Come Back (5 page)

My days of suburban isolation were over. This time, her doctor’s partner reported it to The Authorities. Mia and I were about to enter the city’s labyrinthine mechanism for the protection of its youth, Child Protection Services. Once you step over that threshold, your life is no longer yours. You spend months and years waiting, in endless freezing hallways, in dingy offices, on dirty plastic chairs, waiting to hear your fate for that week. You get scrutinized, ignored, supported, vilified, validated, admired, scorned, pitied. You can’t ask, you get asked, you can’t tell, you get told.

THE AUTHORITIES, STEP ONE:
A POLICE REPORT

The big Officer sat in my pink velvet chair asking me but what did you
yourself
actually see, I don’t wanna know what your sister saw. I tell him again about what Mia said to me that night, about Nick’s lap, the erections, about what he said about kids and sex.

The Officer sighed impatiently, repeating, “Okay, so he read the Sunday paper with her, that’s it?”

“No. Why won’t you write what I’m saying?”

Writing “Child stated and demonstrated sexual molestation by father” was simply not a possibility for this Officer. This was before wives had much credibility with the law in domestic matters, children even less. It was also before I knew anything about relevant statistics. If one in three or four women have been molested as children, the percentage of men
doing the deed can’t be too far behind. If you were a gambler, the odds on Mr. Officer weren’t too bad. Maybe I’d hit the jackpot.

THE AUTHORITIES, STEP TWO:
CHILD PROTECTION SERVICES INTERVIEW #1

Carrie H was a beautiful woman with big, sad eyes who took Mia into a room full of dolls and toys. To find out who did what, who didn’t, and if the who didn’t could be trusted to protect Mia. She couldn’t share anything Mia said with me. But, can you tell me how can I help her, I pleaded, I don’t know what to do, my baby girl’s stopped smiling. She yells at the daddy ducks to get dead, she wants to kill the daddy gorilla at the zoo, she wets her pants again. What does this mean, is she damaged emotionally? What do I do about her sadness, her anger, her little slumped shoulders? She had no answers, none of them would.

Carrie interviewed me, too, but I remembered little of it. I could hardly remember my own address. I moved slowly, comprehended slowly. I felt trapped in a dark, cottony silence. And yet I was astounded when Carrie noted in her report that I appeared depressed. I didn’t say anything about being depressed. It never occurred to me that she could see on my face what I saw on Mia’s.

THE AUTHORITIES, STEP THREE:
CHILD PROTECTION SERVICES INTERVIEW
#2

A perky Intake Counselor bounced into Mia’s bedroom to assess her, using her toys and stuffed animals. To find out more of who did what and make recommendations. She didn’t interview me and wouldn’t tell me anything Mia said either, though she did tell me that until further notice I must not allow her father to see her.

THE AUTHORITIES, STEP FOUR:
DR. FLYNN

All I wanted to do was give Mia a treat afterward, something sweet to balance the exam, like at the pediatrician.

Dr. Flynn snatched it from me. “You want her to associate having
someone touch her genitals with a treat? You’re supposed to be teaching her never to let anyone touch her there!”

I had no idea, I had no training for this. She looked at me as if I were an accomplice, as if I let it happen.

I buckled Mia into her car seat, went around the back of the car, and sat on the bumper, where Mia couldn’t see her mother fall apart, in the street between two cars. Maybe Dr. Flynn was right, maybe I
was
to blame. Maybe I should have smelled the coffee and left him after his mother’s first visit.

THE AUTHORITIES, STEP FIVE:
THE STATE’S TWO CENTS

Mia played in yet another room full of toys for a state attorney behind two-way glass. Again, little was said to me. Mia rarely told me much, either. Our time together was almost free of him, she didn’t speak of what he’d done and I never asked. We did what we always did, played at the beach, spent days at the zoo. She just did it more sadly.

While I waited during her interview, I picked up a doll from a basket in the waiting room. A girl ragdoll with pigtails. I tossed her back and her dress flipped up. Someone had taken off her panties and she wasn’t like any of the dolls I used to play with. She had genitals, openings. I picked up the other dolls, children and adults with private parts, and was pierced with a sudden despair.

