Nick nodded. “He wanted to know all about me.”
Rice took a long look at Nick’s face. His cuts looked uglier today, darker, and his bruising was worse. There were purple lines on the left side of his neck now. Nick only remembered one blow to the head, but he’d been hit multiple times and choked. A man didn’t just unleash on a stranger like this once without having done something like it before. And he’d probably do it again.
Nick had said earlier that Josh asked if Elle would mind Nick talking to him. Nick seemed to think Josh meant to ask if Nick’s friend would be angry to be ditched for a hookup. Rice had other suspicions. This Josh—he thought Elle was a beard, a fake girlfriend. And he’d asked Nick if he’d “done this” before. Maybe he didn’t mean going home with a stranger. Maybe he meant sex with a man.
Josh thought Nick was in the closet. Maybe he’d done this before, to men who didn’t want to out themselves by reporting the assault.
“Do you need a break?” Lisa asked softly.
Nick shook his head.
“He just bought you the one drink?”
Nick’s eyes shifted from Lisa back to Rice. “Yeah.”
Rice glanced down at his notepad. “So you had a shot of tequila when you got there around nine, two whiskey ginger ales between nine and ten thirty, another shot of tequila, this time sitting at the bar with the man, and then he ordered you an old-fashioned?”
“Yeah.”
“So if you met him around ten thirty or eleven, how fast did you have that last drink?”
“I dunno. I was kind of milking it, because it was disgusting.”
Rice and Lisa both laughed.
Nick smiled. “I’d never had one before. But I drank the whole thing. I wanted to look like, you know. Like I drank real drinks.”
“You finished it before you left?”
“Yeah.”
“When was that?”
Nick looked back at his phone. “At twelve seventeen Elle texts the group chat that I just left with him.”
Rice triple-circled Elle Nguyen’s name on his notepad. Megan O’Malley, another detective in his office, was interviewing Nguyen, along with the other roommate who’d driven Nick to the hospital. A Johnny Maserati. Ridiculous name. Rice would call O’Malley from the car and follow up.
“Would you say you were drunk?”
“Is it bad if I was?”
Yes, Rice thought. “I’m just trying to understand how you were feeling when you left.”
Nick nodded slowly. “Drunk. Not, like, sloppy.”
“Okay.”
“More just . . . tipsy, I guess.”
“But you didn’t black out, or brown out, or anything?”
“No,” Nick said. “No, I remember everything until he hit me.”
It was helpful to know what Nick could remember from earlier in the night, but, in Rice’s view, it didn’t mean the alcohol hadn’t contributed to the memory lapse he was suffering. Maybe the blow to the head caused an injury that combined with the effects of the alcohol. If they could get enough to hand the case over to the DA’s office, the state would need to find an expert.
“Okay,” Rice said. “Who asked who to leave?”
“He asked me. And he asked me if I’d ever had a one-night stand before.”
“He did?”
“Yeah.” Nick looked to his side like he was remembering. “He asked if I’d ‘done this’ before. But I think he meant hooked up with someone I didn’t know.”
Or, maybe he was asking if Nick had ever had sex with a man before. This “Josh,” he was carefully choosing who he brought back to his room.
“Okay,” Rice said. “So you left at twelve seventeen, and you cabbed to the Motel 4 Deluxe?”
“Right. He paid for the cab with cash. That reminds me, though, I did ask him about Motel 4, because seriously? And he said something about his company paying for it and they’re all about the bottom line. Like that was why he was in such a shitty motel.”
“So he made it seem like he was from out of town?”
Nick nodded. Rice pointed to the recorder, and Nick said, “Sorry, yes.”
“Did you ask him about why he was in town?”
“He just said business.” Nick paused and flushed. “He said he didn’t really want to talk business tonight.” The kid’s eyes began to well up as he shrugged.
Lisa passed him a box of tissues, whispering, “This was not your fault.”
Once, a couple of years ago during an interview of a rape victim, the victim advocate had said something like that when the victim started crying. Afterward, Rice had told the advocate, a petite, quiet woman, that she really shouldn’t say things like that during the recorded interviews—didn’t want a defense attorney calling them biased or saying they were reinforcing the victim’s version of events. The woman had looked at him incredulously and seemed to swell in size as she said, “I understand that you’re building your case, Detective, but once this is over for you, it’s not over for her, so if I see a survivor struggling with feelings of guilt, I’m going to tell her it’s not her fault.” Rice had been floored, and he never complained about anything a victim advocate did again.
Nick wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and looked back to Rice. He wanted to keep going. Tough kid.
“Can you walk me through entering the room one more time? Go slower.”
“There’s not much slower to go. We went up to the door, Josh already had a key card. He opened the door; we went in. I shut the door, then I felt him hit me on the head.” Nick shrugged. “That’s all I remember.”
“What was happening as you walked up to the room? Anything between you two?”
“I was going there to hook up with him, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, well, I mean were you holding hands, talking, uh, kissing, anything?” Rice hoped his hesitance had gone unnoticed. He knew people were gay, it was a thing, it was fine, none of his business, but he had a hard time asking the more intimate questions.
