Earth Angel (33 page)

“This is what I’ve been reduced to, reading self-help books on parenthood. Is anything more pathetic? Now you know my darkest
secret.” He climbed back into bed. “Josh is a good kid. He has values, he cares about his sister. I think he even cares about
me. For my last birthday he made an exact replica of a Mantamba ceremonial mask for me. He hand-painted each detail, including
the caterpillar on the cheek. It was magnificent. Whatever resentment he feels toward me as a substitute for the anger he
feels at his parents for dying, I have to just ride it out. Let him battle his demons and be there for him no matter how much
he tries to push me away.” He took off his reading glasses, folded them, and set them on the nightstand with
the book. “Of course, if he pulls another stunt like this, I may just nail his tongue to the kitchen table.”

We lay on our sides facing each other.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, holding my hand.

I smiled. “No one’s asked me that since college.”

“What was your answer then?”

“Same as now. I was wondering if we were going to have sex tonight.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know whether I can handle it with the kids just down the hall. Can you?”

He laughed. “I’m not that provincial. I spent a couple of months with the Mangaians, a Polynesian people who inhabit an atoll
southwest of Tahiti. They are—”

I pretended to snore.

“Hey, aren’t you interested in my keen insights?”

I snored louder.

“Fine.”

“Okay, what did those zany natives do?” I tickled him and he jumped.

“Actually, this is interesting. At first they seem very reserved and prudish. Husbands and wives never show affection in public,
not even holding hands. But in truth, they are obsessed with sexual genitals. While we find endless fascination with breasts
and butts, they don’t care about either. They focus only on the penis and the size, shape, and texture of the pubic mound.
Young men compete to see who can achieve the most orgasms in a night. Young women do not want to hear any romantic crap about
love or devotion, nor are they interested in physical foreplay. What a woman looks for is a man who can achieve numerous orgasms
in a single night, thereby proving his virility and her own desirability. The average number of orgasms for eighteen-year-old
males is three times a night, every single night. By the time they reach twenty-eight, it drops off to about twice a night.”

“What are you saving? You need sex twice a night, every night?”

“Are you kidding? I’d be dead in a week, make that a month. Six months at the outside.”

“Was there some point to this story, professor?”

He rolled onto his back. “Yup. Sex is weird.”

I cuddled up next to him, pressing my nose to his chest. He smelled of the ocean. He always smelled of the ocean.

“Truth is, Grace, I feel a little creepy right now, after what happened to that Cummings girl. A guy does something like that,
it makes all guys feel a little guilty.”

“It’s not just a guy thing, El Macho. I feel guilty, too. I think it’s more an adult thing. We feel as if we should do better
by our children, protect them better.”

“At least she’s safe now.”

“Is she? You know what those doctors do when they take her to the hospital? They break open a rape kit and examine her anal
and genital areas with an ultraviolet light because semen fluoresces and glows white—”

“But you said Lieutenant Trump told you she hadn’t been raped.”

“They still have to check. They can’t count on a traumatized girl remembering. After they shine a light on her vagina and
anus, if they find anything, they do an acid phosphate test on the samples to see if they turn purple. If it does, it’s semen
and it gets placed into a plastic evidence bag and sealed. The girl is not through yet. She lies there on the table while
being examined for foreign pubic hairs. Also, any cuts, bruises, or lacerations are documented. Next, swabs from the mouth,
vagina, and anus are taken to check for gonorrhea; a sexually transmitted disease is considered excellent proof of molestation.
It’s all bagged and sealed and signed by the doctor, then returned to the rape kit. Then, just to make sure, an AIDS test
will be conducted. Even if she contracted it, it will be too soon to tell since the test measures antibodies and it would
have
been too soon to develop them. But they check because if she develops it later they have evidence that she didn’t have it
right then. More evidence. And more months of torturous waiting for the girl and her family.” I rolled away from him, suddenly
angry. “How does that compare with your multiple-orgasm story?”

“How do you know so much about these cases?” His voice was quietly concerned. “Were you raped?”

