My daughter is writing an essay on euthanasia for her tenth-grade English class. She asks, “Mom, why do people think it’s the right thing to put their dog to sleep when they’re suffering, but won’t let people do the same thing?” Without hesitation I tell her the harsh truth that festers like a bedsore, “Because people care more about animals than people.” What other explanation can there be for the medical care that animals receive from their veterinarians? Terms such as quality of life are considered with every treatment recommendation: will chemotherapy lengthen this pet’s life, while at the same time provide her with a meaningful existence? When pictures fly around the internet with dozens of dogs in cages with fur sucked into their ribs, a public outcry ensues. Where is the same consideration for children? I’ve known for five years that people care far more for dogs than children. I’ve known ever since I learned the truth about Pumpkin. Pumpkin was a Chow mix—orange and fluffy just like a well-whipped pumpkin pie. He had a pink tongue with a black dot, like most Chows. He was playful, but he’d bite you. My ex-husband was eleven-years-old when he first got Pumpkin. They grew up together—became men together—in all the ways. In a way, Pumpkin was how Adam came to understand the world. He’d lick Adam’s cheeks; he was warm and kept the cold away in Northern California—Los Gatos to be exact, which means The Cats in English. We call it biting fog when the cold rolls over the Pacific as Adam read comic books in his bed with Pumpkin—the sun never coming out when he wanted it to. Adam’s long, curly black hair grew into a mullet and his right ear was double-pierced. I don’t know why Adam tried it the first time at age thirteen, but I know why he kept doing it. He did it because he had complete control. Like most deviants, he started with a warm-blooded animal and then transitioned to humans with ease. What made Pumpkin back into him that first time? Was it the love they shared in that bed growing up? Or was it the fear we all felt when he raised his voice? I will never know. But I stayed too, so I can’t judge Pumpkin. Our whole marriage Adam talked of loving Pumpkin like an idealized child that had never been born: the one of dreams; the one I could never give birth to because humans weren’t animals. Humans were not meant to be trained or controlled, but they often were. I found Adam’s childhood stories about Pumpkin endearing, this pet he could trust. He spoke often of loving animals and children. Once Adam left me and filed for divorce three kids and fourteen years later, I found out what Pumpkin meant to him. In our basement a cardboard box was stacked between the work bench and the dual water heaters. I looked for the answers to why Adam left me, why our son accused him of laying on top of him and squishing him, and why our son said he would kill us both if he told. Hidden in a pile of journals: black moleskin from his post-college trip to Europe, red flannel with postcards glued to the pages from Washington D.C., and a green journal that told the secrets about growing up with his sister and Pumpkin. Adam wrote about sex with Pumpkin in his green journal the very year we were married. The blue denim diary I found had disappeared. He confessed that his girlfriend Brittany would stick a carrot, anything, in his ass that he asked her to. I pretended that I’d never read it, just like I’m sure she forced herself to forget the things he asked her to do that led her to leave him. He “felt important” when he made Brittany cry. She escaped, but we did not. I tried to have sex with Pumpkin, he wrote, as if he had ever tried to do anything and not done it in his life. I don’t know what trying looked like. I think that a hard dick tries to do lots of things. It seems normal to stick it in a hand lathered in lotion. What about a dog? I questioned when my own child’s butt cheeks became red and chapped, but I had no answers at the time. Adam thought it was his job to raise his little sister alongside Pumpkin. He “Became very judgmental of the things she did.” I had seen what that judgment looked like for my children and me—but, he started with her. He reacted when she annoyed him “By hitting her on the top of the head with an open hand.” Did he already know that an open hand was less likely to leave a mark? I think he knew that a closed hand meant questions and that shame was a more powerful weapon than violence. He forced his sister to draw in his hurt and make it her own. I know because he forced me to do the same thing. He made her do things for him, “Like scratch [his] back and if she didn’t [he] whacked her.” He wanted to “Be mean and bad.” * The house sat quiet as my mom and I baked a pumpkin pie. The kids and our dog were at Adam’s house for the weekend. The journals I read a month ago were hidden in the top of the guest room closet. My mom dumped two and a