Just past the turnstile, I looked over my shoulder and Braden was still there, waiting to make sure I was through. “Hold on,” I called, fumbling through my backpack for my camera, unzipping it from the case. A second later I was framing him in the viewfinder, noting the way that the rain had turned his curls into ringlets.
“What’s that for?” he called, his voice echoing in the tunnel.
I yelled, “Documentation,” and waved goodbye over my shoulder.
* * *
MK came in the next morning as I was getting ready, throwing his keys onto the floor and collapsing onto the couch. I stood over him, toweling my damp hair.
“Um, hello? Are you playing hooky today or something?”
He groaned into the couch cushion. He was in the clothes he’d worn yesterday—navy pants, a wrinkled Oxford with a stain that looked like ketchup near his pocket.
“Seriously. It’s almost time to leave.”
Another groan.
“Did something happen with Sophie?”
He rolled over, his face coming into view—a raspberry-colored bruise high on his left cheek and a deep gouge beneath his eye, the width of a fingernail. That wasn’t ketchup on his shirt after all.
“Whoa. What happened? Did you get mugged or something?” I reached out to get a better look, but he turned away, face into the cushion. Whatever he mumbled had the word Sophie in it.
“Sophie did that to you? Sophie the socialite?” I whistled. “Why, did you break up with her?”
He laughed, then winced, bringing a hand to the left side of his face. “What did she think was going to happen? The summer’s almost over. She’s heading back to NYU. I’m finishing up at Princeton.”
“You’re right. Those sound like insurmountable odds.” I laughed despite myself, remembering what I knew of Sophie—blonde and lithe, one of those girls who looked like a sudden breeze could knock her off her feet. “So she hit you?”
“I’m glad one of us is enjoying this. But yeah, she did. Hell of a right hook.”
“Looks like she took some of your skin as a memento.”
He swore. “She just went crazy. I was lucky to get out of there.”
I glanced at my watch. If I didn’t leave now, I would definitely be late. “What are you going to tell Dad?”
“Could you take care of it for me?”
“Seriously? After the way you treated me all summer?”
“Hey, I left you alone. I thought you would like that.”
I ignored this, remembering the handfuls of cereal I’d eaten straight from the box in front of the television night after night, until I finally worked up the courage to go out by myself. “How am I supposed to take care of it?”
“Tell Dad that I ate something funny, and I was up all night vomiting.”
I laughed. “That doesn’t explain why you look like a punching bag.”
“And then tomorrow I’ll say that when I was wandering around the apartment dizzy and dehydrated, I fell and hit my head on the coffee table.”
I had to hand it to him—MK always had a story. Had it come to him just now, or had he figured it out on the way back from Sophie’s apartment? He could, of course, just tell the truth—but that wasn’t how things worked in our family, not when the truth cast shade on the Mabrey name. I remembered Marcus, and the truth that no one, especially me, had told.
No, this was what the Mabreys did. We assessed and reframed and came out with a better story, a better version of ourselves. And then we held the line.
I grabbed my shoulder bag, giving MK a goodbye pat on the shoulder. “Put some ice on that,” I advised.
In a day or two, he would be fine, and no one would ever know.
OCTOBER 12, 2016
Megan
I’d been counting on Anna Kovics. She was intelligent, well-spoken, sympathetic. Her attack had been less than a year ago, and because it was within the statute of limitations, the district attorney could take her case seriously. I entertained, in between moments of shock and heartache, the fantasy of a dramatic arrest on the steps of the Capitol.
But by Wednesday, less than forty-eight hours into my rekindled nightmare, Anna Kovics had withdrawn her complaint and dropped out of sight. An attorney for Senator Mabrey said that she was seeking counseling, and that while they “were shattered by the grave and inflammatory nature of her false charges,” the family “wished her well on the road to healing.”
In other words—she’d taken the money, and the Mabreys had won.
