"Dr. Hessler, did any of Robert's behavior indicate to you that he indeed might be a masochist?"
"Quite the contrary. He was very timid about being touched. He is not a young man who enjoys pain."
"Thank you, Dr. Hessler. I have nothing further."
The bedroom was cold, though she'd already turned up the thermostat. Something wasn't working properly. She lay in the dark beneath the covers and considered getting another blanket out of the closet. Exhaustion kept her lying there instead and perversely, kept her awake as well. Worrying.
She thought that despite a few setbacks the day had gone fairly well, all told. So did Owen Sansom.
Tomorrow was the problem.
Tomorrow it was her turn.
If only he'd tell them, she thought. If only Robert would say.
She'd tried once again in the car, picking him up after court and driving him from Cindy's house back home. She'd tried to reassure him. Said that she'd protect him. That if he told nothing would happen to him.
She was losing patience, though.
It was impossible to understand his reluctance in the face of what was going on.
She'd pressed too hard. She'd made him cry.
It wasn't the first time.
It wasn't just worry but guilt that was keeping her awake nights.
She phoned Barbara afterwards as soon as they got home. She'd been somewhat out of touch with her sister lately. It was hard for her to talk about this over and over again, even with her. Barb had wanted to go to court for her as a character witness, but Sansom said that with Barbara being family it would carry little weight. Besides, she'd only just started a new job. So they'd decided she should stay where she was. Cindy was always there for her if she needed somebody.
But at that moment for some reason she needed family. She told her sister how guilty she felt.
"You're doing this for him," Barbara said. "Not for yourself. You're doing it to put a stop to what Arthur's been doing and you've got to remember that. Of course you're frustrated. How else could you possibly be?"
It was good advice. But Lydia knew she was also doing it to him. To Robert. There was no getting around that. Badgering him to say the most terrible things about a man he'd always loved. And probably, despite everything, still loved.
If he can't then he can't, she thought. Leave it alone. Make it happen without him.
You do it instead.
And the day to do it for him was tomorrow and that was keeping her awake.
She needed another blanket. The room was too damn cold.
She got up and walked to the closet. The floorboards felt freezing under her feet. She took a heavy quilt off the shelf and spread it out across the bed and then slipped between the sheets. Better.
Something bumped into a table downstairs.
She heard movement. A floorboard squeaked.
She thought about the cold. Maybe it wasn't the thermostat.
An open window?
They'd been closed when she went to bed. It was winter. They'd been closed for months.
An intruder.
Arthur.
She got up and moved back to the closet as quietly as possible. The Ladysmith .38 he'd bought for her was in a shoe box behind some shoes and linens. She hadn't looked at it once since he'd left. But she knew he kept it loaded. Safety on, bullet in the chamber.
The metal grip felt icy in her hand.
There was a choking sensation in her throat and her heart was suddenly pounding—as though the gun carried an electric current that traveled up from her hand and jolted her.
She moved to the stairwell. The urge was strong to check on Robert but his room was down the hall and the door was shut and whoever was down there was bound to hear the latch fall if she opened it.
If someone was down there.
If it wasn't just her imagination.
No, she thought. You heard something.
Maybe you heard Robert. Sure, that's it. It's him down there.
But she wasn't exactly sure she believed that.
She took the stairs slowly, holding tight to the banister with one hand, tighter to the gun with the other. By now the hand that held the gun was sweating.
On the landing she heard the sound of metal brushing ceramic.
The chain on the table lamp by the window.
She peered around the corner, leading with the .38.
She saw him kneeling on the couch. Motionless. His elbows leaning against the back of the couch. He was staring out the window. She slipped the gun into the deep pocket of her nightgown hoping he wouldn't notice its dark heavy mass through the thin cotton.
She walked over and touched his shoulder.
"Robert?"
He didn't acknowledge her at all. Just kept staring. Sleepwalking? she thought. Please, god. Not that too.
"Robert?"
"He's outside," he said.
"Who?"
But she knew.
"Do you think he wants to get in?" he said.
"Daddy?"
He nodded.
She looked out the window. The lawn, all the way down the hill to the street, was empty.
"Where do you see him? Where is he?"
"Over there."
He pointed to the old elm tree near the center of the lawn. "I woke up and saw him from my window and I came downstairs."
He sounded calm enough. But his eyes were wide.
"He's hiding," he said.
"Wait here."
In the hall closet she found a pair of boots. She took a coat off the coat rack and slipped it on. Robert remained staring out the window. She transferred the gun to her coat pocket, unlocked the door and stepped outside.
As quietly as possible she closed the door behind her.
She stuffed both hands into her pockets and walked toward the tree. The boots and coat were no match for the cold but her face felt flushed and the hand on the gun felt greasy now with sweat. She approached quickly at first and then as she got closer slowed her pace.
She walked wide of the tree to the right until she could see around it to the other side.
Nothing.
To be absolutely certain she walked all the way around it. Circled it.
