“He did,” Nick said. He could hear it: “Wanna get out of here?” It should have been cheesy, but Josh—Ray—had the perfect voice for the line.
“How did you decide where to go?”
“He said he had a room, so we just went there.”
“Where was the room?”
“Motel 4.”
“How did you get there?”
“We took a cab?”
“What happened in the cab?”
Nick felt his face flushing.
He had liked Josh so much. He’d felt loose and pliable from the liquor, Chris’s rejection. Josh was so handsome, mature, with crinkles by his light eyes. Josh had been so relaxed about himself. They’d gotten into the taxi, a male cabbie up front, Josh had said, “Motel 4,” and he’d leaned into Nick. Josh didn’t care what the cabbie thought, and in that moment, Nick didn’t, either.
“We made out.”
He was really getting into it now. Not just that he was gay—that alone was probably a problem for some of the people in the room—but that he’d been willing. At first, he reminded himself. You were only willing at first.
He looked out at the group of them, and he accidentally locked eyes with a man in the front row. The man looked away quickly.
“Just kissing?” Linda asked.
Nick’s hands were in his lap, and he began to rub at his right forearm. It was dark in the cab, their breath had been fast, and Josh had brought a hand to Nick’s groin. Nick hadn’t told that detail to anyone yet.
“Yeah,” Nick said.
He worked his thumb up under his sleeve.
* * *
When Nick came out of the double doors, Tony was standing at the end of the hallway.
“Hey,” he said, and walked back to Nick quickly.
“Linda said I can leave if I want,” Nick said.
“How did it go?”
“Okay.” Slow and fast at the same time. Exhausting, stressful, but better than he’d worried it would be. He’d stuck to his story. Didn’t fuck anything up. “I think I did okay,” he said.
“Is he indicted?”
“She’s not done.”
Tony looked over Nick’s shoulder, at the door behind him. “You don’t want to wait, just in case?”
Nick shook his head. The adrenaline that had rushed him as he testified was draining. “I want to go home.”
In the parking lot, Tony offered to take him to lunch first, but Nick was too tired.
He climbed into the front seat and sank back against it. He might fall asleep on the drive, he thought. As he brought his seat belt over his torso, the soft inner flesh of his forearm stung where it rubbed against the inside of his sleeve. He clicked the buckle into its lock, then turned his wrist upward. He looked down, as subtly as he could. A pinprick of blood had soaked through his sleeve.
29
John Rice, 2019
Julia had said nothing in response. She just kept sipping at her tea. Even now, Rice couldn’t help but be reminded of Irene when he looked at her. Irene had been solid as a rock. Julia used to look solid, too, but today her hands were shaking.
“You’ve never been to a grand jury,” Rice said.
“No.”
“Generally pretty boring, but Nick’s was interesting.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one, the victim doesn’t always testify, but you know that. Linda wanted to give him a practice run, see how he did.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Did you know he made a mistake?”
“No.”
It was subtle enough that Linda Davis, the ADA, hadn’t even noticed it, and she had pretty good attention to detail. Something about it, though, had bothered Rice. The boy had reached the part of his story where he and Raymond Walker entered the hotel room. He testified that he shut the door, and Walker hit him over the head. He said he fell to the floor, then Walker turned on the light, and that was where Nick’s vision and memory faded out. Rice remembered looking at the boy’s face as he said it. Nick was looking down, which was not abnormal; it wasn’t easy stuff to talk about, let alone to a room full of strangers. But suddenly Rice felt itchy under his collar and like he needed to stand up. Rice had waited until the boy left and Linda began speaking to the jurors, then he leaned back in his chair as casually as he could and opened his folder. He pulled out his notes from his interview of Nick, but he would have to listen to the recording to be sure.
Back at the station, he sat at his desk, put on headphones, and pulled up his interview of Nick. Hunched forward, hands in his lap, he listened to the entire thing. Yes, it was small, but there it was. Nick had never mentioned Walker turning on the light before.
In the interview, Nick had said it was dark when Walker hit him, and that was the last thing he remembered. Now he said he fell to the floor and Walker turned on the light. Such a sensory detail. The kind of thing you couldn’t help but picture: the black hole of a dark motel room flooding with yellow light. So why hadn’t Nick mentioned it before?
“He changed something,” Rice said.
“At the grand jury?”
“Yup. And as crazy as it sounds, that was the moment. That was when the case slipped away from me.”
A case was never fully in the state’s control start to finish—that was impossible. That wasn’t what Rice meant. He walked into that grand jury feeling as good as he could about a case like Nick’s. The story had been consistent. The physical evidence was on their side. Even Chris Gosling seemed to be less of a problem than they’d worried—Chris told O’Malley the same thing Nick told Rice: they weren’t dating. As far as Rice knew, Nick didn’t have a motive in the world to make up a sexual assault.
And then at the grand jury, Nick fumbled on the strangest point.
“What do you mean it slipped away from you?”
Rice shrugged. “I knew something was wrong, and I sat on it.”
Julia stared at him, wide-eyed and miserable.
