The Kindness of Strangers (21 page)

“Courtney?”

Libby nodded. Sarah was shocked. Courtney hadn’t called
her.

“She was great. She gave me advice, a pep talk, and some referrals until she’s out. I’m so damn furious. Even if she’s out, she won’t be allowed at the hospital. Can you believe that? I’m willing to go to the damn
jail
for her to deliver this baby. Help me think of a crime I can commit.”

Before stepping into the gym, Sarah asked, “Even . . . even with the accusations, you still want her as your doctor?”

Libby looked at Sarah as if she were insane. “Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I? There’s no way she was involved in this. She’s going to get crucified, though, because even if her name is cleared, she’ll be branded forever as a bad mother for not knowing it was going on. It’s the curse of all us working moms, Sarah. You know that.”

Libby spoke with such certainty that Sarah envied her. And although she wanted to hear people defend Courtney, she found herself wanting to protect Libby. But Libby thanked her for the help and waddled through the door.

A wall of heat smacked Sarah in the face as she followed Libby into the gym, the air heavy with human humidity and tension. She looked for a seat but saw no empty chairs. She made eye contact with Carlotta Imparato, who looked quickly away. Goose bumps rippled over Sarah’s scalp. She’d made a mistake by being rude to Carlotta at the market Saturday.

Feedback whined as someone turned on a mike.

Sarah headed for the back of the gym. She passed Gwinn, who waved and pointed to the empty seat beside her that she’d saved. Sarah saw Libby still searching for a seat, though, so she directed Libby to the chair instead. Libby mouthed a thank-you.

Sarah found a spot against the back wall, standing shoulder to shoulder with other parents. The wall was cool but clammy behind her. She pressed her palms to it and tried to calm her racing heart.

The superintendent started the meeting with hollow phrases of comfort for this “difficult, challenging” crisis in which they found themselves. The audience fell quiet, but they didn’t really listen yet. They leaned together, whispering, and Sarah appreciated her vantage point. She couldn’t see faces, but she could watch body language. Husbands and wives sat close, postures stiff and coiled. Fury seethed from the rigid spines and crossed arms. Sarah was angry, too, but guarded her anger. It felt too frightening, too out of control, to show it to anyone else. It felt like an admission, and it was terrifying to admit she’d been so wrong. No one else seemed to have the same hesitation, though. But because Mark and Courtney weren’t there to bear the brunt of that wrath, the crowd seemed poised to unleash it on those who were. Sarah’s heart went out to the scheduled speakers. She scanned the row of seated people on the small stage, and something shifted in her chest when she recognized Detective Kramble.

Seeing him there made her feel not so alone. The superintendent’s voice became background noise as Sarah studied Kramble. He sat, too large for his folding chair, with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward as if enthralled by the superintendent’s comments. Kramble had taken off his jacket, draped it on the back of his chair, but even so, Sarah saw the sweat stains darkening his light blue shirt. She felt bad for him.

She jumped when a man in the audience stood and shouted, “What are you going to do about this?” interrupting the superintendent. Sarah looked to Kramble, expecting him to be angry, but Kramble nodded at the man, his expression one of sympathy.

The superintendent stammered, then turned the microphone over to the Oakhaven chief of police, who read a statement that outlined the case thus far—information the parents already knew. Mark Kendrick was still at large, but Courtney was being held. A bail hearing would take place soon. They were not able to discuss details of the case but wanted to reassure everyone that all of the children in the pornography
had
been identified.

A school counselor spoke next, a gentle woman with a hypnotizing, lullaby voice. She also stressed that all of the abused children in this case had been identified. The Oakhaven schools had been swamped with hundreds of calls from parents wanting to know if their children could have been abused. The counselor wanted to educate parents about symptoms that were common in abused children. She read a list to the gathered crowd: nightmares, eating problems, fear of going to school or to any specific extracurricular activity, fear of separating from a parent, crying, broad changes in personality, excessive masturbation, or an increased desire to talk or ask questions about sex or sexuality. By the time she’d finished rattling off the list, the audience was agitated to the edge of hysteria.

Kramble watched the counselor, his expression a combination of sorrow and disappointment. When he finally stood to take the podium, Sarah found herself rooting for him. Those sweat stains embarrassed her on his behalf, but his composure impressed her. He set his notes on the podium and slowly and deliberately rolled up his sleeves before he spoke. His tall, imposing presence and his assured movement made the crowd shut up and listen.

He hunched over to talk into the mike. “First of all,” he said, without introducing himself, “there are many
other
reasons any of those symptoms might occur in our children,
including
”—he paused a moment to stress his point—“including the attention being devoted to this case.” Sarah willed him to adjust the mike and stand up straight, but instead he draped himself over the podium and said, “People are talking about what happened. They’re talking about sex acts that even consenting adults don’t normally discuss in public. Kids hear those conversations, they read the papers, they see the news, and they’re being exposed to confusing and stimulating sexual information.” He opened his arms. “Come on. The daily paper lately has been reading like soft-core porn!”

A few people laughed, and a communal exhalation flowed through the room. Sarah released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“The purpose of this meeting,” Kramble said, “was not to alarm you and send you home full of fear but to educate you. To reassure you.”

And here, finally, he introduced himself. Sarah learned he’d worked in child abuse for fifteen years, specifically in child sexual abuse for the last ten.

“I know, nobody likes to think that sexual abuse of children happens in a ‘nice’ neighborhood like this.”

Sarah actually saw some people nod.

“No one likes to think about child sexual abuse at all. It’s frightening. It’s disgusting. It’s not discussed in polite society.”

A murmur rippled through the gym.

“But one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before their eighteenth birthdays. That’s a lot of children. A
lot.
”

Sarah processed these statistics with horror.

