After a time, my breathing grew less ragged. The spinning carousel slowed.
“Emily?” Tentative.
Nothing came out of my mouth, even though I willed myself to speak, and my body to stop trembling. I tried to identify the one emotion that hadn’t been wrenched out of my gut. I felt relief. But not healed. I wanted desperately to feel healed.
“I’ve always suspected something like this.”
I swallowed a hard rock in my throat. “You aren’t mad?”
“Why in God’s name would I ever be mad at you for this? I’d like to kill the guy.”
I didn’t say anything. Mike didn’t make empty threats. The last thing I wanted was for him to go hunting.
“There were signs.” Mike shook his head. “I saw them. Marguerite saw them. She said not to push you. That it would happen. That you were almost ready. Because you loved me… and wanted to change. You wanted us to change.”
Marguerite, our last therapist, our best therapist, a University of Chicago Ph.D., the only professional who told me with unwavering faith in her Supreme Being never to be afraid to try again. She was only in her late twenties, but she knew about losing things. She’d grown old on the streets of Detroit before she was sixteen. She had told us that much. She didn’t say that she’d been raped in that city of decay. But I knew.
“I don’t think I can live without you,” I whispered.
“Why in hell would you ever have to?” He arranged a few pillows on the headboard and patted the space nearby. Familiar territory. I scooted up and leaned my back against his stomach, staring at a pattern of nail holes in the wall, at the three oval shadows in the paint left behind by a set of framed vintage flower prints. Now the orchids were permanently gone, and so was the old lady who hung them.
Words stumbled out of my mouth. I told Mike excruciating, inane details, like the empty Domino’s pizza box sitting on the floor of Pierce’s dorm room. I avoided dragging him along razor-sharp wounds, like how there was another person in the room. Mike didn’t seem to need any more than I was willing to say, murmuring encouragement, never interrupting.
Not until I mentioned the package.
“Someone sent the rape report here?” he barked, rolling away. “You don’t know where it came from? Where the hell is it?”
“In my purse. On the dresser.”
He jerked himself off the bed, and I immediately felt a chill, the moment disintegrating. Zero to sixty, tender to tense, in a split second. Our pattern.
“How the hell can you find anything in here?” Mike was back on the edge of the bed, pulling things out of my purse recklessly: loose coins, lipstick, my wallet, receipts. Dumping it all onto the tangled sheets. No woman can bear this kind of invasion of her purse, especially when it’s a nuclear disaster inside, even when it holds no secrets.
“Mike, calm down. Stop. Please.”
I grabbed the purse from him and opened the zipper compartment. The crumpled sheet was now smoothed, folded in half twice.
“You wadded this up? Were you not going to show it to me?” His voice held disbelief. “Never mind.”
He read quickly down the page, detached, professional, not the lover who had moments ago curved his hand around my breast.
“This cop, if you can call her that, should be shot like a dog. I don’t like this, Emily. Did you ever think this could be from him?”
“No,” I said, truthfully, thinking I didn’t like that expression. Shot like a dog. Any rabid dog was better than the man who raped me.
“Frat-boy rapists like him don’t stop at one.”
No, I thought. They marry shy little wives who homeschool their kids, they go to church every Sunday, rail against homosexuals, and continue their sexual perversions on the side. I closed my eyes and pictured a Christmas card photo with Pierce and an imaginary family: a lovely wife and two sweet-faced children posed with him in front of a simulated forest, everyone wearing forced smiles and coordinating black shirts and worn jeans. Trying too hard.
The pitch of Mike’s voice was rising, the cadence more and more frenetic. “A friend of mine who works sex crimes calls date rape ‘the last frontier of crime.’ Women won’t report. If they do, juries don’t like them because they are traumatized and look guilty because they feel guilty and can only paint a picture of fragments. But the rapist, he isn’t confused at all up there on the stand. He’s not feeling guilty. He’s got the whole picture. He drew the fucking picture.” Mike dropped back onto the bed, resting a hand on my leg. “I shouldn’t even call him a frat-boy rapist. He’s a serial predator. A planner. These guys operate in their social network, careful not to leave marks, assessing targets less likely to tell. You know that he planned to rape you that night? Maybe for weeks.”
Mike was making a noble speech in our bedroom, rushing to fill the space with his experience, with facts, to attach some kind of sense and reason to something that couldn’t be tacked down by either one. He was meaning to make it less, not more. But his ferocity and the cold, antiseptic words flying out of his mouth-target and predator and social network-only broke loose more pieces of that night.
The cloying odor of Pierce’s shampoo. My first, absurd thought when he flipped me over. He’s not going to marry me. The sting as my roommate dabbed alcohol along the path where his fingernail had raked my leg.
It was almost unbearable, the pain and guilt I felt for that naïve, humiliated girl. But Mike was trying so hard. I couldn’t let him know he was making it worse.
“I don’t think that Pierce Martin sent this.” I hadn’t spoken his name out loud in thirteen years. He was like a roach crawling out of a sink drain.
“Where’s the envelope?”
“In the kitchen trash.” He grabbed his boxers off the floor and pulled them on. I swiped at his arm but too late. “Wait. Mike.”
Already, I could hear him tossing the kitchen trashcan, slamming a drawer shut that was in the way, silverware rattling. It didn’t take long, but long enough for me to urge my heart rate slower.
“This it?” He stood in the doorway in old blue boxers, holding a piece of paper, red-faced and half-naked, and it struck me not for the first time how there was never a moment that he looked vulnerable.
I nodded and spoke quickly, hoping to diffuse things. “I keep thinking… this might be Caroline’s work. Mike, where are you going?”
Let me tell you about the box, dammit. About a club of pretty Texas vipers entwined by their ugly secrets.
“To take a shower.” His response was brusque. “Then to work for a while. To butt in.”
When Mike reappeared, he was dressed in his new uniform of crisp khakis and a dark blue polo shirt with CLAIRMONT POLICE DEPT. embroidered over the pocket. He strapped on the gun lying on his bedside table before leaning in to simultaneously brush my forehead with his lips and run a swift hand over my belly, always part of the goodbye now, like rubbing a Buddha for luck. But it was the tiny Buddha inside me who needed all the luck he could get.
He turned at the door and spoke gruffly. “You good?”
This was typical of Mike, to acknowledge as he was walking out the door that we’d just experienced something of a breakthrough.
“I’m fine. Really. Thank you.” This was typical of me, not asking him to please hang around.
I knew the uselessness of telling Mike in this mood that it was too late to go back to work-8:13 p.m., by my clock radio-so I lay back on the bed listening for the front door to click shut, to hear his key locking it from the outside. I wondered what he planned to do with the police report, whether he would search for Pierce Martin and find out the rest. Untie the ribbons of my secrets all by himself.