‘I guess he just can’t.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘When I saw them together I thought they were a matched set, and you say they were in love for at least two years. But I guess Stan’s just weak, or something.’

  ‘Like it was her fault!’ Mimi interrupted.

  ‘I’m not defending him,’ I said gently. ‘I’m just trying to understand, because I need to. I have to stay in the class.’

  ‘I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But you know how broken up Barbara is, and Stan acting like this is all she needs, right? Now is when she needs him most. Now is when he bows out. Remember how she kept asking?’

  I didn’t want to remember our visit to Barbara. I’d suffered with, and for, Barbara Tucker as much as our limited acquaintance would allow, since I’d so naturally liked her at first meeting. Now I was weary of the pain and fear her situation had given me.

  But I couldn’t help remembering. I heard again her bewildered voice asking Mimi if she knew why Stan hadn’t been by. That had been the day after the rape, when Barbara was still disoriented and in pain.

  When Stan had dropped her at the door, she told us, they’d both been sleepy from too much to drink. Stan started back to his own place to collapse. Barbara had climbed the steps to the front door of her garage apartment as usual – probably making a lot of noise, since she was clumsy from the bourbon.

  The man had already broken in the back door. He was waiting for her in the dark. When she’d reached to turn on the light, she had instead touched an arm.

  We could scarcely bear to hear it, but Barbara went on and on in a shaky voice. She had finally fainted. After the rape. When he hit her on the jaw.

  But it wasn’t over when she’d come to. It wasn’t over for a while. Now it would never be over; never. That was what had shaken me to the core, so painfully that I’d recoiled from Barbara. What had happened to her could not be mended, healed, shoved aside, bought off, glossed over. It was irreparable.

  In New York, I’d known women and men who’d been robbed on the street or burglarized. But by chance I’d never been close to anyone who’d been the victim of a personal and violent attack by another human being.

  Like Heidi Edmonds, Barbara had never seen her attacker’s face. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what he looked like: eyes, hair, build, or anything.

  But he had called her Barbara.

  Mimi and I agreed later, once we’d gotten home and calmed down a little, that his knowing her name might mean a great deal, or nothing at all. If he’d been stalking her (Stalking? In Knolls?), he’d have easily found it out. On the other hand, he might be someone she knew well. She seemed sure of it. And that was so unthinkable that we just blotted it out.

  6

  TWO MONTHS went by while my thoughts were turned to my books. Those weeks were so full of adjustments and assignments requiring all my concentration that the outer world just had to get along without my participation.

  Alicia dropped by from time to time, and we went to dinner at her house. Ray seemed to like me more now that I was doing something as ordinary as finishing college. Whenever I talked about my life in New York, though, those pale eyes would flicker.

  Mimi and I met Cully at the Houghtons’ for a Sunday brunch. It was an uncomfortable meal. Mimi and Elaine sniped at each other from the underbrush, and Don still had that gleam in his eye that made me uneasy. Cully, too, was at his dryest that day. He said his counseling load at the college was much heavier than he’d expected – a lot of freshman students were already having qualms about attending college at all. They were homesick. He and I seemed to have established some kind of truce. The talk and feel of things between us was easier and more relaxed. I caught him watching me at odd moments, and developed the notion that he was beginning to see me as a rounded human being, not just a beautiful dodo. But that was the only bright spot of the meal.

  I decided to ruin the day good and proper, so I called my mother. She’d been to church, come home, and started drinking. Jay wasn’t there. She tried hard to sound sober, but I knew she wasn’t. However, she was proud of my going back to college, and she managed to ask correctly after the Houghtons and send a polite message to them. Mother also said one curious thing. She told me, quite out of the blue, that she hadn’t told Jay where I was.

  I was going to have to think about that.

  Before I went to sleep that night, I decided that Jay might have dropped a hint to Mother, God knows why, that he’d gotten rough with me all those years ago. It also occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d known Mother to hold off drinking long enough to get dressed and go to church. I tried to cancel that thought; I pinched myself in punishment. I would not hope.