* * *
All day Wednesday, my tears threatened to come in the middle of the most mundane activities—filling out a purchase order for office supplies, processing a request for a grade change. I was crying just as much for Anna Kovics as for myself, not to mention all the other women, victims who had fallen prey to the charm, the money, the inherent power that came with being a Mabrey.
I wondered what stories Anna had told herself, and if they were anything like the lies I’d been living with for fourteen years.
I’d told myself the I-must-have-led-him-on story, one that offered as evidence the black one-piece I’d bought that spring at Target, admiring my rear view in the dressing room mirror, not to mention all the times he and I brushed against each other at the dinner table, reaching for a pitcher of water or a pat of butter.
I’d told myself that I’d sent the wrong signals, that maybe it had been natural or understandable or at least not monstrous for him to see my friendliness as flirtation, to take a smile as a suggestion.
I’d tried to tell myself that it was only sex, that I wasn’t a victim. I’d tried to place it alongside my last night with Kurt Haschke, the night of Becky Babcock’s party.
And mostly, the only thing that could help me get back to sleep when I’d woken from the nightmares of footsteps on the path behind me and a hand on the back of my neck, was the story that I was the only one—a fluke, an aberration in an otherwise normal and law-abiding sex life, a one-off, a mistake he wouldn’t ever repeat.
Anna Kovics had blown that theory to bits, and the fragments ricocheted in my brain. I’d been attacked fourteen years ago; Anna Kovics had been attacked last year. In between us, and maybe before and after, must be a trail of other women. And all of us, collectively, were too ashamed to do anything other than keep quiet and try to move on with our lives.
* * *
Bobby held me that night, smelling faintly of sweat from his after-dinner run, his body a reassuring weight. In his arms, I was wooden. “What can I do?” he asked over and over. If I’d needed a cup of tea or a new box of Kleenex, he would have jumped into action, ready to solve anything that was solvable. But I shook my head each time, staring ahead into the yawning cavern of our open closet door, seeing nothing.
Anna Kovics had dropped her complaint, and he would get away with it all over again.
If I had come forward all those years ago, Anna Kovics would never have been attacked.
That was true, wasn’t it? It was like that Ray Bradbury time-travel story: if you stepped on a butterfly in the past, you could significantly alter the course of human history. If I’d squashed him back then—if he’d been squashable, unprotected by the Mabreys—he might have done jail time, registered as a sex offender, been shunned by politics, forced to live out his days on one of the white couches in Holmes House. Or maybe not—I still believed that coming forward would have affected me more than him.
I shuddered, and Bobby held me tighter.
Back then, I’d made the best choice I could make at the moment. But I was no longer a twenty-one-year-old girl, crying on questionable sheets in a cheap hotel. I was no longer the girl whose entire world had been disrupted, who was scrambling for a foothold in a life that wouldn’t intersect, ever, with Lauren Mabrey or anyone in her family.
I wasn’t that girl anymore.
&n
bsp; I hadn’t been her for a long time.
I sat up, and Bobby shifted next to me, head propped on the palm of his hand. “It’s time for me to tell someone,” I announced, even the words sending me into a cold sweat.
“That’s good,” Bobby said. “That’s really good, isn’t it? I was looking into our health plan, and I saw that we have behavioral counseling, ten visits free.”
“I’m not talking about a behavioral counselor,” I said. “I’m talking about coming forward, period.”
Bobby sat up, too. “You mean—”
“It’s time,” I told him, holding his gaze until he nodded back at me. “It’s long overdue.”
I reached for my cell phone, knowing where I should start. In my list of contacts was a number I’d called only rarely over the years, first in desperation, later to arrange the logistics of transport for my Keale belongings, and eventually just to check in with the major moments of our lives.
She answered on the third ring, her voice coming through so clear, she might have been standing in the next room.
“Miriam? It’s—”
“Megan,” she breathed. “Thank God. I’ve been waiting for your call.”
