, tuned to Court TV. I’ve allowed a tiny nod to the situation beyond these walls. A passive preparation.
“How was your day?” I ask.
“Fine, yours?”
“Fine.”
Our regular exchange—we keep to questions with known answers. We sit on the sofa staring into the backyard. I slip my hand under Charles’s waistband looking for life, which today does not come as it often does not, as it did not that day in the shed, my hand slipping beneath his waistband in search. I kept my hand there, keep my hand there, an assurance, until dusk has completely fallen, and I must leave for the store. I shop late now. All the other old folks, people who would know me, my situation, shop in the daytime before cataracts, poor night vision, and general fatigue of body and brain impede safety.
On the way, I pull over at an elementary school, not mine, not ours, not hers. I sit on a swing, feel the plastic strip of a seat cut into the fat of my bottom, feel my body lopping off the sides past the chains that link by link climb to the beam above.
I lift my feet from the ground. I am suspended, dangling. Here in the dark I could be her. I could be her again.
• •
Next to me Charles sleeps like a baby, no hint of worry in his dream-face though the trial is a week away. I am tossing in the sheets. The weather has turned, mercury finally in sync with season. But I am burning. I wrap myself in a robe—an added layer of heat but one that gives privacy—and I sit on the back porch barefoot. I didn’t mind being alone in this home until I retired from the mortgage brokerage. Without the daily distraction of home buying—such a hopeful endeavor, streams of families, newlyweds, newly born—it became hard to separate one day from another, so I began to mark the start of each week by riding past Walt’s house across town. The fourteenth week I finally saw what I was looking for—his daughter standing there, waiting by the car, leaning, chewing gum in that insolent child way, completely unaware of what she’s done, of her power over men, over me. So falsely innocent I wanted to jump out of the car, shake her by the shoulders, punch her in the gut for being what she is, what I was and can never again be. But I drove on and never returned. Because she’s a child. Because I’m an adult. A senior citizen, I must remind myself again and again. I submerged myself in the world of my peers, avoided reminders of her, places where children congregate. I attended singles functions at the senior center. A few dates, a few awkward sexual encounters, then Charles spotted me, saw a buried familiarity. It took minutes of probing until we landed on third grade, the shed.
“Funny how it’s hardly the worst day of my life,” he said over coffee on our first date. “But I remember it with such horror.”
“I know, me too,” I lied.
“And you were there for that.”
I was. I was excited to be there in a world apart from children and adults, unseen, slipping my hands into the pants of a boy, my feet cool in the soil, my small, cylindrical fingers closed around something small, cylindrical, even softer than any part of myself. I felt earth beneath my toes dampen and sink, as if the weight of us could bore a tunnel, a worm hole taking us down and away. My fingers circled him, top joints of thumb and forefinger overlapping.
Wind gusts. The oak leaves rustle. The twin ropes of the swing sway in independent rhythms, unconnected. I wonder if Charles could fix the seat, if he’s handy like that. I’ve never asked. I assumed him too old to be of much use.
The balls of my feet ache as I pad inside. I find Charles in the position I left him—on his back, one arm at his side, one raised over his head. I slide into bed, reach inside his pajama pants. He stiffens. At her? At now? At then? At a dream? At a hand? At me, ridiculous me, body out of time with want. Woman when I should be girl, girl when I should be woman.
• •
The day before the trial we go to the lawyer’s office. Charles is having a good week. He is out of the wheelchair, relying on a walker. We sit on the love seat across from Dwight’s desk as he explains what to expect.
“You don’t have to testify, Dwight says. “It’s your right not to. I think you should, but it’s your choice.”
“What sort of thing will they ask me?” Charles asks.
“Your porn habits, how you accessed this image. Why you didn’t report it when you saw it.”
“Does that look guilty?”
“It doesn’t look innocent. But I think people may understand. You were ashamed.”
