Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/603229.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M, Other
  Fandom:
      The_Mentalist
  Relationship:
      Alex_Jane_&_Patrick_Jane
  Character:
      Patrick_Jane, Alex_Jane, Teresa_Lisbon
  Additional Tags:
      Incest, Parent/Child_Incest
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-12-22 Words: 2859
****** He Has a Body But it Doesn't Matter ******
by Trapelo_Road475
Summary
     Patrick remembers everything. That he was eight years old, because
     Carlo the Strongman and Edwin and Katrina the sword-swallowers and
     Trevor who ran a petting zoo that ran the carnival circuit organized
     a party for him. He had a birthday cake. Katrina had sugared violets
     and had written his name. The candles reminded him of his act.
The father was dead and the son would not speak. The pretty daughter home from
college tossed her head with high and desolate scorn like a mare before the
theft of her colt. The mother was antiseptic, scrubbed of all shadows, pleasant
and pale and offering tea. Her shaking hands and the glint of a wedding band
betrayed her. She had known. The daughter had not.
The son was silent and barricaded somewhere behind his eyes.
The father's blood still tainted the house with a tinge of metal, the grit-
taste in the sinuses, clinging.
Patrick had sipped his tea (the woman was a connoisseur, perhaps the one thing
she had that was her own) and slid his question in with deceptive kindness, the
knife between the ribs, the sugar cube between the teeth to dull the bitterness
of medicine.
How long had your husband been molesting your son, Mrs. Kelty?
The tea service rattled.
The daughter's rage sparked hard in her eyes.
Patrick had set back with feigned surprise - the perfect act, incredulity,
Lisbon beside him with her teeth set (he was sure of it, he didn't bother to
look) And your daughter, too?
For once the word did not come from his tongue like bile. For once he did not
think of his child.
Mrs. Kelty told them in a voice like a high-windowed white room to get out.
Simply that. Get out. Now.
On the drive, Lisbon had asked him where he'd pulled that guesswork from -
"Rigsby said everyone called Mr. Kelty a real family man, loved his kids."
"I'm sure he did," Patrick had said, looking out the window at the sun
stretching in long bands through the trees, "but the fact remains he was
abusing them. The son at least. The daughter, eh, maybe not, but the son,
certainly."
Lisbon had been terse with him, but that was because the media was all over the
case, spouting rubbish about the teenage sociopath, maybe one of those goth
kids, maybe trouble with drugs, maybe this, maybe that, and the poor innocent
loving papa and his lost-cause kid. One of their favorite old saws. Local boy
goes rotten in spite of the family's best efforts, and tragedy results.
"Did you notice the empty spaces on the wall, where the photos should be?"
Patrick asked. "Did you notice the trophy in the garbage out back, broken in
two?"
"A broken trophy?" Lisbon's skepticism was a challenge. He took it accordingly.
"And the photos in the son's room, turned over, facing down."
Early morning when the call came in. Mother making breakfast. Father just
putting on his tie. Six shots. The son in his pajamas and covered in blood, his
eyes brimming with determination and relief.
"They were on his nightstand, he probably knocked them over putting on the
snooze," Lisbon said and again, the edge of challenge - it wasn't that she
didn't believe him, only wanted him to be certain, which of course he was
certain, but he liked the rapport.
"The father would've done it. When he abused the boy. He'd have wanted privacy,
even from the photographs."
He could feel Lisbon's eyes tracking on him. He knew what her expression would
be.
They had not had many photographs when he was a child. Photos made you real,
and they could be stolen, or lost, and you could be stolen, too. That's what
his dad had said, when he was small. The only photograph they had was one of
his mother, in a little frame shaped like a cat, the flocking wearing off at
the edges where he had liked to hold it. Liked to look at her. His dad had said
he looked like her and sometimes when he was very small he had tried to see in
the cracked bathroom mirror, holding up the photo, pulling his curls and his
face this way and that.
Patrick used to sleep with his dad, in their little trailer, and he would hold
the photograph in it's frame the way another little boy in the real world
would've held a teddy bear or GI Joe.
His dad used to say he looked like his mother.
"That's what molesters are all about, isn't it?" He asked Lisbon, knowing the
answer. "Secrecy. Getting into the trust. Look at mister family-man-community-
pillar Kelty, dead in his own bathroom - he coaches the soccer team, he
chaperones field trips, helps the kids with their homework - where does he find
the time to do it, Lisbon? Everyone says he's perfect, and there's no such
thing."
"Jane - " her sigh. She hears him. She'll hear him out. " - that's not proof."
Her way of saying she believes him, but she wants to do it by the book. Her
eyes are on him again but he watches the scrubby hillsides and the dry ditches
and the barbed wire fences with the detritus of a highway clinging like flags
of surrender.
