She almost said: “I’m not sure I was.” But she was not melodramatic that way and she had no doubt that she had, in fact, been rescued. “It was pretty anticlimactic. He ran a red light and just started babbling to the police officer. It turned out that a clerk in Piggly Wiggly had seen us in the store that morning, thought we looked odd, and called the police.”
“What did she notice that no one else had seen all that time? Were you never in public?”
She did not want to lie to Peter, or mislead him, but nor could she tell him everything. “It’s funny, what people don’t see. He had cut my hair—god, he had given me this horrible haircut, it made me cry—and while I didn’t look like a boy, which was what he intended, I certainly didn’t look like the photo of me that was circulating. And I was scared of him, I didn’t mouth off or try to do anything to draw attention to us.”
“You know what?” Peter had said.
“What?” she had asked, fearful. She honestly could not imagine what would happen next, given that she had confided in only one other person, back in high school, and that had ended badly.
“I think you need more coffee.” He didn’t signal the waitress, who was busy with another table, but got up and grabbed the thermal carafe from behind the counter, filled Eliza’s mug. She knew, at that moment, that Peter would always take care of her, if only she would let him.
That had been their pattern for almost twenty years now; they were solicitous of each other, dividing their duties between the world at large and their home. Peter fought the battles beyond the house, while Eliza tried to make sure that the windows were always closed and locked, their alarm system in working order. They were a team.
Over time, of course, she had told him more, in greater detail. Peter never wondered why she was the lucky one. He took it for granted that she was, and he was glad for it. “We don’t ponder why lightning strikes where it does,” he said once. Later, after a London-based magazine had asked him to file dispatches from New Orleans on the first anniversary of Katrina, he had written beautiful passages about the levees, human-designed and maintained systems that had failed spectacularly. He described how arbitrary water was, destroying one neighborhood while leaving another relatively intact. He never said as much, but Eliza believed he had written those words for her, that it was a sonnet of sorts, more proof that Peter understood. Walter was a natural disaster made catastrophic by human failures. She had been on one side of the levee, Holly on the other. Don’t ask why.
Now, packing up his briefcase, getting ready to go, Peter said: “The lawyer, Blanding, told me that Walter’s phone list is up to him, but his visiting list is another matter. It would be almost impossible for you to visit him. But Walter might ask for that, eventually. And if you were interested, it could happen because of who you are, your status.”
She didn’t think she was interested, she was pretty sure she wasn’t interested, but she couldn’t help wondering what Peter had said on her behalf. “What did you tell him?”
He looked surprised. “That it was up to you, of course. It is. I assume you don’t want to see him, but maybe you do. I’ll tell you this much: I’d be more comfortable with you going to see Walter, with security all around, than with you meeting up with this Barbara LaFortuny person. She’s the one who scares me.”
He kissed her temple, said, “Off to make the doughnuts,” and headed out to another one of his twelve-hour days. Eliza no longer really understood what Peter did for a living. She knew what venture capital was, and she knew that Peter had been recruited, in part, for the lucidity of his prose and his ability to explain complicated investment tools to the most unsophisticated investors. But she didn’t really know what he did, much less why it paid so well, and that was a little terrifying. Their old friends, almost all in the newspaper world, were taking buy-outs or pay cuts, getting laid off, and her family was thriving. Again: Don’t ask why.
She drifted over to the computer, entered the name “Barbara LaFortuny.” For an activist, she was suspiciously inactive, leaving few traces of herself in the public sphere, although there was a Baltimore Beacon-Light profile available only in abstract; she would have to pay to read the entire article. She wasn’t that interested, and it was a relief to discover how low her threshold was: She wouldn’t pay $3.95 to find out more about Barbara LaFortuny. But her fingers continued to wander, plugging the name into the images file and recoiling at the one photo that showed up: a woman with three-quarters of her face swathed in bandages. Amazing, the power of an image compared with words. Peter had stood here not five minutes ago and explained that this woman, Walter’s champion, had been a victim of a knife attack. But the horror hadn’t truly registered.
This was why Eliza seldom spoke of the rape. Words could not convey what Walter had done to her, the depth of the betrayal, more brutal than the act itself. And there was no photo, no image, to show the damage he had inflicted. Eliza was not inclined to be competitive about suffering; after all, there were at least two dead girls always at the ready, eager to inform her that she was, in fact, the lucky one, and a whole cadre of possible victims behind them. But she couldn’t help feeling a little superior to Barbara LaFortuny. Just a little. A line from a poem came to her, something about the people who never got suffering wrong. Yet in Eliza’s experience, everyone, even most victims, got suffering wrong. That’s why it was better never to speak of it.
14
1985
THEY DROVE. IF THERE WAS a purpose, a destination, Elizabeth could not pinpoint it. They had dipped down into Virginia, this much was clear from the highway signs, and they sometimes crossed the Shenandoahs into West Virginia. Walter found odd jobs to make cash—chopping wood, for example, to help people with vacation homes prepare for the winter ahead, which Walter said would be a bad one, as bad as last winter, which had seen one of the worst snowstorms in the area’s history. “I feel it in my bones,” he said, and he was being literal. He chopped wood, he did yard work, he fixed things. Elizabeth was surprised by the ease with which he found work, how people looked past her, never questioning why she was with Walter and, after Labor Day passed, not in school. Perhaps they thought she was simpleminded, as simple as Lennie in Of Mice and Men. She seldom spoke. Walter had made it clear that she should answer only direct questions with as few words as possible. And although Walter had purchased clothing for her—two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a sweater, all from JCPenney—she always looked a little dingy because she had to wear each outfit three to four times before they could go to a coin laundry. It was one of the few times he left her alone. He would have her strip down behind a sheet, whether at a motor court or a campsite, then hand him her clothes. He tied her hands, but not her feet, and although he gagged her the first few times, he didn’t even bother with that after a while.
She could, of course, have left the room or the tent, wrapped in nothing but a sheet. Her feet were free. She could have called for help when he stopped gagging her. But it was too embarrassing. She could not get past imagining those first few minutes, when she would be the girl in the sheet, when people would point and laugh and maybe worse. There was the very fact of the… un-loveliness of her body, the potbelly, which was more pronounced from their fast-food, on-the-go diet. She could not imagine walking around in a sheet, worrying about what might be glimpsed, or how it might come untied.
The real problem was that she couldn’t imagine escaping at all. He would kill her. Kill her family. She dreamed of rescue, hoped for it, prayed, but she believed it would have to be something that happened to her, not because of her.