Crystal Grader by Tag Cavello (read my book txt) 📕

It turned out to be sooner. That very night in fact, and later on after they’d gone to bed, Crystal was thankful Lucretia had stopped drinking after two glasses, or else things might have been much worse.

The exchange began innocently enough. Lucretia asked (whilst breaking a piece of mozzarella cheese from her lip) what Crystal planned to do now that she was home again.

“Visit Hannah,” Crystal replied. “Say hello to Joey and Eva in person instead of over the phone.”

“We’ll driver over to North Fairfield,” Lucretia said, nodding. “Luke will probably like seeing them as well. And of course Hannah’s excited to meet her nephew for the first time.”

“Why isn’t she here tonight?”

“Joey has the chicken pox.”

Crystal’s eyes widened. “Oh, goddamn. We’ll have to wait then.”

“For a few days, at least. And don’t swear in front of your baby.”

“Oh please. It’s not like he can repeat it.”

Luke laughed and banged his spoon on the tray of his high chair.

“God-da! God-da!”

“Or,” Crystal said, blushing, “maybe he can.”

“Take him outside tomorrow anyway,” Lucretia said. “Show him the park.”

“I’ll do that. I’m thinking of going back to the Jackson farm, too. Is it still there?”

Here Lucretia’s stare had turned cold.

“Why would you want to see that place again?” she wanted to know.

Crystal shrugged. “I still think about it a lot. I miss it.”

“Miss it?”

“It’s a beautiful place, Mom. The memories are good.”

The cold stare turned colder. “A place where you were raped and almost killed. That’s beautiful. That gives good memories.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by raped.”

Lucretia’s fork clanged onto her plate. “Statutory, Crystal. Look it up if you don’t know what it means.”

“I know what it means just fine,” Crystal snapped. “But don’t sit there and tell me I was too young to know any better. Because today, at twenty-five, I’m still glad it happened.”

The other woman fell silent for a long time. Crystal took another drink of wine. She wiped Luke’s face with a napkin. An absurd feeling that she was about to be sent to bed early swept over her. But if Lucretia wanted that she didn’t let on. Instead, she asked:

“Did you really seduce him, Crystal? Did you?”

“I did, Mom,” Crystal replied, as Luke’s tiny hand squeezed her finger. “And I would do it again.”

The older woman made a face. “Don’t touch the baby while you talk like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like a whore.”

Crystal pulled her finger away. “What?”

“You heard me. Did he pay you, Crystal? Buy you new clothes and jewelry?”

“I was paying him.”

This reply instigated a snort loud enough to make Luke laugh.

“Yeah, you sure were. That was one hell of a tuition fee ole Hemingway dumped on you. Spilled on you.”

At that Crystal stood up, knocking her chair over backwards. “Now you’re being disgusting!”

“And what came out of it, Crystal?” Lucretia went on. “What did you get in return? I certainly haven’t seen any of your novels at the bookstore.”

“That isn’t his fault.”

“Ha! Congratulations, girl. You said that just like the victim you are.”

Crystal bent to pick up the chair. Her hands shook with fury; tears could not be far off. Hell of it was, she’d known this conversation would happen, prepared herself for it in advance. Do not get angry, she’d told herself over and over. No matter what she says, do not get angry.

Well, so much for that strategy. Lucretia’s sarcasm had sliced it to pieces with almost comical ease. All Crystal could do now was retreat.

“I think I’ll take the baby upstairs and go to bed early,” she said, tight-lipped. “I’m sorry I mentioned the Jackson farm.”

“It wasn’t very tactful,” Lucretia informed. By that time she too was standing, and her hands were busy with gathering empty plates.

“Come on, you,” Crystal said to Luke. “Let’s get cleaned up and go beddy-bye.”

Lucretia let them get halfway across the living room before calling out. Crystal turned and raised her brow, expecting some last, brutal yank on the line that would really lodge the hook in deep. It didn’t come. What did was an answer to the question that had started this whole mess.

“The farm is still there, Crystal,” Lucretia said. She hadn’t moved from the table, but her eyes were able to cross the distance between them with eerie brusqueness. “The new owners don’t like visitors, though. Fair warning.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s a NO TRESPASSING sign at the corner of Wye Street, right where you drive down into the woods.”

“I guess I’ll stay away then,” Crystal lied.

“You’re lying. And you’re as terrible at it as you’ve always been.”

“Why do you care either way, Mom? I don’t understand.”

Lucretia picked up the stack of plates. “Just go to bed.”

There it was—the parent’s timeless command. But instead of rising to the remark (as she had many times as a child), Crystal decided to do as she was told. As a consequence it was still light out when, less than an hour later, both she and Luke were under the covers with a storybook and a bottle of milk.

The baby fell asleep at 9:30. By midnight, Crystal knew, he would be awake again; thus, she tried her hardest to use these next couple hours for some sleep of her own. The task proved difficult. Every time she closed her eyes the bed seemed to rise from the floor and take flight like the 747 she’d arrived on. Then there was Lucretia. It would never do to let her stay angry. A way to smooth things over needed to be found. That, or a new place to live.

