Sorry he had ignored me, she thought. What did he mean? When could he have taken me out? While I was still in high school? No one was really trying to take her out then. She couldn’t even recall times she had seen him. Where or when would they have had the chance to meet while she was still in high school? And yet he had known who had taken her to the prom.
Oh well, she thought, who could blame her for being oblivious to what went on around her back then?
She wasn’t oblivious to what was going on around her now. The orgasms she reached seemed to lift her body higher. She let her head fall back and welcomed each rush that flooded every part of her with a warmth she had thought beyond her forever. He lifted himself to look down at her and she looked up at him.
‘I swear,’ he said, ‘you’re as non-refundable as any girl could be.’
She studied him as best she could, searching his face for some deception, but he looked younger, more like a boy swearing and promising.
I can’t survive a betrayal, she thought, but she had gone too far.
She was dangling over a cliff and he was holding her hands. If he let go, she would fall forever and ever and never trust another kiss, much less a promise.
It would be as if the world had finally closed up around her and left her to whatever she could find in the darkness.
Afterward, they took a shower together. She didn’t realize how much sun she had gotten until then. Somehow, she had neglected the sun lotion. He rubbed some lotion on her while she sprawled on her stomach on his bed and then they made love again, more slowly, more controlled, moving like people who now knew the road they were on and could anticipate every turn.
He collapsed beside her and she curled up in his arms. They closed their eyes, which was a big mistake because neither awoke until it was a little after one thirty in the morning. Her first thought was she hadn’t done anything remotely like this since the Incident.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, when she moaned at the realization. ‘Are they going to be waiting up for you or something?’
‘Something,’ she said, rising to dress quickly. He did the same.
‘I guess your mother will have me washing blackboards.’
She paused, the panic broadcast in her eyes.
‘There’s nothing you can be blamed for, Bart. I’m a big girl.’
‘Oh, sure. Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just joking.’
They didn’t talk much on the way to her house. No matter what she said or how she said it, she could see he looked guilty and sorry.
They saw a dim light through the living-room window. She wondered if her father would be in his chair, waiting and worrying. He started to get out when he pulled into her driveway, but she told him it was unnecessary. He kissed her and she started out, but he grabbed her arm and she turned around.
‘I don’t want anything to get in the way of our seeing each other again and again and again,’ he said. He was so firm about it that she had to smile. ‘I mean it, Victoria.’
‘OK.’
‘I’ll call you some time after twelve or so.’
She nodded and got out. He waited until she had opened the front door. She looked back and he waved and backed out. She watched him drive off and then entered. She paused in the living-room doorway and was happy to see that neither of her parents had waited up for her. She turned off the light and made her way to her bedroom. Her parents’ bedroom door was not fully closed. She smiled to herself. Either her mother or father had left it that way so either could hear her walking to her bedroom. Maybe they both were listening.
What were they thinking?
Were they really, deep down, happy or were they simply nervous wrecks?
She’d know sometime today, but for now she couldn’t be happier.
And she knew it would take her only minutes to fall asleep again, eager for the first time in years to start a new day.
THIRTEEN
Victoria recalled that she could see what Chief Hal Donald was thinking on his face. His deep wrinkled forehead might as well be a television screen. Are you kidding me? Nearly two years after the fact, you walk in here with additional clues? How could you not recall these things for so long? How do I know you didn’t dream all this? And really, what does it add to what we have?
She was sure her mother saw the same thoughts as they sat in the office of the town’s police chief, an office that was spartan with its dark cherrywood desk on which there was simply a phone, a small note pad beside it, some papers, neatly stacked, and a ballpoint pen. The office had very dull pale white curtains. They looked faded from the sunlight. A framed three-by-four picture of President Kennedy, two brassy plaques, one seemingly for a golf tournament, were on the walls. A simple black file cabinet was in the far right corner. The window behind Chief Donald looked out on the dull backyard of the police station, where bushes overtook the remnants of the Ontario and Western Railroad tracks, a railroad that once had been a prime contributor to the establishment of this part of the Catskills as a resort area. The memory of it in its heyday was drifting away like some dead relative.
Victoria and her mother sat on two hastily gathered yellow wooden chairs. The floor itself was cement painted a dark green.
‘And you just remembered this?’ he asked and tapped his pen on the pad after he had written down what Victoria had told him.
‘Do you know what a repressed memory is?’ her mother asked him.
Hal Donald’s face seemed made of clay for a moment. It looked as if his lips were rolling from one side to the other. His cheeks went in and out like fireplace bellows and his eyes widened as his temples tightened. He cleared his throat.
‘Well, I don’t think I could give a definition that would satisfy a college professor,’ he said, tacking on as harmless a smile as he could manage.
‘Let me do that for you. Repressed memories are memories that have been unconsciously blocked due to the memory being associated with a very high level of stress or trauma.’
‘Sure. I know that,’ he said.
‘The point is this new information is not diminished because of the time that’s passed. In fact, the time that has passed helps bring it to the conscious mind.’