There was no way to atone for the sins he had committed. But at least he could confess.
“You know why I called you here, don’t you?”
30
Julia Hall, 2015
Last week, Raymond Walker was indicted. They hadn’t gotten many details about the grand jury proceeding: just that it had been successful. This good news was followed swiftly by what felt like bad news: press coverage.
Linda had been smart to make Nick’s name private, because the press seemed hooked on the rape case with the male victim. Even a paper up north had run an article on the case following the indictment. Julia couldn’t remember any of her cases making the news like this, with statewide coverage or regular updates.
The articles discussed the procedure thus far—the arrest, Walker’s bail, the indictment—and contained a couple quotes from Walker’s lawyer, Eva Barr. The quotes were the same across the articles—she must have sent them by email. “We’re unsurprised by the indictment, given that the grand jury only hears the prosecution’s version of events. We’re confident that when a jury has the chance to hear from Ray, he’ll be acquitted.” The article then recapped Walker’s letter: according to him, “the alleged victim had been drinking, pursued Walker at the bar, and then the two consensually engaged in ‘rough’ sex.”
That was hard enough to read, but Julia’s primary anxiety, unfounded as it was, was that Nick’s identity would somehow get linked to the case, destroying what little privacy he had in this mess. Julia wasn’t a fan of reporters, per se, but she trusted them not to publish Nick’s name, given that the judge had ruled it should be confidential in the court proceedings. It was the active comment sections of the articles that worried her. For whatever reason, people felt compelled to take to the internet and give their view of the case. The only people who knew “the victim” in these articles was Nick Hall wer
e other Halls and a couple of Nick’s best friends, save for the professionals. That someone might out him online seemed far-fetched, but even the possibility bothered her. The day after the indictment, she skimmed the comment sections of each article she could find. She tried to look only for capital N’s and H’s, but it was impossible to resist reading. Many of the comments were anti-Walker. Some were not.
There was the sexist:
I might be able to swallow this if the “victim” were a smaller female, but a 20yo male gets knocked unconscious in a single blow? It’s just very hard to buy.
And the bigot:
Is this not how two dudes get down?
Mostly, the negative commenters questioned Nick’s story.
TBH this sounds like a kinky hookup?
Do we really want judges, i.e., taxpayers, sorting out levels of consent when this much alcohol was involved and two adults went to a hotel room?
So can we just get straight that this guy blacked out, wasn’t hit on the head or whatever nonsense . . . just doesn’t want to own that he drank himself dumb. If he doesn’t remember what happened, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t consenting to it.
* * *
The comments bothered Julia for hours after she read them. They bothered Tony for days. He kept trying to show her new ones. Fresh grenades of hate lobbed at anyone who read them.
“I’m done with that stuff,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s too painful. It’s nothing new and it just—people suck. I don’t need to keep reading all the ways that people suck.”
“What if Nick is seeing this shit?”
They were in bed, Tony on his phone, Julia setting down the book he was distracting her from.
“He might be seeing it,” she said.
Tony looked at her like, exactly. As if she could do something about Seaside News’s comment section. He was all revved up at the faceless users who’d left the comments, and the only person he could reach about it was Julia. She got that. But it was starting to piss her off.
“It is terrible,” she said emphatically. “But I don’t know what else to do.”
“I wanna kill all these people.”
She snuggled against him. “That is super reasonable.”
He laughed softly.
She added, “We could fit some bodies out back.”
* * *
Tony seemed to calm down about the whole thing for a couple of days, but apparently not enough to stop looking for news online. Julia was showering when Tony came in.
“He fucking did it again.”
She pushed back the curtain. “Who did what?”
“Walker.” Tony shoved his phone in her face.
It was a Facebook page. She read aloud. “‘Confirmed: My son’s accuser has a boyfriend.’ Oh, Christ,” she groaned. “Is this his mother?”
“Yup,” Tony said. “Keep reading.”
“I’m in the shower.” The most self-evident statement she’d ever made. “Can it wait?”
Tony read on. “‘Anyone think of a reason he doesn’t want to admit to sex?’”
Julia turned off the water. “That’s awful.”
“He must have told her to post it.”
“Can you pass me a towel?” Julia squeezed the water from her hair.
Tony handed her one through the curtain. “Can they use it against him in court?”
She wound the towel around her torso and secured it. “A statement by his mom? They can ask her about it, but I don’t know what good it will do.”
“Why don’t you sound more upset?”
She pulled back the curtain. “I guess because we knew this was gonna happen. We knew they’d try to make something out of Chris.”
“Can’t the judge make him stop talking?”
“It’s not his post.”
“But isn’t that a thing a judge can do?”
She sighed. “A gag order?”
Tony’s mouth pulled into a tight line. “I’m annoying you.”
“Kind of. I’m trying to get ready; I need to go to the store.”
Thanksgiving was that coming Thursday. The grocery store would be a mob scene.
“I can go,” Tony said.
“No,” she said quickly. “I know this is hard. He’s your brother. It sucks. I’ll take care of the store.”