Kramble went on, “Sixty-seven percent of the victims of
all
reported sexual assaults are children. You can check those statistics through the Department of Justice or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or any number of other organizations. The point I’m trying to make is that child sexual abuse is
not
unusual. It’s a common problem, kept common by silence. It’s not pretty, it makes us uncomfortable, so we don’t talk about it, therefore allowing it to happen.” He paused. “Now, I imagine, the hardest thing for you to accept is not that these crimes happened here but that none of us suspected them.”

People nodded again. Sarah thought Kramble was smart to use “we” and “us.” He made everyone in the room breathe again.

“We want to keep our children safe, so we tell them to look out for bad touches from strangers,” Kramble said. “In our worst fears, we picture that ‘dirty old man’ or ‘crazed monster,’ but most child victims are sexually abused by someone they know and trust. Most successful child molesters are attractive, white, upper-class, educated people who violate every common preconception about the nature of a sex offender. Sexual predators only rarely sneak into our houses in the middle of the night. Those cases make the national headlines
because of
their rarity. Most of the time we invite them in through our front doors. We give them permission to coach, to teach, to befriend our kids, because we don’t recognize them as predators. We think sex offenders are monsters, and surely
we
would recognize a monster, right? Except for the fact that they enjoy having sex with children, child abusers look and act pretty much the same as everybody else. They have jobs and families, they’re liked by their coworkers and neighbors, the sort of people whose friends will say, ‘It can’t be true. I know those people. They’re nice people.’ ”

A collective moan rose from the gym.

“Researchers have spent lifetimes, and I’ve spent years, searching for the profile of a typical child molester, but we’ve concluded that there simply isn’t any such thing.”

Sarah felt the dissatisfaction. No one wanted this to be true.

A woman in the back row, only a yard away from Sarah, stood up and asked, “But isn’t it true that abusers were all abused as kids? That it’s a cycle? Isn’t that a profile?”

Kramble did his patient nod, the nod that Sarah realized told people,
I’m listening to you. Your concern has been heard.
“You’re absolutely right, that
some,
not all, sex offenders were abused themselves as children. But you need to know that the high number of molesters reported to be former victims comes mostly from the
self-reports
of arrested molesters. These people are masters at manipulation. The offender who claims he was a victim himself gets more empathy. This has become strangely comforting to some people—it gives some kind of motivation to the offenders and lets us feel bad for them. If offenders are just victims, too, then we don’t have to face the reality of the cruelty, the fact that there are people out there who prey on others for reasons we simply don’t understand—because they
like
to, because they can.”

The woman who had asked the question still stood. An awkward silence fell.

Kramble cleared his throat. “
But
even in the cases where there is evidence that the offenders were abused themselves, the offenders’ methods and modes of operation vary widely. And it is important to note that not all people who were abused as children grow up to perpetuate abuse.”

Goose bumps prickled across Sarah’s spine. Had anyone else noticed that he touched his own chest as he said “not all people who were abused as children”? Is
that
why he was so passionate about this work?

“It is
not
a cycle that has to continue,” he said. “Not at all.”

And with that he moved into what these concerned parents could do now, outlining helpful ways to discuss the situation with their kids without alarming them or asking suggestive, leading questions, and how to arm and educate their children to prevent abuse.

He took questions from the crowd, and Sarah leaned against the wall and wished she could sit down; her legs quivered. It was so damn hot. The man to her right wore too much cologne, and in the heat the thick scent made her nauseous.

No one mentioned Jordan, and Sarah knew that people wanted to “protect his privacy,” but it felt wrong not to speak of him, as if they were denying what had happened to a child they knew. Looking back, there were clues that seemed to have neon arrows pointing to them, but as each clue had presented itself, Sarah had simply noted its strangeness and then dismissed it. Like the way Jordan seemed to live inside his own head, muttering those odd statements:
“I wish I were an angel.”
Was it just the setting, the little girls in their angel costumes, that made Sarah not take that statement for the obvious suicide wish it now seemed? And once at school, while Sarah stood with some kids waiting for their rides, Jordan had said, “I don’t want to go home.” When Sarah had asked, “How come?” he had at first looked startled, then shrugged. Sarah had never pursued it.

She wiped the sweat off her neck and swallowed. The cologne clogged her head. She angled her body to the left, but the woman on that side had had a few cocktails, and the alcohol fumes reminded Sarah that she hadn’t eaten. White sparkles danced at the edges of her vision.

Kramble took more questions, still huddled over the podium like some giant, with his sweat stains spreading. Sweat trickled down Sarah’s own sides, between her breasts. She pulled her shirt away from her skin and blinked hard against the white sparkles.

“Damn, it’s hot,” Cologne Man said.

Sarah nodded. The movement made her dizzy. She sagged against the wall.

Carlotta Imparato stood and asked, “Why didn’t Jordan ever tell anyone?”

There. Someone had said his name. Just like at the market, Carlotta sounded so accusing. This abuse had been going on for years. Did Carlotta think a kid in elementary school was supposed to be brave and together enough to go make a police report against his own mom and dad?

Kramble said the same thing, but with much more tact. “I can’t discuss details of this case in particular, but I can tell you that it is common for a child not to tell. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children actually has an ad slogan that goes, ‘The sound a child makes when sexually assaulted is often silence.’ Kids freeze when they’re faced with something they can’t understand. A young child is not going to know how to understand or explain a sex act. He’ll think an adult he loves wouldn’t do anything wrong. And imagine the additional confusion when a child is abused by his own parents. It’s a rare kid who will tell his mother and father no. Would
your
kids say no to you? Haven’t you raised them to respect your authority even if they have doubts or complaints about what you ask? It’s hard for us to understand, but in most cases of incest, the kids don’t
want
their parents to be punished or put in jail. All they want is for the sex to stop.”