It happened on the last Sunday of October, a miserable bookend to the worst month of his life. Somewhere in the early-morning hours of that day, Nick had finally shut his laptop and gone to sleep. He awoke bleary-eyed and disoriented, unsure of where he was. The room was bright with sunlight. There was his bedside clock: it read 11:27. There was a knocking behind him, and he realized he was in his bedroom and someone was at his door.
“Yeah,” he croaked, his vocal cords coated with sleep.
“Can I come in?” The voice was dulled by the door, but he recognized it was Elle.
“Yeah.”
He rolled toward the door as Elle pushed it open. She took two reserved steps into the room. “Are you just waking up?”
“Yeah.” Things had been awkward between them since the morning after it happened. He didn’t blame her for any of it, but he knew she blamed herself. She kept apologizing. Was painfully careful around him. It made Nick tired.
“You haven’t been on your phone?”
Nick rolled back and reached for his phone on his bedside table.
“Hold on,” Elle said as she came toward him.
Nick’s screen overflowed with notifications.
“What’s going on?” Nick felt immediate despair.
“Um, that guy, Ray, he sent, like, a statement into all the newspapers.”
Nick had missed calls and texts from Tony and Julia, Tony’s mother, friends, even Chris. He hadn’t spoken to Chris since he stood Nick up that night. He opened the message.
I’m so sorry.
Nick looked up at Elle. “What did Ray say?”
Elle looked like she was going to cry. “Um, basically that you two went home together and you were, uh, basically that it was all, like, consensual and you . . . Well, he said it in a weird way, but he made it sound like you wanted him to do what he did.”
Nick shook his head, trying to process Elle’s gibberish.
“Like rough sex. Like you wanted him to be rough. And now you’re lying.”
Disbelief rolled upward from deep in his stomach. At first Nick couldn’t speak: he felt his mouth hang open in a horrified smile. No one would believe that . . . would they?
Inexplicably, his first question was, “Which newspaper?”
“All of them. Or, I don’t know.” Her voice cracked. “Like, the Maine papers.”
Nick sat up higher in bed. “Wait, does he name me?”
Elle’s eyes filled with tears. “He said you went to school here.”
Nick looked back at his phone. Chris knew it was Nick.
“Do people know it’s me?”
Elle began to cry.
Wait. Wait, no.
“Elle?”
“They know,” she sobbed.
“How?”
“The letter. He said your major.”
No. No.
“And.” She paused. “And I guess Mary Jo’s boyfriend told some people.”
“How does he know?”
Elle stepped closer to Nick, her shoulders drooping. “I told Mary Jo. I’m so sorry. You were gone and you didn’t answer my texts, I thought I could tell her. And she told him. I never would have told her if I knew he’d be so stupid.”
His mind raced. If Chris knew . . . Chris didn’t hang out with Mary Jo or her boyfriend. How many people had her boyfriend told for Chris to find out?
“How many people know? What are they saying?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. She was lying.
“Do they believe him?”
“Mary Jo’s boyfriend?”
“Ray,” Nick said.
Elle shrugged with a grimace. That looked like a yes.
“They do,” he said.
“Just trash people who post in the comments on newspaper websites,” she said as she sniffled against her hand. “People are commenting, that’s all—it doesn’t mean anything. It’s too ridiculous to believe. Anyone who knows you believes you.”
Nick looked down at his phone again. Pulled up the internet browser. Elle snatched the phone from his hands.
“Hold on, you’re not reading it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Of course I’m reading it. Give me my fucking phone, Elle.” Nick forced the words out of himself in a voice he’d never heard before; pushing harder with each word felt good. He could let his anger out on Elle—she deserved it. That night hadn’t been her fault, but this was. Her face was wet, but she had stopped crying. Her eyes were wide, like a sad baby deer. Perfect, make me feel bad when I’m the one whose life is ruined, that’s just classic Elle.
“Please promise not to read the comments,” she said quietly, handing the phone back.
“Bye” was all he said.
Elle turned and left quickly as Nick reached back into his hair and dug the scab off. It was smaller and drier from its days of respite, and it came off clean and fast. There. He quickly decided to check the local paper, Seaside News, though it sounded like it was in the larger papers, too. Seaside felt the most personal. There it was on the main page. man arrested for sexual assault speaks out in a letter to the editor. As Nick clicked the link with his right hand, he felt the fingers of his left twirling a small section of hair next to the patch. STOP. He sat on his left hand and read.
It began with a paragraph in italics. The letter, it said, did not reflect the views of the newspaper. It was an opinion piece from a reader about the criminal justice system. He began to skim Ray’s letter. Read the words without processing them: brought the wrong man home, he had been drinking hard, rough play. Rough play. Nick’s stomach turned into a hot, solid mass, and adrenaline swept through him in a tidal wave. Rough play. Ray was saying Nick wanted it: the whole thing. Saying Nick pursued Ray, not the other way around. Nick asked to be hurt—asked for what Ray did to him. The slap, the punch, the hands on his neck—stop it, stop it, don’t think of that.
