“Yes,” Danny said heavily. “Yes, Jesse knows. I spent years trying to figure out who the woman was, but I never could. And yes, I feel awful, and yes”—his voice was rising—“I’ve felt awful about it for years, and I have tried to do better, to be better, because I know exactly how lucky and how privileged I am, and I know how we h-hurt her.” His voice cracked. “Every day of my life,” he said, speaking each word distinctly through his tears, “I have tried to be a better man than I was that night.”
Daisy’s mouth was dry, and her eyes were, too, at the enormity of everything that Danny had done, or not done; the terrible things he’d allowed to happen. “You let me marry him,” she whispered. Her voice was anguished. She could feel tears squeeze out of the corners of her eyes and fall onto her shirt. “You didn’t tell me about him,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried to.” Danny’s voice was plaintive. “Don’t you remember?”
“No! No, I do not! And I’m pretty sure I would have remembered anyone, at any point, taking me aside and saying, ‘Hey, guess what, the man who wants to marry you is a rapist!’ ”
“I promise you, I tried to tell you about Hal,” Danny said.
“When?” Daisy snapped.
“Right after you called to say you’d gotten engaged.”
Daisy put her fisted hand against her lips. She and Hal had had a whirlwind courtship—three months of dating, a proposal, a wedding six months after that. She remembered making phone calls to her mom, her brothers, her grandma Rose. She remembered calling David and his wife, and she remembered calling Danny. He’d congratulated her, and he’d asked her to put Hal on the phone so he could say hello to the groom. A minute later, Hal had handed the cordless phone back to her, and they’d continued going down their list.
And then, she remembered, the next morning, Danny had called back. “Diana, are you sure about this?”
“Sure I’m sure!” she’d said. The two-carat square-cut diamond Hal had given her was sparkling on her finger, sending rainbow spangles against the wall as it caught the light. She couldn’t stop looking at it.
“It’s just… you’re still a baby. And Hal was…” His voice had trailed off. “Hal’s got kind of a history.”
“I know. He told me. He quit drinking when he turned thirty, though. I don’t think I have anything to worry about.”
No, you’re wrong, Danny could have said. He could have told her the whole ugly truth, could have explained what he’d meant by kind of a history. Instead, he’d said something like I just want what’s best for you, and If you’re happy, then I’m happy, and Daisy had ended the call, eager to get back to work on her registry, to tear out pages featuring possible dresses from the bridal magazines she’d bought and plan the menu for her wedding-night dinner.
“You told me he had a history,” Daisy said. “Isn’t that right?” Danny had barely mumbled his confirmation when Daisy continued. “Did you ever think that maybe you could have been a little more explicit? Like, maybe said, ‘Oh, by the way, he raped a girl when he was eighteen’?”
“Would you have listened?” Danny asked heavily.
“Of course! Of course I would have listened!” Daisy shouted. “My God, Danny. What would Dad think of you? He would have been so disappointed. He wouldn’t have cared that you’re gay, he would have loved you, no matter what, but if he found out that you didn’t look out for me, that you let this happen to me…”
“You didn’t want to hear it. You made that very clear. And anyhow, that wasn’t the end of it. I kept trying.”
“No, you didn’t!” Daisy was trembling with fury. She wanted to tear her clothes, she wanted to scream, she wanted to hit something. She’d never in her life imagined feeling so furious, so betrayed. “You never said another word about it!”
“No,” Danny said, very quietly. “Not to you. To Mom.”
* * *
Daisy’s legs felt like planks of wood, solid and unbending. Somehow, she got them to carry her into the bedroom. Lester stared at her unhappily as she pulled her suitcase out from its shelf in the closet and began to fill it with what she’d need for the weekend, pulling out handfuls of underwear and stacks of T-shirts without even a glance. She found a duffel bag for Beatrice. Then she took out her phone and punched in a number from her contact list.
“The Melville School. This is Crystal Johnson. How can I help you?”
