Lucky

"What is it, Alice?" she asked.

"I just saw him, Mom," I said.

"Saw who?" my father asked, as always two beats back.

"The rapist."

I don't remember their reaction. I couldn't. I was calling because I needed them to know, but, once I told them, I did not wait, I rushed at them with facts. "I'm going to tell Professor Wolff I can't come to class. I've called Ken Childs, he's meeting me to walk me home. I want to make a sketch."

"Call us when you get there," my mother said. I remember that. "Have you called the police?" my father asked.

I did not hesitate. "Not yet," I said, which meant to all of us that it was not a yes-or-no question. I would call them. I would pursue this.

I went up the stairs to where my workshop was held, and ran into Wolff as he was about to enter the English office.

The other students were filtering inside. I approached him. "Professor Wolff," I said, "can I talk to you?"

"It's class time, we'll talk after."

"I can't make it to class, that's what it's about."

I knew he would not be happy. I did not know how not happy he would be. He proceeded to tell me how lucky I was to be in the class, and that missing this one class was equivalent to missing three classes of a regular undergraduate course. All this I knew. All this had been why I walked blindly up to Humanities Hall instead of returning directly to my dorm.

I begged Wolff to give me just two minutes of his time. To talk to me in his office, not the hall. "Please," I said. Something in the way I said it called to that place inside him beyond the formal rules of the classroom, which I knew he valued. "Please," I said, and he responded-still it was a concession-with, "It will have to be brief."

I followed him down the short hall, turned the corner after him, and stood there while he unlocked the door. Looking back, I can't believe how calm I remained from the moment I saw my rapist on the street to that moment, inside Wolff's office, with the door closed. Now I was with a man I knew would not hurt me. For the first time, I thought it was safe to exhale. He sat facing me while I hovered over and then sat in the student chair.

I burst.

"I can't come to class. I just saw the man who raped me. I have to call the police."

I remember his face and I remember it vividly. He was a father. I knew this vaguely at the time. He had little boys. He came near me. He wanted to comfort, but then, instinctually, he pulled back. I was a rape victim; how would I interpret his touch? His face fell into the recesses reserved for the pure confusion one expresses when there is nothing on this earth that he or she can do to make something better.

He asked if he could make a call, if I had a way home, what, if anything, he could do. I told him I had called a friend who would meet me at the library and walk me home, where I would phone the police.

Wolff walked me back out into the hall. Before he let me go-my mind already working on putting one foot in front of the other, thinking of the phone call to the police, repeating over and over again in my head maroon windbreaker, blue jeans rolled at cuffs, Converse All-Star sneakers-Wolff stopped me and put both hands on my shoulders.

He looked at me and when it was clear to him that for that second he held my attention, he spoke.

"Alice," he said, "a lot of things are going to happen and this may not make much sense to you right now, but listen. Try, if you can, to remember everything."

I have to restrain myself from capitalizing the last two words. He meant them to be capitalized. He meant them to resound and to meet me sometime in the future on whatever path I chose. He had known me for two weeks. I was nineteen. I sat in his class and drew flowers on my jeans. I had written a story about sewing dummies that came to life and sought revenge on dressmakers.

So it was a shout across a great distance. He knew, as I was later to discover when I walked into Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York and bought This Boy's Life, Wolff's own story, that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.

The walk to the library, only two hundred yards across the front of the quad and on the other side of the street fronting the Hall of Languages, was a walk I made on automatic. I became a machine. I think it must be the way men patrol during wartime, completely attuned to movement or threat. The quad is not the quad but a battlefield where the enemy is alive and hiding. He waits to attack the moment you let your guard down. The answer-never let it down, not even for a second.

With every nerve ending pushing out against the edges of my skin, I reached Bird Library. Although I was still wary, I allowed myself to exhale here. I walked through the fluorescent light. It being still early in the semester, the library was not busy. The few people I passed, I did not look at. I didn't want to meet anyone's eyes.

I could not wait for Ken; I was too afraid to stop. I kept walking. Bird was constructed so that by walking through the building, I could exit on the other side of the block, no man's land. It was a street populated by old wood frame houses, many of them used by fraternities and sororities, but it was no longer the sanctified quad. The streetlights were fewer here and in the time it had taken me to walk from Marshall Street to tell Wolff I couldn't come to class, it had grown dark. I had only one goaclass="underline" to get back to my dorm without injury and to write down everything he'd worn, to detail the features of his face.

I got there. I don't remember seeing anyone. If I did, I brushed by them without comment. Inside my small single, I called the police. I explained my situation. I had been raped in May, I said, I was now back on campus and had seen my assailant. Would they come?

Then I sat down on my bed and made a sketch. I had written out details. I started with his hair, went next to height, build, nose, eyes, mouth. Then there were comments on his face structure: "Short neck. Small but dense head. Boxy jawline. Hair slightly down in front." And his skin: "Pretty dark but not black black." At the bottom of the sheet, in the left-hand corner, I did a sketch of him and beside this noted his clothing: "Maroon jacket-windbreaker-style but with down. Jeans-blue. White sneakers."

Then Ken showed up. He was out of breath and nervous. He was a small, fragile man-the year before, I had romantically compared him to a pint-size David. So far, he had not shown much ability to handle my situation. Over the summer he had written once. He explained, and at the time I accepted it, that he had reinvented what had happened to me so it wouldn't hurt him as much. "I have decided it is like a broken leg and like a broken leg, it will heal."

Ken tried to improve on my sketch, but he was too nervous-his hands shook. He sat on my bed and looked very small to me, frightened. I decided he was a warm body who knew me, who meant well. That had to be enough. He made several attempts to draw the head of the rapist.

There were sounds in the hall. Walkie-talkies tuned to a self-important pitch, the sound of heavy footsteps. Fists thumped against the door and I answered them as girls came out into the hall.

Syracuse University Security. They had been alerted by the police. They were amped. This was the real shit. Two of them were quite wide and, in my tiny studio, their size was accentuated.

Within seconds, the Syracuse City Police arrived. Three of them. Someone shut the door. I relayed my story again and there was a slight squabble about jurisdiction. The SU Security seemed personally disappointed that since the original incident had happened in Thorden Park and the sighting was on Marshall Street, it was clearly a City of Syracuse matter and not a campus one. On a professional level, this reflected well on them, but they were not as much university representatives that night as they were hunters with a fresh scent.

The police looked at my sketches and Ken's. They repeatedly referred to Ken as my boyfriend, though I corrected them each time. They eyed him suspiciously. In his slight physique and nervousness, he stood out as a freak in a room populated by large men armed with guns and billy clubs.