Doubtful Joy—Part 2

I got to Andi’s house at 4:30 with the barbecue slated to start at 5:30. I’d promised I would come to get the grill going. The police had been to my office and my computers—in fact, my whole office—had been impounded. The entire trace on my searches was subject to rules of evidence and it had to be certified that I had broken no laws in finding what I had. As far as I knew, I hadn’t even encountered a security measure that might be considered suspect. Since I don’t maintain data on my computers, and the police had no warrants for anything that wasn’t resident on the computer itself, there was no reason to fear anything from my past coming to light. Besides, Jordan was leading the investigation and I knew he would be circumspect.

But I was totally drained. The discovery left me doubting basic humanity.

Four teen boys. God knew how many others had been near. But three had been lured away from their families and later found mutilated and dead. The fourth had never been found. The messages had come, first flaming them on the Internet, destroying their friendships, warning them away from certain parks, restaurants, bars, and finally, one offering help. The boys had sought out the kind voice, and gone to meet with the friend. They’d never been seen again. It was never about sex or orientation. Like always, it was about power. Middle aged, white, male power. Sometimes I hated being associated with such a foul class of humanity.

I’d been looking forward to seeing Andi ever since I left her last night. In fact, even in the depths of the discoveries I’d made I had flashes of her smile flit across my mind—tastes of her lips on my lips. Then I was standing at her door. I raised my hand to knock, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt so foul, just having discovered what I did.

The door opened before I’d had time to retreat. She stood there, smiling at me, welcoming me into her home and into her arms. We both had a moment’s hesitation before we lost ourselves in the embrace. I smothered myself in her hair, yearning to wipe away all the memories of the day past and start again from where I kissed her last night.

She seemed of like mind and when our embrace loosened, she raised her lips and sought mine.

We were still tentative. The newness of this relationship was still overwhelming and neither of us wanted to miss one bit of the way it developed. She stepped back away from me and looked me in the eye. She must have seen the fatigue and pain there. Her eyes fell.

“Are you okay?” she faltered. “Are we okay?” My God! She thought my fatigue and pain were because of her! I hastened to correct her.

“We are great. We are the best thing about my day. We are just beginning. I, on the other hand, just happen to be wiped. It’s been a very bad day.”

“Oh dear. Poor baby. Did the bad guys get away?”

“No.” She took my hand and I followed her into the living room where we sat down together on the sofa. She cuddled up next to me, an intimacy we hadn’t dared express before today.

“Tell me about it.” I couldn’t give her specifics because of police investigations. I told her of the boy and father who had come to me, about getting a clue about where to look for the cyber-bully, and then about the revelation of the predator and involvement of the police. Like the boy’s father, Andi wanted to go directly to her computer and pull the plug out of the wall. She stroked my cheek and soothed me and in a moment we were kissing again. I didn’t think we’d break this time. I was breathless when our lips parted. She pushed me lightly away.

“We have company coming,” she said softly.

“It’s a good thing,” I answered, breathing deeply.

“We need to get ready. Uh… I bought a treat for you. There are ginger snaps on the kitchen counter.”

I confess, I’ve had a weakness for ginger snaps for years. When I was a little kid, my dad carried ginger snaps in his lunch. Three. Ginger snaps are very small cookies with a spicy ginger bite. It was really no problem for a big Swede like my dad to eat his lunch and polish it off with three ginger snaps and a big cup of black coffee. But every once in a while, Dad would bring one home in his lunch pail. He’d catch me up in his arms and say, “I went fishing today.”

“What did you catch?” I’d ask.

“A little sardine.” I’d wrinkle up my nose. “I made it into a cookie. Want to try it?” I’d be doubtful, but nod. Out of the pail he would pull the one last ginger snap and offer it to me. My eyes would light up and I’d take a bite. If I was very lucky, Dad would pour the last spoonful of coffee out of his thermos and I’d sip it as if I, too, were working on the docks like my father. Ginger snaps have had a special place in my taste-buds ever since.

I went into the kitchen, intent on grabbing a couple cookies before I lit the coals in the grill. I glanced around, finally lighting upon a cookie jar under the cabinets. I lifted the lid and reached in for a couple of cookies and pulled out two foil packets. I thought it must be a new brand of cookie that was individually wrapped, but when I looked in my hand, I froze. I heard a sudden intake of breath behind me and spun to see Andi with her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide. I quickly shoved the condoms back in the cookie jar and put the lid on.

“Cookies,” I whispered. My mouth was dry and my voice cracked.

