The Morels (34 page)

The psychologist takes Penelope aside and urges her to let them speak alone for a few minutes, that her presence might be a stressor keeping Will from speaking more freely.

Is there a way I can watch?

Watch?

Through like a two-way mirror or something?

This isn’t an interrogation room.

Penelope agrees. When she is gone, Will says he likes to play
the Game Boy with his father, but that his father is not very good. He likes to help his father make pasta and peas, though neither of them is very good at this either. Will doesn’t look at the psychologist; he doodles with the fountain pen. In our apartment we have a roof we can go up on. I have a radio-controlled UFO, which is an unidentified flying object. People believe they’re real, but the government says it’s weather balloons. That’s what I read anyway, and I have to agree. Isn’t that easier to believe? The other option is an entire race of beings from another galaxy, which scientists say is impossible, coming light-years—that’s miles that are so big they measure it in time not space—to get here and do what? Crash-land in a cornfield? You would think if they had the technology to fly all that way they’d be smart enough to know how to land safely. But I guess what if the government shot them down? I’d still say it’s weather balloons. Anyway, we went up on the roof sometimes and flew it out over the edge, which you weren’t supposed to do, but Art said if I wouldn’t tell, he wouldn’t tell.

The drawing that Will has just finished looks unmistakably like a penis, though when the psychologist asks, Will writes the words
WEATHER BALLOON
with an arrow pointing at its shaft. People think they’re round like a balloon, which in reality they aren’t. They look like enormous penises. Floating in the sky.

Tell me about your father’s book.

It’s supposed to be fiction, but it has a lot of true-life details in it. Like?

Like our names. And our address. I’m not sure about what people say in it because I can’t remember word for word. Like now, I probably couldn’t tell you what I just said.
I can’t remember word for word like now I probably couldn’t tell you what I just said
. But I couldn’t tell you that ten minutes from now.

Will begins writing down, verbatim, everything he is saying. His speech slows as he attempts this feat, and he loses track of what he’s saying and has to be reminded. There are things—in the book—that—are not true, like—I had a tantrum when
I—couldn’t,
n
-apostrophe-
t
—stay up to watch
ER
. It wasn’t
ER
—and it wasn’t a tantrum. For instance. And there are things—that happened—that did not happen in the book. Like the UFO—on the roof.

What about those things that happened in the book and also happened in real life?

Will writes the words:
master, bait
.

I know how to spell it, he says. It’s with a
u
even though it sounds like
master
. You want to know … did we … take baths.

What does the book say?

It says we did.

And did you?

He has just written his previous line of dialogue,
It says we did
, and now underlines the two words
we did
.

Each of the psychologist’s follow-up questions becomes more pointed, more explicit, requiring explicit and pointed responses about what exactly Will and his father did together in the bath. Will stops speaking, stops looking up at his interrogator; instead he keeps his eyes on the page in front of him, letting the pen trace out those words he cannot utter.

The psychologist excuses himself and joins Detective Ramirez, who is sitting with Penelope on a bench outside the room.

I think we have a case here.

Detective Ramirez says, I need your son to come back and speak with one of the child psychologists.

Aren’t you a psychologist?

No, ma’am. This is Detective Carvo. Detective Carvo extends his hand.

You tricked me.

No, ma’am.

But you did. You tricked me and my son into talking to you. You coerced a confession out of him.

Ma’am, we’re not out to get your husband or you or your son or anyone else in your family. We’re just looking for the truth here. This is a preliminary interview, information gathering, nothing
more. We don’t want to falsely accuse anyone here. Which is why we need an expert to speak with your son. Do you have an objection to that?

No.

Good.

Detectives Ramirez and Carvo visit Arthur at his place of employment. They would have preferred to speak with him at home. Talking with him here will put him on the defensive, and at this point it would be better to have him comfortable. The tells are easier to spot when they have a baseline of ease. But they must work with what they have. Another case has them elsewhere in the mornings and evenings, and they don’t have time to guess at when he might be home.

A young woman shows them to Arthur’s office. She seems thrilled that Arthur might be in some trouble. There is another man in Arthur’s office, speaking with Arthur.

The detectives ask the man if he wouldn’t mind leaving while they spoke with Arthur privately. They don’t announce themselves as officers of the law. In places like this, they rarely have to. Who else would they be? It’s understood. People make a wide berth, whisper to one another.

When they close the door, they show him their badges. Arthur sits down. Detective Carvo stands; Ramirez sits on the edge of the desk. They take an aggressive tack. They box him in, fold their arms over their chests. It is Arthur who determines this, though he doesn’t realize it. Were Arthur to have remained standing, the officers would have sat, folded their legs wide, presented him with smiles and open palms. But Arthur is telling them, by sitting with his back against the wall, to press down on him.

It’s a tag team of questions. Arthur can’t keep up with the answers. The detectives are civil, polite even, but Arthur can feel an icy burn expanding throughout his body. He’s drowning in a quicksand of questions, he can’t catch his breath. He wants to give them what they want, but what they want doesn’t seem to have to
do with answers and questions. He stands, he moves toward the door, but can’t bring himself to ask them to leave, so he leans, arms folded, in the corner by the door.

