Deadline

  Jake disciplined himself not to let his shock or anger reach his face. It was like playing poker, trying to hide the worst possible hand. He didn’t want to betray what he was feeling for fear he would shut Carly off. Besides, none of the hostility he felt was toward her.

  “She said this was the way to have safe sex. If we used a condom, we’d be safe. If we ever wanted more, she had a file drawer full of them. She has one of those condom trees on her desk, you know, like the surgeon general? She joked about all the different colors and flavors. Michael laughed and squeezed my hand. I thought she was pretty cool too.”

  This is a school nurse? Helping our kids do things that can bring them under a death sentence?

  “Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d held a condom. The Planned Parenthood people came into class last year and passed around condoms to everybody. They said, ’Try them on your fingers if you want to.’ Michael and I were still just friends, but he handed one to me and whispered a joke about maybe trying it out together sometime. I was embarrassed at first, but you know, you get used to it with everybody talking about it all the time. They said most kids have sex, so it’s normal. You don’t want to be the weird one. They just said, be sure you do it safely.”

  Carly’s voice suddenly went up a few decibels, and Jake thought he heard in her some of the anger he was feeling.

  “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. Maybe it’s because Michael and I don’t talk anymore. It’s over between us. And my counselor at school, my health teacher, who was one of my best friends—at least I used to think so—we don’t talk either. And my friends are all into rally and the Snowball Dance, and trying out for club volleyball. I guess I won’t be playing volleyball anymore, even after the pregnancy.” Carly’s heart sank, as still another domino fell.

  “All this is so hard on Mom, and except for her, I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this but you. Or maybe it’s that all of a sudden I just don’t know how much longer I’ll have to talk to anyone about anything.”

  “I’m glad you’re talking to me, Carly. I haven’t been much of a father, especially the last few years. But it’s like what I said about the baby—I want to be there for you now and help anyway I can.”

  There, I said it. Jake felt relieved, and he was pleased to see Carly’s sad drooping lips turn up slightly at the corners.

  Jake could tell there was something important about this teacher Carly mentioned, so he took the opening and jumped in. “Why don’t you and your teacher friend talk anymore?”

  “I guess … it’s because I don’t trust her anymore. See, I told her Michael had the HIV. And I told her how he got it.” Jake wanted to ask, but the time wasn’t right. “And I told her I was thinking I shouldn’t have sex with him, and maybe I shouldn’t let the relationship go any further, but…”

  “But what did she say?”

  “Well, she’s Michael’s counselor too. She said she knew he loved me very much. That he’d shown his love by telling me he had the HIV. And maybe it would really hurt him if I said no to him.”

  “She actually said that?”

  “I can’t quote her exact words,” Carly said defensively. Jake stepped back and sat down in the recliner, lessening the intensity. “That’s the definite impression I had, though. She told me abstinence was okay for some kids, but sex was part of a mature relationship, so most people want to experience it together before they decide whether this is the right person or not. She said with the old way, people got married and discovered too late that they weren’t … you know, compatible. So she said it was my choice, and the really important thing was to not have unsafe sex. She said there was no right or wrong decision, it was whatever I felt comfortable with. I’m sure she thought she was doing me a favor.”

  “But…?”

  “But all she did was put more pressure on me. I expected her to say ’No, stay away from him, don’t go steady with him’ or at least ’Whatever you do, don’t have sex with him.’ To be honest, that’s what I was hoping she’d say. She kept telling me I had to be true to myself and my own values, but I kept thinking, what does that mean? I just wanted her to tell me what the right values were.”

  Carly looked at Jake with pleading eyes that made him want to do anything in the universe to make her feel better.

  “Daddy, I didn’t want to have sex with him, I really didn’t. Not only because I was afraid of the virus, but I just didn’t want to. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Of course I do, honey. I totally understand.”

  What Jake didn’t understand was who this irresponsible teacher thought she was to pressure his daughter into having sex at all, much less potentially deadly sex.

