by Wendy Walker
Charlotte stopped to gather herself. She had a particular method, which she used without deviation. It was a long inhale, eyes closed, quick shake of the head, then a slow exhale. She looked down first after opening her eyes, then nodded in confirmation of the control she had wrangled.
I’ll just say it, all of it, quickly and then be done. She was raped from behind, vaginally, anally, back and forth apparently, for an hour. Okay. I said it. It’s done. They did the rape kit. They found traces of spermicide and latex. This … this creature wore a condom. They didn’t find one hair either, and the forensic people who were brought in from Cranston later that night said he probably shaved himself. Can you imagine? He prepared for this rape like an Olympic swimmer. Well, he didn’t get his gold medal, did he? Every physical wound healed beautifully. She won’t ever feel any different from any other woman. And emotionally, well …
She paused again, this time more to take stock than regain her composure. Then she continued in a voice that was irreverent.
I remember thinking, thank God for the treatment. Everything he did to my little girl, we undid. So, I’m sorry for the bad language, but I thought—fuck him. He doesn’t exist anymore.
Chapter Three
Charlotte and Tom Kramer did not agree on the decision to give Jenny the treatment. Charlotte won that fight.
The medical community is still learning about the formation and retention of memory. Studies have been on the rise, and new research surfaces regularly. Our brains have long-term memory, short-term memory, the process for storing memories and of locating and retrieving memories from the places where they are stored, which scientists now believe to be vast. Consider that for decades, neuroscientists believed that memories were stored in the synapses that connect our brain cells and not in the brain cells (or neurons) themselves. Now they have disproved this and believe it’s the neurons that hold our history. We have also discovered that memories are not static. In fact, they change every single time we pull them from storage.
The treatment used to induce limited anterograde amnesia of traumatic events was found through a series of trials on both animals and humans over many years and in many variations. It starts with morphine. As early as the 1950s, doctors noticed a reduction in PTSD from the early administration of morphine in high doses. The findings were inadvertent—the morphine had been administered to children who were victims of burning following a fire, purely for the intention of pain relief. Those who received the higher doses immediately after the fire had noticeably reduced symptoms of PTSD than the children who received less or no morphine. In 2010, a formal paper was written confirming the benefits of morphine for children suffering from burns. Morphine, along with other drugs, has been used for years to treat soldiers in the field, and researchers correlating records of trauma, morphine, and PTSD have found that high doses administered immediately after a trauma can significantly reduce PTSD in wounded men and women.
This is why: Every waking moment, we have experiences. We see, feel, and hear. Our brains process this information and store it in our memories. This is called memory consolidation. Each factual event also carries some emotional counterpart, and that triggers chemicals in the brain and those chemicals then place the events into the appropriate file cabinet, if you will. Things that capture our emotions are filed in the locked metal cabinets. They are not replaced by subsequent events and can be easily recalled. Other less provocative events, what we made for dinner last Thursday, might go into a manila folder somewhere. As time passes, these will get buried under other manila folders and at some point become impossible to find. They may even get sent to the shredder. Some researchers believe that morphine reduces the emotional reaction to an event by blocking norepinephrine so a “metal cabinet” event may get reduced to a “manila folder” event. This is the first component of the treatment.
Now, because the filing of any event requires the interaction of chemicals in the brain, you can see how interfering with those chemicals while they are trying to do their filing could interrupt the process. This is why a night of binge drinking results in a “blackout.” It’s also why drugs like Rohypnol (the date rape drug) enable a person to function “normally” but not remember anything that happened while the drug was in the system. The brain’s filing staff is on a break. Nothing gets filed, and the events are presumably lost, as if they never happened. But this is during the short-term-memory phase. The second part of the treatment involves a revolutionary drug that claims to send the filers on their break during the consolidation of long-term memory—it stops the synapses from working at this stage by inhibiting necessary proteins, so the short-term memories are discarded. They call it Benzatral.
The tricky part with trauma is the timing. There is no exact time between short-term- and long-term-memory consolidation. Every memory involves different parts of the brain, depending on what the memory is made of. Was it a sight, a sound, a feeling? Was it music or math or meeting a new person? The brain is functioning while the trauma is occurring, so the filing is in process. The treatment has to be given within hours of the trauma, and even then it may not be completely effective if some of the events have already made it to long-term storage.
Jenny had the perfect set of circumstances. She was already inebriated when the rape began. She went into shock during the attack. Within half an hour, she was given a sedative. And within two hours, the treatment was administered. She awoke twelve hours later with only the small bits and pieces I have already mentioned.
Tom Kramer also recalled the conversation in the family lounge. I cannot fully capture the emotion with which he recounted it, so I will just give you his words and tell you that he did not cry. I think by this point he had no more water.
