Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  He looked over his map and smiled longingly at me before his pale blue eyes glazed over with sadness. “It doesn’t do that for me, Adelaide,” he said gently. “My sister was raped here, and she died here. I can’t walk up to Ninetieth Street without losing it.”

  Of course, I thought. How insensitive of me. It was my first real date in a while, and I was already bringing the poor guy to tears. This kind and serious fellow with towelettes in his pocket and a sensitive stomach. I smiled encouragingly back at him. With the exception of Frankie (who had the heart of a true reporter) and Randy (who was my second cousin, after all), I hadn’t known any young man of my generation to be as tenderhearted as Tobias seemed, and it was truly refreshing.

  “So you’re dissin’ us for that total stranger?” Allison had asked me in the elevator earlier as she and the other girls headed for the same restaurant we dined in last night.

  “Let’s meet up for coffee in my room later,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “Be careful,” Belinda whispered.

  But I felt safe enough on the arm of an antirape activist, and even if I didn’t, I was going out. So I talked on and on to Tobias Moore as if there were no tomorrow as he asked me question after question about my life.

  He seemed to hang on my every word through dinner. He was a gentleman and completely transparent, and I was taken aback at the attention he was paying me.

  He hugged me good night at the revolving door of the lobby, and I breathed in his delicious scent, a combination of fresh mint and aftershave.

  “Have breakfast with me tomorrow morning,” he said just as I was turning toward the door.

  Before I could respond, he assured me, “I’ll pick you up in the lobby at 7:00 a.m., and I promise I’ll have you in a cab bound for LaGuardia by 8:00 a.m.” He motioned to a well-worn diner across the street that was lit up and bustling with patrons. “We’ll just catch a little bite there and have a few more minutes together.”

  Cabs were racing down Eighth Avenue as though the city was just beginning to wake up to the summer night. They were honking at one another as a traffic light turned yellow, and in the distance was the sound of a police siren. An elderly man with two Scotties walked by and tipped his hat toward us. Tobias was standing on the balls of his feet, waiting for my response.

  “See you tomorrow, then,” I said, tilting my head to the side before waving good-bye.

  He stayed on the sidewalk, tapping his thumb against his thigh as he watched to make sure that I made it safely through the lobby and into the elevator.

  That night the three girls made their way into my room. They sat along the edge of my bed and recounted the interview as I poured them decaf coffee from the hotel pot.

  After a lull in the conversation, Allison said, “Don’t you guys dream about castrating them?”

  Belinda pulled her legs up in the fetal position on the opposite bed and rocked back and forth. She sort of smiled at the thought of it as she rested her chin on top of her knees.

  Leah breathed a sigh and said, “Yes, I do.”

  Mmm.

  I looked beyond Allison at the city view. My back stiffened when I pictured coming face-to-face with my assailant.

  “I used to imagine I’d get him in his sleep,” I said.

  “Yeah, and he would never know what hit him, right?” Allison said.

  Belinda let out a peep of laughter.

  “I’m going to video my interview and FedEx it to him,” Allison said, holding up her cup for a refill.

  “You know where he lives?” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “I’ve driven by there before, and once I stared him down when he was getting out of his car after a workday.”

  “What’d he do?” Belinda looked up to ask.

  “He looked like he had no idea who I was, and then he bolted into the house.”

  We all chuckled sinisterly, and when I said, “Mine works on Capitol Hill,” the laughter grew until Belinda and I plummeted back on our respective beds and held our aching stomachs.

  Allison kicked in the air, and when we came back up again, she said sarcastically, “So how was your date?”

  “Nice,” I said. “You know, not every guy is an assailant.”

  She was biting the inside of her cheek, and I hoped she wasn’t wishing some awful fate on me the way she had her offender.

  But the other two—Leah with the depression and Belinda with the anxiety—seemed to look at me as though I had two heads. Leah’s mouth was half open, and she was taking deep breaths, and Belinda was blinking her eyes over and over as though I were certifiable.