  “When Ms. Beal said what she did”—Carly paused for a moment, as if unsure whether she should have said the teacher’s name—“I was more confused than when I came in. I don’t know what my values are—and if I did, how would I know if they were right anyway? I mean if nothing is right or wrong, how do you ever know what to do?”

  How does a teenage kid know what to do? How does anyone know what to do anymore?

  “I met with the teacher”—Jake noticed Carly didn’t say her name again, but he wasn’t forgetting—“during my study hall, just a few hours before Michael took me to see the school nurse. Then he asked me to come to his house that night. His parents were out of town. He sort of had it planned.”

  Jake felt nausea at the thought of a strategy leading up to his daughter’s loss of virginity. He also felt shame as he remembered doing the same thing with other girls in college, including Janet.

  “He took me into his parents bedroom.” Suddenly Carly clutched her mid-section and fell to her knees, startling Jake. He jumped out of the recliner and knelt at her side.

  Carly clung to Jake like she had after her terrifying bike accident as a nine-year-old. “Oh, Daddy, it was terrible. I was so scared. And the worst part was seeing his parents’ wedding picture on the wall. It didn’t seem right. It just didn’t seem right.”

  That’s because it wasn’t right.

  Everything within Jake rose up in rebellion against the permissive attitude toward sex that he’d bought and sold his whole adult life. He’d been on the side of the sexual revolution, but the cause had betrayed him. It had littered the landscape with too many corpses. The thought that Carly, sweet innocent Carly, would become one of them was more than he could bear.

  “Michael kept telling me everything was okay. Just before we … went all the way, I told him I didn’t feel right about it. He argued with me and claimed that the teacher and school nurse wouldn’t have said it was okay if it wasn’t. He said, ’Remember where we got the condoms? Do you think they’d be giving us stuff at school if it was bad for us? If you won’t trust me, at least trust them.”’

  Carly pressed on with the story, in Jake’s arms, her eyes looking down on the floor behind him.

  “He kept telling me everything was safe and that I’d feel much better after we made love. He was wrong. I didn’t feel better. I felt used and betrayed. And like a really lousy lover, too. I wasn’t like the women in the movies. He wasn’t very gentle and I was just so scared. And afterwards I was ashamed, Daddy. I was so ashamed that my clothes were off and that I’d done such a bad job.”

  Carly sobbed again. Jake didn’t know what to do except hold her tighter and stroke her hair. After a few minutes she sat down and resumed her story.

  “I realized immediately that ’losing your virginity’ was exactly the right phrase. I’d lost something precious. Those romance novels Mom reads and the ones I got from the school library, and the sitcoms and the movies, they make it sound so wonderful. Then, when my virginity was gone, it surprised me I felt such a terrible loss, like the death of a close friend. I’d begun to think of it as a burden, but once I could never have it again, I realized that all along it had been … a treasure.”

  Carly sounded to Jake like she was reciting something.

  “What
I just said, more or less, was right out of my journal. I’ve gone back and reread it more times than I can count.”

  Jake didn’t know Carly kept a journal, like he did. There was a lot he didn’t know about this girl. His eyes moistened again as he envisioned her pouring out her heart to that journal in the middle of the night, after she’d lost something so precious to her.

  “The strangest thing,” Carly went on, “was that I thought so much about it afterward. I thought about my future husband. And I knew Michael wouldn’t be the one. I felt like I’d cheated on my mate. And I thought, I wonder if the man I’m going to marry is sleeping with some girl right now that he’s always going to compare me to.”

  Carly laughed bitterly. “I guess there’s no danger of that now, is there? I’ll never even have a husband!”

  The torrent of tears was unstoppable. Jake knelt down next to her chair and pulled Carly’s face right up to his. It seemed important they see each other’s tears. The streams from Carly’s face joined with those from Jake’s and flowed down on their clothes. Neither had a thought to go look for a Kleenex. Both were wrecks and neither cared.

