The Best Kind of People (3 page)

They snuck up the back stairs, rubbing their wet heads on the threadbare sunburst swim towels hanging from the coat hooks by the door to the basement. Jimmy traced a finger along Sadie’s spine, causing her to pause, shiver, and bat his hand away before she stepped over Payton, the fat sleeping tomcat on his designated fourth-step nap space. She headed for the kitchen barefoot, in search of iced tea. The plan to sneak up to Sadie’s room and finish what they had started was immediately thwarted by the unusual presence of her parents, seated at either end of the kitchen table.

The Woodbury parents were the academic sort, floating brains in denial of the body. Sadie reasoned that it was better not to talk about sex with them, to ensure that both she and her parents retained the privacy they both needed. It was less denial, she reasoned, more maturity. The same way that they all went to church on Sundays but never talked about God. Some things were meant to stay inside our own heads. When Jimmy stayed over, she was never sure if they knew or not. She did know that neither party was eager to discuss it.

When they entered the kitchen, the adults reacted with a sudden and uncharacteristic silence. Her mother’s brownish-grey bob was pushed back behind her ears with the help of her glasses. Joan usually had two facial expressions — tired from work or happy to have a day off. Her face betrayed a sense of resigned incredulity. She never drank after dinner.

“What’s up with you guys? You’re not usually up this late.”

“Nothing,” Joan said, in a way that sounded the opposite. She picked up the container of lemon squares and held them out to Jimmy, who put a whole one in his mouth and grabbed a second, grinning appreciatively while he chewed.

“It’s past midnight …” Sadie sing-songed expectantly. Joan stared at her daughter for a few moments before realizing what she meant.

“Oh, happy birthday, darling!” Joan said, half present.

“Yes, happy birthday, beautiful daughter,” said George, standing up to give her a hug.

Sadie felt a brief moment of birthday excitement, and then the house seemed to shake with a pounding on the front door, followed by an insistent baritone call: “We’re looking for George Alistair Woodbury!”

“What’s going on?” Sadie said, peering through the kitchen entrance and down the hall to the foyer. Red and blue flashed through the open windows, a light show for the symphony of cicadas. She approached the door tentatively. George sat back down at the table, staring into his glass of wine.

“Sadie, don’t. I’ll get it,” Joan said as she approached the door, peering through the peephole cautiously. She opened it slowly to find two plainclothes detectives and several uniformed officers.

“Hello, ma’am, is your husband home?”

They made it only a few feet down the front hall before spotting him through the living room, still at the kitchen table. He stood, knocking over his glass. It pooled, then slowly dripped onto the kitchen floor.

For months Joan would replay this moment, trying to decipher the look on her husband’s face. Was it guilt? Confusion? Indignation? Stoicism? Acting? But nothing, not even a revolving camera of omniscience, a floating momentary opportunity to narrate, would allow anyone to truly understand the truth about George. He became a hard statue, an obstacle, a symbol.

The father and the husband, from that moment, had been transformed.

EARLY MONDAY

TWO

JOAN WATCHED AS
George was cuffed in the foyer of their home.
Sexual misconduct with four minors, attempted rape of a minor.
The words didn’t make sense. The police were gentle with him, and he did nothing to resist but offer up a face blooming in perplexity. Joan was baffled by her own reaction. Politeness.
WASP
accommodation. She just let them take him away, standing there as detectives filled the house like a swarm of unwanted bacteria. She didn’t know what to do. She did nothing. The shock and shame consumed her. She noted a blush creeping over George’s stubbled neck and face as he tried to maintain some semblance of authority. He was still wearing a blazer, his collar loosened, his tie draped over the back of his chair at the head of the kitchen table. It felt as if she were being forced to watch someone attack him and she felt a violent urge to protect him at all costs. But she stood still, watching.

“We’ll get this mistake sorted,” he said. “You’ve nothing to worry about, Joan. Tell the kids it’s just an error.” He leaned over and kissed her. His tone was assured, commanding, but Joan noticed that his right eye twitched in an insistent triple staccato, as it did when he was getting a stress headache.

