Dark Places(68)
“So I saw some girls at the mall today,” Diondra said next to him. “They say you’re fucking little girls at school. Like ten-year-olds.”
“What are you talking about?” Ben said, still dazed.
“Do you know a little girl named Krissi Cates?”
Ben tried to keep himself from bolting up. He crossed an arm behind his head, put it back down by his side, crossed it over his chest.
“Uh, yeah, I guess. She’s in that art class I been helping out after school.”
“Never told me about no art class,” Diondra said.
“Nothing to tell, I just did it a few times.”
“Just did what a few times?”
“The art class,” Ben said. “Just helping kids. One of my old teachers asked me to.”
“They say the police want to talk to you. That you did some wrong stuff with some of those girls, girls who are, like, your sisters’ age. Touched them funny. Everyone’s calling you a perv.”
He sat upright, a vision of the basketball team mocking his dark hair, his perviness, trapped in the locker room while they fucked with him til they were bored, drove off in their bigass trucks. “You think I’m a perv?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Why’d you just have sex with me if you think I might be a perv?”
“I wanted to see if you could still get it up with me. If you would still come a lot.” She turned away from him again, her legs pulled up to her chest.
“Well, that’s pretty fucked up, Diondra.” She said nothing. “So do you want to hear me say it: I didn’t do anything with any girls. I haven’t done anything with anyone but you since we started going out. I love you. I don’t want to have sex with any little girls. OK?” Silence. “OK?”
Diondra turned part of her face toward him, that single blue eye fixed on him with no emotion: “Shhh. The baby’s kicking.”
Libby Day
NOW
Lyle was stiff and silent as we drove toward Magda’s for our meeting. I wondered if he was judging me, me and my packet of notes I was going to sell. Nothing I’d decided to part with was particularly interesting: I had five birthday cards my mom had given Michelle and Debby over the years, cheerful quick notes scrawled at the bottom, and I had a birthday card she’d written to Ben I thought might bring decent money. I felt guilty about all of it, not good at all, but I feared having no money, really feared being broke, and that came before being nice. The note to Ben, on the inside of a card for his twelfth birthday, read: You are growing up before my eyes, before I know it you’ll be driving! When I read it, I had to turn it facedown and back away, because my mom would be dead before Ben would ever learn how to drive. And Ben would be in prison, would never learn how to drive anyway.
Anyway.
We drove across the Missouri River, the water not even bothering to glisten in the afternoon sun. What I didn’t want was to watch these people read the notes, there was something too intimate about that. Maybe I could leave while they looked at them, assessed them like old candlesticks at a yard sale.
Lyle guided me to Magda’s, through middle-middle-class neighborhoods where every few houses waved a St. Patrick’s Day flag—all bright clovers and leprechauns just a few days stale. I could feel Lyle fiddling beside me, twitchy as usual, and then he turned toward me, his knees almost punching my stickshift out of gear.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“This meeting, as is often the case with Magda, has turned into something a little different than planned.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Well, you know she’s in that group—the Free Day Society. To get Ben out of prison. And so she’s invited a few of those … women.”
“Oh. No.” I said. I pulled the car over to the curb.
“Listen, listen, you said you wanted to look into Runner. Well, this is it. They will pay us—you—to find him, ask him some questions, father to daughter.”
“Daughter to father?”
“Right. See, I’m running out of money. So this is where the next funding will come from.”
“So I have to sit here and let them be rude to me? Like last time?”
“No, no, they can fill you in on the investigation into Runner. Bring you up to speed. I mean, you think Ben is innocent now, right?”
I had a flash of Ben watching TV, my mom rustling his hair with one hand as she walked past with a load of laundry on her hip, and him smiling but not turning around. Waiting til she left the room before he combed his hair back into place.
“I haven’t gotten that far.”