I crawled about the floor searching for the girl doll’s panties, I fixed all their clothes, zipped up zippers, buttoned shirts. I laid them in their basket home. Then I noticed that their mouths were holes, too. I looked at the children on their backs with their open pink mouths and felt like I couldn’t take another breath on this earth. I curled up on the floor and wept.

Nick was busy, too, either crying to my mother, all I did was love my daughter, I don’t want to go to jail. Or continuing to discredit me. Our accountant greeted me with how can you do this to him, to such a good Catholic boy. I’d gone from vindictive wife to vindictive
Jewish
wife.

He called people snarling he’d find the person who did this to Mia!
Too stupid to realize that he’d just acknowledged that a “this” had happened at all, a day after telling a detective nothing happened, that his wife had made it all up.

He’d end up implicating himself in all kinds of ways. Most pedophiles don’t see their transparency. Because keeping your actions a secret isn’t that difficult. Concealing your very nature is almost impossible.

He would make a career of threatening “to get” people—me, my mother, his therapist, his therapist’s children, Mia’s psychologist, oh, they’ll all be very sorry.

THE AUTHORITIES STEP SIX:
THE CHILD PROTECTION TEAM REPORT

Recommendation: Protection of Child from Father until he is under treatment, further evaluation of the Child, mothers-of-abused-children therapy for Mother.

Treatment? For what, a sexual preference? As far as I was concerned, the only treatment that would work was measured in miles.

I applied to a college in another state. We would get counseling there. Not so fast, said the authorities, your divorce is now a matter before the court. You’re not going anywhere. I had to start the application process all over again, to a local university.

For the next two years, our fate lay in the hands of the Honorable Judge Percy Moran. He was handsome, curt, easily angered. I was alternately afraid of him and furious at him. For two years, the judge ignored what I said about Nick’s violence, threats, or bizarre behavior.

Nick denied touching Mia. The judge knew there was evidence to the contrary. The judge didn’t care. He wanted more proof, more reports.

He initiated Round Two of the system: The Experts. Court-appointed psychiatrists and psychologists, experts in sex abuse, psychological testing. We endured two years of smaller hoops with bigger fires, so the honorable judge could get at The Truth. Of course, all he needed to do was talk to Mia. She was the keeper of Nick’s secrets. But why listen to
a small girl? Courts then didn’t listen to big girls, ask rape victims, ask black-eyed wives.

Anything Mia or I said was invalid until one of the experts said it, too. And I never got over the fear of the consequences if they didn’t. It was ever present, my fear that he could hurt her again.

I was reduced to two emotions, love and fear. I felt them so intensely, it must have altered my DNA. I’d mutated into a Mia-protecting machine. Equipped with heightened receptivity to every nuance of her behavior and mood. To the judge’s. To knowing when to least expect something. To everything, everywhere, every day. I lost the ability to think one thought at a time. No thought was unaccompanied by fear. Especially thoughts of Mia. My feelings for her became entangled with it.

Having Mia had taught me that love is expansive, that its strength and magnificence come in unleashing it. Fear’s potency is nuclear, it comes in harnessing it, in compression, density. It generated the heavy fuel I needed then. Because vigilance is a hungry animal.

There were two bright spots in the midst of this. I got accepted quickly into a local university and secured grants and scholarships to pay for it. And I found Elaine, a lawyer who was just the kind of woman Nick hated. And just the kind we needed—brilliant, principled, unyielding. Our very own gladiator.

Nick needn’t have worried about the family name. Their reputation followed them thousands of miles away, right into the deposition of one of Nick’s doctors. I noticed that the legal stenographer there seemed uncomfortable. She followed me to my car when it was done, making sure no one saw her.

“I can’t believe this,” she whispered. “This is the P. family from Philadelphia, isn’t it?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“I was good friends with his sister in high school when I had a boyfriend my parents hated, who, by the way, his sister slept with behind my back. Her mother called me one day to tell me that since I couldn’t bring my boyfriend to my own house, he and I could go to their house and have sex anytime we wanted.”

