The Animal Girl (16 page)

Leah nodded, and soon the woman officer had reached him at work. “Your daughter is here in my office, Mr. Mitchell. She's just told me that she's been sexually assaulted.” How easily—as if it were straightforward information—the woman had said this sentence. And now, reassuringly and repeatedly, she was saying, “She's safe, Mr. Mitchell. She's right here with me. She'll stay here until you arrive.”

After the lady cop hung up, Leah told her story about how Max had raped her: first the picnic and softball game, the departure of all the guests but Leah, the cleaning up afterwards, the beers he had given her, the conversation on the couch about how sorry he was to see her go, followed by him reaching over and kissing her, then the struggle Leah had lost. Leah was struck by how easily she began to lie, and by how, without contempt for Max, without much feeling at all for Max, she continued to lie. The woman nodded. She said, “I see. I understand.” She gave every possible sign of listening and taking it all in, and this encouraged Leah and kept her talking. There were more difficult questions, questions Leah hadn't expected and didn't want to hear. “Did he penetrate you, Leah? Did he ejaculate inside you?”

Leah shook her head. “I don't know,” she said. “I mean, maybe not. I don't think he did.”

“Okay,” the woman said gently. “You'll need to see a doctor.”

“Not now,” Leah said.

“The sooner the better.”

“But not immediately. Not this minute.”

“No,” the officer said. “Not right now, but soon.”

It was not until her father arrived that Leah wanted to take back everything she had said and realized that she could not—not with the woman officer sitting across from her. Franklin was oddly shy when he entered the room and saw her. He wore a suit and floral-pattern necktie that Noelle had recently given him. “Leah,” he said. His beardless face, thin and clean, still seemed unfamiliar to her. How strange it was to see him in the middle of a workday. There was something—not quite pain—in his face as he looked at her. As if he were trying to see the ruin and suffering she'd undergone. As if he were trying to imagine what had happened to her. He hesitated before touching her, placing a hand cautiously on her shoulder.

“I'm okay, Daddy,” she said. It was unbearable, looking out at the nightmare she was creating. She closed her eyes then and heard Franklin make a sound, a brief sigh, a sign that he, too, couldn't bear this scene. His hand left her shoulder. Leah opened her eyes.

“My God,” he said. And though he was usually calm, mild, slow to react and feel things, he became suddenly fidgety, nervous. He thrust his hands in his pockets and paced. He looked frightened now. He looked impulsive and uncertain. “What do we do?” he asked the officer. “What next?”

She said something that Leah couldn't listen to about a doctor, about filing criminal charges. “I need to leave now,” Leah said. “I need to go home. Please. Now.”

Soon Leah was following her father down the hallway and out the station, knowing she'd have to return later that afternoon, though she wasn't thinking about that. She just wanted to move, get out and away, forestall and put everything behind her. Acceleration and velocity. That's what she needed now.

But the world outside the police station was slow. It seethed with humidity and a dull, fleshy layer of midafternoon sun. Franklin's forehead broke out with sweat as soon as they hit the air. The green on the trees seemed unctuous, seemed to weigh them down
and sadden them. There was no breeze, no motion. As they crossed the street, Leah felt the sticky asphalt burn through her soles and bake her ankles. And everywhere she looked, Leah saw terror thinly veiled. A small, shirtless boy on the other side of the street, his chin smeared with something like ice cream, held onto a bike and quietly sobbed. Where were his parents, his brothers and sisters, his friends? A large truck backing out of a driveway, its bed filled with layers of ripped-up sod, made that insistent bleating sound that was supposed to warn pedestrians away. Franklin was walking too fast across the street, and though no cars were in sight, Leah felt the threat of being hit, crushed in a moment too sudden to anticipate. Before getting in her father's car, she looked for the truck. It was gone. Suddenly nowhere. As was the child. Gone. Snatched up. Stolen. “I'm sorry,” Franklin was saying. Inside the car, the heat became viscous, as if the air would gather and begin to boil. The leather seats stuck to Leah's legs, sucking on the backs of her thighs. Her skin—her face, her arms, her chest—stung with sweat. “Daddy,” she said.

“It's going to be all right,” he said. And then: “I'm sorry. So sorry. I can't believe Max would do this. I can't believe anyone would. He's a little funny, a little lonely. But that's all I thought he was.”

