Girls with Bright Futures

by Tracy Dobmeier

  She clicked on the Messages folder and watched as several messages from Chase Alder’s wife, who Maren noted was in fact named Naomi, appeared one after the other on the screen. With no time to read the messages, let alone fully absorb their meaning, Maren whipped out her cell phone, snapped photos of each screen, and then jumped out of the chair and took one photo from a distance in case she ever needed to prove the computer in question was in Alicia’s office. She made sure to capture in the background of the photo the Vogue magazine cover featuring Alicia in the World’s Most Powerful Women issue, which Maren had framed and hung on the wall for her. And then, finally, one more click back for a snapshot of the family tree.

  Thankfully, she hadn’t yet gotten to the to-do item of applying WD-40 to Alicia and Bryan’s bedroom door hinges, so she heard the door swing open. Time was up. Maren logged out and then reflexively hid behind the open office door, waiting for Bryan to pass. She listened as he thumped down the stairs like an elephant. Nothing about that man was subtle. When the coast was clear, she went down the hall to the master bedroom to finish her chores for the day, blazing with fury at everyone. At Alicia for such a massive invasion of privacy; for stirring up a past that Maren badly wanted to keep buried; and for dragging Winnie into this, forcing Maren to finally have the conversation with Winnie not on her terms but on Alicia’s. At this Chase Alder, whoever he was, for the heinous, life-changing thing he’d done to her. At his wife for having the balls to approach her daughter at school. At Bryan because, well, just because he was such a pig.

  Maren’s seething anger gave her the energy she needed to attack her work. And as she did, she made a plan. First, she would go home and do some online research on this Chase Alder asshole, and then she would try to work out what all this meant for Winnie’s safety. The question of how to extricate herself from this abusive relationship with Alicia was no longer theoretical; she resolved to keep her eyes peeled for the first available off-ramp.

  Unfortunately, no amount of planning could drown out her dread of the impending conversation now looming over the one and only relationship on earth that mattered to her.

  * * *

  A few blocks from home, Maren pulled over on a side street, threw open the car door, and spewed the contents of her stomach onto the road. She wiped her mouth with a half-used Starbucks napkin the consistency of sandpaper and then tossed the rapidly disintegrating material into the puddle of vomit before finishing the drive home. If finding out the name of one’s rapist wasn’t a reasonable excuse for littering, then she would accept the punishment without complaint. As she continued home, her hands squeezed the steering wheel with such force that their continued trembling seemed almost to defy the laws of nature. Maren was neither physically nor emotionally ready to have this conversation with Winnie.

  When she got home, she was relieved to see that Winnie’s bedroom door was closed. She pulled a loose strand of hair back behind her ear only to find it was wet. Instinctively she lifted her fingers to her nose. One sniff of her own vomit and she almost threw up again right there. She raced down the hall to the bathroom, peeling off her clothes as she moved, and jumped into the shower.

  The blisteringly hot water ran down her body. She prayed the whooshing noise made by the water slapping against the fiberglass shower-surround would drown out the sound of her weeping in the same way the water itself was washing the evidence of her tears down the drain. Though she tried to keep her mind fixed in the present—on the hot water, the slippery soap, and the repetitive action of scrubbing her scalp with shampoo—her willpower was no match for her psyche, which was apparently determined to dredge up the past.

  * * *

  The last time she’d cleaned herself with such violence was eighteen years and three months before. Maren vividly remembered waking up on the Kickapoo Country Club golf course in the wee hours of the morning, curled up in a ball and crying. As she lay there, she had the odd sense her mind was trying to recall what had just happened while simultaneously attempting to blot it out forever. But all she could think about was fluid. Sweat, a sticky sensation, and the golf course sprinklers spraying her with rhythmic precision. She reached her hands down to explore the aching sensation in her vagina and came up with the torn remains of her underpants. And that was when she noticed the blood.