“Crystal? It’s Daisy Shoemaker.”
“Daisy!” Crystal said cheerfully. “Everything okay?”
“I need to take Beatrice out of school for the rest of the week.” Lowering her voice, even though the house was still empty, Daisy said, “My mom hasn’t been well. We’re going to head up to New Jersey to see her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that! Well, it’s no problem.” Crystal laughed. “I swear, it’s like a ghost town here already. Half the kids took off early for Memorial Day. A bunch of the teachers, too. But I’ll be sure to let her advisor know.”
“Thank you. And, listen, this is a little delicate. But if Hal calls, looking for Bea, can you just tell him she’s with me? And that we’ll see him on the Cape this weekend?” The lies were flying out of her mouth, one after another, like a flock of birds she’d kept penned up behind her lips. “It’s kind of a mess. Hal thinks I’ve been doing too much for my mom, and that my brothers aren’t pitching in enough, and I promised him the next time she asked, I’d tell her no, and I did, but then my mom called me herself, and she was pretty insistent that I’m the one who has to help. So we’ll swing by her place on our way up, and Hal doesn’t need to know.”
“I gotcha.” The warmth in Crystal’s voice made Daisy’s eyes sting. “Family drama. Believe me, I completely understand. If he calls, I’ll just let him know that Beatrice is with you.”
“Thank you,” she murmured. She imagined that Hannah was with her, watching, following along as she made one last pass through the bathroom, gathering sunscreen, toothpaste, and soap. She called the pet hotel where Lester occasionally stayed, and made a reservation for a week, with some extra daily one-on-one time, because she felt terrible about leaving him.
Glad you’re looking after the dog, she imagined Hannah saying. But what about you? What about Beatrice?
She stood by the door, waiting. When her daughter arrived, carpetbag looped daintily over her forearm, Daisy shoved the duffel bag into her arms. “Go upstairs and get enough clothes for the weekend. Bring your homework, and a sweatshirt and shoes you can walk in. Quick as you can, okay? I’ll explain everything once we’re in the car.”
For once, thank God, Beatrice didn’t argue, or roll her eyes or do any of her usual teenager tricks. “What’s going on? Where are we going?”
“Grandma’s place first.”
Beatrice’s eyes were very wide. “What about Daddy?”
Daisy hadn’t heard Beatrice call her father “Daddy” in as long as she could remember. Don’t tell her, she thought. Hal is still her father, no matter what he’s done, he’s still her dad. And there was another voice, the one that could see the bones of Beatrice’s face, the outline of the woman she was becoming. It was that voice that Daisy spoke with. “Honey, it’s complicated. I promise I’ll tell you as much as I can. But, for right now, I need to ask you not to tell Dad where we’re going. No phone calls, no texts, no emails.”
“I can’t call anyone. You’ve got my phone, remember?”
“Oh. Right.”
“Mom.” Her daughter’s face was troubled. “What happened? What’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you any more right now, but I promise that I’m going to keep you safe. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. I swear, I’m going to keep you safe, no matter what.”
31
Diana
After what had happened in Baltimore, with Brad, Diana swore that she was done. She’d learned her tormentor’s name. She had hunted him down. She had called him to account for what he’d done, made him look at her, made him see h
er, and the damage that he’d done. Now he was dead.
Had he belatedly developed a conscience? Was it that Diana pulled the veil from his eyes, showing him who he was and what he’d done, and had he been unable to live for even another day with the knowledge? Or had she found a troubled, broken man; a man truly trying to do better, and pushed him over the edge, depriving his children of their father, his parents of their son?
She didn’t know. And when she tried to think it through, the facts that she laid out so reasonably kept sliding away, replaced by an image of Brad’s children, Claudia and Eli, trudging up the stairs with their backpacks and their unsuspecting faces. Those children, and their half-siblings, would all grow up without a father. And that was her fault.
