Ecstasy

by Beth Saulnier

So I drove to a well-kept little house, a Cape Cod bungalow whose quaint facade was marred by the addition of a clunky-looking ramp that ran from the walkway up to the front door. I rang the bell, and after a minute, I heard someone struggling with the handle. I turned it myself, but the door only opened a few inches before it struck something.

  That something turned out to be Alan Bauer’s wheelchair.

  He didn’t greet me so much as ask what the hell I was doing there. Then he said, “My parents aren’t home.”

  “I know. I called where they work to make sure.”

  “You…Why are you here?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Trish Stilwell.”

  He bit his bottom lip. “I…You already know about that. Everybody knows.”

  “They know what happened,” I said. “But they don’t know how. They don’t know why.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “You were there, Alan. You’re the only one left who was.”

  “But… why do you want to know?”

  “Because,” I said, “I watched her die.”

  A melodramatic statement, I know—but an effective one. Alan backed up the wheelchair into a neat three-point turn and headed down the hallway into the kitchen. It was a sunny sort of room, all yellows and whites; there was an empty space on one side of the glass-topped table, and he parked himself there. I took a chair next to him.

  “I’m going back to school next week,” he said, like he was trying to prove something to one of us. “I get to graduate with my class.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And…I’m having physical therapy three days a week. The doctors say I might be able to walk in three months or so.”

  “That’s good too.”

  “But no more sports,” he said, and this time I got the feeling he was talking directly to himself. “No more sports, ever again.”

  “Maybe it won’t work out that way.”

  “I don’t really care,” he said.

  I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t bother to argue.

  “That night at Melting Rock,” I said. “The night Trish got hurt. What happened?”

  “You think I’m going to tell you so you can put it in the paper? So you can get the cops to—”

  “It’s all over, Alan. There aren’t going to be any more stories. And you’re not going to be arrested. Without Trish, there’s no victim to press charges. You got away with it.”

  He slammed a fist on the table. “Got away? Are you crazy? Look at me. I’m fucking crippled for life, okay? My three best friends are dead. I’m sorry about what happened to Trish and all, okay? If I could take it back, I would have—we all would have. Don’t you think we would?”

  “I…I suppose so.”

  “Do you want to hear what happened? If you do, just sit there and shut up and I’ll tell you. But don’t go saying that I’m not sorry, that we all didn’t get fucking punished for what we did, okay? Because we did. We did.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “And you swear none of this goes in the paper?”

  “I swear.”

  He took a deep breath. “I…A bunch of us did some E. And it was…We were just really flying. And the four of us, just the guys, we decided we wanted to go for a swim.

  “And it was cold, way colder than usual, but we totally couldn’t feel it, you know? We were all having fun, splashing around and shit. There was nobody else there, just us, and it was, like… perfect.

  “I don’t know. It sounds stupid. Just some stupid adolescent shit, right? But we were just screwing around, and all of a sudden Trish showed up.

  “And she was kind of lit up too, maybe not as much as us, but she said she wanted to go for a swim. And first we told her no, like ‘no girls allowed,’ just messing around, but she said it was a public place and she could swim if she wanted.

  “So she came in, just wearing her bra and underpants, but then Billy said, ‘Fine, you can swim, but no bathing suits.’ And we all laughed ’cause Trish was always the shy one, and we figured she’d split, but she said it was cool.

  “And I knew… I kind of knew she had a thing for me, and like I said we were all just having a good time. So I started playing around with her, saying, ‘Don’t take it off yourself; let me do it for you.’ It all seemed like a laugh, you know? But like I told you, she was maybe a little bit lit up, and she came over to me in the water. And she, like, turned around and lifted her hair off her back and said, ‘Go ahead.’

  “So I did—I unhooked her bra in the back and just kind of threw it in the water. And then she turned around, and all of a sudden she…”

  He paused for so long I finally prompted him. “She what?”

  “She just looked different, you know? Really… beautiful. I don’t know if it was the E or what, but I never saw her like that before. She was just standing there topless, and I…I just wanted to touch her. So I reached out and… did it.

