by Paloma Meir
“Well, she didn’t. It’s been five months. A little late to be collecting samples.”
“He needs to be in jail.”
“In a perfect world... It didn’t happen. Do you really want to dredge this up with her? Hasn’t she been through enough?”
“She’ll feel stronger if he’s put away.”
“She is strong. I know you like to think that she’s a delicate flower, but she’s not... The way she hung on you? She wanted you to be her big and strong boyfriend. That’s romance to her. Have you ever looked at the books she reads? Never mind. From what I saw she led you around”
“I’m going to ignore everything you just said because it has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.”
“Don’t bring this “bring Spider to justice” garbage up to her.” You’ll set her back... You watch too much TV. She would have to answer a million degrading questions slanted to make her sound like she was asking for it. Be happy that she only remembers the last five minutes of it.”
“Carolina you are the patriarchy she’s always talking about.”
“Neither one of you grasp the concept of the patriarchy. I would love to never hear that word again.” She screamed in frustration. “Danny what do you think he would say in the one in a million chance they found him? Nobody knew his real name. He was a drifter. John had the same idea you did. He played detective on the beach. He couldn't find him. He’s going to admit to raping a 15 year-old girl? He’ll say she was asking for it, drinking on the beach. Have you looked at your girlfriend? She’s looked like she was 18 since she hit puberty. You want her to be an example? To fight the good fight? You want this to be her life? Because that’s what would happen.”
“You think he should get away with it?” I said sarcastically, but truthfully she had shaken my resolve.
“He’s not getting away with anything. He’s stuck being him.”
“What does that even mean? Stuck being himself? You think he cares?”
“We can’t go back and change how everything unfolded. It’s done.”
“You should have let her call me. You should have called me. It didn’t have to be like this.” My voice cracked harder than my chest. I was on the cusp of understanding where my rage was coming from, but I wasn’t there yet.
“I’m sorry.” She buried her face in her hands and cried, “We always took care of each other. It was too big for me, then her Mom... I thought she would tell you when we got her home. I told her to tell you. She made her own decision. She felt ashamed. She didn’t want you to see her that way.”
I pulled over to the side of the road not far from our homes and put my hand on her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her. She was so tiny, and her body shook so hard. It hit me like a punch how young we were, and how much we didn’t know or understand. “You should have told me. Didn’t you see what was happening to her?” I said as gently as I could.
“I saw it as well as you did.” She straightened herself up and said, “I don’t want to hurt you but you could have confronted her, stood up to her. Why do you think she stomped up and down that street? You were her big strong hero. You just watched her walk by.”
“She had one little fit in her bedroom that night and you’re scared of her? She didn’t return your love messages and that’s it? Do you want to rethink which one of you is the strong one in this situation? It’s not looking like you.” She sighed heavily, very dramatic.
“I’m sorry Danny. I shouldn’t have said that. Who wouldn’t run away from someone that acted that way? In the end you swooped down to save her from herself. I couldn’t have done that.” She stopped crying.
“You’re right. I failed her. I’m going to make it up to her.”
“Forget I said all of that. You’re the one who got her help. Who knows what would have had to happen before her parents did anything...” She shook her head as if trying to shake the thought out. “I feel so bad all the time. I failed her, not you....”
I started up the engine and pulled out into the road. “Like you said, we can't go back and change how it all unfolded. You and me? We did the best we could. Both of us need to let it go. The guilt's not helping anyone in this situation."
“Okay... I don't know how to do that but I'll try.”
I didn't have any suggestions for her, so I squeezed her hand instead.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The days went by quickly. I lost interest in my sessions with Rita after her be in the light comment, but the meetings? I loved them. I talked in them, taking up the time. I avoided the bad day but everything else? I talked, and they supported me.
Patients came and went, everyone had started on a different day. Soon Keith and I were the old timers helping the new patients get their bearings. We ate sweets, did our schoolwork and ran the hallways like maniacs.
Danny came to visit almost every night. Keith and him warmed up to each other. I kept talking about myself to the minimum when he was there. I never brought up my feelings for him, happy to have him with me in the way he felt comfortable. I listened to every word he said cataloging it in my head to pull out in follow up conversations.
My hair had grown out and Erica had given me her lipstick before she left. She promised to stay in touch. We were like a big family. I had never felt a sense of that before coming here. We were all screwed up with our addictions but we were there each other and you couldn’t say anything without someone one upping you in someway. My temporary phone book was full of beautiful and crazy old people.
On Keith’s last night in the rehab we had a candy party in his room. We sat behind his bed playing on his phone looking at pictures of his friends.
“Pull up Danny” I wanted to see if looking at the picture of myself with him in my mini-skirt and crazy aqua boots would still make me feel ill.
“I don’t think you want to see it.”
“I won’t get upset again. I want to see us together. Come on Keith hand me the phone.” I swatted him and took the phone from his hands.