“On this counter,” Andi squeaked. She pointed at an unopened bag on the opposite counter.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I thought… I just… I’ll go start the coals first.”

“They’re Cali’s!” she almost shouted. My jaw dropped and I rushed out into the yard. I’m sure I used more lighter fluid on the coals than is strictly legal in the City of Seattle.

***

“So Dag got the surprise of his life when he reached into the cookie jar!” Everyone started laughing. I blushed, but was thankful that Andi had not included the part about how embarrassed we both were. The story was shared by several people who had been in at the actual start.

“We invited Andi and Cali over to join us one weekend. What was that? Five years ago? Cali was 12 or 13. There were eight of us total and we were playing Pictionary with two teams of four,” Jan started. “It was Cali’s turn to draw.”

“She looked at the card and just stared at it for the longest time and we started saying, ‘Cali we can’t guess if you don’t draw. You should have seen Andi’s face as the drawing took shape,” added Laura. “Eyes wide and mouth hanging open.”

“She drew a penis.”

“Not just a penis, a text book quality illustration of a flaccid penis. There were a few tentative guesses, but the rest of us were all adults and we just knew there was no way it could be one of the words any of us was thinking.”

“The thing is that she didn’t stop there. She drew a line around the whole thing, balls and all, and closed it like a circle. It was definite that she was calling specific attention to the genitalia. Thank God, someone noticed the sand had run out of the timer!”

“Andi said, ‘Cali, honey, let me see your word, please.’ When she looked at it she almost choked!”

“The word was ‘rubber.’ I said, ‘Oh, I see, honey. But a rubber is usually put on an erect penis and doesn’t cover the testicles, too.’”

“Cali got embarrassed, which is what we were all trying not to do to her, and she said, ‘Well how was I to know? They told us about them in health, but I’ve never actually seen one!’” Everyone was howling by this time, and I was wiping the tears out of my eyes.

“The thing is,” Andi said, “I realized that what they call Sex Ed in Middle School simply isn’t. They were tossing out a bunch of crap and not really explaining what everything meant. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, so to speak, and teach her what it all meant. So I bought a pack of condoms and explained them to her. We practiced rolling them onto a ketchup bottle. It kind of got started as a joke and I’d leave a condom randomly around the house. If she didn’t find it while we were cleaning, I’d make her clean again. Then, I told her that she’d never have to feel embarrassed talking to me about that again and if the time ever came when she actually needed one, she would know there was a supply in the house. We finally decided to put them in the cookie jar and periodically over the course of the following years, we just kept adding to them. When she turned 16, I made her go to the drugstore and buy one herself so she would know it was okay. That one went in the cookie jar as well.”

So that was what I’d walked into. A cookie jar full of condoms that six of the guests tonight already knew about.

“You should probably check the expiration dates on them,” Jan said. “It wouldn’t do to have her get one in an emergency and then have it fall apart.”

“They have expiration dates?” Andi exclaimed.

“Yeah. I knew a guy who put one in his wallet when he was a freshman in high school because he had heard you should always be prepared. Boy Scout I think. Anyway, he didn’t get a chance to use it until he was a senior in college. He pulled it out it was torn to shreds.”

“That was probably just from being in his wallet for that long.”

“Maybe I should check.”

***

When Cali and Mel arrived after her rehearsal, the entire room went silent with no one wanting to say anything about the discussion. We were spared by Cali’s rant in answer to her mother’s simple question, “How was rehearsal?”

“I can’t believe it! I hate this play!”

“Oh, oh.”

“Everybody for act one scene one. Places. Cue 1. Cue 2. Cue 3. Cue 4. Okay, cut to Macbeth’s line. Cue 5. Cue 6. Positions for end of scene. Cue 7. Cue 8. Scene ii. Actors.”

“No, no, no, no,” Mel chimed in. “We have to go back to cue 5; there’s a light out. Electrician!”

“Now, Cali, let’s go over your mad scene on the parapet again. You just aren’t selling it. You’re looking angry, not mad.” Cali growled and stomped around the room. “First we’re just slabs of meat getting dragged around under the lights so tech can practice over and over again, then I can’t get my lines right. I just don’t get her. Why’s she go mad. What did she think? You stab someone, there’s going to be bloody blood. She’s in medieval Scotland. She has to know what blood looks like. Probably kills her own chickens.”