half cups of white flour into a wide and deep glass bowl. She told me, “Make some ice water and juice half a lemon.” As the ice sloshed in a glass measuring cup, I rolled a lemon with the heel of my hand and cut it in half. The smell reminded me of opening up the Christmas box from my grandma all the way from California. The box overflowed with Meyer lemons individually wrapped in paper towels, walnuts, soap, and dish towels. My grandma would have loved that we were making Adam a pumpkin pie. My mom used one half of a cup of butter and shortening. She added salt that she never measured and mashed the fats into the flour with a fork until balls the size of peas formed. I added the lemon juice to a half a cup of ice water. “Hand me the water,” she told me. We worked mostly in silence as the air conditioner compressor heaved on and off outside the window. My mom used her hands to knead the dough into a silky disc. She rolled out the crust with my great grandma’s rolling pin with the ball bearings. The hard maple wood was tinged like honey with tawny bruises. It glided each time she slapped the wood on the granite countertop. The ice water stiffened the dough until it stood tall as my mom pinched the scalloped edges around the rim. As she worked on the crust, I opened a can of organic pureed pumpkin. I scooped it into the stainless steel bowl of my stand mixer and poured in a can of condensed milk. Before flipping the switch to turn the mixer on, I cracked two eggs on the side of the bowl and scooped a tablespoon of pumpkin pie spice. I took the fluid and fragrant whipped pumpkin over to the crust my mom had molded to the pie dish. I poured the pumpkin filing into the crust, clapped my hands against each other and said, “That’s that.” I felt satisfaction and relief as I slid the pie in the oven. Baking the pie with my mom was the first step to showing the world what Adam did was wrong. We went to pick up my children at the market halfway between our family home and his apartment. A neutral location seemed less intrusive than him driving by the house and picking up the kids like take-out. My mom held the pie on her lap. We parked two spots away from Adam in his blue family wagon. I exited the vehicle at the same time my mom leaped from the passenger seat. “Adam,” I tried not to yell. He was opening the tailgate to return all the items I sent for the kids every other weekend. The kids and our black pug Miles were still inside his car. My mom walked over to Adam and handed him a Dixie paper plate with a slice of pumpkin pie topped with whipped cream from a can. She sneered at him, “We made pumpkin pie and we know how much you’d like a piece of pumpkin…pie.” The whipped cream wilted in the hot Colorado sun. Adam’s jaw stiffened as his fingers tightened around the plate like he imagined it was our necks. As he turned his back to me to set the pie down, I could see his eyes slit as he tried not to react. “I surely do hope you enjoy your pumpkin pie,” my mom said as she helped the kids get out of the car. Once all the items had been transferred, Adam strode long, angry steps to the front of the store. He extended his arm as far in front of his as possible, as though the pie were a poisonous snake. My mom and I caught up to him. He said to her, “Why don’t you mind your own business?” She just kept walking through the door. The kids looked back at my mom as he dumped the pie in the trash, just like he had thrown all of us away. She turned to him and said, “Children have always been my business. These children will always be my business.” We hurried to the back of the store to get the kids a snack when he yelled something I will never know. I wondered if it is what he yelled at Pumpkin. He revealed himself; his guard was erased with the confrontation of Pumpkin. When we were still together, he chastised us when we were loud or noticed for anything that set us apart as different. His extraordinary emphasis on fitting in was necessary to portray the charming and effusive man he put out in the world. No one looked beyond his custom-made suits and beaming smile, not even his own wife and family. As we left the store, my daughter said to my mom, “I was afraid of what he was going to say to you.” My mom looked down at all three kids, “He has nothing to say to me about you and you have nothing to fear from him when you are with me.” This pumpkin pie showed the truth; a truth I could no longer deny or ignore. I wanted Adam to know that I knew about Pumpkin, as a way of saying I finally saw him and that our son’s statements were true. Nothing Adam ever said to me was the complete truth. My mom had worked at the state hospital and knew the progression of a deviant’s behavior. She knew the profile of someone who abused an animal at such a young age. Adam could not stop the urges; he could only change his target. His turpitude tore from Pumpkin, to his sister, a man named