"I'll get a summer job, I guess," I said.
"I'm hoping we'll go to trial soon," she said. "You will be available, won't you?"
"It's my number-one priority," I said, not putting it together until years later: In rape cases, it was almost expected that the victim would drop out of the process even if she originally initiated it.
"Alice, let me ask you something," she said, her tone shifting a bit.
"Yes?"
"Will you have someone with you from home?"
"I don't know," I said.
I had talked to my parents about this during the Christmas holidays and then again at Easter. My mother had spoken to her psychiatrist, Dr. Graham, about it, and my father fretted that the longer the trial was postponed, the greater the chance it would ruin his annual trip to Europe.
Until recently I believed that their final decision, that he would be the one who came with me, was based on her own inability to be there-the unpredictable chances of a flap. But as it turned out, Dr. Graham had counseled her to go despite her panic.
In the phone call in which my mother told me how the decision had ultimately been made, I stayed quiet. I asked the questions a reporter would ask. Numbly, I gathered the information. My mother was peeved at Graham, she said, because, of course, Graham would "support the professional, i.e., your father."
"So Dad didn't want to come with me either?" I asked, playing out what she'd begun.
"Of course not, his precious Spain awaited."
What I came away with was the fact that neither one of them had wanted to be at the trial with me. They had their reasons; I acknowledge these.
Finally, it was decided, my father would come with me. I held out a small corner of hope, up until the moment my father and I boarded the plane, that my mother would park her car in the long-term lot and rush in. No matter how tough my pose, I both wanted and needed her.
By the close of her senior year, Mary had mastered fifteen Arab dialects and won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Damascus in Syria. I was both jealous and in awe. I made my first, but not my last, joke about our respective majors. "Yours may be Arabic," I said. "It looks like mine is rape."
Mary excelled academically in a way I never could, perhaps in a way I was too distracted to ever attempt. But the truth was, Mary had been escaping via academics for a long time. Raised in a house where my mother's problems provided the glue of family, she patterned herself after my father. Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.
I had not quite given up on the idea of the blissful sibling relationship that my mother wanted for us, but events always conspired, it seemed, to make this impossible. The City of Syracuse scheduled testimony to begin on May 17, the same day as my sister's commencement ceremony at Penn. I continually stole her spotlight whether I wanted to or not.
I talked to Gail. They could not reschedule the trial, but they would lead with the other witnesses and somehow work it so I could testify on the second day. My father and I booked a flight for the evening of the seventeenth. Directly after Mary's graduation, my mother would drop us off at the Philadelphia airport. Until then, my mother, father, and I agreed, Mary's day would be our focus.
My mother, Mary, and I went clothes shopping-Mary for a dress to wear to graduation, me for an outfit for the trial.
Both my sister and I had strayed far from the way we were dressed as children, my mother having a penchant for the colors of the flag. Mary went toward dark greens and creams, I went to black and blue. But for the trial, I ceded my Gothic tendencies to my mother. I put her firmly in control. I would wear, as it resulted, a red blazer, a white blouse, a blue skirt.
In the evening, on the sixteenth, my father and I packed. On the seventeenth, we all dressed in our separate rooms and prepared for the drive down to Penn. I took a last look in my mirror. Whatever the trial's result, my part in it would be over by the time I saw myself there again. I was going to Syracuse and would meet and see many people, but all I thought about was the one appointment I had to keep. I had a date with Gregory Madison. As I opened the door of my bedroom I breathed deeply. I shut myself off. I turned myself on. I was Mary's little sister-excited, ebullient, alive.
At the ceremony, my father would march in his Princeton colors. Mary and he stood with us in the crowded lobby of the auditorium, where mothers and fathers fussed over the last-minute set of mortarboards, and one woman, unhappy with her daughter's mascara, spit-washed the black flecks from under her eyes. Extended families surrounded the happy graduates, flashbulbs popped, and self-conscious girls and boys tried to make mortarboards look less than nerdy by tilting them on their heads.
My grandmother, mother, and I found our seats on the main floor, to the side of the large body of graduating students. I stood on my chair to find Mary. I spotted her smiling beside another girl, a friend of hers I didn't know.
After the ceremony, we celebrated with a lunch at the Faculty Club. My mother took too many pictures of us on the concrete benches outside. My mother still has an enlargement framed and mounted from that day. I used to wish that she would take it down. But it commemorates an important day in our family: my sister's graduation, my rape trial.
I don't remember the airport. I remember the rush from a day of celebration into the onset of dread. Once in Syracuse, we were met by Detective John Murphy from the DA's office. This man, with prematurely gray hair and a friendly smile, approached my father and me as we located the signs for the main terminal.
"You must be Alice," he said, and extended his hand.
"Yes." How had he known me?
He introduced himself to my father and to me, told us his job-to act as our escort over the next twenty-four hours-and offered to carry my bag. As we walked briskly toward the exit, he explained our accommodations and that Gail would meet us in the cafe in the lobby.
"She wants to go over the testimony," he said.
Finally, I asked, "How did you know who I was?"
He looked blankly at me. "They showed me some photos."
"I would have hoped I looked better than that, if they're the photos you mean."
My father was tense; he walked at a remove from us.
"You're a beautiful girl, you can tell that even in those photos," Murphy said. He was smooth. He knew the answers to give and the things to say.
In the county car on the way to the hotel, Murphy talked over his shoulder to my father, making eye contact with him in the rearview at lights and turns.
"Follow sports, Mr. Sebold?" he asked.
My father did not.
Murphy tried fishing.
My father did his best here but had little to go on. If Murphy had gotten up at 5:00 A.M. to study Cicero, they might have had something to start with.
We ended up on Madison.
"Even in holding," Murphy said, "I might go up there and say 'thanks' to a guy, act all friendly with him. Then I leave. That gets them in trouble with the other inmates, makes them look like an informer. I'll do that to that puke if you want."
I don't remember my response, if I had any. I was aware of my father's discomfort and, in turn, aware that my own comfort with such talk had grown during the last year. I liked men like Murphy. Their quick, exact talk. Their no-bones-about-it demeanor.
"They don't like rapists," Murphy informed my father. "It can go rough on them. They hate child molesters the most, but rapists aren't much above."
My father acted interested, but I think he was scared. He found talk like this distasteful. He liked to be in control of a discussion and if he wasn't, he usually opted out. This meant his paying attention itself was something out of the ordinary.