  The only crystal-clear thought she had for the next twenty minutes was that she had to get home and shower. She pulled herself up from the sand trap she didn’t remember entering and stumbled toward the pool house to find her best friend, Jane. She was almost there when Jane came running toward her. Thank God.

  “You slut!” Jane screamed as she got closer. “How could you do that to me!” Jane’s hands were clenched.

  “Jane!” Maren started bawling. “I think someone raped me! Please help me! I need to get home. Please!”

  “Raped you? Maryanne saw Charles pick you up on the pool deck and carry you off to the golf course. She said you were giggling. When Charles came back, he told the whole party that you begged to have your cherry popped before you went to college.”

  “Look at me!” Maren stared down at her once-beautiful white dress that was now ripped up the side and dotted with a mix of sand, blood, and water. “Do I look like someone who did this on purpose? I don’t even know what happened!” She felt like she was screaming, but her voice came out in a whisper.

  Jane was crying now too, black mascara streaming down her cheeks. “You’re such a fucking liar,” she spat. Over Jane’s shoulder, Maren could just make out Charles’s silhouette along with a few other boys clustered together.

  “I swear! If that’s what he said happened, he’s the liar. You have to believe me.”

  “Just go home,” Jane sneered. “Oh, and here’s a hot tip: don’t screw any guys your friends like at college. It’s the opposite of cool.”

  Maren fell to her knees sobbing as Jane, her best friend since third grade, turned her back and returned to the waiting group.

  * * *

  Maren had no idea how long she’d been in the shower when her mom forced her way into the bathroom, but her fingers were wrinkled like raisins, her skin was bright red from the scalding water, and she’d long since taken a crisscross seated position over the shower drain. She was also pretty sure she was still bleeding; she was definitely still crying.

  “Maren! What in the world is going on? The water’s been running for over a half hour. Our water bill is going to be a fortune.” Her mom whipped open the shower curtain and stood with one hand on her hip, glaring down at her daughter.

  Maren hugged her knees to her chest and whimpered, “I think Charles Brown raped me.”

  “What do you mean you think he raped you,” her mother said, stepping forward and turning off the water. “That’s impossible. He’s a nice boy. He goes to Harvard. Did you tease him?”

  “No! You don’t get it.” Maren sobbed uncontrollably as her mother held open a towel and looked away while she climbed out of the tub.

  “Maren, have you been drinking?” Her mom sniffed the air, disappointment writ large on her face.

  “It’s not what you think! I don’t know exactly what happened, but I know it was bad. Really bad.”

  “Well, no one would ever believe you in your state,” she said. “Anyway, what would you have me do? Tell the president of the Kickapoo Country Club that his son may have raped my daughter, but she can’t be sure because she was too inebriated? We’d be the laughingstock of the club in five seconds flat. I’d never be able to show my face in church again.”

  “But shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “And tell them what exactly?” her mom said. “No, you’re going to get yourself cleaned up, say your prayers, go to bed for a few hours, and start your new life at IU tomorrow as planned. Whatever may or may not have happened tonight will be a distant memory before you know it.” Maren’s mom motioned toward the door.

&n
bsp; “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have my period. I think the tampon is stuck. I can’t even feel the string. That’s bad, right?”

  Maren’s mom was such a prude she’d barely acknowledged the onset of puberty. The day almost-twelve-year-old Maren had first gotten her period, she’d been sure the brownish fluid on her underpants meant she had some horrible disease. After assuring Maren she wasn’t dying, her mom had disappeared and returned a half hour later with a brown paper bag from the drugstore and told Maren to take it to the bathroom. No instructions, no advice. Just a bag with pads and tampons for Maren to figure out on her own. Sex had never been a conversation between them either, other than she was not to do it out of wedlock. All Maren knew was what she’d learned from the developing bodies book she’d borrowed from the library out of desperation. But now, her mom sprang into action as though her entire life depended on it. “Sit on the edge of the counter. Come on. Let’s go.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Just do as I say, Maren.” Her nostrils flared in disgust.