  Time ran through my fingers as my life with Mimi settled into a comfortable routine. Having two separate floors to live on made that much easier. We didn’t collide in the bathroom, we didn’t keep each other awake with lights or music or studying. Our most serious disagreement was the great debate about when to put the garbage out – the night before pickup was due, so we wouldn’t have to surge out in our bathrobes at the crack of dawn, but the dogs often got it; or early in the morning, in which case the dogs still might get it, but not if we watched to shoo them off. We solved this knotty problem by alternating garbage duty instead of sharing it.

  Because of our lavish cooking I gained four pounds, which Mimi swore became me. I thought I looked like I’d swallowed a cantaloupe.

  Attila became quite possessive. He cuffed Mao un-mercifully when the smaller cat ventured too close to me. I grew used to studying with a heavy load of tabby on my lap. When I was alone, I discussed things with Attila in disgusting baby talk. Mimi overheard me a couple of times and made graphic gagging noises.

  Occasionally I heard from New York friends. Their phone calls seemed like communications from a foreign land. I was sliding back into my own. My speaking cadence slowed. I didn’t wear camouflage on the street. My manners resumed their former polish. My way of thinking reverted (a little) to the labyrinthine.

  But mostly I studied. I had to. If I wasn’t reading, I was writing: not the novels of my dreams, but essays and term papers of one kind or another.

  I dated a friend of Charles’s once or twice. He was nothing worth working at, just good for a mildly pleasant evening; for one thing, he talked about duck hunting too much. But our double dates gave me a chance to observe Mimi with Charles. To my relief, she showed distinct signs of finally having developed a streak of caution and a sense of her own rights.

  Sometimes she sang in a fair-to-middling alto as she got ready for a date, and sometimes she had that exalted, melted, ‘in love’ look. But more often she seemed thoughtful. I was glad to see that; I hadn’t brought myself to like Charles yet though I was trying. And I did not, repeat did not, criticize him to Mimi. But perhaps she sensed my anxiety. He was courting her at such a furious clip that I’d become semiseriously concerned about finding another place to live in Knolls, in case Charles really did succeed in sweeping her off her feet and to the justice of the peace. Housing in Knolls was no idle concern. Because of the shortage of dormitory space, every doghouse and garage in town was rented during the college year. Barbara Tucker had had an awful time finding a place to live after she got raped. She just hadn’t been able to stand her garage apartment any longer.

  Poor Barbara. She was the only specter on a horizon I found full of promise, and she was becoming a very faint wraith. I was truly busy, desperately busy; and the tiny tremor in her voice reminded me that I should, must, treat her specially. She was of the walking wounded. She marched down the sidewalks of Houghton very swiftly, and very alone. Stan’s defection had proved permanent. From a comment she dropped during one of our rare meetings, I got the idea she was seeing Cully professionally, and I hoped my surmise was correct. Cully’s calm, restraint and precision would be comforting to a woman in Barbara’s situation, I thought.

  Talk about Barbara’s rape was no longer current in Knolls, partly because neither Heidi Edmonds (the first victim) nor Barbara had ever been figures in the mainstream of town life. According to Mimi, the feeling prevailed that the rapes were a campus problem – though plenty of residents strolled through the gardens, and of course Barbara’s rape had happened off-campus. The scare had hit hard only among faculty wives and town women who worked at the college. These women watched what went on around them more carefully, and many installed extra locks. The female students went in pairs after dark, at least while the fear was fresh.

  Mimi and I were conscientious about locking the doors every night and I tried to do all my library work before I came home to supper. We decided we were doing everything we reasonably could to make ourselves safe. I distinctly remember the phrase ‘fortress mentality’ coming into our conversation when we discussed security measures.

  On the whole, this was a pleasant and rewarding period in my life. I loved it. I was living in a place I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, spending time with a friend I cherished. I was slowly making more friends. The ladder was gone; I didn’t have to climb it, or scrabble to keep my place on it anymore. I seldom turned on the bulbs of my mirror for that dark close examination.