Yes, I wanted to say. Every time I had to treat one of these kids. Every time I had to open a rape kit. But where did I get
off feeling sorry for myself when it was these kids doing all the suffering? This was the kind of world I’d almost brought
my own child into. “No, I wasn’t raped,” I said. “I saw it in a documentary.”

There was a long silence as we each lay on our side of the bed. David Letterman was on the television interviewing Geena Davis.
He was flirting. He never handled women well on his show. Either he was in awe of them and acted like the nerdy high-school
newspaper editor who only took the job so he could meet girls, or he treated them as if he was the star quarterback and they
were lucky he was talking to them at all. I was mentally composing a letter to him pointing out this flaw when David rolled
toward me and propped his head up on one hand.

“You know what is bothering you about your involvement in this case?” David said. “I finally figured it out.”

I frowned at him. As if he could possibly know what was bothering me. “Tell me.”

“You’re bugged because the whole thing hinges on someone—in this case you—knowing useless information. You resent that your
head is packed with all that crap about movies, not to mention song lyrics, historical minutiae, celebrity gossip. You know
all this junk, but you also know all this useful stuff about being a dentist, stuff that can ease suffering and help people.
But what is it that is needed right now, your knowledge of trivia.”

Until he’d said it, I hadn’t realized that was exactly right. I was a trained and competent doctor who’d held beating hearts
in her hands. But that knowledge was useless now, had been useless in saving Tim. What information is useful? I’d read hundreds
of biographies over the years, famous and admirable figures who changed history. But did I know individual people any better?

I pulled a pillow to my chest and said, “I hate myself for knowing so many stupid things. I hate that I can sing all the words
to ‘Itsy Bitsy, Teeny Weeny, Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.’ I hate knowing that during the reign of Elizabeth I they had a law
that any woman who lured a man into marriage by using false hair, makeup, false hips, or high-heeled shoes should be punished
with the penalties of witchcraft, including death. I hate that my brain is imprinted with the knowledge that there is a profession
called chicken-shooter, for the person whose job it is to fire dead chickens through a cannon at aircraft to see what damage
is caused by a bird smacking into a plane. I hate knowing the type and location of every tattoo on Roseanne’s body. What good
is it? Yet, it stays in the brain, clogs it up like hardening arteries choking off the heart, until you can’t remember what
is important and what isn’t.”

“What makes you think one thing is more important than the other? God is in the details.”

“That’s wrong.” I shook my head. “The saying is: The
devil
is in the details. I think it means that intentions may be inspired by heavenly motivations, but it’s implementing those
intentions that screw people up. The details of getting them done is what does most people in. They find excuses, they give
in and give up. As in: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“No, the saying is: God is in the details. The idea of a god, anyway. Everything exists in one big swirl. Nothing is more
important than anything else. Knowing CPR isn’t more important than knowing the lyrics to ‘Itsy Bitsy, Teeny
Weeny, Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.’ Knowing who is the Secretary General of the United Nations isn’t better than knowing your
kids’ favorite colors.”

“How about knowing Suzanne Somers’s favorite color?”

“Well, that’s just sick.” He laughed. “Ease up on yourself, Grace. You’re not that important.”

People would sometimes ask me whether pediatrics wasn’t especially difficult because I had to watch so many helpless children
suffer sickness and death. It’s true that such things were painful, but the real distress came from a more mundane source:
the daily routine of hurting children myself. Even though I realized I was ultimately helping them, saving their lives or
protecting them from worse suffering, by constantly having to poke and prod, stab them with needles, insert the IV’s, I was
the one they looked at as the bringer of pain. Soothe their fears, stop their crying. The mantra “for their own good” stops
being enough armor. Being the source of so many children crying blurs the line between angel and devil.

Ease up on yourself, Grace. You’re not that important
. I knew that, of course. But the way he had said it, so cheerfully offhanded, was somehow freeing, as if he’d just lifted
a school bus off my chest. I felt better. I turned toward David again and held him.

Neither of us spoke again. We both fell asleep. David woke up at some point in the middle of the night and fiddled with the
remote until he turned the TV off. I lifted my groggy head, watched with no comprehension, then we both dropped off again
with him curled behind me.