  Fifteen minutes later, after more attempts than Maren could count, untold exhortations to try harder to relax muscles Maren hadn’t known existed, and even at one point the careful use of dull tweezers, her mom finally fished out the tampon from Maren’s insides. “There,” her mom punctuated the moment. “Now off to bed.”

  It was the last time Maren would ever use a tampon in her life. She remembered hoping her mom was right that she would be able to put this whole thing behind her once they dropped her off at college the next day. Little did Maren know she’d be back home for good at Thanksgiving with an even bigger problem.

  * * *

  “Mom?” Winnie’s voice penetrated the bathroom door. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine, honey.” Maren turned off the shower and reached for a towel. “I think maybe I picked up a stomach bug. Don’t come too near me, OK?”

  “OK, but did you find out anything at the Stones’?”

  Maren steadied herself against the bathroom sink and tamped down another wave of nausea. “No, not yet. Everyone was home this afternoon. I’ll figure it out tomorrow though.” She just needed a little more time.

  “Well, that sucks. I guess I’ll just hang out in my room for the rest of my senior year,” Winnie snarked at Maren through the door before her footsteps retreated down the hall.

  “Beats any plan I can think of,” Maren muttered.

  A few minutes later, she’d toweled off, put on her pajamas, and slid under the covers with her laptop and phone. She breathed in and out several times and tried to accept the inevitable. Thanks to her unscrupulous boss, Maren had no choice but to finally confront the truth about who this Chase guy was, aside from the cruel architect of her long-term misery and the partial creator of her greatest joy.

  Maren started with a garden-variety Facebook name search and struck gold immediately. What kind of an arrogant asshole rapes a woman and then maintains a public Facebook page? According to his “About” page, he worked for Williamson, McKinnon, and Goldberg, LLC, a San Francisco law firm specializing in torts and civil rights claims. He’d studied at Northwestern School of Law and—there it was—Yale University for undergrad. Seeing that Chase had attended Yale confirmed that it had to have been Alicia or another member of the Stone family who’d snitched about Winnie’s supposedly educated “father” to Ted Clark. Other details quickly came into view. He lived in San Mateo, California, and was married to one Naomi Alder. But his birthday, or rather his birth year, was the real shocker. He was only thirty-three years old, which would mean he had only been sixteen years old when he’d raped her. What kind of monster does something like that at such a young age?

  Maren clicked on the photos tab and squinted at the screen. At first glance, Chase didn’t look familiar, but there was one close-up that sparked a glimmer of recognition. Nothing concrete though; more like a vague sense that she might have laid eyes on him once. She looked at more photos. The most recent one was from more than a year and a half ago—of him and his wife with two little kids, a boy and a girl. The pictures looked like they could have been lifted straight from a J.Crew catalog.

  Maren swallowed over the lump in her throat and then zoomed in on his wife, Naomi. With a start, Maren realized that Naomi resembled the brown-haired woman with the Nike cap who had been in the ER while she’d waited for word about Winnie. What the heck was going on? Had she caused the accident?

  She continued digging, but the sparse Facebook page didn’t answer any of her questions, including the one that had been eating a hole in her gut since she first saw his name: How had Chase Alder ended up at Kickapoo Country Club that night, with his penis forcibly thrust inside her? But really, what had she expected? A series of tell-all posts chronicling his life as a violent sex offender who hid in plain sight dressed as a Brooks Brothers model?

  She was just about to give up when she saw an old picture of what looked like a large family reunion. Chase had been tagged by someone: “Missed you (again) at Kickapoo, cuz.” Maren sat up in her bed and strained to make out the faces in the picture. Her heart skipped a beat when she realized she was looking at none other than Charles Brown and his extended family. And just like that, she remembered where she’d seen Chase. He was Charles’s younger cousin. Different last names, but it would explain the hints of Mrs. Brown’s face and languid body movements that Maren tried hard not to notice in Winnie from time to time.