  “And she didn’t push me away. I swear she didn’t. She just kind of… smiled. And so I pulled her toward me, right there in the water, and I kissed her. And she kissed me back, really deep, and I was like …I’d never felt like that before, okay? I’d done E lots of times, but I’d never been, you know, turned on before.

  “When I think about it, it feels like it happened to somebody else, you know? I’m not trying to say I’m not responsible; I’m just trying to tell you what it was like—like I was there but I wasn’t. And the memory feels weird, like it comes in pieces, but the next thing I remember is laughing. I was laughing; Trish was laughing; the guys were all laughing. We pulled away and Billy and Shaun and Tom were all yucking it up at the sight of us. Then Billy came over and started stroking Trish’s back, and we were all just laughing and laughing…. First he kissed her on the cheek and then on the mouth and then he touched her… her front, and we just all kept laughing.

  “And the next thing I knew, Shaun and Tom were there too, and we were all in a circle around her, all touching her and laughing. But after a while, she said, ‘Just Alan, I just want to kiss Alan,’ and then we kept laughing ’cause it just seemed so funny, this game we were all playing.

  “And that’s what it felt like the whole time—just a game, just something to do for laughs. But when she tried to get out of the water, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to play anymore. So I picked her up and carried her to the shore and I started kissing her again, right there on the ground, and she asked me to go back to the tents with her so we could be alone.

  “But it didn’t make any sense to me. I thought, We’re having so much fun here, why would we want to leave? And she started laughing again; at least I thought she did. She was making all these sounds and I thought, Good, she’s having fun again.

  “And she looked so beautiful, lying there on the grass, and I thought how much I wanted to see the rest of her. So I started to take off her underpants, but she tried to stop me, and it took me a minute to realize…to understand that it was just part of the game too. So I got Billy to hold her down, and we were all just laughing and laughing, and I thought Trish was laughing too.

  “And I wanted so much to…to be with her like that. It just all seemed so perfect, like this perfect thing to do on this perfect night, all of us together just laughing and laughing. She was lying there, looking so beautiful and perfect, and being …on top of her just seemed like the most natural thing in the world.”

  He paused, and though I should’ve kept my mouth shut, I couldn’t manage it.

  “And then you raped her,” I said. “All four of you.”

  “I know…how awful it sounds now. But you asked what happened, so I’m telling you. And…back then, at that moment, it just seemed, right, you know? Like it was what we all wanted.”

  “Are you saying she asked for it?”

  “No. No. I’m not saying that at all. When I think about it now, I know she said no. I know she didn�
�t want to… to do it. And I guess she tried to fight back, to yell for help and everything…. But then, right then, it seemed like a game, something we all just got caught up in. And Melting Rock…it just never seemed like normal life in the first place, you know?”

  “Did you ever talk about it afterward? Either with her or each other?”

  “We kind of made a deal just to forget about it, the four of us guys. But later, Tom told me… he said once he tried to tell Trish he was sorry, that he knew the whole thing had gotten out of hand, but she pretended like she didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “And when the other guys got killed, didn’t you think maybe this might be the reason?”

  “I know you probably won’t believe it, but… no.”

  “But how could you possibly—”

  “I just thought it was some stupid random OD at first, okay? And then even when the papers said it wasn’t, I didn’t really believe it. It wasn’t until… until I got hit by the car that I started to think that it had really happened on purpose.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something?”

  “What was I supposed to say? ‘Gee, Chief Stilwell, my friends and I gang-raped your daughter and now somebody’s trying to kill me’?”

  “You never suspected it was him?”

  “No. Of course not. Why would I ever—”

  “Because it was his daughter.”

  “Yeah, but Chief Stilwell, he always seemed so”—he shook his head—“I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “Try.”

  “I guess he just always seemed like… the opposite.”

  “The opposite of what?”