I don’t remember exactly what was said. I just kept hearing the word “rape” over and over. I can tell you that it was a brutal, merciless attack. That they had no suspects. That he had been careful, wearing a condom and perhaps shaving his body hair. They thought, and this was later confirmed by the forensic investigators, that he wore a black wool mask—like one of those ski masks that covers your entire face and head. They said it lasted for about an hour. I have thought about that more than I should. When Jenny was back in the hospital eight months after the rape, when I knew this was not over, I went home and lay on the floor with my face pressed to the ground, my body positioned the way they said hers was. I lay there for an hour. An hour is a long time to be tortured, longer than any of us can imagine. I promise you that.
Anyway … the treatment. So they explained the process. The drugs that would be given. How it would put her into a sort of coma for about a day and that, if we were lucky, it might block her memory of the rape and at the very least, and this they said they knew for sure, it would reduce any PTSD she might suffer. They said the PTSD could be debilitating and require years of therapy. Dr. Baird asked if we wanted to speak with a psychiatrist to better understand the treatment and what life might be like for her without it. He said every minute that passed reduced the effectiveness.
Charlotte’s eyes got so wide. “Yes!” she said without even looking at me. “Do it! What are you waiting for?” She stood up and pointed to the door like they should both rush out to follow her orders. But I grabbed her arm. I may not be the smartest man, but this didn’t sound right to me. If she couldn’t remember, how could she help them find this creature? How could she help put him behind bars, where he would get what he deserved? Detective Parsons nodded and looked at the floor like he knew exactly what I was saying. He finally confessed that it would be very difficult. That even if the drug didn’t work completely, anything she did remember would be ripped apart in court as unreliable. Of course it would, right? I mean, come on. Game over. Look—I’m not saying I wanted this guy caught and punished more than I wanted my daughter to recover. But where her mother saw her recovery in forgetting and pretending this never happened, I saw it coming more by way of facing the devil, you know? Looking him square in the eye and t
aking back a piece of what he had stolen. And I was right, wasn’t I? Jesus Christ, I wish I wasn’t, but I was.
I asked him the next logical question. “If you felt so strongly, why did you agree?”
He thought about this for several seconds. I think he had asked himself this same question a million times, but he had never had to say the answer out loud. When he did, he looked at me with a blank face, as though it should have been obvious to me. Tom had not yet come to see that the dynamics at play in his marriage were anything but obvious—or normal, for that matter.
Because if I was wrong, if Jenny didn’t get past it, I would be blamed. So why did I agree? Because I was a coward.
Chapter Four
What I haven’t mentioned yet is the carving on Jenny’s back. It didn’t really become important to the story until now, and I should explain it before I go on. Everything happened so quickly the night of Jenny’s rape. She was at the hospital within an hour of being found. She was then sedated. Her parents arrived within a half hour of that, immediately bombarded with the decision regarding the treatment. It had to be administered by the psychiatrist through the IV that the nurse inserted into the back of Jenny’s hand. There were waivers and forms to review and sign, guarantees for payment. The treatment was not covered by insurance. And, finally, she was prepped for surgery to repair the damage from the rape, and for the thorough forensic examination.
Tom stayed with her until she was rolled away to an operating room. He said it was like watching his daughter in a manufacturing plant. He had visited one in Detroit years before, when he sold Fords. Metal parts, nuts and bolts, plastic and wires and computer chips, thousands of workers with busy hands and machines with moving parts putting things together. As he watched Jenny’s limp body handled by five people, each with a job to do on her body, each concerned only with her body as her mind was manipulated with chemicals and forced to stay asleep, that was the image Tom recalled, and he was deeply disturbed by it, and by his own deferential behavior. He had wanted to lift her from the gurney, raise his fist in the air, and tell everyone to leave her the hell alone. But, of course, he did nothing of the sort.
Not to belabor their differences, but Charlotte had wanted to join her daughter in her sedation, fall asleep, and forget this ever happened. She did not watch the professionals do their work. Instead, she went home and relieved the babysitter, took a sleeping pill, tucked Lucas’s blankets tighter around his body, and then curled up in the spare bed a few feet away. She listened to him breathe until she fell asleep herself. I would come to learn that she did this often to avoid being in the same bed with Tom.
When they were finished repairing the tears to Jenny’s genitals and bowels, she was admitted to the ICU. Dr. Baird stopped up to see how Tom was doing. He was joined by Detective Parsons shortly after. It was then that Tom first learned about the carving on her back. Parsons explained it this way:
We had the preliminary report from the forensic examination. They had some samples of fluids and hairs that needed to be tested, but as we now know, nothing would ever be found. During the examination, they found the carving. It was more of a cut, really, in terms of how deep it was. It was only an inch long, but it required seventeen stitches. No one noticed it at first because she was so dirty and there were so many other superficial scratches that they didn’t think much of it until they’d washed her. This one cut kept bleeding. The team that examined the woods where Jenny was attacked found a stick. It was sharpened at one end with some kind of knife like a small spear. The stick was only about a foot long. There was no skin on it except for Jenny’s, but they did find some fibers that would turn out to be neoprene. That’s the material used for sports gloves. They think he used the spear like a carving tool, slowly whittling away at the layers of skin.