The cover photo wasn’t of us anymore. I felt sick as I saw that he had replaced our holiday picture with a picture of him with Serge and his friend Brendan. It was a happy image of the three of them after winning their lacrosse game.
Danny had been excited about winning the final game of the season and told me about in great detail. I paid attention to what he was saying as closely as possible, but the rules and objective of the game never made sense to me. Guilt threatened to overwhelm me, especially as I looked away from Danny in the picture and focused on Serge.
“I shouldn’t have pulled it up. You okay? I don’t get your boyfriend at all.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. But I was thinking about Serge.” I pointed him out in the picture.
“That’s Carolina’s brother? That don’t look anything alike.”
“I was horrible to him. I don’t know how to… Never mind it’s Serge. He’s my friend. He’ll understand… I don’t want to talk to him about it though, you know?”
“I got a lot of that in my life too. We can’t fix everything at once…”
“You’re right,” I smiled and handed him back his phone, “I’ll go back to thinking about my boyfriend. But he’s not my boyfriend…” I took a chocolate kiss from the candy drawer and opened it slowly, mesmerized by the silver foil.
“Can you see the future in that candy wrapper?” He laughed and took a one out of the drawer and opened as painstakingly as I was opening mine, “Don’t worry about Danny. I sit with you two every night. He’s hung up on you.”
“I scared him away. I thought if I really listened to him and wasn’t “hypersexual” he would come back to me.” I popped the candy into my mouth, “I guess we’re just friends now.” I felt hurt as I shrugged it off, but not the anxiety that had been plaguing me for so many months.
“Forget about him," I continued, “What am I going to do without you for the next four days? You have to go to the meetings every day. No drugs. I’ll be out in a f
ew days. Hang on and we’ll stick it out together.”
“I’ll keep it together. You’re coming over the day you get out. We will be like the two old alcoholics that started AA.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s all AA is two alcoholics helping each other out. All that other stuff? They built it up over the years. Didn’t you read The Big Book?”
“They gave me a pile of books when I came to this side. That’s the last one on my list. I’ll start reading it tomorrow. What else am I going to do without you here?”
“You got your “checklist” all wrong. That should have been the first book. Hey if you don’t talk about Danny for an hour I’ll leave all my candy for you.”
“Challenge not accepted. Who else would you leave it to?” I grabbed his pillow off his bed and hit him over the head with it. An epic pillow fight followed. In the morning he was gone. The candy lay at the foot of my bed.
...
Countdown to the escape from my prison/heaven. Four days to go. I read the AA book. It was a series of testimonies. I reveled in their squalor. I worried I was reading the book in a way it wasn’t intended. The stories were mini soap operas to me. Before coming here I had thought I was the only odd one out in life and Carolina too of course. There was whole big world of screwed up people out there. Everyone was a mess. If I could have I would have been sad at this discovery, instead it made me feel more a part of it all.
It was my last session with Rita. I had lost a lot of respect for her with her boring platitudes but I still liked her and decided to give her what she wanted. It would be good to get off my chest. I hoped saying it once would put it away forever. It had worked with other issues in the past thirty days, why not this?
“Hey Rita want me to tell you why I blamed myself? Why I thought I deserved what happened to me?”
“That’s what we’ve been working towards all this time.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to work this out in my head...”
“You should have been sharing it so we could have gone through it together. It doesn’t always have to be so hard Zelda.”
“Shhhh, I’m trying to tell you. I had a lot of fun with my clothes and took a pride in my looks, but that day I was dressed pretty normal, black jeans, black sweater, silver jacket. So what right? My last memory of Spider was of him leaning over to kiss me. I didn’t fight him off." I paused for a moment, collecting myself. “I let him kiss me. The time goes black there and all of you know what happened after that.” My stomach clenched, but I held tight and didn’t let it overwhelm me.
“Zelda, Spider is a predator. He pushed you into drinking a toxic amount of alcohol. He knew what he was doing. He knew you would become malleable with the drinks. Spider is a rapist. You were raped, you have to say it, you have to know it. You never had a choice. He beat you Zelda. If it were consensual, would he have done that?”
The nausea faded away but tears filled my eyes.
“I wanted Danny, nobody would let me call him. Now he’s gone.” Rita hugged me, and I clung to her soaking her plain white blouse with my tears.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
I visited her, and I guess Keith, every day. She had gotten into the habit of twisting her hands. I kind of thought she did it to keep her hands off of me, but that could have been wishful thinking on my part.
I brought them candy. Those two couldn’t get enough of the sweets. She had found her elf mate in Keith. She would eat a pack of Rollo’s in the hour I was with her. When she would laugh, which was a lot, her teeth were brown from the chocolate. The two of them were going to have a painful visit to the dentist when they got out of rehab.
Her and Keith had a million private jokes. Her relationship with him was easy, so different from the intenseness she shared with all of her other friends. I felt like she was slipping away. Her eyes were focused, her words direct. It made it easier to be her friend because I didn’t know this person.
