The Crystal Child (16 page)

She tried to put the words as objectively as she could, as if the truth needed to be told at any cost.  “I think I could.  I think I understand.”  She saw an expression of disgust come over his face.  “Please.  It’s not easy to tell you.”

He moved a few paces off and turned away to ask, “Is there anything else you’re going to tell me?  Something that’s even harder?”

She knew there was only one answer he wanted.  She gave it.  “No.  There’s nothing.”

***

They made no effort to replace Mme. Verlaine.  For another month, they struggled to stay on civil terms with Aaron, giving him more latitude than they felt was prudent, but having no choice.  He made no promises, but seemed to be respecting certain limits to spare them legal complications.  He came and went as he pleased, often staying out later than they would have wished.  One morning in the month before Julia was due to be released from Stockton, they found a letter on his pillow.

Julia steeled herself for the ordeal of imprisonment.  She expected humiliation, loneliness, austerity.  She also expected her crime to cost her most of her friendships, as it had cost her her marriage.  Jake, as she might have guessed, filed for divorce at once as soon as she was sentenced, serving notice that he wanted a complete and final break. Julia gave him what he wanted without contest, asking only that he pass the clinic along to someone who would manage it well. He rapidly sold it off to a few members of the staff.  “What about the house?” John Briggs had asked her at one point.  She simply stared back at him.  What did he mean?

“Sell it?” she asked more than answered.  She had never given the matter a moment’s thought.  Could criminals own houses?  She had stopped thinking beyond the next ten minutes.

“Sell it?” He wagged his head, dismissing the idea.  “You need someplace to land when you get out.”

“Oh, yes,” she answered at last.  “Can you do something?”

Briggs nodded.  “I’ll take care of it.  Sign over your power of attorney to me and I’ll work out an arrangement with Jake.”  Resigned to Julia’s air of distraction, Briggs sighed heavily like a man forced to take up a heavy load.  “Whatever we do, you’re going to come out of prison in debt, and I don’t mean simply to me. I’m putting a lot of this on the cuff indefinitely.  Even so, you may have to declare bankruptcy at some point to protect whatever assets you still have when this is over.”

Over
?  When would that be, she wondered.  What assets were there going to be now that her family and career were destroyed?  Still she nodded her assent to him.  Let him do whatever it was he had in mind.  What exactly Briggs arranged, she never fully understood.  Later she learned Jake had struck a hard bargain about the house, something that would cost her a great deal of whatever money she had left.  Before the trial started, Jake had threatened to move out of the area with Alex.  A few months after she had been sentenced, she learned that he had done just that, taking care to keep his new home secret.  Eventually she found out he had moved to Los Angeles with Alex and had opened a new legal practice there.  She could find him if she wanted to, but she had no plans to do that.  She could not imagine looking Alex in the face again.  Where Alex was concerned, she felt frozen into a permanent condition of moral embarrassment, a face he would want to forget.

She soon learned that being cut off suddenly and totally could be a blessing.  Dealing with the few visits she received from colleagues was more painful than being left alone.  She had pled guilty to a despicable offense; that fact hovered over every encounter.  Those who showed up to visit tried to put the best face on the situation.  Invariably they acted as if she had been unjustly convicted, but she did nothing to play along with the pretense.  Soon after she started serving her sentence, her younger sister flew in from Texas to do the sisterly thing.  Like the others, Ellen was quick to affirm Julia’s innocence, as if that was what was expected of her.  But Julia could not bring herself to lie.  “I can’t explain what I did.  But it did happen.  If that makes it difficult for you, you don’t have to come again.  I’ll understand.”  Perplexed as she was, Ellen promised to visit each month.  But by the third month, she was finding excuses for not coming.  She sent brief notes and greeting cards instead.  On Julia’s birthday, she made a phone call that consisted mainly of apologies for not calling before.  But she did send books.

What Julia had not expected was the hostility she faced from her fellow prisoners.  She discovered that there is a hierarchy in the community of criminals. Child molesters rank at rock bottom.  Female child molesters were lowest among the low, a species of offender so rare that she was unique in the experience of most of the inmates.  Many of the women she shared the prison with — a surprising number — were mothers.   Most were there on narcotics charges, others were prostitutes, shop-lifters, thieves. A few were murderers.  One and all they were bitter, defeated people, angry with the world, angry with themselves.  The one vestige of respectability the mothers among them clung to was parental pride, the simple code that a mother protects her young.  That was the excuse they offered for their offense: they had stolen, cheated, prostituted themselves, even killed to save their young.  A visit from one of their children was a rich reward.