JUNIOR YEAR
2001–2002
Megan
On a normal Tuesday morning, the world erupted. I was toasting an English muffin when someone screamed in the hallway, the words terrorist and attack sending us running to the television in the communal room. A group of us in our pajamas and sweatpants watched as one of the twin towers leaked a horrible gray puff of smoke, and then a plane flew, as smoothly as if on autopilot, into the other tower. We clutched hands as the buildings crumbled, one by one, into giant balls of dust onto the streets below.
We couldn’t find the words for it. It was horrifying, it was a nightmare, it was, unbelievably, happening.
Keale canceled classes, and we spent Tuesday and Wednesday huddled in student union buildings and common rooms, hugging and crying, watching the TV screens with grim determination. Everyone had checked in with their families, needing the reassurance that we were okay, that they were okay, that our personal worlds were okay. Mom and Gerry had been scheduled to fly to Chicago at the end of the week to visit his brother, and now they were planning to drive. “It’s horrible, it’s horrible,” she kept repeating, and then, although somewhat illogically, “I wish you were here, where you would be safe.”
But it no longer seemed that simple.
Over the next few days, more news trickled in. One Keale girl, Anya Friedman, lost her oldest brother, who had worked for a financial firm in the North Tower. Other connections were more tenuous—a friend of a friend, the brother-in-law of a sister-in-law. Yet everyone was shaken, everyone was horrified.
It was a shock to see Senator Mabrey appear suddenly on CNN that Thursday, dark circles under his eyes, his tie slightly askew. He was speaking in front of the Capitol Building, snagged by a random reporter as he fought his way through tightened security. I looked around for Lauren, but she wasn’t in the room. If I hadn’t been looking at the screen, I wouldn’t have identified the voice as his—it was so fiery and determined, not the mild voice of the man who’d danced with his daughters on New Year’s Eve or jostled his granddaughter on his knee.
“We must call them what they are, terrorists, because they dared to come on our soil to perpetrate this horrible act, and they deserve to be treated as terrorists,” he said, in front of the flash of cameras. There were two deep creases in his forehead that I didn’t recognize. “And we must not back down from this. We must hunt them down, so that they know there is no corner of the world where they are safe to hide.”
The clip played on CNN frequently in those first few days, along with scenes of American flags billowing over the decimation of Ground Zero, and snatches of speeches by presidents and mayors and world leaders. We went to our classes and returned to the news crawl, like we’d been implanted with homing devices. We couldn’t take a break from the story—we needed every detail of lives lost and lives saved, of small acts of heroism against the larger backdrop of a world in turmoil.
Even our professors had seemed shell-shocked and subdued when class resumed on Thursday, giving us grace periods on our reading, extending office hours for those who needed to talk. If they were so rattled, with their fancy degrees and years and years of adulthood, how were we supposed to make sense of it?
Lauren skipped her classes that day, hanging around the basement offices of the Keale Courier instead. The paper was putting out a special edition, and Lauren had been shooting the reactions of people on campus, asking how the attacks had affected them, how they were feeling. “What’s the point of going to class?” she’d asked, and although I’d gone, I didn’t have an answer, either.
My main source of comfort came from the Sisters, most of whom had taken Intro to Political Science last spring and had now joined me in Dr. Stenholz’s hybrid political and literary theory course. Dr. Stenholz—Miriam, she asked us to call her—was intimidating in her slim pencil skirts and black turtleneck sweaters. A dozen gold bangles jangled from her arms, and her irises were magnified behind green-framed glasses. In our first class since the terror attacks, she abandoned her customary spot at the podium and sat with us, our desks pulled into a semicircle. “Let’s just talk today,” she said, fixing her unsettling gaze on each of us in turn. “What’s on your mind?”
There was an awkward silence, and then we all spoke up at once, our words spilling over each other. We were scared about the state of the world. We were scared for what came next. We wondered if it were possible to have PTSD when the trauma was only being experienced second-or thirdhand. One by one we admitted we were scared, we were nervous, we were worried.