I relaxed with her and didn't feel a need to interrogate her feelings for me. Sometimes she looked at me in that familiar lovesick way and I probably looked at her that way too but you wouldn’t know from seeing us together that there had been anything between us. The other patients probably thought I was her brother.
The only crack in her spirit was when I would leave. She would walk me to the exit twisting her hands and ask to come visit her the next day. Her eyes wide with that lost look as if she expected me to say no. Every night I said yes, kissing her on the cheek good-bye.
…
On Keith’s last day I brought a batch of my Valencia’s chocolate chip cookies that Zelda had always liked so much. She had gained back all the weight she had lost. Her cheeks were pink and other than wearing my sweatshirt most of the time she changed clothes every day. She didn’t wear make-up, but she was squeaky clean again. She never needed the make-up anyway.
A counselor called Zelda to the front desk for a long distance call from her parents leaving Keith and I alone at the table. We sat quietly together as I watched him chomp down on the cookies. In my life I’ve never seen two people eat more sweets than the two of them did while in rehab.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” I asked specifically to get him to slow down his pace.
“Run. I’m going to run to San Diego and back. Other than some interpretive dance twice a week we don’t move here. Got get off the sugar too. I was more of a salt person before coming here.”
“Zelda always liked candy, not like this though.”
“She was skinny when she first got here. I thought she had an eating disorder, like anorexia or something. Wrong there. Your girl eats.”
“Does she talk to you about what happened?"
“I don’t know what happened. I thought she had gotten caught up in partying until that day Albert went off on her. Fuck that guy. They kicked him out right after that.”
“Who’s Albert? How did he go off on her?" I tensed up, and looked around the room for whoever Albert was, ready to destroy him.
“Sorry man, I thought she told you. Forget about it. The ladies took care of her. She’s good.”
“Keith you’re going to tell me right now.”
“Chill out man.” He looked at her across the room at Zelda talking on the phone and nodded his head. “She was unbraiding my hair in a meeting, sitting in a chair together… and he called her a slut. She stood up and screamed, loud. I figured it out then. Don’t worry, we took care of her.”
I popped a cookie in my mouth. What else was I going to do? Never in my life would I will be able to help her.
“She’s good. She talks in all the meetings. She’s got her checklist.” he laughed, “She’s going to be all right.”
“At home she makes spreadsheets.” I needed to change the subject, “What do you two talk about all day?”
“She’s a chatterbox. Mostly about your shoulders, your eyes, the usual. She’s the rehab cheerleader. They’re going to miss her here.” he laughed again.
Zelda came back to the table and told us about her parents getting stuck in customs. They would be back in three days, just in time to bring her home. How nice of them.
Keith was gone for the last few visits. Zelda would bring new patients to the table. It kept our conversation light. Leaving was the only time she would seem nervous, not trusting that I would come back. I reassured her each time. We were stuck. If anything she was more dismissive of me after Keith left.
Chapter Forty
After a very long good-bye to all my newfound friends and counselors, my parents arrived at the rehab in a rush to pick me up and drive me back home. I thought I would be nervous as we rounded the corner on Sunset up to our house. I worried I would want to drink, or hide myself away. But that didn't happen.
I felt happy as we pulled in to the driveway. I was even happier to see Danny sitting on our porch dressed in his workout gear waiting for me. I didn’t know why he was there, why he felt such a responsibility towar
ds me, but I couldn’t have been happier to see him.
I ran ahead of my family and shouted out a “hello” to him as I opened the door and ran straight back to my room to drop off my overnight bag. I hadn’t wanted Danny to follow me. I didn’t want to be alone with him. Our boundaries were important.
We sat down at the kitchen table. My dad made us a breakfast of pancakes and veggie scrambled eggs. I had so looked forward to a home cooked meal after four weeks of institutional food I had been eating. I savored every bite, closing my eyes while I chewed, involuntarily making noises of satisfaction. There was a whole world of food outside of sweets I thought to myself.
“I made a calendar for you. It has your school schedule, extracurricular and your therapy appointments.” My mother held up her hand drawn schedule with pride, no computer spreadsheets for her. “I thought maybe we could take a series of Krav Maga classes. They start next month. See it’s right here on the schedule.” She pointed to the words Krav Maga. What was I going to do with my newly anointed Mother of the Year?
“What’s Krav Maga?” I asked not knowing what else to say about her newfound interest in my life.
“Israeli self-defense. Very physical, you’ll love it.” I forced myself not to roll my eyes, a habit I picked up from the older women in rehab.
“I’m thinking of taking up jogging. It’s supposed to be a great stress reliever.” The self-improvement advice in the hippie meetings was ridiculous, but I had to do something, becoming dizzy or nauseous at the smallest unpleasantness was not the way I wanted to go through my life.
“We could do that together. I run more than jog but I could slow down until you get the hang of it.” Danny said.
“Move on Zelda” I muttered to myself at the thought of running with him. Really, how far was he going to push this friendship? Every moment with him was breaking my heart.