Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

  “But the people here know there wasn’t any automobile accident,” Karen argued, wondering dimly what this had to do with sixteen-year-old Laura.

  “Maybe they do and maybe they don’t,” Beverly declared. “Besides, hospital records can be sealed or something, and then we can do whatever’s necessary to prevent anyone else from finding out.”

  “What about Peter?”

  “The time for worrying about Peter was before you went walking in Central Park, I should think,” her mother replied tartly. “But of course we’ll have to tell him the same thing as everyone else.”

  “I can’t lie to him,” Karen objected.

  “Of course you can,” Beverly snapped. “What chance do you think you’ll have to make a decent marriage, to him or to anyone else, if you repeat this dreadful story? Do you really want to ruin the rest of your life? Because that’s exactly what will happen if you ever tell anybody what you told us.”

  Karen’s head was throbbing and she began to pray for the oblivion that had always come to ease her pain to come now and swallow her up forever.

  “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “Fair?” her mother pounced. “You think it would be fair to stand up and tell the whole world what you did?”

  “What I did?” Karen echoed. “You mean, what he did, don’t you?”

  “Whatever,” Beverly replied, picking the piece of lint off her jacket.

  “You’re my parents,” Karen whispered. “You’re supposed to love me. I thought you’d be on my side.”

  “Of course we love you,” said Beverly. “Of course we’re on your side. That’s why we’re willing to go to such lengths to protect you.”

  “No,” Karen accused. “You think this was all my fault. You don’t think he ought to be punished—you think I should. You think I flirted with him and teased him and then enticed him into the park. You think I asked him to do this to me, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think anything of the kind,” Beverly retorted. “I think there was probably a terrible misunderstanding somewhere along the way and he took advantage of you. Maybe he should be punished for that, but not at the expense of this fam-ily’s reputation.”

  Suddenly Karen couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her right leg was in spasm, her face turned beet-red, her whole body began to heave, and she was clawing at the wires that fastened her jaw.

  “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” Beverly shrieked.

  Leo sprang up and grabbed for his daughter’s hand before she could do any serious damage to herself. “Get a nurse in here,” he told his wife.

  Beverly rushed for the door. “She can’t breathe,” she shouted into the corridor. “Do something.”

  Rose Thackery came running. After one look she turned on her heel, returning seconds later with a hypodermic. She hurried to the bed, almost knocking Leo aside.

  “Karen,” she said firmly, “calm down now. You’re having a little anxiety attack, that’s all. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  She stuck the needle deep into Karen’s hip. Then she took hold of her patient’s hand. “Listen to me,” she said soothingly. “You’re all right. You’re safe. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

  Karen stared at the kind face through the flood of gasps and tears—a face that had always meant comfort and acceptance and good humor, and heard the soft words that had never been anything but supportive.

  The panic began to subside.

  “Just take a nice deep breath,” the nurse encouraged. “Come on, just one.”

  Slowly, Karen began to draw air into her lungs, and when she could hold no more, she let it all out.

  “Now another.”

  Karen obeyed. By the third breath, the spasm in her leg had eased and her face was returning to its natural color.

  “She’s all right now,” Rose Thackery assured the Kerns. “Do you know what caused this? Did one of you say something to upset her?”

  “Certainly not,” Beverly retorted. “Why on earth would either of us say anything to upset her?”

  eight

  It was dark outside the window. The draperies had not been I drawn and night shadows moved in all directions. A cloud scudded across the moon, a newspaper was swept up in a sudden gust, a taxi slid along a slippery street.

  The weary swing shift had departed, the grumpy graveyard shift had arrived. Most of the patients on the third floor of Manhattan Hospital had been asleep for hours.

  Karen lay in her bed, wide awake despite her evening sedative, her head pounding even after two doses of aspirin. Try as she would, she couldn’t get her mother’s words out of her mind. The thing she had feared the most had happened. She had disgraced herself and her family. So much so that her mother was willing to tell a terrible lie rather than have anyone know the truth.

  But what was the truth? That was the question Karen struggled to answer in the dark hours before dawn. Had she in some way prompted her own misfortune, as the police had more or less intimated, and her mother seemed so ready to believe?

  For the thousandth time, she began to replay that long, harrowing night in her mind, from the moment she spilled mayonnaise down the front of her dress to the instant Bob’s fist smashed into her jaw and the world had gone black. She went over every action, every gesture, every smile, every giggle, every word she could remember, but it had all been harmless party flirting to her.

  Was it possible that Bob had seen an invitation in her behavior she hadn’t meant to be there? Read some signal she hadn’t realized she had given? Yes, she had been flattered by his attentions, but had that made her appear easy? Did casual flirting mean she had agreed to have sex? Had she really brought all this on herself?

  Two men she didn’t know and two people she had known her whole life apparently thought so. Karen groaned aloud in the darkness and wished she could ask for more aspirin. But it was barely half an hour since she had had the last ones.

