So Shelly Read Free Page B

Christian in her midthirties who alternately doted on and physically abused Gordon while giving nominal notice to the attention-starved Augusta. May tended to Gordon’s body and his soul. His every morning, from the age of two until thirteen, began with prayer followed by a ritualistic cleansing bath, which May administered with a bar of coarse pumice soap, until long after Gordon was capable of washing himself. The inherited wickedness of Mad Jack had polluted Gordon’s insides, she believed, and the devil’s brand marked the boy’s foot. May Gray’s divine purpose was to reclaim Gordon for Jesus. If her methods were oddly pedophiliac or abusive, the contradiction was lost on her as she caressed, kneaded, stroked, smote, and ultimately sucked the demon’s seed out of him. Gordon never complained.
    Gordon’s exquisite exorcisms ended when Catherine—she had encouraged her children to call her by her first name—passed his wide-open bedroom door as he stood unashamedly naked, admiring himself in the full-length mirror hung on the inside of his bedroom closet door. Her presence inspired no humility or shame in her son. Suspicious,the next day she installed several “nanny-cams,” and that night watched three stomach-turning seconds of a grainy black-and-white video of May masturbating Gordon with her left hand while reciting scripture from a Bible in her right. Only Catherine’s embarrassment and desire to spare herself the publicity and spectacle of a trial kept May Gray from prison.
    The Byron children were educated at home via an online Montessori school, which Catherine had paid the nanny (she would never refer to May by name again) extra to supervise. Both Augusta and Gordon were intellectually gifted and shared their mother’s passion for literature; Catherine’s extensive personal library of literally every book she had ever owned was theirs for carte blanche exploration. She made no allowances for age-appropriate texts, trusting that their natural interests and curiosities would either pique or repulse at the proper developmental stages. Her faith in nature was somewhat shaken one winter night, however, when Gordon was ten and Augusta twelve. She stumbled upon Gordon reading, by flashlight, Erica Jong’s erotic novel
Fear of Flying
to his half sister as the two of them lay giggling beneath the covers on Augusta’s bed.
    Still, books were the one extravagance Catherine lavished upon them without guilt or reservation. The first Saturday of every month was set aside for excursions to Cleveland area bookstores, where daylong book hunts bagged armfuls of reading material sufficient to sustain their voracious literary appetites for the next four weeks. Their challenge was alwaysto consume whatever was purchased before the next month’s safari.
    As neighbors, Shelly and the Byron children were play partners during warm weather months; however, winter on Lake Erie is an inhospitable crone, shooing mortals indoors and out of her frosty company. From early November until late March, Lakers rush from house to car, from car to work, from work to car, and back from car to house, heads down, chins tucked, hands buried in pockets, and eyes, stinging with cold, trained on the nearest portals to warmth and light. A next-door neighbor might as well be the man in the moon, for all the likelihood of any prolonged social intercourse. But during the summer, in the child-starved Acedia, Augusta, Gordon, and Shelly formed a threesome that, according to the ever shortsighted Gordon, “only God or death could destroy,” and he dared either one to try.
    Their front yard was a Great Lake. The backyard was a shallow bay perfect for every kind of water toy imaginable: Jet Skis, sailboats, wakeboards, paddleboats, Kodiaks, kayaks, and canoes. Between the two families, they owned them all. It was swimming, however, that Gordon did best and loved most. Shelly loved the water as much as Gordon, and, even though she wasn’t his match