More and more, I thought back to my last night with Megan, wondering how it could have been different. Maybe if I hadn’t let her out of my sight, she never would have wandered off with my brother. Maybe if I’d actually let her tell me about it, I would have understood the why beyond the how and the what. Maybe I would have forgiven her by now, and we would be back in our twin beds at Keale, gossiping about our suitemates and getting sloppy drunk once in a while and telling each other our best and worst truths and lies.
* * *
I didn’t even take pictures that fall, except for the odd digital snapshot for the Sentinel. Instead, I spent hundreds of hours in Phil Guerini’s darkroom, developing the pictures I’d taken over the summer—Lizzie in her sunflower-print dress with her tiny saltwater sandals, Mom and Kat in side-by-side lounge chairs, the wide brims of their hats shielding their faces. Dad and Michael standing next to each other on the pier, silhouetted against the sunset. Michael and Peter helping the boys light fireworks. Lizzie and Annabelle waving the burning ends of sparklers in the air. A shot of Dad and Uncle Patrick and Aunt Sue, all sitting on the sand, empty beer bottles stationed around them. Ten feet to the side was Megan, her knees drawn to her chest, her chin resting on her knees. This was right before she’d left the beach, then, right before she and Michael had wandered off together. Once they were developed, I boxed up the prints and wedged them into a dusty spot under my bed.
I wanted to forget everything that had happened—the summer of Mom in her wig with her painted-on eyebrows, the summer of Kat’s miscarriage, the summer of Megan and Michael, the summer I’d lost everything.
* * *
After Christmas, Mom and I went back to Washington with Dad to visit with MK and his new girlfriend, Rebekah, a Georgetown graduate. They were both working for one of the top law firms in the city. Mom said that Rebekah had all the marks of a politician’s wife, which was the highest praise she could offer. She looked like a female version of MK—tall with thick dark hair that was often slicked back into a low ponytail or chignon. I never saw her that winter without three-inch heels, even when we walked through snow and on icy sidewalks.
On my last night in town, I went with MK and Rebekah to a Georgetown alumni party. When Rebekah excused herself to the bathroom, MK told me that she was the real deal. “This is it for me,” he swore. “No more dicking around.”
“Oh, by the way,” I said. “Megan sends her love.”
I was satisfied when he nearly spat out his drink.
Twenty minutes later, I was bored and on my way to drinking too much from the punch bowl when I saw Braden Leavitt smiling at me from across the room. I raised a hand to wave, and he began making his way toward me.
It was one of those funny moments in life where time slowed down, where things became sharp and clear. Still, if Joe Natolo had walked into the room right then, I would have fallen into his arms and demanded to know where he’d been and escaped with him two minutes later to kiss in the stairwell. But Joe was gone, and Braden was there, and I had the feeling that my life was about to go in a completely new direction.
“Lolo Mabrey,” Braden said, taking my hand and holding it to his lips, like he was some kind of courtier, and I was some kind of lady. I gave him a clumsy curtsy.
“Lauren,” I reminded him.
“I know.” He smiled. “That’s not the kind of thing a person can forget.”
* * *
Brady came to Scofield for Valentine’s Day and took me out to dinner at a new Chinese place in town, and we ended up back in my unshared room, moving quietly so we didn’t alert my suitemates to his presence. I visited him in Washington over spring break and he took me to too many Smithsonians and the jazz club where we’d first reconnected. Most nights we talked on the phone, long, lazy conversations that started nowhere and went nowhere and left us wanting more. In the past, I would have spent those nights in the darkroom, the smell of chemicals sharp and familiar. Or I would have spent those hours with Megan, the two of us telling stories or listening to music or doing nothing at all. Or I would have spent them with Joe, knowing that we were operating on borrowed time. It was different with Brady—he was levelheaded and mature, smart and compassionate. He was studying immigration law; he cared about the things my family professed to care about but didn’t unless it was an election year and a sound bite was needed.
“You’re so funny,” he said once, when I’d told him a story about the Mabreys, one of the pieces of my life I was carefully doling out, one by one, trying not to scare him away. “So funny and so different.”
I laughed. “I’m trying to figure out if that’s a good thing, being different.”
“How could it be anything other than a good thing? You’re just being you.”
* * *
I was already pregnant when I graduated that spring, although you couldn’t tell in my oversize black gown, whipped side to side in the wind of a storm that was just about to blow through Scofield, sending the whole commencement crowd running for cover.
But there was no hiding it from anyone at the end of the summer when I married Braden Leavitt in a little chapel on Georgetown’s campus with only our immediate families present. Mom had a hard time smiling; it wasn’t the wedding she would have planned for me. There was no dress shopping, and since my feet were swollen, I wore a pair of white Converse tennis shoes with the laces out.
Stella was born when we were still in DC, and Emma when we moved to Rhode Island a few years later. Brady’s job meant long hours, at best average pay and a sense of satisfaction that more than made up for it. Before long, our lives were so crazy and so full that I hardly thought about Megan Mazeros at all.