“We had started making out during the cab ride,” Nick said, “and he took my hand as we walked to the room.” He paused. “We kissed outside the door before we went in. It was . . . I thought we were, like, really compatible, I guess I’m saying. I don’t know why he . . .” Nick shrugged and took a sharp breath.
“What, ah, was the plan when you got inside?”
Nick looked confused. “Plan?”
“What had you wanted to do with him?”
Nick dropped his gaze to the tissue in his lap. “Just hook up, I guess.”
“But what does that mean, for you?”
Nick’s eyes hardened. “I didn’t have a plan,” he said. “I was gonna take it one thing at a time. I didn’t know I needed a plan.”
“I don’t mean to say you did, I just had to ask.” Rice’s neck flushed with itchy heat. “I’m not blaming you.”
Nick looked up at him. “I know.”
“You see what he used to hit you?”
Nick shook his head. “I was looking the other way. And it was still dark in the room. It happened so fast.”
“And that’s it? You don’t remember anything else?”
“I don’t know what else you want.”
“I want to find this guy, and when we find him I want to nail him. It could be your word against his. If you remember stuff later, that’s fine, but it always looks a little . . .”
Nick dropped his gaze back to his lap.
“The sooner you give us information, the more believable it looks. Does that make sense?”
Nick stared at his lap and nodded, pulling the tissue to moist shreds.
“So nothing else?”
Nick shook his head.
“Did you, ah, clean yourself up at all at the motel?”
“I just got dressed and left.”
“Okay,” Rice said. The evidence tech had found a dirty towel in the bathroom. If Nick hadn’t used it, maybe Josh had. If they were lucky, it would give them his DNA.
Rice asked Nick a few questions about the morning after, then turned off his recorder. Before he left, he had Nick hand off his phone and sign a consent form so they could pull the data off it, and another for his medical records.
“Thanks for your time, Nick. I know this was hard.”
Nick shrugged like it had been nothing, but his eyes were tired.
Rice stuck his head out into the hallway. A nurse told him Tony’s wife had shown up and they’d gone to the cafeteria.
“I’ll stop by the caf on my way out,” Rice said to Nick. “Send them back to you.”
“I will wait with you,” Lisa said.
Nick looked spent, but if he didn’t want her there, he was too polite to say so.
7
Nick Hall, 2015
When Detective Rice left, Nick and Lisa were quiet for a moment. Nick understood now why people called it “giving” a statement. With his words, he’d given away his energy. He lay back into the pillows behind him, staring down at the loaner T-shirt and sweatpants Dr. Lamba had given him. His eyelids felt heavy.
“Okay,” Lisa said. “I will only ask once, but I must: How are you feeling?”
Coming from anyone else, the question would have bothered him. Might have even enraged him. But from Lisa, it was genuine. She knew he wasn’t okay, and she didn’t expect him to pretend he was. At the same time, she didn’t look at him like everyone else did, like his life was over. To Lisa, all of this—police interviews and hospital beds and rape—was just something that happened sometimes.
Nick liked Lisa. He wanted to give her the truth, but he searched and felt nothing. “I don’t know,” he said.
Lisa said nothing, prompting him to try again.
“I keep saying I’m fine. I almost do feel fine. Like nothing.” In his lap, Nick rolled the pieces of shredded tissue into a ball. During the nurse’s exam in the ER, he’d felt like he wasn’t there. It wasn’t his body she was peering into. Wasn’t him she was photographing, naked in a bright room. “Why do I feel so little?”
“Your body, your mind, they are protecting you. It is your way of easing into the knowledge of what happened. There is nothing wrong with you.”
That was good. Nothing wrong with him.
That was the other thing he liked about Lisa. Not once did he see in her eyes what he had seen so many times in the past two days: secondhand shame at the sight of a man who was raped. He’d seen it in the cop’s eyes, and the detective’s. He’d seen it when they got to the ER, at the front desk. The woman asked why they were there.
“I think I was sexually assaulted,” Nick said.
Her face had been surprised. Her eyes had flicked to Elle and back to Nick. “You were sexually assaulted?” she asked. Implicit was the question: Did you mean to say that she was?
To Lisa, nothing was wrong with Nick.
“The next part will be bad, right?” The day before, Lisa and the nurses had given Nick pamphlets and a folder of information specially made for rape survivors. Eventually, the deep freeze he felt now would thaw. Instead of his normal self, though, those pages said he might be depressed, guilty, sleepless, suicidal.
“Maybe,” Lisa said. “It is truly a bit different for everyone. Dr. Lamba told me you will be seeing Jeff Thibeault when you leave.”
The therapist. “Yeah,” Nick said.
“Jeff is a wonderful man.” Lisa’s broad face spread into a pleasant smile, like she knew Jeff well. “I think you will like him. And if you don’t, you find someone else. You choose who is on your team. You decide.”
Nick nodded. That would feel good: to be in control. He hadn’t felt in control since—well, since he left the bar with Josh. Elle and Johnny had taken him to the hospital. He remembered them talking over his head, Elle saying they had to go to the hospital, Johnny asking if they should go to the police instead.
“He’s hurt,” Elle kept saying. “He’s hurt.”