“Wow,” I interjected. The English teachers were huddled. I slipped out of the room and into the kitchen, ostensibly to go out to check on the grill—which I did. On the way through the kitchen, I grabbed a freezer bag out that was lying out waiting for leftovers and squirted a bunch of ketchup in it, then filled it with water. It was weak blood, but I figured that would be easier to clean up in the long run. I grabbed a plastic butter knife and opened my own pen knife in my hand. For good measure, I squirted a little ketchup in my mouth, and went back into the dining room.

“Cali,” I said. “Do you know how much blood is in the human body?”

“A few pints.”

“Here,” I said, handing her the plastic knife. “Stab me in the heart.”

“With a plastic knife?”

“You don’t think I’m going to give you a steak knife, do you?”

“What’s the point?”

“You need to get into the emotion and violence of what you’ve done. You got Macbeth the kill the king, then you went in and dipped your hands in the blood to smear it on the guards. You need to lose sophistication and become the animal inside.”

“How do you know so much about Macbeth?”

“I went to college. Now think about the one thing you want most in your life and then imagine that I’m the only thing in the world standing between you and it. All you have to do is work up enough of that anger they say you have on set into action and stab me.”

I actually saw the change in her face as she became Lady Macbeth. It was frightening. Her eyes went cold and she clenched her teeth. For a minute, I didn’t think she’d do it. Then she went into action faster than I could move. She shifted the butter knife in her hand and rushed at my chest stabbing down. I was shocked and surprised to see the amount of anger she could wield at a moment’s notice—so much so that I fell to one knee and then down on my back as she continued to reign blows down on me. I clutched my heart with my right hand and with the penknife cut a slit in my shirt through the bag. Her next blow squished and she brought her hand back wet. Her eyes suddenly went wide.

Cali screamed.

I pushed the rest of the red water out of the bag and let a little ketchup escape from my mouth.

She kept screaming. The plastic knife went flying.

Andi was on her feet with her arms wrapped around Cali, glaring at me as I propped myself up on one elbow. Cali was sobbing in her mother’s arms.

“You would make a terrible father!” Andi yelled at me. I thought I was just going to be helpful. I was terrified. Then Cali lifted her head and I could see she wasn’t sobbing, but laughing.

“No! No!” she laughed. “He’d be great. That was awesome! Oh my God! I thought I killed you. That was spectacular!”

“That was soooo cool!” Mel said. “How much blood is in the human body.”

“Five or six quarts, depending on how big the person is,” I gasped. Between the onslaught of Cali and then the fear that I’d totally screwed things up, I was completely out of breath.

“I totally get it!” Cali exclaimed. “There’s a difference between knowing and actually doing it. Oh wow. I think I can go mad now!”

“I still question whether that was smart,” Andi said looking at me pointedly. “You should have asked me first. You scared me to death.”

“Face it, Mom, you were more worried that I’d hurt Dag than that I was emotionally damaged.”

“Well, you were convincing.”

“Wait, wait,” Paula said. “What’s going on between Andi and Dag?”

“They’re dating,” Cali announced. Both Andi and I blushed. We hadn’t planned to say anything to anyone. Outed by the teenager.

“Well, we were until that little stunt,” Andi said, still not forgiving me, but she did slide her hand over close enough that I could reach it with my own. I took hold of her hand and brought it to my lips.

“Would it help if I volunteer to clean up the mess?” I asked.

“Well that would go a long way.” Everybody in the room chorused with variations of “Aww.”

***

I did clean up. I had to run up to my apartment to change shirts. That was one of my favorites, too. Well, it was worth it, I thought. I cleaned up the dining room, including scrubbing the ketchup off the hardwood floor and for good measure, I washed the entire dining room floor. I got the grill cleaned up, packaged up the leftover food, and generally made myself useful until the last guest had bid goodnight.

Finally, Andi and I stood in the entryway and I knew it was time for me to go as well.

“I am sorry I pulled that little stunt. I should have talked to you instead of jumping to my own remedy.”

“It worked out okay. And Cali was right. I could see her laughing before she stopped screaming. I just wasn’t sure you were okay.”

“Maybe I would make a terrible father.”

“With what you did today?” she asked. She wasn’t talking about the stunt with Cali anymore. “You showed powerful empathy for a vulnerable child and you put the wheels in motion to bring the perpetrator to justice. Dag, you are a wonderful, caring man. You just haven’t had any practice.”

I leaned down to kiss her. It was brief.

“Cali and Mel are here. Will I see you tomorrow?”

“I’m taking my mother to brunch tomorrow. If I can’t be a good father, maybe I can still be a good son. I’ll be back about 3:00.”

“I can live with that. Let’s go for a walk tomorrow.”

I leaned in for one more light kiss and then mounted the steps to my apartment.