by Hart, Callie
33
ELODIE
THREE YEARS AGO
The metal chair creaks underneath me, the loud, abrasive sound cutting through the tense silence of the small, windowless room like a knife. The man on the other side of the scratched, wobbly table gives me a tight smile that doesn't come close to reaching his eyes. He looks like he feels sorry for me but he doesn't quite know what to do to comfort me. He probably doesn't have kids. Probably unmarried, too. There's no wedding band on his left hand, which means he's probably one of those cops who's dedicated his life to his work. When all you do is focus on the bad shit people do to one another, it stunts your heart's ability to feel anything other than contempt and mistrust.
“Won't be long now,” he says in a heavily accented voice. Someone must have told him that I only speak English. I nod, looking down at my hands, resting on top of the table; I was allowed to wash them after the photographs were taken and the forensic analysts had swabbed me, but I was so numb that I didn't do a good job. There's old blood, black now, still shored up beneath my nails—dark crescents of gore that keep on reminding me of the surreal scene I came home to from school.
Seconds pass.
Minutes.
The clock on the wall tick, tick, ticks, its hands marking off the unbearable stretch of endless time that I sit here at this table in my stinking clothes, feeling the emotionless eyes of the detective crawl all over me. Eventually, the door opens and a beautiful woman wearing high waisted pants and a crisp white shirt whirls into the room, carrying a stack of paperwork. She smiles at me; she has one of those soft, warm smiles that instantly makes you feel at ease. Like she could be a friend. “Hello, Elodie. My name is Aimée. It is a pleasure to meet you. I am sorry it has to be under such painful circumstances.” Not Amy, like the Americanized name. Aimée, like the French verb 'to love.' Her accent's wonderful. You can always tell when someone's new to the English language. They don't use contractions. 'It is' instead of 'it's.' 'I am' instead of 'I'm.' They aren't comfortable enough with the language to get lazy with it yet.
She sits down next to her colleague, and a waft of jasmine water hits the back of my nose. I begin to piece together this woman's life as she flicks through the papers she's brought along with her. She's French, obviously. Early thirties. She takes excellent care of herself, working out every day in private behind closed doors but never talking about it, as is the way of all classically French women. She drinks her coffee black, dipping her croissant into the piping hot liquid at her desk each morning. She loves children, but she's never found the time to have them. She'll make a good mother one day if only she can settle down long enough to find someone and fall in love. She loves to be outside. She loves to live by the sea, and craves—
“Elodie? Yes, there you are. Good girl. Come back,” she says, her warm brown eyes full of emotion. “I know this is hard, but I need you to try and focus for a little while, okay?”
I jerk my head up and down.
“I was asking you if you could tell me what happened, please? The officer who found you at your house said you were not making any sense when he...”
She can't even say it. So I do it for her. My voice creaks and cracks as I push the words out of my mouth. “When he opened up the box.”
“Yes, Elodie. When he opened up the box.”
“I don't remember what I said to him,” I tell her.
“Yes. That is understandable.” She's perfunctory. She manages to hide her horror well. That could be why they chose her to come in to speak to me. Aside from the fact that she's a woman, and she has kind eyes, and she shares my mother's nationality—points that they probably figured would help me open up to her. “Do you think you could start at the beginning for me?”
Everything's so confused. My thoughts are all tangled together, like an unspooled ball of wool. I pull memories through my hands like I'm searching for the end of a string, but it just keeps going and going. “I don't—I can't really...”
“Okay. It is okay.” Aimée reaches across the table, touching her fingers to the back of my hand. The contact startles me so badly that I reel back, knocking over the glass of water they gave me. The spilled liquid spreads across the table, running off the edge of its surface, dripping down into my lap, but I don't move. I don't try to mop it up. I just sit there and let it happen.
“Merde!” Aimée hisses. She runs out of the room and comes back a moment later with a wad of paper towels. Between her and the silent guy sitting next to her, they clear up the mess quickly, drying off the table. Aimée gives me a bundle of napkins to pat my jeans dry, but I don't bother. I just hold onto them, my fingers rustling over the rough surface of the cheap paper. Round in circles. Round in circles.
“Elodie? Are you listening?”
I snap my head up. Aimée's back in her seat again. God knows how long she's been sitting there. “I cannot suggest what happened to you based on what we know at this stage, but I can read back what you told the officer. Do you think that would be okay? And then you can tell us if there is anything else you remember, or if there is anything you want to change? And don't worry. There is no right or wrong here. If you remember something differently, that is okay. You are allowed to tell us, and you are not going to get into any trouble.”
I blink to let her know that I've understood.
She cracks her neck, inhaling in and out a few times as though she's steeling herself before she starts reading. And then she begins.
“I came home at six. He was already there at the house. My father. He was supposed to be away on maneuvers, but he must have come back early. I realized he was drunk right away. At least, I thought he was drunk. He was acting weird, staggering around and walking into the furniture. He wouldn't talk to me. I called out for my mom, to tell her that there was something wrong with him, but she didn't answer, so I went looking for her.
