The man above her wasn’t Bryan. He was too old. His hair was gray. He had bloodshot blue eyes and a drinker’s nose.
“Who done this to you, hon?” he said gently. “Who done this?”
Her lips formed “Bryan,” but she couldn’t say the word. No sound emerged except the whistle. Then she tried to cough again, blood trickling down her throat.
She was choking, choking on her own blood.
He put a hand behind her back and she pushed at him, but weakly, no strength at all. And no feeling in her limbs. They were like rubber. Toy limbs.
“I’m helping, I’m helping,” he said. “You gotta breathe, hon. Relax, okay? Relax. You’re gonna be fine.”
It was a lie. One of those kind lies other people told you when you were not going to be fine, not ever going to be fine.
“What’re you doing?” The second guy came back. He was clutching a cell phone in his right hand. He was beefy, made even beefier by the cable-knit sweater he wore over work pants and heavy boots. “They said not to touch her.”
“Like I know that,” the first guy said. “You were the one talking to them. She’s choking here. I didn’t take that CPR crap at the office. Did you? You gotta clear the passageways, right? Make sure she can breathe?”
“She’s breathing,” the second guy said. But he sounded doubtful.
She felt doubtful. The whistling had stopped. The rasping too. And she could feel that trickle of blood gathering deep inside.
She wanted them to help and she didn’t want them to help and she wanted to run and she wanted to tell them to watch out for Bryan, he could be here, anyone could be here, there was nowhere safe, but she couldn’t find the words, she couldn’t find the air, she couldn’t make a sound.
Noise scares them, her self defense teacher said. Screaming or a whistle or a loud “What the fuck are you doing?” It’ll startle them, make them stop, even for a moment. Then you can get away. Noise is your biggest ally.
Noise. She couldn’t make any.
“She’s crying,” the first guy said. “Hon, you’ll be okay. Honest. You’ll be fine.”
“You wrapped her in your coat.” The second guy sounded accusing, but he crouched, put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “They said you shouldn’t touch her. Crime scene, you know”
She shook her head. The crime scene wasn’t here, she wanted to say. Upriver. Or was it down? How long had she floated? How far had she come?
“Shut up about the crime scene.” The first guy glared at his buddy. “Can’t you see she’s scared?”
“Shit, I’m scared,” the second guy said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”
To him? She looked at him. He was crouched beside her, so big that he could have broken Bryan in half. Nothing had happened to him. Nothing except the inconvenience of calling 911.
“Who do you think she is?” the second guy asked.
“Can you tell us who you are, hon?” the first guy asked. “Are there people we should call?”
People. Yesterday she would have said Call Bryan. He’s got all the numbers.He was the only one in the building who did because she trusted him. She trusted him and believed in him and when she’d told him—
Her mind flitted away.
And suddenly, there were EMTs and stretchers and lights. From inside the ambulance, the siren sounded like a buzzer—less disturbing, she supposed.
The men were gone—the first guy and the second guy (she never learned their names)—and her mouth hurt. She had a vague memory of someone trying to put a tube down her throat, but it didn’t work and they’d cut a hole.
But she could breathe now at least, even though she didn’t feel air through her nostrils. She reached up, tried to touch her throat and one of the EMTs—a woman, thank god, a woman—caught her hand and put it down again.
“She’s conscious.”
“Let’s keep her that way until we get to the hospital. Let them decide how to handle this.”
How to handle what? She couldn’t ask. Her mouth felt odd. Her nose, breathless. And yet she was breathing. Lots of air through her aching chest.
She was shivering too. Cold and prickly as the numbness in her limbs was easing.
“You’re going to be all right,” the woman EMT said, and there was that lie again. “We’re taking you somewhere safe.”
The second lie, worse than the first. There was nowhere safe.
Didn’t they know that?
* * * *
vi
They whisked her inside—industrial greens and blues, fluorescent lights and the sound of cart wheels on tile, but no smells. There should have been smells, dozens of them, and she couldn’t identify any.
As they took her into one of those so-called rooms—really, a space separated from another space by an inadequate curtain—a nurse came up beside her, clipboard in hand.
“I know you can’t talk, sweetheart,” she said in a gentle voice.
Can’t talk? She didn’t know that. Not for sure. But she had suspected it. Just like she suspected a lot of things. Like the reason she couldn’t feel her feet, the reason she couldn’t stop shivering, the reason those men had looked on her with such incredible pity.
“But,” the nurse was saying, “can you write down your name for me, maybe an address? Maybe even the name of a family member or a friend?”
