But What About Me?

by Marilyn Reynolds

  “You like lightweights and faggots. I hate a girl who likes fuckin’ faggots. I saw how you were, all laughing and happy with your faggot friend at the doggie jail.”

  “Let go of me!” I jerk my arm away, but he grabs it again. He pushes me backward, into the kitchen table.

  “Leave me alone!” I scream.

  He grabs my hair with his free hand, jerks my head backward, then shoves me against the table with the force of his body. His hand is wrapped tightly in my hair, pulling. I kick at him, trying to get free. He forces me onto my back, on the table. My head hits the jar of mustard. I squirm and push at him, trying to get up.

  “What are you doing? Stop!”

  I feel him heavy on top of me, grabbing at my jeans, pulling at the zipper. I twist, shove, kick, but I can’t get away.

  “You think you’re somethin’. You ain’t nothin’,” he says, breathing stale whiskey into my face.

  “Get away from me! Get off!” I buck hard, trying to move him, grab his hair to get his ugly face off of mine. Where’s Danny?

  “Danny!” I scream. “Danny!”

  “Your lightweight can’t help you now,” Joey says, yanking my jeans down, tearing at my underwear.

  I pull at his hair again. He grabs my arm. I lunge upward and bite his hand, hard.

  “Bitch!”

  He pulls his pants open in one quick move and I feel him ramming at me.

  “Here’s something you won’t get from any faggot lightweight,” he hisses at me.

  I lunge and kick, trying to keep my legs closed tight. He jams his knee, hard, between my legs and then starts ramming again.

  “Danny! Danny!” I scream at the top of my lungs, feeling a pain searing through my lower body, my head banging on the table. God! This isn’t happening. “Danny!” I cry, kicking, losing strength.

  Suddenly—a dog, Kitty, barking, April and Rocky, screaming. I see Kitty’s muzzle, lunging at Joey’s arm, clamping. April has her hands over Joey’s face, pulling him backward while Rocky is pulling at his shirt. Kitty goes for Joey’s neck. He grabs a knife from the table and swings at her. She falls back, then lunges again, this time sinking her teeth into his exposed butt. He screams and moves back. I roll over on my side, on the table, sobbing. That’s when I see Danny standing in the doorway.

  “What’s going on?” he slurs.

  Joey pulls the knife back, then jams it full force into Kitty’s throat. She lets go. He raises the knife again, stabs again. Kitty, crouched down now, growls. Joey backs away.

  April comes to me, helping me up.

  “Get out of my house, you slut,” Joey says to me.

  April puts her arm around me. “Can you walk?” she whispers.

  “I think so,” I say, standing.

  “Kitty,” Rocky cries, bending down. “She’s bleeding!”

  “Get a towel,” I tell her.

  Rocky runs into the bathroom and comes out with a terrycloth towel. I lean down and tie the towel around Kitty’s neck, firmly but not so tightly she can’t breathe. I’m aware of a searing, stinging pain all through my vagina and lower abdomen, and a terrible pain at the back of my head, but somehow I move as if nothing’s wrong, trying to help Kitty.

  Joey has hobbled out of the room, gripping his butt. Danny comes to stand beside me.

  “Are you okay, Pups?” he slurs.

  Stupid question, I think, not answering. He just looks at me, confused.

  I go back to one of the bedrooms and rip a sheet from the bed. We make a sort of hammock for Kitty and carry her to the car. Danny follows behind and stands watching as we pull away from Alex’s house. I sit with Kitty in the back seat, applying pressure to her neck to try to slow the bleeding.

  “The comer of Fourth and Jackson,” I say, directing April to the emergency vet.

  “You need a hospital, too,” April says, driving like a maniac along Fourth Street.

  “Not as much as Kitty does,” I say.

  The vet, Dr. Roberts, takes us in right away. I sit on the metal chair beside the examining table and Rocky and April stand next to Kitty.

  Dr. Roberts calls an assistant in, and together they shave Kitty’s neck.

  “What happened here?”