“She likes to write letters to my grandmother in the back sunroom, so that's where I looked first. She was lying on the tiles there, covered in blood. She was on her stomach and her skirt was up around her waist. I didn't understand what had happened at first. But then I saw the blood on her underwear.” Aimée pauses. Swallows. Continues. “There was a hole in the side of her head.” Aimée looks up at me. “What kind of hole, Elodie? Like a bullet hole?”
Bile rises up the back of my throat. I'm apart from myself, outside my body, removed from this place and this situation. It's the only way I can give her the information she needs, but it means that I sound like a robot when I speak. “No. Bigger. About the size of a golf ball. And her skull was...it had caved in around the hole.”
Aimée taps her fingernail against the table in a staccato beat. She stops when she notices me flinch. She goes back to my statement. “I screamed for Dad to get an ambulance, but I knew it was already too late. Her lips were blue. I checked for a pulse, though. I turned her over and put her on her back. I tried to give her CPR, but she was already dead.”
I remember saying all of this. And the look on the officer's face, too. He looked shell-shocked by the things I was telling him. But I don't remember feeling this rising anguish, rushing toward me like the inevitable end of a Shakespearean tragedy, refusing to slow or change its course. I know what's coming, and there's no holding it back. I wish I could.
“That's when he came and grabbed me,” Aimée reads from the statement. “He grabbed me from behind. He was so strong. I couldn't fight him. And I didn't think he was going to do anything bad. Not at first. But then he carried me over to the steel lockbox where he keeps his uniforms and his equipment. He handcuffed my arms behind my back, and then he put me inside. I kicked and screamed, and I fought, but I couldn't get out. A long time passed. I thought I was going to die. He came back later, and he seemed normal again, but he wouldn't let me out. He wouldn't let me out of the box.”
Aimée stares blankly at the report for a moment. “Is there anything else you want to add, Elodie? Anything else that you've remembered?”
&nbs
p; “Yes.” I have to say this now, while I am not myself. I couldn't tell the officer who found me. He was too young. Too frightened. He'd thrown up on his shoes. This little room feels safer, though, and Aimée doesn't look like she will puke. “Something happened. Something before...he put me in the box.”
The detective narrows her eyes. “Yes?”
“He did to me what he did to my mom. He forced himself...into me. Between my legs. He held my head against the tiles, and he…he hurt me. I screamed. I tried to stop him, but...I could see my mom. Her eyes were still open, and she was looking right at me, and...”
That's it. That's all I have. I don't fall apart. I just run out of steam. I can't continue. Aimée looks at me, her lovely brown eyes boring into me, and a single tear wobbles on the end of her eyelashes. That single tear is more than I've shed for myself since I escaped from that lockbox. It seems wrong that she gets to be the first person to cry over how terrible this nightmare is. She knows it, too. She quickly bats the tear away, clamping down on her errant display of emotion. “We need to get you back to the hospital. I don't think they conducted a rape kit.”
Shame sets me alight. I try to shrink in on myself, trying not to imagine the humiliation that is to come.
“Just a few more questions and we'll get you out of here. What day was that, Elodie?”
“Yesterday. Friday. It happened after I came home from school.”
Aimée pales, the color leaching from her face as she glances down at the report in front of her. She doesn't appear to be looking at anything in particular. Her hand trembles and she quickly tucks it under the table, out of sight. “Do you have any idea what day it is now, Elodie?” she asks in a quiet voice.
Those endless hours in the dark, cramped into a ball, my joints screaming in agony, begging me to stretch out, with my nose pressed against those tiny holes. They felt like an eternity. A hell that spanned full lifetimes. I know how the mind plays tricks, though. Hours feel like days, that feel like years. I've been here at the station since three in the morning, which means it must have been around midnight when that officer cracked the lock off the box and released me. My brain balks at the idea of tackling the simplest of mathematics, but I force myself to count off the hours on my fingers. “It's Sunday,” I tell her. “The early hours of Sunday morning.”
“You think you were in the box for nine hours?” Aimée whispers.
I look from the female detective to the man sitting next to her, back and forth, back and forth, trying to work out the complex expressions they're wearing. “Yes?” The guy's face creases into a mask of horror. He clears his throat, but it sounds more like he's choking. He pushes away from the table, bolting for the door. “Jesus Christ. I can't...I'm sorry. I need to get some air.”
The door makes a quiet shush as it closes behind him.
Aimée sits back in her chair, rubbing nervously at the base of her throat. “We cannot continue this interview without two detectives present, Elodie. I'm sorry. But...you should know...you were not inside the box for nine hours. Today is Tuesday, my love.”
I frown at that. That doesn't make any sense. “Tuesday?”
She nods.
“I was...in the box for...five days?”
Aimée looks away, covering her mouth with her hand.
Five days.
Pissing and shitting on myself.
Gagging on the smell of my own filth and the reek of my mother rotting on the other side of the room.
That thin straw poking through the hole in the box, providing my only supply of water.
The tiny pinpricks of daylight, blazing against the back of my eyes, and then the darkness creeping in. Rinse and repeat. Did it all happen that many times? Did that many days really blur into one another? How could I, could anyone, survive something like that without losing their minds?