When he saw Elle in the apartment, a dam had broken in him and he’d cried too hard to talk. Too hard to say, Yes, take me to the hospital; no, don’t call the police. Elle called 9-1-1 in the car on the way. And then suddenly, the tears stopped. He could speak again, but she’d already called the police, already told them Nick’s name, the hospital they were driving to. So Nick grew calm again. He grew calm, and he made a plan.
“Your brother loves you very much,” Lisa said.
Nick nodded. “Yeah.”
Tony being so upset had been the worst moment so far, worse than every humiliation he’d felt seeing the housekeeper and knowing she would find his blood on the sheets; worse than the two-hour exam; worse than talking to the nurse, and the officer, and the detective, one after another. Nick had felt pain, actual pain in his chest, when they released themselves from that first hug and he saw that Tony had been crying.
“How old is your brother?”
“Uh, twenty plus seventeen is thirty-seven.”
“Seventeen years apart!”
Nick gave his normal two-word explanation: “Different moms.”
Lisa cocked her head. “Where is your mom now?”
“She’s, ah, not good with this kind of thing.” How could he explain? It wasn’t worth the effort. “She gets upset. It would be hard.”
Lisa nodded. Her eyes were curious, but she didn’t pry.
“Tony takes care of me fine,” Nick said, but he was underselling it. Tony was more than fine at taking care of Nick; he’d been doing it Nick’s whole life. They weren’t like any of the other sets of siblings Nick knew. They didn’t fight. They were never in competition for food, toys, attention, anything like that. They hadn’t grown up together: Tony had grown up without Nick. Tony was an adult in every memory Nick had of him. He was almost like an extra parent. He remembered Tony buying him things—ice cream cones and action figures. He remembered Tony taking him to the playground by Nick’s house. He remembered them playing games, so many games, but not as equals. He’d always been the kid, and Tony the cool guy Nick wanted to be.
Lisa shifted in her seat. “Do you have questions for me, while I’m here?”
“What are the chances they’ll find him?”
Lisa shook her head. “I don’t know.”
For some reason, ever since Nick had made it safely into the cab outside the motel on Saturday morning, it hadn’t occurred to him that he might see Josh again. Even after the examination, the swabs, the questions, the photo he told the cop he had. He knew Elle had called the police. The police were there to solve crimes—solving crimes meant finding the bad guy.
They had a shitty photo of Josh. If his name even was Josh. They had whatever they got from Nick’s body yesterday. So maybe they had Josh’s DNA, but maybe not. Maybe they wouldn’t find him. Maybe, after some time, the police would give up, and maybe one day Nick would wake up and he wouldn’t remember any of it.
8
Tony Hall, 2015
It turned out, the taste of hospital food changed depending on why you were at the hospital in the first place. This obvious truth had not occurred to Tony the first two times he ate at a hospital: first, after Julia had given birth to Chloe, and again after Sebastian. On neither occasion had the food been good by any stretch of the word. But anything, anything at all, would have tasted fine on those days. Damp sandwiches, weak coffee, packaged pudding cups. They had all sated his need to eat something, anything, so he could get back to his new baby, his wife, their excitement.
Today, he’d have rather fasted. When Julia showed up to see Nick, the detective was interviewing him, so she started in on Tony, nagging him to eat something. Nagging wasn’t fair—she knew how upset he was. Knew he wouldn’t have eaten. So they’d gone to
the cafeteria, and Tony had selected the blandest thing available: ham and cheese on white bread. With every bite he took, the soft bread stuck to the roof of his mouth. Eating felt wrong, so wrong that he felt the tickle of his gag reflex kicking in.
They sat together in silence, Tony working at his sandwich, Julia sipping coffee.
When Tony looked up, Detective Rice was walking across the cafeteria.
“We’re all set,” the detective said. “Thanks for stepping out for so long.”
Tony nodded. The bite he’d just taken was at the back of his mouth, resisting descent.
“It was no problem,” Julia said for him. “It gave me the chance to make him eat something.”
“What’d you get?”
Tony took a sip from his Styrofoam cup. The coffee took the lump of sandwich with it. “Ham,” Tony said.
“I’ve had it.” Rice nodded. “Not great.”
Julia laughed. Tony cleared his throat, pushed the plate forward on the table.
“Hey, Nick did great today. One of the hard parts is behind him now.”
Tony nodded. Good to have it over. The detective had been in there with him for hours.
“How long until the sexual assault kit comes back?” Julia asked. Tony wondered if she’d told the detective that she used to be a defense attorney. She knew more than most people did about the world Nick was stepping into. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, grateful to have her.
“No promises,” Rice said, “but probably about a month.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought it would take longer.”
Tony was surprised. A month sounded like a long time to wait.
“No,” Rice said. “Not usually. Our crime lab normally turns them around pretty quick. Since Nick’s willing to prosecute and we don’t know who did it, we’ve already sent the kit up to Augusta.” He hesitated. There was something he wasn’t saying. “We don’t know if the kit will be much use, you know?”
In his peripheral vision, Tony saw Julia nod.
Tony didn’t know what that meant. Before he could ask for explanation, the detective spoke. “But, hey, Nick gave me a lead.”
The Damage Page 5