  If only she hadn’t thought Bob so attractive. If only she hadn’t enjoyed the envious looks of the other girls at Jill’s party. If only she had insisted that they wait for the doorman to hail a cab. If only she hadn’t worn her favorite black dress. If only she had stayed at home in the first place. Her head throbbed with all the if-onlys that might have kept her from ending up, with her clothes and her life in tatters, under a clump of bushes in Central Park.

  Was it only two months ago that Karen had believed there was nothing worse than getting pregnant and having to marry a man you didn’t love? It seemed a lifetime ago. How could she have been so naive? Why, compared to the Kerns, Jill’s family would be considered fortunate. Next to Karen, Jill had everything.

  A small light began to flicker in the darkness of her soul because there was one thing Jill didn’t have, and that made all the difference—she didn’t have Peter Bauer.

  Strong, devoted Peter, who called on the telephone twice a week and sent funny little cards and big bouquets of her favorite yellow roses. No matter how bad things got, Karen could still take courage from the knowledge that Peter was there for her, and that alone was enough to ease the pounding

  in her head and let the gray curtain of sleep steal over her.

  * * *

  Michael Haller came back two weeks later, wearing the same baggy suit. Tug McCluskey was not with him.

  “I found Bob,” he said without social preamble. It was on the tip of his tongue to fill in the last name for her, but he decided there was really no point unless, of course, she asked. “He was exactly where you said he would be.”

  “Did you arrest him?”

  “We couldn’t really do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Haller pushed his eyeglasses back up his nose. “Because we have no proof that he committed any crime.”

  “Look at me,” Karen cried. “You can see for yourself what he did. Isn’t that proof enough?”

  “Yes, well, the thing is,” Haller replied, studying his scuffed shoes, “the young man doesn’t exactly corroborate
your story. Actually, he says it was your idea to walk across the park and that it was you who came on to him.”

  The fact that this Bob had been so easy to find, in plain sight at Harvard Law School, had more or less clinched things in Haller’s mind. A man bent on rape didn’t normally go around telling his victim where to find him.

  Karen stared at the investigator. Part of her was outraged, but part of her, she realized, had almost expected it. The conspiracy, as she now thought of it, was complete.

  “He said I asked for it? He said I wanted him to do this to me?”

  “He said he didn’t do anything—other than accommodate you, that is,” Haller told her. “He said he simply had sex with you and afterward, when he wanted to leave, you refused to go with him.”

  “Did you believe him?” she asked dully.

  “He seemed sincere.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Haller declared in his own defense. “It’s what a jury would believe, if this were to go to trial. We have no real evidence here, no eyewitness, just your word against his and, from everything my investigation has turned up so far, he’s a straight-A student from a prominent San Francisco family who’s never been in any trouble.”

  “Neither have I,” Karen reminded him.

  Haller shifted uneasily. “I know that,” he replied. “But in cases like these, the burden of proof is on the state. And the reality is that juries just don’t convict fine upstanding young men from prominent families of rape without a great deal more evidence than we have here.”

  “You mean they’d say I made it all up? That I seduced him and then went off into Central Park by myself, looking for more, and lured some stranger into the bushes, and begged him to rape me and beat me half to death, and then tried to blame some nice innocent guy who didn’t do anything but try to take me home?”

  “It could go down like that,” Haller said.

  “Even if that’s not what happened?”

  “Look, if it were up to me, I’d lock the bastard up and throw away the key,” he told her, because he didn’t need her anger and he had a perfect out. “But it’s up to the DA, and the DA doesn’t go to trial unless he thinks he can win. He just doesn’t think he can win this one.”

  In fact, the wily politician had all but laughed Haller out of his office.

  “You mean, winning is all that matters—not what’s true or what’s right?”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that.” The scarecrow sighed. “But I never said anything about justice. I’m only saying it’s the system.”

  A justice system that didn’t have anything to do with justice? Karen pondered his statement in genuine confusion. It had never occurred to her that truth could be meaningless if no one chose to believe it. Or that lies could be accepted because of expediency, because they were more comfortable to live with.

  “Did my father come to see you?” she asked.

  “Yes, he did,” Haller said. “As a matter of fact, both your parents did.”

  “Did they tell you that they wanted you to stop this investigation?”

  “If they did,” Haller replied, “it’s because they don’t want you going through any more pain, and I happen to think they’re right. You’re a nice kid. You have no idea what a clever defense attorney would do to you in open court. Trust me, by the time he was finished, he’d have the jury believing you weren’t much better than a two-dollar hooker off Eighth Avenue. If you want my advice, forget all about it. You won’t get any satisfaction in a courtroom.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Karen said.

  If the police thought her a liar, if her parents thought her a tease, if a jury would think her a whore, what was the point of protesting any further?

  “I’m sorry,” Michael Haller said, annoyed because his words sounded so hollow and inadequate.

  “So am I,” she replied.

  “No one deserves to be hurt as badly as you were hurt,” he added, to make up for some of it. “I hope you get well soon.”

  The conversation was over. He turned to leave, noting that she hadn’t asked for Bob’s last name. It was just as well.