I take Charles’s hand and interject:
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. The girl was an accident. Don’t people understand you can click on the wrong thing, make one wrong move?”
“I suppose it’s common enough, a plausible mistake,” Dwight says, drumming his fingers on the desk. “But there can be a disconnect between what a juror does in private and their stance in front of peers in the jury room.”
I release Charles’s fingers, fold my hands on my lap and consider for the first time the possibility of conviction. The idea that twelve jurors will see something I don’t. By judging him, they are judging me. Outside eyes seeing me as stupid, as victim. Seeing me as complicit, looking the other way. Seeing me at fault, ugly and old, so revolting what else could a man do but rewind the clock, reach backward for a girl.
• •
The night before the trial I lay in bed as Charles showers, my ears perked for sounds of distress as water pounds tile and skin. Sometimes I help bathe him but not tonight. He’s feeling strong, and I never like to nurse him, even on bad days. I’m not the mothering sort. I’ve lived long enough to have seen my many selves—daughter, sister, girlfriend, wife, ex-wife, second wife, enemy, friend, employee, coworker, boss, girl, lady, woman, this woman, that woman, other woman, bitch, slut, cunt, comforter, listener, lover. I’ve thought of myself as mother. Though I’m not one and I don’t want to be. Still she is there sliding beneath the others. I’ve never thought of myself as prison wife until tonight, Charles on the other side of a closed door inside the shower stall, naked, alone, vulnerable.
Charles exits the bathroom, slides under the covers, still damp and smelling of soap. This could be our last time together. If convicted, he goes directly from the courthouse to jail. I don’t think he would do well in prison. I don’t think he would last long. I don’t think we would last long, separated by concrete walls and prison Plexiglas.
Our first time together on the couch in the sunken family room Charles grew hard in my hand, in my mouth. But when I straddled him and tried to take him inside me, he was too limp to enter.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Is it me?”
“It’s age.”
Time. He blamed time. We are not young any more. But we were young together once, and I hold that in my head whenever I reach for him, whether my hand finds him hard or soft. This is why I’ve let him in my life, a man I hardly know, a man I share nothing with beyond a small, dark space of bygone time.
• •
The trial begins with an opening statement. The prosecutor paces before the jury, reciting the facts of the case, all well-known to me, nothing surprising until the end, when she stands still at the center of the room and points to her feet.
“I just went to Paris for my fiftieth birthday and bought myself these high-heel shoes. Custom made. I could have bought two, three pairs. But I wanted only a single pair to remember my trip. It means more that way, when it’s one special pair. And that’s what this image is to Charles Terhune. His one special picture.”
The frivolity of this woman. Making this all about herself, about the shoes on her stubby feet, while our lives lay on the line. I examine the jurors—six women, six men—a decent mix Dwight has assured us. But there’s one woman, my age, frumpy, sitting in the center of the box lapping up the prosecutor’s story like warm milk, nodding at the idea of Charles and his one special picture, bonding with this prosecutor over shoes. Another in the back, a bleach blond sneering at the prosecutor each time she mentions Paris. The others sit stony-eyed and sleepy-faced.
Dwight has nice hands, piano-playing hands, nails trim and buffed, his left ring finger unmarked by the sun. A brief marriage, never married, or maybe a life lived in interiors, out of the daylight. His baby would be born by now, but it seems a violation to ask him about his life, despite what he knows about mine. Despite the fact he’s now speaking to twelve strangers about the pornography habits of my husband, who is back in his wheelchair, gray-haired and liver-spotted, separated from me by thigh-high wooden barrier—the bar, they call it. I cannot cross the bar, it’s only for lawyers and defendants, direct stakeholders in the proceedings. And I’m just a wife on a courtroom pew, beneath a vent spewing stale air, directly behind the hunched shoulders of a second husband, our fate hinged on another accidental girl. I wonder if Dwight handles divorces, too, why I haven’t considered the impact of Charles’s scraggly goatee on his appearance, how it makes him look devilish, dirty, like a man who looks at porn all day while his wife reads crime thrillers in the bedroom, pausing to stare out the window, to muse at rope hung on an old oak the landscaper says should have been cut years ago.
