Freedom [122]
“I said I would call her tomorrow.”
“Do you honestly think you can use my daughter as a sex buddy for four years and then just walk away when it suits you? Is that really what you think? She was a child when you started having relations with her.”
Joey thought of the momentous day in his old tree fort when Connie had rubbed the crotch of her cutoff shorts and then taken his somewhat smaller hand and shown him where to touch her: how little persuading he’d required. “I was a child, too, of course,” he said.
“Hon, you were never a child,” Carol said. “You were always so cool and self-possessed. Don’t think I didn’t know you when you were a little baby. You never even cried! I never saw anything like it in my whole life. You wouldn’t even cry when you stubbed your toe. Your face would wrinkle up but you wouldn’t make a peep.”
“No, I cried. I definitely remember crying.”
“You used her, you used me, you used Blake. And now you think you can just turn your back on us and walk away? You think that’s how the world works? You think we’re all just here for your personal pleasure?”
“I’ll try to get her to see a doctor for a prescription. But, Carol, you know, this is a really strange conversation we’re having. Not a good kind of conversation.”
“Well, you better get used to it, because we’re going to be having it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day after that, until I hear you’re coming for Thanksgiving.”
“I’m not coming for Thanksgiving.”
“Well, then, you better get used to hearing from me.”
After the library closed, he went out into the chilly night and sat on a bench outside his dorm, caressing his phone and trying to think of somebody to call. In St. Paul he’d made it clear to all his friends that his thing with Connie was off-limits conversationally, and in Virginia he’d kept it a secret. Almost everybody in his dorm communicated with their parents daily, if not hourly, and although this did make him feel unexpectedly grateful to his own parents, who had been far cooler and more respectful of his wishes than he’d been able to appreciate as long as he lived next door to them, it also touched off something like a panic. He’d asked for his freedom, they’d granted it, and he couldn’t go back now. There had been a brief spate of familial phoning after 9/11, but the talk had mostly been impersonal, his mom amusingly ranting about how she couldn’t stop watching CNN even though she was convinced that watching so much CNN was harming her, his dad taking the opportunity to vent his long-standing hostility to organized religion, and Jessica flaunting her knowledge of non-Western cultures and explaining the legitimacy of their beef with U.S. imperialism. Jessica was at the very bottom of the list of people whom Joey would call in distress. Maybe, if she were his last living acquaintance and he’d been arrested in North Korea and were willing to endure a stern lecture: maybe then.
As if to reassure himself that Carol had been wrong about him, he wept a little in the darkness, on his bench. Wept for Connie in her misery, wept for having abandoned her to Carol—for not being the person who could save her. Then he dried his eyes and called his own mother, whose telephone Carol could probably have heard ringing if she’d stood by a window and listened closely.
“Joseph Berglund,” his mother said. “I seem to remember that name from somewhere.”
“Hi, Mom.”
Immediately a silence.
“Sorry I haven’t called in a while,” he said.
“Oh, well,” she said, “there’s really nothing much happening around here except anthrax scares, a very unrealistic realtor trying to sell our house, and your dad flying back and forth to Washington. You know they make everybody flying into Washington stay in their seat for an hour before they land there? It seems like kind of a weird regulation. I mean, what are they thinking? The terrorists are going to cancel their evil plan because the seat-belt sign is on?