Diablerie (16 page)

"I love you, Daddy,'' she said, leaning back and looking into my eyes.

I love you too," I said. What else could I say?

Mona was on the couch crying when I got home. At first she thought I could have been someone else.

"Who is it?" she whined when I came through the door.

She was desolate on the cushions, crying into the roseate floral pillow. When she looked up at me, I could see that her despair had nothing to do with me.

"He dropped you?" I asked.

She pressed her face back against the pillow.

I sat down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She sat up and put her arms around my neck as our daughter had done.

"Ben," she cried.

I wanted to tell her that Rollins would have left her anyway, that she was just a dalliance on a long road of women that the detective was traveling. I wanted to confess about my lies to him, but for some reason—for the first time in a long time—I didn't want her to let me go.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I lost my mind. I wanted somebody to love me. I wanted it so bad. But he, he just told me that it was over, like he was mad. I don't know what I did."

I let her hold on to me, unbothered by her need to lament her lover's abandonment. What did it matter anyway? I hadn't been there for her. I couldn't figure out how to talk to her in the bedroom, at the dinner table, in the morning when there was possibility in the air.

For a long time we sat like that. She molded to my form and bleated.

Many minutes later the phone rang.

"Should I get it?" I whispered.

She nodded.

"What if it's him?"

"I don't want to talk to him," she said, looking up at me.

"Hello?" I answered the phone.

"Ben?" Harvard Rollins said. "What are you doing there?"

"What do you want?"

"IS Mona there?"

"She doesn't want to talk to you."

"I have to speak to her," he said, with some urgency in his voice. "It's important."

"She said that she doesn't want to talk. Maybe you could drop by her office tomorrow. Right now she's on the couch crying her heart out."

"You're a motherfucker, Dibbuk. I could have you arrested for what you did to me last night."

"I didn't do anything to you, Officer Rollins. You just fell on your ass, man."

"Let me speak to Mona."

I hung up then and took a deep breath. I was still as lost as I had been before. But now I felt a little better. All the pieces to the game I was playing had settled into their places. Maybe I was going to lose my position, or my life, but it seemed possible that I could make some decisions from that point on. At least I had obtained some kind of free will.

"Honey," I said to Mona as she lay dejected and wretched on our couch.

"What?"

"Let's go out to dinner and then, and then let's get Seela and go to that inn you like in Montauk."

"It's Saturday," she said. "It'll be booked up."

"I'll call," I said. "If they've got a room, we could go there."

Seela answered the door wearing the same blue housecoat.

"Millie and Martin are asleep," she whispered.

"I got us a room in Montauk for tonight and tomorrow night," I said. "Come with us."

At any other time Seela would have said no. She didn't like sudden changes. But I was sure that she was in bed thinking about her transgressions, and she must have felt especially used with Martin in bed with Millie again.

Seela was a good girl and easily made to feel bad.

"Okay," she said, failing to make a smile.

"We'll be in the car out front," I told her.

I had already called Svetlana.

"I'm going to take Mona and Seela out to Long Island for a day," I said. "I have to get things straight with them.''

"Okay," Lana said.

"That's all? Just 'okay'? Aren't you mad at me?"

"No. They are your family. I will be here—waiting."

"Lana—"

"Don't worry, Ben, darling. I am here . . . for now. You must live your own life. I will be here waiting for you."

When I got down to the car, I found Mona asleep against the passenger-side window. We owned an old Citroen. It was olive green and had the look of a VW bug that had been squashed down by some heavy-footed behemoth. It had a hydraulic system that made you feel as if you were riding in a boat instead of a car. And owning a Citroen was unique; there were no other cars on the road to rival it.

I got in behind the wheel.

"Is she coming?" Mona asked.

"I thought you were asleep."

I rubbed the palms of my hands along the laced leather guard on the steering wheel. The supple and yet rough texture against my skin elated me. I was alive and still able to move forward in my own life.

"I was watching two men have sex in that doorway across the street," she said, almost wistfully. "One of them was dressed like a woman. He was fucking the other one. I was watching them and then I was in Saint Croix with my family on a vacation."

"She's getting dressed."

"What are we going to do, Ben?" Mona asked, sitting and waking up with a twist of her shoulders and torso.

We hadn't talked much at dinner. She was still too sad about Harvard and his sudden, inexplicable desertion.

"Why didn't you tell me about Barbara Knowland?" I said in answer to her question.

We both knew how long it took for Seela to put together her things and so it made sense to start a longer conversation. We had at least fifteen minutes' waiting time.

"Harv said that he should look into it before bothering you," she said, avoiding looking into my face.

"Had you already started your relationship then?"

Mona hesitated a long while and then whispered, "Yes."

"So you made love and then decided, or maybe it was the other way around," I speculated. "Maybe he told you to leave me flapping in the wind and then he took you up in his arms."

"You don't have to be cruel, Ben."

"Did you at least consider telling me?" I asked.

"Yes. Of course I did. But, you see, Barbara didn't call me first, she called Harv. She knew him because he had talked to her in Oakland, to see if we should do the original story on her. He's the one that told me about the accusation. Telling you would have involved him and that was just too . . . confusing."