Nick curled into a ball in his bed, barely able to breathe. Blood pounded in his ears. His mind was rushing, swirling, bursting, but he was too paralyzed to move. It had happened. Ray had hit back. Of course he had. He’d already proved he wasn’t weak like Nick. And the prosecutor’s motion to protect Nick’s name hadn’t mattered. Everyone knew it was Nick. His story to be weighed against Ray’s. Nick would be proved one of two things: a victim or a liar. Finally, his hand began to reach for his head. Stop. Too visible. Nick reached below his sheets for his right thigh. He pinched a tuft of thin leg hair between his fingers and pulled slowly. His skin released the small bulbous hair roots with a collective pop.
21
Tony Hall, 2015
The view from the front porch had changed. The hay laid down on the field had lost its golden color, looked more gray-green after weeks in the dipping temperatures and occasional rain. On the horizon, the tree line had gone gray too: the colorful leaves had dropped to the ground, where they would eventually rot. Tony stood on the porch in his robe, the air cold on his bare ankles. Was the end of fall always this ugly?
He heard Chloe come down the stairs. He turned and watched through the door as she drifted by and down the hall. He’d closed the inner door behind him when he stepped out onto the porch. The bottom half was screen, the top half glass. Through the glass, he could see Seb down the hall, standing in the kitchen, watching Julia make pancake batter.
The furnace had kicked on, but the house was still warming up. The incident with Nick had thrown off their usual rhythm, and Julia hadn’t yet renewed their annual debate about the ideal thermostat setting. For now, that left Tony in charge, and layers were much needed in the morning. Chloe’s hair was in its usual after-sleep form—something like a rat’s nest disasterpiece—and seeing it spilling from the blanket she was bundled in sent warmth through his bones.
Get out of the cold, he thought, and go in to your family.
Tony wen
t down the porch steps and stooped to grab the newspaper on the front walkway. In truth, his subscription to the Sunday paper stretched their budget. But the tradition had grown too important to abandon; it was almost integral to his sense of self. He’d started reading the paper the summer he dropped out of law school—the same summer he started dating his former classmate, then Julia Clark. While Julia toiled on in school, Tony dropped out. He would never admit it out loud, but reading a physical paper made him feel like he was still an intellectual. Still able to match her in conversation, or at least keep up.
Tony slid the paper from its plastic sheath as he climbed the steps. The past few weeks, Tony had combed the paper for mention of Nick’s assault. There had been short articles online following Walker’s arrest, but the incident had not made the Sunday paper. He straightened the pages. There was no need to comb the paper today. It was on the front page.
In the bottom right-hand corner was a headline: man arrested for sexual assault speaks out in a letter to the editor. Tony heard himself suck in air. Something else, he thought. Another case, please.
But it was not another case. Beneath the title was Raymond Walker’s name. Tony began to read.
I started writing this letter from the jail in Salisbury. One of the guards gave me paper and a dull pencil that I had to use in the common area. He didn’t want me stabbing anyone or digging at my wrists, apparently. Overnight I was stripped of my humanity, assumed I’d act like an animal in a cage, perhaps because I was put in one.
Take a moment, from the comfort of your home, and imagine yourself in my shoes.
So now you are in a cage. How did you end up there? Simple. You brought the wrong man home with you.
You met him at a bar. He sat beside you, offered you a shot, asked your name. He asked about your job, said he was in school for business, asked if you might teach him something. All you could see was that this young, dynamic man, to your lonely delight, was making a move on you. What you failed to see was that he had been drinking hard when you arrived, and he doubled your pace as you sat together talking.
You waited for him to grow tired of your graying hair and uncool style. Instead, to your delight and your destruction, he asked you to take him home.
He must have lived nearby for school, but you failed to think through why he didn’t want you seen at his place. You were simply too eager, so you brought him to a hotel.
There, he surprised you again with an invitation you hadn’t expected from the sweet-faced boy at the bar: one for rough play. It was an invitation you’d accepted with other partners, and you welcomed it that night. A conversation ensued in words and touches. A back-and-forth that climbed and crested.
Tony’s vision blurred and doubled. With each line it grew harder to read. He cried out, a strange “gah” dragging from deep in his throat, and he ripped the front page off the paper, and the second, and third. He threw the paper down the steps and spun, trying to register something, anything he could strike. Let it out. Let it out. He turned to the house. The door. Tony lashed out with a tight fist and put his hand through the glass at chest-level. His foot went through the screen panel and he fell, scraping his arm down the broken glass.
“Jesus Christ!” Julia’s voice echoed down the hall.
He staggered upright to see his wife rushing toward him, his children standing in the kitchen behind her.
22
John Rice, 2015
Some smart-ass defense attorney had dropped off a couple dozen doughnuts at the station that morning, and Rice found O’Malley standing over them in the breakroom.
“I’m a goddamn cliché,” she said with a mouthful of Boston cream.
“You’re disgusting is what you are,” Rice groaned. “Keep your mouth shut.” He selected a plain, cakey doughnut.
O’Malley gulped to swallow her mouthful and pointed at Rice’s selection. “You are also cliché.”
A plain doughnut? “I’m classic!”
