The Night My Nephew Called Me

Sharon

I have to tell you about Sharon, because a story that leaves her a simple villain would be a lie, and I promised myself I would tell this true.

My sister-in-law was not a cruel woman. She was a broken one. She had lost the man she loved with no warning, at fifty-one, in a field, and she had a young son who found the body, and she was drowning, and Wayne came along and threw her a rope, and she grabbed it, and she did not look closely at whose hand was on the other end. Then, once she had grabbed it, she could not let herself see the truth, because seeing it would mean she had let a man like that into the house with her boy, and that guilt was more than she could bear to feel. So she managed. She kept the lid on the pot. She looked at Wayne before she answered questions. She called it making it into something.

It took her a long time to come out of it. There were weeks that fall when she was angry at me, at Cody, at everyone but the man who had actually done it, because if she got angry at him then the whole floor would fall out from under her. She did not come to the first hearing. She sat in her car in the courthouse lot and did not come in.

But she came to the second one. I think a mother can only stand at the edge of the truth about her child for so long before something deeper than fear reaches up and grabs her. She read the photographs, and she read the medical timeline that Dr. Alvarez had documented, a year of injuries with tidy explanations, and I watched my sister-in-law’s face as she understood, finally, fully, that every one of those tidy explanations had come out of the mouth of the man she had married.

She stood up in that second hearing, on her own, no lawyer prompting her, and she told the truth. She told the judge about the split lip and the trip into the door frame and the basketball that was never a basketball. She told him she had known, somewhere, and had made herself not know, and that she would carry that for the rest of her life. Then she looked over at Cody, sitting next to me in his cast, and she said, “I’m sorry, baby. I should have believed you. Your daddy would have believed you and I didn’t and I’m so sorry.” And she cried, finally, the way a mother is supposed to cry, and it was an awful thing to watch and it was the best thing that happened in the whole business.

What happened to Wayne

I will not pretend the wheels of the law spun fast or clean, because they did not. But they spun.

Wayne Prewitt was charged with felony child abuse, and with the wrist injury documented the way Dr. Alvarez had documented it, careful and dated and clear, and with Cody’s account, and Pam’s photographs, and Sharon’s testimony once she found her feet, and with the fact that Wayne could not keep his own story straight from one deputy to the next, the case against him was solid. His lawyer tried the thing everyone knew was coming, the troubled boy, the grief, the made-up story. It did not fly. It does not fly nearly so well when there is a year of medical records and a mother on the stand saying no, my son is telling the truth, it was my husband.

He took a plea in the end, the way these men usually do when the calm reasonable act stops working and the evidence is stacked. He served real time, and a felony record, and a permanent no-contact order protecting Cody. And the thing that I think galled Wayne most of all, more than the cell, was that he walked out of the whole affair without one acre of the ground he had spent two years scheming after. The trust held. Merle Hutchins made sure of it. The farm was Cody’s, exactly as Dale had drawn it up in the quiet of the year before he died, a careful man reaching forward through time to protect a son he would not live to see grown.

Sharon and Wayne divorced. She got herself into counseling, real counseling, and she did the hard slow work of it, and she and Cody are rebuilding the thing between them that got so badly broken. It is not all the way healed. It may never be all the way healed. But it is honest now, and honest is a foundation you can build on.