  Late October had never seemed so full of golden light.

  7

  I WAS JERKED OUT of sleep so suddenly and violently that the shock robbed me of breath. A hand was clamped over my mouth. If I had had any air, I would have screamed.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ whispered the figure that was only a darker part of the darkness filling the room.

  That figure was not Mimi or Cully or anyone who had a right to be there. In the worst moment of my life I knew clearly what was going to happen.

  I couldn’t breathe, I had to breathe. I lifted my hand to knock his away, let me breathe!

  ‘Don’t move, I have a knife,’ he whispered.

  He held it up into a shaft of moonlight he was careful not to cross. I saw the blade, as he wanted me to.

  Oh my God I’m going to die.

  And I imagined the blood soaking the sheets, and God bless Mimi, she would find me. I was going to die and I wanted to live.

  My heart was pounding so erratically and loudly that I feared a heart attack, too – fear was going to kill me, fear and the knife, fear or the knife. This was my end; this secret dark and hideous incubus was going to end Nickie Callahan, and my God I couldn’t breathe.

  There was hate filling the darkness around me, hate trickling down that shaft of moonlight. I was sick from the hate and the fear.

  He moved his hand and I gasped air, air, oh Jesus, let me live! The hand had risen to gain impetus for the smashing blow it delivered to the side of my face. I choked on blood and pain.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he warned me, and then he hit me again. And again.

  Sometime before the fifth blow I was still conscious enough to begin to hate, for my hate to match his; conscious enough to want his death for the death he was dealing me.

  I heard the ordinary sound of a zipper rasping.

  He put the extra pillow over my face and he raped me.

  I twisted my head to one side under the pillow’s smothering pressure and breathed wonderful air for the minutes I had left. My arms were locked protectively across my chest. I could feel his head brushing them. I wrenched my mind away from my body. I loathed the thing that lay on me. What was happening bore no relation to anything I’d experienced before. This was not sex but punishment. He hated me. He was going to kill me. And I couldn’t move to defend myself. If I moved I would surely die, and there was a chance, some kind of chance, there had to be . . . a chance that I would live . . . if I stayed still.

  The incubus owned my life.

  Where was the knife? Somewhere it was waiting to slide into me, between my ribs, ripping me, violating me in another way. Both his hands were occupied (don’t feel, Nickie), the knife must be somewhere in the tangle of sheets.

  But I couldn’t move to find it.

  My heart pounded erratically, on and on, frantically wanting an end to this. I knew the end would be soon.

  Then it was over. He was off me, and I heard a fumbling in the dark as he zipped up his pants. My silent screams had compounded into such a noise inside me that I could barely hear the things he was whispering. I was glad of that. I had reached the bottom of humiliation and helplessness.

  He hit me again, body blows now; over and over, and I thought it would maybe be better if he went on and used the knife. The fear would be over, the pain would end. I was going to die soon. There was no chance of my living. I could feel that rage, taste it in the blood in my mouth – my rage and his. He surely wouldn’t let me survive to hate him this much.

  He bent to my ear, bent to the air gap under the pillow. ‘I might come back, you superior bitch,’ he whispered. ‘Think about that. I might come back.’

  I suddenly realized that he meant to leave me alive this time – alive. This bastard was going to permit me to live; and I hated him, it throbbed in the blood pumped by my exhausted heart.

  ‘Don’t move, or I’ll kill you, Nickie,’ he whispered again. ‘Do you understand?’

  I nodded somehow; he must have seen the pillow shift. Then a funny sound. It came to me that I was hearing gloves sliding onto hands.

  A final ‘Don’t move.’ I felt a stir in the air.

  I was going to live.

  He was leaving.

  If I had gotten up, and to the window, perhaps I could finally have seen him. I couldn’t move. Nothing could get me off that bed. My muscles were locked, and fear was still shrieking through my veins and arteries.

  I had survived.

  I stared into the darkness from under the pillow wet with my blood – but not my lifeblood. The fact that I was going to live filled the universe under that pillow.