For the first time in a long time, Diana started having trouble sleeping. Menopause, suggested her doctor, and Hazel, her therapist, had looked her over carefully with eyes that saw too much and asked, Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind? Diana hadn’t been able to do it, because what would Hazel say if Diana told her the truth?
Every night, Michael would sleep by her side, and Pedro would sleep at her feet, and Diana would lie awake, staring out into the blackness. On moonless nights, it was impossible to tell where the sky became land, and where the land became water. I am going to forget about this, she told herself. I am going to forget about Henry Shoemaker and Daniel Rosen. I’m not going to think about what happened to me, all those years ago. I am going to get on with my happy life.
She might have been able to do it, if she’d been better rested, or if the entire country was not in the midst of facing the wreckage of decades of sexual harassment and sexual assault, if the news had not been full of stories of the terrible things that some man or another had done, and how many women he’d done them to.
Diana would read the stories and think about Hal, and her hands would clench, and she’d think, He should suffer. He should pay. Then she’d remember what had happened with Brad, and think how much worse it would be, because Daniel Rosen had a husband and Henry Shoemaker had a wife and a daughter, a daughter who was almost exactly the age Diana had been that summer, a daughter the age that her nieces were now. I can’t do anything, she would think… and then, an instant later, she’d think, but I can’t do nothing.
“See the paper?” Michael asked one morning in June, tossing the Cape Cod Times down on the table.
“Who is it this time?” Diana asked without looking. So far, there’d been the famous movie producer, the morning news anchor, the conductor of a prominent orchestra, the editor of a famous literary magazine. Actors, athletes, NFL owners, one by one by one, they’d been exposed.
Michael poured himself a cup of coffee, and made Diana her tea. Then, instead of sitting at the table, he’d gone to the couch and patted the space beside him. There was gray in his reddish beard now, to go with the gray in her hair. He wore orthotic inserts in his shoes, and did stretches for his back before he went to bed at night.
He held a section of the paper, turning it so that she could see. A RECKONING, read the headline.
“I don’t want to tell you what to do,” he began.
“I think you do,” she said, her voice sharp.
Michael shook his head. “Look, all I’m saying…” He’d stopped talking, then nodded at the newspaper. “This is a moment. It’s a chance.”
“For what?” she’d asked. Not justice. She’d given up on justice a long time ago.
“You don’t have to go to the police and demand a trial. I’m not saying you call WGBH, or call the guy’s boss.”
“I don’t think he has a boss,” said Diana.
Michael had continued doggedly. “I’m just saying that this is maybe a chance to get some closure. To find this guy and tell him that he hurt a real person.”
“Because that went so well the last time,” Diana said bitterly.
“What happened the last time was not your fault,” Michael said, the way he’d said the same words to her a thousand times already. Diana didn’t answer. For a moment, they sat in silence. Then Michael said, “What if he did it to other women? Did you ever think about that?”
Diana buried her face in her hands, because, as Michael undoubtedly suspected, the answer was all the time. It was her biggest fear—that her rapist hadn’t stopped with her, that, to the contrary, she’d been the first, in a line, maybe a long one. She’d spent many of her recent sleepless nights wondering what her obligation was to that possibility, what she owed those girls and women.
Michael touched her back, then the nape of her neck, until he was cupping her head in his big, warm hand.
“I was reading an essay online. It said this was a whaddayacallit. An inflection point. Things are changing.” After all their years together, she could hear what he wasn’t saying. Things are changing if there are people brave enough to come forward, to stand up and say enough is enough.
“I tried,” she said, her voice quavering. “I tried to do the right thing, and look how that turned out!”
“Okay, okay,” said Michael, holding up his hands. “It’s up to you. Completely up to you. It’s just—I know you aren’t sleeping. I feel like you’re suffering. I just want you to be able to find some peace. And I wonder—I wonder if maybe…”
Diana shook her head. Her mind had been made up, and she’d been firm in her convictions. Leave it alone, she told herself. Live your happy life, run your restaurant, be with the people you love, and leave it alone. But Hal’s existence nagged at her, tugged at her, like a hangnail or a loose thread. What if he did it to other women? This is a reckoning, she’d think. And if I sit here and do nothing, I’m just as bad, just as complicit, as he is.