  “Someone stabbed her,” April says.

  “Why?”

  “He was trying to get her to let go of him,” I say.

  “She was attacking him? If she was attacking him we’ve got to file a report and quarantine her.”

  “She was protecting my sister,” Rocky says.

  “Did she bite this guy? Did she break the skin?”

  “No,” April lies, flashing a look at Rocky.

  Dr. Roberts looks over at me, as if he’s noticed me for the first time.

  “What happened to you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I lie.

  I sit hugging myself, trying to keep from shaking. I hurt all over.

  Dr. Roberts gives Kitty a local anesthetic. “We’ve got a pretty extensive stitching job to do here, but she’ll be all right,” he says, looking over at me. “Why don’t you go home? We’re going to have to keep your dog for awhile, anyway.”

  “For Christmas?” Rocky says.

  “Maybe longer if we have to quarantine her,” the doctor says.

  “Some Christmas,” Rocky says, looking as if she might cry.

  Christmas. I’d totally forgotten about Christmas. We get up to leave. April holds onto my arm and sort of guides me out the door.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” the doctor asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  I sit in the front seat, suddenly cold. I can’t stop shivering. April wants to take me to the hospital, but I only want to go home and soak in a hot bath. I’ve got to get clean. My head is spinning, with sharp pains jumping from back to front. I can’t believe this happened to me. For the first time I think the word, rape.

  My mom and dad are waiting for us when we get home, still in the holiday spirit.

  “What took you so long?” Mom asks, smiling. “Where’s Danny?”

  I watch her smile fade as she gets a closer look at me. I don’t know what I look like but I can tell it’s not good just by watching the expressions on my parents’ faces.

  “What’s happened?” Dad says.

  Everyone starts talking at once—everyone but me, that is. I sink onto the couch, numb. Dad sits beside me and puts his arms around me and holds me tight. I start crying, shaking with sobs, shivering with cold. Dad gets a blanket from the linen closet and wraps it around me. “Oh Holy Night” is playing on the stereo. Mom is sitting next to me, looking at my face, the back of my head, asking where I’m hurt.

  “I want to take a bath,” I choke out through trembling lips.

  “Not yet,” Dad says.

  My mom goes into the next room and picks up the phone. I hear her say, “My daughter’s been raped.”

  Rape, I think. Rape. Then we are all getting into the car and going to the hospital. It is just after midnight. Christmas morning.

  Chapter

  16

  An attendant is waiting for us at the hospital emergency entrance.

  “Erica Arredondo?”

  I nod.

  “Are you her mother?” she asks, turning to Mom.

  “Yes.”

  “Come back with her, if you’d like. The rest of you can wait here, or in the main waiting room upstairs,” she says.

  “I’ll go, too,” Dad says.

  “Only one. You or the mom.”

  “I’ll go, Grant,” Mom says.

  The attendant, Cindy Nguyen according to her name tag, hands Dad a clipboard with a bunch of forms on it.

  “I’ll need you to fill out these papers. When the police get here they’ll want to interview all of you, so stick around.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dad says. “I definitely want to talk to the police.”

  The attendant leads me and Mom down the hall and into an examining room. The equipment in here is not unlike that
in the Humane Society surgery room, an EKG, a breathing monitor, a high, narrow table. But the table in here has a mattress pad on it, instead of being bare metal. And stirrups. This table has stirrups.

  The attendant motions for us to sit down and pulls a chair up opposite us.

  “My name is Cindy,” she says, extending her hand first to Mom and then to me.

  “We try to make this as easy as possible, but nothing is easy at a time like this, is it?” she says with a smile.

  I’ve still got the blanket from home wrapped around me, and I’m still shivering.

  “Let me explain the general procedure to you . . . In a potentially criminal case, it’s important that evidence be gathered in the proper manner, so a police officer with special training will be here soon to monitor procedures. Also, because rape victims often feel further victimized by the system, someone from the Rape Crisis Center will be here . . .”

  Cindy talks on and on, while I feel myself removed, watching as if from a distance, as if this is all happening to someone else.