  “What?” I asked. “Why are y’all staring at me?”

  “How can you date?” Allison said.

  “Because I’m not dead,” I said.

  I thought of a verse that Shannon had sent me, and I said it out loud:

  “‘There is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.’ That’s Job 14 something—”

  Allison waved away the words and shook her head in a kind of bitter disbelief. “So you’re religious. That explains it.”

  Leah and Belinda chuckled behind her.

  “Back to my fantasy,” she said. “I’ve got it all worked out in my mind.” And she went through a step-by-step castration plan that would make Lorena Bobbitt look like a peacemaker.

  We finally decided to call it a night.

  “Keep in touch,” Leah said to me, and then we all exchanged numbers and addresses.

  After they plodded back to their separate rooms in their shackles of pain, I could hear Allison’s television turn on in the room to the right of mine, then the squeak-squeak of Belinda rocking back and forth in what I imagined was the fetal position in the room to the left.

  After crawling into bed, the hotel chocolate from my pillow melting in my mouth, I thought about Devon Hunt and his telescope and the stars on the campus hillside, as the sound of cab horns and screeching breaks wafted up and into my window. As I fell asleep, I wondered what had become of him.

  “May I write you?” Tobias asked the next morning after we ordered our pancakes and coffee.

  He had been sitting in a lobby chair facing the elevators when the steel doors slid open at 7:02 that morning. I was blotting my lipstick on an old Kmart receipt when he stood up to greet me.

  “Sure,” I said. “I love to get mail. With the exception of bad poetry.”

  He reached out and took my hand before fixing his eyes on me. Either the poetry thing went right over his head, or he didn’t give a hoot about anything other than my “Sure.”

  Tobias wrote me every day for the next eight weeks before he and his communications director, Glenda Lyles, traveled down to NBU to interview Cecelia, Dr. Atwood, and me for their newsletter. When I was giving him the campus tour on the early October afternoon of his visit, he stopped as the fiery-colored leaves fell down and around us on the quadrangle, took my hand again, and said, “You’re very important to me, Adelaide. I really want us to get to know each other. There could be something here between us.”

  I nodded and gave him a wide grin. After all, he was handsome, tenderhearted, socially conscious, and we didn’t share the same gene pool.

  “What’s not to like?” I said to Ruthie and Jif after he left. They were lounging in the snack bar, watching Thirtysomething reruns and eating junk food.

  “He’s a looker, that’s for sure,” Jif said, sucking on a Tootsie Pop.

  “I mean, those cobalt eyes. C’mon!”

  Jif was in a better place once again. She was not concerned about her weight, because it would be months before school was out. Also, she was making a real effort to circle the wagons and spend time with her old friends before graduation.

  “Yeah, but more important, he’s nice, and he seems to respect you,” Ruthie added.

  Jif pulled a bag of jelly beans out of her bag and offered it to us before declaring, “Go for it, Adela
ide! You deserve a fresh romance, girl.”

  God, I really like Tobias, I prayed as I meandered out of the library that evening and watched a couple embracing at the top of the colonnade.

  I hadn’t been writing my thesis or preparing my graduate-school applications. Instead, I’d been going over the campus map and marking off every twenty yards where an emergency “attack” button could be installed. The plan was due to the engineer the next morning.

  As a couple walked arm in arm through the pillars, I thought of Tobias and his affectionate gaze that afternoon on the quad, and my heart leaped.

  “Someone likes me!” I grinned. “Someone really wants to get to know me!” And I skipped (landing awkwardly and saving myself at the last second from a sprained ankle). It was a big-time confidence booster, and I welcomed it with open arms. It was about dern time!

  Wait, I might have heard the third voice say, but I was too excited to tune to that station. Rather, I began to connect the loose dots in my mind so as to convince myself that a relationship with Tobias was right.

