Lilith: a novel (8 page)

She finally gave into Travis, even though she knew that his judgment was flawed, even though she knew that he was less intelligent than she was—despite him happening upon his computer-related knowledge during his time in prison.

She told him that yes, they could go back to the dating websites and find someone to replace Mark Quinn. She would take the new laptop to the University of Cincinnati’s library tomorrow. The university had a guest WiFi; and in that environment, she could easily blend in. No one would take any notice of her. She would look like just another graduate student.

“I just want to see you on that beach, baby,” Travis said, when she relented. “I just want to see both of us there—together.”

Jessica decided that she should be patient with Travis. Even though he frustrated her at times, she knew that she was bound to that dark rage that pulsated inside him. She was drawn to his strength and his sheer physical beauty.

And Travis, moreover, was the one who kept her hands clean.

Jessica knew enough about the law to realize that the legal system would regard her guilt as more or less equal to that of Travis. And Ohio was a death penalty state. If they were ever caught, she was certain that she and Travis would have more or less equal chances of winding up in the state’s lethal injection chamber. Just like she had said—even though Travis had not wanted to hear it.

And yet, she had never set out to become a murderess—not even an accessory to murder—which was probably a better description for what she had been doing with Travis.

But all actions had consequences—and they often led to additional actions. She told herself that she had to be realistic about that much. Her current life—a life of crime with an ex-con named Travis Hall, had been more or less inevitable, hadn’t it? It all revolved around men and sex and money, men and sex and various forms of leverage.

Jessica had long ago reached two conclusions about men: First of all, that she could easily manipulate them; and secondly, that men could not be trusted. When push came to shove, men would always betray you—they would always let you down in the end.

She had learned the second lesson first. Jessica’s father had been a factory worker in Iron Mills, Ohio, a bedroom community of Cincinnati. He had left when Jessica was only six, leaving behind a single mother and a daughter.

To this day, Jessica had few distinct memories of him: He was a big man who wore a padded denim jacket during the cold weather. Jessica’s father had also worn a green John Deere cap. He smelled of cigarettes, and the oily chemicals that stuck to his clothing at work.

Jessica’s mother had coped with the situation by setting herself two objectives: to make as much money as possible, and to try to find a replacement for the husband/father who had deserted them both.

It was the late 1980s, and Iron Mills had been relatively prosperous: Jessica’s mother found work at a factory that made electronic components for the automotive industry. The factory paid good wages during that time—though it closed around the turn of the new century, another casualty to the low-wage, industrial behemoth of China.

Jessica’s mother worked the swing shift. For many of these years, Jessica was effectively raised by her maternal grandmother. For several years, her mother seemed to exist only on the weekends, and then she was dead tired.

Even at a young age, Jessica could tell that her mother was growing prematurely old. The cold facts of aging and sexual economics were staring her in the face. If she was going to replace the man who had departed, she would have to replace him soon.

Then one Saturday afternoon, the year she turned twelve, Jessica was introduced to Floyd, her mother’s new boyfriend.

Floyd was cut from the same cloth as Jessica’s father: a big, blue-collar man with simple tastes. The first time they met, Floyd tilted his head and gave her a broad, tobacco- and coffee-stained smile. 

Shortly after her introduction to Floyd, Jessica’s grandmother had a stroke. Jessica’s mother and her mother’s two siblings arranged for the grandmother to take up residence in a subsidized nursing home. Afternoons with her grandmother were now a thing of the past. At the age of twelve, Jessica came home every afternoon to an empty house.

But the house wasn't completely empty. By that time, Floyd had already started sleeping over on the weekends. Now he started sleeping over during the week as well. At twelve, Jessica’s mother deemed her no longer a child, but not an adult either. And she seemed to want the girl to develop a bond with Floyd—though not the sort of bond that Floyd would eventually have in mind.

At first Jessica welcomed the change in living arrangements. Her father had been gone for over half a decade; and there was something sterile about the all-female household that consisted of only her and her mother. Floyd usually worked the night shift, so when Jessica arrived home from school, he was only beginning to stir.

She mostly stayed out of Floyd’s way while he was getting ready for work—not because she was in any way afraid of him, but because she knew that her mother could be a crab when she was rushing to get out of the house and leave for her shift. She assumed that Floyd would be of a similarly distracted nature. Floyd, for his part, greeted Jessica with an almost shy formality.

