All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

I looked up at her, but I was the only one who did. The lawyers all had their heads bent over their legal pads, but none of them were taking notes. Why bother, when they could get a transcript of it from Penthouse Letters?

The girl sat back in her chair, smiling like an angel.

“Miss Quinn, would you please—” The prosecutor cleared his throat.

“He never raped me. I love him. I want to marry him.”

I hesitated with my fingers over the keys.

“Type it. That’s part of my statement,” she said.

“Miss Quinn. Do you understand that this will be entered into the evidentiary record and legally, your signature indicates that you swear this account to be true?” the prosecutor said.

“I understand. Will Kellen see it?”

The prosecutor and the public defender swapped nervous looks.

“I want him to see it,” she said.

Definitely one of the more disturbing depositions I ever took, and I didn’t for a minute think her testimony would convict him. All the defense needed to do was put that girl in front of a jury and let her do her little reenactment.

9

AMY

Fall 1983

When Mom finally came home from Powell, she brought Wavy and Donal.

The whole first month, they slept together in the other twin bed in my room. They didn’t have anyone else, besides us, and I wasn’t sure how they felt about us.

For a while, we lived in a circus with Mom as the ringleader. In the middle of the night, I often heard her on the phone with one of her friends, or fighting with Dad. Once I woke up to Mom yelling, “Restitution is important! Wavy deserves something for what happened.”

All of Val and Liam’s property was tied up in the mess with the drug bust. Most of the property wasn’t even in their names, and the government confiscated it all. Mom wanted to sue Kellen, but he was indigent, dead broke with a public defender.

All along Mom had said, “If he actually cared about her, he’d plead guilty, so she wouldn’t have to testify.”

He pled guilty to one count of Criminal Sexual Penetration of a Minor under Sixteen and was sentenced to ten years. Mom still wasn’t satisfied.

“The S-O-B who stole her innocence gets to walk free after ten years,” she told her book club. It wasn’t much of a book club by then, more like Mom’s personal support group.

On the day we got the news that Kellen had pled guilty, we found out what happened to his assets. There wouldn’t be any restitution. No “making that bastard pay.” Kellen had already signed everything over to Wavy: his house, his business, his bank account, plus half-a-dozen vehicles, including a 1956 Harley-Davidson Panhead.

It stuck in my mother’s craw for a long time. She wanted revenge, but no one had to force him to do it. I think that’s why she went on trying to get revenge against Wavy. Mom insisted everything had to be sold and the money put in a trust for Wavy, which Mom would control. Kellen’s business partner bought out his share, Mom found a buyer for the house and some of the vehicles. She wouldn’t even let Wavy go to the house and retrieve anything of Kellen’s. Wavy didn’t argue. Nothing belongs to you, she always said.

When Mom found a buyer for the motorcycles, though, Wavy put her foot down. In the middle of our driveway, as Mom tried to leave for the lawyer’s office to sign the paperwork.

“Mine!” Wavy screamed it until my mother gave in. How could she do anything else, with Wavy standing in front of our house, shrieking that one word at the top of her lungs over and over, until the neighbors came out and stared? Wavy got to keep the Panhead. A mechanic from the motorcycle shop in Garringer delivered it and wheeled it into a corner of the garage. Wavy and Kellen’s helmets were in the saddlebag.

Watching her run her hand over the gas tank, the mechanic said, “Maybe she’ll ride it someday,” but her feet didn’t even touch the ground on either side of the bike. I knew she’d let it rust on rotten tires before she let someone besides Kellen ride it. Still, she kept the chrome polished and changed the oil. Every once in a while, we’d hear the sound of its engine, started and revved a few times in the empty garage before she turned it off. It took her whole body weight to kick start it, but she could do it. Once a year, a mechanic from the local bike shop came to give it a tune-up. Wavy wasn’t allowed to pay for that out of her trust fund, so she got an after-school job doing typing.

That, though, that all came after the worst of the circus had ended. The real circus was the lawyers and reporters and total strangers invading our house. Like Wavy and Donal’s paternal grandmother, who’d never met them, but wanted them to come live with her in South Carolina.

If it had been up to Dad, he would have let them go. He and Mom fought all the time. About the money spent, about Mom’s obsession with the dead-end investigation into Aunt Val’s murder, and the endless trips to Powell. About Wavy and her behavior. The sneaking out, the not eating, the not talking, and the strange surprises that made their way into our house, like a baby raccoon living in Wavy’s laundry hamper for a month. All the things that had sent Wavy to live with Grandma in the first place, but Grandma wasn’t an option anymore.

The whole thing upset Dad’s schedule. When Mom was in Powell, he was supposedly making sure we had dinner and went to school. It turned out to be harder than it looked when Mom did it, and we mostly took care of ourselves.

“This is destroying our family,” Dad said about once a week.