  “He sounds neat,” Shannon told me during a phone conversation halfway across the country. She had ended up at Wheaton and was majoring in theology. She was planning to serve with a team of inner-city missionaries in Colombia, South America, as soon as she graduated.

  “How’s your thesis coming?” I asked her.

  “It’s a breeze,” she said. “You know, just a little ol’ examination of the sanctification process.”

  “Sanctifa-who?” I said as I continued to picture Tobias saying, “I think there could be something good between us.”

  “Well, it’s complicated. I mean, it’s like after you receive salvation, then you go through a process where the Holy Spirit brings all that you are into obedience and conforms everything about you to the standards of His Word.”

  “Heady stuff,” I said. “Fill me in more one of these days.”

  “You’d be fascinated by it, and it would make for great poetry.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s rich. It’s like the spiritual you has passed from death to life, and now the natural you—the human flesh part—has to pass from life to death. Or to put it another way, just like a tree has to shed its dead leaves in order to thrive, so we have to let the Holy Spirit subdue our fallen nature.”

  “Mmm,” I said, not really attempting to comprehend the notion. My mind was still on my new romance, and I was a Homer Simpson, stumped in my thought processes by the image of a glazed donut. I blushed as I described Tobias’s sweet, doughy goodness to my friend.

  “Well, he sounds great,” Shannon said. “But is he great for you?”

  “Yes, he is!” I declared a few minutes later as I hung up the phone, and from that point forward I couldn’t put on the brakes. Dr. Atwood was calling on me constantly, and I was reworking Peño’s case before the first hearing in November. Tobias phoned me every night, and I melted into his warm voice at the other end of the line. It felt so good to be adored and to be on the front line of an important issue, and I couldn’t resist falling in love with him and his role in the fight against violence.

  While he was sensitive, he was also tenacious, and he found excuses to come down to NBU to visit. Also, he invited me up twice to DC when his organization needed a student to speak on behalf of the victims.

  I almost breathed easy on that quick flight up to National Airport even though the landing and takeoff unnerved me. I still remembered the 1982 crash of Flight 90 into the Fourteenth Street Bridge.

  I was eleven at the time it aired on the nightly news as my family and I ate dinner on our den trays and watched the icy horror unfold. I’d had nightmares about the plane plummeting into the Potomac River, and if I closed my eyes, I could still see the rescue workers pulling the handful of survivors out of the freezing water.

  “This is the shortest runway in the country,” a businessman told me when my white knuckles clutched the seat beside him one Sunday afternoon just before the ascent that would deliver me back to Roanoke.

  “I really needed to know that,” I muttered, looking out the window.

  Behind the thick airport glass, I could see Tobias, who was still pacing at the departure gate where he’d gently kissed me good-bye. He knew I hated the takeoffs, and he wanted to see me through it. How dear he was!

  I had finally shared the story of my conversion with him that weekend after a Violence Against Women awareness dinner at the Watergate Hotel.

  “I know you’re spiritual,” he’d said, squeezing my hand when I told him exactly how I’d become a convert.

  “So, I haven’t ever really heard from you on the subject. What about your faith?” I asked. I was a novice Christian, but even so I knew I needed to be with someone who was on the same page.

  “Well, you know I don’t go to church every week or anything,” he said. “But I’m open to that. I grew up in the Unitarian Church, and I have good memories of my time there. But I think doing something is the best way to get in touch with the divine. And with Rachel’s Rape, I like to think I’m doing something every day to help someone somewhere. I think God can see that, don’t you?”

  After he said this, he repositioned me on the inside of the sidewalk. He said he always wanted to be on the outside so that he could protect me from a speeding car or a daredevil cyclist. And he had practically shrieked with fear when I’d gotten turned around in the subway earlier in the day and nearly boarded a train for the rough inner-city neighborhood of Anacostia. I’d noticed that his forehead was wet with anxiety after he pulled me out of the train compartment just before the doors shut and prodded me down the escalator to the next platform. He had taken a towelette out of his back pocket and patted his forehead while we waited for the train to take us to Capitol Hill, where he had promised me a tour.