But then again, have I kept mine?
Aimée leaves the room and comes back again almost immediately carrying a jacket. She places it on my shoulders, wrapping me up in it. “Come on. I know this will be hard, but I'll be with you, okay? I won't leave your side, I promise.”
We aren't even out of the building when the military cops show up. In full uniform and armed to the teeth, a man I don't know with three stripes on his arm stops Aimée in the hallway, thrusting a piece of paper at her.
“The girl needs to come with us,” he clips out.
Aimée's horror-stricken. Her eyes wide, mouth hanging open, she shakes her head, tucking me into the side of her body. As if she can protect me from what's about to happen. “This girl has been sexually assaulted and tortured, Sergeant. She's not going anywhere with you. I'm taking her to the hospital.”
The sergeant side steps in front of her, blocking her way out of the building. “I'm afraid that's not possible, Detective Berger. This young lady is a minor and an American Citizen. And she was witness to an accident that took place in a building owned by the U.S. government, which is technically U.S. soil. Israel Police has no jurisdiction here.”
“Accident? Her mother was murdered! And that building wasn’t on your base. It was on Israeli soil! It doesn’t matter who owns it.”
“Take it up with your chief. We have our own way of doing things, Berger, and we have our own police. We've investigated the scene and deemed Mrs. Stillwater's death an accident, as a result of an unfortunate fall. You understand, Colonel Stillwater's a very well-respected man. There's no way he would have laid a finger on his wife.”
Aimée's mouth works. She can't seem to find the words she's looking for. “Your precious Colonel Stillwater raped his own daughter! What kind of man does that?”
“Not the kind that commands thousands in the U.S. military, Detective Berger. I'd be very careful if I were you. Repeating slanderous accusations like that can have dire consequences.”
The sergeant's hand closes around the top of my arm. He pulls me out of Aimée's grip. She reaches for me, grabbing, but it's no good. I was already far beyond her reach before these guys even showed up. She just didn't know it yet.
I don't know what happens next. The world begins to shrink in on itself, darkening around the edges. The next thing I know, I'm falling forward, legs collapsing beneath me, and the ground is rushing up to meet me.
34
ELODIE
I saw that police report once. It was very detailed. Incensed by the way the army handled my mother's death, Detective Aimée Berger petitioned the Israeli government to try and pursue the criminal case in-country, but the whole thing turned into a political nightmare. Her hands were tied, and so she could do nothing but sit by and watch as the military swept the entire thing under the rug. My father was exonerated of any wrongdoing, I never received that rape kit, and my mother was buried without ceremony in the back of a Jewish cemetery, even though she was Catholic, in a country that had never felt like a home to her. I wasn't allowed to attend the funeral, and my father sure as hell didn't go.
I do my best not to remember any of this. Remembering only makes things more difficult. But Wren's sitting next to me, holding my gaze with steady green eyes, and he has questions. I resent that he's dredging this up. Most of all, I hate that this whole time, the guy I'm insanely attracted to has known this horrible, dirty, dark, evil secret about me that no one in the world should know.
“I thought the army police had that report destroyed,” I say. “They made sure to have all record of it expunged from the Tel Aviv police force's database. I know that for sure.”
Wren nods, picking at his fingernails; he attacks the very last chip of black nail polish that he's been wearing since the first night I met him, finally taking care of it once and for all. “They kept a copy on their own system,” he says.
“I see.”
“I can't believe they sent you back there to live with that piece of shit,” he says.
“Well. I was fourteen. And they'd decided he did nothing wrong, so where else were they going to send me?”
“What about your grandpa
rents? Your mom's parents? Couldn't they have taken you?”
This is so futile. What good is trying to retroactively figure out a better alternative now, three years after the fact? It's all long done and dusted. “My grandfather was already dead. My grandmother had Alzheimer's. She never really understood that my mom had died. I went back to live with my father and that was all there was to it.”
“It's just so...” He flares his nostrils, his hands curling into fists. He looks like he wants to hit something really fucking hard. “Did he ever touch you again?” he growls.
“No! No, god. No. It was only that once. He never did it again. I think he was high on something when...the day that happened.”
“I've had bad trips before, and I've never raped anyone, Little E. I've never fucking killed anyone. And even if that were the case, he would have come down the next morning. What possible reason could he have had for keeping you in that fucking box for five days?”
Going back into those memories means going back into that box, and I just...I can't fucking do that. Slowly, I get up and move to the window. The sun's shining brightly outside, and everything is so green. The spring-like day contrasts so starkly with the grey, oppressive cloud that's descended over me that none of what I see on the other side of the glass feels real. “I don't know. We never spoke about it after that day. I knew that I'd wind up dead if I brought it up, and my father seemed content to pretend like nothing had even happened, so I just did what I needed to survive. He started training me into the ground after that. Every single day, he put me through the most brutal training. I couldn’t understand it at first. But then I began to see the self-loathing in his eyes. He wanted me to be able to protect myself. From him. I think he always worried that…that he might do it again.”