A search warrant was placed in Joan’s hand, which she gripped out of instinct but did not read. She was overcome with dizziness, and leaned into the coat rack, watching as the police car drove away through the front stone gate.

“Ma’am,” said a nameless officer, “can you show us to your husband’s computer?”

“Certainly,” she said. Certainly? Who speaks like that? What the fuck are you looking for? How would you like to hand your computer over to a stranger wielding infinite power?
Certainly
echoed in her head, mockingly, as she walked up the stairs, a stranger’s steps mimicking her own.

She was in crisis mode. To remain calm was to her advantage. Politeness gets you further than outrage. Joan had been an emergency room nurse for almost twenty-five years. Hysteria helps no one. Triage is second nature. But this time she had no idea what to do first, let alone what to do next, and so she followed the most identifiable chain of command. There was a ringing in her right ear that got louder as she watched while the heavy-set cop with one wonky eye unplugged the computer and lifted it, trailing the cord behind him as he walked back into the hallway, then turned to survey her briefly before continuing down the stairs into the living room, the kitchen, pulsating with sweat. She gripped the banister. She stopped herself from kicking him in the back.

She picked up the phone and called her sister Clara in the city. “I need you to come here. George has been arrested. Please call Andrew too. I can’t explain right now, the house is full of cops.” Clara’s alarmed voice came through the receiver, but Joan couldn’t accommodate her questions. She was being approached by a man in an expensive suit who had appeared at the door, which was now propped open with one of the decorative garden stones from the front yard. A ladybug. He was red-faced with hypertension, and sought her out from the crowd.

“Joan! I am your husband’s lawyer, Bennie.” He reached out his hand to shake hers, and then took her arm and led her into the living room.

“How did you know to come?”

“George called me earlier this evening, said it was urgent.”

“But it’s so late.” His grip was solid, paternal, and it made Joan want to fight him off. Something felt off, his arrival out of the blue. He motioned towards the couch, directing her to sit, before sitting himself on the edge of the coffee table across from her like a child.

“What’s best right now is if you just let the police do their job and co-operate. We’re going to get everything sorted.”

She watched as police continued to carry everything of value into their trucks, or throw it about the room like robbers in a cartoon. She slowly blinked the room back into focus.

“Do you want to post bail?”

“Of course,” she said.
If your loved one is trapped somewhere, you do what you can to get them out.
It was primal.

“There has been a mistake,” she said.

Bennie didn’t agree, he just stared at her briefly and looked down at his iPhone.

“You should be at the station with my husband,” Joan said to Bennie.

“My associate is there on my behalf. We have the whole firm working on this.”

“This is a big deal? Why the fuss? This is a misunderstanding,” she said.

“This is going to be very high-profile, Mrs. Woodbury. I need you to brace yourself.”

AS GEORGE WAS
being processed at the police station, it seemed to Joan that everyone in the town knew immediately. She was not certain how it happened, because she sure didn’t tell anyone, but everyone knew almost as soon as she did. They talked. It must have felt nearly involuntary — it was simply too beyond the realm of possibility to
not
talk about. Humans crave connection, after all, even when it’s about another’s misfortune. Perhaps especially then.

THREE

JIMMY AND SADIE
sat on the loveseat, their heads still wet with lake water. Jimmy held on to Sadie’s hand the way he had on the Cyclone in the summer. A female police officer in uniform sat across from them on the La-Z-Boy, right leg propped on her left knee like a table, and opened up a spiral-bound notebook. Sadie dug her nails into her bare legs, and then twisted her drying ponytail around her fist.

“Was your father ever inappropriate with you?”

“No.”

“Did he ever talk about sex too frequently, or in an odd way?”

“No.”

“Did he walk in while you were changing?”

“No.”

“Did your friends ever mention feeling uncomfortable around him?”

“No. This is totally insane.”

“I get that this is confusing to you, but we have to follow procedure.”

“It’s not confusing. You’re making it pretty clear what kind of person you think my father is, and you are wrong. There are real criminals in the world. My father is not one of them.”

Sadie tried to stay alert, sit up straight, answer honestly, anything to get them out of the house, but this was too much. She twisted her ponytail around her fist for the twentieth time.