She nodded and someone propped up the back of the bed. It was hard to grip the pen, her fingers wouldn’t bend—they were a bluish gray color, something she’d never seen on her own fingers before.
She saw the space for name and pressed the pen against it, thinking,it’s right there, right thereher name, everyone remembers their name, right?
And the only name she could recall, the only name was Bryan.
Bryan.
Her mind tried to flit and she held it, just for a moment.
If she could remember Bryan, she could remember his address, where he lived, right? That would help, at least.
She slipped the pen down, wrote down an address in a shaky hand, scratched out the apartment number, then went back to the name.
Name.
Bryan.
And then she was gone.
* * * *
vii
Maybe years maybe months maybe hours later, she opened her eyes—no longer gummed—and smelled (smelled!) disinfectant and the faint odor of tobacco mixed with perfume. Two women stood over her, official looking, identifying themselves as NYPD.
They told her they’d already done a kit (rape kit?) and had taken what they could for evidence. They explained all kinds of things that she didn’t really want to listen to—skin beneath her fingernails, fingerprints on her neck, a footprint imprinted on one thigh.
They called her Miss Walker. Nicole Walker. That was it. That was her name. She remembered now.
Nicole Walker, originally from Poughkeepsie, moved to a one-bedroom paid for by her salary as an accountant (with some help from her parents) while she wrote her little stories and plays.
Her head was restrained by something plastic. The plastic thing was what smelled of disinfectant. There was tape alongside her mouth, and a tube inside it that the tape held in place. The shaking had stopped, but her entire body hurt.
They’d found her. From the apartment address?
“Who did this to you?” the nearest woman asked. She was forty-something, with frown lines and gray roots on black hair, a color that didn’t suit her.
“We know you can’t talk,” the other woman said. “We have this.”
She took a white board, set it beneath Nicole’s left hand. Not her right. Why not her right? Most people were right handed, right? That’s what they should have done.
She tried to lean forward, to see her right hand, and couldn’t. She couldn’t move her upper body at all.
“They don’t want you moving much,” said the first woman. Her voice was sympathetic. Her eyes were dead.
How many times had she seen something like this? How many t
imes could a person see this without losing empathy, without losing the ability to feel at all?
“Just try to write,” said the second woman. “I know it’s hard.”
The pen was fat—a marker. She could feel the coolness of the white board against her left palm, the fat pen stuck between her fingers. She could just see its end, but she couldn’t see the board at all.
“Who did this?” the first woman asked again. “Do you know?”
Her mind wanted to flit. But it couldn’t. It didn’t dare. If they found her apartment, then they’d find Bryan and they’d think he was a friend. The only one she talked to in the building. The only one with her emergency numbers. The one her friends were supposed to call if she had gone missing.
She wrote:
BRYAN
“Bryan hurt you?” the first woman asked.
Nicole nodded—or tried to.
“Okay, okay. Don’t try to move,” the first woman said as the second woman asked, “Are you sure?”
She wrote:
YES
But she wasn’t sure if she had written that over the word “Bryan” or not. She didn’t cafe. They seemed to understand.
“Bryan who?” the second woman asked.
And, before she could catch it, Nicole’s brain flitted—this time to the water, and Bryan’s voice:
What the fuck did you just say?
And when she came back, the women were gone. She would have thought she had imagined them, except the room smelled faintly of Magic Marker.
* * * *
viii
It took six surgeries to repair her neck. She was lucky, the doctors said. The attack hadn’t damaged her spine.
But her voice box was gone. Really and truly gone. They couldn’t repair it. She got one of those electronic voices that chain smokers got, and she was told she should be grateful.
Grateful. Grateful that she had survived.
The water alone would have killed most people, one of the doctors had told her.You had presence of mind.But if she had had presence of mind, she would have fought back properly.
Grateful. Grateful that she had friends who offered to care for her after her last surgery.
But she couldn’t face them, not every day, not waiting on her in a way that she would never, ever be able to pay back.
Grateful. Grateful that she still had parents who were willing to take her in, even though she had privately vowed never to return to that podunk town, that claustrophobic house.
She spent most of her days on their couch—a leather reclining number that had replaced the soft 1980s high-back that she’d stayed on most of her childhood.
She watched the big screen television, got to know Oprah and Ellen and half a dozen soaps. Her father ordered movie channels for her and watched with her, never saying much. He hadn’t said much since he first saw her, in that hospital bed, her head strapped into place so she wouldn’t damage her neck any farther.
