Here We Lie

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Sex with Kurt had always been pleasant, if not earth shattering. There had been a routine, a predictable order of events that brought an undeniable comfort. My life might have been a mess otherwise—the shitty tips at the diner, my father slowly dying in his recliner—but I’d been able to forget that when I was with Kurt.

  This time, it wasn’t so much sex as it was punishment, making a point. Kurt’s hands were rough, his stubble like a Brillo pad on my skin. His eyes bored into mine, as if he were delivering a message. Look what could have been yours. Look what you’re missing. Or maybe it was something else, more sinister—Look what you deserve.

  I gasped when he entered me, my body resisting although my mind had already agreed. He took this as a form of encouragement and pushed harder. With each thrust, his T-shirt fluttered over my face. I turned my gaze to the side, unable to look at him, focusing instead on the floor mat where an inch of green liquid sloshed in a lonely bottle of Mountain Dew.

  I didn’t protest, didn’t refuse, didn’t say no, didn’t stop him.

  It’s just one time, I promised myself. One last time.

  He pulled up his shorts when he finished, and I reached behind my back, trying to bring the stubborn halves of my bra together.

  “What now?” he asked, and I stared at him. We hadn’t spoken the entire time, and now it didn’t seem that there was anything to say. There was something hopeful in his question, as if we could go back to Becky Babcock’s party, his arm around my shoulder, my hand tucked into his back pocket.

  “Now you take me back to my car,” I said.

  He pounded the steering wheel once with his fist before hitting the gas. The tires spun, kicking up a cloud of dust outside the window.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until later, when I’d retrieved Mom’s car and was driving back to Gerry’s house that I glanced in the mirror and saw that my cheeks were tear-stained. I pulled over at a gas station and went into the bathroom, wiping my face with a scratchy paper towel and mopping up the shame between my legs. When I got home, Mom and Gerry were already in bed, the lights off except for a lamp in the foyer. I logged onto Gerry’s computer in his office and saw an email from Lauren.

  Hello from paradise, she wrote. Can you believe we’ll see each other in a week?

  There was an attachment, and it was slow to load, starting as a pixelated blue that ended up being the sky. It was a picture of a boat out on the water, taken from The Island, as the Mabreys called it—their own private paradise. The whole family was there, she said. You should be here, too, she said. Wouldn’t that be fun?

  I went to bed knowing I wouldn’t ever see Kurt Haschke again, and for that matter, vowing that I would never return, in any significant way, to Woodstock.

  By morning, I’d reframed the story, Megan-from-Kansas-style, planning how I would tell it to Lauren in one of our late-night dorm room chats. I’d tell her that I ran into my old boyfriend, that we’d had some wild times down at the river, that we’d hooked up at a few parties. I’d shrug the whole thing off like it was nothing serious, like it didn’t mean anything at all.

  OCTOBER 10, 2016

  Megan

  I cleaned up the ceramic shards, my hands fumbling with the broom and dustpan, and then I watched the press conference again, using the rewind and fast forward buttons on the overly complicated remote. A young blonde woman, identified on the bottom of the screen as Anna Kovics, read from a statement as cameras clicked and flashed around her. “He came up behind me and forced me into his office, where he held me down...” There was a slight waver to her voice, a sheen of sweat on her face under the studio lights, the purplish stain of dark circles under her eyes.

  “He tore my skirt,” she said.

  She looked directly into the camera when she said, “He raped me.”

  I watched it again and again, a dozen times, unable to look away. All the while, the minutes were racing; I’d used up the morning’s extra time. Still, I watched it again. The girl on the screen looked a whole lot like me, down to the purple circles under her eyes. Or at least, she looked like me when I was in college.

  Fourteen years was a long time. It was long enough to forget, forgive, move on.

  And yet when I finally got to my feet, nausea surged inside me, threatening to bring up the morning’s coffee and whatever was undigested from last night’s dinner. I heard Anna Kovics’s words, filtered through my long-ago self:

  He came up behind me.

  He held me down.

  He raped me.

  At 8:20, I logged onto my email and sent an apology using the vaguest of terms. An upset stomach, a sudden onset. This much was true, although the real story was a dozen layers deep, buried with the person I’d been then, so different from the person I was now. Calling up the memories was like watching an old home movie and not recognizing myself on the screen.

  I spent the day surfing headlines on the Hartford Register, the Boston Globe, CNN and MSNBC. There was a blurb in the Washington Post and later, a short mention in the New York Times. I read every single comment on every article, cringing. Some were supportive of Anna, some were against men in general and politicians specifically, many were inflammatory and a few were horrific—a regular verbal vomit stew.

  Just another money-grabbing whore.

  These men think they can get away with anything. It’s time to hold them accountable!

  This is what happens when you get a little bit of power.

  I’d do her, lol.

  What else are interns for?

  I pressed on, grimly determined not to look away. Not this time.

  It was a smaller story than it might have been under different circumstances, without the craziness of the presidential election or the backdrop of police shootings and drilling on sacred land in North Dakota. This was one woman, one senatorial candidate, one accusation. But the story came in the midst of a condemnation of “locker room talk,” the pushback against a swell of misogynistic behavior, an anti-boys-will-be-boys movement.