Leah's window came down. Air rushed in. One tree, then another and another, passed by. They were driving. “But you're okay, aren't you? You're fine. You're safe. I can see that. Thank God. Anything could have happened. We just need to go home now.” But home was just down the street from the station, and they had already passed it. He looked at either side of the street. “We drove right by our house, didn't we? We'll have to turn around. We'll go home and rest. And then we'll see what has to be done.” He let out a sigh. “Bad things. First your mother and now this. We were okay before. We survived. We'll be okay again.”

“Daddy,” Leah said.

He didn't look at her. He just kept driving.

“I lied,” she said.

He was trying to find a place to turn around, his eyes searching the road, attempting to focus, to concentrate.

“I made it up.” She wanted him to stop the car now and listen,
but he didn't. “Max didn't rape me. Nobody did. Max didn't even touch me. He didn't do anything. I made it up. I did it because I hate people. I hate everyone.”

He slowed down now. He stopped, pulled the keys out of the ignition, let his head drop to the steering wheel, and began to sob, at first quietly and then more loudly. This was him. The man she recognized as her father: small, hurt, weak, overcome by grief. Not happy, not vigorous, not in love. He lifted a fist, the keys clenched in his fingers. “Daddy,” Leah said.

He stepped out of the car then and, without shutting his door, began to walk. They were on the edge of West Park, a place her parents had often taken her as a little girl. Leah's mother had been alive then, and everything had been fine. When Leah walked after him now, he left the sidewalk and started moving faster over the grass. “Daddy,” she said again. He began to jog, and so did Leah. And then, his suit tail flapping behind him, he was running. Leah ran after him, but he was fast and thin, in better shape than ever. He lengthened his stride, leaned forward, and broke into a sprint, losing a black leather shoe in the grass. Leah ran until her lungs burnt. Then she stopped and watched her father run over a hill and disappear on the other side.

When Leah arrived home with her father's shoe, a police car was parked at the curb. Inside, Franklin stood in the entryway. “Here's your shoe.” Leah held it up. That shoe, the largeness of it, the empty, clunky presence of it in her hand as she had walked through the park, then around and around the same block, wanting never to go home, never to face her father again, haunted her, reminded her of the times as a little girl that she'd put on his buckskin house slippers and been consumed up to her ankles by animal hide as she tromped through the house, imagining and visualizing his gargantuan strangeness, the simple mystery of his size in comparison to hers, all the while overjoyed by the fact that this alien giant was hers, all hers. And now he wouldn't take it, wouldn't even look at it. Leah put the shoe down. His necktie was undone, and his face showed an exhaustion Leah had not seen since her mother's death. Two cops sat at the
kitchen table, obviously waiting for her. “They're going to arrest you,” Franklin said. “I called them.”

“I don't suppose we'll need to use handcuffs,” one of the cops said.

Franklin was looking at Leah when he said, “I'd like to request that you do use them.”

She turned and put her hands out behind her. “I don't mind,” she said. The younger cop, a boy with a crew cut who seemed only a few years older than Leah, stood up and began taking the cuffs from their container at his waist. With her head down, she could see where the bulky black pistol sat in its holster on the boy's hip. “You have a gun,” she said. Then she began to cry.

Still holding the handcuffs, the boy looked over at Franklin. “All right,” Franklin said. “I guess she doesn't need those.” The boy put them away.

Leah truly did not know how to be arrested. It was awkward and humiliating. The young cop, no doubt new to his work and seeming anxious, gripped her arm too tightly while the other read her rights. Her father said and did nothing. From the curb outside, Leah looked back for him, but the front door was already shut. “Thank you,” she sobbed when the boy lowered her cautiously into the backseat, making sure her head did not hit the car. It wasn't right. She wasn't right. Criminals didn't say thank you. At the station, the cops gently—too gently—searched her with a metal detector, took her mug shot, then left her in her own private cell that nonetheless had real bars and a door that slid heavily into place. Later she would hear from both her father and Jason Clark how four uniformed cops had gone into the lab and compelled Max to accompany them to the station for questioning. They'd visited him at his workplace without warning because such visits intimidated criminals and because, Franklin explained, intimidation often led to confessions. In front of Jason, Diana, and others, the cops told Max he was suspected of criminal activity. They offered no more explanation, and Max had been too terrified to ask for more. “You should have seen his face,” Jason Clark would later tell her. “He couldn't speak. He just followed them. He got into a car, and they drove him off.”

