Dear Mrs. Peacock

Dear Mrs. Peacock,

I recognize that, at this point in time, you might be dead. I knew you thirtysomething years ago, and my impression of your age at that time is impressionistic at best. But my guess is that you were in your forties or beyond. So if you're not dead yet, you will be soon. Which makes it urgent that I at least try to communicate to you what I failed to say in that dark room all those years ago.

Have you thought of me? Have you wondered what kind of woman that skinny wavy-haired girl grew into after she left the hallowed halls of Tiny Tots? Did you imagine her, perhaps, as a criminal, a supervillain, a woman who would see a man hanging off a building ledge by his fingertips, cackle, and pry those fingertips off? Or grind her shoe into them, like Martin Landau in North by Northwest? That is more or less what that skinny wavy-haired girl did, isn't it?

I remember two things: the moment of accusation, and then the room. It began on the second floor of the playhouse, where, having exhausted the enjoyment potential of that level, I patiently waited my turn to climb out the two-by-two window and down the red plastic ladder to the floor below. The identity of the child in front of me—boy or girl, bully or innocent—is lost, squeezed out of my memory by you, but that child was the catalyst, crying out, pointing, whining: "She pushed me!"

I denied it at that moment, I'm sure I did, though shyness had already manipulated its way into my personality. When a woman of Mrs. Peacock's standing points her finger, even timidity falls away in the presence of the need to defend oneself against false accusation. "No!" I said. "I didn't!" I said that. I'm sure of it.

But to no avail. My memory jump cuts to that room, upstairs I think it was, which I shall describe as it exists in my memory, inaccurate though it may be. The room may have had pink and periwinkle walls, plush mini chairs in primary colors, paintings of dolphins or Star Wars characters or Thanksgiving turkeys on the wall. But none of that exists in my memory, and my memory is likely the only place that room still exists at all. So I might as well consider my version of it the truth.

I sat in an austere wooden chair, the slats digging into my back. You dimmed the lights, except for one exposed bulb hanging from a rope—100 watts for sure—that shone in my face with the intensity of a flashlight, swinging slowly as if the devil himself was blowing on it. You stood over me, sweat stains in your armpits, baton and cuffs hanging threateningly from your belt, and told me to confess. Or maybe it was to apologize. Either way, your MO was the assumption of guilt; never mind that I had already protested my innocence, sworn that the child had fallen without being pushed (or perhaps, I will admit, another child behind me had pushed me, causing me to inadvertently bump into the child at the top of the red ladder, which could be seen as causation but in no way described as "pushing").

So I was silent. I had argued my case in the urgent chaos of the playhouse and was too afraid to argue it again in the face of your angry certainty. We stayed in that room for hours, staring each other down, proving our mettle by not wiping off the perspiration, by not leaving to use the potty or get a glass of juice, by not giving in. You told me you were ashamed. That if I owned up to my crime, all would be forgiven. Whether out of timidity or out of pride in my innocence—or both—I gave you only silence. The heaviest silence a four-year-old could manage. I wonder how it weighed on you.

Did you change my life that day? Did you give me, at an early age, a taste of the arbitrariness of justice, the uselessness of truth, that would inform my weltanschauung through to adulthood? There must be a reason I remember that day as clearly as I remember the time my four-year-old self opened the car door at 40 miles per hour and almost fell out. Equally traumatic—but we all know, Mrs. Peacock, that emotional trauma has greater life-changing potential than mere physical trauma. So, in an effort to lift some of the weight that has sat on my own shoulders lo these thirty-one years, I give you this: I forgive you. I was innocent, and I forgive you.

What can you do to make it up to me, you ask? If that room still exists, Mrs. Peacock, take no child there without proof. Sit no child in that chair; tell no child she is guilty until proven innocent. Even tiny tots deserve due process.