Chapter 8

Juniper enjoyed Monday night so much she took a mental health day off from work on Tuesday and we spent most of the morning in bed. I called Mary Jane and asked her whether I could drop by on Wednesday morning to talk to her instead, and she raised no objection.

I hadn't been told that my talk with Juniper's mom was something I was supposed to keep a secret, but I kept it to myself anyway.

The Red Sox came in Tuesday night and thoroughly whipped our ass, 13-4. We were never in it, and once again our starting pitching was unreliable from the early innings.

I got two hits and drove in a run. Most of the regulars were hitting decently. If we had been getting any kind of pitching, I don't think the absence of our four-hundred-hitting first baseman would have been fatal to our prospects. But as it was, we were losing ground and seemingly dropping out of contention.

Sure, it was only mid-May and scarcely time to panic, but in recent years the Orioles and their fans had become accustomed to the return of the good times.

This didn't feel like the good old days.

Just after lunch Wednesday, while Juniper was at work, I called Mary Jane, verified that it was a good time to go out there, and drove to the Jones house.

She offered food, but I'd already had my lunch. I accepted the offer of fresh coffee, and she put on a pot.

As he had predicted, Franklin wasn't home when I arrived. I suspected his absence was deliberate. Whatever Mary Jane wanted to talk to me about, her husband regarded it as private. Or maybe he knew the story but felt the whole thing would go down better if he wasn't sitting there listening.

"Thanks for coming over," she said. "I guess Juniper doesn't even know you're here -- right?"

"That's right. I got the impression that's what you were ... expecting."

She seemed embarrassed. "Well, yes. I mean, I don't believe in keeping secrets from family members. Not usually, anyhow. But this is -- different. Franklin and I talked about it a lot in these past days, because Juniper has been behaving ... strangely. I mean, she's been behaving great, y'know? ... But, for her, it's been, it's seemed like, strange behavior."

I didn't say anything and the sound of the gurgling coffeemaker in the kitchen dominated.

"There are reasons why Juniper is ... the way she is," Mary Jane said. "They're not very pretty, but it doesn't take a PhD in psychology to see the connections."

More hesitation. Finally, she listened to the silence from the kitchen and said, "Let me go get the tray and the coffee."

"Why don't we just go out there and sit at the kitchen table and talk?" I suggested.

We did.

"Juniper was ... abused as a small child," she said. It came without preamble and she waited, probably expecting me to look shocked and appalled. I guess I was appalled, but to say I was shocked would be overstating it, because I'd already suspected something along these lines.

As Mary Jane had said, one didn't have to be a psychologist to read the situation. Early child abuse had been the most likely of causes for Juniper's behavioral aberrations -- if that wasn't too strong a word.

I kept reminding myself that to some degree, Juniper's defense of her own behavior -- that she was simply conducting her sexual life the way a man might -- had a modicum of merit. Who was I, after all, to impose standards on her?

Even her parents, I thought, had limited control over her behavior, and perhaps that's the way it should be. Juniper, after all, wasn't some teen-aged kid who'd fallen in with the wrong crowd. She was an adult with well-established patterns of behavior. Arguably, her behavior worked for her. She'd been making choices for herself for a long time -- evidently ever since back when she really had been that teen-aged kid.

But now Mary Jane was verifying what I had suspected. It wasn't that old "wrong crowd" cliché that had led Juniper astray.

It was a problem that had arisen right there in her own family.

Not all that unusual. Far too commonplace a problem, in fact -- if what the newspaper and magazine articles frequently suggested was really true.

"It was her father," Mary Jane continued. "Her real father. She was just a little girl then. The marriage was a complete mess almost from the start, and it was only a matter of time, I think, before Ross and I would have ended it for our own reasons.

"But when I found out ... what he'd been doing. Oh, God! I left him that same day! We were just -- gone, Juniper and I. I made damned sure he never so much as even saw her again, unless there were large men with guns in the immediate vicinity!"

"You said she was a little girl. How old was she?"

"When we left him -- her father -- she was eleven," Mary Jane said.

"Jesus."

"And it was ... serious. He had been having actual adult sex with her. Right there in our home! And it had been going on for awhile before I found out about it. The miserable son of a bitch! I wanted to kill him! I actually tried to! It was the worst kind of scene that you could imagine! He must have known I was bent on hitting him with anything I could get my hands on, because he got out of there, real quick.

"And while the bastard was running for his life, I got Juniper and me both out of there -- right then. That same goddamned day! I wasn't really thinking very clearly, but in retrospect, it was the smartest way to handle it. The only way, really."