Then Floyd began to grow more comfortable in his new second home. (Jessica did not know if Floyd had maintained a separate residence during this period.) He began to act less like a guest, and more like the man of the house. His possessions were no longer confined solely to the bedroom he shared with Jessica’s mother; his clothing was now nearly as ubiquitous around the house as her father’s had been. He made superficially minor, but somehow meaningful changes in the knickknacks and wall decorations that adorned the home.

There were other changes as well: Jessica had begun to “develop”. Over the course of less than a year, puberty transformed her body from one of a gangly child, to what might be fairly described as the body of a young woman.

And during that year, Floyd’s attitude toward her changed, too.

It was almost imperceptible at first, and easily overlooked: a glance that lingered a bit too long, a tone of voice that was a tad too familiar.

“Just you and me,” he would sometimes say, when they ran into each other in the kitchen. “Just you and me and the four walls.”

Half-sensing what was going on, Jessica would nod and excuse herself as quickly as possible.

Then one day Floyd emerged from the bathroom, having taken a shower. He had conveniently forgotten his towel.

Her eyes were involuntarily drawn to the part of him that was partly swollen. Jessica knew what that meant. She had known all about the birds and the bees since the age of ten.

“Oh, I didn't know you were home already,” Floyd said, even though Jessica had been home for the better part of an hour. Almost casually, he walked back into the bathroom. When he came out again, a towel was wrapped around his waist.

It was a game, Jessica quickly realized. He wasn't going to molest her, wasn't going to force her. He wanted her to make the first move.

And there was no way that was going to happen. Jessica didn't yet have any experience even with boys her own age, and Floyd was thirty-seven or thirty-eight.

Floyd continued to make suggestive comments and stares, and Jessica continued to ignore his covert advances.

Once or twice she considered discussing the matter with her mother, but there were two obstacles: First, between her mother’s job and Floyd, alone time between mother and daughter was now rare. Secondly and even more importantly, Floyd seemed to realize that there was a line he could not step over. Although his intent was clear enough to her, Floyd had actually done nothing that she could put a name to: He had never tried to kiss her, never fondled her.

To the best of her recollection, in fact, Floyd had never even touched her. Yes, there had been the incident with the shower, but that could be explained away. And Floyd could truthfully report that he had apologized and returned to the bathroom to wrap his lower body in a towel.

In later years, Jessica would learn the name of the principle involved:
plausible deniability.

The game continued until she noticed that Floyd’s presence in the house was becoming more and more infrequent. Jessica had been a small child when her parents split up. Thirteen now, she was better at reading and observing adult relationships. And the relationship between her mother and Floyd was going south.

One Saturday, the first Saturday in recent memory when Floyd had not put in at least a brief appearance, Jessica’s mother broke the news to her daughter: She and Floyd were splitting up. She might see him one afternoon during the following week, as he planned to stop by and pick up his things. Then he would be gone.

Then her mother began talking to her as if she were an adult confidant rather than her thirteen-year-old daughter. Her mother said that she didn't know why men were so unreliable.

If anything could be gained from this experience, her mother said, maybe it would be the lesson that Jessica would have to rely on herself.

Finally, Jessica’s mother actually apologized to her: She said that she hoped Jessica hadn’t gotten too attached to Floyd. Jessica was dumbfounded: Her mother had had no idea of Floyd’s designs. Perhaps Floyd had expertly concealed them, or perhaps her mother had simply not wanted to see the kind of man that Floyd was. But she made no effort to disabuse her mother of her illusions.

As it happened, Jessica was alone in the house with Floyd on that day that he boxed up the last of his things and loaded them into his pickup truck.

Jessica had come to dislike, and even fear, Floyd’s presence. Now that he was leaving, though, she found herself oddly regretful. She recalled how she had at first welcomed his presence in the house.

Floyd studiously avoided talking to her as he made his trips between the house and his pickup truck. She could have simply gone to her bedroom until he was gone. Instead she sat in the living room, where he would be forced to make some kind of a farewell. She wanted to hear what Floyd would have to say for himself.

She heard the click of Floyd placing his key on the kitchen table. On his way out the front door, he passed her in the living room. She had been sitting there all this time, the television turned off, with her arms folded across her chest.

Floyd made as if to depart without saying a word, pretending that Jessica wasn't there. He almost made it to the door like that. Then he turned around and said:

“I could have liked you a lot better, you know. But you never even—aw, never mind.”