Joel, his girlfriend Brittany, me, our son, and then our daughters. To be clear, no allegations have been proven in a court of law to be true. My ex-husband is innocent in the eyes of the law and society. My children and I have different findings—all because of what he did admit he tried to do to Pumpkin in that same courtroom. My children were the reason I kept fighting against him for three more years. I acted as my own attorney when I ran out of money and credit. I asked the questions, produced the evidence, and studied case law. I filed motions, responses, and replies. We were at yet another hearing in Colorado, fifteen hundred miles from where I had moved. I called him as my last witness with ten minutes left on the clock. I asked him to turn to Exhibit Y, which consisted of a handwritten page from his journal that I found in our basement. The letters written in loopy cursive covered seventy-five percent of the page. He wrote the journal entry during our first year of marriage while he worked at a boarding school for rich and troubled teens. Part of his job as a counselor was to participate in group sessions where he revealed things about himself in order to gain trust. Each group, called disclosures, had a different theme to address common issues amongst the population. I asked Adam, “Is this your handwriting?” He asked the judge with pleading eyes, “Can I confer with my attorney?” The judge said, “There’s no objection, so I’m going to allow it.” Adam replied with a rattle in his throat, “Yes, it is.” I could not believe he admitted it. I knew I had him. I asked him, “Can you please read the journal page?” He read with an even tone, “We just did disclosures, it was easier this time. And I had my hardest first, the one about Joel. I did a couple new ones, the one about Pumpkin, trying to have sex with him. It was pretty easy and safe in there and I felt good.” “I don’t mean to interrupt you, but that’s all that I need you to read.” I continued my line of questioning, “Who is Pumpkin?” “Pumpkin was the family dog,” he very calmly, and somewhat proudly, announced. I asked him, “Does this copied page say you tried to have sex with the family dog, Pumpkin?” “Yes,” he replied as his eyes shot to his girlfriend in the back of the court room. “Did you have sex with your family dog, Pumpkin?” “No,” was his only reply. “Did you try to have sex with your family dog, Pumpkin?” My directness and authority boomed through the microphone to the solemn courtroom. “Yes,” he stammered, “It was something stupid I tried when I was thirteen.” He looked at his attorney, who remained silent, and back at his girlfriend again. I interrupted him as I swiftly closed my computer and gathered up all of my documents. “No further questions.” He kept talking and I said again, with more force, “No further questions, Your Honor.” After three years of fighting, he finally admitted his guilt. * When I told people about Pumpkin, it seemed the most devastating news they had ever heard. Everyone gasped; some covered their mouths with both hands. All expressed remorse for the dog. They cared about Pumpkin and felt bad for him, more than for my children. When I told people about my son, and what he said his dad did to him, everyone tried to explain it away as if they could rationalize the allegations into extinction. They could somehow believe that a boy fucked his dog, but not that a father could abuse his son. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see the connection—not even after my daughters confessed his abuse of them as well. There’s no telling what it’ll take for people to understand the significance of abuse against children and not just animals. I, too, tried to explain away what I heard and saw, but then I knew what the children told me was true when I read about Pumpkin in Adam’s journal. I figured out why Adam left me, why the world cared if a boy fucked his dog, and didn’t if he abused his son or daughters. Maybe it’s not true that people care more about animals than people. Perhaps it’s harder to accept that a child has been molested more than an animal, because then action on their part would be required. Often the victim is diminished and accused as a contributor to the act of abuse. Dogs can’t be contrite to their abuse, but people can. Many can’t ignore a helpless dog, but can somehow justify not coming to the aid of a child. I was guilty of dismissing the allegations myself at first, until all three of my children told accounts of the same abuse. Like seeing a dog locked in a car on a hundred-degree day, I was forced to take action to save what life they had left. Animals and humans aren’t meant to be controlled or dominated—we all play a part as complicit bystanders if we take no action. I did my best at the time, but today I tell my daughter that I vow to create a world where children and animals are given the same consideration for a quality of life. |