"So nothing ever happened to him? No lawsuits, no jail?"

"Nothing except a quick divorce and me putting about five hundred miles between him and Juniper."

"Christ! What a story. And I can see what you're saying ... about the kinds of effects that had to have on her."

"We really had to struggle, after," Mary Jane said. "Financially, I mean. I didn't have any skills, and there wasn't anything coming in from Ross -- that was his name, Ross McCarty.

"But at the time, I thought -- it seemed like -- Juniper was ... fine. I mean, it was like she had weathered it, you know? And later, when Franklin came into our lives, well, I was afraid of how she might react to that -- to there being another man around. A black man at that.

"But she seemed fine. She was real positive about Franklin right from the start. So that encouraged me, and I starting thinking about how Franklin and I could, y'know, give her a good home together, and maybe she'd be okay."

There was another one of those pregnant pauses. Mary Jane got up and refreshed our coffee cups and then sat back down at the kitchen table.

"But things weren't okay," I prompted.

"No. The way it's been, Franklin got more heartache from us than he had bargained for. There wasn't much sign of anything wrong around the time we were dating or when we got married. But not too long after -- Juniper was around thirteen by then -- she started up."

"With boys?"

"With boys in school. With much older boys than her, mostly. And with grown men a few times. It was terrible, Travis. Shocking and ... and terrible."

"A lot of kids have to go through some kind of teenaged rebellion," I offered. "I mean, Juniper told me you were a kind of latter-day flower child yourself."

"It wasn't like that," Mary Jane said. "It wasn't a rebellion. It was just -- odd. Juniper was a model student, and around the house, she acted like a model daughter. And she got along great with Franklin, and they developed this sweet, easygoing relationship. It just seemed ideal in every way.

"Except at the same time, she had this other life going on, where she was having frequent sex at a ridiculously young age, and with multiple partners, and, and... inappropriate partners.

"Oh, Travis, it's been awful. And now she's older and a grown woman and all, and you'd think that would make it easier. But it doesn't. It's almost -- I don't know -- it's almost worse than when she was just this wild kid. Because now it's like she really ought to know better, and you'd think that experience ought to have taught her something -- changed her. Only it hasn't. It's like she's still thirteen, and she's still just giving herself away like a ... like a..."

Mary Jane was in tears now. As usual, I didn't know how to react, so I did nothing. Sometimes nothing is the best thing.

"Maybe she's starting to change," I finally offered.

"It does look like it, a little bit, doesn't it?" Mary Jane said, making eye contact that was attempting to force me to say something else to her. Something else that was encouraging.

"I don't know her well enough yet to really ... know anything," I said. "I mean, for the moment, I feel kind of encouraged, but it's not like something magic has happened."

"She treats you ... differently. From the others, Travis. When you were in California, she was behaving strangely."

Mary Jane laughed out loud at her own statement. " ... She was behaving strangely because she was behaving so... normally.
She was behaving the way a young woman would be if her boyfriend was out of town.

"Normal -- for her -- would have been to forget you existed as soon as you left town. Normal would have been to hook up with some other guy. A guy she knew or just ... a guy she ... found."

"There aren't any guarantees that this will continue," I warned. "And I've got to tell you, Mary Jane, I'm kind of a fair-weather guy on this. I'm not going to hang around and watch her fall off the wagon repeatedly, like a confirmed alcoholic.

"For me, this is something I want to take on -- this reclamation thing. But I really doubt my ability to get knocked down and then get up for more. It's important to me -- it's critical to me -- that Juniper really change. And right away, too!

"I'll try to be clear: I think I can forgive and forget just about anything she's done before now ... But if this thing has such a tight grip on her that she continues the same behavior in the future? I'm afraid I'll give up on her pretty fast. I'm sorry. But that's the way I feel about it. If you're looking for a hero who's gonna save your daughter, you got the wrong guy. I'm not him. I'm not interested."

Mary Jane was still crying, but it seemed to be just residual sniffling from the emotional catharsis of discussing her daughter with -- of all people -- her daughter's latest lover.

"I hope you'll help her, Travis. Since you came along I've gotten a new shot of ... hope. I've gotten where I really believe again that she can change, and for a long while, I'd lost that. That belief.

"Franklin and I, we've been together almost ten years. Last few years, we've just ... given up on Juniper. On her changing, I mean. It's easy for us to do. In so many ways, she's like a normal daughter. She even still lives with us!