But in her cell Leah wasn't thinking of Max. She was too terrified to think of Max. It wasn't the handcuffs, the Miranda rights, the body search, or even the mug shot that scared her. It was the numbing aloneness of incarceration, the lack of detail, the simple repetition of bars, the orphaned bareness of the single toilet in the corner of her cell, the bland white of the concrete wall at her back, the drain—not unlike the drain in her animal basement—in the concrete floor, the weird echo of someone whistling somewhere down the corridor of cages. She'd expected the place to be teeming with prisoners, with bad men and women. But across from her and next to her, the cells lay vacant. There were no sounds of talk, of laughter. No screams, no sighs, no grunting. She half expected to hear her dogs and sheep, and she thought of them now, thought of them in the basement of the lab, in their cages as she was now in hers. She wanted some sign of them: a bark, the bleat of a stupid sheep. But she heard only the weird whistling and her own unsettling breathing, heavy and too fast and snotty because she couldn't stop crying. She felt the thud of her heart. She wanted someone—her father, Noelle, even a criminal, a real criminal—to be in the cage across from her.

Finally, Leah heard footsteps approaching. It was the woman cop who had questioned her. She was gruff and unkind and disgusted with Leah. “I'd like to know why the hell you did that,” she said. “You had me convinced. You really did.”

Leah shook her head. “I hate people,” Leah said. But she'd already said that, and it didn't seem entirely true. “I don't know. I don't know anything. I'm stupid.”

“You are,” the cop said. “Stupid.”

She left Leah alone again. At some point she fell asleep, and woke when her cell door opened and a cop took her to her father. Franklin was in his white shirt and suit pants, and seemed diminished without his jacket and tie. His face did not greet her. It told her nothing. When she embraced him, he did not receive her for a few terrible moments. And then she felt his arms lift and hold her.

That night Leah and her father said very little. They sat down at the kitchen table without Noelle present. She was down the hall in the
TV room, keeping a low profile so that Franklin could, Leah imagined, discipline his delinquent daughter. “I have two things to tell you,” Franklin said. “I called Max. I apologized for you. He doesn't want to see you. He doesn't want you near his house. He doesn't want you near the lab.” Franklin paused and Leah nodded. “The other thing is this: I can't forgive you quite yet. I don't understand you, Leah. I'd even say I'm afraid of you. I don't know when I'll be able to forgive you. I just know I can't tell you that it's all right. It's
not
all right. It won't be all right for some time.”

Leah nodded again and Franklin stood up and left her at the table.

That season ended with rain. Day after day of rain, preceded and followed by a mist that rose in sheets from the grass and trees and left the sky white and featureless. At times, thunder would accompany the storms, and black weather rolled across the lush flatness. But mostly the rain was a quiet, constant drizzle, and the days were blank and colorless. Leah stayed inside and waited, for what she wasn't sure. Perhaps for the weather to pass. Perhaps for her final year of high school to commence and for what seemed an endless stampede of stupid classes, inane teachers, and even more inane classmates to end forever so that finally—thank God—something else could begin. College. University. Without anticipating it, Leah felt something like optimism: She entertained the thought that these future four years might be better than the years before. How could they possibly be worse?

As she waited, as she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, as she read one silly paperback mystery after another, as she walked down the hallway to piss, as she napped and woke in the middle of another white rainy day, she felt it distinctly. A weight in her chest that needed to be relieved. She wasn't exactly sorry. It was more than that, since she knew apologies would fix nothing. It was remorse. And the demands of remorse, she was now discovering, were nearly as impossible as those of grief. She wanted simply to undo what she had done. She saw her father bent over in the front seat of his car and willed him to sit upright, willed his sobs, his fear, and shock to be undone. All of it needed to be erased in a series of simple reverse ges
tures. She saw Max looking up at the cops in his office, his face blue from the glow of the computer screen and all his scientific intensity, his passion for knowledge arrested by fear and humiliation. And again she willed the cops to return from Max's office, walk backwards toe to heel down the hallway, up the stairs, and out the lab until their car doors had closed them off from what they'd long ago done, until their patrol car drove off in a backwards enactment of all that had happened, of which every event, every action, even the smallest of them, Leah saw now, was done and would not be undone.