Dwight is telling the jury that the girl was nothing more than an accident, that the evidence will show Charles looked at a lot of porn, an amount, he admits, that some may find excessive and distasteful, but that in that volume Charles’s proclivities become clear.
“My client likes women,” Dwight says. “Young, many teen-aged, but they were women. Fully developed women. The girl was a mistake. A slip of the finger. There is no criminal intent.”
Now the frump in the first row is scowling, the bleach blond is nodding along. I wonder what happens if they can’t make a decision. A hung jury. No guilt, no innocence. Outcome indeterminate, hovering, amorphous.
Detective White takes the stand, details a neat time line—report from Pinterest, tracing IP number, trip to Terhune house, interview, device review, arrest. And the state enters the image into evidence. The prosecutor mutters as she fumblingly sets up the projector and inserts a thumb drive into a slot on the side. It takes minutes for the projector to warm up and shed a rectangle of light over the detective’s shoulder. The image, the girl, fills the screen. It is as described. It is not as I thought. She is smiling. Her fingers are not fully grasping what they hold. I squint until my vision blurs her shape and age. I refocus, look only at her face. She looks like me, me then. Same brown eyes. Same thin hair. Skin pale and even, pink of face same as pink of belly. Unmarked by the sun. I look at the jurors. Six looking at the girl, five looking down, one—the frump—looking at me. I’m afraid she can see me in the girl, the girl in me. There is a trace of her still visible on my surface, how else would Charles have recognized me in the senior center’s unforgiving light, made his way across the other bodies to mine, grabbed my elbow and said—I know I know you. And we sat on the senior center sofa, knees touching, sifting through life until we found the shed.
The prosecutor switches off the projector, and the screen goes blank. I still see the girl. She has color, form, flesh, fat padding her cheeks. Her lips in a smile. Protrude out. Thin upper lip. Full lower lip. Nearly pressing against each other as if to cleave together, cleave apart. I am nauseous. I feel the jury staring at me, warmth on my face, at my back. I rise from the pew. Dwight looks back, Charles does not, as I leave the courtroom.
The bathroom is dim with gray light. I enter the largest stall. I am burning. I hike up my skirt, lower my pantyhose. I sit on the toilet directly, don’t bother to shield flesh from surface. The seat is cool. My haunches hang off the sides. I am burning. I remove my shoes, my pantyhose, plant my feet on the cool tile. My head drops between my knees. I want to look inside myself. I want to take the girl, stuff her in me, birth her on this cold tile floor. Another life. My spine curves, my neck and head hang down, an unfinished question mark, the curl of a fetus. Can I whorl myself, find my hole and keep going, come out the other side? A reverse birth. A self-birth. An unbirth. I could be her, her again. My bare feet wriggle on the tile floor. It is hard and dry and clean. There is nothing to sink my toes into. It will be a hung jury, I know. They will sway between frump and bleach blond, guilt and innocence, accident and intent. Most will blame Charles, some may blame me, one might blame the girl. One might.
One might be a girl. A curious girl. A girl who holds girls inside herself, who keeps girls outside herself. A barefoot girl, a pucker-faced gray, gray girl. I try to look inside the dead-living part of me, my womb ever-empty, ever-mine and mine alone. The jury will hang, the cradle will rock, and all I can do is put on my shoes, stand and close my fingers around the silver toilet handle, thumb joints overlapping index finger. I push down. I have deposited nothing in the bowl. Clean, clear water swirls in on itself. The bowl empties. I go back to the room where I will wait for the jury to hang as the sword swings over the small, gray head of my second husband. I consider the space between truth and verdict, then stop. I wonder only how old would she be now, how old would she be?