  In the middle of the day, I summoned the energy to climb the stairs, strip off my pajamas and stand in a cloud of steam in the shower, my forehead pressed against the cool tile, hot water stinging my back. That night was there, the memories waiting—he came up behind me, he ripped my clothes, he held me down. And then I grabbed a loofah and scrubbed my skin raw, trying to wash away fourteen years of shame.

  By the time I returned to my laptop, the story had turned: Anna Kovics went to nightclubs. She drank. Her Instagram account had a selfie of Anna in a tight red dress, her lips pouting at the camera. An ex-boyfriend from UConn described her to a conservative news site as “wild.” She wasn’t virginal and unspoiled, the way we like our victims to be.

  By one-thirty, the Mabreys had released a statement expressing shock over the allegations, and it was there, on all the cable news stations. It wasn’t hard to imagine Mrs. Mabrey in her tidy home office, under her daughter’s framed New York Times wedding announcement, dictating the official wording: “Senator Mabrey was sadly deceived by the character of Ms. Kovics, who worked closely with our family during the last campaign. We are confident that these charges will be exposed as false, and Senator Mabrey will continue to work on behalf of the people of the great state of Connecticut.” There were various shots of the senator—dark-suited and poised behind a microphone at a congressional hearing, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier that month in Hartford, in a navy sweater with his arm around his wife.

  Anna Kovics was nothing more than a crumb to be brushed from his lapel.

  Bobby always teased that I was the least connected person in the world. A Luddite, he claimed, although this wasn’t exactly true. I had a cell phone, although it was only sporadically charged; I had a single email address, used only for work. Bobby loved social media, especially since it allowed him to follow his sports on a half-dozen platforms—Ret
weeting baseball scores and Instagramming snaps from his slow-pitch softball league, posting status updates about trades and injuries for his Fantasy Football league. He had more than seven hundred friends, including colleagues and former students and just about everyone he’d ever met socially. Sometimes, he posted a picture of the two of us—at a birthday dinner or a New Year’s party, some occasion where we were both dressed up and smiling—but I insisted that he identify me only as Megan.

  Megan no-last-name, Megan the social-media-phobe, Megan who shall not be tagged.

  I knew his Facebook log-in, though, and occasionally I went onto the site—not so much to snoop on Bobby, who was transparent to a fault—but to peek at Lauren’s account. I’d found her first years ago, after clicking on the page for Keale alumni. Unlike women from a generation ago whose trails were lost by marriage and name changes, the Keale page listed everyone’s maiden name. Once I clicked on the name Lauren (Mabrey) Leavitt, her life had spilled open like a sack of rice.

  Facebook told me that Lauren was married to Braden Leavitt, a Georgetown graduate and immigration attorney. They lived in Tiverton, Rhode Island, a place I’d Googled, bringing up the map and street views, trying to imagine Lauren walking there, living there, being Lauren there. I tried to pick out her neighborhood, based on what I knew of the Mabreys. A single-family home, a large yard, a European sedan in the driveway. The postings on her actual page were sparse—no doubt she had enabled some privacy settings to keep people like me from finding her—but a few were viewable in an album of profile pictures. It was a shock, always, to encounter this more recent version of Lauren, to reconcile her with the reel-to-reel Lauren of my Keale memories, the girl who was always behind a camera, the shutter blinking like a giant third eye.

  In her new life, Lauren had two daughters and a husband with a kind smile. Her hair was still dark and thick and long, spilling over her shoulders like she was posing for a shampoo advertisement. Tiny lines were etched around her eyes, and there was a crease at the corner of her mouth when she smiled. She looked happy. Why not? Why shouldn’t life work out for her, the way it worked out for all the Mabreys?

  There was no mention on her Facebook page of today’s scandal—the allegation or its aftermath. Not that there would be—the Mabreys as I had known them were unfailingly insular; they were probably hunkered down in their Connecticut estate, coming up with plans and strategies and counterattacks. Maybe Lauren was in the thick of their discussion, or maybe she was down in the basement dungeon, her feet up on the coffee table, flipping idly through channels.

  What would she think of today’s allegations?

  Would she dismiss Anna Kovics instantly—we were sadly deceived by the character of Ms. Kovics—or would there be a flickering moment of doubt, one that wormed its way deep inside her, one that reminded her of me?

  Not for the first time, I wondered if she ever searched Facebook for Megan Mazeros, if she ever thought about that summer, if she regretted that night.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if she ever thought about me at all.

  * * *

  By the time Bobby came home, I was propped up in bed, the television muted in front of me, the misspelled comments of the announcers appearing in short bursts of closed captioning. He kissed me on the forehead, as if feeling for a fever. “Doing any better?”

  I shook my head.

  “Forget about tonight, then,” he said, loosening his tie and pulling it over his head like a noose. He went through his end-of-the-day routine: hanging up his tie and belt, placing his shirt, pants and dress socks in the hamper, reaching for the jeans and T-shirt that were draped over a chair in the corner of the room. “Do you think it was something you ate this weekend? I thought the chow mein smelled a bit funny when I looked at it this morning.”

