And then she would wake and gasp, berating herself silently for the ways in which the fierceness of the anxiety kept her from any kind of thought about the general suffering in its terrible scale coming from the devastations of September, the horrors of the new war. She told herself that she had no right to complain about anything. She was safe. They were safe. From his little study there sometimes came the sound of the music he loved, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, and the concerto, too, played softly so as not to wake her—and if she had been asleep, it would not have awakened her.
Occasionally in their mornings he would speak to her about what was in the paper, the articles about the war and about the continuing work in the rubble of the Trade Center and in Washington, the details of the passengers of Flight 93. It was all just words to her, all a matter of fighting to maintain the half smile or the look of concern, feeling the fear rise, the helpless stirring of rage at herself for it, watching him struggle with his own intuition and anxiety about what was between them.
Neither of them could find the way to break through.
One morning in the middle of November, after spending long, mutually sleepless hours apart, they sat across from each other in the kitchen, with the paper on the table between them. Each was holding a section of it open, as if neither of them wanted to look at the other, though their exchanges that morning had been quite unruffled and warm. Before he was dressed he had sat on the edge of the bed and called Iris to ask if she wanted to come over. Iris had said she was planning to sleep some more. He apologized, put the receiver down, and showered and dressed and then walked into the kitchen to make the omelets for them. But neither of them had eaten much. Minutes went by with the only sound being the shuffling of the pages and the coffee cups being set down on the table. “This is terrible,” he said suddenly.
She looked up, thinking it was something in what he was reading.
“Isn’t it,” he said.
“Oh, Michael,” she said. “Let’s not look at it.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”
“Honey. We—we all have to stand it, somehow, don’t we?”
His voice rose: “I’m not talking about the war.”
She sought to control the crying that welled up. “Please,” she murmured. “Don’t shout at me.”
He stood and moved to the door and paused, then sighed. “I’ll see you later.”
“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this morning,” she managed.
He opened the door, hesitated, but did not look back. “You all right?”
“Routine.”
Now he turned. “Nothing specific?”
“It’s routine, honey.” She smiled and shook the strands of dark hair from her brow.
He looked at her hands where she held her part of the paper. She was trying so hard to be what he needed. “Sure you’re all right?”
“Routine.” She kept the smile, but a tear trailed down one cheek.
He came quickly back to the table and kissed her hair, feeling like a bully.
“I’m just tired,” she got out.
“See you,” he said, and her smile changed slightly, her lips trembling a little. He kissed her there and then hugged her. She stood into it, and they remained that way, arms around each other, for a long moment.
“What should I make for dinner?” she asked, wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm.
“Can’t think about it now.”
“No, I know. Me, too.”
“Not much appetite.”
“No.”
“Well, spoil yourself today.”
She sobbed softly, and he held her again, rocking slightly, the two of them standing by the door. “I love you,” she got out. “So much.”
“Honey, why are you crying? What is this with us?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. We’re—we’re fine. We’ll be fine.”
They were quiet again, rocking slowly in the embrace.
Finally he said, “Gotta go.”
They moved apart, and he reached over and brushed the hair from her brow, set it along the side of her face. “There,” he said. He thought he had never seen anyone so darkly beautiful.
“I’ll call you,” she murmured.
He stepped out on the small stoop and closed the screen door. She stood in the granular frame of it with her hands at her sides. “Leave the mess,” he said. “I’ll get it when I come home from work.”
“It’s nothing,” she told him.
It occurred to him that they probably looked like newlyweds in the first flow of life. He thought his heart might give out.
At the job, he saw people in trouble, mostly men, all of them looking for work. And there was so little to be had. The largest local business, FedEx, had been badly hurt by the grounding of all the airplanes just after the attacks, and other companies were either laying off workers or simply unable to hire anyone new. Faulk kept trying to get interviews for people and to find some strategy for them to pursue other than simply collecting unemployment. It made him feel useful while it frustrated and saddened him for how little he could accomplish under the circumstances.
This morning, a man entered and, sitting in the chair beside the desk, looked hard at him. He was gaunt, dark, with a deeply lined face. There were pockets of darker skin under his eyes. “I know you.”
“You weren’t sent in here?” Pete asked from his desk.
The man turned to him. “Oh.” He handed over the form.
“You recognize the padre?”
“Yeah.”
“Weird to see him here, right?”
“What kind of work are you looking for?” Faulk kept his gaze on the form.
“Anything. Handyman. Anything. Yeah. Padre. I know you.”
The form showed that the name was Samuel Witherspoon and that he had eighteen years of employment with the airlines, three different carriers, the last of which was Delta. And that he had spent the last two years in prison for assault and battery with intent to kill.
“The airlines,” Faulk said.
“I was a flight attendant,” said Witherspoon. “Haven’t ever done much of anything else.”
“We’ll find you something,” Faulk told him.