Detective Parsons is a young man of thirty-one years, which explains the liberty he took when informing the Kramers about Jenny the night of the rape. With youth comes the inability to know what’s going to happen as a decision is played out. It is one of the greatest shames of the human experience that by the time we know how to conduct ourselves in an appropriate manner, there’s little conducting left to do.
Fairview doesn’t have much use for detectives. The job here is either a stepping-stone up to a more “active” situation elsewhere, perhaps in neighboring Cranston, or a step down toward retirement. Parsons is not a bad detective. But with his relative inexperience came an awkwardness when he recounted the more “intimate” details of the rape. His eagerness to appear disinterested and professional actually served to reveal just how interested he actually was. It was unsettling. But as I’ve said, the gravitation toward the prurient does not make us evil. We still do everything we can to try to conceal it. And so Detective Parsons did just that as he continued.
When we consulted the rape specialists from Cranston, they had all questioned the time frame. An hour is highly unusual for a rape in a public setting. It would have been difficult to see them in the woods that night. There was little moon and significant cloud cover. But she was within hearing range of anyone out on the street coming or going from the party, and certainly of anyone coming into the yard like the two individuals who did eventually hear her and come to her aid. But they could not argue with the medical facts. Then when they learned about the stick and the scratch, they said it made more sense. They think he stopped and started his various (there was an oddly long pause here) penetrations to whittle her. The carving was low on her back. It’s the place where girls like to get tattoos. They think he was marking her, or maybe just enjoying the cycles of relief and renewed fear from the starting and stopping, and then the winces from the pain of the sharp blade in her skin (another long pause, this time reflective). They think he may have gone through his own cycles of arousal, perhaps needing to refuel his excitement with the carving activity. This added a whole new direction to our thinking. This perpetrator was more sociopathic than we had originally assumed. And we were already thinking pretty far down that road.
Jenny’s physical recovery was not without its hardships. The areas that were sewn are not easily “shut down” and so there was regular pain, daily pain. Jenny tried to stop eating to reduce the amount of eliminating she would have to do. She lost over ten pounds in the two weeks her body was healing, and that time was spent mostly in bed or on the sofa loaded up with painkillers. There was some discord over the decision to send her back to school. There were only three weeks remaining when she was well enough, and the school, including all her teachers, had generously offered to provide her with materials and allow her to take her final exams over the summer.
I was curious to learn how the Kramers came out on this issue. Interestingly, it was Charlotte who wanted to keep Jenny home and under wraps, and Tom who wanted her to “get back on the horse.” I wondered if Charlotte’s real motivation had to do with the fact that Jenny did not look well at this point. In addition to the weight loss, she was pale, almost gray in color. She had dark circles under her eyes that can come from painkillers. And, overall, she had lost her “verve,” her bounce, her smile. I think Charlotte would have seen, had she been honest with herself, that she didn’t want anyone to see Jenny until the rape had been erased from her appearance the way it had been erased from her mind.
Charlotte won this fight as well.
The Kramers took a summer house on Block Island. It was a big sacrifice for Charlotte, who had to give up her spot on the pool committee at the club, but it had been her idea, a way of pressing the “reset” button. I imagine it was also a welcome break from one another. The fault lines in their relationship had now been stressed, and both of them feared the fracturing that seemed imminent. Tom came and went on weekends, then spent two weeks there in August. Lucas attended a local summer camp. He had been told about the attack (the word “rape” was not used), and he had not given it much thought beyond the impact it might have on his life. That is very normal for his age. Jenny finished her schoolwork and exams to
complete tenth grade. She invited Violet to come for a week. They went to the beach and celebrated her sixteenth birthday. There were some smiles. Tom saw them as forced. Charlotte believed they were genuine, and as it had become her job to watch over Jenny carefully, journaling her moods, her eating habits, her disposition, her sleep, she felt very in tune with her daughter’s emotional recovery. In either case, the summer ended without incident. Of course, this was just the calm before the storm.
Jenny was told about the rape by the counselor and psychiatrist at the hospital before her release. There had been very little follow-up with any mental health professionals. No therapy, no counseling other than routine checks. It had been recommended, but both Charlotte and Tom were against it. For Charlotte, what was the point of talking about the rape when they’d gone to such trouble to forget it? For Tom, who had not been in favor of the treatment in the first place, therapy sounded like another way of avoiding what needed to be done—and that was to find the rapist.