In truth, she wanted the excuse to get out of the house and take a breather.
* * *
Julia’s list was long, encompassing a normal week of meals and a dinner for ten, since Nick was bringing his roommate Elle. In a few days they would host Thanksgiving, as they had for years now. Julia considered their unit—herself, Tony, and the kids—to be the hub of the family. Her widowed mother, Tony’s divorced parents and Jeannie, and Nick were the spokes they connected. One year Nick would have a serious boyfriend, and he might go to another family’s dinner, but she hoped that once he was married, and if he had kids, he would continue to celebrate the holiday with them. She loved Nick. There had been moments that fall when Tony acted like he didn’t believe she did. She had been heartbroken when he was assaulted. She felt miserable for him with each new invasion the process brought. Her feelings just didn’t have the same staying power as Tony’s. This was all much more personal for Tony. Maybe she would have understood if Nick were her brother, but it seemed to be more than that. Their relationship was different than most siblings she knew. Tony felt responsible for Nick.
Hopefully Tony would cool off in the hours she and Seb were at Shop ’n Save. Bless him, Seb was obsessed with the grocery store, and while Chloe would usually pass on the chaos of a weekend shopping trip, Seb would throw a fit before he’d be left at home. Though she was merely guessing, Julia assumed people who tripped on acid looked something like her son as he stepped through the automatic doors of their local Shop ’n Save. Every week, Seb was visibly in awe of the colors, smells, and busy sounds that inundated him on arrival.
The storefront of the Shop ’n Save in Orange hadn’t actually worn that name in more than a decade. A big corporation bought it out and changed the name long before Julia even moved to Orange, but her neighbors still called it by the old name. The store’s products and prices catered more to the inhabitants of the town center—mostly liberal, mostly wealthy, mostly that southern Maine mix of bougie and hippie. Sometimes Julia’s neighbors in the country griped about what the store had become, and Julia felt like a fraud for feigning her agreement with them. With her creaky farmhouse and stay-at-home job, they didn’t know she came from affluent stock by way of her parents in Yarmouth. They didn’t know how much she liked to buy six-dollar loaves of rosemary bread, herbal face oils, and all organic everything, right down to the canned beans. “Shop ’n Overpay,” her neighbor Willie called the store. Julia soothed her guilt by buying eggs from Willie every week. She always noted the irony that they were quite expensive.
This weekend the store was a madhouse, and Seb was in heaven. He cradled sweet potatoes in his arms, dropping one with a thud as Julia tried to intercept him on his way to the cart. He selected a purple onion and inspected it with a severe look on his face before holding it up to an older gentleman riffling through the pile to his left.
“Good choice,” the man said with a nod, and Sebastian beamed. As they made their way through the store, her chatty son greeted neighbors and strangers alike. In the cereal aisle, Julia was crouching for a canister of oatmeal when she heard her son exclaim, “Detective!”
She turned to find Detective Rice standing over her. She must have looked startled, because he opened with an apology for sneaking up on her.
“It’s fine,” she said as she stood. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said with a smile.
A woman came up next to the detective with her cart, and he moved out of her way in the cramped aisle.
“
I didn’t realize you lived over here, too,” Julia offered.
“Oh, I don’t, but my sister-in-law and her kids do. I’m due there for lunch, and I was stopping to grab bread.” He held a single, fresh boule in his hand. It was from the bakery section across the store—had he followed her?
“Are you making sandwiches?” Sebastian asked brightly.
“I think so, little man.”
“Is your wife here, too?” Julia asked.
“My wife passed away, actually, little over five years ago.”
Julia winced; he continued before she could speak.
“It’s all right, really.”
“That’s so sad,” Sebastian said. “Do you miss her?”
Julia put a hand on Seb’s shoulder; she felt an urge to shush him, but there was a sweetness to his innocent concern that didn’t deserve to be silenced.
“Very much,” the detective said.
“How did—” Seb began.
“Honey, Detective Rice needs to get to his family’s house.”
Detective Rice took the hint and nodded. “I just saw you and wanted to check on you quick. Lot of business in the news lately.” He spoke in code for Seb’s sake. “Hope you and your family are doing all right.”
Fatigue crept over her shoulders. “We are.” She let his eyes hold hers for a beat. What did he expect her to say? There was nothing to do but survive it. The wheels of justice were grinding along slowly, and there was no way for Detective Rice or anyone else to shut down the public chatter in the meantime.
Detective Rice departed with a quiet goodbye to Julia and a wave to Sebastian, who had wandered to the end of the aisle, bored with the adults talking about the news. Julia watched the detective amble away, slightly hunched, looking older and maybe smaller now. Was it her new knowledge that he was a widower, and one who still wore his wedding band? Or was it the image of him, just a man on the weekend, off the clock, worried about what her family was going through? Julia had felt that way a thousand times before at her old job—like she couldn’t do anything real for people who desperately needed help. She had assumed a man of Detective Rice’s experience would be immune to such feelings of failure, but now she suspected she didn’t know him as well as she had thought.
The Damage Page 14