  “I’m fine, Tobias,” I’d said, sensing his shortness of breath.

  Then he walked me to his coworker’s apartment just off DuPont Circle. Glenda Lyles was a thirtysomething African-American lady who had worked at an array of Washington nonprofits from the Hunger and Homelessness Alliance to the National Organization of Women, and she had taken me in during my two visits to DC.

  Glenda’s spare bedroom smelled like cinnamon and Ivory soap, and I loved to stay with her because of this and because she kept the place so warm that you didn’t even need to put on socks when your toes hit the tiles of her bathroom floor.

  “Good night, Adelaide,” he said to me before buzzing up to Glenda at the top of the brownstone steps.

  “I wish you just lived here,” he whispered, his voice making the edge of my ear tingle. “Wish you could just glide on home with me to Adams Morgan and stay there forever.” His eyes glistened beneath the glow of the streetlight, and the laughter that poured from an apartment next door made me smile.

  “Maybe one day,” I said.

  (Randy had been dating the cheerleader off and on at this point, and I considered Tobias and the cheerleader to be acts of grace that allowed us both to broaden our horizons. But then again, I didn’t want to hear all the details from Georgianne.)

  Tobias winked at me once, then squeezed my hand. “Breakfast before your flight, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll meet you at Starbucks.”

  “Meet me, no. I’ll swing by and pick you up at eight.”

  Feeling a poem coming on now, I closed the door to Glenda’s guest room and fumbled through my backpack for a pencil. My fingers sifted through the crud in the front pocket: a handful of lint, three dull pennies, the last mint in a tube of Breath Savers, and the St. Christopher medal. I rubbed it with my index finger before it dropped back down into the pocket.

  The poem was sappy and superheroesque.

  He worships

  with his hands

  on paper

  petitioning

  for protection.

  (I trashed it.)

  Seek ye first, the third voice surfaced as Glenda’s guest-bedroom pillow cushion
ed my head, but I was intoxicated by the laughter from the apartment next door—trying to piece together the conversations as if they were the definition of bliss and well within my reach. I fell asleep breathing in the cinnamon and the romantic love that was saturating my heart with its gratifying scent.

  At 4:00 a.m. I awoke in blackness, the hum from a busted street lamp sounding off across the street. My heart raced as I suddenly pictured Rachel during the last days before she took her life, and in the quiet I wrote:

  The morning

  claws its way

  into your quiet room—

  white light

  through a thick pane.

  You wake as a child

  blinking twice

  before memory,

  the edge of a hoe

  in a fertile

  garden,

  digs up

  the blackest soil.

  Tobias rang the doorbell at 8:00 a.m. sharp the next morning, carrying a bouquet of pink tulips wrapped in waxy green paper.

  Seriously perfect, I thought, looking at his damp blond hair curling up from the back of his neck and an overlooked tuft of shaving cream tucked in the curve of his ear. When I hugged him, he smelled clean and manly all at the same time, and I thought I might never let go.

  19

  Senior Year

  I cringed when I received two letters from my professors one early December morning.

  “The first portion of your thesis is overdue,” Professor Dirkas had written me. “What’s going on, Adelaide?”

  And then another from Dr. Shaw, “You’ve skipped two classes in the last week. Are you all right? You’ll need to get with a classmate to catch up before finals.”

  I had been so wrapped up in the campus-assault stuff—the placing of the attack buttons, the interviews, and the letters that came pouring in after the 60 Minutes show aired in October—that I could barely keep up with my schoolwork.

  Two letters had been slipped under my dorm-room door late at night. One said, “Thank you (from an anonymous victim).” Another said, “It still happens.”

  I took these victim letters as a sign to keep going, and I became consumed once again with my role on the student life committee and my budding relationship with Tobias.