Megan
The full impact of what I’d done didn’t hit me until that spring, when I should have been graduating from Keale, when I should have made definite plans about my future. I wondered if Lauren had graduated, if she’d figured out what came next in her life, or if she’d let her mother do that for her.
I didn’t call Miriam again until that summer, a full year after I’d promised to keep her updated.
“Oh, my God,” she said. It felt horrible to hear the relief in her voice. “I was so worried.”
“I’m sorry for everything,” I whispered, holding back the tears that threatened to come.
“I don’t understand why you need to be sorry for anything. Do you want to come back? I can make some phone calls, and we can get you enrolled for the fall. I’ve been here long enough that they won’t refuse me anything.” This was probably true.
“No,” I said quickly. “I just need a bit of a favor.” I told her about the boxes I’d left in Keale storage, full of books and winter clothes and the mementoes I’d kept from my childhood.
“Of course. Do you want me to bring them to you?”
“No,” I said too quickly. I couldn’t imagine Miriam in my cramped apartment, teeming with roommates, every surface littered with our junk. “Maybe you could just keep the boxes for me for a while? Like, in your garage or something, if that’s not too much trouble?”
“Yes, but I’m happy to—”
“Thank you,” I whispered, hanging up the phone before she could undermine my resolve with her generosity. I fought the urge to call her back and unload everything—the rape, the fight with Lauren, my frantic trip back to the mainland, the job where I earned just enough in tips to break even.
But I wasn’t going to complain, because this was what I had chosen. This was my life now.
Sometimes, at parties where I’d had too much to drink from the keg or the punch bowl, I told stories about Lauren. I changed her name and didn’t mention the political connection, but the rest was true: the monthly clothes allowance that would have paid my rent, the estate in Connecticut, the private island off the coast of Maine.
“Get out of here,” someone would say. “A private island? Who the hell has their ow
n island?”
And I would laugh along with them, like it was the funniest thing in the world, these silly rich people and their silly rich lives.
* * *
Eventually, I ordered my transcripts from Keale and a few years later, I finished my courses at a state school, attending class during the day and waitressing at night. I met Bobby on one of those nights, when he came in with a group of fourteen for a birthday party, and I flirted with him in the same family-safe way I flirted with men, women and children alike. That was part of the schtick of being a waitress, the difference between a lousy tip and a decent one, between just making rent and having something left over at the end of the month. As a rule, I didn’t pay attention to men in the restaurant. It was a rare week when one of them didn’t leave me a note on a receipt or a business card that I promptly crumpled and tossed into the trash.
When I saw him a few weeks later at a gas station, filling his Toyota across from my crumbling Cabriolet, he said, “Hey! You’re that waitress.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Lucky guess.”
“No, from the lobster place. Remember my family? Aunt Harriet turned ninety-three. You sang her ‘Happy Birthday.’” He was wearing a Red Sox cap, and he took it off, gesturing to his hair, as if that might make him more recognizable. “I wasn’t wearing a hat that night.”
I smiled. “Now that you mention it, I do remember Aunt Harriet.”
He was watching me, and the gas was pumping slow, and I thought we might be stuck smiling at each other for a very long, very awkward time, until he blurted, “Do you like Shakespeare?”
“Do I like Shakespeare?” I repeated. “That’s a nonsequitur.”
“Smart and pretty,” he said, and I blushed.
I said, “I mean, he’s not on my top-ten list. But yeah, I like Shakespeare.” The gas nozzle clicked, and I transferred it from my car to the holder, wondering if I could leave before my interest in other white, male, dead authors could be probed.
He leaned against the gas pump. “That wasn’t the best way to ask what I wanted to ask. What I meant to say was I’m Bobby. Short for Robert, but Bobby has basically stuck, even though it might be ridiculous for someone who is thirty-one. Which I am.”
I nodded, moving slowly backward toward the driver’s door.
He was talking faster, trying to outpace me. “And you probably know there’s a Shakespeare in the Park thing going on this Saturday. I think it’s Much Ado about Nothing. Something light, you know. A comedy. Guy gets the girl, girl gets the guy.”
“Right,” I said, opening the door to my Cabriolet.
“So a big group of us are going, and it would be great if you came, too. I mean, I think it would be great. Obviously we don’t know each other that well...”
“Obviously.” I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. “Well, maybe I’ll bump into you there.”
“Wait! I mean, it’ll be a madhouse. There will be people milling around everywhere. I couldn’t risk your not finding me. So if you decide to come, and no pressure, whatever you want, I’ll be at the wine stand by the entrance half an hour before the show starts. If you don’t come, it’s cool. If you do come, that would be even better.” He tapped the top of the gas pump twice, as if signaling an end to his soliloquy.
“Thanks, I’ll think about it.” I gave him a short wave and stepped into my car. There was an embarrassing beat while the starter choked and before the engine finally came to life, but then I was pulling away, and in the rearview mirror I saw that Bobby no-last-name had a hand raised, like a goodbye or maybe a benediction.