She felt limp with relief.
He wasn't there.
She wondered what she'd have said to him or done to him if he had been.
She walked back to the house remembering what Robert had said.
He's hiding, he'd said.
It wasn't true, not literally, not this time. Robert had imagined him out there behind the tree, dreamed him there no doubt and then come downstairs still frightened and half asleep. But in a less literal sense it was completely true.
Of course he was hiding.
And Robert saying that, acknowledging that, was probably as close as he was ever going to come to telling the truth about his father.
And accusing him.
Twenty-two
The Hearing: Second Day
Waiting for Owen Sansom in the courtroom, sitting across from Andrea Stone, she tried to read a newspaper. It had been days since she'd seen one but now her attention kept slipping away. The stories took on the patchwork quality of a dream, one slipping into the other, none of them coming to any real conclusion.
One story managed to hold her though. In New York, a twenty-seven-year-old suburban woman had been arrested for leaving her children at home unattended while she drove to a nearby town to engage in acts of prostitution. The woman had been abandoned by her ex-husband—a lawyer—over a year ago and since that time had received no child-support payments from him and had no training and was unable to find a job. Her two boys, aged seven and nine, had been placed in foster homes following her arrest. The woman said she had involved herself in prostitution only to support them.
She thought how horrible it must be to become so desperate as to feel that this was your only option. That if her story were true then this woman had felt backed into the kind of corner in
which responsibility and irresponsibility were all but indistinguishable.
The story troubled her.
"Where is he? Where's Owen?"
Andrea Stone was standing over her.
Lydia was aware of her cologne. Georgio, she thought. She was dressed in a dark blue tailored suit and white blouse, wearing a single string of pearls. She looked keyed-up, nervous.
Lydia put the paper aside.
"I don't know," she said.
"Burke'll be here any minute."
Lydia looked at the clock. It was ten after nine. Where the hell was he?
Andrea Stone turned abruptly and walked back to her desk.
"The Honorable Thomas J. Burke. All rise."
Burke crossed to the bench just as the double doors flew open behind her and Sansom appeared hurrying down the aisle.
The fact that he was late wasn't lost on Burke. He didn't comment.
Sansom looked awful.
His suit didn't exactly look as though he'd slept in it, but it did look uncomfortably close to that. The tie was crooked, the collar in need of pressing. His glasses were water-spotted again.
She glanced at Edward Wood standing next to Arthur. She didn't like the contrast she was seeing.
"Are you all right?" she whispered.
He nodded. "Late start," he said. "Sorry if I worried you."
You're worrying me now, she thought.
"Be seated," said Burke. And so the day began.
Bromberg seemed ill at ease, shifting in his seat and sipping from a glass of water as Sansom questioned him about Robert's symptoms. His shyness and his stuttering, his clumsiness, his incontinence, his dreams.
"And are all these consistent with what you'd see in a case of child abuse, Doctor?"
"At Robert's age the onset of stuttering's somewhat unusual. Otherwise I'd say yes."
He took him through an explanation of his treatment—the "play therapy" that was designed to open Robert up. "Would you say he's responding well or badly?"
Bromberg smiled. "Not too well, sorry to say."
"He's uncommunicative?"
"Yes, mostly."
"And is this consistent, in your opinion, with a child who's ... with ah, with an abused child?"
"An abused child would tend to be secretive and withhold information, especially from adults. Yes."
"Doctor, based on your knowledge of him, do you believe it likely that Robert's been abused?"
"Likely?"
"Yes. Couldn't these symptoms all be accounted for by some other means? His parents' divorce, maybe?"
She saw what he was doing. He was heading Wood off at the pass with that one.
Bromberg thought it over.
"No, I'd have a problem with that explanation. It's what we've been calling his clumsiness, you see, which isn't really clumsiness at all. The boy's hurting himself—and he's doing it frequently. To me, that's the most significant indication that someone else is hurting him. That and his incontinence, of course."
"So you'd say it is likely."
"Yes."
On cross-examination Wood took him carefully over the same terrain—at first going nowhere in particular that Lydia could see. But Bromberg seemed more relaxed now and she had to wonder to what extent the two men had talked together prior to the hearing.
Then that became apparent.
"So this is your conclusion, Doctor. That Robert's been sexually abused."
"Yes."
"And did you also conclude that the abuser was definitely his father?"
"No, I did not conclude that. Not necessarily."
"Couldn't it just as likely have been his mother, then? Didn't you in fact tell Mrs. Danse that you hadn't yet ruled her out on that?"
"I did mention the possibility, yes."
"Exactly what did you say?"
"I said I had suspected abuse for some time. She asked why I hadn't reported it to her. I told her that one did not discuss this sort of thing casually, especially when it had been known to happen that a parent would bring his or her child in for therapy as a kind of smoke screen, to disguise their culpability in the abuse or perhaps even, subconsciously, in the need to be discovered."
"And how did she respond to that?"
"She became ... quite angry."