Arthur is right. The answers don’t matter; whereas Arthur may determine the means, he has no control of the end. It has already been decided, at least as far as Detective Carvo is concerned. The man is guilty. But Detective Carvo is young. Hard work and intuition have gotten him this far. He is still high on his own intuition. Detective Ramirez, on the other hand, has had enough years on the job to have been proved dead wrong enough times to know that they’re not all guilty, that some of them like this character Morel very well may have broken no laws, may in fact be just a run-of-the-mill pervert. Ramirez will reserve judgment because the truth is you never know. People lie, and for all sorts of reasons. It’s not just the perverts, but the victims, too.

Anyway, they’re not looking for concrete answers from this guy. They’re after reactions. Is he outraged? Disgusted? Squeamish? Guilty? Afraid? It’s how he reacts to key words, key phrases, not the answers themselves. They’re looking for him to say something to complicate the story or change it in some way: maybe the boy has a history of lying, or the wife’s father is a repeat sex offender. But the interview doesn’t yield much.

At the same time, though, Arthur’s reactions do not do him any favors or rule him out as their man. He goes from blank-eyed terror to sneering in the space of twenty minutes. He offers no damning tells, nor does he offer any complicating factors that might take the heat off him. Anyway, this case will come down to the boy’s testimony. Until they have that, short of Arthur’s full confession, it doesn’t matter what he says.

Arthur had questions of his own, raised through these detectives’ troubling line of questioning. Why were they hounding him about the “events” of a work of fiction? Where had they gotten the idea that his novel was true? Who had they been talking to? What had they been told? When had all this happened?

Penelope and Will return to the precinct for an interview with the child psychologist.

The place, in its bustle, seems less threatening this time around. She breathes a little more freely while she waits outside in the hall for her son. She feels safer, as though this place—in that impersonal yet reassuring way of hospitals—has her best interests in mind. That the people here only want to do right by her.

Detective Ramirez is a particularly comforting presence. He brings her coffee, bagels—when they go out for lunch he brings her back a sandwich. He sits down with her while she waits and explains gently, slowly, how everything will unfold. Much the way a surgeon would before a complicated procedure, with the same kindness and gravity. Unless the psychologist comes out and says something unexpected, they will ask Will to make a statement, record it on tape.

Will he also be asked to testify in court, Penelope asks.

It may come to that, yes, but there’s plenty of time before we cross that bridge. First we will talk to, hopefully, Joanna. She is very nice, you’ll like her. She works with the district attorney’s office, and she will help us decide if and how we should move forward.

And if we do?

We will need to have a serious talk with Arthur. We will bring him in here. And at that point, it’s really up to him. (Back to that idea again—Arthur in control of his own destiny or, if not his destiny, than at least the route he prefers to take to hell.) A confession may buy him some jail time. If he’s not willing to confess, then we will have to make our felony complaint without it. We’ll obtain a warrant for his arrest. We’ll need you to be available for the whole gamut of court dates. For the next six months you’ll learn how to make yourself comfortable on these benches, the art of waiting for your name to be called. I don’t want to candy coat things for you, Penelope. It will be a full-time job for you, managing all of this. The court appearances will be stressful, but you have family, I hear, yes?

They’re in Virginia.

If you could get them to come up, support you here, you should consider it. Mostly though, it will be crossword puzzles and handheld video games, if that’s what Will’s into. My son’s crazy for his Nintendo.

Reassuring the mother, this is important. She is the most dangerous person here. She can help things go smoothly or make things impossible. Best to get her on board early.

When the psychologist emerges, he says that he believes the sort of abuse described in the book, the abuse Will recalls, may very well have taken place. Penelope sobs. It comes out involuntarily, like a sneeze. She allows herself to cry, to dissolve on this bench, in front of these men who do nothing to comfort her.

Some days later, she receives a visit from Joanna Brady, the attorney who will be handling the case. She is a towering redhead with hands that could palm a basketball. She meets Penelope and Will as equals, friendly with Will without being solicitous. Will takes an instant liking.

He follows her around the apartment. Try holding this in one hand without letting it drop. He hands her a large honeydew melon. If you knew the technique of Shaolin finger strength you could crush a man’s head with your bare hands, which is a lost art, apparently. Kendrick is always threatening me in the lunchroom, but I looked it up. Plus his father is a real pussy, which is a word I’m not allowed to say, so forget I said it.

Joanna is distressed to hear that Arthur is the one living in their apartment.

There’s no reason for you to be hiding out here. Will should be in touch with things familiar to him. This is going to be hard enough on him as it is. She urges Penelope to take the opportunity, once Arthur is processed, to move back in, to claim the space. We’ll try to have a judge issue an order of protection—he’ll just have to find some other place to go.

It’s hard to have a focused conversation with Joanna, Will is all over the place. He’s in and out of the bathroom. It’s not hard
to imagine what he’s up to in there. Rachel has barged in on Will twice standing in front of the mirror with his pants at his ankles, playing with himself.
Test-driving
, she’d joked. This chronic masturbating was new.

The night before, Penelope was tucking him in and could swear he was touching himself under the covers. She made him hold out his hands to her, and she took them and kissed them and told Will that none of this was his fault. That it was okay to be nervous, to be upset by all this, but to know the trouble his father was in—it was trouble of his own making. Will argued with her, using logic to condemn himself for this awful turn their lives had taken: it wasn’t true that he, Will, had nothing to do with it; he was there and, by virtue of being there, wasn’t it true that he was a participant and, literally, a part of it? Had he not been there—had he, for instance, not been born—

Your father is not well, Penelope said, cutting him off. And this is not your fault, but then Will wanted to explore the definition of
well/unwell
, and Penelope was forced to turn off the light and leave him to his guilt, which, God help her for thinking it, she found annoying.