I considered toughing it out, but the pains were too intense. My stomach was cramping. At the end of a poem, I stood and noisily made my way between people's knees and the back of the row of seats in front of me.
Out in the hall, I called Marc. He had a car. I told him to meet me at Bird Library. I was too sick to take the bus home, I had used the same phone two years before to call my parents, but I had scrupulously avoided it since then. That night I failed to honor superstition.
Marc had to take a shower. "Twenty minutes at most," he said.
"I'll be the one cleaving to my abdomen," I tried to joke. "Try to hurry."
As I waited outside Bird, I began to tense up even more. Something was wrong but I had no idea what it was.
Finally, after forty minutes, Marc pulled up. We drove off campus and up Euclid, where many students lived in run-down wooden houses.
We turned the corner onto my street. Up at the end of the block, where Lila and I lived, were five black-and-whites with their lights going. The policemen were out running around, talking to people.
I knew.
"Oh my God, oh my God," I started saying. "Let me out, let me out."
Marc was flustered. "Let me park, let me go with you."
"No, let me out, now."
He drove into a driveway and I got out. I didn't wait for him. All the lights were on in our building. Our front door was open. I walked right in.
Two uniformed policemen stopped me in the small foyer.
"This is a crime scene. You'll have to leave."
"I live here," I said. "Is it Lila? What happened? Please."
Involuntarily I started peeling off the layers of my clothing and letting them fall on the floor. My winter hat, my scarf, my gloves, jacket, and down vest. I was frantic.
In our living room, there were more cops. One of the uniforms made a gesture to someone there and began, "She says she lives-"
"Alice?" the plainclothes detective said.
I recognized him instantly.
"Sergeant Clapper?"
When I said his name, the uniforms ceased restraining me.
"It's Detective Clapper now," he said, smiling. "What are you doing here?"
"I live here," I said. "Where's Lila?"
His face fell. "I'm so sorry," he said.
I noticed the policemen looking at me differently than before. Marc entered the apartment. I told the uniforms he was my boyfriend.
"Alice Sebold?" one of them asked.
I turned back to Clapper. "Was she raped?"
"Yes," he said. "On the bed in the back bedroom."
"That's my room," I said. "Is she okay?"
"The female detective's in with her now. We need to have her examined at the hospital. You can drive with us in the car. She didn't struggle."
I asked to see her. Clapper said, "Of course," and went back to inform Lila I was there.
I stood there, feeling the eyes of the uniformed policemen on me. They knew my case because it had been one of the few convictions in a rape case in recent years. In their world, my case was famous. It had brought Clapper up in the ranks. Whoever worked on the case had benefited from it.
"I can't believe it. I can't. This cant be happening," I said over and over again to Marc. I don't remember what he said back to me. I was beginning to rally myself, to assume a control I didn't have.
"She doesn't want to see you," Clapper said, upon his return. "She's afraid she'll break down if she does. She'll be out in a few minutes and you can ride with them to the hospital."
I was hurt, but I understood.
I waited. I told Marc that I would be in for the long haul-the hospital, the police-and that he should go home and make his place nice. The three of us would sleep there, Lila and I in the bed, he in his living room.
The police made small talk. I started pacing. One of the uniforms gathered my clothes from the foyer and brought them over to the couch near me.
Then Lila was coming out of the room. She was shaken. Her hair was disheveled but I saw no marks on her face. A short, dark-haired woman in uniform trailed her.
She was wearing my robe, but it was belted with another tie. Her eyes were bottomless-lost. I couldn't have reached her then no matter how hard I tried.
"I'm so sorry," I said. "You'll be okay. You'll make it. I did," I said.
We stood there looking at each other, both of us crying.
"Now we really are clones," I said.
The female detective moved us along.
"Lila says you have another roommate."
"Oh my God, Pat," I said. I had forgotten him until that moment.
"Do you know where he is?"
"The library."
"Can someone get to him?"
"I want to go with Lila."
"Then leave him some kind of note; we don't want him touching things. And he should stay somewhere else tonight until we can secure that back window."
"At first, I thought it was Pat playing a prank on me," Lila said. "I came back from the bathroom and the door to my bedroom was farther out from the wall than usual, like someone was standing behind it. So I pushed it in and he pushed it out and back and forth until I got tired of it and said, 'Come on, Pat,' and walked into the room. He threw me on the bed."
"We've got an exact time," the female detective said. "She looked up at her digital clock. It was eight fifty-six P.M."
"When I felt sick," I said.
"What?" The female detective looked mystified.
I didn't know where to stand. I was not the victim. I was the victim's friend. The detective took Lila out to the car, and I hurriedly went into Pat's room.
I did something nasty. I used the speculum to weigh down the note. I left it on his pillow because the rest of the room was a mess. I could be certain he'd see it there: "Pat, Lila was raped. She is physically okay. Call Marc. You need to find somewhere else to stay tonight. I'm sorry to have to tell you this way."
I left the light on in his room and looked at it. I decided not to care about Pat-I couldn't. He would be okay, bounce back. It was Lila now.
We drove to the hospital in silence. I sat in the back with Lila and we held hands.
"It's horrible," she said at one point. "I feel filthy. All I want to do is shower."
I squeezed her hand.
"I know," I said.
We had to wait what seemed an interminable time in the emergency room. It was crowded and because, I've always assumed, she had not struggled and had no open wounds, could sit upright and talk coherently, she was made to wait. Repeatedly, I went up to the woman in admissions and asked her why we had to wait. I sat with Lila and helped her fill out the insurance form. There had been none of this for me. I had been wheeled directly in, from ambulance gurney to examination room.
Finally they called her. We walked down the hall and found the room. The examination was long and plodding, and several times we had to wait while the man examining her was called into various other rooms. I held her hand as Mary Alice had held mine. Tears rolled down my face. Toward the end Lila said, "I want you to leave." She asked for the female detective. I went and got her and sat in the waiting room, shaking.
My nightmares had never let Lila be raped. She and Mary Alice were safe. Lila was my clone, my friend, my sister. She had heard every part of my story and still loved me. She was the rest of the world-the pure half-but now she was with me. While I waited, I became convinced that I could have prevented Lila's rape. By coming home faster, by knowing instinctively that something was wrong, by never having asked her to be my friend in the first place. It didn't take me long before I thought, and then said, "It should have been me." I began to worry for Mary Alice.
I shook, and I wrapped my arms around my shoulders and rocked back and forth in my seat. I felt nauseous. My whole world was turning over; whatever else I'd had or known became eclipsed. There was no chance to escape, I realized; from now on this would be it. My life and the lives of those around me. Rape.
The female detective came out for me.