"How do you know she was angry?"
He smiled. "You only had to look at her, Mr. Wood. Or listen to her."
"She was hostile toward you?"
"She became quite curt with me, yes. And I'd say, sarcastic."
She was aware that Andrea Stone across the aisle was glancing at Owen Sansom. Her expression seemed puzzled. And Lydia thought she had a pretty good notion why.
"Shouldn't you be objecting to this?" she said. "I mean, isn't he calling for an opinion or something?"
He waved her off and continued writing whatever he was writing in his pad. "Means nothing," he said.
He was starting to scare her.
"Let me ask you this, Dr. Bromberg. Have you ruled out Mrs. Danse as the boy's abuser to this day?"
"How could I? The boy won't say."
"Nothing further, Your Honor."
She looked at Sansom.
"I have nothing for this witness, Your Honor," he said.
No, she thought. Get up. Do something for god's sake.
Sansom just kept writing.
What in the hell was wrong with him?
Was she overreacting? She felt suddenly as though she were drowning. Bromberg had just told the court that there was every possibility that she was the one who was hurting Robert—a lie as outrageous as it was frightening.
She saw a look of displeasure cross Andrea Stone's face as she glanced at them once again and then stood up.
"Doctor," she said, "do you have any reason to seriously believe that Mrs. Danse is the abuser here?"
"Objection."
"I'll allow it. Objection overruled."
"No. I have no real reason to believe that at all."
"Do you find it likely?"
"One can't be certain. Not without the boy's saying."
"But do you find it likely, Doctor?"
"Not really. No, I tend to doubt it."
"And her response to you. Isn't an angry response from a worried mother completely within the scope of what you'd call perfectly normal behavior under the circumstances?"
"I suppose it is, yes."
"I should think so. Thank you, Doctor."
"We call Lydia Danse, Your Honor."
There was never any question that she'd have to go through with this, but knowing that didn't make it any easier. She had nothing in her experience to compare it to. Both divorces had been relatively easy, uncontested. Now she felt a sick hollow empty feeling in her stomach and her hands were shaking as she walked to the witness stand, her mouth dry and sour-tasting. She asked for a glass of water and drank it down immediately.
She began to relax a little as she felt Owen more or less regain control of the situation, questioning her carefully but gently about Robert's symptoms in general and his behavior up to the night he'd come home from Arthur's fouled and hurting. He referred to the notepad frequently. He took a good deal of time going over the once-mysterious knees-to-chest position, getting her to describe it in detail and estimate its frequency and finally, over Wood's objections, establishing its meaning.
"You had seen this position before, then, is that right, Mrs. Danse?"
"Yes"
"You had personal experience of this position?"
"Yes."
"Tell us what that experience was."
"With Arthur. It was Arthur's favorite position. When we were having sex together."
She felt herself flush.
"Anal sex?"
"Yes."
He took her through the night in question. Her discovery of what had happened, packing Robert up and taking him over to Cindy's, going to the bar and accusing Arthur to his face. And then the following day, taking Robert to see Bromberg and Hessler. When
she got to the part about cleaning him up that night she began to cry, remembering her helpless pain for him. Otherwise she thought she got through it well enough and calmly.
And then Wood stood, smiling, and walked over.
"You were angry with your husband that night. Weren't you, Mrs. Danse?"
"Yes."
"Furious?"
"I suppose so, yes."
"Hysterical, would you say?"
"No. Angry."
"And you let him know that you were angry in no uncertain terms."
"Yes I did."
"In public. At his bar."
"Yes."
"Within earshot of others?"
"I wasn't paying attention to who might be listening, Mr. Wood."
"Understandable. As you say—you were furious."
"Objection." It didn't come from Owen but from Andrea Stone.
And Judge Burke seemed annoyed with her.
"Ms. Stone," he said, "you are not Mrs. Danse's lawyer, you are Robert's lawyer. Try to keep that in mind, all right?"
"I object, Your Honor," said Sansom.
"Fine. I'll sustain that objection. Please move on, Mr. Wood."
"You didn't mind making a scene, then."
"You didn't see my son, Mr. Wood. If you had, you'd know that making a scene or not making a scene was not something you'd consider at the time."
"It didn't bother you, Mrs. Danse, that you were accusing your husband of a terrible, heinous crime there in his place of business, at the establishment in which he earns his living, in front of patrons, possibly friends, even business associates?"
"He raped my son, Mr. Wood!"
He smiled again. "That is what we're here to determine, isn't it? Were you speaking loudly?"
"To Arthur?"
"Yes."
"I don't know. I suppose so. Probably."
"Loud enough so that others might easily have heard you."
"Yes. Probably."
He paused, looking at his notes.
"Do you recall saying to him at that time that from now on you were denying him visitation?"
"I recall saying that he was never going to see Robert alone again, not if I could help it. And that if he wanted visitation he could see Robert while I was in the room and only then."
"But that was not your legal arrangement with him at the time, was it?"