As Julia’s story got around, the women began to mark her out as the one inmate they could all freely denigrate. Their judgement was even more severe than the court that had tried her.  Women — all the more so, a woman who was a mother herself — simply did not do such things.  When Julia was near enough to hear, they would start conversations, asking, “How d’you suppose a woman molests a little boy?  How d’you think she makes his weeny stand up?”  When they learned Julia was a once-successful doctor, their rancor grew worse, as if she — educated and well-off — had trespassed on the prerogative of the poor.  She had no
right
to be a criminal, to take up space in
their
prison. One day in the lunch room, she looked up to see two black women glaring at her across the table.  The one said to the other. “Me, I seen some hunks, like sixteen-year-old studs, you know, I could hit on, sure.  But ten-year-old!  You imagine a woman screwin’ a ten-year-old little boy?  Hoo! You gotta be some kinda real crazy, fucked-up bitch.  Any woman ever do that to my boy, I cut her throat.  That’s what they shoulda done to her.”

Julia realized that her notoriety was being enhanced as her story passed from person to person. Would it make any difference if she told the woman that the boy was eleven, not ten?  How much moral mileage was there to be gained from fornication with an eleven-year-old rather than a ten-year-old?  Julia let the point go. After that, she took her meals at a table as far from the others as she could get.

Despised as she was by her fellow inmates, Julia’s reputation commanded grudging respect in other quarters at Stockton.  Three days after she entered prison she was summoned to the infirmary.  The doctor in charge was a stocky, hard-faced, Asian woman in her fifties with an accent so marked that Julia had to listen closely.  “You are a doctor,” she said, eyeing Julia suspiciously as if she doubted the record she was holding.

“Yes. A gerontologist.”

That brought a skeptical frown.  “No need for specialists here.  Just basic.  The warden wants you to assist me. Medical Technical Assistant.  You understand?  Now on, you report here after breakfast every morning.”

“The women haven’t been too friendly,” Julia told her.  “They may not want to see me.”

The doctor gave a dismissive laugh.  “They don’t get to choose in here.  They lucky to have even a nurse.  Now they got two doctors.”  She leaned across her desk to offer her hand, a curt gesture of welcome.  “Amelia Santiago.”  She turned to drum her finger on the diploma that was displayed behind her desk.  “Luzon,” she said with a challenging glance, waiting for Julia to show disapproval.  Julia had never heard of the Luzon School of Medicine, but she smiled and nodded.  “What school?” the doctor asked.

“Me?  Johns Hopkins,” Julia answered.

Dr. Santiago grunted approval.  “Yes, I have heard of it.  Good school.  You call me Dr. Santiago, okay?”

“Certainly.”

“I call you Julia, okay?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Must be clear to the women.  I am the doctor.  You are Technical Assistant.”

Julia’s duties in the infirmary allowed for some variation in the otherwise deadening monotony of her daily routine, but that did little to ameliorate her ostracism.  More and more isolated among the inmates, she retreated into her imagination.  When she was finished for the day with Dr. Santiago, she returned to her cell and rarely left.  She was not alone there, but she might as well have been.  Her cell-mate was a slovenly young Hispanic inmate whom she suspected was retarded. She was small and fragile with large frightened eyes.  Her left cheek was badly damaged, a deep cut from the eyebrow to the chin that had healed badly into a puckered white scar.  She knew little English and spoke hardly at all.  She was content to spend her time in sulking silence, doing as she was told or lounging before the television set that was shared by all the cells in the wing.  Young and shy, the girl was frequently the butt of jokes. 
Cochina poca
, little pig, the others called her, with some justification.  She had no interest in washing and grooming, perhaps — so Julia guessed — because she was too sick to care.  When her smell got too strong in the cell, Julia would insist that one of the guards march her off to the showers.  How old was the girl, Julia wondered.  Poor health added years to her age, but, had she not been so red-eyed, pimply, and emaciated, she might have looked young enough to belong in the hands of the juvenile authorities.