  But he might come back even now. I sensed he was gone; but he might be back, he might be just in the next room. Had he meant immediately? Or had he meant some night in the future?

  Oh God I can’t stand it if he comes back. I can’t survive it again.

  There was not such a thing as time. There was only breath after breath, one more breath that I had lived, then another . . . In. Out. Not dead, I’m not dead, alive alive alive. In. Out.

  There came a breath when I was convinced he was gone.

  In one convulsive shove I threw the pillow from my face and the chilly night touched my face. I stared into the dark corners of the room. Even the shaft of moonlight had vanished, covered by clouds.

  It was really over. It had really happened. I smelled of it, to my sick disgust. I had lived through it. And I had to have help. I managed to roll. I stretched my arm. I found the switch on my bedside lamp.

  Light. Blessed light, emptying the room of shadows that might hold him. He was truly gone; I would truly live. I was filled with an intense shock of astonishment.

  Now. If I could get up. I looked down at my body and shuddered, feeling more naked than I had thought it possible to feel. There was damage. He must have worn a ring; maybe he’d put one on especially to cause more damage. I felt as sorry for my body as if it were a separate thing, not a part of me. My mind pitied my body for what had happened to it. It had to be covered, poor bleeding raped thing. I had to reach the closet to cover up that bruised body. I didn’t want it to be naked anymore, ever.

  But the closet was a few feet away. Need drove me. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, bringing them together in a tight protective parallel. Holding on to the bed table, I stood. I swayed for a second and caught myself. I shuffled forward, my knees trembling, and turned the handle of the doorknob. Opened the closet. My robe, my winter robe, the long one that closed up to the neck, that had a sash that I could tie tightly; that was what I wanted. It took me a long time to find that robe and get it on. I had to rest before I started for the hall. If my knees would just stiffen; come on, please, legs.

  Raped. Oh Jesus God, raped.

  I hadn’t left the door to the hall closed when I went to bed. It was closed now. I opened it with infinite effort. It swung in silently, disclosing the blackness of the stairs and hallway.

  And I wondered if Mimi was still alive.

  The terror started all over again. My hand independently found a switch and pushed it up. The stairs leaped into light. Attila was huddled in a mass of wild-eyed panic on the landing. His tail twitched as he stared down at me. I couldn’t climb the stairs; I tried to lift my foot to the first step, and failed.

  ‘Mimi,’ I whispered. Louder, Nick, I told myself.

  ‘Mimi,’ I said raggedly in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own. I felt fluid running down my thighs. I gagged.

  Then I screamed, ‘MIMI!’

  An uncertain sound upstairs. Then a whole series of little thumps, a door opening. Attila turned his crazed eyes upward.

  Alive and unhurt, Mimi appeared at the head of the stairway, buttoning her bathrobe. She stopped on the landing when she saw me. I stared up at her.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said quietly. She brought her hands up to cover her mouth. ‘Not – oh, Nickie. Not you.’

  The tears that started down her cheeks ran over her hands. She jumped when she felt the wetness, dropped her hands to grip the banister, and crept down the stairs to me, hand over hand on the wood, like an old crippled woman. When she was level with me she looked at my face, into my eyes, and shuddered. I didn’t feel anything, anything at all. I knew that would end, soon. And there was a lot to do before it ended.

  ‘Call the police,’ I mumbled. Something was going wrong with my mouth. My knees gave way and I sat on the stairs. ‘Call them right now.’

  She moved past me. The cat streaked past her heels, mad with all this abnormality, wanting out. Away. I huddled close to the banister and crossed my arms over my breasts, pressing the bathrobe more tightly around me. I could feel blood moving down my cheek and couldn’t – wouldn’t – lift a finger to stop the ooze. I focused on the front door, directly across the expanse of living room from me. Soon a lot of people would be coming through that door. I dreaded the unknown process that was about to be set in motion; I dreaded the questions; I dreaded, most of all, the faces.

 

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