  Maren thought harder. Maybe she’d seen Chase at the pool earlier that fateful day—she remembered that Charles’s cousins occasionally visited from California in the summer—but she had no recollection of him at the party that night. She wiped the curtain of sweat off her face. So she had been at least partly right. Charles might not be Winnie’s father, but his cousin was. And given what her ex-best friend Jane said that night, Charles had something to do with her rape. But what?

  Maren was reeling. She’d operated all these years under the assumption that Charles was her rapist, but with no memory whatsoever of the actual act, she could never truly be sure. If it wasn’t him, she’d assumed it had to be one of the other four boys who’d been at the party that night. Boys she’d grown up with, swimming and sledding and dining at Kickapoo Country Club. An unforgivable betrayal, but somehow the knowledge that she’d known her attacker had become an integral stitch in the fabric of her story—a story she’d slowly and agonizingly come to terms with. But now to discover she’d actually been raped by a virtual stranger? It was as though her entire narrative had unraveled in her lap, and to knit it back together, she had to experience every excruciating detail once more.

  But this time, she didn’t have the luxury of eighteen years to make her peace with the new version of the story. Winnie was possibly in grave danger, and it might have nothing to do with Stanford. Maren had to tell her everything—and soon. The heartbreaking conversation she’d feared since the day she’d first nestled Winnie in her arms was coming at her like an asteroid. She buried her head under a pillow to muffle her crying and tucked herself into a tight ball to smother her shaking. Would this nightmare never end?

  A familiar darkness soon engulfed her. She was so tired. Not in the normal superficial way, but tired in her marrow, wrung out on a cellular level. If a five-alarm fire were to rage through the house in that moment, Maren knew she might not summon the will to save her own life. But she would do anything to save her daughter. Somehow, she needed to find the strength to protect Winnie.

  With her stomach rumbling, Maren forced herself to set down the laptop and go to the kitchen for a fortifying snack. She nibbled on a cracker, but the thought of any more food in her stomach was revolting. Instead, she reached deep into the cabinet above the fridge for her emergency vodka bottle. Foregoing the glass entirely, she downed several gulps straight from the bottle. The vodka burned going down, but it eventually numbed her nerv
es a degree or two, enough for her to continue her quest for information.

  Back in her bedroom again, Maren pulled up the photos she’d snapped of the apairofgenes.com correspondence on Alicia’s computer. The messages had started about ten days before the accident. Her heart skipped a beat as she read them in order and put together that Naomi had been in Seattle more than once over the past few weeks. Not only was Maren correct that she was the woman from the ER, but it was now clear she was also the woman who had stalked Winnie on the bus the day before the accident and who had accosted Winnie at school just yesterday. Why was her rapist’s wife so hell-bent on finding Winnie? Maren flipped to the final screenshot. Naomi’s most recent message was sent just last night, mere hours before Maren discovered Alicia’s handiwork. Maren read in utter disbelief.

  Sent 1 day ago

  Winnie,

  It’s Naomi again. I’m sorry if I’m scaring you. You obviously don’t remember me from your accident, but I was the one who called the medics and waited with you until help came. I know you don’t want to hear from me anymore, but I have to explain our situation because we are racing against time. I’m begging you to just read this email. Please.

  Chase and I have been married for eight years. We live in San Mateo, California, with our two children. I’ve uploaded a photo so you can see your half sister, Olivia, who is six years old, and your half brother, Eli, who is three. We also have two golden retrievers called Mac and Cheese (named by Olivia and Eli) and a cat called Candy.

  A year and a half ago, when Eli was eighteen months old, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of fast-growing cancer. Eli went through chemotherapy, but six months later, the cancer returned. More chemo, more hospital stays, and another remission. Three months ago, the cancer returned again. Now we’re told he needs a stem cell transplant to survive. Statistically, our best chance for a match is a blood relative. None of our close family matched. I went on apairofgenes.com to try to locate more relatives in our quest to save Eli, but so far, we’d failed to turn up a match. And then your name popped up.