"It's just that what?"
"I guess I expected you to be okay with it."
I yelled horrible things at him. We had never been best friends and now we would cease even to be acquaintances.
Robert Daly showed up. He was a rock. That is how I remember him. We shared a taste for honest criticism in our fiction workshop and a respect for Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. Robert and I weren't close either, but he helped me. I cried in front of him and he didn't like it when I apologized. He took my rocker and daybed and some other items. For a few years, until it became obvious I wouldn't come back for them, he dropped me cards to say my furniture was doing fine and wishing I were there.
I changed, but I didn't know it.
I went home for Thanksgiving. Steve Sherman came over from New Jersey to spend time with me. He had been Lila's friend first, before becoming my boyfriend, and the idea that both of us had been raped overwhelmed him. He told me that when he found out about Lila, he had been in the shower. His roommate had come in to tell him. He'd looked down at his penis and suddenly felt a self-hatred he couldn't describe, knowing that so much violence had come to his friends that way. He wanted to help. He stored the rest of my things and I slept in his spare bedroom. When Lila came back two weeks after her rape for the GRE's, she stayed in his house. He kept me company and volunteered as my security guard, walking me home from work or class.
The division that came was inevitable, I guess. People felt compelled to take sides. It began the night of the rape when the police had come up to me so openly. Lila's friends started avoiding me, looking away or to the side. During her overnight for the GRE's, the police came to Steve's house to do a photo lineup. I was in the bedroom with Lila and two policemen. They spread the small, wallet-size photos out on the desk. I looked over Lila's shoulder.
"I bet you recognize one of these," a uniformed policeman said to me.
They had put a photo of Madison and his lineup buddy, Leon Baxter, in the pack. I was so mad I couldn't speak.
"Is the one who raped her in here?" Lila asked. She was sitting at a desk in front of me. I couldn't see her face.
I left the room. I was sick. Steve reached his arms out and grabbed hold of me.
"What is it?"
"They put a photo of Madison in there," I said.
"But he's still in jail, isn't he?"
"Yes, I think so, yes." I hadn't even thought to ask.
"Attica," a uniform said in answer.
"To have to pick out her rapist and see him there, the focus is all wrong," I said to Steve. "It's not fair."
The door opened. Lila came out into the living room behind the officer who held the mug shots in an envelope.
"We're done here," a policeman said.
"Did you see him?" I asked Lila.
"She saw something," the policeman said. He wasn't happy.
"I'm stopping it now. I'm not going to pursue it," Lila said.
"What?"
"It was a pleasure getting to meet you, Alice," the officer said. He shook my hand. His partner did too.
They left and I looked at Lila. My question must have been obvious.
"It's too much," Lila said. "I want my life back. I watched what it did to you."
"But I won," I said, incredulous.
"I want it to be over," she said. "This way it is."
"You can't just will it away," I said.
But I felt her trying. She took her GRE's and returned home until after Christmas. Our plan was to live together in graduate student housing. Her family was going to loan her a car because it was the only way to get back and forth from campus. That, or the bus, which I would take.
I'll never know what the police said to Lila in that room or whether or not she saw her rapist among those men. At the time, I couldn't understand her decision not to pursue it, although I thought I did. The police had a theory that Lila might have been raped out of revenge. They based this on several things. Madison, though in Attica, had friends. He had been given a maximum sentence and would be inside a bare minimum of eight years. The rapist knew my name. Raped her on my bed. Asked after me while he did. He knew my schedule and that I was a waitress at Cosmos. All this could have been evidence of a connection to Madison, or it could just have been the thorough research of a criminal intent on finding his victim alone. I still choose to believe that part of the horror of the crime was in its cruel coincidence. Conspiracy seemed a stretch to me.
Lila didn't want to know. She wanted out of it.
The police interviewed my friends. They went to Cosmos and interviewed the owner and the man who flipped the pizzas inside the front window. But there were other rapes being done with a similar MO to Lila's. If Lila wouldn't prosecute, any link to me was now inconsequential. They had no witness and, with no witness, no case. The police dropped their investigation. Lila went home until January. She gave me a copy of her schedule. I told her teachers why she wouldn't be in attendance at finals. I called her friends.
My life became streamlined, and the fallout began.
I went home for Christmas.
My sister was depressed. She had graduated and won a Fulbright, but was now living at home and working in a garden shop. Her Arabic major was not translating into the job she had hoped for. I went to her room to cheer her up. At some point she said, "Alice, you just don't understand, everything comes so easily for you." I sputtered in my disbelief. A wall went up. I cut her out.
I had nightmares now even more vivid than before. My sporadic journal of those years is full of them. The recurring image is one I'd seen in a documentary of the Holocaust. There are fifty or sixty chalk-white and emaciated dead bodies. Their clothes have been stripped from them. The clip shows a bulldozer rolling them into a deep, open grave, the bodies plunging as a tangled whole. Faces, mouths, skulls with eyes set deep, the minds inside gone to unimaginable lengths in order to have survived. Then this. Darkness, death, filth, and the idea that one person could be struggling, trying to stay alive in there.
I woke up in cold sweats. Sometimes I screamed. I would turn over and lie facing the wall. Enter the next step: Awake now, I consciously played out the intricate plot of my almost death. The rapist was inside the house. He was climbing up the stairs. He knew, on instinct, which steps would betray him by a noise. He was loping down the hall. A breeze came through the front window. No one would think to question it if they were awake in the other rooms. A light scent of another person, someone else in the house, would waft into them, but like one small noise, it would warn no one but me that something was going to happen. I would feel then my door opening, a sense of another presence in the room, the air changed to allow for a human weight. Far away, near my wall, something was breathing my air, stealing my oxygen. My breath would grow shallow and I would make a promise to myself: I would do anything the man wanted. He could rape me and cut me and take off my fingers. He could blind me or maim me. Anything. All I wanted to do was live.
Resolved, I would gather my strength. Why was he waiting like this? I would turn slowly around in the dark. Where the man stood so vividly in my imagination, there was no one, there was the door to my closet. That was all. Then I would turn on the light and check the house, going up to each door and trying the knob, sure it would give and there he would be, standing on the other side and laughing at me. Once or twice the noise I made woke my mother. "Alice?" she would call out.
"Yes, Mom," I said, "it's just me."
"Go back to sleep."
"I will," I said. "I'm just getting something to eat."
Upstairs in my bedroom, I would try to read. Not look at the closet, or, quickly, over to the door.
I never questioned what was happening to me. It all seemed normal. Threat was everywhere. No place or person was safe. My life was different from other people's; it was natural that I behaved differently.