  “I don’t think it was anything I ate,” I said.

  He sat on the bed next to me, a sympathetic hand reaching for mine.

  On the television, the news cycle returned to Senator Mabrey. The pictures cycled, lingering on the one of him with his wife, the two of them as poised as a pair of Kennedys. I pointed the remote in the direction of his face, the female announcer’s voice filling the room. “...in the wake of an accusation from a former intern. We’ll continue to update you if there are further developments in this story.”

  I hit the mute button again, plunging the room into silence.

  Bobby sighed, gesturing at the television. “What gets me is the women, you know what I mean?”

  I tensed. “No.”

  “I don’t mean the victims. I’m talking about the wives, the ones who just stand there with these fixed smiles on their faces while their husbands claim to be family men. How do they do it?” He stacked two throw pillows for cushioning and leaned back against the headboard.

  “It’s disgusting,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is.” After a moment, he put his arm around my shoulders, his hand gently massaging through my curls. I thought I’d cried myself empty in the shower, but it turned out there was more—all the things I’d kept hidden, things I should have said years ago. I’d been too ashamed; it had been easier to be the person to whom horrible things hadn’t happened. Not a victim, but not a survivor, either. A blank slate, unspoiled, undamaged.

  “Hey—you’ll be okay,” Bobby said.

  It was funny how love worked. The longer I was with Bobby, the fuzzier some of the specifics became, until it took moments like these to bring them back into focus.

  Bobby was kind—to his friends and family, to our neighbors, to his students and coworkers, to the people he met in line at the grocery store.

  Bobby understood things. He could talk to anyone—teenagers, their parents, cashiers at the 7-Eleven, random people we met in the airport who were wearing Red Sox paraphernalia. He could cry unabashedly—he’d done so when the Sox won the Series in 2013, and again at his aunt’s funeral last spring.

  He was loyal to his teams, to his school, to his friends, to me.

  “Bobby, I have to tell you something,” I said, and he turned to me, a question in his eyes.

  * * *

  It wasn’t an easy story to tell, but then, it hadn’t been an easy thing to live. I tried to begin at the beginning—but where was the beginning? All the way back when my dad died, or when I’d left Woodstock for the first time, excited and terrified all at once? It came out a bit muddled, but I got there: to the Mabreys and to that summer and everything that came after.

  Bobby had gone very still, his arm balanced like a heavy weight on my shoulders.

  It’s okay, I promised myself. Whatever he says or does, you’re going to be okay.

  “Will you say something?” I asked finally. “Anything—whatever you’re thinking.”

  “I don’t know how—” He moved his arm, and when he brought it to his face, I realized he was crying, too. “First, I’m so sorry that this happened to you, and I’m sorry you didn’t think you could tell me. And second, I hope you’ll get some help. You know, really talk to someone who knows the right things to say, unlike me. And third—” he bunched his hands into fists “—I wish that guy was standing in front of me right now, because I’d kill him. I’d fucking kill him with my bare hands if I could.”

  I turned off the television, placing the remote on the nightstand and Bobby and I held each other until it grew dark outside. I felt a bit lighter, but guilty, too. I’d transferred some of my pain onto his shoulders.

  Fourteen years, I thought.

  It was a long time to keep a secret.

  It was too long.

  SOPHOMORE YEAR

  2000–2001

  Lauren

  Everything felt different that fall. We were sophomores now, no longer new to the campus and its rituals. Megan and I were in a different dorm, sharing a suite with two other girls. The word suite was somewhat generous, considering the cramped b
athroom and kitchenette shared between the four of us. “I think my bedroom at home is bigger than our entire place,” I complained without thinking one afternoon when it rained and the four of us were cooped up with our musty-smelling coats and boots. Megan only shrugged and said, “Feels like home to me.”

  I had a car that fall, too—MK’s hand-me-down Saab that was pushing a hundred thousand miles. The car had been Dad’s idea and Mom’s concession; MK didn’t need it anymore, and Mom must have been tired of ferrying me between campus and Holmes House for holidays and long weekends. Maybe she was too busy, or maybe she was simply loosening the reins a bit, a reward for keeping my head down and staying out of trouble. Megan and I took fewer bike rides and longer drives, winding our way past Connecticut’s woods and lakes, singing along with Blues Traveler at the top of our lungs. Once we saw a red fox down by the river, so brave it darted directly between the two of us. Another time we took off our shirts and lounged in our bras under an Indian summer sun. Only a week later, we got caught in a freak thunderstorm, the clouds rolling in low and black before we made it back to campus. I pulled over to the side of the road and we waited out the rain, buckets of water washing over the windows.

  “Do you ever think about getting married?” Megan asked. She had told me about getting together with her old boyfriend over the summer, but her question caught me off guard.

  I shrugged. “I guess, a million years from now.”

  “Not me. I’m never getting married.”

  “What? Sure you will. We all will, eventually.”