O’Malley rolled her eyes. “Just take your coffee and your plain doughnut and go play cop.” She made a goofy, bug-eyed face at her own doughnut. “Leave us be.”
“Gladly.”
Rice made his way to his desk in the bullpen. For such a serious detective, O’Malley could get playful sometimes. Rice didn’t mind, though. Unlike some, she could turn it off like she was flicking a switch. She was always professional when she needed to be. Her sense of humor was just her coping mechanism—humor, long-distance running, and apparently Boston-cream doughnuts. Irene used to be Rice’s favorite grounding force—sinking into her arms after a long day eased him like nothing else ever had. He still had mass and yardwork. Breakfast with his old friends. Visits from the grandkids; calls with his daughter.
Rice had spent a lot of his weekend thinking about the Hall family. It hadn’t been the first time he’d struggled to leave the work at the office, so to speak, and it wouldn’t be the last. In a small way, all the sadness that happened to the victims in these cases happened to him, too, and it had a way of building up in his mind. With decades of experience, Rice had learned to firmly tell unpleasant thoughts to leave him alone while he was off duty, but it didn’t always work.
On Sunday, Rice opened his paper to see that Santa had dropped off his gift early this year. On the front page was a letter to the editor from Raymond Walker, admitting that he was, in fact, the man Nick met at the bar that night. Calling what had occurred at the motel “rough play.” It was everything Rice had wanted, everything Walker wouldn’t give him at the station two weeks ago: an admission and an unbelievable defense. Rice nearly kissed the paper.
But then it started to bother him. He’d even thought about calling Nick on Sunday, to check on him mostly, but also to talk to him. He prayed for the Halls at mass instead.
Now, he dragged his chair forward at his desk and pulled up the letter on the station computer. He scrolled to the words that had lodged in his brain.
There, he surprised you with an invitation you hadn’t expected from the sweet-faced boy at the bar: one for rough play. It was an invitation you’d accepted with other partners, and you welcomed it that night. A conversation ensued in words and touches. A back-and-forth that climbed and crested. You parted from him feeling understood, feeling like the luckiest man on earth.
A week later, the police call you at your work and ask you to come to the station. They show you a photo of the man you met at the bar. Your stomach flutters, and you wonder if he committed a crime. You say nothing, unsure if an acknowledgment would betray him.
Then the police say that this man has told them that you raped him.
To say you are shocked is an understatement.
They want your side of the story, they say. You almost give it to them, but you can feel the trick in it, and you hold back. They arrest you.
For the first time in your life, hard metal handcuffs are tightened around your wrists. You are sat down in a police car and driven to the jail. You are strip searched. You are given a uniform to wear, and you think, Just like on television. Because you were arrested on Friday and don’t happen to have $100,000 in the bank, you spend the weekend in jail.
You have to wear the uniform when you go to court, and they add shackles, as if you’d be stupid enough to run. You meet with the free lawyer for the day, who looks about eighteen years old, in the holding cell with all the other prisoners. There’s no privacy, not that the lawyer has time to talk about much with you. Still, she says enough to make your cellmates raise their eyebrows.
“They’ve charged you by complaint with gross sexual assault,” she says. It’s the beginning of a long morning of gibberish that will only occasionally be translated for you.
“They’re going to indict you,” she says, “so you don’t have to enter a formal plea today. The only thing worth focusing on is getting your bail lowered.”
In the courtroom awaiting yo
u is the same judge who granted the arrest warrant. The same judge who told the police they could cuff you, swab your mouth for your DNA, and put you in a cage for the weekend. And why did she let them do all that? Because she read a story about you. A story the man from the bar told the police. This judge already hates you, has already chosen a side. She leaves the bail so high that you’ll have to use your house as collateral.
“First you have to get it appraised,” the free lawyer explains, “and you’ll need to record the lien, there’s a form; if you forget you can call the clerk’s office.”
Instead, you call your mother from the jail and tell her what’s happened, because you need to ask her to arrange the appraisal. You need her to drive the papers around until the court is satisfied that it effectively owns your house if you violate your bail conditions.
In all, you spend twelve nights, thirteen days, in a cage, waiting to bail out. You are so obsessed with regaining your freedom that you don’t realize the depth of what is happening until you walk out of the jail. You’ve tasted what it’s like to lose your freedom. To sleep behind a locked door across from a toilet. To feel prisoners—and you’re one of them—look at you sideways. You’ve heard your name on the news followed by the words gross sexual assault. You know that, if you cannot disprove a cry of rape, not only will you go to prison, but when you are out, you will never be free again. Your name will go on a list, and until you die, every person who sees that list will think that they know you. “Know” what you’ve done. “Know” that you are something less than human.
You will be reassured when you recall our experiment: this is my situation, not yours. My impossible battle to fight against a story. My life that will hinge upon who is more believable: me or the man from the bar. The man I found so charming, so trustworthy, that I went to bed with him.
His story might ruin my life. I don’t understand it, this man’s decision to lie. I can make educated guesses. Self-hatred. Shame. It’s not easy for many of us to accept ourselves, as gay men. Add to that the taboo of what he likes in bed, and, well, I can say I hadn’t planned on sharing my predilections with the public.
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