"But, honey," I said in an evenly metered voice, "not telling me might have gotten me sent to prison for the rest of my life."

Mona looked at me sorrowfully and Seela rapped on the window. She had a bag that was filled with enough stuff to go away for a week.

"Pop the trunk, Daddy."

*  *  *

Mona and Seela slept on the long late-night drive. Or, when I think back on that night, maybe they just pretended to be asleep. Both of them had a lot on their minds. Mona betrayed me and in return was let down and deceived by both me and her lover. Seela was losing her parents, and she had in her own way betrayed those that she loved.

I worried about them on that ride, and not as distant relatives with vague problems, which is how I usually saw my wife and daughter, but as victims of my own wanton disregard.

I didn't feel guilty about what I'd said to Harvard "Harv" Rollins. A man had to do something to derail an affair like that. But all those years of quiet indifference I showed Mona and Seela had taken from them the water of life. They were dried-up seeds hoping for dew or the sweat of strangers. And I was the drought, the famine that afflicted them.

Oddly, these thoughts soothed me on that three-hour drive. I felt that my passive crimes against my parents, my wife, and daughter explained why people were after me, looking to put me in prison.

It was as if1 had summoned up Barbara Knowland and Winston Meeks, Harvard Rollins and my wife's betrayal. I was guilty and this was my punishment.

Most guilty men, I'd been told many times over, see themselves as innocent; this is the tragedy of the criminal: Because of his denial of guilt, he can never learn and therefore cannot contribute to the rehabilitation, not of himself but of the world that he has wronged. But I was guilty and I knew it. Maybe I hadn't murdered Sean Messier, but I had wronged my family.

When these notions came into my mind, I laughed out loud. The ladies roused in their slumbers, or pretenses, and then settled again.

We got a place at the beachside Montauk Manor House because someone had cancelled a reservation just an hour before I called. They left the door to our bungalow open and we tumbled in late that night, all of us going to sleep almost immediately. We didn't even take our bags from the car.

I awoke to the sound of the ocean through the open window, the susurration of waves felt as if it were calling to me.

Mona was deep asleep. She didn't stir as I climbed out of the rickety bed. I went into the common room of the suite. Seela's bag was on the broken-down blue sofa. That meant she was up and had already gone to the car.

The sliding glass doors that led to the ocean were open.

I could see my daughter walking down along the beach in shorts, her dark legs scissoring the bright sunrise.

"Hi, baby," I said, coming up to Seela.

I was barefoot, wearing gray suit pants and an old T-shirt.

"Hi, Daddy."

"What's wrong?" I asked, responding to her tone of voice.

"I don't know how to talk to you now that you found me up there with Martin."

"I already told you about me, honey, and it's not like you did something wrong, Seela. You aren't married to Jamal. Martin's not married to Millie. It was me that was wrong for even mentioning Jamal's name."

"It's not that," she said.

The cold water from the sea rolled over my bare feet and pant cuffs. It crossed my mind that I would have never allowed my business clothes to get wet like that before.

"What is it then?" I asked.

"Are you going to break up with Mommy?"

"That has nothing to do with you or anything you've done."

"When Marty came over yesterday, I had no idea what was going to happen," she said. "Neither did he."

"Nothing wrong with spontaneity."

"No, but there's something wrong with me. I feel it in my shoulders and at the back of my neck," she said. "If a boy or a man touches me there, I can't help myself. When Marty put his hand on my shoulder, he was just being friendly, but after that he couldn't stop me. I've been like that ever since I was fourteen."

"With other kids at school?"

"And two teachers."

"What teachers?"

"I won't say, Daddy. They shouldn't have done it, but I'm the one who came on to them."

Again I thought about being guilty. I humiliated my daughter by shining a light on her indiscretion. Now she opened a door for me to pass through. Where was I when she was so vulnerable? Where was I when she was a child having sex with men? And why would I burden her with my troubles? I felt responsible but out of control, like when I would go out on a drinking binge in California and Colorado.

My little ugly duckling,
that's what I had always thought about Seela. Could she have read my thoughts? Had I ever called her beautiful, as she was to me now? Had I looked into her eyes when she got home from having sex in the cloakroom with Mr. Hodges or maybe Mr. Rhynne?

My strength left me and I fell to my knees in the wet sand. Seela knelt down beside me.

"Don't tell Mommy," she said, "not ever."

"Have you written about any of this in your diary?" I asked. "No one knows. I haven't written about it and I haven't told anyone, not a soul but you."

The cold wave on my knees sent a tremor through me. And a thought came into my mind.

"On those days that you, that you did that, what did you write in your journal?"

"I just wrote down things that happened a long time ago," she said, "or I made something up."

She was my daughter all right. She protected herself automatically, like a seasoned boxer or some amphibian hatched onshore but who instinctively knows to run for the water before the ominous shadows descend.

"Would you consider going into therapy for a while, Seel?"

"You think I'm crazy?"

"Uh-uh, no. But I do think that you feel guilty for things you've done, and if you can talk to somebody who's safe, maybe you'll learn how not to feel bad."