I
WAS STANDING AT THE BATHROOM SINK BRUSHING MY TEETH WITH
David’s ratty toothbrush and staring at the kidnapper’s note when David came up behind me and pressed his naked erection
against the small of my back like a robber demanding money. I jerked in surprise, spraying a few drops of toothpaste foam
onto the kidnapper’s note.

“Hunnf,” I complained, and spit the foam into the sink. “What’s the big idea?”

“Big? You’re just being flattering.” He threw his arms around me and hugged me close. His penis was pinned along my spine,
warm and firm. One hand cupped my breast and squeezed slightly.

“You’re kinda frisky for this early, aren’t you?” I said.

“You mind?”

I leaned back into his arms, reached around and grabbed a handful of butt. I was wearing only my underpants because I find
it hard to brush my teeth naked, somehow it seems unsanitary. But those cotton briefs were no barrier to David. He didn’t
even bother pulling them off. He turned me around, lifted me onto the counter, onto the kidnapper’s note actually, and stretched
open the leg of my underpants,
guiding his penis past the elastic. I was about to protest, remind him of birth control, when I looked down and saw he already
had a condom on. I leaned back, widened my legs, and scooted my hips forward to meet him. I expected a little resistance down
there, since it was early and there had been minimal foreplay, but he slid right in.

His fingers scooped under my buttocks and lifted me slightly so I was actually half sitting in his hands. With each thrust
forward, he lifted me with his fingers and rocked me toward him. That felt particularly good, so I leaned forward and webbed
my fingers around his neck, resting my forehead on his shoulder. Each rock forward sent a low hum up my stomach. Warm blood
flushed across my chest and cheeks. The rocking increased, and we were jumping up and down like a butter churner. My hip knocked
over a shaving cream can, a thin sliver of soap was stuck to my sweating rear end. Beneath me, the kidnapper’s note was crinkling
rhythmically. I wasn’t doing any work here, just holding on, but I was still starting to tire, not from the physical exertion
but from the overload of stimulation. My vagina felt like an electric outlet with a hundred appliances plugged in, all turned
on. Tears welled in my eyes.

David pushed forward hard, driving me back across the counter, knocking over the toothpaste and the deodorant stick. My hip
caught the faucet handle, turning on the cold water. He lifted me off the counter and I scissored my legs around his waist
to hold on. The cold water was still running and just as I was thinking we should shut it off and not waste water, I started
coming and kept coming as he stood in the middle of the bathroom, bouncing me up and down. It felt as if I were straddling
a metal train-rail heated in the noon sun and I could feel the nearby train rumbling toward me, starting with a low vibration
in the thighs and building as it transmitted its momentum and will through each blood vessel and rattling bone. At some point
the
train sneaked up and smacked me into the air and I blacked out for the merest fraction of a second, sensing only the panicked
thrill of flying.

I opened my eyes and watched the reflection of David’s back in the mirror. I was spent, merely a lump of female draped around
him. From the back he looked like a naked fireman rushing an unconscious smoke-inhalation victim down a flight of stairs.
I could tell from his breathing he was close to coming and I wanted to help, do some serious writhing or talk dirty or something.
But I was pleasantly paralyzed.

I noticed the kidnapper’s note balanced on the edge of the counter. It was crumpled and a little wet, first from my toothpaste
drool, and second from my sweat and sex. I cringed, as if somehow David and I had been blasphemous, like the time I spit at
a kid in Hebrew school and accidentally hit her Bible when she used it as a shield. Even though I hadn’t believed in God,
surely
somebody
would punish me for that? The note was like the Ten Commandments, a communication from beyond human comprehension, a message
from a mind we feared and were struggling to understand.

David was still staggering around the bathroom, getting closer and closer. Looking over his shoulder I reread the note and
involuntarily movie titles started running through my mind. When David orgasmed, it was like trying to read while driving
over a rough country road. I got dizzy and closed my eyes, picturing the country road. There on the side, a dead opossum.
Roadkill? What movie featured a roadkill? Maybe when he said Popeye, he meant only Robin Williams. Robin Williams. Roadkill.
A robin as roadkill?