Something on my face made her pause, then say, “You did know the family was…you know,…kinda weird? You know, sexually?”

The reports from Moran’s experts started rolling in. They’d spent months with Nick, with Mia, with me, and they all concluded to varying degrees that what Mia reported was true, and once she was sure Nick couldn’t hurt her again, she reported plenty.

I found out what “plenty” was in a cold, dim court hallway. I opened the file Elaine had given me and read the things he’d done to hurt her, things I hadn’t known, things she “patected” me from.

My heart twisted, my lungs felt as if they were being wrung. I sobbed going into Moran’s chambers for the hearing. Which greatly annoyed him. Until he read the report himself, snapping from page to page. The recommendations in the report were no less painful. They recommended treatment and immediate supervised visitation; after treatment, well, Mom and Dad should make some rules, say, like no nudity between father and daughter.

“You mean he can still see Mia if he gets
therapy
? And you think this time around he’s going to follow rules?” I asked outraged.

Dear naïve, stupid Claire. How unsophisticated. How primitive. Don’t you think the experts know what they’re talking about? Don’t you know that a hundred years of psychology has allowed us to
evolve
in our understanding of human behavior and the laws that govern it, made us wise in these matters?

And our wisdom, our bottom line is this: we don’t think molesting a child is a
choice
—we don’t think he could
help
consciously calculating for months to hide what he was doing or stop himself from telling Mia not to tell on him. We think it is a
disease
.

Of course you do. To a hammer, everything is a nail. If the almighty psychologist can change a gay person’s desires, as they thought they could then, why, of course they can make someone stop finding little kiddies irresistible, too.

“You mean you really think you can cure this ‘disease’?”

Well, okay, maybe not
cure
it, maybe just
control
it.
Maybe
. So, we’re also recommending therapy for your violated child so she can learn how to avoid future molestations. We recommend that she understand her
“private zones”
and what to do if she is touched inappropriately.

We’ll give you the opportunity to do it again after treatment, Mr. P, but with a new vocabulary. After all, a man is entitled to his biological child, even one he betrayed and violated in the worst possible way.

What about what
Mia
wants, you ask? Why, Claire, she’s hardly four years old, how can she
possibly
know what she wants? We’ll tell her what she wants.

And as for Mom, well, she’d best learn to cooperate with you and to control her angry expressions.

This was how they protected our children in family court. It made me sick to my stomach. Who it protected was themselves; it was men scratching each other’s backs. It still is. It’s not so hard to figure out. Men become politicians and judges: politicians and judges make laws.

Elaine no doubt told me what I could expect, but it didn’t stick. Even though we were in family court and jail was never a possibility, I was sure that once the judge got at The Truth, Mia would be safe for good. What a fantasy. Perhaps what she needed protection from were my own delusions.

The following week I ran into a very upset Carrie in the courthouse. She’d just learned that a respected judge was found fondling his granddaughter. She told me of another judge who watched a videotape of a visitation between a little girl and the father who molested her. When the father entered the room, the girl started screaming and tried to force herself under a low coffee table to hide. It was horrible to watch, she said.

“What did the judge do?” I asked, afraid Mia might face the same fate.

“He shook his head and said, ‘We just have to find a way to get those two back together as a family.’”

To his great credit, Judge Moran did insist Nick complete a full course of MDSO therapy, as in Mentally Disordered Sex Offender, before any kind of contact with Mia, even supervised. Nick got the judge to change the wording to just Sex Offender therapy.

Mia never saw Nick again. But not because of anything the system did. Because he decided not to go to the therapy as ordered.

In between all the madness, Mia and I moved on campus and began what would be two of the happiest years of our lives. When I wasn’t battling my ex, I loved my life. Mia attended the campus nursery school; I majored in art history and film studies.

A few months after starting school, Mia began to smile again. For a
long time, she started every day by asking if she’d have to see “him” today. One day she was climbing a slide and said, “Are you really really really sure I won’t have to see him today?” Really really really, little monkey. She reached the top of the slide, looked down, and smiled her gorgeous wide smile, and I thought my heart would burst.