“Grace Episcopal. Yeah. Father—Father Faulk.”
“He’s quit that,” Pete said.
Witherspoon simply turned to look at him.
“Walked away from it. Matter of principle,” Pete said.
“No,” said Faulk.
“You know what happened to me, Father?”
“I’m not Father Faulk anymore. It’s just Mr. Faulk.”
“Every day my wife came home late.”
Faulk nodded, looking through the list of job inquiries for general repair work, house painting, and carpentry.
Witherspoon went on, “I got nobody to talk to. Christ.”
“There’s a couple of things here,” Faulk said. “Look, I don’t do that anymore.”
“But I feel”—the other put one hand on the desk—“I can talk to you, you know?”
“I’m sorry, but this is neither the time nor the place.”
“I saw you all those Sundays,” said Witherspoon. “It hit me the second I looked at you sitting there. You were the one every Sunday when I was a good citizen.” He let go a small, rueful laugh.
Faulk nodded slightly and said nothing.
“Why’d you leave, anyway?”
“Mr. Witherspoon. You’re here to find work, and I’m here to see if I can help you do that.”
Witherspoon wasn’t listening. “She went with somebody else. The wife. We hadn’t been married two years.”
Faulk saw the lines in the other’s forehead and at the corners of his eyes. Witherspoon glanced over at Pete as if his presence was somehow threatening.
Pete sensed this. He looked down at the page he was writing on and concentrated.
Witherspoon went on. “Father, I can’t help it. I just found out last night she w
ent ahead and married the son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry,” Faulk said, thinking, Please.
“Excuse the language.” Witherspoon sighed and sat back, putting his legs out, a hand on either thigh. It was a gesture not of trying to get more comfortable in the chair but of exhaustion. His head came against the chair back. “She came to see me in prison. Now why would she do that? I beat the son of a—I went after the—I hit him with a cane, you know, repeatedly—I thumped him with it and broke his skull. Nearly killed him. Wanted to kill him. Coming around like we’re friends and sleeping with my wife. And I get sent up because he needs surgery on his head, and she comes to visit me. Comes to visit me, Father.”
Faulk felt himself taking on the habitual mind-set of the priest, wanting to offer counsel, solace, some remedy out of the grandeur of the church he used to represent, though this urge to use his former state was also, he knew, an element of the wish to fend off the other man, keep an official’s distance. “Have you talked with anyone else about it?”
“The whole time I’m there she keeps coming to see me, the wife suffering through her husband’s jail term, telling me how sorry she is, and she’s living with him. The whole time. She was with him the whole goddamn time. She felt guilty about the trouble I got in. Christ. I gotta find something to do for work.”
Faulk turned to the screen and cursored down to the list of contacts for handyman kinds of work: electricians, carpenters, landscapers. They were mostly contractors, seeking to hire people specializing in specific tasks. “Can you do electrical work?” He heard the quaking of his own voice. He cleared his throat and repeated the question.
“I remember looking forward to what you had to say on Sundays. Sorry. It was just a shock to see you here. Sorry. It’s nothing you need to worry about anymore, is it, and maybe it never was.”
“You have to concentrate on this,” Faulk said, seeing his own distressing images and trying to clear his mind. It came to him that it was going to be impossible for things to keep going on as they were. He would shake her out of her denials, would get it out of her some way, the real truth. The real truth. He put his hands to his face for a moment, his elbows resting on the desk. His own thoughts appalled him.
“I don’t know how to do electrical,” Witherspoon said.
Faulk stared at the screen. “I’ve got someone here who needs a carpenter. Do you have any formal training in that?”
“No.”
“Well, I can send you over there to talk to the guy.” He wrote the address and number down and handed the paper across the desk.
“Thanks, Father,” said the other, folding the paper. He shoved it into his pocket and went out the door into the bright sunlight.
Faulk turned to the computer, trying again, without success, to repress his own apprehension and doubt, seeing the mental image of Natasha with someone else, on the beach in Jamaica. He sought to shut it down, break it up into the reasons to deny it, to bring forth out of himself the belief that nothing had happened. He could not concentrate. And again he thought of forming the words simply to ask her outright: What did you do in Jamaica that you can’t tell me?
Except that he had asked her about it in direct and indirect ways, and in the same ways she had steadily denied everything while pleading with him not to bring it up, not to mention Jamaica at all.
There was already someone else waiting to see him.
3
After he was gone, she worked for a time. She had decided not to use the apartment in Midtown for at least the first few weeks, wanting to be in the Swan Ridge house where, as she expressed it to him, they were home. She spent an hour trying to make progress on the picture of the sad-eyed woman—the faded color of it seemed just beyond her reach, though she had come close several times. And she had not even begun to get down to the shades of feeling in the eyes. It was going to be a long struggle, but she had been thinking about it with a kind of hunger. The necessary concentration was good; it kept back fretful turns of mind. Today she felt the practical pressure of what else there was to do.