  “Erica. Erica,” Mom says, touching me gently on the shoulder. “Cindy’s talking to you.”

  Cindy is holding a hospital gown in front of me.

  “Step into that little room and take your clothes off. Put this on with the opening in the back.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom first,” I say.

  “Sorry, that has to wait until after the examination. It shouldn’t be long now.”

  I go into the room and start to take off my clothes. My mom stands at the doorway, watching, teary. My shirt is stained with blood. Kitty’s, I think. My jeans are tom at the waist. My underpants are sticky with a combination of my blood and Joey’s cum, a repulsive, dark gummy fluid, of the sort Gregor Samsa dirtied his room with. The sight, the acrid odor, sickens me. I retch up the soup from a happier time. Mom is suddenly beside me, holding me, wiping my mouth with the blouse I’ve just removed.

  Cindy comes to the door with paper towels and a damp wash­cloth.

  “Oh, no,” she says, seeing the blouse in Mom’s hand and taking it from her. “This is evidence,” she says, gathering it and the rest of my clothes up and placing them in a plastic bag.

  “Here—just your face,” she says, handing me the washcloth.

  I wipe my mouth, wanting desperately to wipe between my legs, to wipe Joey away, but Cindy is watching me as if she knows my

  mind.

  Mom holds the hospital gown up for me and I slip my arms into it. She leads me to the examining table and I lie down. She tucks the blanket from home around me and Cindy brings a hospital blanket to put over that. I am still shivering. I think I may never feel warm again. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel warm.

  It is all a blur to me, the policewoman, the woman from the Rape Crisis Center, questions, murmurs of reassurance.

  The doctor, also a woman, gives me an injection that she says will not put me out, but help me relax. Something like the pre-anesthetic we give the animals before spaying, I think. Maybe I’m going to be spayed, my ovaries and womb turned into fertilizer, I imagine, under the slight haze of a relaxing drug.

  The doctor first apologizes, then pokes and prods where I’ve already been poked and prodded, where I hurt. Mom holds my hand and the policewoman writes information on a clipboard while blood samples and fluid samples and scrapings are collected from me. The doctor combs my pubic hair with a fine-tooth comb, to gather possible pubic hair from the rapist, she tells me. I think it’s me. I’m not sure. I’m keeping my distance.

  “You can use the bathroom now,” the doctor says, calling me from my hazy world.

  Mom walks with me down the hall. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  I shake my head no.

  “Well. I’ll be right out here if you need me.”

  I use the toilet, then soak paper towels in hot water, douse them with liquid soap, and scrub between my legs. It is not enough. I need a shower. A bath. A cleansing that is beyond anything I know of.

  Back in the examining room, Jenny, from the Rape Crisis Center, hands me a clean pair of underpants and a set of sweats.

  “Loaners,” she says. “Wash them and bring them back to the center some time. No hurry.”

  “Thank you,” Mom says for me.

  I get dressed and we walk out to the waiting room to get the others. Jenny follows behind us.

  The policewoman is there, asking April and Rocky some ques­tions. I now notice it’s Officer Wright, the one who lectured me when I got taken in with Danny and Alex that time.

  I sit down next to my dad, who puts his arm around me and pulls me close.

  “Okay?” he whispers.

  I nod, though I have no idea what okay might feel like after all this.

  “Let’s finish this another time,” Dad says, standing. “I want to get Erica home. She’s been through enough.”

  “April, when I write this report I’d like you to come look it over, be sure we’ve got everything down that you witnessed.”

  “Sure,” April says.

  We all stand to leave. Officer Wright gives me a long look.

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  I just look at her.

  “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas,” she says.

  Jenny jumps between me and Wright. “That was totally uncalled for, Officer!”

  Wright just shrugs her shoulders and walks away.

  At home Mom runs a hot bath for me and sits on the closed toilet while I bathe.

  “I’m okay, Mom. You can leave.”