  Karen shut her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to watch him go. Oddly enough, it seemed to be the broken bones and bloody bruises that disturbed people more than anything else. It was almost as though, if they could focus on them, they wouldn’t have to deal with what had really happened to her.

  nine

  Karen was discharged from Manhattan Hospital on the eighth of May. Her jaw had healed, as had her arm. Two more sessions in surgery had reconstructed her smashed left kneecap. Physical therapy two times a day was helping her to regain muscle tone and she had learned how to walk again with the aid of crutches.

  The hole in her throat, where the tracheotomy tube had been, was now a small red bump. The hole in her side, where the chest tube had been, was now a little wrinkle of skin between two ribs that she could reach around and feel with her fingers.

  Driving home in her father’s roomy Buick was almost like seeing the world for the first time. Winter had come and gone during her months in the hospital and spring had burst across Long Island. Karen drank it in.

  The mighty maple trees and graceful elms that she last remembered being naked and gnarled were now dressed in bright new greenery. Tired lawns had been transformed into lush carpets, and everywhere, it seemed, azaleas and rhododendron were in bloom. Little gray sparrows and red-breasted robins hopped from branch to branch, singing of sunshine.

  When Leo turned onto Knightsbridge Road, Karen craned her neck for a first glimpse of the circular driveway that fronted the stately brick colonial where she had lived her entire life.

  “The cherry blossoms waited for you,” her mother said, as the Buick slid beneath a row of delicate pink petals that were usually gone with April.

  Karen sighed happily. It looked exactly as she had hoped it would: the burgeoning trees, the curving beds of begonias and impatiens and peonies that her mother so carefully cultivated, the thick blanket of grass, the neat hedges that separated them from their neighbors. It was good to know that some things never changed.

  From the outside, the house looked just the same as it always had. Although Karen had gotten used to the quiet hustle of the hospital’s third floor, the constant stream of white uniforms that passed by her door, the ministering routine that never varied, and her wonderful mechanical bed with its infinite positions, it hadn’t been home.

  Home was like a pair of old slippers that you could snuggle into and be totally comfortable, and it didn’t matter how you looked or what you said or even what you did, because you were loved and accepted. But coming home this time was different, because she was different, and the spacious colonial on Knightsbridge Road felt both familiar and strange as she crept back to it and pulled the walls in around her.

  At first she hobbled from room to room, learning to negotiate on her crutches, needing to reacquaint herself with everything that had always signified stability and security— the polished mahogany banister she had slid down as a child, the Persian rugs and Duncan Phyfe furniture that seemed lost in the huge living room, the flowered wallpapers and heavy brocade draperies, the Meissen lamps, the Dresden porcelain, the Revere silver, her father’s books overflowing the shelves in the library, her sister’s Elvis Presley albums and, last but not least, her own room that hadn’t been changed since high school, with the moiré curtains, the profusion of yellow ribbons and rosebuds that climbed up and down the walls, the white oak furniture, the cluttered desk, and the cork bulletin board that told the story of her girlhood.

  The first night, once she got Beverly to stop fussing over her, Karen locked her door and wept, wishing she had never left her room, never grown up. Long after she felt the rest of the house go to sleep, she snapped on her bedside lamp and rummaged in the nightstand drawer for her box.

  It was a wooden keepsake box of her grandmother’s, old and scarred, but the intricate
inlay was still visible. In it, Karen kept scraps of paper on which she wrote down whatever came into her head. She called them her thought pages.

  She pulled out a clean sheet and began to write:

  They say a dog found me,

  torn and bleeding,

  more dead than alive,

  left there like discarded garbage.

  Perhaps I am.

  They threw words around me,

  like exposure,

  massive trauma,

  pneumonia.

  But I wasn’t there to hear them.

  They say surgery lasted

  six hours.

  They removed

  more than they left.

  But I was already empty inside.

  It was days before I opened my eyes.

  Weeks before I spoke.

  What could I say

  after all their fine work—

  they should have let me die … ?

  Karen put the page into the box and put the box back in her drawer. Then she turned her head into the pillow and cried herself to sleep, her lamp still lit.

  She spent many hours in her mother’s treasured garden, sitting quietly in a lounge chair with her leg propped on a pillow, alternately reading, sipping iced tea, and staring into space, smelling the gentle fragrances of spring warming into summer. Before long, the hospital pallor began to fade and her cheeks grew pink in the sunshine.

  Now that Karen was eating real food again, her mother had instructed Winola, the maid who had been with the family for as long as any of them could remember, to follow the girl around with tempting plates of goodies.

  “If you keep this up, I’m going to be as fat as a pig,” Karen complained, but not too loudly.

  She had nothing to think about but getting well as she waited for Peter to come and rescue her—like the princess in the tower that her mother had read to her about as a child.

  Twice each week, Beverly drove Karen back to Manhattan Hospital to continue her physical therapy. It would have been much easier to go to the local hospital for treatment but Beverly had waved the idea aside.