Factoring Humanity

Heather had seen her daughter naked. They had belonged to the same health club on Dufferin Street — indeed, Heather had started taking Becky there as a teenager. She’d never really looked closely at her daughter except to notice, with some envy, that she had a trim, youthful figure, with none of the stretch marks Heather herself had had ever since her first pregnancy. She had noted that Becky’s high, conical breasts hadn’t yet begun to sag, though.

Becky’s breasts.

A rush of memory — but Heather’s own, not Kyle’s.

Becky had come to see her mother when she was fifteen or sixteen, just about the time she’d first started dating. She’d taken off her shirt and her small bra and shown her mother the space between her breasts. She had a large brown mole there, raised like a pencil eraser.

“I hate it,” Becky had said.

Heather had understood the timing: Becky had lived with the mole for years; indeed, three years ago she’d overcome her modesty to ask Dr. Redmond about it, and he’d assured her it was benign. No doubt countless girls had seen it in the locker room at school. But now that she was dating, she was thinking about how a boy might react to it. It was all too fast for Heather — her daughter was growing up much too quickly.

Or was she? Heather herself had only been sixteen the first time she’d let Billy Karapedes get his hand up under her shirt. They’d done that in the dark, in his car. He hadn’t seen anything — but if Heather had had a mole like Becky’s, he would have felt it. What would his reaction have been?

“I want to have it removed,” said Becky.

Heather had thought before responding. Two of Becky’s high-school friends had already received nose jobs. One had had freckles lasered off. A fourth had even had breast-enlargement surgery. Compared to that, this was nothing: a local anesthetic, a flick of a scalpel, and voilà! — a real source of anxiety gone.

“Please,” said Becky when her mother made no reply. She sounded so earnest that for a second, Heather thought Becky was going to say she needed it done by Friday night, but apparently things weren’t moving that fast.

“You’d need a stitch or two, I bet.”

Becky considered this. “Maybe I could get it done over spring break,” she said, evidently not wanting to face the locker room with suture protruding from her sternum.

“Sure, if you like,” said Heather, smiling warmly at her daughter. “We’ll get Dr. Redmond to recommend somebody.”

“Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.” She paused. “Don’t tell Daddy, though. I’d die of embarrassment.”

Heather smiled. “Not a word.”

Heather could still picture that mole. She’d seen it twice more before it was removed, and once, even, after the surgery, when it was floating in a small specimen container before it was taken to a lab to be tested — just to be on the safe side — for malignancy. As she’d promised Becky, she’d never said a word about the little bit of plastic surgery to Kyle. The Ontario Health Insurance Plan didn’t cover it — it was, after all, purely cosmetic — but the cost was less than a hundred bucks; Heather had paid by smartcard for it and had taken her much-happier daughter home.

She conjured up an image of her daughter’s breasts, beige, smooth, wine-tipped, with the mole between them. And she plugged that image into the matrix of Kyle’s memories, looking for a match.

Her own memory could have faded — it had been three or so years ago, after all. She tried imagining slightly bigger breasts, different-colored nipples, larger and smaller moles.

But there was no match. Kyle had never seen the mole.

He’d come into my room, have me remove my top, fondle my breasts, and then —

And then, nothing. Kyle had never seen his daughter topless — at least not during any time after puberty, not at any time when she’d had real breasts.

Heather felt her whole body shaking. It had never happened. None of it. There had been no abuse.

Brian Kyle Graves was a good man, a good husband — and a good father. He’d never hurt his daughter. Heather was sure of it. At last, she was sure.

Tears were rolling down her face. She was barely aware of them — the moistness, the salty taste as some slid into her mouth, an intrusion from the outside world.

She’d been wrong — wrong even to suspect her husband. If it had been she who had been accused, he would have stood by her, never once doubting her innocence. But she had doubted. She had wronged him terribly. Oh, she had never accused him directly. But the shame of having doubted was almost unbearable.

Heather made the effort of will, extracting herself from psychospace. She removed the cubic door and staggered out into the harsh light of the theatrical lamps.

She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and sat in her office chair staring at the faded drapes, trying to think of how she would make it up to her husband.

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