Patrick remembers everything. That he was eight years old, because Carlo the
Strongman and Edwin and Katrina the sword-swallowers and Trevor who ran a
petting zoo that ran the carnival circuit organized a party for him. He had a
birthday cake. Katrina had sugared violets and had written his name. The
candles reminded him of his act. Happy Birthday Patrick, our Boy Wonder. Not
many presents, little things, trinkets, a key ring with a pendant that held a
lock of lion's mane in glass, a sackful of plastic dinosaurs, a smooth white
stone that Katrina called a sand dollar, and said it came from the ocean, which
he had never seen before.
Later he was playing in their trailer with the sand dollar, sitting on the bunk
he shared with his dad, and asking, daddy, have you seen the ocean?
'Course I have, Paddy.
What's it like, daddy?
It's like a whole lot of water, Paddy.
Is it like a lake?
Oh, bigger than that. And bluer, too. Blue as your eyes, Paddy.
Is it beautiful, daddy?
Oh, yes.
And then daddy lay him down without a word and began to touch him, over his
clothes and then in them, told him that he was beautiful and daddy loved him.
"Jane?"
He recoils from her fingers at once - her touch invading his too-vulnerable
reverie, and he castigates himself inwardly, stupid, stupid, pay attention -
and recovers just as quickly, flashing her a grin.
"Need to get a new mattress," he said. "Old one is like rocks. Can't sleep a
wink."
"You never sleep."
She said it like a joke, exasperated as she was.
His father singing in his ear. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you
Rough and shivering. Patrick's hand is on his father, on his hardness, moving
up and down as his father directs between lines, happy birthday dear Patrick
...
"I'll have Cho talk to the kid, see if he can get anything out of him - "
"Rigsby."
"Hm?"
"Rigsby should do it. Cho'll just scare the kid, no offense to Cho, but he's a
little intense. Get Rigsby to put that doofy big-brother act on, we might get
something useful. And don't send VanPelt with him, the boy's mother didn't do a
damn thing to protect him and he won't talk to a woman."
"Got it all figured out, huh?"
He does. He always does. He isn't stupid, he never was.
"Of course."
He was eight years old. He didn't know any better.
"So why not send you in, hot-shot?"
"Oh, I like to watch you work." Flattery, which gets him nowhere with Lisbon,
but he tries anyway.
...
Everything is going swimmingly and he is right, as usual - the father was
abusing his son nightly, the mother looked the other way, and what seems open
and shut never really is.
Rigsby visits the children's center where the boy is being held and gets a
full, graphically detailed rundown from the kid with nothing but the big-
brother act and a slinky. It's all on tape and Rigsby looks pallid and
reluctant to talk much about it when he returns.
The boy on the video plays with the slinky, stretches it, contracts it, watches
it ripple and gleam in the flourescent lights. His voice is soft and much
younger than fourteen. His mannerisms, as he sinks into the chair, are closer
to nine, ten at the outside, and even VanPelt remarks he sounds 'like a little
kid'.
The boy says it started in fourth grade, when he'd made the travel soccer team
for the first time. His dad was so proud. Took him out for Burger King to
celebrate, and they never had fast food, so it was a big deal.
"I got a kids meal. They had the little cars and I wanted one. My dad said he
was sure I'd get the biggest trophy in the league by the end of the season."
"The trophy," Patrick leaned over to remind Lisbon, "in the garbage.
Bakersfield Under-10 Junior Gulls Soccer, Most Goals."
"He'd do it to me with his mouth."
VanPelt practically flees, touching her throat, where exactly the cross she
wore until she joined the police would be.
"I'd wear like three sets of pajamas to bed but it never stopped him and I
didn't never sleep much."
Rigsby, pale and tight around the eyes, stalks away straight-backed - Patrick
knows he'll be going to the 2nd floor gym, and Patrick knows that Lisbon
doesn't care.
"There was blood on my underpants sometimes, mom still did my laundry but I
guess she didn't care."
Cho respectfully excuses himself, something about paperwork.
"He said he loved me. He said it a lot, said he loved me."
Lisbon utters, very softly, a swift and violent string of profanity detailing,
eloquently and explicitly, exactly and unprofessionally what she'd like to do
to this man.
"Cheer up," Patrick says, because it helps to steady his mind to say it aloud,
cheer up, and he can set aside the confused boy back in the tiny trailer in his
memory palace and ignore the fact that there's a veritable army of tiny
trailers each holding a memory of some terrible violation. "He's dead now,
isn't he?"
"Yeah, perp's dead and the kid's locked up, some deal."
"But they'll let him out. Extenuating circumstances. Justifiable homicide,
right?"
Lisbon sighs and hits the cursor, stops the DVD, stops the child mid-sentence,
his face pasty under the lights and his expression far away.
"Depends on the judge," she says.
Patrick's stomach hinges the way it always does when he hears some stupid,
bureaucratic cock-up of justice being undone. "You're kidding."
Lisbon shakes her head. "I'd like to tell you the kid's going to have a fair
hearing in juvenile court and get the help he needs, but ... I can't. I can't
guarantee that."