‘Makes sense,’ he said, nodding, but he looked as if he was about ten feet under water.
Helen Myers couldn’t prevent a disdainful smirk. Hal Donald corrected his posture instantly. After all, he was the chief of police.
‘I hate to even suggest this because I was far from satisfied with her,’ Victoria’s mother continued in the same condescending tone, ‘but maybe you should pass the information on to that state policewoman who was in charge for most of the investigation.’
‘Everything she did or discovered is in the file here,’ Chief Donald replied, nodding at the file cabinet. ‘Lieutenant Marcus has moved on to other things, I’m sure.’
‘We haven’t,’ Helen Myers countered.
He nodded, but avoided eye contact. ‘We’ll look into it,’ he said, tapping on the pad.
She closed and opened her eyes as though she was enduring a sharp pain.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said. She looked at Victoria and then stood.
Chief Donald turned to Victoria and smiled. ‘How are you doing?’
‘All right,’ she said and stood quickly, too.
Her mother nodded toward the doorway. ‘Please keep us informed,’ she told him.
‘Will do,’ he said as they turned to leave.
Victoria’s mother muttered under her breath and marched ahead of her. The air around her was electrified with her frustration. She practically lunged at the car’s door handle, but then paused and looked back at the station.
‘If it had happened to a man, they would have turned the world inside and out by now,’ she declared. She shook her head. ‘Get in, Victoria.’
They started away. The hamlet of Fallsburgh was just awakening. It wasn’t yet the resort season, so store owners and merchants weren’t rushing about to make e
very minute profitable. Unenthusiastic hands pulled up window shades slowly and unlocked doors that they inched into open positions as if they were fighting the decision to work. Near the end of the town, Ted Kerry lifted up the service area door of his gas station and garage, revealing the two automobiles that waited like wounded soldiers in a surgery to be mended. The fifty-four-year-old stood as still as a statue for a moment, as if the effort to open had taken all his available energy for the day. He watched them drive by.
To Victoria, it seemed as though the small town was yawning, unhappy to admit it was morning. The poster on the movie theater had not been changed. Last week’s showing of Lolita hung like the headline on a vintage newspaper – old news. Empty boxes of popcorn and candy still littered the front, waiting to be removed like the dead on a battlefield. You could see the flies circling with glee.
She had been to the movies only once since the Incident, and that was when she went with her parents because her mother wanted to see To Kill a Mockingbird. She was very self-conscious sitting between them as though they were bookends keeping her upright and protected, which she thought made her look pathetic. To their right and left and in front of them, girls who were on dates were snuggled closely to their boyfriends, and if she let her gaze drift from the screen, she could see some kissing. The giggling infuriated her mother who declared she would not go to the movies on a weekend ever again. When they left, Victoria kept her head down. She didn’t want to greet anyone or see the disdain in their eyes. Who goes with their parents to the movies on a weekend? Who goes with them after you are seven or eight years old anyway?
This sense of having regressed only grew stronger as time passed, and she found herself either left out or retreating from social activities attended by almost everyone else in her class, even Jena. She couldn’t help the trembling when a proposal with the potential for some promiscuity was made in her presence. ‘We’re just going for a ride with some boys, but who knows what will happen?’ Or ‘Everyone’s going to Darlene’s house this weekend. Her parents are visiting relatives. It’s a BYO party,’ which meant you had to bring your own booze.
She wasn’t even participating in a glass of wine with her parents at dinner anymore. Every time her father offered it, she glanced at her mother who looked as if she was waiting for her decision as some sort of test. She knew what troubled her. Was Victoria capable of ever doing what she had done, of putting herself once again in that compromising situation and letting down her guard? Was she doomed to be forever the vulnerable one? How could she even think to spread her wings and fly with her flock? It was easier to turn down invitations or ignore suggestions.
I’m in a form of social hibernation, she once thought. Will I ever wake?
On the way home from the police station that day, her mother wondered aloud why no other girl these past few years had suffered such a sexual violation. Unbeknownst to Victoria, her mother had, through her own connections, tapped into police business. She was aware of criminal activities in just about every hamlet in the township. On Sundays, she would scour the local paper which listed police department reports. It had become an obsession. There had been plenty of domestic violence incidents, the usual petty robberies, an occasional car theft, some burglaries, two murders of passion without premeditation, drunk-driving arrests and the like, but the crime she searched for had yet to appear, even during the resort season. In a way, she was hoping for at least one or two, some modus operandi that might track back to Victoria’s assault.
However, when her mother voiced her astonishment at the absence of a similar crime, Victoria didn’t see it that way. Instead, her complaint seemed to indicate that, yes, Victoria had done something in particular to bring about this crime, something most girls would never have done. Here was the proof. It didn’t happen to anyone else her age.
‘I’m sorry it’s happened only to me,’ she said bitterly. It brought tears to her eyes, tears that would freeze there and then, somehow retreat to wait for another, better opportunity to spend themselves.