At the end of the hour, we spilled into the stairwell, still talking. Miriam offered to continue the conversation, and so we piled into a few cars and followed her to a tiny cottage in Scofield, barely big enough for us to perch on her couch and sit knee-to-knee on the floor. She served us coffee and little chocolate cookies from a dusty tin that might have been left over from the Christmas before, and when we were still hungry, a few of the girls helped her make a giant pot of pasta topped with two jars of Prego. It took every dish in Miriam’s house to feed the twelve of us.
“A toast,” Miriam proclaimed, when we were all seated. She was still wearing her pencil skirt and turtleneck sweater, although she had kicked off her heels, and the seam of one stocking had ripped a small hole near one toe in a way that was endearingly human. We followed her lead and raised our glasses and coffee mugs filled with tap water. “A toast to you beautiful women. May you do great things with your compassion and intellect.”
It was late by the time I got back to our dorm, but there were still clusters of girls in the common rooms, silent in the face of flashing images on the television screen. I didn’t see Lauren there, and she wasn’t in our room, either. I changed into my flannel pajama bottoms and attempted to do the reading I’d been neglecting all week, but my eye kept drifting to the illuminated display on my alarm clock. Eleven-thirty, twelve-fifteen.
I checked the common room again, then called the Sentinel office, where the phone rang and rang before Phil Guerini’s voice came onto the answering machine. Lauren wasn’t in the Courier office, and by one o’clock, when it occurred to me to check the parking lot, I didn’t see her navy Saab, either. Back in our room, I discovered that her camera case was gone as well as her purse and her leather overnight bag, which was usually wedged beneath her bed next to her suitcases.
What the hell? Where could she have gone?
Lauren wasn’t back on Friday morning, when I ran into Bethany in the common room at the end of our floor. She was spooning the last of her milk out of a cereal bowl, and when I asked her if she’d seen Lauren, she stopped with the spoon in midair. “Yeah, I saw her last night around six, heading to her car. I thought she was going hom
e.”
Of course. It hadn’t occurred to me that Lauren might have gone back to Holmes House for some reason. But then I realized what Bethany had said. “So, she wasn’t going home?”
Bethany shook her head. “She said she was going to New York. I told her she was going to get herself killed, but she said she just had to do something.”
I grabbed Bethany’s sleeve when she turned away to rinse her bowl in the sink. “She went to New York? Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I know. She’s crazy. But—well, I guess I have to admire her for that.” Bethany pulled herself gently free from my grasp, and I backed off, shaking.
Back in our room, I looked for any sign from Lauren—a Post-it note that had fluttered to the ground, maybe, a page ripped from my notebook, even a message I might have missed on our machine. But there was no note. There was nothing. What was she thinking? How could she not have told me what she was doing? It was chaos in New York—people were trying to get out, not in, not unless they were emergency personnel. What was she trying to prove, exactly?
* * *
For three days, Lauren didn’t call. I was glued to the news, scanning the words on the crawl, the number of dead and missing, the short blurbs from politicians, the terror groups denying or claiming responsibility—half expecting to see her name there. I wondered if she’d bothered to tell her parents what she was doing, but this question was answered on Sunday afternoon, when Mrs. Mabrey checked in for her weekly call. Her voice was cool, and I imagined her sitting in her office at Holmes House, surrounded by photos of dignitaries and Kat’s framed wedding announcement from the New York Times. “Oh, hello, Megan. Is Lauren available?”
Stupid Lauren. Stupid, stupid girl. Something horrible could be happening to her right now, and none of us would be able to help. I cleared my throat. “She was—just here, but she stepped out. I think she mentioned something about a photo assignment.”
Mrs. Mabrey was quiet on her end, and I wondered if she knew I was lying. I’d never been that great at it—Dad said my whole face was a “tell,” but I was hoping whatever weakness my facial expression held couldn’t be detected over the phone.
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