“Do you feel sick?” Julia asked her one evening, reaching out to feel the girl’s brow. The girl would not allow her hand to rest there long before she stepped away, a frightened expression on her face.  But Julia’s hand was there long enough for her to tell the girl was feverish.  “You should come to the infirmary,” Julia told her.  “
Enfirmería.”
  But either the girl could not understand or pretended she could not.  “All right,” Julia said with a shrug, “have it your way.  But just don’t pass it around.”  The girl dropped on to her bunk and gave her an evil look.  Then she broke into tears.

***

Evenings were the worst, a prison of a different kind.

Through the evenings, while the women in her cell block watched whatever appeared on the television screen, Julia read from the books she had brought with her or was allowed to borrow from the prison’s undersized library.  They were mainly books of folklore and myth.  She had not made the choice of books deliberately; she had simply taken what spontaneously appealed to her title by title.

As she read, she let her thoughts wander back to the first time Aaron had kissed her, recalling the strange scene that had flooded her mind that night.  Each time she returned to that image, she grew more certain that here was the moment when her life turned a corner. That was the beginning.  After that, a succession of long-buried images she associated with her childhood began to well up inside her, creatures half-man and half-beast, passionate and violent encounters between humans and magical beings.  She saw her experience now within the frame of a greater life that was still in touch with transcendent longings.  At first she thought she was simply covering over the ugly realities of her life.  But she had to make some sense of what she had done.  Why had her judgement failed her?  It was not in her character, at least not in the character she had been shaping through the first forty years of her life.  At a touch, Aaron had melted away all her caution, her professional discipline.  It had happened swiftly but gently.  What could this have been but a kind of sorcery as the old myths remembered it?

Those who scorned her could never understand the bliss she had known.  And there was more she understood now, recollections that were assuming greater definition. As she yielded to the dead routine of prison life, there was less to agitate her thoughts.  No appointments, no deadlines, no phone calls.  Each day blurred memories grew clearer like reflections when the water becomes still.   She remembered how strangely passive Aaron had been, rarely doing more than permitting her to show her feelings. The things she did, the physical love she showed him, never seemed important to him.  He presided over the moment, more observer than participant.  After that one incident, he showed no further interest in intimacy.  He was reluctant even to touch.  And if they did, he looked mildly offended, as if physical contact, the only way she knew how to express desire, was a poor approximation of something far more impassioned, a music beyond her range of hearing.  Aaron had simply been leading her along the only course she knew, body thrusting against body.  Animal pleasures.  How must it have looked to Alex that afternoon when he discovered her with Aaron?  All he could see was the outside of her experience, two bodies locked together in bed.  What she felt inside could never be known to him.  There would be only this image of a perverted and inexplicable act.  It was not simply the obscenity of the memory that she regretted, but the betrayal it represented in his eyes.  How could he ever again trust anyone to be what they seemed?

***

The La Jolla Immortalist Center was all that remained of a once-prospering chain of spas that had spread Peter DeLeon’s name across the United States, Europe, and Japan.  Legal problems and mounting costs had gradually put the American side of the DeLeon Institute out of business.  The surviving La Jolla center remained as a modest beach-front facility, an office and
pied-a-terre
for DeLeon, a gathering point for clients in transit to San Lazaro.

“Is the Lord of Longevity in?” Aaron asked at the front desk where a young, blond woman was working at a computer.  She looked up, but found no words to reply.  Instead, she stalled in inquisitive astonishment.  The small, slight person who stood before her invited confusion.  This was obviously a child, but she could not be certain if the child was male or female.  The voice might have been either.  There was a wealth of hair, but it had been tightly piled under a woman’s cap.  The sunglasses were uncalled for on an overcast day.  Strangest of all, he — or she — was wearing a heavy coat of badly-applied face make-up.  This was clearly someone hiding behind an amateurish disguise.

“Who?” she asked at last.

“Isn’t that what he calls himself?  The Lord of Longevity. Dr. DeLeon.  I’m here to see him.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes.  My name is Aaron Lacey.  I phoned you.”

The receptionist checked her book.  “Lacey. Oh, yes.  You’re down for three o’clock.”  She studied him with a quizzical eye.  He knew what she was thinking.
I had no idea you were a child
.  “Are you with someone?” she asked.

“Do you mean a parent or a guardian?  No.  I’m all by my lonesome.”

Still puzzled, she glanced at the clock on the wall.  It was two-thirty.  “Dr. DeLeon is running late.  In fact, he has to leave town this afternoon.  May we reschedule this?”