The senator is a regular on primetime news shows, and now every time I see him interviewed, I think, You’re famous. I’ve never met you. I’ve never met your wife. Our lives haven’t touched. But I know this thing that could blow up your world.
I wonder about the people on the periphery of my secret. My parents probably told Father Joe about the rape as they sought counsel from our family priest to help me. I’m sure Pierce bragged about that night to his fraternity brothers, who told their girlfriends, who in turn will use my story someday as a cautionary tale for their daughters.
I imagine my old roommate Rosemary bringing me up as a personal example of being touched by rape. That happened to my college roommate, she might say at a party of fellow suburbanites. I tried to get her to turn him in, call the frat board, anything, but she wouldn’t. She thought it was her fault.
It was my fault. I don’t care what a court of law says about the word no or my polite “please don’t.” I laid myself down in that bed. I was naïve, stupid, shallow, flashing my virginity around like it somehow made me better. A prize somebody could win.
Haywood might still be keeping my secret because it was his, too. That night, Pierce branded us both with humiliation and guilt, the kind that embeds in your skin like a tick and spreads disease.
When my mind travels back there, the shame flares up from the embers, licking at my soul until I find myself flushed and kneeling over the toilet. So I’ve worked at not thinking about it.
Until Clairmont, Texas. This small dot on the map, thousands of miles away from where my story began, is the place that my past and present exploded.
My mother believed that Fate is a compass inside us. If she hadn’t met my father in college, she said, she would have found him somewhere else along the way. We choose our steps, she insisted, but they always take us to the place we’re meant to go.
I don’t know how she could reconcile such loosey-goosey mysticism with her belief in Catholicism, especially if she’d known how she and Dad were going to die.
If you follow her theory, we are responsible for running dead-on into the evil as well as the good.
Misty and Caroline turned out to be both. Good and evil.
My kindred spirits and my tormentors.
They were the catalysts to free my soul.
But their secrets almost killed me.
2
If someone asked a few months ago, I’d say my compass pointed north. But a strange wind blew me here, and I held my breath.
I didn’t want much. Just for every moment to be like this one. Blessedly normal. For the shadows to go poof, little vampires extinguished by the sun.
There was plenty of sun. Mike lay in a yellow patch of it, stretched out on the bed, nursing a bottle of Sam Adams, surrounded by piles of my discarded clothes. He flipped the pages of a Sports Illustrated while absently observing my state of fashion crisis.
I’d ripped open every U-Haul moving box that littered the floor of the room.
“Eyes up here,” I ordered. “What do you think of this?”
“I think it looks good. Just like the last five things you’ve tried on.” He patted the bed. “Why are you worrying about this so much? It’s not like you’re walking into a room full of celebrities. And, I’d like to point out, you’ve actually done that with a lot less drama beforehand.”
I propped the full-length mirror leaning against the wall in a better position to see the side effects of a protruding belly.
“I’d think you’d want me to wow them, chief,” I said, tugging the orange top down so it wouldn’t show the safety pin keeping my pants together. “This makes me look like a construction cone.” I yanked the top over my head and slung it at his head.
I’d started to really show in the last couple of months, but the move and goodbye lunches with colleagues and friends left no time for maternity shopping. In the life I’d resigned, as director of a small SoHo art gallery, I would throw on something black, a gold cuff, and be done with it. But even in the two short weeks we’d been in Texas, I could see that would make me look like a fat crow among a flock of colorful, glittery birds.
“I don’t want to stand out as too… New York. My father always said, ‘Make a bad first impression and you’re digging yourself out of a grave for years, make a good first impression and people-’ ”
“ ‘-will give you the benefit of the doubt forever.’ I’m familiar with the wisdom. And why do you think New York is an instant bad impression?”
“We’re snotty, rude, walk too fast, use big words when little ones will do just fine. Steal their best baseball players.”
Mike moved from the bed to the floor, kneeling with his ear pressed against my bare tummy. “Just be your quirky, sweet self,” he murmured. “Texas thanks God and the Yankees every day for stealing their overpriced baseball players. I hear they’ve incorporated it into the Lord’s Prayer.”
My hand rested gently on his head, shaved bare to avoid the inevitable, the unexpected bonus being that it made him look even fiercer during his seven-year run as an ATF agent. Mike had led a brotherhood of men who carried recessive genes from cavemen ancestors to kill and protect the way others carry genes for cancer and beauty. I’d watched these men drink beer and tease one another in my kitchen like regular guys, but they never, ever truly relaxed. I sleep beside one of them, so I know. They are different from the rest of us.
Our mirror reflected a happy, loving union. No fear, no tension, no anger. No hint of three years of painful infertility treatments, miscarriages, weeks of utilitarian sex, and hot words that nearly ripped us in two.
My eyes remained glued to the couple reflected there, hoping it was real. In Mike’s case, the bald look worked, like it did on men without ridged Cro-Magnon skulls, making him even more attractive than he was before.
“Come on, give me a more detailed rundown on my hostess tonight.” It was my practice to be fully equipped before negotiating a room of strangers.
“Three words,” I demanded. An old game we played.
Mike shrugged. “Rich. Widow. Tragic.”
“OK, need more than that. And your left hand needs to stop right there.”
“I think she lost a son,” he said. “I don’t know if she cast a vote, but she attended my final interview, so she wields power here in little Clairmont. Mostly with her wallet. I was told she provided seed money for some upgrades at the new headquarters.”
So far, my only impression of Caroline Warwick was a soft Southern drawl on the other end of the phone. Three days ago, she invited me to a gathering of the town’s female elite and seemed slightly annoyed when I told her I’d have to get back to her. Despite his casualness now, Mike had urged me to accept. Get to know people, Emily. Help establish our new life.
Texas was not even a glimmer in our wineglasses on those late nights after the stick turned blue and we talked dreams with new urgency.
So Mike was lightly dismissive when an old FBI friend of his mentioned a position leading a well-funded police shop in a high-heeled Southern town, the kind of town rising on Fortune magazine lists. Clairmont, Texas, per capita the wealthiest, most highly taxed city of its size in the country, home to CEOs and Dallas Cowboy football players and Texas land barons and nouveau riche wannabes who carried mountains of mortgage and credit card debt.
But then there was a phone call from a persuasive head-hunter. And another. Mike flew down first-class for two interviews. The salary shone like a gleaming platinum carrot: $175,000 a year, plus a bonus plan tied to lowering the town’s crime statistics, which were mostly connected to rowdy teens. In Texas, that amount of money meant something. Mike feared it also meant he’d been bought. I could tell it bugged him, this worry that he, the caped crusader, was selling out. That maybe he wasn’t hearing the whole story.