  Jake felt sure that some of this she hadn’t even shared with Janet. Maybe there were things a girl needs to tell her father and no one else. The thought had never occurred to Jake until this moment.

  “Anyway, from then on, Michael wanted to do it all the time. He wanted to do it in the car, and once even at school. It got a little better for me—I guess I should say it wasn’t as terrible as the first time. But it was never what you see in the movies, not even close. It was like we were little kids pretending we were Tom Cruise and Madonna, or something. It was a joke. But it wasn’t funny.”

  By now every new revelation was to Jake like another shot of Novocain to a man already numb. He could feel the presence of the needle, but couldn’t sense anything more. The pain had exceeded his ability to feel it.

  “We used the condoms every time at first. Then once we didn’t have one and it seemed okay to do it anyway. Once you get going, it’s pretty hard to stop. At least we didn’t. I mean, Michael and I can’t even keep our rooms clean or floss our teeth,” Carly laughed, “so it’s not like we’re going to always do the responsible thing with a stupid condom!”

  Safe sex for teens suddenly seemed absurdly self-contradictory in a way Jake had never realized.

  “When Ms. Beal saw us in the hall she’d say things like, ’Hope everything’s going well with you two.’ A few times she even winked at us. Almost like she was the godmother of our sexual relationship, like she was getting her kicks from it. It really started to bug me. One time in health class she made some joke about sex being fun, and caught my eye as if to say ’isn’t it fun, Carly?’ I was so embarrassed. I started avoiding her and we haven’t talked since I told her I was pregnant, and she suggested the abortion. When I decided to have the baby I could tell she disapproved, like I ruined my whole life or something, but by then I wasn’t feeling so good about her either.

  “Well, there it is, Daddy. True confessions from your little girl. I remember my flub-up in the fifth-grade Christmas play and how it made it into your column. I sure hope this one stays out of the newspaper.”

  It shocked Jake that she remembered a column from six years ago he had forgotten completely. Obviously, he’d embarrassed her.

  “Carly. You mean so much more to me than a stupid column. I would never do that. I’m sorry if I did it before.”

  “I was just kidding. I didn’t think you would.”

  Several seconds of silence brought Jake to the question he’d put on the back burner.

  “Honey, you mentioned Ms. Beal knew how Michael had gotten the HIV. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. But if you want me to, I will.”

  Jake nodded and braced himself.

  “Michael got it from a guy. He doesn’t know who, exactly. That’s the worst part. It could have been a few dozen different guys. Most of them … Michael doesn’t even know their names.”

  Carly hung her head again, embarrassed for Michael, and more embarrassed for herself.

  “Michael is a homosexual?” Jake couldn’t hide his shock.

  “He says he’s not really a homosexual, he’s bisexual. Ms. Beal told him the bisexual thing wasn’t abnormal or anything. She told me the same thing—’some people are born homosexual, some heterosexual, some bisexual. It’s a diversity thing. It’s not wrong, it’s just the way it is,’ she said. That’s her favorite line—’It’s not wrong, it’s just the way it is.”’

  “No right or wrong, no standards, no moral responsibility for anything, huh?” Jake’s voice dripped with cynicism and resentment. Had there been a nearby voodoo doll in the image of Ms. Beal, Jake would have riddled it with needles, enjoying every puncture.

  “Excuse me. Isn’t this Mister Broadminded, Mr. Free-thinking Liberal I’m talking to? I’ve read your columns on the homosexual lifestyle. You say it’s perfectly acceptable, and you call people bigots who say otherwise.”

  Carly seemed to almost relish Jake’s stunned look. “Well,” she was pushing now, “am I right or wrong?”

  “Uh, I wouldn’t put it quite the way you just said it,” Jake was running for cover and he knew it. Carly was ready, and with a determined look started to reach for something on the coffee table.

  “At least, I wouldn’t put it that way if I were writing it now.”

  “So you feel differently on these things when it gets closer to home?”

  This sweet little girl knows how to put the knife to you. He couldn’t help admiring her for it.