  “The doctor said you’d be groggy from the shot for awhile. I don’t think it’s safe for you to be in the bathtub unattended.”

  I want to wash in private places. I don’t want a witness, not even my mom. I guess she figures it out because she stands up and says, “I’m going to go kiss Rochelle goodnight, then I’ll come back and check on you.”

  In the middle of the night I hear the phone ring and my father’s voice. Is it a dream? I’m so buried under layers of fog I’m not sure. At first it is only mumbling, then Dad’s voice rising.

  “NO! I won’t wake her to come to the phone!”

  There is a slam of the receiver, and all is quiet again. I reach my feet to the end of the bed, reaching for the warmth of the sleeping Kitty, only to find the eerie lightness of a blanket over my feet. Kitty? Memory returns for an instant and then I will myself to sink again.

  “Merry Christmas doesn’t quite fit the occasion, does it?” my dad asks, sitting on the edge of my bed and gently rubbing my back.

  I open my eyes to a sun-filled room. The blinds on my windows are open, showing it to be a Califomia-Christmas kind of day, brisk, but bright. Already I hear the kids from next door riding new bikes around the cul-de-sac.

  “Eleven,” Dad says. “We thought it was time to rouse you.”

  I get up and take a long, hot shower and wash my hair again, even though I did that not more than seven hours ago. I check myself in the mirror. Not much shows. A big bruise on my arm, a small bruise on my cheek, a cut on my hand, a nail broken past the quick. Nothing to indicate the change in me. I had expected to see a reflection of a huge beetle when I stood before the mirror, but no.

  In the living room, Dad and Mom and Rocky sit waiting for me, Rocky not even complaining about holding off on the opening of gifts for so long.

  “I miss Kitty,” she says, looking at the traditional package on the tree that contains a new ball with a bell in it.

  That’s the Christmas routine. Kitty runs around, bouncing her ball, happily ringing the bell all the while we open gifts.

  Suddenly I remember what Dr. Roberts said about possibly quarantining Kitty.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say.

  I go into my room and rummage through my backpack and find my little book with telephone numbers in it, then dial Dr. Franz’s home phone.

  She answers, “Merry Christmas.”

  “I need your help.”

  �
�Erica?”

  I tell her an abridged version of what happened last night, going light on the gory details.

  “What a terrible experience for you.”

  In the background I hear the strains of “Jingle Bells,” and laughter. I get to the point.

  “Kitty shouldn’t have to be quarantined for protecting me.”

  “That’s standard procedure,” Dr. Franz says.

  “I know, but, could you help me get her out?”

  There is a long silence on the phone, then she asks the name of the vet who treated Kitty last night.

  “Dr. Roberts.”

  “Gray hair? A little thin mustache?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well . . . I know her rabies vaccination is up to date because I personally inoculated her at last month’s clinic . . . Still, anytime a dog bites someone . . .”

  “Please,” I say.

  Another long pause, then, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I know you’re busy with Christmas and all . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that. Are you going to be okay?”

  “It will help if we can get Kitty back.”

  “I’ll try.”

  We open presents with Christmas music playing on the stereo. Gramma and some of my parents’ friends come for dinner. People talk and laugh and eat. Rocky sings “Oh Holy Night” for everyone, sometime between dinner and dessert. It looks like Christmas and it sounds like Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas to me.

  I read a book once about people who’d had near-death experi­ences, and how, when their hearts had stopped and they were totally unconscious, they floated serenely above the scene, seeing their own motionless bodies below, and watching the activity all around them. That’s how it is for me right now. I’m floating, disconnected.

  Several times during the day the phone rings. Dad always answers it. Sometimes it’s a friend from faraway, and I hear him say “Merry Christmas to you, too.” A few times he answers but no one is on the other end. Just after we finish dinner, April calls.

  “Do you want to come to the phone?” Dad asks.

  “I’ll call her tomorrow,” I say, feeling too drained of energy even to talk to April.

  “She’ll be okay,” I hear my dad say. “She’s been through a lot. But April, thank you. Things would have been much, much worse if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”