She would spend hours convincing herself to live her life, her happy, peaceful life, and do nothing. Then, at night, awake in the dark, she’d remember what had happened with the judge, a man about her age with an Ivy League education and impeccable credentials, who’d been on the fast track for confirmation to the Supreme Court, when a woman came forward and said that he’d assaulted her at a party when they’d both been teenagers.
The man had denied everything, had called the woman a liar, part of a political plot to take him down. The woman had testified, telling her story in a calm, clear voice, telling the world what the boys had done. Indelible upon the hippocampus is the laughter, she’d said. She’d gone on to become a professor of neuroscience, an expert in how the brain processes trauma, a fact that only amplified Diana’s shame at her own life having been so thoroughly derailed.
Diana had watched every second of the hearings. She’d sat, riveted, holding out hope that the judge, who’d seemed so mild-mannered, would confess to his actions and apologize. Maybe he would say that he was drunk and immature and stupid and that he was sorry, that he’d never treated another woman like that since and certainly never would again; that he loved his daughters and did not want them living in a world where men could harm them without consequences. Instead, the judge, red-faced and furious, spewing indignation and spittle, had denied everything. He’d insisted—before anyone had asked—that he’d earned all of his achievements by working his tail off, that he had no connections or extra help (“I guess parents who paid for prep school and a grandfather who went to Yale don’t count,” Michael said). He bullied the female senators who asked about his drinking. “I like beer. Do you like beer?” he’d asked one of them, the daughter of an alcoholic, who’d gently asked about the possibility of blackouts. “What do you like to drink? Do you have a drinking problem?” Diana kept watching, paralyzed and wordless in her fury, powerless to look away as the judge blustered and brayed, red-faced and wet-eyed with rage, convinced that he was the real victim.
The man became a Supreme Court justice. The woman went into hiding. And every day, every night, Diana Carmody, who’d once been a fifteen-year-old girl, running over the sand on the beach on a warm summer night, would think about him, and about Hal Shoemaker, about all the men who’d harmed women and who’d sa
iled on with lives continued, unimpaired. She would think about her nieces, and all the girls and young women she knew, growing up in a world where every day was dangerous, and she knew she couldn’t give herself the luxury of inaction.
This time, she decided, she would do it differently. This time, instead of going straight for the men, she’d approach the problem sideways and come at the women. Or, really, just one woman: Daisy Shoemaker, wife of her rapist, sister of the boy who’d watched. She would be much more careful, making sure that her actions did not cause children to suffer, or that at least she did whatever she could to minimize their suffering. Awake at night, she laid her traps, claiming an email address that was close to the other Diana’s, constructing a fake website and a bogus Facebook page, finding blogs and books about consultants, so she’d get the lingo down, seeding the ground for the day she would go to Philadelphia, to meet Daisy Shoemaker, the main connection between the two living men who’d harmed her, the wife of one, the sister of the other. She would look this other Diana in the eyes and then she’d decide what she would do, how she could confront Hal without hurting some poor blameless woman, in a world where being born female meant spending years of your life at risk, and the rest of it invisible, existing as prey or barely existing at all.
32
Daisy
Why are we going to Grandma’s?” Beatrice asked, after they’d dropped off poor, sad-looking Lester and gotten on the highway.
“I need to speak with her.”
“And you can’t just call?”
“I need to speak with her in person,” Daisy said. Once she’d gotten behind the wheel, a strange coolness had descended over her. She felt as if she was enclosed in a bubble where she could be reasonable and calm. The bubble would pop at some point, and all the terrible truths would come flooding in to assault her, but, for now, she could listen, and reason, and think.
That Summer Page 34