  “Yes, to be honest,” Jake replied. “But it’s not just that, Carly. I’ve been rethinking a lot of things. But this isn’t about me, it’s about you.”

  “Oh, no, Dad, it’s about you, too, more than you think. I’m not blaming you for anything, but I’ve got to tell you what happened. I didn’t know what to think about Michael’s homosexuality. I only knew it seemed wrong, even though at school the teachers and a lot of the kids seem to think it’s okay. But it hurt me. It hurt me because it seemed bad for Michael and I knew it was bad for me. Little did I know just how bad it would turn out.”

  Carly stared lifelessly at her hands. Noticing how tense they were, she stretched them out in an attempt to relax.

  “Still, I kept telling myself that maybe it really was okay. That it was okay to be ’bi’, that the condoms were okay, that having sex was okay. It was uncomfortable talking to Mom, and I wouldn’t dream of calling you. But it was you I went to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My trusty scrapbook,” Carly said, pulling a large green notebook off the coffee table. “I keep this in my room, by the side of my bed, but I brought it out here since you were coming. I didn’t just read your article on The Final Exit. I’ve read every word you’ve written in the last three years.” Carly looked Jake right in the eyes.

  “You look surprised. Well, with you pretty much staying out of my life since the divorce, reading your column was the one way I had to get a letter from my dad, three times a week. Sometimes I pretended it wasn’t for a million other people, just for me. I saved every one of them.”

  Jake felt tinges of warmth, regret, and dread at the same time.

  “So when I was looking for answers, I went to my scrapbook and used my yellow highlighter on everything you said about sex and morals and right and wrong. Like what you wrote saying no one had the right to try to keep pornography away from people, first amendment and all that. And that sex outside marriage was all right. And that homosexual acts are okay too.”

  Carly laid the book on Jake’s lap, pointing to some of the highlighted passages.

  She’d make a great prosecutor.

  “And after reading your stuff, I decided I needed to be more open-minded,” Carly said. “I mean, what kid wants to be more conservative than her dad, right? Well, I became more open-minded all right. And now I’m going to die.”

  The sheer for
ce of her words suffocated him. He gasped for breath.

  Carly wasn’t angry like she’d been three weeks ago. She had the settled look of someone who’d finally said something she needed to say for a long time. She had arrived at the predetermined punch line. It was over. She quietly stood up, turned and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Jake heard the water running. He pictured her washing her flushed and tear-drenched face.

  Carly’s punch line left him reeling. He sensed a need to fully confess his wrong and ask for forgiveness and help. But just as he began to give in to the responsibility he bore for all this, something happened. He didn’t analyze it, but it was as if some force deep inside him pushed its way to the fore, sending a flood of denial to derail his admission of guilt. Jake’s mind was suddenly swimming in a deluge of thoughts that were his, yet not from him:

  I wasn’t writing guidance for lovelorn teenagers. It’s not a “Dear Jakey” column. I was writing for adults, consenting adults with sense enough to see the whole picture. I can’t take the blame for what happened to Carly. The adults who talked with her and gave her the condoms were to blame. That school nurse. And Ms. Beal…

  Jake’s defensiveness roared into a mighty wind, bursting into flame his smoldering rage. She was there to hand out condoms to my daughter, willing to drive my daughter to an abortion clinic. But where is she now? Her life’s going on. My little girl’s going to die.

  The sound of someone at the door startled Jake. A key turned in the lock. Jake swept around instinctively, hands in front of him ready to defend or attack, as if responding to the threat of an enemy in an Asian jungle. He was surprised to see Janet come in the door, and self-consciously moved out of his combat posture. He looked at his watch. Ten o’clock already?

  Janet looked up and seemed even more surprised to see him. “Jake?” Not seeing her daughter, and sensing his tension, she looked around the apartment and with a loud panicky voice, called out, “Carly?”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Carly came out of the bathroom, running a towel over her face. “I called him. I’ve told him everything. I mean, about Michael and … the virus.”