The Unremarkable Heart

was her teacher. He was Grace’s father. He was friends with her dad. Danielle didn’t want tolose her best friend. She didn’t want to upset June. She just wanted to pretend it didn’t happen, to hope it never happened again.
    But, she couldn’t forget about it. She turned it over again and again in her mind and started blaming herself, because wasn’t it her fault for being alone with him? Wasn’t it her fault for not pulling away when he brushed up against her? Wasn’t it her fault for letting their legs touch or laughing at his jokes or being quiet when he told her to be?
    Slowly, in her little girl voice, Danielle catalogued out the subsequent encounters, each time shifting the blame.
    ‘I was late with an assignment.’
    ‘I was going to miss my curfew.’
    ‘He said it would be the last time.’
    And on and on and on until it really was the very last time, when Grace had walked into Richard’s office at home. She wanted to know if her dad wanted some popcorn. She found instead her dad raping her best friend.
    ‘That’s why …’ Danielle gasped, looking up at June. ‘That’s the night …’
    June didn’t have to be told. Even if she wanted to, there was no way she could clear that night from her mind. June had been working in her sewing room. Danielle and Grace were upstairs eating popcorn, lamenting their lost chance at the regional championship. Richard was in his office. Martha Parson called, looking for her daughter. Richard offered to drive her home but the girl chose to walk. Why hadn’t June thought it strange that a fifteen-year-old girl would rather walk six blocks in the cold than take a lift from her best friend’s father?
    ‘It’s my fault,’ Danielle managed between sobs. ‘Grace saw us, and …’ Her eyes were nearly swollen shut from crying. Her shoulders folded in so tightly that she looked as if she was being sucked backward down a tube.
    There was a long row of windows behind Danielle and her parents. The sun was at June’s back, and she could see Richard’s reflection in the glass. His face was passive. There was a glint of white from his glasses. She glanced down and saw that his hands were in his lap.
    She glanced down and saw that he was enjoying the story.
    By the time the deposition was over, June’s jaw was so tight that she could not open her mouth to speak. Her spine straightened hard as steel. Her hands clenched into fists.
    And yet, she did not say a word. Not when the girl had described a birthmark on Richard’s back, a scar just below his knee, a mole at the base of his penis. Not when she talked about the obsessive way he’d stroked his hands through her hair. The way he had held her from behind and used his hand on her. The way he had seduced this fifteen-year-old child the same way he had seduced June.
    And June had thought of her words, long ago, to Grace. ‘Which is more possible,’ she had asked. ‘That every single person in the world is conspiring to make you seem a fool, or that you are only fooling yourself?’
    June had left the prosecutor’s office without a word to anyone. She drove straight to the school administration offices, where they gladly accepted her temporary leave of absence. She went to the dollar store and bought a packet of underwear, atoothbrush and a comb. She checked into a hotel room and did not go home until the newspaper headlines told her that Richard would not be there.
    He had left the heat on eighty, a man who had fastidiously turned off hall lights and cranked down the thermostat on the coldest days. The seat was up on all the toilets. All the bowls were full of excrement. Dirty dishes spilled over in the sink. Trash was piled into the corner of the kitchen. The stripped mattress held the faint odor of urine.
    ‘Fuck you, too,’ June had mumbled as she burned his clothes in the backyard barbecue.
    The school board couldn’t fire her for being married to an imprisoned sex offender. Instead, she was moved to the school in the worst part of town where routinely she was called to testify in court cases concerning students who’d been accused of armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, and any other number of horrors. Her social life was non-existent. There were no friends left for the woman who had defended a pedophile. There were no shoulders to cry on for the principal who had called the students who’d been raped by her husband a pack of lying whores.
    Over the years, June had considered giving an