“You have to report it, Elise.”
“It’s too late anyway. All those showers I took last night. I’ve destroyed the kind of evidence they’d need.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
She sighed. “I’m not going to the police, Josh. I couldn’t handle what Sandy went through.” She stared at her coffee. “I wasn’t exactly an angel in college, you know.”
He’d met her when she was still trying to get over the senior who’d dumped her. She hadn’t dealt well with her heartbreak. Drank, smoked, slept around. Had something of a reputation there for a while. The kind of thing defense lawyers get down on their knees every night and pray for.
“I don’t want Lisa to ever have to hear about me that way. And if there was a trial, she’d eventually hear about it. About me. And this isn’t exactly the kind of news Dad needs either.”
Right now, her seventy-eight year old father’s cancer was in remission. But news like that certainly couldn’t be good for him.
He reached across the table and took her hand. She pulled it away as if he’d electrocuted her. “I love you so much, Elise. But to just let this thing go—”
“Now it’d just be my word against his.”
They stared out at the night. It was just warm enough tonight for the raccoons to put in an appearance. He loved sitting here in the nook with the lights off, watching the raccoons play on the white snow in the blue moonlight. He liked it especially when the baby raccoons came along.
He said, “Do you remember what he looked like?”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember any identifying marks?”
“No. But I remember the number of the squad car he was driving. Number 93.”
“That’s great.”
“It is? For what? We’re not going to do anything about it. So what’s so great about remembering it?” She looked sad and weary. “I’ll just have to work through this myself. Just please don’t ask me any more questions about it.”
The next two nights, Josh went looking for car 93. He had an approximate sense of which precinct the car was from, and what part of the city it would be cruising.
He didn’t spot it.
He came home late, exhausted, Elise asleep in the guestroom. She still didn’t want to be in the same bed with him.
On his lunch hour, he walked to a nearby Barnes and Noble and found a book on the aftermath of rape.
Elise was following the general pattern the book outlined. Rage, shame, depression, anger, an inability to make any kind of physical connection even with her husband, even if that connection was as unchallenging as a hug.
There was one other terrifying piece in the hook. One he’d already thought of because he’d heard it somewhere before. Some men, after their wives had been raped, blamed the women themselves. And no longer wanted to be intimate with them. The same way some men responded to their wives’ having a mastectomy. Rationally, none of this made no sense. The women were the victims, not the men who loved them. But then given the male ego, he could see how some men might see the rape as some kind of abstract challenge to their own masculinity. He prayed to God that his male vanity never got that far out of control.
He was thinking of all this when, a few nights later, he spotted city police car number 93. The place was a strip mall. The police vehicle was parked in front of a shoe repair shop with a large front window. The car was empty. The cop was inside at the cash register.
Josh had pictured a hulking man. This one was tall but sinewy and slim. He was losing his hair. The way he was laughing with the shoe repairman, he looked like one of the many Officer Friendlys they had on TV to talk to kids. He was even just a tad nerdy.
When he came out and got in his car, Josh realized that he might be looking at the wrong man. Maybe the rapist was in another car tonight. Or it was his day off. Or he’d call in sick. He just couldn’t imagine that this was the man. He picked up his cell phone and hit the proper speed-dial button.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it, honey,” he said. “I just want you to describe him for me.”
“I thought we had an agreement.”
“We do. I just want you to describe him.”
“I thought you were at the office.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not. And you haven’t been at the office the others nights either, have you?”
“Just please describe him?”
“Why?”
“I’m — working on something.”
“Working on something? Just leave it alone, Josh! Leave it alone!”
“Just tell me if he’s tall and slim and balding.”
“Yes but—”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
He followed number 93 for nearly twenty minutes. He stayed a couple of cars back, the way detectives always do on TV. The .38 was in the glove department.
He didn’t have any sort of plan. He’d just wanted to actually see the man. He’d told himself that that would be enough for him. But it hadn’t been enough. Now he just wanted to follow him around. Hopefully, that would be enough.
But number 93 burst away from him suddenly, siren screaming. Probably a traffic accident somewhere. Or a tavern shooting. This was the kind of neighborhood for it, long, shabby, dying blocks.
At home, Elise accosted him as soon as he came through the kitchen door. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“You know what I’m talking about. That gun you bought a year ago.”
“Oh.”
“God, Josh, that’s all you’ve got to say is ‘Oh?’ Now where is it?”
“In my pocket.”
“I want it. Now.” She put her hand out, palm up. He put the gun in it. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. “If I can handle this whole thing, so can you.”
Lisa started crying upstairs. Elise hurried to find out what was troubling her little girl.
After dinner, he thought of a good excuse to leave the house. He was low on computer supplies for his home machine. Office One was at a mall twenty miles away.
“You couldn’t wait till Saturday?”
“I’m just going to the mall.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You’ve got the gun. What’re you worried about?”
“You. That’s what I’m worried about. Doing something crazy.” She slid her arms around him. Pulled him close. “I know you love me, sweetheart. But it doesn’t help me if I have to worry about you as well as deal with this thing myself.”
“So he just gets away?”
“Sandy Lewin’s rapist got away, too. And she got destroyed in the process.”
“He’ll do it again, you know. Rape somebody else. Maybe even kill them sometime.”
“We have a life that I love. I’ll learn to live with this. It’ll take some time and some patience but if we really love each other we can put it behind us. I want another baby, Josh. And I thought you did, too.”
“You know I do. It’s just the idea of him getting away—”
He kissed her more passionately than he had since she was raped. She surprised him by responding. No mad surge of passion. But her lips parted and she moved her hips gently against his. The mention of babies had brought back his favorite mental photo of her. There in the delivery room. Being shown Lisa for the first time. Thinking about it, he teared up.
“I love you so much,” he said.
Office One was crowded for a weeknight. He bought more than $400 worth of supplies. He knew he should have gone straight home. Instead, he headed for the cross-town. And for the precinct where car 93 prowled the streets at night.