"This boy should be hailed as a hero."
"I know."
"They'll let him out."
"I've been around cases like this long enough, Jane, to tell you that some kids
get help, some kids wind up in the youth authority, and some kids get waived to
adult court and spend half their lives in the state forensic hospital."
Patrick looks again at the boy, the victim, on the laptop screen. He is a
handsome child - tan and lean from running, with his mother's wide-set eyes and
thick, straight black hair. He is wearing a set of hospital pajamas with the
children's center laundry mark in red creeping over the right shoulder, and
they fit badly over his frame. The slinky is frozen in almost a delicate dance
on his fingers and his mouth is parted.
Patrick hits the play button.
"We were at this summer tournament in Nevada. Staying in this real fancy hotel
with big beds and he let me order room service. He gave me some wine and told
me one sip or else but he didn't care when I drank the whole glass. He had this
look on his face so I knew what we were gonna do, 'cause we did it a lot. He
did a lot of kissing like he didn't do at home. It was different. It was sort
of like a movie in my head, like I was watching it, like I wasn't even there.
He had a little snap-tube of something, it looked like toothpaste but it wasn't
it was slippery, and he put it on my fingers and he put it on his fingers and
he put 'em inside me, told me to relax, but I couldn't, and the movie got real
slow in my head."
Patrick wants to hit stop but he can't think fast enough how to do it with a
reason, because everything he does has a reason, he is in control of everything
and he can't think of what to tell Teresa what insight he's gleaned from
listening to a child talk about -
"He put his hand over my mouth. I can smell his hand. It was like sweat and
sort of like bandaids and the slippery stuff. I smell it and I scream a whole
lot. It really hurts. He says he loves me."
- being raped, and the doors of all the trailers and the tents inside his head
are opened and the multitude of children who are his memories limp or creep or
stomp or saunter out into the dusty tracks and dead grass of the fairgrounds.
The first time.
-the boy, pay attention, Lisbon, the boy, say something.
A tall, pretty woman with red hair pinches his cheeks and calls him a flirt. He
beams, and later his father assaults him so brutally that their act is
cancelled for a week.
Get your head in gear, Paddy, get your head in gear, what's she looking at you
like that for, don't let her touch you, step off, don't touch the merchandise -
He flirts with everyone. His father seizes the opportunity and sells him to a
mark - a cool five hundred for an hour with his prepubescent self.
The video has stopped, blue-screened. Play again?
His father owns his body until he is seventeen and makes a run for it with
Angie, Angela, who never knew the depth and breadth of the violence done to his
body, who never would've loved him if she'd known, who never would've let him
hold his baby if she'd known ...
"I never told her," he says. And wants to take it back.
Lisbon looks at him, as she often does, as if he's crazy.
"My wife. I never told her about my father."
"Jane?" It's her patient voice, not her have you gone off the fucking deep end?
tone but the, jesus christ, you have gone off the deep end, tone, the nice
kind, where she feels bad - as if crazy were a very bad thing that she'd never
wish on anyone. He isn't so sure crazy is so terrible. If he were really crazy
- back ward, snake pit, thorazine shuffle crazy - maybe now he would not feel
his father's hands on his body, hear him singing, hear him whispering.
"Jane, what about him?"
Patrick looks at her and breathes and steadies his heart even though he can
feel grimy sheets and frosting all around his lips. "That every day, from the
time I turned eight years old til I left, he took from my body as if it were
his own."
"Jane - "
But he is already gone. Turning from her. Striding back to the office and
collapsing on his couch. He doesn't like the couch much right now but what he
likes doesn't matter, because he has to look like everything is fine.
"Put in a good word for the boy, Lisbon," he says, his arm over his eyes but he
can hear her step distinct from all others.
"Jane."
"Too many kids these days," he says, reaching for one of his books - poetry, a
collection from a small college in one of the small towns they'd visited on an
investigation, "fall through the cracks, Lisbon. Don't have justice done for
them. No one to speak on their behalf."
He hears Rigsby clearing his throat softly, probably loosening his tie. Cho
shuffles papers, stills and shuffles them again. VanPelt will be sitting
straight-backed, knees tight, one hand in her lap, foot jigging.
What's wrong with them? The boy? The boy will have his justice done. Lisbon
will come down on the DA like the horsemen of the apocalypse. The child will
not grow up bent-backed under his father's perversity. No. Of course not.
Patrick feels the heat behind his eyes, the faint dampness on his lashes. He
feels it often when he least expects it, this strangeness, at the laugh of a
little girl or the way two lovers in a park hold hands and match the other's
stride, when the barbs cut close, when someone assures him that it was quick,
the way his child died, and merciful, which he knows, like most assurances, is
a lie.
Like his father loved him.
Before the dampness can escape he drops the book on his face, and feigns sleep,
until the sounds of the office resume their music, and Lisbon's step turns, and
disappears.
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