Jessica didn't reply. Floyd walked out of the little house for the last time, and she would never see him again. She sat there on the couch for more than an hour, though, trying to understand why Floyd’s parting remark had made her feel so hollow inside. Rationally speaking, the guy was a creep: She should be glad that he was out of her life—out of her mother’s life. But the inexplicable sense of loss remained with her for weeks.

After Floyd and her father, Jessica required one more significant experience with a man to cement her belief that the breed was fundamentally unreliable.

High school began on a surprisingly auspicious note. She was pretty, having inherited the best of the combined physical features of her mother and her long-departed father. She was not an honor roll student; but her intelligence, and a reasonable amount of dedication maintained her GPA near the upper middle of the pack.

Then, in her senior year of high school, she began dating Tony McClure.

Tony played football; but in a small town like Iron Mills, the line between the jocks and the dead-enders was often razor-thin. Tony’s membership on the football team didn't stop him from getting high, or from drinking to stupefaction every weekend.

Tony messed with her head. He somehow sensed Jessica’s weakness, the gap that had been there since her father left, the gap that had been widened when Floyd had answered her tentative, adolescent search for a father figure with sly, furtive lust instead.

“You ain’t so great,” he said, when he rolled off her one evening. They were naked in the back of his father’s van—a customized relic from the 1980s.

Jessica frowned and began to put her clothes on.

“When did I say that I was ‘great’?”

“Oh, I know that you think you are: You’re on the honor roll at school, and you’re always talking about college this and college that.”

“I’m not on the honor roll. But yeah, I wouldn't mind going to college.”

“Same thing,” Tony said.

Jessica didn't bother to refute this questionable logic. She couldn't understand why her attention to school threatened Tony, why he interpreted it as a personal insult. True, she had talked about going to college—but not in a way that any reasonable listener would interpret as arrogance. To the contrary, she had revealed to Tony that she was unsure of her chances. Her mother worked in a factory. No one in her family had ever attended college.

Then she realized: Tony, given his grades, would be lucky to even graduate. He had talked several times about getting a job at one of the factories around Iron Mills—the factories that had been dying off, even then.

A few weeks after that, Tony unceremoniously dumped her for another girl, Julie Trevor. Julie was blonde and wild, and as uncomplicated as Tony was.

But the breakup nevertheless stung, and she found herself thinking more about her father, more about Floyd. She began spending long hours in blank, ponderous mental states, like she had on that afternoon that Floyd had departed.

It wasn't long before her grades began to nosedive. She was pulling a C-minus in Algebra II on the day that she entered Mr. Frogge’s classroom to discuss her precarious situation. There had been a test that morning, and she knew that she hadn’t performed well. She had fully intended to study for this one, but the previous two nights her mind had been in a fog.

It was mid-December, only a few weeks before the two-week break for the Christmas holiday. It was that time of year when the sun sets at 5:30 pm, and the students and faculty of Iron Mills High School tended to hurry home after school let out. Football season had ended a few weeks before, and there would be no more major school activities until January. No one wanted to be in the school at 4:30 pm, when Jessica had set the appointment to talk with Mr. Frogge.

Mr. Frogge was behind his desk when she arrived, busy grading papers. He looked up, cordial but not exactly friendly.

“Jessica,” he said. “I can see now why you wanted to talk to me. I just got done grading your test.”

“What did I get?”

Mr. Frogge sighed. “It isn’t good, Jessica.”

Jessica reached out for the test paper that Mr. Frogge proffered. She turned the paper over and looked at it.

It was worse than she had expected. At this rate, she wouldn't merely get a C or a D in Algebra, she would fail the semester.

“We have to do something about this,” she said.

“Well, Jessica,” Mr. Frogge said, not unkindly. “There isn’t much that ‘we’ can do about this. It’s a fait accompli. Do you know that word?”

Jessica nodded. She had not heard the word before, but it was easy enough to grasp from the context.

“You had the same chance as every other student in the class. And most of the class did pretty well on this one, to tell you the truth. The grades on this exam actually ran above the average, so there won’t be any sort of a curve.”

“I—I’ve had a lot of problems of late,” she said. She then fumbled through a vague explanation about ‘personal problems’—how she had had trouble concentrating.

Mr. Frogge listened to her without interrupting. When she had finished, he said, “I’m sorry Jessica. I really am. But you can understand that if I rigged the test scores of every student who had broken up with her boyfriend—yes, I know all about you and Tony McClure—you can understand that I would spend all of my time rigging grades, and the administration would throw me out on the street. Does that make sense, Jessica?”