She washed the breakfast dishes and finally went into the bedroom and lay down. For the past week, she had experienced the signs of her period starting. She was late, but she had never been regular. There had been two episodes in her twenties where she worried about being pregnant. Sometimes she couldn’t bring herself to the point of concern. At that age, trouble was what happened to other people. And she was irregular. Nothing had ever happened. Lately, she had been getting up to pee in the nights, and while she knew what that meant, she still thought at first that it was simply because she was awake. But the tiredness had grown worse, and the tenderness of her breasts, more so than the usual feeling prior to a period. She did not want to think about any of it, and it was like a trap. She had been through that heavy period the last time, and so if this was a baby, it was Faulk’s baby, and Faulk wanted children. She wanted children. A family. And having a child could be the beginning of really finding the way to get past everything and be new again.
New again.
The receiver for the phone was on his side of the bed where he had left it. With a sudden strong impulse she took it and touched zero and waited for the operator. She was going to do this. During the few minutes it took to get the number, she held the receiver between her shoulder and collarbone and put on a pair of jeans and a white blouse. Then she sat on the bed and called the number. The Orlando Police Department. Her heart was pounding in her ears. She sat down and leaned over, eyes closed. The ringing went on, and she waited, feeling sick. A recorded voice answered and recited options. Before the menu was finished, she disconnected and lay back down.
Then, lying there, she brought the receiver up and punched in the number again. She could ask somebody how to proceed; she could find out some things.
When the menu started again, she touched the zero, and a female voice came on. “I want to report a rape,” Natasha heard herself say.
“Are you safe now? Can you say where you are?”
“It was—it was back in September. September eleventh.”
There was a pause.
“Hello?”
“Just a minute.” There was a slight static pulse and then silence. And then another female voice. “This is Officer Lorraine Brown. Who’m I talking to?”
“I just need some answers,” Natasha said. “I’m—this is not a crank call—”
“Do you need someone to come assist you. You sound distraught. Are you all right?”
“I’m—it was in September.”
“Yes, I was told—but you sound distraught.”
“No.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
“I was raped. In Jamaica. On September eleventh. The night of September eleventh.”
“Your name, honey?”
“Iris,” Natasha told her.
“Okay, Iris. Tell me about it.”
“The man—his name is Nicholas Duego—lives in Orlando.” She spelled the name. “He’s Cuban American.”
“That’s me, too, honey. I’m Cuban American. My husband’s name is Brown. There are some things I’ve got to ask you. Are you okay with that?”
“Yes.”
“Would you rather come in and talk to me?”
“I’m not in Orlando.”
“Okay. These questions are gonna feel intrusive. But I have to ask them. Okay?”
“Yes,” Natasha said. “Yes, okay.”
“Are you in any pain right now?”
“It was two months ago.”
“Okay. Not in any pain.”
She waited.
“And you’re not in any danger.”
“No.” She lost her voice and had to repeat the word. “No.”
“Well, you ready, then?”
Natasha sat up on the side of the bed and put her elbows on her knees. “Go ahead.”
Officer Lorraine’s questions were what she said they would be: Did you know the attacker? How well did you know him? How much
time did you spend with him? Did you do anything that might’ve enticed him?
She kept using the word attacker even after Natasha had said the name again. And the questions seemed to lead into a kind of moral test: Were you drinking? Were you drinking with the attacker? How much did you drink? Were there any drugs involved? Did you have drugs with the attacker? How much? Did you allow him any kind of sexual advance before the incident? Did he threaten you? Did he use a weapon?
It went on.
“These questions,” Natasha said. “God! He almost—almost killed me.”
“I’m asking you these questions,” Officer Lorraine said carefully, patiently, “because a defense lawyer will ask them—if we can ever get the attacker to trial. And, Iris, I have to tell you the chances are pretty slim given the lapse in time, and the facts as they are. I believe you when you say nothing you did constitutes permission for the attacker to do what he did, but it will be a problem when it comes to prosecuting him. Honey, it just will. This is where we live. Now, I can put the name on file and watch for him in other attacks for a time, but I’ve gotta tell you that a lot of these cases even when we can bring the attacker in result in acquittal, especially lacking enough forensic evidence.”
“I’m sorry,” Natasha said.
“No,” said Officer Lorraine. “You did the right thing. We’re aware of it, and we have the name. And we will pursue it as far as we can if you want to press charges. But lacking witnesses there’s not much we can do short of interviewing him and explaining his rights to him. And if you decide to press charges, then you’ll have to come down here and confront him. So—I’m sorry, but I’ve got to tell you the chance of a conviction, even if you’d reported it that night, would anyway be in serious doubt. Drugs and alcohol. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you? And the defense lawyer will want to know about your past, too—the past year or two anyway. I’m so sorry about it, but that’s just how it is.”
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