  “The opposite of anything goes,” he said. “The opposite of doing whatever you feel like and not having to deal with it later. I guess what I mean is… the opposite of Melting Rock.”

  THAT NIGHT, after what she said was a fair amount of soul-searching, Melissa told me she was moving out. The bottom line was she felt like she could never feel safe in the house again. And though I hardly felt like dealing with looking for another roommate—or finding a new place to live—I could hardly blame her.

  Things with Cody, though weird, appeared to be on the mend; at least he seemed to be having a good time out at the Citizen Kane with the rest of us. We sat there drinking in relative moderation, trying not to rehash the whole Melting Rock thing but managing to talk about nothing else. When I finally got around to recounting my visit to Alan Bauer, the conversation got a little dicey.

  It was Melissa—who’d recently suffered through her fair share of male aggression—who asked the questions. Was what happened to Trish an example of aberrant behavior? she wondered. Or did I think that there was some measure of pack mentality lurking in the collective hearts of all human males?

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “I mean, some people think morality is really situational. It’s not that people are inherently good or bad, it’s more a question of how you behave at a particular time.”

  “Pardon me,” Cody said, “but that sounds like a bunch of crap. I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I think a person has to stand for something. The boys that attacked Trish Stilwell might have done it because they were all together or because they were wacked out on drugs, but what matters is they did it.”

  “And you think that makes them fundamentally bad?”

  “Damn right,” he said. “Anyone who’d be capable of that kind of thing can’t call themselves a decent person. To say it’s a question of circumstances… that just seems to me like a cop-out.”

  “Here, here,” said Mad.

  “I’m with you guys,” said O’Shaunessey. “Nuns never taught us morality was a part-time job.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me you think good people never do bad things?”

  “Sure they do,” said Mad. “Which then makes them …What?” He turned to O’Shaunessey.

  “Bad people.”

  “Fine,” I said, “call me wishy-washy or whatever you want. But even if you want to say the other three were a moral wasteland, Tom Giamotti was different. He was a decent guy who got all screwed up on drugs and did something awful. Or didn’t the nuns bother to teach you about redemption?”

  “Guess they covered that after I got expelled.”

  “And no offense, Mad, but I’d hardly call you a poster child for the Moral Majority.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I know damn well you’ve been trying to get an eighteen-year-old girl into the sack.” Mad began to take a passionate interest in his Beer Nuts. “Son of a…You didn’t.”

  “None of your damn business, okay?”

  “Tell me you didn’t sleep with that child.”

  He let out a strangled sort of cackle. “ ‘Child’? What are you, nuts?” He took a long drink of his Labatt’s. “Lauren Potter is a lot of things, but a child is definitely not one of them. Trust me.”

  “Yo, Madison,” Ochoa said. “What did that chick do to you, anyway?”

  Mad surveyed his audience, then poured some more beer. “Never mind.”

  “Come on,” I said, “you know you’re going to tell us eventually.”

  “And why the hell would I do that?”

  “Because every single one of us is a reporter, except for the one who happens to be a cop. That’s why.”

  “Oh, for chrissake, she… she turned out to be, um…to have been around the block a lot. Or at least on a way freakier block than I’ve ever been to.”

  “Oh, really? How so?”

  “The chick just scared me, okay? She was a little too… out there for my taste.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Come on, would you lay off already?”

  “Just spill it. How bad can it be?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Would you just—”

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “The morning after, I got rid of my most prized possession.”

  “Mad,” I said, “you didn’t.”

  He raised his beer mug in a mock salute. “Damn straight.”

  “Madison,” O’Shaunessey said, “you’re breakin’ my heart here.”

  Ochoa shook his head. “If it’s true, it’s the end of an era.”

  Cody raised a reddish eyebrow. “Somebody want to let me in on the joke?”

  “What I believe Mad is telling us,” I said, “is that he sold his signed copy of Lolita.”

  “Sold it?” he said. “I burned the damn thing.”

  “Really? Are you serious?”

  “Well…no,” Mad said. “But I stuck it up on a really inconvenient shelf.”