A new place to live…

Isn’t that why you left Monroeville in the first place, Crystal? And isn’t it why you came back?

Indeed. Yet things had not gone well in either the small town or the big city. Where did that leave? She needed to know. For Luke’s sake even more than hers, she needed to know. A child could not learn to stand without a place to put his feet, nor could a woman learn to live without a place for her heart.

At midnight she got out of bed. The room looked much the same as she’d left it five years ago. The part of it she remembered best—and still liked the best—was the reading nook, and here she went to wait until Luke woke up for a diaper change.

What to do? What to do?

There were no answers in the park beyond the window. Save for a single arc-sodium lamp over the baseball diamond, it was pitch black, and utterly devoid.

Crystal sighed. Perhaps coming home had been a mistake. Perhaps she should have stayed in Manila, gone on being the good wife and teacher. It was silly to run from one hive of bad memories to another. If she wanted to start her life anew, why had she returned to Monroeville, where everything old was still old and always would be?

She went back to bed and lay down. You’re all problems and no solutions, Crystal. It was an accusation Roberta used to make from time to time. Tonight, at last, Crystal was beginning to think she’d had a point.

Ten minutes later the baby woke up. She changed his diaper. For the time being, it was all she knew how to change.

19

“Tell me about when you were young,” Crystal asked.

After thinking long and hard about how best to learn more about Vicky, this was the approach she decided to use. It wasn’t her first choice. Going back to the shoebox and reading through each and every one of the love letters again seemed more logical. Problem was, she hadn’t been alone in the house since the day of their discovery, and indeed, didn’t much like the idea of reliving those circumstances. Tough she was. Independent too. But damn, was the Jackson farm ever spooky without company around.

Jarett simply had to be with her, which meant no snooping. So she waited until their next lesson—a week after the blizzard—to put forth a cautious request for entry into his past. It earned her a quizzical look from the other side of the coffee table, where Jarett, whilst puffing a cigar, sat reading the first ever poem by Crystal Genesio. The first and, if she had any say in the matter, the last.

“What do you want to know?”

“What was school like?” Crystal lifted a brow. “Were any of the girls like me?”

Jarett’s gaze went to the window as he thought about this. She gave him the time, taking another bite of leftover birthday cake. Aggression wasn’t the answer here. If she wanted to learn more about Vicky, she would need to use the same method she’d used to learn more about his sex: tact.

“I don’t know,” Jarett said. “I didn’t talk to many girls in school.”

“Why not?”

He was still looking out the window when he answered. “Baseball.”

Ah, here was a piece of the puzzle she already had, but one with notches where others would surely fit.

“All year you thought about baseball?” Crystal asked, keeping her tone innocent. “Doesn’t it end in October?”

“Well…I mean, yeah. It does. But not the training. The training is year-round.”

Jarett, stop fucking with me.

She almost said it out loud, but of course you didn’t use the word fuck when engaged in tactics. Alas, this puzzle piece would have to go back in the box for now.

“Tell me a story about when you were young,” she said, delving for another.

“All right,” he shrugged. “A true story?”

“Of course. The truer the better.”

“By the way, this poem is pretty good. However I don’t think many readers are going to know what to make of it. Remember you need to make a connection, let people etch their own markings.”

“I’m not sure I can be a poetess. I kept wanting to ball that thing up burn it.”

Jarett dumped the remains of the cigar in his coffee. “It’s nowhere near that bad. But what you said does remind me of a story.”

“Tell it.”

“Me and my brother and a friend who lived down the street…we almost got arrested once for shooting off fireworks in our backyard.”

Crystal nodded. Serendipity seemed to be with her today. The story she was about to hear came straight from the shoebox where Vicky lived. A way to connect these pieces had to be near at hand. It was only a matter of listening for the proper clues.

“What happened?” she asked, leaning forward. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

***

“In Ohio fireworks are illegal. You know that. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. But we didn’t care—not when we were kids. If there was a way to buy them, we bought them. And there were ways. There’s a specialty shop in Sandusky that’s still open where a kid can get things powerful enough to sever body parts. You just have to sign a waiver first that says you’re going to maim yourself out of state. Lady-fingers and cherry bombs were popular back then, mainly because they packed a good, fast whollop. You lit one, it exploded, and then you ran away before the police showed up. Fun, right?”

“I guess so,” Crystal said, “if you like to blow things up.”

“Yeah. But that wasn’t what we were about. Me and Todd and Ted. For us the big thrill was bottle rockets. Again though, illegal. And most of the time we didn’t have a way to get to Sandusky.”

“So how did you buy them?”

“Under the table. We traded baseball cards and packs of bubble gum with other kids who had relatives in West Virginia. Ted’s dad smoked, and sometimes we stole his cigarettes and traded those. A lot of grown-ups don’t know about these things, but there is some heavy wheeling and dealing that goes down among kids. How