‘That’s not it. You’re missing my point, Victoria. What this indicates to me is that it is more likely that it very well was not committed by local men. I hate to use the word “men”. I mean, by local animals.’
‘If that’s true,’ Victoria said, ‘then my additional details really won’t make any difference. Maybe they’ve never returned.’
Her mother was silent. Whom does it bother more that they will get away with it, Victoria wondered, my mother or me? Would the capture and conviction of the perpetrators change the way everyone viewed her? Would that bring the sympathy she longed to see in other people’s eyes? Would it somehow wash away the stains? Would she return to the world?
She had little hope it would happen anyway, even now, even with the revelation of repressed memories.
Before they reached home, her mother looked at her and, sounding more like Dr Thornton than ever, asked, ‘How could you have walked that path?’
Was she referring to the first time or now? It sounded as if she meant the first time.
‘I never felt in any danger walking it. I didn’t imagine Norman Bates dressed as his mother was hovering in the shadows or anything.’
‘No, no, I don’t mean the first time. I mean now. To me, the emotional and psychological trauma would be overwhelming. That would take a lot of inner fortitude.’
Was she proud of her now? Victoria wasn’t sure.
‘I told you. Jena read this article about how that would help make a victim stronger. You defeat …’ She swallowed back the remaining words like someone afraid that merely saying them would bring the evil back.
‘Defeat what?’
‘Ghosts,’ she replied and looked out her side window.
For the past two years, there hadn’t been very much discussion about the Incident at home and she was grateful for that, even though some would think her parents were fleeing from reality. Her mother had even stopped grilling her about her sessions with Dr Thornton. They simply asked, ‘Is it helping?’
Even though she wasn’t sure it was, she said so just so she wouldn’t have to go on and on about it.
Why did I go on that path again? I should have left it, she moaned to herself. All I’ve done is tear off a scab. It was all back. It was all Jena would talk about again, and her mother would surely go into some sort of tirade about the police when they were home and with her father. He would say something that might sound as if he was defending them and that would shatter the ceasefire that lay quietly over it all. Her father would retreat to his chair, to the television or to a magazine or book, and her mother would mumble to herself as she went through the house, the complaints dropping and shattering around her in every room.
Of course, Victoria would retreat, too.
She wished she and her mother had not stirred up the hornet’s nest, and, again, she regretted going with Jena to retrace her steps. She was always worried this would keep the Incident fresh and her name would return to gossip and chatter. She’d been seen the way she was those weeks and months that followed, and she feared she would never be free of the memory.
The first time she felt she might breathe again came when she received her confirmation of admittance to Columbia University. The letter took on the power of a passport or the famous letters of transit in her father’s favorite movie, Casablanca – permission to leave that even the Vichy French government couldn’t rescind. There it was. She pinned it to her wall so she could treat it with the reverence that other people showed a religious icon.
Finally, she had something she could brag about, something that brought a true, deeply felt smile to her face in and out of school. When teachers and administrators congratulated her, she felt redeemed, blessed, cleansed of any sin. She could walk with straighter, prouder posture and hold her head high. Jena was the only one who seemed wounded by the news.
‘I thought you’d be happy for me,’ Victoria told her.
‘Oh, I am. I just thought you s
aid you applied to New Paltz, too.’
‘Not far enough away,’ Victoria told her. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll see each other on holidays and keep in touch,’ she pledged, but secretly harboring the hope that she would unload Jena and the baggage that accompanied her. In the end, she didn’t. If there was one thing about Jena now, it was that she was safe. Jena knew when to remind her of the Incident and when not to. It was simply that Victoria wanted a clean break from it all. Was that possible?
In fact, she was disappointed to learn that their class valedictorian, Dave Stein, had been accepted to Columbia, too, and even though he was also accepted at NYU, he decided to attend Columbia. There would, after all, be someone who knew her history, not that he was particularly someone who cared. In fact, he surprised her by congratulating her personally and carrying on a long conversation about it at lunch.
It wasn’t often that one of the boys in their class joined Jena and Victoria at their table, but on this particular day, Dave did. He ignored Jena entirely and talked about all the things he knew about Columbia and places he had visited in the city. She thought – dared to think – that he was actually happy to have someone from their school going to Columbia, too – even her.
However, she was aware that having his attention and interest wasn’t an enormous accomplishment. He was referred to as one of the class ‘brains’ and was not on any sports team or even in the drama club. He was in the chess club and wrote for the school newspaper. In fact, journalism was the career he wanted to pursue.
He was also a good two inches shorter than Victoria, stout, with habitually unruly dull brown hair. As far as a girlfriend went, he occasionally took Barbara Kenner to a movie or to a school party. She, too, was considered one of the class ‘brains’ and had been accepted at Bennington. She dressed like someone’s mother and barely brushed her reddish brown hair. Most of the time it looked as if it was on its way to becoming a bird’s nest.
The Incident Page 16