She nodded. It did make sense, when you put it that way.

“I—I could maybe do something if there’s been an extraordinary situation. Is someone in the hospital? Has someone
died
, God forbid?”

Jessica shook her head. She was briefly tempted to invent a personal tragedy, but that was no good. Iron Mils was a small town. A wild, outright lie would be quickly exposed. Mr. Frogge wasn't stupid.

“Well, I’m sorry then. I have no choice but to give you the grade you earned. Do you understand?”

Jessica’s heart was pounding, and she felt herself suddenly short of breath, when she said, “Maybe we can work something out.”

Mr. Frogge leaned back in his chair, raised his eyebrows and said, “Excuse me?”

Jessica took a deep breath. She had been thinking about this all afternoon, without allowing herself to fully acknowledge what she was thinking. She had known—she had decided—that this was the only way.

Mr. Frogge had noticed her—in that way that men notice women. He hadn’t been as overt or as lame as Floyd had been five years ago, but there could be no mistake about the lingering looks he often gave her when she entered his classroom for second period every morning. Sometimes she would see him looking, and he would turn away, his face slightly red, obviously torn by a mixture of longing and shame.

And if she had to sleep with a teacher, she could do far worse than Mr. Frogge. For despite his name, Mr. Frogge
wasn't
a frog. He was perhaps thirty-five years old, with a full head of hair and a strong, dimpled chin. The physique of his athletic youth had been only slightly softened by time and adulthood. He was the Iron Mills wrestling coach, and he had gone to the state championship as a wrestler himself less than twenty years ago, around the time Jessica had been born.

Mr. Frogge was also married and he had a small child. His wife was in her late twenties. Mr. Frogge frequently mentioned her during class, and everyone knew that her first name was Janet. Janet Frogge showed up at school now and then, when Mr. Frogge had left some necessary item at home, or when he stayed late during the wrestling season. Janet Frogge was less than ten years older than Jessica was at the time. So in terms of the age difference, what she was proposing wasn't so much of a stretch—especially if you compared her to Mrs. Frogge.

“You heard me,” she said. “And you know what I mean. You know exactly what I mean—so please don’t try…please don’t try to play dumb.”

Mr. Frogge gave her another raise of the eyebrows. “I see,” he said. His tone was different now. They were no longer teacher and student, strictly speaking. They were dealing with each other via other terms.

Over the course of the next few minutes, it was decided that they could use the little storage room at the rear of Mr. Frogge’s classroom.

The coupling was hurried and unromantic, though not completely unpleasant. More importantly, her brief time alone with Mr. Frogge achieved its intended end. When the grades were returned the next morning, Jessica received a middling B, rather than the failing grade which she had earned.

The arrangement continued for a while, until the day Jessica, blithe with her newfound power, turned in a blank exam. Up until now, she had made a reasonable attempt at solving the problems on each exam, and Mr. Frogge had spotted her points where necessary. Mr. Frogge had explained once that she needed to make an effort on each test, so that no one would ever have a cause to be suspicious.
Plausible deniability
, once again.

The blank exam was returned to her with a grade of zero.

When she confronted him after school, Mr. Frogge was indignant.

“What do think this is, Jessica?”
he hissed through clenched teeth.
“Do you think that this is some kind of a game? I can’t give you a passing grade on a blank test paper.”

She realized that she had unnecessarily tested him, even though he had been drawing away from her of late (or perhaps because of that). He might have been feeling guilty. He might have simply been growing bored with what they were doing. Perhaps he was afraid that the school’s administration would find out.

“I can get you in trouble, you know,” Jessica said. “I can—tell someone.”

Mr. Frogge’s response was pure ice. “Try it. See how your story squares with that exam paper of yours.”

She would later reflect that she probably should have blown the whistle on Mr. Frogge. At the very least, she might have been able to bargain her way to a passing grade in Algebra II, in exchange for an agreement not to press charges. Or something. Could she have pressed charges if she had wanted to? She wasn't sure. She had been a minor when she had the affair with Mr. Frogge. Not by much, but barely.

She ended up with a low C average in Algebra II for the year. The larger problem, however, was that her grades in other classes had suffered as well during her “fog period” following the break-up with Tony. There would be no scholarship, no financial aid, no college.

So Jessica put her affair with Mr. Frogge—and the artificially inflated test scores—behind her.

And then came Seth, and a crime of much greater magnitude.