She still wore a brace. She might have to wear it for the rest of her life. Jogging was out of the question, even if she wanted to do it again. Movement was difficult. Talking embarrassed her. Eating was hard.
Yet she should be grateful.
And in some ways, she was.
Grateful she didn’t have to return to that apartment.
Grateful she didn’t have to face him—at least not yet. Maybe not ever.
The detectives had been blunt: It’s a tough case. It’s your word against his. The river destroyed most of the evidence. There were no witnesses to the attack, and to make matters worse, you were friends before it happened. He’s a well respected young attorney with no priors. You’re...
An accountant, she had finished for the detective, but she had known what the detective meant.
You’re a young woman, a dreamer, someone who had moved to the city hoping to become someone else.
Well, that worked, hadn’t it? She was someone else now, someone she never wanted to be, a physically handicapped woman with so many medical bills she’d never be able to pay them. She might be able to go back to work, when she could safely sit in a chair hunched over numbers or work on a computer without straining her back.
But she had worked long enough, hard enough, to know that her very appearance would make getting a new job difficult. Who wanted an accountant who sounded like a machine? Particularly if the accountant had to deal with collections.
Her life, the one she had known, was over. She had to start again. When she could. When Ellen and Oprah and the soaps stopped being compelling.
When she allowed herself to think.
When she allowed herself to remember.
* * * *
ix
She had pressed charges. And there had been some evidence, however minor. His DNA (damaged) under her fingernails, scratches on his face and wrist. He had said they had come from a night of rough sex. She, of course, denied it.
Then there was his handprint on her throat. His hand, reproduced in bruises, on her skin. Without fingerprints, without much more than size and shape.
The bruise on her thigh from a size 13 men’s shoe.
And that was all. That was the extent of the physical evidence.
Aside from the crime scene photos—meaning her body as it had washed up—and the sympathy she would elicit in a jury.
At least, that was what the young female prosecutor was telling her. The woman had driven all the way to Poughkeepsie to visit her, looking like a lost Manhattanite in the wilds.
Her skirt was too short, her make-up too heavy, her hair so stylish that people probably noticed it as she drove by. Her voice was lovely when she wanted it to be, and Nicole found herself watching the woman’s throat as she spoke.
Nicole sat in her father’s chair, wearing new sweats that her mother had found, sweats large enough to fit around the brace that ran down her entire torso.
She knew how she looked, even now, months later. The bruises had faded, except around the surgical scars, but no one saw those since they were wrapped in gauze. The brace, the gauze around her throat, the stupid electronic voice box, and the fact that she still couldn’t walk unaided made her into some kind of freak.
People didn’t meet her gaze, not even the prosecutor—Janet? Janice? Joann?—Nicole couldn’t remember and she didn’t really try. She just waited until the woman looked at her, actually looked at her, instead of dryly reciting facts about a case that until today had just been a possible problem on paper.
“There are some hints in his past,” JadeJaneJoyce said to her now, “but they’re probably inadmissible. We’d have to get former girlfriends to testify and almost all of them have disappeared.”
That, Nicole would have said once, was almost as good as a confession. But she didn’t. She now knew better than to use that flat electronic voice for all but the most important sentences.
“So I’m here to walk you through that night, to see what you do remember. If we can get the full story now, we might be able to find more evidence, or maybe a witness or two. Can you do that? Can you walk through the crime with me?”
Nicole clenched her fingers against the armrests. She didn’t remember much. Just what she had forced herself to remember—his hands, reaching, grabbing, pinching, pulling, clutching her neck so tightly she couldn’t pry them free. That knowledge that she was dying, that she was contributing to her own death by fighting him wrong, and being unable to stop that automatic reaction—the panic that came from not being able to breathe, not being able to think.
“The doctors say I have partial traumatic amnesia.” She wasn’t used to the electronic voice either. In her memory, her own voice had been as musical—more musical—than JoyJillJolene’s. “I remember the attack. I remember Bryan’s face. I remember falling into the river. I don’t remember much else.”
Because her mind still flitted away from it. She didn’t pass out any longer or lose time, but she did find herself contemplating the pattern on the couch or an ad on television every sin
gle time she tried to remember the events leading up to the attack.
“All we need to know,” JocastaJerriJanna said to her, “is what set him off. All we’ve been able to gather is that you were on a routine jog with him, something you’d done a dozen times, and then he was attacking you.”
His voice, filled with fury: What the fuck did you just say ?
And no time. No time to respond.
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