The police officer didn’t offer any words of comfort or contradiction after her outburst, she just kept asking questions as though she were conducting a survey.

“Have your father’s moods changed lately? Has he been irritable?”

“No. My father is … honest, kind. He never even looks at women,” she said. “He’s a nerd. He knows what’s right and wrong. God, he gave me
this
.” Sadie pulled out the red plastic whistle she always wore around her neck. She’d tied the leather string with a double knot and just never took it off. “It’s a
rape
whistle,” she said, a frustration building in her chest. She blew it sharply. Everyone in the room was silenced, looked in her direction. She spat the whistle out, the taste of stale plastic and trapped lake water lingering on her tongue as everyone went back to destroying their home. She felt as though she were having one of those dreams where she was screaming but no one could hear her.

“It’s my birthday,” Sadie said. “I’m seventeen. We have plans to celebrate. This can’t be happening.”

The cop showed no emotion. She transcribed whatever Sadie said. When she leaned over to write, a tattoo of a swallow was visible underneath her clavicle. Her ponytail ended in a web of split ends touching the collar of her uniform shirt. Her gun lay so casually on her hip.
There are guns in our house
, Sadie thought.
Our anti-gun house is full of steel and bullets.
They had an old rifle in the basement, but it was ornamental, historic, passed down for generations. Sadie couldn’t even look at it; that’s how much guns scared her. She flashed to the man with the gun at school. The rain on the black and white floor tiles.

“I think that’s enough,” Bennie said, sitting down beside Sadie and Jimmy, shutting down the conversation. “All other questions should go through me.”

Joan, who had been following the detectives around, walked into the room holding a dripping mop, which was oozing soapy water into the carpeting.

“Can I go pay bail now? This is ridiculous,” she said, looking at her watch as if she were in a waiting room and the doctor was hours late.

“He’ll be arraigned Tuesday morning, and bail will be set then,” Bennie explained.

“He has to sleep … in
jail
, for two nights?”

“It’s late, and the paperwork takes a bit of time.”

THE DETECTIVE LOOKED
at her. It was the same look she gave people at the hospital when they were being entitled and clueless, acting as though the emergency room was an extension of their living room. Joan noted the scar on his left cheekbone, spreading out like a tree limb towards his ear.

“Burst appendix, last spring. Your wife’s name is Josie. You’ve got twin boys.”

The detective took a step back and cocked his head to the left in a question.

“I was the head trauma nurse on duty when you came in.”

He had been stoic at first, and then a classic baby, like most men when they get sick, especially cops and other authoritative types. He was wailing and afraid. His wife left the twins, six years old at the most, to wander through the waiting room. Groups of other cops showed up, demanding and dramatic, and caused problems.

The detective blushed a little. “Yes, that sure, uh, was painful.” He laughed as though they were engaged in casual small talk. She knew then that he’d mistaken her for some Woodbury Lake society wife, someone he could delight in bringing down. His body language changed after that. He softened, convinced the group to gather and head out the door quickly, with a nod and a motion of his hand.

Joan paced the house cleaning up, talking to her sister Clara and son Andrew on the speakerphone as they drove towards Avalon Hills. The drive normally took over three hours, but she knew they’d be speeding, and there wouldn’t be much traffic in the middle of the night. In his early thirties now, her first-born returned home infrequently for short weekend visits. He was often too busy for anything beyond Christmas and Thanksgiving. His agreement to drop everything and drive in the middle of the night surprised Joan, though she felt relief that she’d soon be joined by other adults. She could not fall apart with only Jimmy and Sadie around to watch. Not that falling apart was really in her character. But she knew that the dissociative state she was currently functioning in had a time limit.

Joan stood at the window waiting for Clara’s headlights, while Jimmy and Sadie slept curled up on the couch. She watched as Clara clicked the gate open with the extra remote she had clipped to the rear-view mirror of her mini Smart car and pulled up beside Joan’s Volvo. She got out of the car and ran up the stone steps. Andrew got out more slowly, stretching his long legs and cracking his neck in the moonlight.