I went—and not quite on a whim. I worked Saturdays, every Saturday, year in and year out, because the parties were bigger and the tips were higher, and that was how it went in the restaurant business. But I found someone to cover for me, and I met Bobby at the wine tent, because I figured, what the hell? I was twenty-seven years old, and I thought the ugliness was all in my rearview mirror. Other than a drunken kiss here and there on New Year’s Eve, I’d kept my distance from men ever since Michael Mabrey.
Bobby and I dated and broke up and dated and broke up and then we finally moved in together. He asked me to marry him three times, until I asked him not to ask me anymore. “This is good,” I said, gesturing around the little house we rented, a ten-minute walk from the Merrimack River. The ratio of books to people was extremely skewed, but there was enough room to breathe. “Maybe it’s even better this way.”
He said he couldn’t promise never to ask me again.
I said I wasn’t going anywhere.
Gerry and Mom came out to visit every summer, and we flew there every other year for Christmas or Thanksgiving, alternating with Bobby’s family in Boston. It was fairly uncomplicated, and the visits always seemed too short.
I had given Bobby pieces of my life over the years, like little offerings, the most I had to give at any moment. I told him about my dad dying, and how I’d left Kansas and, later, how I’d left Keale, leaving out most of the specifics. He wasn’t an incredibly curious guy; what I told him was always enough to satisfy him at that moment.
“I’m just not that complicated,” I always said, shrugging.
He professed to love that about me, my sweatshirts and jeans and Converse, the curls that sprang out from my ponytail at the end of the day.
But of course, inside I was as tangled as a root ball.
* * *
I went back to school for my master’s degree in counseling and ended up in a course about sexual assault. I learned all the things to say to victims, all the things not to say. It was a strangely clinical way to learn about everything I had been feeling for more than a decade, and stranger still to use the techniques to counsel myself.
Before too long, I could recognize them on sight, the young women and sometimes young men who came into my office. What they wanted to talk about was always something else at first—trouble with registration, struggles with a particular course that was holding them back. I answered questions, directed them to the appropriate avenues. And then sometimes I asked, “Was there anything else? I’ve been told I’m a good listener. In fact—” I would lower my voice, glance to the office door that gaped open a few inches “—I’m actually paid to listen.”
Sometimes, it came out right then. The abusive boyfriend who had left a trail of finger-shaped bruises up both arms. The controlling partner who demanded that she be home by five o’clock sharp, which meant that night classes were out of the question. The suspicious boyfriend or girlfriend who demanded a response to a text within two minutes. Sometimes, it stayed locked inside them, the pain lingering in smiles that never reached their eyes.
I learned a new vocabulary—survivor, not victim. I had been, for a very long time, a victim. In a way, that was easier. I got to wallow in the details, to feel sorry for myself, to keep my mouth shut. Being a survivor required a different level of courage.
* * *
I was at work in 2013 on the day Lauren’s father died, a fact I received from the NPR station that played like white noise in the background of my office. According to the report, he’d passed away suddenly—a heart attack, only hours after addressing Congress. For the next week, I was a news junkie, Googling for an obituary and tributes, reading through the entries in an online guest book. “Senator Mabrey worked tirelessly for our country.” “Blessings to his family.” I watched clips of his funeral on the news and then, later, found a longer video on YouTube, posted by one of his constituents. Michael Mabrey had delivered the eulogy from the pulpit of First Congregational Church in Simsbury, and I watched with my fist in my mouth, remembering how I’d attended church there with Lauren’s family, sitting next to her in a pew in my corduroy skirt and scuffed boots. Michael talked about how wonderful his father had been, a provider, an honorable person, someone who fulfilled his promises, someone who cared about the citizens of our country.
“Sounds like a political speech,” Bobby commented, listening from the other side of the room with a stack of essays spread out on the table in front of him.
I nodded, not able to speak.
In the audience of mourners, I saw them all lined up in a pew—Mrs. Mabrey with her cropped hair, a black veil partially shielding her face. Kat and Peter and a grown-up Lizzie, gangly, with a brush of acne on her chin. There were two girls with them, twins, their features decidedly Asian. Then Michael and his wife, Rebekah, tall and dark-haired, with their lookalike boys in matching dark suits and ties. And Lauren, always lovely Lauren, with her husband and two girls, sweet in their navy dresses. A united family, a united front.
Imagine if I had said something that night on The Island.
Imagine if I had tried to unravel one of those threads.
* * *
A month later, I read that Michael had been appointed to fill his father’s congressional seat until the end of the term in 2016. Just like that, the man who had raped me was a senator of the United States of America. Inside, I raged and seethed, forming long internal monologues about political cronyism and nepotism, but the real problem, of course, was that Michael Mabrey was a rapist, and he would never have to pay for what he did to me.
The nightmares had started again after that, the ones where he came up behind me. The location kept changing, though—sometimes it was in the parking lot of the grocery store, other times I heard footsteps behind me in a deserted stairwell. I carried my pepper spray like a talisman; I took a one-unit self-defense course on campus so many times that I was asked if I was available to coteach in the future.
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